Matt Pounsett

The One Where I Talk About A BBS Game

2011-09-09T18:51:00.005-04:00

20 years ago I was, along with many of my friends, spending quite a lot of time on computer Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs). Most of us had already been doing this for many years, and there were people out there who'd been doing it even longer. The BBS scene at the time was pretty sophisticated we thought.. it was becoming possible to do some really great things!

One of the things that I thought was really great was playing computer games against other people in different places. This idea was still pretty novel, as computer networking, the way we think of it today, simply wasn't possible with most home computers – what few even existed. Most BBSes only had a single phone line for people to connect, and so out of necessity virtually every BBS game was turn-based, usually allowing a single turn per day. So, every day, I had time set aside to dial in, see what had transpired since the previous day, and take my turns.

One of my favourite games, and one of the few that I remember in any detail, was Esterian Conquest. It was a multi-player take on some of the early empire-building 4X games, set in a small two-dimensional galaxy, where each player had to build a fleet of ships, and go forth and conquer by force or diplomacy. Don't let the simple idea fool you though.. EC was a beast of a game, with simple rules that allowed for a plethora of complex results. Early on, my nightly turn would take but a few minutes to think about and execute, but later in the game I could literally spend hours pouring over reports from my fleets, hand-drawing maps on graph paper based on the information they contained, and then planning out and tediously punching in new orders for all of my fleets and planets.

About four years ago, while cleaning out boxes that had been in storage for ages, I came across a folder containing papers from the last game of EC I ever played. There were printouts of reports covered in pencil notes about possible actions to take, maps with quick calculations of how long it would take my fleets to reach some hot-spot in the game galaxy, and sheet after sheet of new orders.

Fleet 66 join fleet 47
Fleet 32 reduce speed to 5
Fleet 73 move to star at (12,41)

Everything about the game came back, and I started to wonder if it could somehow be resurrected. I had heard years before that the source code to EC had been lost in an all-too-unfortunate hard drive crash, but digging around in more boxes I did manage to find a floppy disk with the copy I had for the BBS I'd briefly run myself. Sadly, it proved to be more work than I had time for to get a computer running that could both run modern networking and connect that to an old DOS game. So I decided that instead, I'd just write my own.

I spent the next few months mapping out the game I'd like to create.. what I thought at the time was probably the first ever Turn-based Strategy MMO. I started writing documentation: how would I like the game to work? After chatting about the idea with a friend of mine, he gave me a photo-copy of an old table-top game he'd played called Stonova for ideas (it was based on Chris Wilkes' "Nova"). I worked out plans; I taught myself the math I'd need for three dimensional navigation (I wanted my game to take place in a realistic three-dimensional galaxy). But, when I really got down to it the game I had in mind would have required programming skills, particularly in the area of graphics, that I just didn't have the time to acquire. The idea was grand, but it was beyond me at the time. So I put the idea away for a while.

A couple of days ago, for no particular reason I can recall, I started thinking about this again. My original idea had been too grand for my meagre programming skills. But what if I scaled it down? In the last few years it's been proven that web-based games can work, and do attract players. So what if I ditched the desktop game idea, and went with the much easier to program web-based game? Games like Travian certainly seem to attract players, and as the basic concepts go it isn't all that different from what I had in mind.

My game will be simpler than EC in places, and more involved in others.

In EC it was possible to send your ships to any point in the galaxy, and along the way they would send back reports if they came within sensor range of any other passing ship. You could interrupt their orders mid-trip and have them pursue whom they spotted, or run away, or slow down and quietly follow at the edge of sensor range. I think I will simplify that a lot, and very likely only allow travel to other stars, not the spaces between them. Fleets will report on other fleets they find in their current star system, but I think I will drop the requirement to calculate intersecting flight paths, and handle changes in destination mid-flight.

EC had a small number of fixed ship types that you could build, and assemble into fleets. I think I'd like to have a bit more range in this area, so I'm going to design a technology research system that will allow players to concentrate on improving certain aspects of their ships. Are you a fan of big weapons? What happens when you go up against your opponent who has put all their research into heavily armoured ships? Or, maybe you just want to build really fast ships that can run away easily when threatened.

EC had no system of trade that I can recall. My game will allow players to trade resources, and might even have some sort of in-game cash economy. Perhaps you won't build warships at all, but will instead build big, fast transport ships and survive by supplying everyone with what they need... and paying tribute for "protection" where necessary.

So, I've started working on the idea again. I have no idea what will come of it, or whether I'll even finish. I haven't even got a name for it yet.. but I'm curious to see what I can come up with.

Wherein I Keep My Stuff Dry in a Downpour

2011-08-02T17:31:00.001-04:00

Last week I rode my bike from Toronto to Québec City and back for the 81st IETF meeting. This is only the second long ride I've done (the first was to Ottawa in May), and the first where I didn't have complete control over which days I'd be on the road – and thus, no control over what weather I'd be riding in. Seeing as it was a work trip, I'd have to carry my laptop, and so some means of keeping it dry would be necessary.

Since a laptop won't fit in my wee Ogio saddle bags, and neither they nor my laptop backpack are waterproof (and I didn't want to wear a backpack for 900km anyway) I needed something I could strap to my bike that would fit a long narrow piece of electronics, and keep it dry.

Rain gear, water, and street boots in the saddle bags, spare gloves,
camera, maps, etc. in the tank bag, everything else in the Seal Line

My usual stop for such things is my local MEC, as they rarely disappoint. This visit was successful as always, and I walked out with a 75 litre Seal Line zip dry bag. At first glance in the store, and while packing, it seemed to be the ideal bag for what I wanted. It's flat and wide, carries easily, holds a week of clothes plus my laptop, laptop bag, and some assorted cables and other gear, and most importantly zips air tight. In fact, after strapping it to my bike I found I had to unzip it to let it deflate a bit.. this made the difference between it poking me in the back all the time and compressing neatly out of my way up on the passenger seat. But, it hadn't really been tested yet... and it would be tested. Oh, how it would be tested.

On the ride home this past Friday, on the leg between Ottawa and Toronto, I ran into a pretty nasty rain storm. Rain wasn't entirely unexpected.. I'd been watching some weather move East toward me from Toronto for a couple days.. but the amount of rain was a huge surprise. I haven't even been outside in a rain storm like this in a long time, let alone out on the highway. As I was passing North of Kingston on Highway 7, Kingston was busy closing down several streets due to flooding. It was some nasty rain.

But lo, and behold, upon my arrival home I found the inside of the dry bag to be.. well.. dry. Bone dry. Where the Ogio bags and me were both soaked, and even my supposedly rain-proof tank bag had some moisture in it, my laptop was saved. Success!

Now if only I could solve the problem of drying out the inside of my helmet in the middle of a downpour.

Screencasting for OSX

2011-01-20T19:35:00.000-05:00

I spent some time this afternoon evaluating several screen casting apps for my Mac. It cost me a bunch of time, and a little bit of money, so I thought I'd share my notes to potentially save someone some grief in the future.

For those who haven't seen the term before, "screen casting" is recording video of all or part of a computer display, usually with some sort of voice over, for the purpose of doing a demonstration to be viewed at a later date. It's often done to demonstrate the use, or features, of a piece of software, but lately it's also gaining popularity for sharing things like gaming experiences on video sharing sites like Youtube and Vimeo.

There appear to be all sorts of applications for doing this today, where there were only one or two a couple of years ago, and they have a fairly wide range in features and quality. Some of the applications I looked at also do "screen grab" (capturing a still image of the display) but I pretty much ignored this in all of them since MacOS comes with a perfectly good utility for this (Grab.app). Full reviews below the cut.

Quicktime Player: The latest version of Quicktime Player is capable of recording the full screen with system audio and one other audio input. It's solid as a rock, records good quality, and comes free with OSX as of 10.6 (earlier versions of MacOS used Quicktime 7 which was very limited unless you purchased a Quicktime Pro license from Apple). Quicktime Player is good for what it does, but extremely limited in terms of its features.

Score: C+
Cost: Free

Screenium: This is the first third-party app I tried out. The general quality of the software is good; it's easy to navigate, has a fairly complete user manual available in the Help menu, and has some good features that aren't very common in other similar applications. There are one or two surprises in the user interface. For example, the video recording options are at the top of the main window, and other options like audio settings, whether to capture the mouse, etc. are further down the list. However, when you pick a video recording style it immediately wants to start recording, so you essentially have to do the setup for a particular recording from the bottom of the list up to the top, which is a bit counter-intuitive. On the plus side, it can record several different audio sources in the same video, which most screen casting applications don't seem to be able to do. Most are limited to system audio and one other input, assuming they can even do two at a time. Screenium requires an external driver for recording system audio, but the driver is freely available and easy to install. Screenium also claims to be able to record just a single window (as opposed to the entire display or a selected area of the display) however this feature doesn't seem to work; Screenium just records the entire display when I try to use it. I would probably have given it a higher score if it simply didn't claim to have the "record a window" feature rather than claim to have it but not work properly. Recording an area of the screen that happens to overlap the window you want to record is a viable option, but getting this right is a bit fiddly as it's hard to spot if your selection is off by only a few pixels. Screenium claims to be able to record video through a video camera, but it was unable to find my firewire iSight camera.

Score: B-
Cost: US $30
Try before you buy: Yes
Version tested: 1.3.3

iShowU: iShowU is probably the most robust screen casting app out there. It has a huge number of features and dials for tweaking its behaviour, and comes in three flavours depending on how powerful a programme you need (regular iShowU, iShowU HD, and iShowU HD Pro – I tested out iShowU HD). iShowU can record an entire display (there's a menu option for which display if you have more than one), or a selectable region of a display. It can't record just a single window, but it will let you automatically set the recording region to overlap the current location of any window, so that's really only a semantic difference (as long as you don't move the window during recording). It also has several presets for input recording area and output video formats and dimensions.

iShowU will record simultaneous video from the display and from an external camera, and will let you overlay the video from the external camera anywhere over the display recording, at any size you like. This is particularly useful for pre-recorded classroom type demonstrations where you want the instructor to be visible along with the content of the class or to do something like overlay simultaneous Sign Language translation without post-production editing. iShowU simultaneously records system audio and one external audio input, lets you set the recording level for both independently, and will let you select whether you want to monitor one or both of those inputs through the system audio output (speakers or headphones usually).

The HD Pro version integrates directly with Apple Pro applications like Final Cut, but is significantly more expensive than the other two options. I think it's worth the extra cost if you'll be doing a lot of screen casting and need to do any post-production editing.

Score: A

Cost: US $20 (Classic) / US $30 (HD) / US $60 (HD Pro)

Try before you buy: Yes

Version tested: 2.1.5

Jing: Jing had me annoyed right off the bat. When you first start the application it runs a quick tutorial, and then requires you to sign up for a personal account on screencast.com (Jing's image/movie sharing site) before it will let you even try the application. This seems to me to be a ridiculous requirement if you have no intention of using their image sharing site. I went ahead and signed up with some false/throwaway information in order to be able to at least demo the software.

Jing claims to comes in two flavours, Free and Pro, but the free version is essentially just a demo as there are several important features which are disabled, the application overlays ads on your captures, and pushes you to upgrade at every turn. Shockingly, the Pro version is actually sold as a service, with a recurring fee, rather than as a piece of software with a single payment at the time of purchase. I refused to pay the cost of the Pro version, so my review is based entirely on the free version.

The free version of Jing is only capable of outputting Flash video, which eliminates most hope of doing any post production editing of your screencast. The pro version can output MPEG-4 encoding, but it's not clear in what container (mpeg, mov, etc.). It can only record one audio source, and the system audio doesn't appear to be among the options, so perish any hope of catching sound effects from your application or presentation. Jing can capture an entire display (but won't let multi-display users pick which one.. it defaults to the display with the menu bar), a screen region, or any single window.

The one thing Jing has going for it is that it integrates directly with screncast.com, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr for uploading your captures directly from Jing immediately after you finish them.

Jing seems pretty bare bones, and there don't really seem to be any other features. I didn't try the application long enough to discover if there were any bugs.

Score: D

Cost: US $15/year

Try before you buy: Yes

Version tested: 2.4.30037

Snapz Pro X: I didn't find this application terribly intuitive. In addition to When you run it, it doesn't stay put; as soon as you take any action it exits, and you have to run it again to do the next thing. To me, this seems to require that you do post production editing since there will be a bunch of fiddling around at the end of every video while you try to stop the recording.

Snapz can record full screen or a selected region, can record system audio as well as an external microphone, and has a huge number of output video formats. It seems to me that it's too expensive for what it is though, which is fairly simple-minded but difficult to use.

Snapz also installs a kernel extension on the system, which I find a bit distasteful considering it's not required by any other screen capture tool I've seen.

Score: C-

Cost: US $70

Try before you buy: Yes

Version tested: 2.2.3

Screenflow: Screenflow is billed as a professional screen casting app, but in my opinion it doesn't quite measure up to that, although it does have several interesting features not present in any of the other applications that I tested. It will let you do multiple recordings, and edit them together within the application, including doing overlays of camera video and audio; you can add text bubbles and other non-video overlays; add transitions, and make use of several other post-production editing features. It's missing some obvious things like recording only a region of the screen or only a window, but you can crop video after it's recorded so perhaps this won't feel like a limitation to some people.

The interface is very intuitive and easy to use if you're at all familiar with timeline editors (video editors, audio editors, etc.) but may require some getting used to for the beginner.

As a comparison, it's more powerful than than iShowU alone but wouldn't stand up to iShowU backed by a basic video editor such as iMovie or Final Cut.

Score: A

Cost: US $100

Try before you buy: Yes

Version tested: 2.1.5

Screenflick: Screenflick is basic, but a solid little screen casting application. The interface is dead-easy to use, it covers all of the basic features (record full screen or selected area, show mouse/keyboard events, export various audio and video encodings, etc.), lets you preview your movies before exporting them, and it's good and cheap. If you only have simple requirements (such as showing your friends your latest Minecraft extravaganza) this is probably the app for you. If you need something more feature rich, then I'd go with one of the others.

Score: A-

Cost: US $25 (seems to be on sale from $30)

Try before you buy: Yes

Version tested: 1.6.15

No Mo' Movember

2010-11-30T20:06:00.000-05:00

Well, it's over. I think the mo turned out fairly well! It's too bad about the lighting in this last shot. Unfortunately, it was so dark out today that I had no natural light at all in my livingroom, and so I either had to go with 'too dark' or 'wow, is that what you look like under a flash?' I went with the former.

I'd like to thank everyone who's donated so far; I've managed to raise $260 at this point. Donations are still open, if you haven't had a chance to contribute, and I'm pretty sure they will be at least until the end of the week.

Thanks again everyone for helping out! As promised, a time-lapse movie of the mo growth is forthcoming, but it's a bit of work to get the photos all lined up right, so it may take me a few days to get it out. I'll be sure to post it here when it's done.

Cheers!

Movember Update: Day 11

2010-11-11T14:13:00.000-05:00

Movember Mugshot, Day 11

So, the Mo is progressing fairly well. My hair is pretty light, so it doesn't show as well in the photograph as it does in real life, but it's coming along nicely. Now that it actually shows up, I'll likely post updates somewhat more often than I have so far (which is not at all). I've been taking daily photos, and when all is done I'll be putting together a quick little time lapse movie of my Mo growth. It should be good for a laugh!

I'd like to say a big thanks to all the people who have donated so far! I really appreciate your contribution! For anyone who would like to donate to prostate cancer research, but hasn't had a chance yet, please drop by my personal Movember page; your help will be greatly appreciated!

Escaping Mac Mail RSS

2010-11-11T12:00:00.000-05:00

Don't get me wrong, the Mac Mail RSS reader is pretty good. If you've just got the one computer, and don't have any desire to read your RSS feeds when you're away from home, then it's an excellent choice. It's shameful, however, that MobileMe – Apple's service for syncing your data between Mac computers – doesn't even try to sync your RSS feeds between Mail clients.

This lack of ability to keep the RSS feeds in my Mail client on my desktop and my laptop in sync (let alone on my iPad or iPhone) has led me to start looking for a replacement RSS reader. As disappointing as the lack of sync is, I quickly discovered the even more shocking reality that there's not even a way to export my RSS feeds from Mail. Go, look ... you won't find anything... I'll wait.

As it happens, there's this standard, which is useful for moving RSS feed information around, called OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), which is a subset of XML (eXtensible Markup Language). I'm not a big fan of XML but there are times when it's useful, and in this case several major RSS readers have implemented an OPML import/export so that you can move your RSS feeds around. It would be really handy if Apple implemented this as well.

Unfortunately, Apple's oversights get worse. Not only can you not sync RSS feeds between computers, or export your RSS feeds, you can't even view the URL of your RSS feeds within Mail so that you could manually copy them to another device or program. Go Apple!

This only leaves one option: manually digging through the files that Mail saves out to keep track of your feeds. This is a task that is beyond the average home computer user, which effectively means that most Mac users who start using Mac Mail as their RSS reader are stuck.

Fortunately, I'm not the average home computer user, and I know where to find these files that Apple writes, and I know how to read them .. so I could go in and cut and paste all those URLs into another reader. But I'm too lazy for that, so I wrote a program to do it for me. This wasn't quite as easy as I expected, since reading in the XML plist files turned out to be a bit of a trick. As much as I don't like XML, trying to describe how I hate XML plist (the format Mail uses for these files) would completely derail this post – Apple really screwed the pooch on that one.

Eventually I gave up on the program being super-portable, and just used someone else's library to read in the plist files. I had been hoping that I could post a script here that anyone could save on their Mac and run to generate an OPML file, but the plist debacle meant that other stuff would need to be installed. Oh well.

In the end I got my OPML file, and I've imported it into Google Reader. Several of the iPad RSS readers will import their feeds from Google, which works well enough.

I'm posting my script below, free to anyone for personal use. In order to make it work you'll need to first install two libraries on your system.

Making it Go

In "Terminal" (which you can find in Applications -> Utilities), type the following two commands:

gem install builder
gem install plist

Once you've installed builder and plist, click on this link. It will download an archive file that contains the script. When that's done, in your Downloads window double-click on the "MacRSStoOPML.tar.gz" entry; that will decompress the archive and show you a new Finder window with the archive you downloaded and the script that was in it. Double-click on "MacRSStoOPML" (it'll have a grey box-like icon) to run it. And you're done! You should now have a file called "opml.xml" on your Desktop, which lists all of the RSS feeds you were reading in Mail.

Happy reading!

Mo Fruits, Mo Flowers, Mo Leaves, Mo Birds - Movember.

2010-11-03T03:02:00.001-04:00

That's right, it's Movember again!

For those that don't know, the month formerly known as November has been given over to the goal of raising awareness of prostate cancer, accomplished by men the world over making a commitment to grow new moustaches (a "Mo"). Much like the commitment to run or walk for charity, men commit to growing a moustache for 30 days to raise funds for cancer research. Last year, global participation in Movember raised CDN $47 million!

I'm taking part for the first time this year, and a couple of mornings ago I got myself a nice clean shave. I'm now waiting for enough to grow in to start trying to decide what sort of mo I'll grow!

Hopefully, a few of you will decide to support my face fuzz with a donation, which you can easily do here. In return I'll commit to new growth on my face, and to regularly posting updates here and on my Movember page, which I'm sure will generate much controversy and hilarity.

The Movember movement aims to increase awareness of prostate cancer and to promote screening (testing before detection of any symptoms), for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, here in Ontario not all men have equal access to the PSA test (Prostate-Specific Antigen test). The Ontario Ministry of Health has chosen not to provide the PSA test as an early detection measure as they have with cervical and breast cancer screening. The Ministry web site says it best:

In men without symptoms (screening), PSA testing is not paid for by the provincial health plan. A man can have the PSA test if he is willing to pay for the test himself. However, it is hoped he will make this decision only after discussion with his Health Care Provider.

The Ministry's explanation for this is that they don't believe the current PSA test is reliable enough to be used as a screening measure. The statistics they quote say that, of every 100 men over the age of 50 screened, 4 or 5 will have prostate cancer: three will be detected, and one or two will go undetected by the test. That seems like a fairly decent result to me, when one in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in his lifetime, and twelve Canadian men die of prostate cancer daily.

Perhaps some enterprising souls will write to the Minister and encourage her to support prostate cancer screening.

In the mean time, please visit my Movember page; enjoy a few laughs at my expense, and please donate if you can.

Pay-as-you-go iPad Service in the UK

2010-08-06T09:08:00.000-04:00

Vodaphone doesn't (and were rude about it), Orange doesn't (you have to have a UK bank account), but Three does. I stopped looking after that.

£10 for 1gig, £20 for 3gig. Seems to work quite well, too.

Losing My Memories

2010-02-15T23:50:00.002-05:00

Back at the beginning of January a horrible thing happened. It was something that a lot of people fear in this day and age, but which few really believe will happen to them. It happened to me though, and I had to find a way to recover from it. Yes, I lost all of my digital photographs.

The the complete details of how it happened are not terribly germane to the post but the short story is that, while moving to a new computer, for that brief period where a lot of this data existed only on my backup disk, a Windows installer decided it would like to reformat that backup disk for me.

Recovering data from a reformatted drive can be tricky. Without the original filesystem information you need some special tools to even find old files, let alone reassemble them into something recognizable. But, with a bit of work I managed to get all of my images back, and this is the story of how I did that.

The whole recovery story started off with a stroke of luck. I happened to mention the demise of all of my photographs to a friend of mine, and he just happened to know of an incredibly useful tool for recovering my data. He pointed me toward TestDisk by Christophe Grenier. TestDisk is rather badly named I think, because testing is the least of what it can do. One of the key features that made my life far, far easier is its ability to do file type recognition when recovering files.

When the filesystem information from a disk is lost, even if you're able to recover files, you can't always recover the file names; often that information is lost forever. That means that recovered files will typically wind up with some sort of coded file name (usually just a number generated by the recovery program). If you're recovering a very large disk, you can wind up with literally millions of files with completely nondescript file names. It would be completely impractical to try and sort through an entire disk worth of files that way trying to find the pictures.

Fortunately, TestDisk's ability to recognize file types based on the data in the file, rather than the file name, meant that I could tell it to only recover the JPEG images from the disk. This way I wound up with a set of files where I definitely knew the type of each and every file. And it just so happens that all of the digital cameras I've owned work in JPEG.

I knew I was still going to have a problem though. Because this was my backup disk, which contained not only my Aperture database, but also all of my Time Machine data (a MacOS backup tool), what would be recovered in searching for all JPEG images would include all of the pictures in my Aperture database, but also my entire web browser cache, and any other little jpeg images stored on my disk as part of various applications, etc. When the recovery ran, I ended up with a bunch of folders with a little under 35,000 pictures in them. Now what?

Well, the first thing I did was to try to eliminate any duplicate images. Even though that would be a fairly simple script to write, I always google for these sorts of tools before I try to write them myself. Usually, someone else has already written and posted the thing I need, and often it's better than I would have written on the first try. This was just such a case, and I found a great little perl script that would search for and remove all the duplicate images.

That got me down to a little over 20,000 images. Still a lot, but far fewer than I had before.

The next step was to try and separate out the original files downloaded from my cameras from all of the other random images. For that, I did write my own script. I scanned through all of the images to extract the original image date/time from the Exif data, reorganizing the images into directories by the day the picture was taken. If an image had no original date in its Exif data, or no Exif data at all, then I assumed the file was not a photograph (or not one of my photographs) and put it off in a separate directory to be sorted through manually later.

Here's the script I used:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use diagnostics;
use warnings;

use Date::Parse;
use File::Find;
use Image::ExifTool qw(:Public);
use POSIX qw(strftime);

my( $source_d      ) = '/Users/matt/Desktop/Recovery/jpg/';
my( $base_dest_d   ) = '/Users/matt/Desktop/Recovery/jpg-sorted/';

my( $dir_date_format  ) = '%F';
my( $file_date_format ) = '%Y%m%d-%H%M%S';

my( $nodate_i, $nodate_d ) = (0, 00);

if( ! -d $base_dest_d )           { mkdir $base_dest_d; }
if( ! -d $base_dest_d.'NoDate/' ) { mkdir $base_dest_d.'NoDate/'; }

sub wanted {
    my( $source_file ) = $File::Find::name;
    my( $source_date, $dest_d, $target_f );
    
    unless( -f $source_file ) { return; }
    unless( $source_file =~ /\.jpg$/ ) { return; }
    
    
    my( $info ) = ImageInfo($source_file);
    if( $info->{DateTimeOriginal} ) {
        $source_date = str2time($info->{DateTimeOriginal});

        $dest_d = $base_dest_d .
            strftime($dir_date_format, localtime($source_date));

        $target_f = strftime($file_date_format, localtime($source_date));

        # in addition to naming the file by date, give the image an index
        # number that advances if there is more than one image with the same 
        # date+time
        my( $target_i ) = 0;
        while( length($target_i)<2 ) { $target_i = '0'.$target_i; }
        while( -f $dest_d.'/'.$target_f.'-'.$target_i ) {
            $target_i++;
            while( length($target_i)<2 ) { $target_i = '0'.$target_i; }
        }

        $target_f = $target_f.'-'.$target_i;

    } else {
        # images with no date/time get put into subdirs, 100 images per
        # directory to keep the directory from getting too large
        $nodate_i++;
        if( $nodate_i > 100 ) { 
            $nodate_i = 1;
            $nodate_d++;
        }
        while( length($nodate_d)<3 ) { $nodate_d = '0'.$nodate_d; }
        $dest_d = $base_dest_d . 'NoDate/' . $nodate_d;

        $target_f = $_;

    }

    if( ! -d $dest_d ) {
        mkdir $dest_d or die "failed to create dest dir $dest_d: $!";
    }

    my( $final_file ) = sprintf( "%s/%s", $dest_d, $target_f );
    printf "%s: %s: %s\n",
        $_, $info->{DateTimeOriginal} || 'NoDate', $final_file;

    link( $_, $final_file ) or die "failed to link files $_:$final_file: $!";
}

find(\&wanted, $source_d );

This has left me with about 7,300 images sorted out into directories by the date the picture was taken, and about 13,600 in directories of images with no known shoot date. This is far more manageable! I'll probably still wind up doing a bunch of manual sorting of the images that are left, but now the task is much more approachable than it was in the beginning. It's also possible I could find some other useful piece of Exif data to sort them by.

So Easy, an Adult Can Understand!

2010-02-09T17:51:00.004-05:00

The Internet, explained to your mom.

That's how I'd describe this video from EuroIX, an association of European Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). Don't worry if you don't know what an IXP is.. the video explains.

I was all set to blog about this months ago, but then they took the video down in order to update and clarify a few things. It's back up now, and so you get to enjoy its informational goodness.

Reporting Made Easy

2010-02-08T11:21:00.001-05:00

An amusingly self-referential new clip on how to report the news:

Safe Driving in the Home

2010-02-05T13:10:00.000-05:00

A creatively conceived and beautifully shot PSA, from the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership in the UK.

Share The Pain

2010-02-03T12:25:00.000-05:00

Ze Frank is working on yet another cool collaborative, creative project. If you're into music creation at all, consider contributing to the Pain Pack. I've just downloaded the audio sources and will be having a listen to see if I have any inspiration of my own.

Motion Doesn't Stop

2010-02-02T23:16:00.004-05:00

An incredible stop-motion piece. The time and planning (and rehearsal!) that must have gone into this is mind-boggling.

Old Money for a New Year

2010-01-05T22:27:00.004-05:00

On New Year's Eve, as I was taking a cab to the train station to pop out to London to spend the night socializing at a friend's place, my cab driver leaned over while at a stop light and handed me a small bill about the size of Canadian Tire money. "Here, take this, it will give you luck!" he said. "And Happy New Year!"

As I would discover, the bill was 100 Iranian Rials, worth just slightly more than 1¢ Canadian. Certainly not a large sum of money. But I appreciate the notion of handing out cash to people as a sign of good luck. We arrived very quickly after that at my destination, so I didn't get a chance to get an explanation of whether this was some sort of typical tradition, or if this was just his own idea and a way to dispose of some currency he couldn't possibly convert, but that wouldn't really change anything anyway.

Partying With the Greats in Space

2010-01-05T21:05:00.005-05:00

I won't be able to make this, but I thought I'd put it out there in case anyone on the West coast is interested. The Planetary Society will be hosting an evening on the 15th with Stephen Hawking, who will be receiving the Cosmos Award, and Buzz Aldrin, who is celebrating his 80th birthday.

Tickets will go quickly.. so jump now if you're interested!

Where Wild Things Return Us Our Childhoods

2009-12-17T23:29:00.008-05:00

Last spring I directed a bunch of excitement this way about the first trailer for Where The Wild Things Are, based on the book of the same name by Maurice Sendak. I finally got to see the movie last night, just barely squeaking in before it left the main theatres in the city.

In addition to the excitement, I approached the whole thing with a little bit of fear, too. Wild Things is an iconic book from my childhood, and I had to wonder how it was going to be possible to fill a couple of hours from a 350 word story and still be true to the original. Oh, also while not managing to look distractingly silly with people in Wild Thing suits.

Happily, not only was the movie not a disappointment, it completely outstripped all my hopes. Jonze and Eggers managed to add depth and detail to Max's life without breaking the feel of the original story. They painted a picture of a wildly struggling young boy with all the fear and loneliness of a difficult life at home and the pure happiness and joy of his refuge in simplicity of childhood games and his own imagination.

Max Records was a brilliant pick for Max. He played the role honestly and perfectly, and incidentally, wins my award for best actor's name ever.

And the Wild Thing suits weren't distracting or silly in the least.

On Joining the Jedi

2009-12-15T04:45:00.002-05:00

Clearly I'm a few months late to the game here, if you'll excuse the pun, but I just had to share once I saw this:

I was a huge fan of KOTOR 1 and 2, and the idea of an MMO based on them is ... well... I can't wait!

Naïveté and How It Can Break Your Internet

2009-09-29T21:02:00.009-04:00

As of the end of last week, I was all set to put together a new post tonight about the latest load of BS from Nominum, but now that will have to wait a few days. There's something much more pressing (and probably relevant) to the five or six people reading this on the day that I post it that I think I should talk about. This morning, the new issue of a weekly podcast that I listen to was posted.

Jesse Brown is the host of Search Engine, a weekly technology news podcast that I have been listening to for about six months, every week, no exceptions (well... actually... excepting weeks when there's no show). Jesse – I hope he doesn't mind if I call him Jesse – seems to me to concentrate on the social aspects and effects of technology (and he may have even stated this himself, on his show), and by and large I think he does it well. This week's issue, titled Are You Gay? (The Internet Wants To Know), was posted this morning, and the second interview (starting at about seven and a half minutes in) was about two subjects I know very well: the DNS, and CIRA. Unfortunately, what I heard on Jesse's show this morning was both shocking and disappointing. And I told him so. In retrospect I was perhaps overly harsh in some of my criticism, but only insofar as twitter is a terrible medium for conveying nuance or detail.

My problem with the interview is that both interviewer and interviewee were wholly unprepared. I'll get to the interviewee in a moment, because what he had to say is my main source of outrage. For the next paragraph or two I'll quickly sum up what I thought was wrong with the way Jesse approached the whole thing, and then get on with the meat of the matter.

The interviewee in this case clearly came to the table with an agenda, and its this agenda that the whole interview was really about: the desire to make sweeping changes to the status quo. Jesse not only did not challenge the position that change is needed, but Jesse admits that he arrived at the interview without knowing anything about the subject at hand. He did no background research and didn't even look for dissenting opinions. This approach is full of fail. If the interviewer doesn't challenge the agenda, and isn't informed enough for critical analysis of the interviewee's answers then it becomes the interviewer's equivalent of publishing a press release as a news item. Of course the person with the agenda is going to present the facts in such a way as to support their argument, and not a balanced view. Worse in this case, the "facts" weren't even really facts for the most part. One would like to believe that a director of an organization would be able to coherently discuss what that organization does, and why it does it that way, but one might be wrong. This whole thing will cause me to reassess Search Engine as a source of information. When covering those subjects that I really know nothing about, will I be able to trust that the expert on the air is really an expert? Certainly not as I have trusted in the past.

I first became aware that Jesse was working on something like this interview last Saturday when he asked a question on twitter that was right up my alley (I missed an earlier, more direct reference). I responded there and in email, offering to help fill in the blanks. I also happen to know that several other people made similar offers. Jesse didn't take me up on my offer, or anyone else's that I'm aware of, and unfortunately it's clear now the reason is that the interview had already been completed at that point, and was simply waiting to be aired. That is far too late to look for supporting information.

So what was this whole thing about?

Barry Shell would like you to elect him to the board of directors for the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), the organization that manages the .ca Internet domain. This in itself is not news. What's newsworthy is why he would like you to elect him. He claims that CIRA is too big and expensive and that the organization should be run more like free online services like craigslist.org, or perhaps like the .ca domain was run back in the late 90's. The problem is that Barry's views are hopelessly naïve, are based on a simplistic understanding of what CIRA actually does and, if implemented, would not only threaten the stability of your Internet (well... the two or three Canadians reading this) but would also threaten the stability of your economy, and possibly even your life.

A bold claim, I know. I plan to back it up. But first, some background on me and where I'm coming from so that you can judge my agenda.

As anyone who has read the sidebar will know, until fairly recently I was the DNS Operations Manager for CIRA. I no longer work there, and I am not a part of, nor a candidate for the board of directors being elected right now. I am still a DNS specialist, and I work for a different (some would say competing) domain registry. So my only association with CIRA at this point is that I am a .ca domain-holder concerned about how the organization is run because it directly impacts the Internet that I use every day. Really, the only difference between me and most of the people likely reading this is that I happen to possess some very detailed information about how CIRA is run currently, about the environment in which it operates, and about the possible side effects of changing either of those things. My agenda is to try to share as much of that information as I can, and hopefully to convince you that the way in which CIRA is run is far more important than Barry Shell would have you believe.

Before I get into the finances, which believe me will be brief, I think it's important to correct the collection of misinformation, bad assumptions, and vague statements that permeated the interview, and which would lead the uninformed to incorrect assumptions.

To begin with, CIRA is not "a server." CIRA isn't even an organization that just runs "a server." CIRA is what is known as a domain name registry, but what is that? To explain, I'll step back a bit from CIRA and start with two other related groups.

First, there's the people who register .ca domains: the registrants. These registrants go to a web hosting company, or their ISP, or some other company to pay to register a new domain. This company, known as a registrar, will charge anywhere from $10 to around $50 to take care of the process, possibly also setting up some email or a web site or some other service to go along with the newly registered domain. In the background, this registrar submits the newly registered domain to CIRA, and pays them $8.50. What does CIRA do for that $8.50? Well, there are two core services that CIRA provides.

As a domain registry, CIRA is responsible for ensuring uniqueness. Just like the land registry, CIRA ensures that no two people or organizations think they've registered the right to use the same space; the difference is that CIRA deals in domains rather than plots of land. The second core service that CIRA provides is to include that registration in a global directory known as the Domain Name System, the DNS. Note that is Domain Name System, not Domain Name Server, as Barry says. The key here is that the DNS is a large interconnected database made up of at least hundreds of thousands, more likely millions of servers. The directory is structured like a tree, with the root branching out to the top level domains, or TLDs, like .ca, .com, .net, .org, .info, and others. The TLDs branch out to registrants' domains like cbc.ca or craigslist.org.. and so on.

What this directory system does is convert those memorable host names you type into a web browser (like www.tvo.ca) or into your mail client as part of an email address, into numeric addresses and other information that the computers of the Internet actually use to talk to each other. This is no simple task, but Ben Lucier has a great little layman's explanation of how part of it works.

CIRA's position in this directory is at the top of the .ca branch of this tree. It is responsible for making sure that any computer that looks up a .ca domain gets to the right place. Due to some shortcuts built into this system, the DNS servers at the top of the tree only see a tiny fraction of the total lookups that occur, but even that tiny fraction means that the servers responsible for the .ca domain answer about 13,500 of these lookups every second.

Every. Second.

Now, that's actually pretty easy work for a bunch of DNS servers, but the statistic starts to underline the importance of CIRA's position in making sure that all of those .ca domains continue to function. And that number doubles approximately every 18 months. When you take into account that most Internet businesses keep equipment in service for three to five years, that means that equipment CIRA is putting into service today to handle 13,500 DNS lookups every second must be able to handle over 100,000 per second by the time it is replaced. It's important that this DNS service that CIRA provides never be unavailable, or those lookups go unanswered.

But what happens if CIRA's DNS servers are unable to answer those queries for a few seconds... or a few minutes, or hours, or days? Does it really matter that much?

Perhaps not, if you're just talking about someone's personal web site, as Barry seems to mostly be concerned with, or a blog, or the place you download a weekly podcast. And in 1998, before CIRA existed, when the .ca domain was run by a bunch of volunteers led by John Demco (not just the two or three people Barry says it was), perhaps it wouldn't have been important if these sites failed to work for some period of time. But of course, we don't live in 1997 anymore. And the model of running a domain registry with a handful of volunteers and some donated servers was replaced with CIRA precisely because the old way of doing things was no longer working.

Today these uses of the Internet are all important, and they're part of what has made the Internet such a fundamental part of our daily lives. But, one must also remember that because the Internet has become a fundamental part of our daily lives, it has also become a major engine in the world economy. According to a study commissioned by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Internet is responsible for $300 billion in economic activity in the US every year. I'm certainly no economist, but if one were to very simplistically scale that back to the size of the Canadian economy, that would mean the Internet injects $27 billion into our economy every year. That's not chump change. If the Internet is unreliable, what happens to that money?

But let's move beyond corporate uses of the 'net and the economy. What's this poppycock about a broken Internet threatening my life?

Well, the Internet is now a part of daily business. What most people forget, is that doing business online doesn't just mean shopping for gifts, or playing online games. People forget that most organizations now use the Internet for internal communication. Organizations like online stores and social media, sure, but also organizations like our governments, critical infrastructure like our water, power and gas distribution... and our emergency services.

You may hear claims from your ISP that they guarantee "five nines" of availability. It's a fairly common service guarantee on the Internet, and it means that they are up and running 99.999% of the time. Put another way, it means that they permit themselves about five minutes of down time per year. Domain registries like CIRA don't do "five nines". They can't afford five minutes of outage every year. The DNS at that level must be a 100% uptime proposition, or Bad Things happen.

When this is taken into account, a pretty high level of redundancy to ensure availability seems warranted. Not only does CIRA need to ensure that there's enough capacity to handle all of the DNS queries their servers receive, without the servers becoming overloaded, they must also ensure that servers can be taken offline for regular maintenance, and that unexpected failures like power loss, crashed computers, network failures at an ISP, or other breakages don't take down the whole system. And that doesn't even address the threat of deliberate vandalism.

You may have heard of a style of attack against Internet services known as "denial of service", or DoS. One form of this type of attack involves sending extremely large volumes of requests to a service in order to tie it up, and reduce the resources it has available for legitimate requests. It's becoming increasingly popular to direct these attacks at DNS services. Today, these attacks are carried out using what's known as a "botnet" which is tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of computers on the Internet which have been taken over to be used for often illegal purposes. Remember how I mentioned that CIRA's servers have to be ready to handle 13,500 queries per second today, and over 100,000 in five years? Well, as it turns out, it's quite simple for a small botnet to dwarf those numbers.

If CIRA simply built to the expected normal load, and added a bit to handle broken servers, they would still be vulnerable to being taken out by a bored high school student. This is nothing compared to the resources available to organized crime, or other nation states. And if you think nations attacking each other over the Internet sounds like a bad spy flick then get out your popcorn, because it's already happening. In order to prepare for these potential attacks, some registries build out their DNS infrastructure to support well over 100 times the expected load.

Given all of this, the money Barry Shell seems to think that CIRA is wasting seems pretty well spent, to me. And I've really only scratched the surface of one part of CIRA's budget, which is available online as part of the annual report, by the way. The side of the registry which is responsible for actually taking registrations may not be quite as essential a service as the DNS is, but many Canadian businesses, the registrars I mentioned earlier, depend on that registry being available to take registrations or they start to lose money, so those systems need to be well built to a different level of tolerance to failure or attack. Then there's CIRA's customer service department, programmers to write the software, systems people like me to make it run, the back-office functions, required by any business, like finance and administration staff... it adds up pretty quickly. CIRA actually operates pretty modestly compared to most domain registries.

Now getting to those finances..

It's been suggested that CIRA should reduce the wholesale cost of registering a domain from $8.50 per year to something smaller. However, it's been demonstrated in past reductions in price that wholesale price reductions don't get passed on to the general public as you might expect. $10 or $15 a year to register a domain isn't really an onerous sum for the average Internet user who wants their own domain, and a few cents to a dollar reduction in that cost really doesn't benefit the average Canadian all that much. The only people it does benefit are organizations that buy domains in very large numbers, like the domain registrars that sell to the general public, and another class of Internet user known as a "domainer". Domainers are those people who own literally thousands to millions of domains each, and frequently use them to put up those web pages that are nothing but advertizing, hoping that when you mistype amazon.com and accidentally go to azamon.com that you'll click on one of their ads and make them a few cents. CIRA takes its stewardship of the .ca domain – a national public resource – very seriously, and has no interest in supporting the interests of domainers over the interests of average Canadians who may want to register those domains that are just being used for ads.

It's true that most years CIRA operates with a budget surplus, in recent years as much as $2M. Where does that money go? Not-for-profit organizations are required by law to not have a profit. It's in the name. If a not-for-profit organization does find itself actually making profit, then the Canada Revenue Agency steps in for its cut. There are some pretty specific rules about when a not-for-profit is permitted to have a surplus, and what it can do with those surplus funds. What CIRA has done with its surpluses so far is to pay off a debt owed to UBC in exchange for all of the years UBC volunteers managed the service before CIRA existed, and to pay into a fund which is meant to support CIRA through any lean or financially disastrous years that may be yet to come. This is standard operating procedure for many companies, and is an especially important layer of insurance for an organization that operates a piece of critical national infrastructure.

Barry suggests that instead of these things, CIRA should be supporting research and other concerns of benefit to Canadians' use of the Internet, as if this is his own idea. In actual fact, CIRA staff have been lobbying the board to do just that for several years, and in the last year or two CIRA has already engaged in operational support and direct funding for several programmes, to the extent that it has been able to do that without stressing its rainy day fund or regular budget.

For having been on CIRA's board for a year, Barry shows pretty intense ignorance of CIRA's business and the environment it operates in. It's one thing for a new candidate, without any prior experience on a board, or without experience in the domain sector of the Internet industry to arrive fresh-faced with misconceptions about what CIRA does. It is essential for anyone who wishes to serve on a board of directors to inform him or herself to the best of their ability about the business they're operating, and the industry in which it operates. For someone who has been doing the job for a year to be so uninformed as Barry Shell requires almost willful ignorance. It's actually a shame that this interview aired when it did, because the election in which Barry is running ends tomorrow at noon, and I'd like everyone voting to listen to it; this week's Search Engine the best argument to not vote for Barry Shell that there is.

The End of the Printed Word

2009-09-04T23:09:00.003-04:00

For years now I've been watching interest in words printed on paper steadily decline among many of the people that I deal with on a day to day basis. Being in high tech, and the Internet in particular, the people around me are on the leading edge of this decline. It freaks me out, partly because I can't completely comprehend it, but mostly because I think there is a lot to be lost if the same disinterest permeates average folks to the same degree.

A couple of months ago I moved from Ottawa back to Toronto. For various reasons, in this move I chose to hire a professional moving company rather than just rent a truck and move everything myself. The cost of the move has come up in conversation a few times, and since the cost was based entirely the weight of the stuff I was moving, every conversation eventually leads to the same question: "How could you possibly have so much stuff?!" The reason for the surprise should be self-evident when you hear that I had nearly 4,500 pounds of possessions packed into a one bedroom apartment. The answer to the question lies partly in my upbringing as a pack rat, but mostly in the size of my library; nearly half of the boxes (and therefore well over half the weight) were books.

Some people react to this news in the way I originally expected, with a look that says, "oooooh, that explains it!" There are a significant number of people in my circle of friends (who are mostly geeks) and in the group of people I work with (virtually all geeks) who react in a completely different way.

"Haven't you ever heard of a PDF?"
"You know about the Gutenberg Project, right?"
"Why don't you just get a Kindle or something?"
"Dude, sell that shit. You need to do a purge."

Every one of these people, at some point, reference the same argument in some way. Sooner or later they all get around to saying that paper is obsolete, and that I should get with the times and move it all to digital formats. I can't express strongly enough how much I disagree with this view without sounding ridiculous, even to myself. My reasons are many.

On the practical side, there are all the usual arguments about the stability of the two technologies: paper doesn't crash, get corrupted, or become unreadable when the power is off. Sure, there are counter arguments to these, but none that I take very seriously. Someone once tried to counter the "books don't crash" argument by saying, "yeah, but they burn real nice." I pointed out that drive crashes that result in a total loss of all data have been far more frequent than fires that gut my apartment (so far, five to nil). Besides, any fire that's likely to take out my library is going to take out any hard drives in my computer at the same time.

I have more than purely practical reasons for preferring paper, though. There's a comfort with paper that simply hasn't been reproduced with any electronic medium so far, and I dare to predict won't be even when we have paper-thin computer displays. I mentioned some of this back in January. Electronic books don't let me flip quite as easily between pages. They don't take pencil marks in the margins all that well, and even when that's possible it's never quite as simple or convenient as with a book. They don't balance quite so comfortably over my head when I'm laying back on my couch engrossed in that pulpy novel. And, browsing a list of book titles on a computer is nothing like reading the spines along a shelf.

Incidentally, I'm the same with my music. I have encoded my entire CD collection into digital formats for ease of listening, but I still have all 600 or so discs on display in shelves because, unless I'm searching for a specific song, or specific artist, it's way easier to flip through a stack of CDs and find something I want to listen to than to scan through a cold list of 7,000 individual tracks.

This sensual aspect to the printed word – the tactile experience and several thousand years of ergonomic refinement – can't be replaced by any combination of technology we have today. Books have a smell, and a weight, and a unique feel that we connect to as much as we connect to the information they contain. And anyway, let's face it: there's something awe inspiring about the visible mass of knowledge in a library, or in the care and craft put into many books. This is something you just can't get from standing in front of computer no matter how many electronic books it contains.

To cement my reputation as a complete geek, I'm going to quote an old episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, because all the truth you need is in fiction. In the first season, the episode I Robot... You Jane introduced Jenny Calendar, the school computer science teacher. In a conversation at the end of the episode, Rupert Giles, the librarian and Buffy's handler and advisor in all things ancient and supernatural, explains to Calendar why books are so important:

"Honestly, what is it about them that bothers you so much?," Jenny asks, referring to computers.

"The smell."

"Computers don't smell, Rupert," she protests.

"I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell: musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is – it has no texture, no context. It's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible, it should be... um... smelly."

It's because of all of this that I reacted with a particularly strong and unpleasant combination of confusion, astonishment, and disgust when I heard that Cushing Academy, a prep school in Ashburnham, MA, had gotten rid of virtually its entire library, to be replaced with a coffee shop, study space, a handfull of Kindles, and a subscription to an online library. Yes, you read that right: according to The Boston Globe, aside from a small collection of rare volumes Cushing has either sold or donated its entire library to other organizations and individuals.

It's one thing for someone to convert their, relatively speaking, small personal library into electronic formats. It's quite another for a school, of all places, to eliminate all of its books and hope that an electronic equivalent will fill the void. I believe it's foolish to think it could be a substitute even in the best of circumstances, and utter folly to hope that students who are still learning to learn will have any hope of getting the same education sitting in front of a computer, with its myriad distractions in email, instant messaging, and other in-your-face social media, as they would sitting at a desk with a textbook and some note paper. And that's just textbooks I'm thinking off. I can't help but think literature is entirely doomed among the students of this particular school.

And I know I'm not the only one who has this sort of reaction. Earlier this afternoon I was witness to a short exchange (online, no less) between the friend who pointed this story out to me, and a friend of hers.

Plastikgyrl: I'm currently reading a book on my computer. It's reinforcing my bookless library horror reaction. As Giles said, computers don't smell. :(

Refashionista: totally -- I swear the vanilla / cigar smoke smell of old paper gets me hawt ;)

Refasionista may have thought she was being glib, but she reinforces the point about the visceral connection people have with knowledge gained through books. This is something that just can't be replaced by any other technology we have today, and may never be replaced.

As I've thought about this more today, my disgust at James Tracy, the headmaster at Cushing, has turned slowly to fear.

I'm behind by a few years, but I've just recently finished watching The Wire, an astonishingly good HBO crime series that aired from 2002 to 2006. One of the major themes of the fifth and final season was an examination of how print news is reacting to the pressures of an increasingly digital world. The move to an online format, where news is given away for free, is setting the entire industry up for an epic fail, and I fear that a new, functional business model won't be found in time to save print news from disappearing in a puff of blogger commentary.

Distribution of the traditional printed newspaper is dropping like the proverbial stone, and online advertizing based on page views and click-throughs is unpredictable, and a slim income at best. The financial foundation of the print media is a sandy beach, and the tide is coming in. And I'm part of the problem. Practically my entire generation has turned away from print media for our news. I don't have a good explanation for this, except perhaps for our desire for less time consuming pursuits, or the simple fact that most of the print news is available online for free anyway.

If this important pillar of the fourth estate were to completely collapse, I don't see how it could ever be recovered, or how the void it would leave could ever be filled. It could spell the doom of current events knowledge among the general population. TV news doesn't have the same ability to surround a story, and examine it in any sort of depth, and bloggers by and large don't do news. To use myself as an example, other than linking to a few outside sources, I'm not reporting any facts here; this is all opinion. Somebody who links to a news story and writes a few pages about how that news affects people isn't doing news, they're doing commentary. Real news takes time and dedication. It takes full time professionals with a access to resources, a beat, contacts, and a certain set of ethics. The few bloggers out there who are trying to do news are lacking those things to varying degrees. Without some sort of in-depth reporting going on, people's knowledge of the world at large is at risk.

I fear that print news is on its way out, and I worry that it may be the toad in the environment of print media, whose death is an early warning that the books I love so much aren't long for this world.

In Which I Discuss Getting Properly Motivated

2009-08-25T04:15:00.000-04:00

I have a confession to make.

For some time now, I've been a heavy TED user.

It started off innocently enough: a bit of cutting edge physics here, a new idea in ergonomics there. Before I knew it, I was spending hours at a time mainlining new talks... as many as I could get my grubby little hands on.

For those who are not familiar with TED, I'll say only that it's a highly addictive source of fascinating information, compelling thought, and inspired discourse. Those already familiar with TED know what I'm talking about. For the rest of you, begin viewing it at your peril because, like Lays, you can't stop at just one.

Anyway, all of that is beside the point. For now I'd like to talk about a particular talk I just saw given by Dan Pink, on incentives and motivation.

You can go watch it later, if you want to risk visiting the site. For now, I'll sum up to say that most of what he talks about is extrinsic motivators ("I'll give you a bonus if you get this done faster") and their effects on tasks that require creative thought. He references several studies which state, put simply, that typical carrot and stick motivators work great for simple mechanical or procedural tasks that have a clear path and end result, but that for virtually everything else these sorts of motivators either do not work, or in many cases actually harm productivity. Extrinsic motivators narrow our focus, and restrict creativity, reducing productivity in areas that require us to be creative.

The solution he proposes, and again he references studies to support the idea, is to use intrinsic motivators... incentives built into the work itself. Specifically, the incentives he refers to are autonomy (our desire to direct our own lives), mastery (our desire to improve at something that matters to us) and purpose (the desire to work as part of something larger than ourselves). Autonomy is key to his talk, and he references several cases where high levels of autonomy result in even higher levels of productivity from creative workers.

My first reaction to this talk was, "okay here we go, more studies into the obvious." Like the recent study by UK Music that states that lots of kids download music. But the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that this isn't such an obvious conclusion for most people. I happen to work in an industry where the most productive people tend to be those quirky loners, wearing all black, with an unusually high tendency toward Asberger's. There's a certain percentage of us that are treated just a bit differently, partly because we're all socially stunted to wildly varying degrees, and partly because big business depends on us so much to keep the lights on and you don't want to upset the emotionally fragile guy in the basement that could cripple your entire business. And as we progress in our careers, and we can make more demands of our employers, that special treatment only grows.

In the last ten years, I don't think there's been more than two days in any given week that I've shown up at the office before 10am. I often work long hours, especially compared to most nine-to-fivers, but I've tended to work for employers that recognize that my job puts odd time demands on me. For example, it's not unusual for me to have to do scheduled maintenance outside of regular work hours, or to be paged in the middle of the night. And so, I've experienced an incredible degree of autonomy over the years, culminating in my current position where I can work pretty much where and when I want, as long as the work gets done. This is how I'm able to be sitting on my balcony at 4am, with a beer, writing, instead of sleeping so that I can be at work at 8:30 in the morning.

I occasionally forget that most of the workforce doesn't experience this degree of self-determination, and thus my flawed first reaction that Dan Pink is telling us things we all already know. So maybe it's not so obvious to everyone, but I think the fact that it seemed obvious to me, due to my experience, shows what truth there is to what he has to say. And anyway, as Pink says in his talk, this isn't a feeling, or philosophy, it's science.

So if science tells us that virtually the entire industrialized world is doing it wrong, why are we still doing it that way? My answer is, the momentum and dogma of middle management. I've seen both represented in several managers that I've seen in action.

The dogma is that employees will not work unless someone is watching them. This is perhaps true for some employees.. but if you have these employees you already have a problem. It's best to let them be lazy, and fail, so that they can be discovered and removed, rather than keep them on a tight leash to make sure they're engaged in some passable, minimum effort.

The momentum is the managers' own work styles. I've had this conflict with a couple of managers in the past: due to the fact that my career is all about managing servers on networks in many locations, there is no requirement that I do my job from any one location, however some of my managers have been incapable of handling a remote employee who they cannot see, or speak to in person. I use the metaphor of momentum to describe this because I believe it will taper off over time as the older managers, who are not used to the online world with dozens of methods of instant communication slowly retire. As younger workers who are used to communicating in ways that do not provide the additional bandwidth of face-to-face communication take over, this will be less of an issue.

I'm quite happy that my current managers do not have either of these problems, but I have had to deal with them in the past. And, most people deal with them on a day to day basis, though they might not realize it.

So then how do we solve the problem? Is it simply a waiting game, where we hold our breath and wait for a slow evolution in the way businesses manage their people, or is there some revolutionary step we can take to change the minds of hundreds of thousands of managers convinced that this is the right way, as well as the millions of employees sold on the idea of bonuses and stock options? I've only been thinking about this for a few hours, so I don't have a solution yet, but I'd bet than Dan Pink has some ideas. After all, he has a book on this very subject due out soon.

I, for one, will be looking forward to the rest of what he has to say.

On Securing the DNS

2009-06-02T16:08:00.003-04:00

I don't plan to make a habit of talking about things specific to my job here... in fact, I will almost never do that. It's just easier than always having to disclaim any relationship to the views of my employer, and so forth. However, today I can't help but toot our own horn.

A few hours ago, Public Internet Registry (PIR – the manager of the .ORG Internet domain name) announced that the .ORG zone has been secured with DNSSEC, the DNS Security Extensions. This makes ORG the largest Top Level Domain that has been signed to date, and the only open registry to implement DNSSEC (open in the sense that all of the other signed TLDs are at registries which have restricted registration policies: six national TLDs, and .GOV).

Undead is the New Chic

2009-05-04T14:42:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure what it is... maybe it's the economy... maybe it's part of the overreaction to the swine flu (more on that later)... or maybe these things just come in cycles like cicada broods.. but whatever the reason, zombies seem to be on the rise right now.

Just this morning I was tweeting that in 28 days it will be the six year anniversary of my move to Ottawa. Of course, that led to an obvious joke. Almost immediately I heard back from @bestswineflu about his posted defense tips for the coming swine-flu-fed zombie apocalypse. It turns out that right about the same time, a friend of mine was announcing the grand opening of his new web site, The Daily Zombie – a news site for the informed zombie. Not to be left out of the zombie action today, @thinkgeek chose this afternoon to pass on this video showing the zombie defense training being inflicted on two Japanese kids. And that's just today.

Does the collective unconscious know something about the future that us poor individuals are missing?

Wild Thing, I Think I Love You

2009-03-25T16:36:00.003-04:00

So it's out. The first trailer for the Where The Wild Things Are movie was released this morning, and it makes the movie look like everything I hope it will be. I'm still a little afraid though... it really is an iconic book from my childhood, and I have to wonder if any movie, especially a live-action film with people in Wild Thing suits, will be able to live up.

A few friends that I've directed my excitement at have responded with weird looks and statements like, "I have no idea what you're talking about." To those people I say, "your childhood is incomplete. Go back and get your Sendak credit."

Thru You: Kutiman Remixes Youtube

2009-03-07T16:51:00.002-05:00

A couple of days ago a link started going around for Thru You, a musical project by Kutiman, an Israeli musician and producer. What he's done is take several dozen Youtube videos, chosen for their audio content, and cut and splice them together into a collection of seven brand new, original pieces of music. It's an amazing technical feat to begin with, but the music he's created is incredible in its own right.

The first and last time I saw anyone do something like this was in 1998 when Coldcut and Hexstatic got together to release the Timber EP (Timber remixes video of logging operations, and has a strong anti-clearcutting message). But even Coldcut/Hexstatic didn't quite commit to the concept the way Kutiman has; Timber contains several audio tracks that clearly aren't from the video sources, including some synthesizer sounds.

Thru You is also an incredible mix of styles; funk, dub, R&B, and even big-beat electronic. All seven tracks are excellent, and if I can get my hands on some clean mp3s they'll be going into high rotation on the home stereo. The first track, The Mother of all Funk Chords, is the best demonstration of the video remix concept, but my favourites are probably This is What it Became, an awesome dub track, Babylon Band, which is a bit like an Eastern-European Prodigy meets Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and Just a Lady, a nice slow R&B tune.

The Thru You web site has gone down at least once, probably due to its popularity, so Katiman has posted some alternates on Youtube itself. The videos on the main site seem to be better quality, so it's probably best to view them there (you can also see the original video sources that way by clicking on the Credits link). But, just in case, I'm including links below to the Youtube postings.

The Mother of all Funk Chords
This is What it Became
I M New
Babylon Band
Someday
Wait For Me
Just a Lady