ongoing by Tim Bray

IO in the Rearview

2013-05-18T12:00:00-07:00

I enjoyed it more than any other so far. More APIs, less hardware. More sessions, each shorter. One keynote.

Scale

IO has been at Moscone West, its attendance thus capped at five-thousand-and-change people, for a while now. I predict it stays that way. Yeah, it sells out instantly and we could probably draw five times that number. All this is true of Apple’s WWDC too; In Unknowable, Rands says smart things about the advantages of smaller size.

Moscone West, about as crowded as it’s legally possible for it to be, and it’s still a pretty decent space.

But there’s another factor; it’s really hard to grow much over 5-6K because then you don’t fit in Moscone West, which is a reasonably light, airy, pleasant space; see above. The only alternative that I know of is Moscone North/South, which is sort of a grungy basement shithole, and an insanely bigger investment of cash and work for whoever’s putting the show on.

If someone came along and built a nice venue that could handle say, 10K, without turning attendees into troglodytes, I bet we and Apple would both give it a serious look. For now though, I’d be surprised if things change much.

What Larry Said

The keynote surprise was a walk-on from Larry Page, which by the way takes a certain amount of courage for a guy with voice problems. His speech drew a certain amount of eye-rolling, but I can testify that it wasn’t put on for the occasion; that’s just what he sounds like when he’s speaking internally to Googlers.

I think John Gruber’s pushback mostly misses the mark. First off, Larry is obviously right that the Net biz isn’t zero-sum. Look, for example, at iOS and Android clawing each other ferociously for market share; who’s winning depends on what measures you use, but the key thing is that no matter how you measure, both sides are growing and growing fast. And I’ll totally unsurprised if one of Microsoft or BlackBerry or Mozilla or someone nobody’s watching yet gets a spot on that mobile-software growth curve.

The bicycle corral. It was busy every day.

Also, more or less all growth is by accretion. There were tablets from Microsoft five years before the iPad; MapQuest was on the Web a decade before Google Maps got interesting; the list of examples is endless.

Great things that didn’t previously exist don’t burst like Athena from some deity’s forehead, but grow by relentless layering-on of improvements and additions; eventually this produces something so much better and different that it’s in effect qualitatively new.

Inside a Chromebook Pixel.

What I Said

My speech, an overview of Identity tech, was pretty rough. Literally 10 minutes before showtime, my Keynote preso corrupted itself and wouldn’t play. I managed to export it as PDF so the audience could see it, minus the nifty animations and transitions, but I couldn’t see my speaker notes. Fortunately I remembered most of the 50 minutes’ worth of material, but there’s a whole lot of hemming and hawing and I am totally unrelaxed.

The talk is up on YouTube, but I don’t recommend it for anyone who reads this space, because I’ll eventually work through all the material here in a probably-more-coherent form.

The Girl/Boy Thing

IO, like every other tech gathering, suffers from horrible gender imbalance. I don’t know what to do about it but I don’t think it’s appropriate to ignore, and I’ll keep highlighting it as long as I keep seeing it.

By the way, I had sort of thought there was not much new to be said about high-tech gender tension, but I was wrong; I recommend The Hawkeye Initiative IRL! by “K2” and Open Source Is Not A Warzone. Not Every Man Is A Dick by a girl-Perl-geek collective. I don’t 100% agree with everything they say, but any new contribution to this conversation is obviously A Good Thing.

A geek.

My Tribe

That gender problem aside, IO left me proud to be a Net nerd. The people at IO are eclectic, open-hearted, loud-voiced; they are Burning-Man hippies, calculating entrepreneurs, concurrency obsessives, amateur opera singers; they come from everywhere, in all colors. (Those that are American include more or less no Republicans, because one thing that’s not cool among us is the celebration of ignorance.) I love them. There’s nothing I’d rather do.

Ingress Chase Scene

2013-05-17T12:00:00-07:00

I hadn’t been out to play in a long time, but I heard of a cross-faction event at IO, and I’d never done one of those. It got way out into crazy-space; Even non-players might enjoy the story.

Previously in this series: Ingress, Things About Ingress, Ingress, Month 3, Ingress Weekly, Ingress Tourism, and Advanced Ingress.

Steve at the Diamond

My Tuesday plane to San Fran was late so I missed the geek dinners. Restless, I checked the Ingress map and discovered there was a major level-8-portal farm down around the ballpark. Thus a late-evening walk round the diamond by the bay, admiring the waves’ twinkles.

I ran into a few local players farming away, notably this one guy whom I’ll call “SteveMcQ” even though that’s not his real or in-game name. He’s a high-energy fast-talking Hong-Kong-American who really loves his Ingress. We hung out, chatted, strolled, loaded up on virtual goodies.

At IO

There was an Ingress booth where eager young staffers dealt out schwag. They had you fire up the game to verify your level, and I got the only in-real-life compliment I’ll ever get from an in-real-life young woman for video-game achievement; that and a cheesy level-8 T-shirt, and a blue Resistance badge with flashing LEDs. Faintly ludicrous, but cheerful.

Roll the Cameras

Operation Bowstring was a cross-faction event organized by Niantic for IO attendees and interested local players. There was one big central portal and a dozen or so others you could win points for your faction by holding or enclosing at 3 checkpoints: 7:30, 8:00, and 8:30 PM.

My faction didn’t organize much, just a brief gathering on a SoMa sidewalk. SteveMcQ showed up and decided I should join him to contend for a portal at the Palace of Fine Arts. “I drive, let’s go!” he said. Except for, the Palace is way over at the other side of San Francisco, it was already after 7, and the third L8 in our party, a nice San Franciscan woman playing as “thecatspaws”, was missing. We found the car, we found thecatspaws, and SteveMcQ put the hammer down.

Suddenly I was in the chase scene from Bullitt. OK, I exaggerate; SteveMcQ is a terrific driver and got us there in the absolute minimum possible elapsed time without actually breaking laws. A police officer might have wanted to dispute some of the finer points, but we didn’t see any of those. All the while talking double-time Ingress shop in Cantonese English, frequently waving both hands in the air. If you’re gonna joyride like a complete fucking madman across a major American city, I think San Fran’s a good choice.

The Palace portal was held by the Enlightened. You can’t drive there; it’s in the middle of a green space the other side of a big pond from the nearest street. thecatspaws’ phone locked up just as we got close; so SteveMcQ jerked to a stop in the middle of the street at 7:27. He yelled at her “You park it, we go!” and we hit the ground running.

The Palace of Fine Arts. It’s pretty, I recommend a visit.

SteveMcQ and I ran like hell through the beautifully-manicured grounds, leaping hedges, terrifying poodles, banking around corners. For the last hundred yards we had our Androids out, firing off L8 bursters fast as we could punch the screen.

The other side was there but, not having seen any of us, had relaxed a bit. I will long treasure the look on the face of Enlightened agent “mercurio” when SteveMcQ and I came hurtling through the Palace arches at 7:29:30 or so, resonators smashing left and right. Later, we found out that mercurio’s app had locked up too, just a moment before. So with that and the element of surprise, even though there were three of them to two of us, we held the portal at the crucial moment, scoring a point for our team.

Then I couldn’t help laughing out loud between gasps for breath. It was impossible not to be madly exuberant.

The next hour was pleasant, with time between bouts for sandwich-grabbing and picture-taking; it’s a nice bit of San Fran. Also, we won both the 8:00 and 8:30PM rematches, the second I think mostly on luck, the third because they tried to fake us out and build a field round the portal. Once we’d scotched that, they hadn’t time for a serious attack.

Then we drove back cross town for the finale at “Cupid’s Arch”, that big bow-and-arrows sculpture by the Embarcadero, where our side was comprehensively crushed by the better-organized opposition; SteveMcQ and thecatspaws and I brought in three of the miserable ~~eight~~ nine Resistance points.

Still, it was cool being out by the bay with hundreds of nerds, nearly everyone badged in flashing green or blue. Then everyone went off to a bar; it was OK but I got claustrophobic and left, found another bar where I talked with random IO geeks about OAuth and queuing systems.

Ingress, it can be serious fun.

Fun at IO

2013-05-16T12:00:00-07:00

There is a conscious effort to make Google IO not just an information-dense environment, but a party. I joined in the fun for all three evenings I was free in San Fran. This included one photo-walk, one rock & roll performance, and one cross-faction Ingress event. Here are words and pictures.

Photo Walk

As in, the Google+ San Francisco PhotoWalk with Thomas and Trey, where T&T are short for Thomas Hawk and Trey Ratcliff, two photogs of renown at least on G+.

Over a thousand people signed up and a few hundred actually turned up. I heard 400-ish which, if true, means that each uploaded ten photos, more or less. The camera ecosystem seems vigorous, the photwalkers wielding everything from exotic monsters in the Alpa and Phase One flavors to the pocket computers that most actual photos are taken with these days. Here’s one of those:

But wow, were there ever a lot of mirrorlesses in evidence.

While I took away a few general-purpose downtown-San-Francisco shots, I thought the most interesting local subjects were the photographers at work, for example here:

After about 800 pictures of this grizzled rocker had been taken I laid a couple bucks on him and I hope lots of other photogs did too.

Is this a great-looking photographer or what?

This was my first-ever PhotoWalk and I’d like to try it again, on a smaller scale.

Rock and Roll

I strolled into the Google IO after-hours party not knowing who was going to be playing — rumor had suggested Daft Punk — and thought, as I walked in, “that looks like Billy Idol”; and so it was.

Billy’s in good shape and moves well even if the years haven’t been kind to his face. I have a lot of respect for straight-ahead hard rock played unironically and well; some fools think that’s an easy thing to do. Billy’s band did, and while a few of the tracks were flat, everyone’s gotta love the chestnuts like White Wedding and Mony Mony.

And then they played LA Woman. I’ve always loved that song for its loping rhythms and chromatic crescendos and genuine menace, but (I realized) had never heard it played live by a competent rock band. I am sincerely grateful to Billy and the band for doing it up just fine.

When a rocker’s playing a corporate gig I guess they have to throw in a few words for the crowd to illustrate that they know where they are. So Billy said something along the lines of “Hope you guys go out there and have good luck with your apps. Some of the money I get for doing this will probably go into them. Isn’t it great to do the thing you most love to do and get paid for it?” It is! I was actually sort of touched.

Ingress

My first ever Ingress cross-faction event. Sixteen or so portals scattered round San Francisco were designated as special and the factions could score by enfielding or owning them.

My own Resistance faction wasn’t remotely organized and so we got our butts kicked; but, as usual with Ingress, I saw some places I wouldn’t have otherwise seen, and met some people I wouldn’t have otherwise met.

My own little role, admittedly in a side-show, was wildly entertaining and I’ll write it up separately. Here are a couple pictures from the closing ceremony down by the Bay Bridge, processed into what I fondly hope is a vaguely Ingress-y style.

Here, a boat pulls up to the pier to deliver a couple satchels-full of prize goodies.

It was kind of nice, if chilly, to be down by the bay with this wildly-random assortment, both IO geeks and local San Fran Ingress nerds. Thanks to Niantic for a decent night out.

Yes, in between the fun, meaningful technology happened and there’s more to come; but the pictures aren’t as good.

Springies

2013-05-08T12:00:00-07:00

I used to run lots of flower pix; it was almost a trademark for this blog in its early days. Their absence hasn’t been a matter of policy; whatever mental subsystem it is that pulls the camera up to the eye operates several levels below the one where I think about things. But the sun was just right after supper tonight.

From top to bottom: Poppies, the Rugosa that’s winning this year’s Rose Race, and a Lonicera ciliosa Honeysuckle. Nothing I can say can add much.

While on the subject of flowers: This spring in my neighborhood, many of the women are wearing simple dresses in floral prints, mostly lightweight stuff with a bit of swing and float to it. There are no words for how good they look; any more than with these blossoms.

Still enjoying my time with the Fujifilm X-E1 and (especially) the 35mm F1.4.

Springtime Tab Sweep — The World

2013-05-06T12:00:00-07:00

The only unifying theme is that they’ve been building up in the browser for months, and are generally consistent with my worldview.

Why it’s OK to hate banks

From The Economist, The people versus the bankers, an approachable, quantitative discussion of why banking is systemically broken, and why it would be good for society to inflict severe financial pain on bankers.

Who you are and where you come from

From Pacific Standard magazine, of which I know nothing, Ethan Watters writes We Aren’t the World, in which it’s revealed that peoples’ cultural roots influence their perceptions and behaviors, um, radically (etymology joke there), which isn’t surprising, and that quantitative social science has never really wired in this apparently-an-axiom, which is.

Unequal Urbanism

Geoff Meggs is a leading light on Vancouver city council and a good blogger too. I read Would a high tech boom hurt or help reduce Vancouver’s inequality? which referenced Richard Florida’s More Losers Than Winners in America's New Economic Geography and, from Urbanophile, Is Urbanism the New Trickle-Down Economics? and Failure to Communicate: Beyond Starbucks Urbanism.

Hmf; I’d sort of uncritically thought that a reasonably well-working city should be an engine of progress, by and large, but the data don’t seem to support that.

Feeds

In these days of Readerdammerung there is fresh new thinking on this topic. John Battelle offers Who owns the right to filter your feed? in which he feels helpless before the Twitter torrent and casts about for strategies to deal with it. I think he’s missing the point, because the torrent’s eddies always bring the important stuff back to me; but John is always interesting.

Pomobilly

As practiced by Willy Moon, of whom I’d known nothing, but I think I’ll have to check him out. What a voice!

Serious Schneier

Bruce is iconic of course, and usually what he writes gets the attention it deserves, but I thought that Our Internet Surveillance State should have lit up more neurons than it apparently did. I’m not sure I agree with all of it, but it’s an energizing read. We need Mr Schneier.

Sunlight!

For some reason this isn’t a news story, but the efficiency of solar energy generation has been increasing steadily for some years now and apparently isn’t slowing down. I have repeatedly heard 14%-per-annum as a typical estimate of recent growth, and while those aren’t Moore’s-law numbers, they’re gonna change the world in not too many years no matter how cheap fracked natural gas gets. Juan Cole, who usually covers Mideast politics, does a roundup in The Incredible Shrinking Cost of Solar Energy Drives Mega-Projects around the World and yeah, smells big to me.

Springtime Tab Sweep — Tech

2013-05-06T12:00:00-07:00

Ouch, some of these tabs are old. Unifying theme: none.

Corroding Style Sheets

Liking the look of Stylus. All these tantalizing alternatives when what we really want is to take the ship up and nuke CSS from orbit.

Wisdom

From CACM, The Tail at Scale by Jeff Dean and Luiz André Barroso. Maybe the deepest thinking about large-system performance characteristics you’re apt to read in any given year.

Git Joy

Both good: LearnGitBranching and Git Koans.

Emacs Joy

Multiple-cursor madness. “And, it’s fun!” Eek.

Mongo Joy

Specifically, High Availability with MongoDB for Fun and Profit. I haven’t built a high-volume site in some years, and while I’ve not missed it that much, I would like a chance to play with some of the new database tech. I’m relaying this not because I think Mongo Is The One, but just because the whole postrelational space continues to be super-interesting.

Web Joy

I don’t know if the Paul Ford who wrote this is that Paul Ford, but Meet the Web’s Operating System: HTTP is a fine piece of work. Everyone knows that HTTP is at the center of everything and it’s still, by any sane measure, underappreciated.

In the center of that HTTP-powered ecosystem lives Pamela Fox, currently in the trenches at Coursera, who is for my money one of the most interesting writers at the Web coalface. Server-side HTML vs. JS Widgets vs. Single-Page Web Apps is well-described by its title, and who doesn’t care about that stuff? Recommended.

Rock and Roll Story

2013-05-02T12:00:00-07:00

I just finished reading Blues Highway Blues by Eyre Price, which is said to be one of a series called Crossroads Thrillers. If you like either American music or crime fiction, you might like this. If you like both, your chances are pretty high.

You might want to visit Price’s site linked under his name there; it’s somewhat unique, which is getting hard to be on the Web these days. As of May 2013, his description of Blues Highway Blues is perfectly accurate; I can’t improve on it, plus it comes with the audio of one of the songs in the book. Go have a look.

So, this novel has vaguely-Elmore-Leonard-flavored (that’s a compliment) villains, violence painted in comic-book colors (meh), lots of American-heartland ambiance (good), and immense pop-music erudition (good) but with a bit of recourse to cheap mythology: Crossroads, Atibon, and so on.

Now, I enjoyed the gleeful insertion of famous rock lyrics and rock people into the narrative, but maybe not everyone would. Example: Billy Gibbons finds the murder victim at the gas station. Example: At the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Detroit, our protagonists are involved in a smash & grab on the ashes of Alan Freed for reasons which are too complex to include here; as you might expect, alarms go off and there are incoming uniformed officials. Our hero calls out “We gotta get out of this place.” Hard not to smile.

The plotting is sloppy in places, and a couple of characters who deserve better are relegated to bit parts, but hey: You get to go on a road trip around America with intensely colorful people, none of them wholly good, a few really intensely bad, and you’ll learn something about roots & rhythm along the way.

Also, on top of being pretty good, it’s pretty cheap.

Who Owns Your Pictures?

2013-04-29T12:00:00-07:00

People are claiming that a new British law is going to allow anyone to steal your online pictures and sell them and keep the money. I think they’re mostly wrong about that law, but in the process of checking it out I ran across some bad behavior by social-media companies.

OMG they’re stealing my pretties!

Someone linked, with a gasp of horror, to UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now by Andrew Orlowski. I was prepared to blow it off because Orlowski is generally wrong about everything. This is the man who, back in 2004, referred to Wikipedians as “Khmer Rouge in nappies” and has continued to get attention with lurid Internet contrarianism; which has also worked for Jaron Lanier, Andrew Keen, and lately Evgeny Morozov. The Net is important enough that it needs sensible pushback, but we can do better than these guys; I miss the days when Cliff Stoll was our best-known naysayer.

In this case it’s not just Andrew; the British Journal of Photography is less alarmist in Controversial copyright framework receives Royal Assent, but they’re still upset.

Um, maybe not

I haven’t read the British legislation, but what it apparently does is turn people loose to re-use “orphan works”; those for which the creator’s and/or rights-holders’ identities can’t be established. I think this is sensible enough; the tricky bit is in identifying the orphans.

Orlowski says “the user only needs to perform a ‘diligent search’” to establish orphan-hood. So, what’s the problem? The things I publish online, as for example here, tend to appear on pages which clearly assert they’re by Tim Bray and that certain rights are reserved. So you wouldn’t have to be very diligent at all to establish parenthood, at least in my case.

But then I read, in the BJP piece, “a large number of online services, such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, strip the metadata from uploaded images, creating millions of new orphan works each day” and I thought, that can’t be right. But it is, partly.

Side trip: On Exif

(Those of you who know about it can skip to the next section.)

It turns out that electronic photograph files contain not just the pixels that form the image, but also textual fields containing “metadata”, information about the picture. This is generally referred to as Exif, and it identifies some or all of: the camera, lens, date, location (if there’s a GPS), size, aperture, and lots of other arcane photographic details. Plus, crucially, the name of the creator.

Exif is super-useful but also sort of a disorganized mess; there’s poor compatibility between cameras and photo-editing packages. For example, there are at least three fields you can store authorship in: Artist, By-line and Creator.

There are plenty of tools that let you peek behind the pixels at the Exif; most photo-editing packages will do this, and those of us who like the old-school command-line approach use ExifTool by Phil Harvey.

Most serious photographers arrange that when they publish an electronic photo, the Exif data includes their name. And getting back to the legal discussion, a “diligent search” to determine who owns a picture would obviously include checking out the Exif.

Metadata amputation

I decided to check and see whether the BJP was right. So I took the picture above, made sure it had my name in the Artist, By-line, and Creator fields, and posted it to Twitter using the Web interface. Then I downloaded the picture and checked the Exif, and sure enough Twitter had nuked it. There were 245 lines of Exif info going in, 58 coming out, and none of them included my name.

In fact, Twitter clearly states “We remove the Exif data upon upload. It is not available to those who view your photo on Twitter.”

Now, I don’t think Twitter is evil. And I suspect there are some fields where this makes all sorts of sense. Lots of cameras and phones put GPS data into pictures, without telling you, and I think it’s probably sensible to keep from sharing your location with the entire world by default.

But I think removing the photo’s attribution is a serious mistake and Twitter should fix it.

Also, it’s not just Twitter; kora foto morgana pointed me at the Embedded Metadata Manifesto site, which has done the digging and published Social Media sites: photo metadata test results. If they’re accurate, they reveal that Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and Twitter are losing attribution. On the other hand, DropBox, Google+, Pinterest, and Tumblr are doing the right thing.

Oops, me too

I checked the pictures right here on the blog and, uh, blush... It turns out that the original image (what you see if you click on my picture) retains the attribution, but the reduced drop-shadowed version just above lost it somewhere along the pipeline through ImageMagick and then also Framer, which I wrote.

Practically speaking it’s not a problem, because anyone who wants to use one of my pictures will want to start with the larger version. But this does show that it’s easy to get this wrong. Doesn’t mean that Twitter should, because some of the competition doesn’t, and they’re supposed to be pros.

Summing up

So yeah, Orlowski was wrong as usual; “diligent search” seems to me an entirely reasonable way to determine whether any digital artifact is an orphan or not, and even with missing Exif, the amount of diligence to required to figure out if a picture in a Twitter stream is an orphan or not isn’t that onerous. And unleashing the digital orphans into the public commons is a good thing.

On the other hand, certain well-known social sites are engaging in what feels to me like egregiously abusive behavior in stripping authorship information from works whose publishing they facilitate.

Please fix that up, Twitter and Flickr and Facebook. Or we might start suspecting your motives.

Johannesburg Noir

2013-04-25T12:00:00-07:00

Zoo City is by Lauren Beukes, published in 2010; she’s written another since then and I’ll make a point of reading it; which should be indicative.

[Background: I was looking at the bookshelf screens on my tablet and realized I’ve read quite a few recently without sharing anything, even though while none of them have been life-changing, a few are well worth the price of an e-book. This is bad behavior in a blogger, so I’ll try to run a few short reviews and get caught up.]

This book is seriously nasty, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Poor people living hard-ass lives in surprising spaces, in and out of crime, with considerable sex & drugs & rock & roll, not to mention appalling violence. What’s not to like?

Well, some of the plot dots aren’t fully connected, like exactly what the deal is with the convicts’ animals, and if that bothers you, well, then this novel will too. And a few times my suspension of disbelief in this particular alternative future was screaming for mercy. Also it’s maybe a little longer than it really needs to be.

But hey, the characters are charmingly ambiguous and some aspects of this future are pretty fascinating, and the story moves right along. The horror gets visceral but goes by so fast that you find yourself looking over your figurative shoulder as you flip through the pages. Well except for the closing climax, which I think will make anyone gasp and blench a little.

Also, if you’re South African or otherwise know Johannesburg, you’ve probably already read this, but if not really consider it. I’ve never been there but it drips with a sense of the place, which given the quality of the writing and the fact that Ms Beukes is South African, seems likely to be genuine.

Also, anyone who’s lived on the Net will be struck by the portrayal of our heroine’s side-job as a 419-scam operative, and a very plausible walk-through of what the successful closing of a 419 might just be like. It must happen often enough, or they wouldn’t be doing it.

Anyhow, it’s fun, it moves right along, and it’s not really like anything else I’ve ever read. So I suspect a lot of you would like it.

HP7 — Draperies

2013-04-22T12:00:00-07:00

My Hawaii Problem is solved, or anyhow I’m out of Big-Island pictures I feel compelled to share. These last two have absolutely nothing specific to the geography.

This appeared by the pool at our resort in Keahou. What you can’t see is the banner; it featured the triskelion which thought was for the Isle of Man; but it turned out to be the Flag of Sicily.

And sure enough, a bunch of Sicilians showed up to eat and drink by the pool by the ocean. Someone played guitar and they sang rousing Sicilian songs. It was an afternoon thing, over by suppertime. Don’t know if they were Big-Island or vacationing Sicilians.

Now here’s something completely different; at a random beach on the West coast of the Big Island. I don’t know why they were sharing the sarong.

That’s it for Hawaii, already feels a long time ago, except for the lava walk; that memory will remain intense as long as my memory circuits work, I think.

Advanced Ingress

2013-04-21T12:00:00-07:00

Wherever you go these days there are Level-8 players, and even the occasional L8 portal. It’s a different game at that level. What may be my last piece on the subject; with a side-trip into BioShock Infinite.

Previously in this series: Ingress, Things About Ingress, Ingress, Month 3, Ingress Weekly, and Ingress Tourism.

A couple of our local enthusiasts got to L8 in less than 30 days’ play. It took me well over four months, and that’s with a few road-trips to places oozing with portals; I confess that when I got real close to L8, I did put in a lengthy weekend afternoon driving around to places in Vancouver to find juicy green fields to smash and relink.

What Matters

Someone who’s made it to L8 is likely fitter and lighter than when they started, they’ve made some new friends, and started to build a microculture. In Vancouver, Resistance level-8 culture centers on pubs with good chicken-wing specials; perhaps not what I would have picked, but there you go.

You hear stories about spectacular Ingress weight losses, which is a good thing; and also, to be fair, Ingress traffic tickets.

BioShock Infinite

While on the subject of games... I kept hearing people talk about this one, so thought the family should give it a try. The graphics are beautiful, the “Vigors” (magic spells) are cool, the arena is built with real imagination, but after less then ten hours, I’m done. There are no other people playing and I’m stuck in my living room; why would I want to do that?

Advanced Ingress Strategy

Once you no longer care about leveling up, everything changes. At the moment there’s not much of an endgame, unless you’re in a neighborhood where the Niantic people stage one of their events, or you organize your own. But let’s assume there’s going to be one. If you want to be on the winning side then, you need to have more high-level players than the other side. So what matters more than anything else is recruiting new players and leveling them up. On that basis:

Don’t build big linked fields. You’re taking away leveling opportunities from your junior players and creating them for the other side.
Do build farms. You can’t do anything without ammunition, and so you need occasional access to clusters of L7 and L8 portals.
Don’t try to play defense. Ingress is ludicrously tilted in favor of the attacking player — an L6 can take down any portal in the game, and an L8 can tear up a whole neighborhood in no time at all.

There have been recent changes to the game that might make defense a little less impossible, but for the time being, it’s not a good use of your time or resources.
Do make pop-up farms. The consequence of the last two points is that you need to get groups of high-level players together, upgrade a bunch of portals clustered in a small area, and farm them all dry, ideally before the other side arrives to smash. In Vancouver this is done with the help of chicken wings.

We also had a suburb a half-hour’s easy drive away with a compact riverfront downtown bulging with portals, and a couple of our more fanatical players lived there. We managed to keep L8’s up for days and days there, and for quite a while had the other side outgunned as a consequence. But it seems they’ve caught on, so I guess it’s back to pop-ups.
Don’t capture portals. If you’re attacking an enemy L7, don’t capture it or even turn it grey. Leave it in the opposition’s hands, but with almost all the portals destroyed and the rest weakened. That way, you’re not leaving the fat first-resonator bonus on the table for the other side.

Unless, of course, there’s a lower-level player from your faction somewhere not too far away. In which case...
Do offer smash/key service. L8 players should be available, when one of your lower-level players is around, to come out, weaken or smash the opposition portals, and load the junior up with portal keys, so they can capture and deploy and link.
Don’t let the other side have farms. My neighborhood is currently full of opposition portals and I just don’t care. But I and our other L8’s keep our eyes open for any of them hitting L7, and we’re pretty good at cleaning them up PDQ when that happens.

How Big Is It?

A lot of people are playing; somewhere over 500 just here in Vancouver. But the rate of growth has slowed, I think; anecdotal, but I definitely have the feeling.

It seems that there are quite a few people who just don’t want to come out and play. They genuinely don’t feel the appeal of getting out there on the streets in their neighborhood. This is hard for me to understand.

Of course, there’s a huge untapped pool of highly-qualified players: the millions and millions of people in iOS-land. My feelings are mixed; I think Ingress is both fun and good for its players. So more people is better. But I’ve also enjoyed the distinct flavor (not necessarily better, just different) that follows on the absence of Apple People.

News Fail

2013-04-19T12:00:00-07:00

So yeah, I sat up till 2AM (Pacific, 5AM in Boston), fascinated by the situation in Cambridge and Watertown. I listened to the police radio online, watched a few live Twitter feeds, and had a couple Google Maps windows zoomed in on streets that I’d never heard of but now know where they are: Hazel, Dexter, Laurel. The professional news media knew less than I (3 timezones away) did, but said more; somewhere between nauseating and just silly.

I tried a few live-TV streams but the inconsequential arm-waving and flow of bloviation-with-good-hair-on-top was unbearable. And clearly they weren’t listening to the scanner or watching the right Twitterers.

One little example: After the big Watertown shootout, some police official said something like “Two suspects accounted for, we are searching for more.” And instantly the so-called news professionals began speculating about not just two guys, but larger gangs and wider plots. If you’d been following the primary sources, you knew perfectly well that there’d been two guys, one was dead or in custody after the shootout at Dexter & Laurel, the other’s location was unknown. There were lots more like this.

This morning, when I got up, the good papers (NYT, WSJ) had well-reported stories about the Tsarnaev brothers and the night’s mayhem, which corresponded well to what I’d heard in real-time. So maybe there’s hope for journalism; but just not in real-time.

Thanks to Danny Sullivan for an excellent curated Twitter feed, and whoever it was at RadioReference that put up the nice robust police-scanner stream.

HP6 — Greens

2013-04-18T12:00:00-07:00

This, I promise, is the second-last outburst consequent upon the Hawaii Problem where my Lightroom is all bulgy with nifty Big-Island photos. Today, shades of green at Akaka Falls State Park.

It’s a nice park at the end of nice drive north from Hilo, with a worthwhile side-trip to that botanical garden then through the pleasant village of Honomu.

The park itself is an unchallenging half-hour ramble along causeways through pretty dense rainforest up to where there’s a nice view of the falls. Except for the green stuff was more interesting that the long twisting white stream of water. Like this:

Oh, and the waterfall.

Since very few monitors out there are correctly calibrated, it’s unlikely that any two people will see the same 50 or so shades of green, but most of the variations will still probably look pretty good.

Measure the Pain

2013-04-16T12:00:00-07:00

Learning isn’t free; re-learning is paying the price twice. Many of the people who use what we geeks make would like to re-learn less.

One of them is Patric King, interviewed in The Setup, an instructive and enjoyable publication. I’m excerpting his whole last paragraph but the rest is good too:

I would love to see a return to a longer turnaround between software packages. There’s an artificial churn happening in how quickly we need to re-learn tools, because companies are learning to move their software products to a subscription basis. I am seriously tempted to jump off that bandwagon, if I were confident I could find a workflow and OS that wouldn’t be painful to re-learn on a bi-annual basis, rather than every six months.

At Apple historically it was like this: If Steve and Jony wanted to make a big change (say, reverse scrolling in Lion), they just told the engineers to do it, and the engineers did it. People complained, but because Steve and Jony had great instincts, usually ended up ahead of where they’d been.

At Google historically, someone proposes a change (say, rework the Gmail compose window), and there’d be agreed-on metrics as to what part of the user experience they were trying to improve, and they’d run big studies, and if the metrics moved the right way, the change rolled out. People complained, but because the data mostly doesn’t lie, usually ended up ahead of where they’d been.

OK, I’m stereotyping: Apple measures things, and Google has Matias Duarte. And crucially, both strategies give the same weight to the interim pain, when people are figuring out how to do again what they could do before: Zero.

This hurts me. I’m an old guy with lots of civilian friends, and when they ping me and say “OMG why did you BREAK my Gmail?!?!” I get pissed, not because they’re ruining my day but because we partly ruined theirs.

Am I a Luddite? Am I just change-averse? Do I want to stick with “good enough” when on the Internet, tomorrow is axiomatically better than today? Do I want us to ignore all the people building better things that people will switch to if we don’t build even better things?

Well, no, mostly. It’s called “software” because it’s soft, you can change it. But I hate to ruin anyone’s day. And I’d like to measure the pain not just the gain.

HP5 — Lava Context

2013-04-15T12:00:00-07:00

Having bombarded you with lava pix while dealing with my need-to-overshare Hawaii Problem, I thought it’d be nice to show the story of where the hot rock came from.

Let’s take that literally; all those glowing-lava pix were part of what the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory calls the “Peace Day flow from Pu`u `O`o vent” (check out the nifty Recent Kilauea Status page). Here’s its path down Kilauea’s side to the sea. You might have to enlarge the photo to see the line of plumes: volcanic smoke, steam, and burning vegetation.

The black-and-white version of that photo is remarkably dramatic, but I’m storytelling here and this one has more truth.

Let’s back off a bit. This isn’t that much of a photo, but does have a story to tell. We’re looking across the crater of Kilauea Iki, which was last a lava lake in 1959, out at the main Kilauea caldera. To the left is Halemaumau crater, which holds a lava lake right now, that’s why there’s smoke coming out of it. And the gentle bulge at the right rear is Mauna Loa itself, the Big Mama volcano that all these are fleas on the side of. One of the park guys told us that when Mauna Loa erupts, it pumps lava at a rate ten times greater than all of Kilauea put together. It’s erupted 32 times since 1843, most recently in 1950, 1975, and 1984. It’s pretty well due.

Now let’s look at some old lava. If you started from where that last picture was taken and headed a little west of north up to the top of Mauna Loa and went down the other side into the saddle between it and Mauna Kea, you’d come to a small, very old, cinder cone on which is the Kipuka Pu’u Huluhulu Nature Reserve. It’s got a little parking lot, a steep-and-slightly-scary path up the side, and the nicest little soft-green spot imaginable at the top, perfect for a picnic.

This is from there; these lava flows are, I don’t know, a whole lot older than those to the south; could be a hundred or a hundred thousand years. There’s not much rain up here so the lava weathers slowly.

Lava, it’s full of stories.