So, I bought this new pair of sandals and they’re just so great I had to pass the word along.

No, this is not going to become a product-placement blog (and who here hasn’t wondered how much it costs to get talked up on Dooce?) No shoe company is paying for this. (Well, there’s an Amazon affiliate link; I’ll be rich, I tell you, rich!)

I hate shoes, except for certain hiking gear. No shoe I’ve ever worn hasn’t made my feet sweaty and uncomfortable. So as soon as it’s warm enough, the shoes go in the cupboard and stay there till autumn. Thus, I’ve bought & worn a lot of sandals and while the ones I like may not work for you, my opinions are informed by loads of experience.

I often wear Eccos, which on top of being comfy, come in leather models that you can pretend are sort of dressy. But I have to say that they’re not that tough; they typically don’t make it through two summers.

Anyhow, I was in the local outdoor-gear emporium and these Chaco “Z/1 Unaweep” sandals caught my eye. Uh, “Unaweep”? But I digress. You can buy them from Chaco, and from a bunch of other vendors via Amazon. But I’d recommend finding a local retailer, because fit matters.

Unlike previous faves, they don’t slip on effortlessly, you have to loosen up and re-tighten; so if your lifestyle includes escapes where seconds count, stay away. Also, unlike Eccos and their ilk, they don’t have that luxurious worn-leather feel. But here’s the thing: once I put them on, they vanish from my sensorium; they’re just not there. I’ve worn them every day in May and I already regret the inevitable eventual return to shoes. And I’ve been out playing frisbee and catch with my 12-year-old a couple of times; they function well as runners, and are lighter than any runner I’ve ever owned. Also, they’re waterproof.

I have no evidence on how well they’ll hold up; but early impressions are very, very good.

There’s been a lot of linkage this week to David Lowery’s Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss? Lowery is a music-biz insider, and says he’s also a geek; and he really, really hates people like me. He makes some really interesting points; unfortunately, he comes across as a jerk.

Tl;dr

Which for those who don’t know is Net-jargon for “Too long; didn’t read”; it can be used both as a comment, and to tag a summary that precedes anything longish. Let’s do both here. First off, Lowery’s piece could have been condensed to a third of its length by a good editor. Second, I’m going to try to pull out some worthwhile bits here.

At one level it’s not obvious to me why I should do this, because Lowery clearly regards me as the enemy. A few choice quotes from him on the subject of those of us who build the Internet for a living:

• A sort of Cyber–Bolshevik campaign of mass collectivization for the good of the state…er .. I mean Internet

• ... they shout as they pound their tiny fists on their Skovby tables.

• “Free expression” and “Innovation” are tech speak for being able to use artists songs, sound recordings, films, photos and books without having to license or share any revenue.

• Google date rapes the spirit of the law

• Silicon Valley IS the new Wall Street. It attracts the same “I wanna get rich at whatever cost” sleazebags that used to go to Wall Street and bilk old ladies out of their pensions.

On top of which, he chest-thumps about his geek prowess, because he does ham radio and “had a fascination with the old RPG punch card programming language”.

Dear Mr Lowery

You’re rude, you don’t understand the difference between “its” and “it’s”, your geek cred is pathetic, and your slides look like gerbil droppings.

Having said that

Sometimes he’s funny: “the .Zip file was a real game changer for musicians, especially banjo players.”

And if you wade through the bad slides, sloppy language, rudeness, and arrogance, there are things to learn here. Since we’re in tl;dr mode, let’s present Lowery’s points in point form. I don’t agree with all of them; but they sound like things that are worth arguing about.

• If you do the math, the effective CD royalties paid to many musicians were a lot higher than the nominal 12% or so, because of the practice of giving advances to prospects whose records didn’t sell.

• The practice of posting takedown notices on Chilling Effects might have an unexpected downside in publicizing personal information about people protecting reasonable rights in a reasonable way.

• There is a perceived lack of transparency about the royalty payouts from stream services. (Nothing new here; I’ve never known anyone getting royalties for anything who didn’t find their statements opaque.)

• It’s reasonable to wonder whether the 30%-or-so cut taken by online services like iTunes & its competitors is reasonable.

• An artist’s best economics are in selling their own music and schwag off their own website. But all the interested-buyer traffic is being drawn away by intermediaries: iTunes and Play and Amazon.

• When you’re doing the economics, it’s reasonable to think about not just the distribution of revenue, but the distribution of risk. Online merchants have arranged to carry more or less none.

On the Other Hand

I think Mr Lowery has some points. I think he’s also nostalgic for the historically-tiny span of years when the music biz fattened on the proceeds of the great vinyl-to-CD conversion. Music has historically been lousy as a business and while we’d all like to make it better, those profit margins are never coming back.

And I think a dialog between Net-heads and non-label insiders like Mr Lowery could be useful for both sides. But as long as he thinks we’re just a bunch of philistine scum and persists in saying so every other sentence, he’s not gonna get one going.

I’m really not much of a gamer; but I did the Diablo dance back in the day, and have enjoyed revisiting the franchise. Herewith remarks on that thing that’s been responsible for so many red-rimmed eyes at early meetings this last couple of weeks. D3 isn’t just flawed fun, it’s interesting in a serious way, I think.

I just finished taking a Demon Hunter (now L31) through Normal mode, playing only an hour and a bit in the late evenings. It was fun. In D2 I was an Amazon guy, and enough of the old reflexes still worked that I usually didn’t feel like a complete idiot.

Considered solely as a game, D3 includes triumphs and failures. The apparatus that goes around it is probably going to prove way more interesting in the big picture.

Triumphs

The really big deal, and what I think burned most of those years getting ready to ship, is the general gameplay balance. For a reasonably-competent player it is excellent verging on exquisite. Time after time in the mid-to-late game, a large-scale battle scene beat me down to a shred of life, but left just barely enough space and tricks to fight back and win the day, breathing hard. There is loads of space for creative maneuvering in these situations.

Another triumph is the performance and stability. I’m running a 2008-vintage Mac Pro with a 2010-vintage Radeon 5770 on 50M cable Internet, which is I think solidly in the 2012 mainstream, and the game holds together like a rock, even in big-party boss battles; better than D2 ever did, for sure.

Another (and this is major-win territory) is the time-of-day readout up in the top right corner of your screen. If you’re a reasonably adult person this will keep you from hanging in till it’s 2:30AM and your eyeballs are hanging out on your cheeks. I adopted a policy of not starting till everyone else went to bed, and knocking off at midnight, and really had no trouble sticking to it. Thank you Blizzard!

The game-sharing scheme doesn’t have many options, but doesn’t seem to need many. Ask to join a public game and quite a few times, it’ll find one that’s OK. Open up an in-progress game and you’re quite likely to attract a decent party.

Failures

When I’d finally exulted over Diablo’s corpse, I watched a few of the closing credits roll by, and broke out laughing when someone was credited as “Lead Writer”. I’m surprised the name wasn’t Alan Smithee. I mean, gimme a fucking break; every cut-scene narrative made me think of a bunch of Seventies stoners sitting around talking about the awesome textures in the shag carpet. Angels in armor vs. the forces of Hell, the latter having bulging muscular pot-bellies. I guarantee I won’t watch a single one on any subsequent trips through.

The boss battles were kind of meh, (except maybe Belial just because of the remarkable visuals). There was just nothing very creative there; the thrills were in the fights along the way.

The graphics would have impressed me if I hadn’t played Skyrim for a couple weeks around Christmas. If you put this kind of teamplay into an open world like that, that would be a good thing. Well, maybe not; the entire global economy would take a beating while everyone checked out to play.

Interesting

So, D3 is free-to-play, which I thought the contrast between D2 and the MMPORGs had shown to be, well, wrong. But it’s going to have an integrated real-money auction house, where you can swap in-game gold and shiny-toys back and forth for real money. With the landlord taking a cut, of course, and presumably policing out scammers.

I think this is likely to become a frenzied and fractured behavioral sink. I think serious money will be involved. I think the distant echoes from Neal Stephenson’s REAMDE may become deafening. It’s sort of already started; there are blogs out there right now to coach you on gaming the auction house.

I don’t play games that often, and when I do it’s to get away from this kind of real-world bullshit. Oh well.

Tactics

Hey, you can’t write about games without giving advice:

• Demon Hunter is a blast and has lots of scope for creative tactics.

• If you’re going to build one, learn how to use Vault, and use it all the time.

• So far a pure glass-cannon build doesn’t seem viable, you’re going to need to pump up that Vitality.

• Switch builds depending on what kind of party you’re with and what kind of battle you’re having.

I also started out a Barbarian but couldn’t hang in for more than a couple of hours; there just didn’t seem to be any tactical depth to it. Which is a pity, because a couple of the parties I joined were sans-tank, and that was a problem.

It occurs to me that I should have some sort of junior character for my DH to stash stuff away for, but I don’t know which.

My 12-year-old is building a Monk and maybe he’ll let me play that sometimes.

It’s kind of fun to be part of a global pop-culture moment.

There’s this blog called FOSS PATENTS written by a Florian Mueller, and when a software-patent-related issue heats up, reporters often seek out his comments for their stories. I’m not sure this is a good idea, and I’d like to offer some evidence; articles he wrote on a currently-hot story back in October 2010 and November 2010. This is a small but representative sample of his (many) offerings on the subject.

I’m not mad at Florian, who has every right to publish his opinions. I am a little irritated with the media for passing on those opinions so uncritically, and think the time for that has passed.

David Weinberger points out in Will tablets always make us non-social consumers? that tablets imply a less-interactive “lean-back” relationship with the Internet and thus the world. It’s possible we can fix this by just uncrippling the keyboard; I can’t really have a conversation with the world if I can’t jam text in fast, interrupting bursts of high-word-flow with flurries of local edits. I sure don’t want to live in a lean-back world.

They’re serious, fierce-looking birds; except when they’re not.

These two were hanging out next to our cabin, so I settled down with the big lens on the camera, hoping to get a dramatic shot of one or both taking wing. One somehow snuck off while I wasn’t looking, and then the other decided it needed to clean up. This went on for a remarkably long time.

I can report that the process works great; that was a fine-looking eagle when it finally flew away. I missed that shot too.

It’s like this: The browser’s doomed, because apps are the future. Wait! Apps are doomed because HTML5 is the future. I see something almost every day saying one or the other. Only it’s mostly wrong.

[If you don’t want to read my opinions, hop to the end of this post for months & months worth of links to things I thought worth reading on the subject.]

Apps Win

If you want immersive/interactive polish, with ultra-fine control over your gradients and textures and how the things on the screen react to being touched, you need an app.

If you want to capture what the phone can see, permute that image’s colors based on how hard you shake it, and vibrate in the user’s hand to say it’s time to stop shaking, you need an app.

If you want to make an urgent phone call based on detecting that you’re within five minutes’ drive of your destination, you need an app.

If you want to be featured in a phone’s electronic storefront, and then be purchased effortlessly with a couple of taps, and have the charge end up on the monthly phone bill, you need an app.

If you want to port your existing C++ shooter which is based on one of the big gaming engines to a new mobile platform, you need an app.

Browsers Win

If your app is mostly about delivering highly-readable text that flows around pictures and contains navigational links, be in the browser.

If you don’t want to be in anyone else’s storefront and pay them a piece of the action for access to the customers, be in the browser.

If you don’t have the budget to write an Android app and an iOS app and (soon, maybe) a Windows Phone app, be in the browser.

If you want to be sure you can reach everybody everywhere, even the ones who aren’t rich enough or hip enough to have the latest pocket jewel, be in the browser.

If you need to be sure you can update your app, not in iOS’ weeks or Android’s however-long-until-the-user-updates, but right now, then be in the brower.

Tiny Case Study

The apps-are-the-future absolutists like to point to Instagram and yep, it’s interesting, all right. Consider this dreamy photo by Scott Hanselman. Is it part of the Web? Well, it must be, because I just linked to it. But can you find it in Google? Not directly, because Instagram explicitly tells the search engines to go away. But, well, you sort of can anyhow. Does the example really prove anything? You decide.

Developers! Developers! Developers!

Pardon me while I get a little geeky and address the Morlocks in the mobile sausage factories:

• HTML5/Browser technology is moving forward fast; which will be changing some of the trade-offs above. But then, so is mobile-app technology. It’s complicated.

• The mobile-app programming models are better than the rococo pandemonium of DOM and JS and CSS and friends. Otherwise, why do things like CoffeeScript and Dart and WebSockets need to exist? It’s complicated.

• There are very few pure things in this world; lots and lots of apps have WebViews inside, doing the heavy content-display lifting. Did I say it’s complicated?

It seems very likely to me that there’s something simple and beautiful lurking inside the browser platform that will hit the greatest 80/20 point in software history. But I’ve been thinking that for a decade or more, now.

Further Reading

Of course, this will be out-of-date the morning after I hit “publish”. But still.

• This Is Not The Net You Thought You Knew by Jon Evans, 2011/12. Tl;dr: There are lots of new technologies behind the scenes.

• Bedrock by Alex Russell, 2012/4. TL;dr: Lengthy but dense ramblings on the nature of the browser platform; contains the phrase “Turing tar pit”.

• Will Apps Kill Websites? by Jeff Atwood, 2012/4. Tl;dr: No.

• Apps are too much like 1990's CD-ROMs and not enough like the Web by Scott Hanselman, 2011/12. Tl;dr: “The real win is linking”.

• The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired Icon Marc Andreessen by Chris Anderson, 2012/04. Tl;dr: Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. But Marca gives money to Republicans these days thus his current opinions can safely be ignored.

• Defining the Post-App Economy by Dan Rowinsky, 2012/4, and Why Apple Won by Betting Against the Web by Sarah Kessler, 2012/5. Tl;dr: HTML5 is groovy, but not just yet.

• Financial Times passes 2m users for its HTML5 web app by Stuart Dredge, 2012/04, and Why Tech Review is ditching its iPad edition by Cory Doctorow, 2012/5. Tl;dr: The browser is for publishing, amirite?

• Triggering Numeric Keyboards with HTML5 by Pamela Fox, 2012/5, and Shell Apps and Silver Bullets by Benjamin Sandofsky, 2012. Tl;dr: The mobile Web is hard.

• Apps Aren't Dead. Neither is The Web. The Parrot Is, Though... by Richard MacManus, 2012/5. Tl;dr: “This isn't an ‘X is dead’ kind of article”.

Particularly intense botanical red; it remains the Achilles’ heel of the sensor in many (all?) digicams. I often see things in my garden that I just can’t get close to with the combination of camera and screen; hm, perhaps the problem is computer screens not camera sensors? Here we have some Japanese maple leaves against blue sky.

The leaves were actually redder than this, but at least the sensor, while losing some of the intensity, managed to get close to the tint.

I’ve been working on some ideas for clean-screen apps; instead of controlling them with the touch screen, you wave your device around or tap it or shake it. To do this, I’ve been learning about the output of the sensors you find on Android devices. I’ve found that the documentation, while complete, contains some scary-looking math and assumes you know more about quaternions and rotation vectors than the average developer. Well, more than I do.

So I created a little app called “Sensplore” which captures sensor data, dresses it up in CSV (spreadsheet) format, and emails it to you. It’s Apache2-licensed on Google code; for those who just want to run it, go hit Google Play Apps.

It took me a couple of tries, a few visits to StackOverflow.com, and input from Android engineering, to get this right; for example, the graphs I recently published in Sensor Kinetics Pictures were, well, wrong. I’ve found it really quite helpful in figuring out what the sensors do. It’s only available on Gingerbread-or-higher devices.

What it does

When you run the app, it fills the screen with a button saying “Go!” Once you press that, you can shake or tap or wave the device as much as you want, then hit the button again, which will have changed to read “Done!”

When you’re done, Sensplore writes out the CSV and fires an intent with ACTION_SEND, which shows you a big list of candidates to do the sending; if you pick Gmail, it shows up as an email from you to you with the subject filled in and the CSV data as an attachment, so you can download it, fire up your favorite spreadsheet program, and get it to draw graphs of what the sensor data is showing you.

[Digression: This made me feel a little bit silly; I’d been toying with all sorts of ideas for getting the data off the device, including RESTful back-ends and the like. The idea of just emailing seemed impossibly klunky at first blush, but in practice it works pretty well; it brings up the Gmail app and I found myself tapping in a few reminder notes to myself before hitting “Send”.]

I suspect that someone who really understands app scripting could set up their favorite spreadsheet to draw the graphs automatically; I end up selecting ranges and asking for graphs, which feels a bit laborious.

What it captures

Sensplore generates CSV containing two output sets, each with four columns of numbers. Each set has a time (msec) column and three floating-point x, y, and z values.

The first group is the raw data you get from a Sensor.TYPE_ACCELEROMETER sensor, which to say acceleration along the x, y, and z axes in the device space; the axes are illustrated in this image from the SensorEvent docs.

You have to be careful with this data; “acceleration” may not mean what you think it does. I’ll probably have more to say later about best practices for using this stuff, but a look at the data is instructive.

The second group represents successive changes in rotation angle around the x, y, and z axes. It’s not measured directly; we take the samples from the Sensor.TYPE_ROTATION_VECTOR sensor, turn them into rotation matrices using SensorManager.getRotationMatrixFromVector(), then extract changes from successive pairs of matrices using SensorManager.getAngleChange(). Once again, these are in device not world co-ordinates.

The code for doing this is easy to get wrong, so if you’re going to want data like this, stealing a few lines from Sensplore might be a good idea.

What you see is what you get

Here are two graphs, produced by Sensplore and iWork’s “Numbers” spreadsheet, showing what happens when I hold my Galaxy Nexus upright facing me and make chopping motions to the left, back, right, and forward, returning to vertical after each chop. The first graph is the accelerometer data, the second the angle changes.

Caveats

I’m not claiming that these are the only interesting sensors. I’m not claiming that the data they produce, or the way that Sensplore processes it, will meet your needs. This isn’t an official Google tool, and may not get any more attention from me; on the other hand, I may use it as a workbench to to explore other sensors and how to analyze their data.

Having said all that, programming up against the analog-to-digital coalface is a new experience for many of us, and anything that helps understand the raw data might prove useful to a few. After all, this is one area in which mobile-device software is profoundly different; waving ordinary computers around in the air is rarely useful.

Recently I’ve become interested in the sensors that live inside Android devices, and how to use them. It turns out that interacting with them is a little on the non-obvious side, as is interpreting the read-outs. So I drew some graphs. [Update: The graphs were wrong. So I deleted them. But I’m about to post a better version.]

Actually, the title is The Ghost Writer; I first noticed it in a movie my neighbor on a plane was watching and thought the visuals were pretty good. Which is relevant because the book turns out to be more or less perfect airline fluff: High velocity, a powerful hook into the real world, and very competent writing.

The premise is that a recently-exited British Prime Minister who looks and smells and sounds like Tony Blair gets in a bunch of trouble for having facilitated torture in the “War-on-Terror” context, just as his autobiography’s ghost writer turns up dead.

The point-of-view is the replacement ghost’s, and while there’s no actual violence, the sense of offscreen menace is satisfyingly high. Did I mention a real-world hook? Here it is: Why did Tony Blair’s government act wholly in support of Dubya’s clueless crusaderism?

This one got me because I thought a lot of Tony Blair, initially; I remember watching an extended interview with him as he closed in on his first big kill; the (admittedly lame) post-Thatcher Tories. I thought “Wow, this is a really smart guy”; the flashes of intellect and insight seemed to erupt from the TV screen. And then, Britain as bit player in the ardent stupidity of the Iraq campaign. Inexplicable.

The book has atmosphere, interesting people, and a powerful sense of you-are-there. The fact that justice for first-world torturers is a deeply implausible notion in the twenty-first century shouldn’t get in the way of your enjoying it.