The Delicious Fruit Has Become Bitter

I just got mail from Yahoo.

It's the opt-out email. YouTube creators Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have bought Delicious from Yahoo! and are going to try to get it going again.

I wish them luck.

I doubt will go anywhere.

I got into Delicious when I was at the clinic, I think. There were two main selling points for the service:

1. Your bookmarks were saved in one central location, so that you could share them between your work machine, your home machine, your laptop, etc.
2. You could see what other people bookmarked and found valuable on various subjects.

Point #1 was crucial to me. You start getting computers, you start getting headaches about knowing where your links are. Point #2? I tried it a few times. It never was too valuable to me. When I set up a new computer, one of the first things I did was sign in with Delicious and download the Firefox plugin.

When Chrome came along with their bookmark system, I jumped. Right now, a few games that don't work right in Chrome are all that keep me going back to Firefox, plus the occasional debugging, and I never ever log into Delicious. A few months ago, I downloaded the bookmarks from Delicious and put them into Evernote. I don't think I've surfed from it yet. I doubt half the content is still there.

Podcasts and Synergy

Image from vanRijn

I've put Google Listen on my phone, listening to podcasts while I drive. One of them is Spectrum from the IEEE, and the one that came on my player was about the Kinect. I have never used the Kinect, as I'm not much of a gamer. Sometimes I'll sit down and play the Wii with the boys, but I have used it more as a Netflix player. So, I'll never use it as intended.

But the interview is not about intention. It is about capability. The Kinect is able to multiple identify people, both by voice and by vision, in noisy, chaotic environments. People are already starting to hack the Kinect to allow Minority Report interfaces and the like.

The second thing I heard was on Hacker Public Radio, which I started to get into after Indiana LinuxFest. The podcast itself is a pre-interview discussion between KDE spokesman Aaron Seigo and Jonathan Nadeau of Frostbite Systems.

Accessability questions have been floating in my head recently. There's lots of buzz about Section 508 in the circles I float through, enough so I've attended two compliance talks in 2011, and my wife has been trying to be a productive person while having severe pain in her right elbow and forearm that keep her from being able to type. She's been playing with speech recognition software, finally trying the Windows 7 native setup that came with her new laptop.

But honestly, when thinking about accessability, I wasn't really thinking about accessibility. I think that there's research at the end of the line for this train of thought that will serve to help accessibility, but it isn't foremost in my head here.

I was driving. I was thinking about cars.

As I think I've mentioned, I've been looking at some travel applications. I tend to have either Listen or a media player of one sort or another playing when I drive, rather than CDs or even worse, radio. (I have only one objection to Amazon Cloud Player, which is that it wants to run only on WiFi, and by and large, I want to use my phone as a media player when I'm mobile, away from WiFi, but maybe the coming of 4G or the next software fix from Sprint will fix that.) I have a TomTom GPS showing my location and speed and I sometimes use Sprint or Google for directions, too. Also, I've been looking into Vlingo, which gives a voice interface to phones. I noticed a bug, hopefully fixed soon, where I hit the Talk Now button while listening to a podcast, and told it to call my wife. Normally, when you tell it to call, it shuts up the media player, Listen included, but here it didn't. So, I'm trying to pause the player and/or mute the player, while on the Interstate.

I know. I know. The point of the exercise is to keep from having this sort of attention-sucking frustration from occurring while I'm driving, because I don't want to hurt myself, my stuff, or other people and their stuff, pretty much in that order. Haven't been too keen of Vlingo since. It's cool enough, but you shouldn't have to press a button while driving to say "I wanna talk now".

And I don't think the Vlingo is alone. Watch just a few high-end car reviews on Top Gear and you'll know that the UIs for even fancy cars are crap.

Ultimately, to do a driving interface right, you have to assume that there will be no vision at all. Most of the things you do while driving (besides avoiding obstacles and other drivers) occur without vision: you use your sense of touch to feel the vibration and you hear the engine to know when to shift. You see the red Check Engine light but you take it in when it starts to sound or feel funny. You can even get away with not often checking the speedometer by staying at a similar speed to your fellow drivers. If you're going to do much computing while driving, it'll have to be via voice. And once that shows up in high-end vehicles, that browser is going to rival Firefox and Chrome and IE at the top of the browser food chain.

(As a pure aside, I think Opera will go there. I don't like Opera and haven't for over a decade, but I know I'm biased on the subject, but it seems like a place that Opera would go, more than anyone else.)

But as we needed the keyboard and then the mouse to get the WIMP interface for computers into the office and the home, we need to rock a voice interface to get the computer into the car. Which is where the Kinect comes in. I kinda think that the car will be a big docking station for future computers, as seat settings and address books and the like are highly personal but a great deal of hardware is there for anyone who sits down. Kinect-based technology would be necessary to distinguish between the driver, the passenger in the front seat who talks with his hands and the loud kids in the back seat. The recognition between conversations between user and computer and conversations between driver and passengers is crucial, and one I think that Microsoft Research and Kinect are closest.

There's going to be a small LED screen for the backup camera in the New Car's rear-view mirror (and some cars of today already have it) and a Kinect as well. Of this I am sure.

Pondering the Future, the Shock of the New, and Defining The Terms

I think I have to start with The New X here. I've gone on about The New Telephone and The New Television without really defining my conception, my mindset. I think it's obvious what I mean with those, but when I hit the next topic on my mind, you get a certain Bob Barker connotation.

Image by Wayne Silver
THE NEW CAR!

I have a concept in my mind of life between 1955 and 1985 (only about half of which I lived through) where the Old Telephone and Television live. The Old Television, for example, consists of complete boxes, with the beginnings of plug-ins from VCRs and Atari game machines. The New Television, still being designed and tested, will involve multiple sources, time-shifting, and modularization such that the screen is but a monitor, one of many.

But TV is fundamentally information. As long as you can see it and hear it, who cares whether it comes from the air, a coax cable or a Cat5e jack? The New Car is different. It is first and foremost a mechanical thing, and thus the issues involved are different.

A person from 1970 stepping into today wouldn't understand cell phones and would be befuddled by the collection of remotes on the TV, but I am very certain she could get into a 2010 car, start it, and drive it around. "Three on the Tree" isn't nearly as popular as it used to be, but the gas pedal, brake pedal, speedometer, turn signals, AC, rear-view mirror would all be about where she'd expect them to be and would behave about how she'd expect them to behave. There would be a few hiccups possible — electric motors and hybrids, OBDII and continuously variable transmissions are three things that come to mind — but they don't particularly affect the driving experience too much. The mechanics of automobiles have been abstracted away from the act of driving, and that's a good thing.

What is changing is the information-related aspects of driving, as fast and as good as the car companies can do it. As the driver of a car that was the cheapest new car we could find, much of what I know is from driving rentals when my car is in the shop, and from watching Top Gear. I see in-dash navigation, but you don't really want to be looking down at the dash too much when driving, and an in-dash system won't have the quick update times of navigating with your phone. Car audio systems have connecting to your iPod and iPhone down just as Android is beginning to dominate the market.

For the car market, electronics is a trailing concern. You want it to be so, clearly, because making the car faster, safer and more economical are the leading concerns. But it makes the choices dated. I saw a video from CNet's Car Tech section where the reviewer talks about the Toyota Camry, mentioning the 6-disc CD player (in the last days of optical media?) and optional dual DVD players in the back seat for too much money, which he suggests you skip and get iPads instead.

I told a friend a few months ago that I wanted to put a computer in a car. He asked "What would you do with that?" The thing that I mentioned is combining OBDII data with GPS so I can connect what I was doing and where I was doing it to what the engine was doing. I'm not a mechanic, so I don't really know what I'd do with that information. That information becomes really usable when you breach the firewall and start connecting to engine, transmission and brake electronics. Currently, you can get aftermarket chips to change the behavior of your engine and such, but that's warranty-voiding stuff, and also, tight inner-loop microprocessor kind of work. It won't wait until the OS pages, queries a database and returns a proper response.

Plus, of course, the standard interface vectors for electronics elsewhere are attention-sucking accident-causing crap for autos.

So, I forsee the creation of The New Car, joining long-term reliable mechanics with high-turnover electronics, as a long-term process that will cause grumbling for a long long time.

Quick Notes: The Doomed Dozen, The New Radio

MaximumPC has list of 12 Technologies on the Bring of Disappearing. This is a bit more long-view than I normally go, but it makes sense.

The Doomed Half-Dozen

1. Pre-recorded Physical Media
2. Stereoscopic (with glasses) 3D TVs
3. eBook Readers
4. Consumer-Level Hard Drives
5. Keys
6. Handheld Gaming Consoles

The Half-Dozen Survivors

1. Digital Music/Media Players
2. Landline telephone
3. Internal Combustion Automobile Engine
4. The PC
5. The Keyboard
6. The Mouse

I do have some quibbles with the list, and some more quibbles with the presentation of the list. For instance, if you're going to keep the landline phone alive as a bulwark against power-outages, then why show a portable phone, whose base unit will die as soon as the power is cut? And the eBook reader holds a niche in that the screen makes it a low-energy device, opposed to the power-hungry notebooks, tablets and smartphones. They're mostly single-taskers, to borrow an Alton Brown term, but they can grow up and out the same way the digital media player is. The list is well-worth reading, though.

So, our car is in the shop, and the insurance company has us in a rental. It's a swank piece of motor art, with gratis satellite radio. We're not too used to it, but we're getting there. The Old Radio has been dead to me for quite some time, as it struck me that there wasn't anything I wasn't sick of being sent to me over those airwaves. The little I hear on the XM/Sirius channels I get over DishTV has been interesting, but never interesting enough for me to even consider it for myself. I have a large enough MP3 collection that I could go some months without repeating a song. (That I do repeat songs has something to do with being a musician, with the limits of Rhythmbox's shuffle function, and with the limits of the SD card in my phone.) And, quite honestly, I don't spend enough time on the road to make it worthwhile.

But I'm beginning to wonder about my wife. She does spend great amounts of time on the road, and given her preference for talk radio, I'm thinking it might be good fit for her. Her stations come out of Chicago and are mostly static when she comes to pick me up. But then, I'm wondering if streaming it with 3G or 4G smartphones would be a better solution.

What are your thoughts about dying technologies and/or the New Radio?

Handwriting Recognition

Jeff Atwood went on about Speech Recognition and how, despite what Star Trek says, it's not likely to become a major mode of computer interface. Not that I've done much with speech recognition, but it sounds about right to me. Honestly, when I want to tell the computer something, I want to poke it with my mouse or trackball or type at it with a keyboard. (When I want it to tell me something, I am not against having it talk to me. I have written a script that makes a time string that's much more friendly to Festival. ("Eleven 55 A M")


Toward the end, Jeff goes on about handwriting recognition, starting with the Apple Newton.

I learned Palm's Graffiti handwriting recognition language and got fairly proficient with it. More than ten years later, you'd expect to see massively improved handwriting recognition of some sort in today's iPads and iPhones and iOthers, right? Well, maybe, if by "massively improved" you mean "nonexistent".

There is a point I think he fails to consider. Apple Newton's handwriting recognition was trying to recognize your handwriting. Graffiti was more about you learning to write the variant of the letter set that Graffiti could understand.

You could take notes on a Palm, if your concept of "taking notes" is "Get eggs on way home". But, if your idea of taking notes was "I'm taking a Senior-level networking course with Comer and don't want to use a paper notebook", you could not really do that on a Palm. The key is that it's faster and easier to type, especially if you can use a dictionary and do lookahead guessing of what you're trying to type. (Although my wife has problems with her Blackberry understanding what she means.) Typing won out in the marketplace of portable items because it's easier to do at speed than handwriting recognition.


But, considering the lineage of the iPhone, it makes me wonder. "Handwriting recognition. Is there an app for that?"