think of this before.

Can you become more popular by making some people hate you?

2011-01-13T16:34:00.013+13:00

In case anybody missed the latest blog post from the OKCupid dating site (http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-mathematics-of-beauty/), the general idea is that

The more men disagree about a woman's looks, the more they like her.

This revelation came after the staff found that if everyone rates a girl as being "quite attractive", she'll get fewer messages than a girl that some men have rated "ugly" and some men have rated "very attractive". The more diverse the opinion, the more messages the girl will receive.

I realised this is also true of television shows. My friend Richard and I occasionally have big arguments about the quality of television shows. We both happen to quite like Star Trek. It's not our favourite thing ever, but we do enjoy it.

I happen to LOVE Firefly, but he thinks it's terrible.

It always seems it's the TV shows and movies that some people hate that develop true cult followings. When was the last time you heard of a die-hard Simpsons fan? Never, right? Everybody knows The Simpsons is good (ignoring the oft-quoted old/ new Simpsons quality gap). But what about Twilight? Holy crap. It even has its own internal die-hard cult following thanks to the Team Jacob/ Team Edward rivalry. For the record, I'm Team Bella. Seriously.

So why is this? Well, one of my theories is that it's about identity. People love to differentiate themselves from others, and one of the ways they can do this is by having a "type" of girl they find attractive, or a genre of movie they enjoy, or a particular story or franchise to cling on to. It makes people feel unique.

When a person discovers a movie, tv show, girl, car etc. whose qualities make up part of their identity, that person might end up overplaying their attraction to it.

My title promised a tricky, unexpected parallel to business, so I'll deliver. OKCupid's final piece of advice to their female internet dating users was

Take whatever you think some guys don't like—and play it up.

Well, what if this applies to everything?

If you're looking for a job, instead of wondering if you're telling too many jokes/ talking too much/ not talking enough/ too scruffy, maybe just take those parts of your personality and showcase them to the point that you would if you were comfortable with a good friend.

If you're marketing your own product (whatever it might be), both you and the product have a personality that the customer is going to end up dealing with. Perhaps the same advice stands here. Play up the personality.

In both cases you're going to

Lower some opinions of you to the point that some might hate you
Raise some opinions of you to the point that you're a dream come true
Actually make yourself more popular overall!

Hard Drives and Bad Puns

2010-02-03T15:44:00.005+13:00

Ever since I bought my motorbike I've been laughing at my inability to painlessly walk up my driveway. There was a time, when I was jogging and regularly attending the gym, that I didn't even notice the incline or the length, but these days it's a little daunting.

The aversion to that walk is a nice counterpoint to this little journey I'm preparing for. That horribly steep driveway is the first 80 metres of an epic four and a half thousand km journey around New Zealand.

For perspective, I normally do a little over 1000km every month, making this ride nearly 5 months' worth of vehicular and bodily wear-and-tear. 4,500km is the distance from Auckland to Sydney and back. Or just a little more than London to Baghdad. And about the same as Los Angeles to New York by road.

It's likely that more than one day of riding will involve high winds and torrential rain - very unpleasant on a bike. There's always a risk of dropping the bike, or being hit by another road user. We're far from home, and often far from any form of civilization (the South Island is 15% larger than England, and only has 1 million people, compared to England's 55 million. It rather endearingly has only one area code). And we're going to be exhausted from pushing a heavy machine around corners 5 hours a day for 2 weeks.

I know I never lost my childlike compulsiveness or naivety and I'm aware those things might be responsible for my next statement (rather than the thrill-seeking adventurer's spirit of some people I know), but all of the above sounds SO MUCH FUN. The more danger, and the more difficult the challenge, the better!

I can't believe that I could ever travel to these cities by coach and feel at all fulfilled. Sure the scenery is beautiful, and I'd see far more of it traveling at sane speeds, looking calmly out the window of the vehicle. And maybe the travel time would be less, giving me more time to explore the towns and cities. But that doesn't matter so much. The destination has never been of interest to me.

For me it's all about the journey. It's all about achieving something impossible that I never thought I could achieve (how sickeningly inspiring is that, huh?*). Every person who comments on the difficulty of our route, or the danger of traveling it on a motorcycle (or riding a bike in general!) just inspires me further.

Don't misunderstand me - I don't usually work for the credit, or the recognition that comes with success. It's just that life has never been truly fun unless somebody has told me I can't do it. Whether it's self-doubt or the doubt of people around me, it doesn't matter. I thrive on it.

My driveway is starting to seem really short. And I'm starting to appear very unfit.

* I am three fools - one for using a cliche, two for commenting on it, and three for paraphrasing John Donne in a footnote.

Just a Few Days Now

2010-01-25T11:01:00.000+13:00

Sitting at work wading through emails asking us to refrain from putting non-compostable waste into the organic recycle bins, or notifying me that some unknown member of staff is currently away sick (or, "sick"), is making me yearn even more for the 13th of February.

At 10am, Ryan and I will be finished packing, strapped snugly in to our jackets and helmets, and heading up our driveway towards the Southern Motorway. 5 hours of riding and 366km (227 miles) later we'll be in Ohakune, at the base of Mt. Ruapehu. I'm not sure, at this point, what we're expecting from the mountain town. It's summer, so there's no skiing, so there are no people. In lieu of any obvious adventures to be discovered by wandering around, perhaps heading up the mountain would be feasible.

Ruapehu is 2,797 meters (9,176 feet) high, which makes it the highest point in the North Island, and (I believe) just about high enough to notice a distinct lack of oxygen. Certainly though, if it's a cloudy day, the top of the mountain might sit above the clouds.

The fun part is Ruapehu is a volcano. A volcano that erupted in 1996, 1997, 2007 and 2008. GOOD TIMES.

Well it's all conjecture at the moment, but I'd quite like to climb it.

Back to work.

Paul Fitts' Toilet

2010-01-20T09:29:00.012+13:00

I was in the bathroom last night, thoughts amplified in the standard fashion by all the reflective porcelain and floor tiles (shock: I just cleaned it), and I realised that I have a pretty serious stand on which way the toilet roll should sit: over, rather than under. So I pensively pulled the roll out of its holder, rotated it, and returned it to the "correct" position.

"But why," I thought, "is that correct?" And then I realised: Fitts' Law.

Fitts' Law is a well known concept in user interface design. It states that:

The time taken to move to and access a target is directly proportional to the distance to the target and the size of the target.

More simply: large, close targets can be accessed quicker. Have a look at these two familiar scenes. The "target", in the case of loo-sitting, is "whatever you can grab that will allow you to pull off toilet paper".

In this situation, the target is small, and far away:

In this situation, the target is large, and close:

In over-the-top mode, the toilet roll is accessed much more quickly. This should be a no-brainer.

On top of that, I noticed that "over-the-top" allows you to use less paper. Whether you're over or under, you generally have to pull the last sheet to about the same location in space in order to get leverage to rip it off - if you go "under", you have to pull the roll further. Try pulling off just one sheet in each position, with just one hand. It's much easier in the "correct" position.

(Thanks to Current Configuration for these. Not that I asked.)

Edit: What's more (thanks for spotting this, Ryan), if you go "under", that toilet roll is touching a wall, which you could easily touch with your poo hand as you go to grab more paper. How many other people use that toilet, and have touched that wall with their poo hand?

Edit 2: I'm completely aware that Fitts' Law strictly applies to single-dimension amplitude of movement, and that the Accot-Zhai steering law would be more useful. Whatever.

A Loss of Faith

2009-12-31T20:20:00.007+13:00

I've lost faith in the women's movement. In feminism. The movement started as a noise-making enterprise designed to gain equality for women. Not just in the workplace (even if a job wasn't advertised for 'men only', the role would usually advertise a different - lower - pay rate for women), but in social life, and in politics. And they succeeded admirably: women in New Zealand were given the right to vote in 1893, the US in 1920, and the United Kingdom in 1928. It is now illegal in Western countries to hire or differentiate pay based on gender (as far as I'm aware anyway).

The main battles have all been won, but there's still a long way to go for Western women (I'm ignoring the subjugated female populations of non-Western countries, some of whom still have to deal with despicable, unjustifiably barbaric genital mutilation. But then again so do most Jewish males, so perhaps that's a different topic). Sexism is still rife. The idea of "traditional gender roles" still exists, but when people say "traditional", I think they tend to be offering a tip-of-the-hat to feminists, while meaning to say "normal", or "obvious". I mean, when was the last time you saw a female tower-crane driver, right? That's a man's job, isn't it? Oh, yep, "traditionally", I guess it is.

So like I said, there is work to do. A lot of consciousness raising. People don't understand the issues, and I hope that when they do, progress can be made.

But, Jesus do the feminists make it difficult. I'm not stereotyping here. I don't refer to the "butch-dyke bra burner" feminist that I think is evoked in many minds when they hear the term. I refer to the normal, modern, everyday feminist. Your wife. Your girlfriend. Your coffee shop employee. Your punk singer. Your electrician. Your chef. It's these people that I've lost faith in.

I do not know one feminist (edit: I now know ~~two~~ three... perhaps my faith can be renewed?) who doesn't make sexist comments or jokes against men in one breath, and condemn innocent sexist jokes against women in the next. I don't know one feminist who isn't, by her own definition of sexism anyway, dramatically sexist.

Perhaps men deserve the comments from time to time, but the fact is, so do women. "Equality" means equal rights, and equal treatment. Nobody ever said that men and women do, or should behave in the same way as each other, and nobody ever said that one party shouldn't think that the other party's behavioural nuances are simply hilarious. In fact, I tend to find sexist jokes against men just as funny as the same against women.

This, I think, is another example of the "priviledged oppressed minority" phenomenon. A similar example is racism in New Zealand from Maoris against white people - even in the government - being quietly ignored, while I expect the whole of Maoridom would be up in arms if a white MP were to make a similar racist comment (and rightfully so). And that dichotomy just has to end.

Vrooom

2009-12-16T14:42:00.004+13:00

Six weeks ago, Ryan Maxwell and I completed an 840km round trip on our motorbikes from Auckland to Cape Reinga (the top of New Zealand) and back, over two days. It was an excellent weekend: beautiful sun, scenary, perfect roads (aside from the 10km of boulders near the Cape).

It was so much fun, in fact, that for our next challenge we're going to do the rest of the country:

That's only the approximate route, but I definitely want to see Wellington, the South Island's west coast, Wanaka, Queenstown, Invercargill, Bluff (bottom of the country), Dunedin, Christchurch, and Taupo on the way back up.

We're going to take it fairly easy and cap ourselves at 420km/ day (about 4 hours' riding)
The 420km cap gives us about 5 days down and 4 days up.
We might be able to check out Wellington's Webstock to see Jeff Atwood talk (except we won't be able to afford the entry fee, so I'll have to talk us in. I'm a little giddy at the prospect of this particular social engineering challenge).
We'll be spending at least a full day in Invercargill, and probably more than a day in Dunedin.
Each night will be spent indoors, in beds - no tents or sleeping bags to worry about.
Yes, I will be taking my electric razor. We're not animals.

The Laundry

2009-10-23T22:11:00.005+13:00

An innocuous comment: "you'll find the dog leads hanging up in the laundry."

Sitting in my friend Richard's study, the singer of Avenged Sevenfold (Shadows, I think. The guy with the neck vein.) was firmly reminding me that I am in fact free to label him if I wish (though apparently committing such an act would lead directly to a counteractive shift in his persona; something I actually find rather strange).

I'd agreed to dog-sit for Richard and his wife, Imogen, a couple of months before. One week away from home was manageable. Easy actually: I like dogs, and I thought I could use the break from humanity in their house out in Titirangi South.

Actually, if I'm honest, I hadn't realised it was a long weekend, and a number of days before said weekend I had to turn down a skiing trip, and long motorcycle trip to Cape Reinga. Well I'm not miffed - there's plenty of time for that later - but I know Richard realised I wouldn't notice that it was a long weekend until... well, probably when I watched the weather on the Sunday night.

Freya, Richard and Imogen's rather large white Pyrenean, was lounging pensively in the hall just outside the door, presumably hoping I would stop staring at the glowing rectangle and chase her through the garden.

I thought that a walk might be in order, and remembered the instruction on the immaculate notepaper left on the kitchen bench: "you'll find the dog leads hanging up in the laundry".

I jumped up, which kicked the dog into immediate action. She sensed impending activity, and relayed her interest by bumping into me and pawing my leg. It was only then I noticed that although I had been in the house countless times, I knew not where the laundry was.

So I searched. For about 30 minutes. I couldn't find it. I'm considering paying Waitakere City Council for the building plans, but I actually think there is no laundry, and Richard is taking the piss.

So that dog's going nowhere, and I'm going to have to buy new clothes to replace my dirty ones.

Obvious, right.

2009-09-22T18:57:00.003+12:00

Yesterday I came up with the best possible replacement for the "save" icon:

Problem solved.

(original post)

Obvious, right?

2009-09-17T10:51:00.004+12:00

What is this?

Well, it's the save icon from Word. Obvious right?

In software design, my favourite field by far is human interaction. I love it because I'm so conspicuously bad at it. It's the one thing left in my chosen field that seems like magic to me. I could honestly listen for hours to the geniuses who design UIs for a living. Studying it is always an interesting experience for me. I understand the concepts scientifically, and I remember them well because they're so interesting, but I seem completely unable to transfer those concepts to the instinctive level required to consider them "art". Thus when I sit down with a blank piece of paper to mock up a UI, hundreds of concepts fly around my head, but I can't actually draw anything!

One of concepts I find most interesting is visual metaphors. If you see a little picture of a pen, you'll think "edit". If you see a picture of a bin (or "trash can" for our linguistically-challenged friends across the pacific), you'll think "throw away", or "delete". What about a little picture of a floppy disk? Save, right? Absolutely it means "save". If you know what a floppy disk is. Word 2010 still uses that same icon for its "save" button, yet I (a programmer who also does a fair bit of tech support for friends and family) haven't inserted a floppy disk into a drive since 2005.

But yeah, ok, I still know what a floppy is. I'm 22, but what about somebody who's just turned 12? Floppies fell out of favour when that kid was about 6 years old. It's highly likely they've never even seen one! But Office 2010 will likely be the 'latest version' until about 2013, still using that little floppy drive to indicate "save".

I recently read a conversation between a tech support guy from a school, and one of the (15 year old) kids:

Techie: "Now save the document"

Kid: *File>Save*

Techie: "You know you can just click the disk icon?"

Kid: "Huh?"

Techie: "That one - the floppy disk"

Kid: "Oh… I thought that was a TV"

Home of the Brave

2009-09-15T00:38:00.008+12:00

Sorry, I forgot to join every other secularist blogger in the world in condemning religion on September 11.

But here's something to make up for it:

http://www.atheist-community.org/images/cartoon/19IbB23EKK819zoMxX.jpg

"But Christianity's not like that," I always hear. It's true that Christianity's New Testament is pretty mild, and to an extent its moral teachings are quite "good". But the Koran is full of statements of peace too, and its moral teachings are often also "good".

The problem is not the teachings of a religion. The problem is that believers consider it a virtue to believe in their god with no evidence, and to continue to believe when evidence clearly points to the contrary.

The problem is putting so much faith in a deity whose existence is not only unproven, but is unnecessary to explain anything we know of in the natural world.

This, I think, is the best way to put it:

Mr. Believer, if there is no god, then the words of your priests, pastors, vicars, and holy men are just that - words of men. If you feel, as you do, that they are speaking for your god, and that god does not exist, then their commands are the commands of men.

It is this unquestioned faith that allowed Middle-Eastern leaders to convince people - not "dirty Muslims", or "evil bastards", but people, to fly planes into the tallest buildings in the world.

And how can you avoid that trap? Question, question, question. Refuse to believe anything until you have good reason to. Question, question, question some more. Does your belief still hold up? If it doesn't, drop it! Right away! If it does, keep going with it! But question it some more!

That includes everything I say to you.

Two quotes from Bertrand Russell, to finish off:

"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths, [and religions], is explained in this way."

"I would never die for my beliefs, because I might be wrong."

Bad Religion

2009-08-28T14:40:00.004+12:00

Apparently (and this is pretty shocking), while over 60% of Americans believe the Bible is 100% accurate, most of them are unwilling to kill fortune tellers (Lev. 20:27), or to prevent dwarves and men with damaged testicles from entering churches (Lev 21:10).

Where have all the good Christians gone?

Great clip from The Chaser's War on Everything:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95hH1H5qK08&feature=player_embedded

I'll null terminate YOU in a minute.

2009-08-26T12:58:00.005+12:00

Here's some simple VBScript (don't stop reading just because I said VBScript).

Set typeLib = CreateObject("Scriptlet.TypeLib")

guid = typeLib.Guid

msgbox("My GUID is: " & guid & ". Cool huh?")

What do you think the output should be? Well, you're wrong.

Obviously the output is "My GUID is: {0CB1DD53-BDD2-41E6-969B-E08158DAD8B6}"

What happened to the ". Cool huh?" at the end? Well, VBScript, in its infinite wisdom, outputs GUIDs with a null-terminator at the end. So the rest of the string can't be displayed.

So every time you want to output a GUID, you have to strip the last two characters of the string (the null termination chars) like this:

guid = Left(guid, Len(guid)-2)

Cheers Microsoft.

Wikipedia

2009-07-16T16:15:00.005+12:00

You may have seen the XKCD comic, "The Problem with Wikipedia" (http://xkcd.com/214/). Hilarious no?

I experienced something similar today. After having a bit of a giggle at this: http://abstrusegoose.com/secret-archives/giant, I spotted the text, "Yang-Mills black hole", at the bottom of the page. In keeping with my "no-stone-unturned" policy, I obviously had to Wikipedia "Yang-Mills". It was a bit of an "oh shit" moment.

My click path was as follows:

Yang-Mills theory, which is a...

Gauge theory, which is a field theory in which the...

Lagrangian (not the same as an orbital Lagrangian point!) is...

Invariant

And so on.

Educational, but since after I finished reading each page (each of which spawned multiple other pages), I had to go back to the previous launch point in order to continue. Multiple browser tabs were definitely not the best way to view this data.

What we have here is a tree. At the top of the tree is the concept you wish to understand, and underneath that concept are multiple other concepts: prerequisites for a proper understanding of theconcept above them.

A "Tree of Knowledge", if you will ;-). Adam and Eve were primitive. They each had, what, a single bite out of a single apple? I propose we unapologetically harvest the whole damned tree.

I'm going to try writing a simple Wikipedia parser that takes a specified topic of interest, and grabs all the links on the page (in the main body of the article), outputting them to nice little bubbles. I'll do the same for each of those pages, down to a custom number of levels. Maybe 4 by default?

What results will be a nice tree, where each node represents potentially prerequisite knowledge for the node above it. That way, when I type in, say, M-theory, I can easily scan down the list until I reach a 'layer' of nodes that I feel I have a good grasp of. Then I just read all the articles in the layer above it.

That way, I get to learn a topic from the ground up, rather than trying to track my education from the top down, with constant "crap, I don't know what that is" interruptions.

Genius? Genius.

As usual, if this already exists, don't tell me!

Han Solo is Hattori Hanzo

2009-07-12T14:41:00.005+12:00

Hattori Hanzo (aside from being the sword maker in Kill Bill), was a famous 16th Century Japanese Samurai. He was really awesome.

Han Solo was a famous warrior who didn't believe in the Force, and Luke really showed him up there didn't he.

I reckon George Lucas based Han Solo's name on Hattori Hanzo. Here's my theory:

Japanese names are 'reversed' from Western surnames. So let's 'Westernise' Hattori Hanzo:

- Hanzo Hattori

"Hattori" sounds like "hitori", which is the Japanese for 'alone', or... 'solo'. So let's swap that out:

- Hanzo Solo

Which might as well be:

- Han Solo.

QED, motherfucker.

Upgrades

2009-01-22T21:11:00.009+13:00

The Upgrades.
Today I took the step. Leaped the bar. Traversed the mountain range. I'm now officially a transhuman.

OK, so I didn't get an electronic implant (as much as I would like to be a wi-fi repeater, or a TV remote control). I got contact lenses. That's right bitches, I can see things that are far away.

Transhumanism
For those not in the know, transhumanism is a movement "supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and abilities". It's about the journey to the "posthuman".

One idea is that this journey is necessary. If (or when) artificial intelligence reaches the point at which it can improve itself, it will then do so exponentially. The world after that point (called the "Singularity") can't really be pinned down (who knows what the AI would do? Wipe us out? Live beside us? Nothing at all?).

In the event that this Singularity is bad bad bad (which is the general concensus), humankind cannot survive. They will be out-competed for all resources, and natural selection will select against us. Yay!

So what can be done? Well, we can begin to improve ourselves so in fact when the singularity arrives, we're part of it. We have to make sure that the singularity is really just us.

What would that be like?

The best way to do this is to look at what we do less than perfectly. Let's make a list!

Communication
Transportation
Reproduction
Respiration
Healing
Sensing
Learning
Response to stimuli

It's hardly exhaustive, but it's a start.

I think Communication is an interesting point to discuss.

The Problem

When we speak to each other now, it's not only slow (speed of sound, plus speed of neuronal information transfer and processing), but it's short range, and severely hampered by language (not to mention communicating between languages).

Obviously we've taken steps to improve communication (telephone, radio, email, mobile phones, texting, video calling). But each of those media is actually quite limiting. In fact texting is so limited (word count, terrible input device) that it actively promotes the degradation of language.

The fix

To communicate perfectly, we all need to be connected. We need the ability to exchange information at the pure-thought level, in real time.

Obviously we should be able to turn it off, but eventually I doubt we'd want to. Privacy is irrelevant in this posthuman world.

The Parts

Neuron-computer interface
Wireless transmitter (high powered, but could be relayed through distributed repeaters)
Kick arse comms software on a very fast chip (it would have to present the incoming signal to your brain in a recognisable way)

SAP User Shiterface

2009-01-07T16:38:00.011+13:00

At work I’ve been given the ongoing task to take care of a system called SAP XI. It’s an integration application that allows us to connect several pieces of software together fairly easily. It’s very interesting stuff – diagnosing problems becomes almost an art form, which I can always appreciate.

But the problem I’ve been having is that every time I see the SAP user interface, I want to throw up. It’s as if they read a reference book on interface design, cover to cover, and deliberately implemented the opposite of everything the book recommended.

Here we go. Much as it pains me to take talk of this horribleness.

Standard Behaviour
Standard behaviour exists because people like to operate efficiently. Scrolling the mouse wheel down should move the scroll bar down (or zoom out). Shift is to be held down in order to get upper case characters, and is not a toggle key like Caps Lock.

These seem obvious perhaps, but there really are a hell of a lot of complicated “standard behaviour” rules that you take for granted. What about something like double-clicking a word in a text box? Now that you think about it you’ll realise it should select that word (ready for delete, or copy/paste…). If there’s only one word in the box, you’ll be selecting the whole contents of the box. It’s by far the quickest way to select it.

But not in SAP. Oh no. In SAP it does this:

Wait. What? The worst part is, this dialog box can also be accessed by pressing F2, or clicking a tiny (and poorly named) “Selection Options” button at the bottom of the screen. So they’ve hijacked the standard behaviour of text boxes to provide us with a third way to access a piece of functionality.

Piss. Poor.

Localisation
Localisation (translation of interfaces, etc.) exists to increase your market share. If you’re making games in America, you want to sell them in China too because they have a billion people. No brainer. But the art of localisation exists to avoid confusing and pissing off your foreign users when they use your product.

I know SAP is German, but when they took the trouble to translate the UI into English (save for a few frightening error messages… “ACHTUNG!”), they could have fixed the numbering system.

In English speaking countries, “2,000” has a comma.

Besides, this should be retrieved from my Regional settings. The fact that it isn’t makes me wonder what else (like time zone information) they’ve neglected to pick up.

Not pleased.

Fitts’ Law
Simplified, the law states that the time it takes to acquire and click a target on the screen is proportional to the distance to the target, divided by the width of the target.

In other words big, close targets will be clicked far quicker than distant, small targets.

The reason size comes into it is because there’s an speed/accuracy tradeoff. The faster you approach a target, the more likely you are to overshoot. But it’s much harder to overshoot a large target.

Note that ‘size’ here refers to the size of the target in the direction of mouse travel. You don’t care how tall a button is if you’re approaching it from the left or right.

An interesting implication of this law is that a target that’s flush against the edge of the screen, say the left side, effectively has an infinite size when approaching from the right, because you can never overshoot! Obviously approaching from underneath might still be a problem though.

Now imagine if a target is flush against a corner. Let’s say the top-left. This target is now infinitely large in all directions. It doesn’t matter where you are on the screen, the infinite size of the target means you can get to it faster than any other spot on the screen (except the current location of your mouse). The corner pixels on a screen, plus the current location of the mouse, are sometimes called “magic pixels” for this reason.

How does SAP screw this up? Well… this is a screenshot of the top right of their UI.

As you can see, they actually had the audacity to replace the standard Windows window controls (Minimise, Restore and Close) with their own, smaller buttons, that are noticeably not in the corner. I’ve checked, and they’re also not flush with the top of the screen.

What! Why not?!

I could go on. I could talk about the little sounds that play by default every time you move something, or when data loads. I could discuss their love of hiding menu items (without telling you that the items are missing). I won’t though, because it’s all so very unpleasant. I have sensibilities, and SAP offends them.

From one of the largest software companies in the world, this is all just pathetic.

Update:
I hate to say it, Apple fans, but Apple's iTunes for Windows has a far worse UI design feature than anything SAP could come up with.

This is the top right of iTunes, maximised on my screen:

Hmph. Not only is the X not flush with the corner (so annoying), but can you see that pretty rounded corner? Those three tiny pixels 'outside' the corner are actually not part of iTunes.

Yep, it's the window behind iTunes (in this case an email I'm reading in Outlook).

If I click there, the window behind iTunes gains focus, and closes!

NOT PLEASED!

Open Letter to Believers

2009-01-01T15:21:00.004+13:00

I used to be a Christian, but gradually I found more likely explanations for all the things I associated with a god. I found them in science.

I had two people talking at me - one said "here's an explanation", and the other said "here's an explanation, here's why I think that, here's the evidence for it, and here's how to repeat it so you can see for yourself". It was easy to pick which person to believe.

I have heard faith described as "the essence of that which is hoped for but not seen". I don't function too well with hope. I like to moderate it. I like to manage it to the point that I'm hopeful only for things that appear likely. I became a much happier person when I lost my faith.

People work in different ways - perhaps you need that hope, I don't know. I certainly wouldn't try and talk you out of it, or try to take it away from you.

The thing is, while religion may be a wonderful thing for many, we all know how dangerous it can be sometimes. We can never distinguish the whims of a greedy leader and the will of a deity acting through a person. Because of that, all we can ask is that you act in accordance with that which we can all see.

Then we might not be so scared of you.

The Right

2008-12-01T00:51:00.006+13:00

Stephen Fry said it best, as he tends to do: "So you're offended! So fucking what?!".

For most I would say it is inevitable that one's actions or words will offend somebody at some point. I feel in this situation that it is right to be apologetic (because as callous as I can appear to be, I really don't like hurting people), and I think it is important to live life in such a way that you avoid hurting others, but if the inevitable occurs, why must offending somebody automatically curtail the speaker's right to free speech?

As an outspoken person, I occasionally find myself offending others; particularly the religious (though I try my hardest to be gentle). I usually justify it as "collateral damage" in my personal little war on illogicality, but I find it interesting that some feel that their disagreement with my sentiments should mean that I stop talking. If they really don't want to hear my thoughts, they are welcome to leave.

A side effect though of this push for, "free speech at all costs", seems to be the versatile, "but people have the right to say/think whatever they want!". Yes, the exclamation mark is mandatory.

This came up in a conversation I had a little earlier today. I suggested to somebody that people should apply rationality to some of the silly, arbitrary reactions they have to certain social situations. My example was a cultivated upper-middle class woman meeting a woman with tattoos and tatty clothes who listens to metal. You would expect the upper-middle class woman to judge the other as "lesser" in some way, possibly of "lower class" background, with little money. The former would never associate with the latter.

Perhaps that's a sensible arrangement - they would not have anything in common after all. But the feeling of revulsion? The feeling that one is inferior? That's a completely unreasonable assessment. The tattooed woman may enjoy body art, while the 'Lady' enjoys diamond jewellery, but who is to say that our metal-head doesn't have a dramatically high IQ, and work as an oncologist?

My colleague replied, "but people have the right to think whatever they want!"

BAH!

Of course they have the right to think as they please, but it does not make their thoughts or words correct, and I can still disagree as vocally as I'd like!

I have absolutely no patience for people who remind me that people are free to hold their own thoughts. It's an inane (and obvious) thing to say, it doesn't progress the conversation, and it proves nothing other than the fact that you are a fool with not an original thought in your skull.

Hmm. Upgrades.

2008-11-20T22:28:00.004+13:00

The Purchase
Dell is known for many things. One of those things is shockingly bad customer service. Obviously we can't blame the Indonesians for speaking unintelligible English, but we can blame Dell for thinking that it's ok.

Another thing Dell is known for is low price. My first desktop (back in 2003) was a Dell - it was at least $200 cheaper than the nearest match from HP, Compaq... anybody. And the thing lasted for years, until my first attempt at a hardware swap out (changing the processor) ended horribly.

So based on my "IT people don't need IT support" mantra, I've always recommended Dell to geeks who don't want to build their own machine.

Bleary eyed on a Sunday morning a couple of weeks ago, walking through Mt. Eden on the way home, I got a call from my brother raving about a discount on Dell monitors.

Apparently I could get a 24 inch full HD flatscreen for $340 ($100 discount plus 10% off with a voucher)... pretty impressive. After extensive research, I discovered people were pretty happy with the thing. So I bought 2.

After I'd made the purchase, I got another call from Marcus, who told me that each screen came with a printer. So I'm now the proud owner of duel 24inch full HD screens and two fax/copy/scan/print devices. Holy shit.

Specs
Diagonal width: 24"
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Response time: 5ms
Contrast: 1000:1
Max resolution: 1920x1080
Brightness: so bright I have to turn it down to 75%
Inputs: HDMI, DVI, VGA
Prettiness: Off the chart.

First thoughts

Well they're really big. So big in fact that I'm wondering if I should have made the second screen a 22 inch. They fit on my desk, but just barely. My right speaker has been relegated once again to the floor, which is OK because I try to use headphones as much as I can.

For years now I've been deathly afraid of LCDs. The ones I've seen have never quite matched up to the quality and smoothness of a CRT. Up until now I've been quite happy with my 19" and 17" - great for gaming, photo editing, movies, and for bending my desk out of shape with their sheer tonnage.

So obviously I was afraid of bad colour depth, low brightness, and the dreaded blur of a low-response time LCD. But my fears were alleviated in seconds. The picture quality is wonderful. Not a bit of motion blur, I haven't tried photo editing yet but the colours look great watching movies.

The HD movie test.
Hooray for Apple Trailers. I watched the Max Payne and James Bond trailers in full high definition (1080p)... abso-fricken-lutely beautiful. I was actually staggard. As was my flatmate.

The Game Test
I loaded up STALKER, and upped the resolution to 1280x720 (a middle-ish 16:9 resolution).

I picked up where I left off just outside Chernobyl... well I tried to anyway. It was as choppy as an axe just before winter. I figured my year and a half old 7600GT just couldn't handle the giant screen.

So I ordered a 9800 GTX+ (major upgrade... and for $360 I should hope so).

OK, let's try again. STALKER. I upped the graphics to the highest possible settings. And it was perfect.

I reinstalled Oblivion - one of my favourite games. Now my 7600GT could barely handle this beautiful 2006 game on medium graphics settings... but the 9800, with this 24"... OK my writing's gone to shit. I've entered the realm of stream-of-consciousness and I can't escape. Everything is just WAY too pretty for me to handle.

Anybody want two free 24" monitors?

Deal with IT.

2008-09-16T11:41:00.005+12:00

So I work in a large corporation’s IT research and development team. It’s a very well paid job, my input is valued, and it’s a lot of fun. And I got there by dropping out of a psychology degree after first year! Even if you aren't in the IT industry, you’ll still need to deal with IT people regularly in just about all walks of life – professionally and at home. So I thought it would help to give you 10 tips about dealing with IT people.

So here we go.

We really do want to fix the problem!

Helpdesk is a bitch of a job. That’s why I moved in to R&D. But regardless of what an IT person does, he or she is still in the service industry, and genuinely likes fixing problems, and solving problems. Some fall in love with the process, and some like to make customers happy. Either way, our grumpiness, demands and ridiculous quirks all exist because we want to get things fixed as quickly as possible.

We hate vagueness

When you describe your problem, please avoid phrases like, “I don’t have time to show you. Can’t you just fix it?”. We need to see you make the computer go from problem-free, to on-fire in order to find out how to fix it. If there’s an error message, we need to know exactly what it says. “It said something about operations”, is not useful.

We don’t read your email

IT guys get asked about this quite a lot. The answer is yes we can read your email, but no we don’t read your email. We’re busy, and you’re boring.

You were not doing “nothing”

When somebody from IT asks you “what were you doing when the problem came up”, and you quickly say “nothing”, your IT person will bash their head on the table, mute their microphone and scream. If you were sitting there at your computer, staring blankly at your screen, and it wasn’t loading or saving anything, and nothing was open, then (and only then) is the answer “nothing”. They aren’t accusing you of breaking it, and even if you did break it they wouldn’t care. They just want to know what you clicked on so they can get you working, and so they get back to reading I Am Legend.

If it’s mysterious, it was probably your fault

Things almost never ‘just happen’, or ‘just vanish’. If you tell me your files just disappeared of their own accord, I will laugh at you, and you’ll become another water cooler “stupid user” story.

Things take time

Fixing computer problems is not easy. It requires expert knowledge (usually a university degree), specialised tools, patience, and time. This is because every problem, however similar it looks, has its nuances. Sometimes big problems take 3 weeks of daily meetings and hundreds of lines of code to solve. Keep that in mind before you start your next ‘fix it NOW’ hissy fit.

We don’t like interruptions

This relates to number 6. Please, please don’t keep calling me every 5 minutes. I’ll tell you when I’m done. And believe it or not, I’m not slacking off. Even if I’m at lunch your problem is running around my subconscious. Does that make you feel special?

Sometimes we have no idea what we’re doing

This is an important one. There are two types of IT person. One kind got good with computers through education, memorisation, and effort. The other kind got where they are by having a natural affinity for patterns, and by being good at guessing correctly. When you’re talking to an IT person about your computer, be aware that you can’t possibly have given him all the information he or she needs to fix your problem. Your IT person will now have to make wild mental leaps in order to get to the bottom of things. This sometimes involves trying a bunch of stuff before getting the answer. Keep in mind a failed test is a useful as a successful test, and remember number 7 – we don’t like interruptions!

We thrive on praise

After drawing on our most remote experiences, our deepest knowledge, and massive amounts of caffeine fuelled brainpower, we really do appreciate a pat on the back. Or a trophy. So far I’ve accumulated Borders gift vouchers, countless slabs of chocolate, and most recently a really tasty imported Spanish beer. Believe me, I remember the people who give me stuff.

Geeks these days are pretty cool.

Yes, I work with a man who looks like identical to the Comic Book Guy. Yes, I wear glasses. Yes, I make maths jokes. Yes, I look like I just woke up. But I also dress pretty well, go to the gym, date beautiful women, and have an active social life. Many of the guys I work with snowboard, or surf, or do naked bungee jumps. The ‘80s geek stereotype still applies to some, but is very much out of date.

(Bonus tip) We WILL lie to you to make you go away

Sometimes you just don’t need to know why something happened. And even if you did, we know for sure we’d just confuse you if we tried to explain (because it possibly confuses us too). So we will make something up. It’ll be close to the truth, but it will be largely bollocks. Let’s say your computer is running slowly, and I make it go faster, and you ask how I fixed it, I’ll say, “I basically unclogged it so the files could flow more freely”. Absolute bullshit, but it makes you feel better and gets you off my back.

Sometimes, the more ballsy helpdesk people have competitions to find the best stupid reason for things to have broken. Among my favourite are “oh, the server ran out of electrons”, and “solar flare” (cheers Nick).

Speech!

2008-06-27T00:51:00.001+12:00

Finally I found something that almost makes switching to Vista worthwhile. Speech recognition. Previous versions of Microsoft's speech recognition required you to say one word at a time, speaking slowly helped ensure quality in the the resulting command or document. But in Vista saying the whole sentence at once actually produces better results, thanks to the context sensitive speech recognition engine. In fact I'm actually speaking this entire blog post into WordPad! It's actually quite scary how little correction have to do to what the speech engine types!

Not only will it let me dictate, it will also let me control my computer quite effectively. I can minimize, I can open programs, I can even browse the web by speaking the links in the browser.

The one problem I have found so far is that it often tries to understand noise, and interpret it as commands. So I might be having a conversation with somebody, and suddenly I'll find my computer trying to delete files. So it's always important to ask the computer to stop listening when you've finished speaking.

This may be a short post but throughout I have been continually surprised at just how good the speech recognition actually is. To be honest I think I probably could have typed this faster with the keyboard, but once it learns my voice, I really think I could be more productive this way.

I don't say this very often, but go Microsoft!

Music with a Vengence

2008-06-22T18:47:00.005+12:00

For the last 4 months or so, I've been waging war against my upstairs and downstairs neighbours. A sound war.

Mr. Downstairs loves his Indian pop music, and loves to play it full volume, windows open. It's often so loud that I can over my music.

Mr. Upstairs owns an electric guitar, a bass guitar, a set of bongos, and I think a full drumkit (though it's dampened). He's actually a brilliant musician, but this is a mid-city apartment!

So obviously I've complained to the landlord, but nothing's really changed. Screaming at the top of my lungs out the window does little to help, so for my last week (or two?) I've decided to even out the playing field...

I've compiled a playlist of hard rock and metal which will play at full volume whenever I'm out of the house - that includes Sunday mornings, nights out, and if I don't come home until the morning one day, then they'll have to suffer the entire night. I think I'm going to add some just-plain-annoying music in there too. Something wailing and horrible.

Other ideas include

Having the computer generate a one-tone signal, and play that at full volume for hours.
Repeating one short song over, and over, and over. It has to be something really bad.
Recording myself playing 30 seconds of terrible guitar and having that loop around.

Any suggestions?

Sick

2008-06-12T22:29:00.003+12:00

So I'm sick! Really sick! I'm pretty sure it's the flu, and there's a pretty terrible sore throat in there as well. It's my blog, and I've decided to whine.

Firstly, living on your own when you're sick is HELL. I had to walk down the road for takeaways earlier (yakiniku don = yum). Bad enough in the cold, but I got home and found they'd given me some kind of omelette-on-rice concoction. It looked nice, but it was cheaper than the dish I'd paid for, and anyway I wanted beef. So I walked back to get it changed. Probably better than trying to cook in my condition though. I'm certain I'd have seriously injured myself.

Secondly, living in the city when you're sick is HELL. My upstairs neighbour doesn't understand he lives in a flat, and plays very loud electric guitar, and bongos, apparently. The guy downstairs plays very loud Indian pop music from speakers near his window. I honestly used to like Indian music, but now even hearing it from a car on the street makes me want to go find a time machine and erase it from the past.

So for many reasons (including these) I'm moving to Birkenhead, into a flat with a couple of friends from work. Should be excellent! I'm getting a motorbike, and so now I get to start living quietly, with a bit more freedom.

EDIT: According to the doctor I have 'really bad' strep throat. When she saw it, her exact word was "WOAH". 10 days of high-strength penicillin!

Democracy. Woot.

2008-06-08T15:07:00.003+12:00

This should be an interesting year, politically. The US and NZ elections have synchronised and we get to see two big showdowns.

Obviously I'm rooting for Labour or the Greens here in NZ, and the Dems over in the US (Obama was hardly the best candidate, but I'm glad we're not expecting another Clinton).

As National seems to be gaining ground in the polls, I thought I'd reprint an old article I did for Massey's magazine a little while ago. No idea if I own the copyright... anyway.

Democracy

“A system in which every adult, man or woman, can have their say in the way their country is run. Intelligent men and women are chosen from and by the masses to represent and champion the ideals of the majorities from which they come.”

Well that's the cheesy, idealistic, pipe dream description anyway. On the contrary our system of democracy simply cannot work like that. Stop your bitching, Americans. You too political science students. I have 3 points for you to consider.

1. Ignorant people
The major problem with democracy is ignorance – the majority of people just don't get into politics enough to actually understand either the issues, their representatives' views, or the ramifications of politician's actions. Case in point, National's near-victory with their 19% tax for all campaign. Just about all of we students pay 19.5% (and get chunks of it back if we're clever enough to file tax returns), but once you get out of uni and start earning real money, any income you earn after $38,000 will be taxed at 33% (so if you earn 40k, then 2k of that will be taxed at the higher rate). Most people don't like 'their' money being taken away, and so they fell easily for Don Brash's advertising.

But what would have happened? Well it doesn't need saying, but most Kiwis don't understand politics – let alone the dubious ideals of a Right Wing party. I'd wager a good majority of the people touting the 'wonderful' tax cut policy were the people benefiting most from rich people's taxes. That money goes into roading, healthcare, education, public amenities and the disaster relief fund, to name a few. If you want NZ's healthcare system to be as crappy as America's, if you want to pay even more for university than you already do, and if you want us to respond to volcanoes, floods, storms and fires as poorly as America responded to Katrina, then VOTE NATIONAL!

I read an article yesterday asking that City Councils “give some of their profits from bus shelter advertising back to the community”. Are they serious? That's what councils do! They take their income from rates and selling advertising and build amenities, keep up the parks, mow the lawns and sponsor cultural events. They won't put it back in your pocket because they know you won't help finance these things, and the city will quickly start to look like Mogadishu! If you don't like council spending, vote for somebody who will change it, or run for Council yourself. Or just pick up an AK and take power.

I'm certainly not blaming you the people, but the problem here is that the system allows politicians to take advantage of us. Their campaigning can be likened to advertising, except they don't actually have to follow through on their promises.

2. Stupid people
By definition, 50% the people in any country have an IQ under 100 (all you first year Psych students pat yourselves on the back for knowing that). That means that 50% of New Zealanders can legitimately be classified using terms such as 'below average', 'highly retarded', 'profound moron'. 50 percent! That's 'half' for all you profound morons out there. Half! To put it in perspective, a sub-100 IQ individual would have a hard time fully understanding this article.

Keeping in mind the ignorance of most voters as discussed earlier, add onto that the sheer stupidity we all see every day on the roads, in the news etc. and what do you have? You have a nation of people either too stupid, or too ignorant to make an informed decision about who they want to represent them.

3. Voter turnout
Yes, it gets worse. If by some miracle you are politically informed and intelligent (obviously a minority), you still actually have to cast your vote. To obtain a reasonable result, you surely have to ignore the votes of those who don't actually understand what they're voting for (they vote in droves), and actually obtain the votes of those who do!

We're so easily swayed by propaganda that many votes are based completely on false information, and should really be considered invalid just like a business contract would be.

I actually didn't vote in the Local Bodies last year because I didn't trust my shaky knowledge of the candidates – they don't promote themselves very well and I don't even know where to find out about them.

I urge you to do the same in future elections – if you don't know what you're voting for, or you can't say with certainty that you fully understand the implications of your vote, then just don't vote – it's a power you're not prepared to wield.

So what would I propose? I suppose it's completely impractical, but how about this:

Question 1:
“Pick a candidate”

Question 2:
“Explain yourself in 100-300 words.”

Anybody whose reasoning is unsound gets ignored.

Ye Olde Vista Webbe-Devve

2008-05-29T10:38:00.008+12:00

Imagine my horror when, just as I'm getting used to driving Vista, I discover that a simple 0.6 second MySQL query takes about 6 seconds to run! It's not just a one-off either - EVERY query takes ages! So my horror led to despair, and a complete lack of any development with web technologies for a couple of months. My inner child wouldn't let me switch to Linux because I really can't do without battling the Combine or perfectly timing a de-orbital burn onto Mars at least once a week (and new nvidia drivers have fixed most Vista gaming issues).

And then I had an idea: virtual machines.

1. Download VMWare Player. It's free, it's quick, it's well stocked with features. And it just works.

2. Do a Google search for a 'virtual appliance' of your choice. Player, being the bottom of VMWare's range, doesn't let you create new VMs from scratch, but you can download the templates from anywhere and build the machine yourself (Windows, MacOS, Linux, DOS - whatever). I chose the latest distro of Linux Mint. Mint is like a modified Ubuntu, made for easier system administration and with a redesigned desktop and UI. Basically it's a cute blonde in a bar at 4am - pretty and easy.

3. Load up your new appliance, and get going. That's really all it takes. Mint worked out of the box on my LAN, including the internet connection. You can even drag and drop files between each OS! Have a look! (Incidentally, that image is a test of Vista Paint's "native" JPG saving feature. Not too impressed.)

At this point I realised that I couldn't use my dual screens with the virtual machine, so I had to do some more thinking...

Enter Samba.

4. Download Samba. Samba is a tool for Linux (among other OSs) that lets you connect to the PC's print/ file structure from a Windows box.

And we're done! Now when I want to do web dev, I have a blindingly fast Linux box minimised in the background, and I'm accessing files through a browser and text editor on my Windows machine. Couldn't be simpler.

Now I should probably go out and find a faster, more hardcore Linux distro as I'm not using this as my desktop. I feel bad leaving all the prettiness untouched.

By the way, since I know you were wondering, following my theatre convention for PC names I called this virtual box 'Riley' after the protagonist of Tom Stoppard's "Enter a Free Man". That gives me 'Arcadia', 'Riley', and a laptop called 'Godot' (because it's slow).

Encryption

2008-05-06T22:29:00.003+12:00

Along with teaching monkeys to type properly, one of my recent projects has been encryption. I have slowly been improving an encryption algorithm that, while not competing in the big leagues, is certainly not breakable by your average person.

I wrote the first draft at lunch one day at work in Visual Basic Script, and coupled it with a simple function to send any typed text (or attached files) as an encrypted email. My basic idea was to provide a way for people to send sensitive data to others using the standard company mail server without other employees spying.

Obviously I had to rewrite it in a real language, but the thing is I still had to cope with the eternal problem of privately sending the encryption key (I was originally using a basic mathematical formula with a symmetrical key). I really wanted a way to imply the key somehow, but I couldn't think of anything other than embedding it in the encrypted string. And I didn't want to use asymmetric keys (like PGP), because what middle manager is really going to care about keeping a private key?

But walking out of work that evening, a solution suddenly hit me - if my encrypted email has only one intended recipient (say the CEO), I could use the CEO's domain user object's GUID as an encryption key (a GUID being a Globally Unique Identifier)! The encryption method would be as simple as retrieving the unique ID of a user selected recipient, and inserting it into the algorithm!

The decryption method - and here's the clever part - would take the currently logged in user's GUID, and use that as the decryption key. The upshot is, if anybody gets their hands on the decryption tool, they'd actually have to be logged in to the domain as the CEO - otherwise they'd get garbage. And how do you log in as the CEO? You need his or her password. Bingo - an implied key.

To get really clever, I could hash the GUID with the MAC address of the CEO's office desktop, so the message could be read only by him, only on his computer.

Yes it's flawed. For example editing another user's GUID to equal the CEO's is a possibility (say on another domain), but for the purposes of hiding the pay review information from Eve Anderson I think I've found an ideal solution.

Natural Selection

2008-05-05T19:37:00.005+12:00

Take a monkey. Give him a computer with a keyboard, and get him to type at random. If he types for an infinite amount of time, he will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. He will even produce the source code for Windows Vista, and probably several far better operating systems as well!

This is the so called 'infinite monkey theorem'. It's usually used as a way of demonstrating the true extent of infinity, as it should be obvious to everybody that it would take a LONG, LONG time for the monkey to actually produce anything of value. In fact in 2003 a 'fun experiment' was carried out using six monkeys. But (according to Wikipedia) "their literary contribution was five pages consisting largely of the letter S".

In fact, probability calculations generally show that the first line of a Shakespearian play would take several million billion billion years.

I have heard many creationists use this fact as evidence that evolution couldn't be real - it would simply take far too long for meaningful life to occur 'by chance'. And that's a fair point. Or it would be if evolution was really all about chance.

Of course evolution is part chance - random genetic mutations occur all the time, which are just like our monkeys pressing keys. And yes, even if you had a million billion billion years you probably wouldn't randomly generate a human through genetic recombination alone. But what if you got to keep the bits that worked?

Imagine our monkey typing - every time he typed a letter in the right place, he got to keep it for the next attempt at typing Hamlet. So the first time around he gets the first letter in the right place. Once he's typed enough letters to fill a book, he starts again and gets the third letter in the right place. And so on - you can see now that this dramatically increases the monkey's chances of typing Hamlet before the universe is destroyed!

And that's what evolution is. Random mutation and recombination of DNA, except you get to keep the bits that work. You condense your quadrillion-year random process into just a few billion years.

Not satisfied with conjecture, I decided to test this by writing a program that does exactly that. I have a 'monkey' that tries to type anything you give it - a word, sentence, or even a book. If the word is 5 characters long, it types 5 random characters, and keeps any that are in the right place. It then types another 5 random characters, and once again keeps any in the right place. Pure natural selection based on random mutation. (Note: it can type any character on your keyboard - numbers, symbols, small letters, capitals.)

And the results? Incredible actually. I first gave it "hello". The record for that is 78 attempts. Then I decided to get harsh - I gave it Ryan's latest blog post. It's about a page - 519 words. The monkey typed it in 629 attempts! Then I thought I'd get recursive and have the monkey type out its own source code: 521 attempts.

The cool thing is the number of attempts required doesn't increase as quickly as the number of words to be typed, purely because the monkey can get more than one letter right at a time. In fact to type Ryan's blog entry three times in a row it only took 1019 attempts. The only real limitation is that the more characters you have, the longer it takes for each attempt (Ryan's post took 2 minutes, but the post 3 times took around 7 minutes). Actually getting this thing to type Hamlet would take around a week (or longer), but I doubt it would need more than 30,000 attempts (a rough estimate!).

After a little bit of optimisation I'll put the source code up - it's currently 37 lines long, and written in Python (which I'm currently learning). I reckon I can cut it down (and speed it up) a little once I've learned more of the inbuilt methods.

Salmonella

2008-04-24T12:11:00.000+12:00

A few years ago, I managed to catch salmonella from a Star Mart chicken pie. The worst part was I ate the chicken pie at 3am during an overnight recording session, with the symptoms presenting at around 5 or 6 am. Imagine throwing up everything in your stomach bit by bit over the course of 2 hours on absolutely no sleep. I must have thrown up five or six times (each time on the side of the road) on the way home to Albany. When I got home at about 8, I fell into bed white as a sheet (after deciding that there was nothing left to exude).

Waking up was a very interesting experience. I opened my eyes, and feeling strangely serene I stood up and walked out of my room. Almost every piece of furniture I saw was new. It just hadn't been there when I went to bed. Worse, there were shelf units with futuristically straight lines, George Jetson-style 6 foot chrome lamp stands... basically I thought I'd woken up in the future. Maybe I had slipped into a pie-induced coma and woken up 10 years later salmonella free, ready to enjoy petabyte hard drives and terahertz GPUs.

Well it turned out I'd been asleep for just over 28 hours, and had woken up after lunch the following day. The furniture was there because some friends had moved back to the States and dumped all their stuff on us. Kinda boring.

But there was redemption. When I woke up, I had involuntarily spoken a single word: "chips". And after that moment all I wanted was greasy, salty, soggy chips. I was craving them like a pregnant woman. Imagine how I felt when I arrived in the kitchen and found a plate of chips sitting in the microwave, no more than 30 minutes old.

So what's the point of all this? Well, craving. And excitement. When your body craves a food it's usually because you're low on something that's in it. Equivalently I seem to be craving excitement. And just like a person might break their 'no fast food' rule to get a protein hit, I'm breaking through social norms to get my jollies.

Looking back at the salmonella experience it was so, well, not boring, that I'm actually glad it happened. It's come to my attention recently that I'm just bored. I've said before that I love my job, and I do - and it's refreshing to have a role that stimulates me, but for all the new and unexpected things it brings me, it's still steeped in routine and procedure. I really think I need to counter that with more 'not boring' experiences.

A friend of mine is having trouble picking between two sisters - he's dated both (each having no knowledge of it), and he claims the second sister one of those 'it just.. happened' situations. He's certainly not in love with either of them, and they certainly don't love him back.

He asked me what he should do, and my response was that he should date both of them, and lie about it. That way he can enjoy the next few weeks or months twice as much, and can also enjoy watching the whole thing tumbling down when they both find out. It may be horrible, but dammit it would be exciting!

There are certain things - very valuable parts of my life - that I would never want to lose no matter how fun the explosion would be, but if you've got a lot of money why not watch some of it burn?

So that's my April 24th resolution - have more fun. Not stupidly reckless fun, not stupidly self-destructive fun, but calculated reckless self-destructive fun. And lots of it.

Shouting!

2008-04-17T11:27:00.002+12:00

Aren’t we getting tired of this whole religion thing? Tired of talking about it, tired of having to explain our point of view?

Throughout our daily affairs, we meet many people. It is usually obvious (especially if you are constantly engaged in serious discussion) where these people lie on the Great Bell Curve of IQ. When an intelligent person meets another intelligent person, the connection is electric – and the counsel of one is generally met with interest and honest attention by the other. Or, at least, thought is given to everything the other says before the shouting begins.

And if an intelligent person was to be lectured by somebody dramatically more intelligent, I expect that the shouting would never begin. The ‘lesser’ of the pair would be interested in learning where he has fallen down in his arguments. I say this because in my experience intelligent people are hopelessly devoted to self improvement.

But I’ve never understood the mental block that causes people to blanket ignore the opinions of people clearly more intelligent than themselves. No, I’m wrong - I understand it perfectly. They ignore the opinions because they don’t like them. My real question is how they can possibly be so short sighted and… well… stupid!

What I really want to see is some of that shouting! I want to see these people get sassy with intelligent people, and I want to see their ideas get knocked down, and for the loss to make a difference in their minds! Basically I want them to argue their points. And I'm open to the idea that one day they'll prove us wrong.

But failing that, to be honest, I could live with them if they kept their ridiculous ideas quietly to themselves. But without fail, after speaking their mind, then refusing to discuss the counter argument they turn around and argue their point to the those who refuse to kick up a fuss! Isn't it telling?

And the really, really bad part is (with the religious, at least) they’re working so hard to maintain this deliberate ignorance in order to glue together an illusion which is absolutely, unequivocally, worse than reality.

Design-o-matic

2008-04-08T09:51:00.007+12:00

I find it easy to quantify the things I'm terrible at. Singing. Dancing. Memorisation. Tolerance. Patience.

I can explain most of these things - for example I can't dance too well because I'm too self-conscious, and also because I still try to dance as if I'm holding a saxophone.

But the thing I've always been fascinated by is my complete lack of ability in the field of design. I can code complicated server applications, I can manipulate dynamic content whether from XML or a database, but I just can't make a website look pretty. The minute my text editor is replaced by a graphics editor my creative faculties seem to completely vanish and I clam up.

I know that REALLY good design is not a simple feat, but you would think SORT OF good design would be easy. I've started to wonder lately if I have Blank Page Syndrome - presented with infinite possibility I can't even begin, let alone finish a design.

Part of the problem might be simply this:

[Photoshop CS2 screen]

vs.

[My PHP template]

With the PHP template, I can get going - I know what the problem is, how to solve it, and where to start typing. With the Photoshop screen however, I'm lost in a sea of possibility. How do I begin from there? Do I start on paper? In fact often with a new development project I just grab a page from the last one and cut it back to a basic function. Can I do that with design or is it always 'start from scratch'?

I wonder if there's a way to simplify the process. We can already generate code from business models, why can't we generate designs from the same? Design-o-matic!

I'm not sure what the answer is but I'm open to suggestions.

Epic

2008-03-19T16:27:00.002+13:00

It's part of my job at Auckland City Council to source new software and match it up to business needs (a big job with over 2500 users). It can be fun, but sometimes I'm asked to source and procure an individual font, and send it to Helpdesk to install. Tedious.

Anyway, I was asked a while ago to source Rotis - a font by Otl Aicher (who created the stick men used on a lot of public signage around the world - kick ass!). I searched online and discovered that it cost over $250. Needless to say the user decided she would use something else.

About three weeks later, I was sent another list of fonts to source (let this be a lesson - if you agree just once to mop up shit, you will always be expected to mop up shit). The font list looked very Maccy (it included two flavours of Helvetica), but it also included Rotis. This piqued my interest and I wondered if I could bag the fonts in Open format from Ryan or Angus.

So I looked up the Rotis 'usage' section on Wikipedia, only to find that "Auckland City Council used Rotis for many years on signage, and the typeface is still visible all over the city."

Huh! So I had a look on our 'packages' server, and lo and behold - Rotis, complete with a quick-install script, AND spare licenses!

Cheers Wikipedia (or User:Darobsta, more specifically)

Success

2008-03-13T12:22:00.001+13:00

I've been thinking lately about what would make me look back on my life, 15 years from now, and think "I've succeeded". And I'm beginning to think that it's not necessarily money. Or career. I'm not sure I want to be a manager in an office somewhere earning 90k or more if it means giving up on certain other parts of my life.

I made a list of the things I really love to do with my time. Here it is (in no particular order):

- Learn things
- Program computers
- Play games
- Sit around and talk politics, philosophy and religion
- Make friends with worthwhile people
- Read books
- Write (fiction and non-fiction)
- Music (listening and playing)

I actually love the job I have right now - I learn a lot of new things every day, there's always a new piece of software for me to analyse. Always something going on that I can actually care about. I get to do scripting too, which I obviously enjoy. AND it pays well. But who knows if I'll get to do this past my one or two month contract?

I'm starting to wonder if I should start doing a half load. Maybe 20 hours a week. Then double the flying I'm doing every week (maybe 8 hours a week instead of 4), and start a Physics degree as well. I could even stay in uni permanently. Slowly getting degree after degree, working just enough to pay rent, upgrade my computer and pay for tuition.

Then in 15 years I could look back and say "I have a master's degree in Physics, Comptuer Science and English and a bachelor of Aviation Science. I've spent the last 15 years just enjoying myself without any real worries." I think I'd be fulfilled, and happy. And if this AI thing kicks off, I know I could even contribute a lot to the field. I could actually contribute to Science!

And then with all the flying hours I'll have built, I could move to Cuba or Hawaii and start an aviation company just doing scenic tours. There's a retirement fund in those fat American tourists, I'm sure of it.

Tech-less

2008-03-11T17:38:00.003+13:00

During one of my many caffeine fueled tech-rants today about the future of human-computer interface somebody made the point that we're increasing our reliance on technology every day. He reckoned that one day soon we won't be able to function without it.

I suppose it's possible. For example my spelling can be quite dodgy and I find writing easy-to-read comments difficult without Firefox's in-line spell checker.

Another point he made was that our increased inactivity leads to health problems and physical weakness that would cause problems in a world without technology. Again, I suppose that's an interesting point, but it got me thinking. My friend Angus is fairly nerdy - he's a proud Mac user, and has always known his way around a computer - and yet he's extremely fit and knows Taekwondo. My friend Ryan is again very nerdy - another proud Mac user and IT professional, studying IT - and he regularly runs long distance for fun, and competes in marathons.

And then there's me. As nerdy as they come! I spend my weekends designing and writing AI, I study physics just for fun and the minute somebody mentions 'server side applications' I get all jumpy with excitement. And yet I usually bike over 50km every week to and from the airfield, and I used to practice martial arts 6 hours or more every week.

I think with an unwaning interest in sports and physical recreation, and a dramatically increasing interest in science and technology the human race will be just fine. We're not only in a better position to protect our contrived little electronic world, but we should be perfectly able to survive without it.

Vista - thoughts.

2008-03-10T14:03:00.005+13:00

So I installed Windows Vista and so far it's been a very interesting experience. Naturally I have a few comments.

Graphics
I really do like Aero. It obviously has nothing on the latest offerings from Apple (will it ever?), but Microsoft has clearly paid attention to the latest design trends and has come up with something clean cut and fancy for my viewing pleasure.
There are a few niggly little details though that really bug me. A good example is the new status bar. It does look quite snazzy, but when it's active it decides it wants to animate itself with a distracting glare that runs from 0% to the end of the bar every few seconds.

I have two screens, and I'm always doing work on one if the other is running a search or an update, and I really don't want flashing lights on the left when I'm busy on the right.

Performance
Granted I'm comparing a newly installed copy of Vista to a trashed 8 month old copy of XP, but I get the strong feeling that Vista is much more responsive than XP ever was. This may be because of my setup (duel core Intel, 2 Gig RAM, nice graphics card) - Vista is actually using my GPU to process its graphics and leaving my speedy machine free to do the dirty work.

Games
Yuck. Well I've only tried one game so far - Orbiter, the spaceflight simulator - and it's noticably worse - in fact the atmosphere doesn't even render, leaving every planet with a stary sky in the daytime. Also your spacecraft sometimes vanishes when viewing it at close range. I'll have to try a few more games and then re-post.

The Rest
In terms of OS administration, Vista is absolutely terrible. It treats me like a complete idiot, never showing me the information I need without extra mouse clicks. I'm constantly seeing options like "Click here to enter classic mode for more options'. Why should I have to? Why can't you show me display properties/ network options and statistics/ user information without an extra mouse click?

My other frustration here is Microsoft's ridiculous "let's hide all the menus" idea. To get to the menus in explorer you have to press 'alt' before you click the menu! Who is going to know to do that, and why should they have to?! Yes, you can turn this off, but not everywhere. Apple still has the monopoly on effective menu browsing with their stay-on-top-context-bar thingy, and now Microsoft is even further from the best than they were with XP!

I'm glad to report though that my Felix efficiency tool and Launchy work perfectly under Vista. Fortunately I'm a keyboard user too, so this all means I'm still quicker than a Mac user even when stunted by the painful navigation of Microsoft's latest hellchild.

To sum up
For now I'm going to be using Vista as my main OS. I'm still dual booting XP though, and the second I become irrevocably pissed off with Vista, I'm dropping it and going back. The games are making me think twice about it though - I decided against Linux and Mac just because I play games, so let's see what happens when I try Flight Sim X and Half Life 2 tonight.

The Enemy

2007-12-05T09:04:00.000+13:00

As of March 2006, there were about 44,000 people on the no-fly list, and that number is still growing.

Hearing Americans, especially those in government, rant on about 'terrorism' and 'the enemy', and 'threats to America' really makes me wonder.

The country is beginning to restrict the liberties of their own citizens for dissent - a good example is Naomi Wolf, author of 'The End of America - a Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot'.

There comes a point at which we have to stop and think "who are these 'terrorists' and dissenters fighting?". Who is their enemy? Perhaps in the case of actual overseas (Muslim?) terrorists like those who destroyed the twin towers, America is the enemy. But what about Naomi Wolf? She clearly loves her country, but is speaking up against the government. And for that she is tagged as a suspected threat to America?

It seems to me that the US government has begun to interpret threats against it as threats against the US itself. And where does that path lead? It leads to a police state, it leads to marshal law, it leads to dictatorship.

Disproving God

2007-12-04T23:00:00.000+13:00

It's a waste of time to attempt to 'disprove god'. Based on what we know of the universe, we may have had a creator. We do not and cannot know that we are not a teenager's science experiment, or a sophisticated computer program. Perhaps our creator's universe was the uncreated one.

Instead we need to approach it from another angle: disbelief in a god must, for a scientist or intellectual (and I would hope the layman too), be the default position. From there, we can look at our surroundings and ask 'is a god required to explain any of this'. In the past, the answer was often 'yes'. Nowadays, there is not a single scientific problem that cannot be answered by something simpler than a god.

Since a god is not required to explain anything, belief in a god is not necessary. That's where it ends.

There is no use trying to disprove god - it's a meaningless idea to start with. Might as well try to disprove Fairies, or the Greek Muses.

An experiment

2007-11-25T02:38:00.000+13:00

After watching a weird video about "Stoned Wheat Squares" (pun intended, sadly), I began to wonder if I could give myself a Jamaican accent just by using one every minute of every day for say... 2 weeks?

We're live!

2007-07-17T00:39:00.000+12:00

So I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy! At the moment I'm trying to get a job in web development, which means I needed to get myself up and running with an online portfolio.

Go have a look at my portfolio (by the way Ryan, you don't need to tell me to fix the navigation. It's 1.30 in the morning. Nobody can build navigation at 1.30 in the morning.).

There's not much there for you unless you're looking at hiring me (!), but I recommend you download Felix if you happen to run Windows. I'm determined to make Windows easier to use than a Mac. And I'm succeeding!

Well ok, I'm succeeding only because I use a Mac style dock on my right screen along with a Windows taskbar on my left screen. A few open-source apps like Launchy make my life easier too.

For your viewing pleasure. I hope this doesn't start a trend of people showing off their desktops.

Joy to the world!

2007-06-25T10:00:00.000+12:00

A blog I read (onegoodmove.org) recently posted this video. It's five minutes long, but it's worth watching right through to the end (there's a special 'treat' in the last 30 seconds).

Shocking huh? In truth all the weird stuff you heard there about god hating you, eating babies, god taking retribution and god 'hating fags' is all (in one form or another) from the Bible. So in a way they're not saying anything particularly odd.

No doubt you caught it, but I can't help laughing when I hear the line "you every one face a fiery day for your proud singing (so just stop it!)", followed by "it's too late to change his mind...". Well if that's the case, let's go wild!

In all honesty though I can't see this as disgusting. I know I should, I really do, but I can't. If I were to make a parody of this particular branch of Christendom, or let's be honest the Church in general, I couldn't do a better job than this! It's pure comedy gold! Well, aside from the little girl singing it at the end. That's yet another example of religious child abuse and is rather painful to watch.

Somebody should teach these people the good news that their god probably doesn't exist.

For another hilarious vid, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e647x8xFKTs
It's 10 mins long, but the funniest bit is at the end. Let it load and watch from 9:00 until the end. They are 100% serious.

The search

2007-06-18T09:02:00.001+12:00

I usually try not to quote science fiction, but I heard this yesterday, and it sums up my views on god, or more importantly "the search" which I think is the same for Christians, Muslims and Atheists.

"If I take a lamp and shine it toward the wall, a bright spot will appear on the wall. The lamp is our search for truth, for understanding. Too often we assume the light on the wall is god. But the light is not the goal of the search, it is the result of the search.

The more intense the search, the brighter the light on the wall. The brighter the light on the wall, the greater the revelation upon seeing it. Similarly, someone who does not search, who does not bring a lantern with him, sees nothing.

What we perceive as god is the by-product of our search for god. It may simply be an appreciation of the light - pure and unblemished - not understanding that it comes from us.

Sometimes we stand in front of the light and assume we are the center of the universe. God looks astonishingly like we do. Or we turn to look at our shadow and assume all is darkness. If we allow ourselves to get in the way, we defeat the purpose — which is to use the light of our search to illuminate the wall in all its beauty, and in all its flaws. And in so doing, better understand the world around us."
- G'Kar from Babylon 5

Stupid mouse

2007-06-16T13:25:00.000+12:00

Why is it that up until now that mouse alternatives have been reserved for the disabled? And why do they all suck?

Anybody who knows me knows I hate the mouse. It's inefficient as an interface for two reasons:

They often require a lot of accuracy.
You have to move from the keyboard to the mouse and back constantly.

The accuracy thing can be helped by not requiring users to click little buttons to maximise/ minimise/ move/ resize the window. In Linux, alt+left-click anywhere in the window lets you drag it around. For resize, it's just alt+right click and drag.

One of the best mouse alternatives I've seen is a simple webcam solution, that lets you set up a cam pointing at your hand, and record what a 'move left' action looks like, or what a 'right click' action looks like. Quite impressive.

OK, so what's the upshot of this? Well imagine holding down alt on your keyboard, and pointing at your screen to 'pick up' a window, then giving it a quick flick to the right to drag it on to your second screen.

Imagine the mouse pointer following your finger, and then double clicking an icon by simulating that action in mid air. Or selecting text by pointing at the start of a word and 'moving' your finger to the end.

This Minority Report style interface is possible now - I even found an example of it. But it doesn't belong on a big wall like that, being used for silly things like moving pictures around - it belongs on your desktop, making your life easier. And giving you less RSI.

But I reckon we could go a step further. Mouse pointer controlled by your eyes, a nod is a click...

Road 'works'

2007-06-15T13:00:00.000+12:00

Queen Street, Central Auckland.

Whose smart idea was it to close a lane in each direction for the whole length of the busiest part of the street?

Not only is traffic impacted, but so are pedestrians - they've removed about half of our pavement space too! It was difficult enough before to walk behind a pavement-width line of slow-walking Asian girls without punching them in the back of the head, but now the lines are forced to be double, or sometimes triple deep, making it impossible to get past!

What else? That's right - the other day, I saw a crowd gathered outside a Queen Street building for a fire drill. A brave fire-fighter dragged a hose from the truck, looking for the hydrant. He spotted it!... Only to find that it was trapped well behind the roadwork fencing, which due to drunken hooligans is BOLTED TO THE FLOOR.

Here's a smart idea: why not do the bottom of one side of the street, and then the other. Afterwards, do the top of one side, and then the other.

It would take very little extra time, because while the work wouldn't be concurrent, they would have four times as many workers handling each section (any extra time would come from non-concurrent setup).

Auckland, it must be said, is the shittest city when it comes to planning.

Here are some examples:

Hey! Let's build a four lane harbour bridge, ignoring the fact that the extra economic and population growth will herald an huge increase in the number of cars, thus making four more lanes necessary in only TEN years! Thank heavens for the Japs!
I know! Let's create a street plan for Auckland. Oh wait, I forgot to go to planning school. Never mind, I'll just slap last night's spaghetti bolognaise in an envelope and send it to the engineers.
Crap. You know, Auckland is such a sprawling city that we're going to have real issues with pollution quite soon. Let's urge people to leave their cars at home and start using public transport by cancelling half the useful routes, and raising the prices twice in one year!

Anyone else pissed off?

Multiple HTML submit buttons

2007-06-15T10:23:00.001+12:00

For my current web application project, I needed to give users the option of submitting a form to one of two different PHP pages.

But how? The action taken by a submit button is defined in the form, and multiple submit buttons would just take the same action.

Javascript to the rescue! Set up your form as normal, with an action, and a submit button. The second 'submit' button is actually just a normal button, with an 'onclick' property pointing to a javascript function that temporarily changes the form's action, and then submits it:

function second_submit()
{
document.getElementById("form_name").action = "secondpage.php";
document.getElementById("form_name").submit();
}

Simple and effective.

Welcome to think of this before.

2007-06-15T10:15:00.000+12:00

Welcome to the blog. From time to time I'll think of ridiculously good ideas. Whether it's code-related, or societal, or political, or religious, or scientific, I often wonder whether or not somebody has considered the same.

So this is my ideas dump. Enjoy!