Emergent Chaos

xkcd on the Debian issue

Delightful!

Point Break, Live

The starring role of Johnny Utah is selected from the audience each night, and reads their entire script off of cue-cards. This method manages to capture the rawness of a Keanu Reeves performance even from those who generally think themselves incapable of acting. The fun starts immediately with the "screen test" wherein the volunteer Keanus (usually 5-15 men and women vie for the role) go through a grueling audition process. The part is then cast via applaus-o-meter.

Point Break Live. So very attitudinally mis-adjusted.. Via JWZ.

One Nation Under CCTV

Banksy has done a wonderful service. The well-known artist has given us delightful commentary on surveillance.

Better than that, he did it in a site above a Post Office yard in London (Newman Street, near Oxford Circus), behind a security fence and under surveillance by CCTV. His team erected three stories of scaffolding on Saturday, did their work, and removed the scaffolding on Sunday.

The Daily Mail has photos that include the CCTVs overlooking the work.

Photo courtesy of Herschell Hershey's photostream.

Evil Genius University

Taken while in San Francisco:

What more needs to be said?

Make Good Money Making Fake IDs

Or something like that. You have to know how to use a Mac and be British. Her Majesty needs you.

There's Going to Be a Paper-Scorching Ka-Booom!

The New York Times has a great story about Cai Gou-Qiang, an artist who works in gunpowder. "The Pyrotechnic Imagination." It's pretty cool stuff for a lazy weekend afternoon read.

[I forgot to mention, he has a show at the Guggenheim, and their press release states, "For publicity images go to http://www.guggenheim.org/press_office.html User ID = photoservice Password = presspass". There's some high quality art there.]

People Not Being Terrorized

Recently, a group of passengers on the London Underground performed the dance from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" in front of an unsuspecting audience. Shockingly, no one panicked. You can see one passenger move out of the way, but people otherwise just sat there and watched.

When the performance was done, the fellow-passengers applauded. Security was not called. No one was arrested nor harangued. In short -- nothing happened. The Sun wrote a bemused article, Thrillseekers hi-Jackson train. Transport for London kept a stiff upper lip and said:

There are clearly occasions, like this, when everyone enjoys being entertained by some talented people.

There are other occasions where inconsiderate behaviour can spoil a journey for other passengers. Our message is simply that a little consideration to your fellow passengers can make a real difference to everyone.

I suppose that means to stay in tune, make sure you hit your marks, and try not to hit the passengers. Or else.

Well done. It should go without saying that Transport for London passengers have been terrorized. It is a tribute to the very notions of civilization and society that guerrilla theatre, properly done, is safe again. Other cities could do well to learn from London's example as well as remember Calvin's immortal words.

Password Fatigue

The Macquarie Dictionary of Australia has an annual contest for Word of the Year. The People's Choice Award goes to the term that is the title of this post:

password fatigue
noun a level of frustration reached by having too many different passwords to remember, resulting in an inability to remember even those most commonly used.

Macquarie notes:

Password fatigue was the most popular word in the online voting, clearly registering a widespread dilemma of the online world.

No kidding.

The selection committee, who no doubt spend less time on their own web site than their readers do, selected:

pod slurping
noun the downloading of large quantities of data to an MP3 player or memory stick from a computer.

The committee notes:

In this increasingly tech-savvy world we live in, it seems pod slurping really is the new memory bank for us busy bees. Why carry around vast reams of documents, or CDs or anything for that matter, when you can download absolutely everything!

Pod slurping has an inventive and sensuous appeal. The committee felt that the most important criterion for word of the year should be linguistic creativity and evocativeness, rather than simple worthiness or usefulness. Pod slurping also dips its lid to pod, a potent little word of our times.

Perhaps the committee slurps from places that don't need passwords.

Photo "pod slurp" courtesy of :: Meg ::.

Hurricane Ivan From the Space Station

Every now and then, an "Astronomy Picture of the Day" is just breathtaking. Today's is Hurricane Ivan from the Space Station. Click for the larger view.

Flower Chaser

My eyes feel better now.

Calla Lily macro 3, by Edwin Bartlett.

Banksy Would Be Proud

In a feat that would make Banksy proud, members of Untergunther, who the Guardian calls "cultural guerrillas", restored the antique clock at the Panthéon. They spent about a year, beginning in September of 2005, in a hidden workshop, dismantling and rebuilding the entire clockwork which had been abandoned in the 1960s. They were never discovered despite having taped into the electrical and network systems.

Getting into the building was the easiest part, according to Klausmann. The squad allowed themselves to be locked into the Panthéon one night, and then identified a side entrance near some stairs leading up to their future hiding place. "Opening a lock is the easiest thing for a clockmaker," said Klausmann. From then on, they sneaked in day or night under the unsuspecting noses of the Panthéon's officials.

Their presence only became known when they revealed themselves so the curators would know to wind the clock. This is far from the first project Untergunther has undertaken.

Klausmann and his crew are connoisseurs of the Parisian underworld. Since the 1990s they have restored crypts, staged readings and plays in monuments at night, and organised rock concerts in quarries. The network was unknown to the authorities until 2004, when the police discovered an underground cinema, complete with bar and restaurant, under the Seine. They have tried to track them down ever since.

So keep an eye on the news, you never know where they'll pop up next.

Controlling Water

In Controlling Water, Dana writes:

...Alex Stupak, [...] dropped this bombshell in my ear with the casual effect of a little bird chirping their daily song.

With no prompt, he said simply, “You know, it’s really just about controlling water,” and walked away.

This simple phrase had the power of a plot changing hollywood one liner, too few words with more effect than realistically possible, delivered at a turning point at which you can see the characters shift indelibly. These words have shifted me.

These “magic white powders” that are given to modern technique, xanthan gum, gellan gum, agar agar, and various modified starches, are simply put, controlling water. And by controlling water, we are controlling texture.

While this fact was a revelation to me, what was even more thought provoking, was how much of my pastry work up to this point was based off controlling water. And it’s not just me folks, it’s you too.

Making desert. It's all about controlling water. Cool.

The Magic Phone

The "gPhone" was announced today. I put gPhone in quotes, because there was no actual phone announcement. What was announced was the "Open Handset Alliance" and their toolkit, Android. They are

"...committed to commercially deploy handsets and services using the Android Platform in the second half of 2008."

and

"An early look at the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) will be available on November 12th."

This makes the announcement the biggest marketing anticlimax since the Segway. They're not announcing anything but a toolkit, and I don't even get to see that for a week. That week only increases the "WTF?" I keep murmuring. Yes, yes, there was this huge buzz surrounding gPhone/Android, but why are you leaving people like me with nothing to do but be snarky for a week, without having the code there. If the code were there, any comment I could make could be pushed back with the reply of, "go look at the SDK." Absent an SDK, I have to peer at what is on the web site, and what is there is anticlimactic, as there will be no phones for a year (or longer). It's less of an anticlimax than cold fusion, but that's not hard.

The parts of Android that aren't an anticlimax are downright frightening.

Some of that is harmlessly frightening. There are two videos on the OHA web page. One is of children talking about, "if I had a magic phone" and it is treacly and content-free. I, too, would love to have a phone that made me an astronaut, take me to the moon, make cupcakes with sprinkles as well as pizza, cookies, and peanut butter sandwiches, and help animals feel better. I would pass on the phone that turns into underpants, and if the gPhone Android does this, I'll stick to something else, thank you.

However, I believe we already have phones that take pictures, fit in my pocket, and have a keyboard. As a matter of fact, there is one of those in my pocket now. Those suggestions show the difference between being imaginative and innovative. Watch this video; I've inoculated you from needing a barf bag.

The other video is of a bunch of adults showing the same level of attachment to reality. The closing child remark is that a magic phone will do whatever you want it to and that is the theme of this second video.

The adults say some telling things. The video opens up with a sound check and a clapper, to let us know this is unfinished. Nick Sears and Andy Rubin's dog tell us about how this comes from thinking from Danger (who made the Sidekick) and T-Mobile, not Google. Despite what the paper of record has said, Google is nowhere mentioned. People who have been following the gPhone rumors know that Google bought the company, Android, that is now giving us the phone software, Android. The message, therefore, is that this isn't really Google, it's Android. They tell us that there is no gPhone, "what we're doing is enabling an entire industry to create thousands of gPhones."

So this is a committee-based, excuse me alliance-based system. It's Linux and all the stuff like GTK toolkits. The tech lead, Brian Swetland, tells that there will be "at least five people out there who read Slashdot, who will be all over that." I blinked when I heard that. Go watch the video for yourself. I didn't take that quote very much out of context. This is not a phone. It is an OS and toolkit. That's it.

The vision behind this non-announcement? Well, the kids want cookies, pizza and trips to the moon. The adults want a shared family calendar (ummm, doesn't the iPhone have that? Not having an iPhone, I don't know, but I thought it does), "keep track of my kids," "maybe some social thing," "my taxes," and "make me understand my wife better -- it would translate her thoughts" (this latter one coming from German Bauer, Experience Designer). Oh, man, I'm sure Jonathan Ive is kicking himself now. (Or maybe not. If you're an android, understanding humans you've married is hard. I think Mr Ive is sympatico with humans.) I finished watching that saying, "That's it? That's it? That's all you can think of?" It is harmlessly frightening because I'm frightened that so many smart people can have so little there.

Missing from the vision of children and adults alike is my vision of a magic phone. I want a magic phone that doesn't drop out every other word when someone calls me, and can display their name when they call, even if one of us is in a different country. My magic phone makes phone calls.

I loathe my present phone with a special white-hot passion because it has a GPS and can show me with Google Maps where I am to three meters, but it doesn't do the things that I think a magic phone should.

The serious frightening parts are in the Android are in the text of the overview.

"All applications are created equal. Android does not differentiate between the phone's core applications and third-party applications. They can all be built to have equal access to a phone's capabilities providing users with a broad spectrum of applications and services."

or

"For example, Android enables developers to obtain the location of the device, and allow devices to communicate with one another enabling rich peer-to-peer social applications."

In other words -- there's no security. Nowhere on the Android web site does that word appear. But they do flat out have as their vision tracking people. The architecture proudly enables geo-targeted ads, malware, bots, spyware and so on. The designers tell us they don't understand their spouses and want to track their kids before they tell us.

"Android breaks down the barriers to building new and innovative applications. For example, a developer can combine information from the web with data on an individual's mobile phone -- such as the user's contacts, calendar, or geographic location -- to provide a more relevant user experience. With Android, a developer could build an application that enables users to view the location of their friends and be alerted when they are in the vicinity giving them a chance to connect."

Gosh, thanks. Eesh.

The clear winner in this announcement is the collection of Apple, Microsoft, Symbian, and RIM, who should see no threat in a committee whose vision is to deliver things that you can get from the iPhone, N95, or other present smartphones. The clear loser is OpenMoko. Sorry, guys. You're dead. Someone else has Linux phone with no apps, and a bigger marketing budget. They're also smart enough to flee from Copyleft and the GPL. They're are using Apache licensing, so they are more open than you. I recommend switching to delivering Android on your hardware for those "five Slashdot readers."

If the winners want to kill Android, they can, easily. Let's suppose that Apple said that Android-compatible apps would work on iPhone 2, or Microsoft said the same thing about the next version of Windows Mobile. Much of the reason for considering Android to be separate would vanish.

Fortunately, we the humans who use phones do not appear to have any threat from the androids, because sometime next year they're going to deliver this year's smartphone.

The Pogues Show

What an amazing show. Shane MacGowan slurred a lot, but I just couldn't care when he sang 'Brown Eyes' or 'The Greenland' or 'The Sick Bed Of Cuchulainn.'

They're touring the western states.

Photo: "The Pogues in Seattle on October 17, 2007 - first show of US tour" by Dan10Things.

"I'm in Love with a Girl"

Another in the occasional EC weekend series highlighting awesome covers.

I'd like this video even if it was silent. That stage is perfect for a Big Star tune, and the sound is right on. [If only they also performed "Thirteen"...Chilton and friends are too old (or indifferent) to play it properly now].

Pseudonyms in the News: Fake Steve Jobs Outed

Brad Stone of the New York Times is a killjoy. Geez. Part of the joy of reading The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is was thinking of him as Fake Steve Jobs, and nothing more. Sure, it's all good that his employer was so delighted that FSJ is going to be hosted by them, now, but -- Geez. Have you no sense of decent fun?

The next think you know, someone's going to out the guy who plays Stephen Colbert.

The only good thing to come out of this is that the BBC has come out with the article, "How to mastermind a fake blog" and it is a very good thing.

Photo is the first person you get when you do a Google image search for "Brad Stone New York Times." Hah.

Camouflage as Security

This is a new twist on an old trick. SFGate reports in, "'I didn't eat and I didn't sleep' -- Coin dealer flies dime worth $1.9 million to NYC'" that coin dealer John Feigenbaum transported a $1.9M rare coin (an 1894-S dime) from its previous owner, Daniel Rosenthal, who lives in the Bay Area to its new, unidentified owner in New York, by hand-carrying it.

Feigenbaum dressed in a T-shirt, "grubby" jeans, and flip-flops and flew on the red eye from San Jose to Newark, carrying it himself with little fanfare.

There was an unexpected problem, however:

Feigenbaum had purchased a coach ticket, to avoid suspicion, but found himself upgraded to first class. That was a worry, because people in flip-flops, T-shirts and grubby jeans do not regularly ride in first class. But it would have been more suspicious to decline a free upgrade. So Feigenbaum forced himself to sit in first class, where he found himself to be the only passenger in flip-flops.

He shouldn't have worried too much, actually. Scruffy people often do fly first class, trust me. They're the ones who travel too much, so they want to be comfy. Read the whole article, it's amusing.

I am reminded of another occasion when a similar trick was used, although for a diamond.

Photo courtesy of Tiffibunny.

Canon Says Over 50% of Cameras Repaired in First Three Years

In the Times Online article, "Digital DNA could finger Harry Potter leaker," we learn that the person who leaked photos of the last Harry Potter novel has yielded up the serial number of their camera, which was in the metadata of the pictures they took.

From this, we lean that it was a Canon, likely a Rebel 350D, which means that the perp bought it in the US or Canada. (This doesn't mean that the perp is there, as lots of people buy electronics in the US or Canada).

However, I blinked when I read something from Vic Solomon, a product intelligence officer at Canon UK:

From what we know, the device is one of the original Rebel cameras, probably a 350D, and given that they've been out for three years, it's likely the owner would have had it cleaned or repaired in that time.

Likely? I take likely to be better than a coin flip -- over 50% chance. I'm a huge fan of Canon cameras, and while I don't yet own have a digital SLR (I'm very happy with my SD 700IS), I'd like one, and this makes makes me wary to hear that it is "likely" that I'll be taking it into the shop in three years. I have a twenty-five-year-old A1 SLR, and it's never been cleaned or repaired. Is Canon's well-deserved reputation for quality a thing of the past?

Or was Mr Solomon merely shooting his mouth off? He also said:

The EXIF data is like the picture's DNA; you can't switch it off. Every image has it. Some software can be used to strip or edit the information, but you can't edit every field.

That's not precisely accurate. EXIF metadata is nothing like DNA. It's metadata rather than code; it's annotations about the picture such as date and time, f-stop, exposure values, orientation of the photo, and of course the serial number of the camera. While photo-editing software often doesn't let you edit it, there are plenty of ways to get rid of it, and I'll bet that very shortly there will be more of them, particularly if they catch the person who did this because of the embedded serial number.

Photo courtesy Lone Primate.

Wretched Word of the Week: Killer

The word "killer" gets used in two wretched ways. The first is Killer Application, and the second is product-killer. They're each wretched in their own special way. It's not only cliché to use each term, but in using it, you are nearly guaranteed to be wrong.

The original killer application was Lotus 1, 2, 3. It was the killer application because it was the application that made early PCs desirable by large numbers of businesspeople with budgetary authority. They bought 1, 2, 3 and the PC was a means to that end.

Arguably, there hasn't been another killer application since Lotus. All the ones I think of are diminished in scope. Killer applications are things that appear once in a very long while, and appear when the underlying thing they promote is immature. I can make the case for some uses of the term. It's been said (and I have said) that email is the killer application of the Internet. Certainly, many people got on the Internet (or stayed on it) because of email, even more than web browsing, even through web browsing gets all the press. One could argue that TiVo was the killer app for satellite TV, or for something. There's an old MIT saying that if you change something quantitatively by an order of magnitude, you change it qualitatively as well. I think that TiVo (and its brethren like Replay) is the VCR so improved that it's a new thing.

Nonetheless, killer applications are once-in-a-generation thing. If you see an article that asks, "Will Foo be the Next Killer App?" the answer is almost certainly no. Killer apps are like porn and art. You know one when you see it. If you have to ask, it's not going to happen -- or perhaps it's better for me to say that betting against is the smart bet.

The second wretched use of "killer" is the product-killer. I've been sitting on this post for a couple weeks waiting for someone to write some article about an iPhone-Killer, and Michael Calore of Wired News wins the prize for his, "The $300 Linux-Powered 'iPhone Killer' Arrives."

Mind you, I'm as sick of iPhone hype and anti-hype as the next person, and I think that OpenMoko is pretty cool. However, an OpenMoko phone is no more of a iPhone-killer than a different Lotus, the Caterham 7, is a Ferrari-killer. It's not an insult to the Caterham to say it's not a Ferrari-killer. It's no insult that OpenMoko is no iPhone-killer.

Like the Ferrari, the iPhone can't live up to its reputation and generates a counter-reputation. But just as importantly, the sort of people who want a Caterham are in general not the same sort of people who lust after Ferraris. The fun workhorse for people who take as much joy in the tinkering as the actual use has a different aura, no less powerful than glitz, but different. Let's face it, the sort of people who would buy an OpenMoko phone are in general not the sort of people who want an iPhone.

We would expect of sports car columnists that they could tell tell the difference between a Caterham and a Ferrari. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a technology columnist to be able to tell the difference between a cool Linux kit-phone and an iPhone.

Despite the headline, Calore can tell the difference. He gives you an honest assessment of the gotchas:

Keep in mind that this unit (the GTA01) was pushed out early so developers could begin writing device drivers, custom GUIs and some cool apps for the phone. The next revision (GTA02), which will be available starting at $450 in October, will be ready for the mass market. It will have wi-fi, 3-D motion sensors and added graphics accelerators. So this phone isn't exactly an iPhone killer -- the next one will be a contender. AptUsTech has a nice comparison of the NEO 1973 and the iPhone.

If you go look at the comparison, there are a number of techno-lust disappointments for an iPhone-killer. The OpenMoko phone has a GPS and twice the pixels as the iPhone, but no camera, no accelerometer, no WiFi, a CPU running at less than half the speed of the iPhone, and a piddling 64MB of flash. Yes, it takes a microSD card, but give me a break! The suffix "-killer" has been used, and I expect to say, "oh, never mind" not merely look at a "contender." Yes, many things are coming in the next version of the OpenMoko, but this is comparing apples to orange futures.

(Also note that it isn't exactly $300, either. The OpenMoko people have executed a sweet marketing coup in making a $300 base model that no one in their right mind would want so they can stress the low price.)

Now, in Calore's defense, he said in his article that it's not a killer. In short, the headline is -- well -- a lie. It isn't exactly an iPhone-killer, and he's one of the few people to point out that it isn't exactly $300.

In more of his defense, I'm quite sure that the real guilty party here is the editor who took his article that says, "isn't exactly an iPhone-killer" and pointed out that the phone you really want is going to be delivered in a few months for $450, and then created an attention-getting but false headline on it. Let's face it, when you try to be nice to some cool little guys while keeping your journalistic integrity and that smacks up against ad revenue, guess which one wins?

And that is why, Gentle Reader, we should shun terms like -killer. It's cliché, and so cliché that its negation gets twisted into the positive. I don't know why it is that editors have a predilection for this, but it's happened to me, too. Write something saying that the sky is blue, and you'll see the headline saying the sky is green. All you can do is shrug and resolve to write better.

Photo of a Ford GT40 by dacorsa.net, and selected because I found it searching for "Ferrari Killer."