Vastly Important Notes

I cancelled my Kindle order, twice.

Hemingway's six words? Mine are nonfiction.

PIVMAN (was almost) Legend

About a year ago my previous company, CoreStreet, was approached by the makers of "I Am Legend". They wanted a PIVMAN handheld to potentially use as a prop in the movie. We lent them the equipment, but never heard whether or not PIVMAN actually made it in to the shoot and survived the editing process.

I went to see the movie on opening night with a few west-coast CoreStreet expatriates and the goal of cheering wildly for our favorite inanimate prop. (I was going to make a Will Smith joke here, but it wouldn't make sense as he's quite convincingly emotive.) Unfortunately, PIVMAN was replaced by some kind of large, hand-held computer that pretended to be a virus-detecting eyeball scanner.

It's a good thing PIVMAN was cut, since the plot called for the replacement scanner to fail in a particularly embarrassing way while sorting out zombies from humans and I'm not sure I would have wanted to be associated with that sort of thing.

For those of you now hankering for some PIVMAN action, the original comic book (for which I get co-author credits, w00t!) is still a good read as far as corporate marketing brochures go. Maybe the next issue will have zombies.

Unboxing the new iMac

Make it, so?

Geech continues to speak truth to power with this trenchant denunciation of Make magazine.  I agree, Make jumped the shark, whittled with found dental tools out of homemade soap, about six months ago.  And by "shark" I mean "bong".

I propose we start a magazine called Break, dedicated to running well produced photo essays of Make stuff being systematically reverted to their constituent elements.

A Plan for Rescuing Star Wars

I always knew that George Lucas harbors a burning hatred for all things that once made Star Wars great.  It's still common for arguments to break out at the office over whether Episode 1 or Episode 2 was the most egregious offender ("Remember JarJar!", "Remember Baby Fett!"), but all true geeks agree that watching the latest trilogy was like having garbage dumped onto your most cherished childhood memories.  Now there's proof that this was literally the intended effect.  Witness this officially licensed R2-D2 trash can on sale from ThinkGeek:

So it was really no great loss when Lucas announced that, although there were always supposed to be nine movies in the series, the anticipated final trilogy was never going to be made.  Better to have Star Wars be 3/6 good than 6/9 crap.  Ok, maybe it was only ever 2.5/6 good as there are some doubts about Jedi.  Still, what if the final trilogy could be made well?  What if it could be so good as to redeem the whole series??  Here's my plan:

1. Give Peter Jackson a billion dollars and send him New Zealand for three years to shoot the new trilogy all at once, ala Lord of the Rings.

2. Do NOT, for the love of god, let George Lucas know that this is going on.

3. Only after the new trilogy is completely finished, approach Lucas and see if you can negotiate the Stars Wars license.  If he says "yes", you've just saved Star Wars!  If he says "no", just re-render the CG with different looking alien models and you've got the world's best sci-fi movie trilogy anyway.

I think this could work, but George must never, ever, know.

Hmm, actually that trash can is kindda neat.  Awww, man, they're sold out.

The Pros and Cons of Biometrics

I wrote this simple article for a new publication - the ASSA ABLOY Future Lab - about biometrics.  If you want to read it for some reason, please do so.

You keep using that word...

I've received much good feedback on my last post about the pudding-headed report criticising the new DHS smartcard program.  Many people are justifyiably mystified by the report's references to Bluetooth.  The strange thing isn't that the new smartcard doesn't use Bluetooth, but that smart cards and Bluetooth have absolutely nothing to do with each other.  It's like asking, "Doesn't the new Honda Accord suffer from all the well documented problems of Esperanto?"  The short answer is "no", the real answer is, "what the hell are you talking about?"

The problem, of course, is buzzword creep.  With all the industry terminology floating around these days, it's hard for people to remember whether combining two particular concepts produces an argument that's coherent (like biometrics and privacy) or less so (like pancakes and the doctrine of original intent).  That modesty does not typically hinder such people from writing technology assesments or legal opinions is beyond the scope of this blog post. 

Bluetooth, a fine technology with many years of buzzwordiness behind it, is particularly suseptible to such content-free punditry.  In service to all the technology companies who make perfectly good products that have nothing to do with Bluetooth, but feel market pressure to be 100% buzzword compliant, I offer the following decal:

You wouldn't put it on a cell phone (whether it had Bluetooth or not), but you could stick it onto a toaster, tax software, or a government smart card.  I'd start sticking it on our software boxes, but I bet our attorneys wouldn't be too happy.

Stay out of my conference rooms

I remember long-ago debates with my friends about whether or not it was appropriate for children to play with toy guns.  Those were simpler times.  Now parents get to decide whether it's appropriate for children to play with toy automated fixed perimeter defense rapid fire cannons. 

Either way, I have just located the next office gadget.  After all, we did name our conference rooms after historically significant fortifications.   

Field test report to follow.

No dripping!

There are machines outside of hotels and office buildings in Japan into which you stick your wet umbrella and get it instantly wrapped in plastic.  This prevents wet floors and makes it look like everyone just bought a new umbrella. 

I'm reporting this fact to my loyal readers on a broadband wireless connection, while traveling at 270 kilometers per hour on the bullet train to Kyoto.

In my mind, this raises three fundamental questions about my own home country:

1. Why don't we have magic umbrella-wrapping machines? 

2. Why don't we have broadband wireless connections that work at 270 kilometers per hour?

3. Why don't we have trains that work at 270 kilometers per hour?

Write your congressman.  It's time for some pork barrel spending.

Mmmm pork barrel.

Back in Japan

I’m back in Japan this week.

The good news about Tokyo cab rides: there’s flawless, high-speed wireless Internet access even at 60 mph.

The bad news: You don’t get to go 60 mph very often and every trip takes an hour.

Net net: Lots of time for blogging.

FDA approves giant pennies

Here’s the MSNBC article.  Prior discussion on this blog can be found here and here.

All kidding aside, I think implantable RFID chips were a great idea for cows and are a great idea for those people who, like cows, cannot be expected to remember to bring their wallets all the time.  A medical history application is a reasonable use for this technology.  Just to be clear, your medical history is not stored on the chip.  The chip just has an ID number which can be used to call up your history from an existing database.  Access to the database can be controlled using the normal methods.  It’s kind of like those medical ID bracelets that professional golfers always seem to wear.  Not the magical copper and magnet ones; those are crap.

Foo Camp roundup

I got back from O’Reilly’s Foo Camp a few of days ago.  It was… what’s the expression the kids used to say…Insanely Great.  There were lots of impressive people and keen sessions.  Among other things, we figured out how to do electronic voting exactly right.  More on that later.

The picture, by James Duncan, is of a working 3D chocolate printer made out of Lego.  Click on the thumbnail for a larger view.

Just for the record, I “camped” in the Sebastapol Holiday Inn Express.  It didn’t make me any smarter, but at least I could snore without making any permanent enemies among the world’s Alpha Geeks.

Since I’m way late in blogging this event, I’ll take the path of least resistance and just provide a partial (!) list of other blog coverage.  This Internet thing is gonna be big some day.

Cameron Marlow (Overstated)
Chris Shiflett
Danyel Fisher (Made of People)
Dav Coleman (AkuAku)
Dave McClure (Master of 500 Hats)
David Hornlik (VentureBlog)
David Weinberger (Joho the Blog)
Don MacAskil (onethumb)
Erik Hatcher
Furzundfeuerstein (Fart and Flintstone)
James Duncan (Whoot!)
Jeff Barr
Jim Winstead (trainedmonkey)
Mark Fletcher (Winged Pig)
Mark Frauenfelder (BoingBoing)
Mie (Kokochi)
Mike Clark
Nan Barber
Paul Jones
Robert Scoble (Scobleizer)
Russel Beattie
Tantek Çelik
Tim Bray
Zak Greant (Polymorph)
Ross Mayfield

Best tech rumor ever

It’s possible that Netflix and Tivo are teaming up to allow electronic DVD downloads straight to your TV.  If true, this is the most important quality-of-life merger since that chocolate/peanut butter thing in the 1920s.

Of course it’s probably a lie; or worse – just a marketing ploy limited to Top 40 Hollywood hits.

Kind of sad

Here are two pictures of quickly-disappearing vintage European phone booths that I took with one of the devices that are making them disappear. 

Cell phones are better in virtually every respect, but it seems like we’ll lose something of the universal city fabric when phone booths are finally relegated to technology museums.  It is fitting that the last generation of cell phones to overlap widely with phone booths have cameras on them to help document the evolutionary passing of their predecessors.  When you take a snapshot of a phone booth with a camera phone, you get a neat trophy, but you also feel like you’ve helped speed the demise.  At some point, the only function of phone booths might be to be photographed by camera phone toting tourists.

Click on the thumbnails for a full-size view.

Leicester Square, London.  Taken with a Motorola V300. 
Was it built at a time when it was considered unthinkably rude to subject passersby to your conversations, or simply when transmission quality was so bad you had to isolate yourself from the outside noise?

Gamla Stan, Stockholm.  Taken with a Motorola V300.
Notice the raised standing platform for inclement weather.

Anyone else have these kinds of snapshots?  There might be a geek-sentimental photo book waiting to be made here.  I’ll try to snap more on my next trips.

New X-Ray

I was flying out of London’s Heathrow airport a few days ago and was pulled aside by a security officer for a “random” screening through a new x-ray machine.  The officer explained that this was a “perfectly safe” procedure that would take four “low-intensity, high-resolution” x-ray images of my body.  If I didn’t want to go through the machine, I could choose an old-fashioned manual search instead.  That sounded ominous, so I agreed to the hands-off option.

The officer took me to a semi-private section near the security line and asked me to empty my pockets.  Then I had to stand with my back to a wall, click, turn sideways with my legs apart and my arms away from my body, click, turn to face the wall, click, and turn to the other side with legs apart and arms away from my body, click.  The whole thing took about 30 seconds. 

I was interested in what the images looked like, so I asked the officer if I could see the computer display.  He initially said no, but I used the secret code-phrase to identify myself as a fellow security professional (“aw come on, lemme see”), so he took me into a little room a few feet away and showed me the monitor.  Luckily for the world, there is no surviving picture of myself standing with legs apart and arms away from my body, so here is a Photoshop recreation using the closest stand-in I could find and my best memory of the event:

“Yikes”, I said, “that’s unattractive.”  The officer explained that, of course, the x-ray makes the image very squashed in the vertical axis.  “Of course”, I concurred.  You couldn’t exactly see bones, but all clothes were effectively removed.  It looked like I was wearing a splotchy full-body stocking (I wasn’t at the time), but the splotches were probably internal bits.  All in all, it looked like this scanner would do a good job finding anything suspicious.  I can understand why they have the monitor in a separate room; many people might be a bit offended at seeing themselves like this.  I also feel bad for the guy who has to sit in a closet and look at quasi-naked, splotchy fat people all day.  It’s bad enough in London, but I don’t envy the operators when this thing gets installed in, say, Houston.

My verdict:  This thing is great.  It’s fast, convenient and (most likely) effective.  I’ve written before about how the metal-detector ceremony is mostly useless and I’m glad that new technology is finally doing something about it.  This type of x-ray combined with one of those air-puff explosive detectors would be an ideal passenger-entry unit.

Oh, the real secret to the code-phrase is the inflection.  Don’t try it yourself unless you really are a security professional, or you'll get it wrong and wind up in airport jail.

Best MP3 player idea

All I’m saying is that if someone where to make an MP3 player shaped like Soundwave from the Transformers, I would buy it.  That is all.

The Mexican anti-kidnapping chip mystery

Rafael Macedo, the Attorney General of Mexico made an interesting claim yesterday:

Mexico's attorney general said on Monday he had had a microchip inserted under the skin of one of his arms to give him access to a new crime database and also enable him to be traced if he is ever abducted….

"It's an area of high security, it's necessary that we have access to this, through a chip, which what's more is unremovable," Macedo told reporters. "The system is here and I already have it. It's solely for access, for safety and so that I can be located at any moment wherever I am," he said, admitting the chip hurt "a little."

I’m more than a little skeptical about the anti-kidnapping claims; I’m not aware of any current technology that’s small enough to be implanted under the skin and still have enough radio and battery power to broadcast its location more than a few feet.  VeriChip, the manufacturer of the implantable RFID chips pretty much says the same thing:

Aceves said his company eventually hopes to provide Mexican officials with implantable devices that can track their physical location at any given time, but that technology is still under development.

My guess is that Señor  Macedo’s claims are a little ahead of the technology.  Unless your implanted RFID chip happens to pass within a few feet of a reader, and that reader is linked into some central alert network, I don’t see how the tracking would work.  If the Mexican chips are significantly more advanced than my best guess, I’d love to know the details.  Otherwise, I’d think twice before boasting about how the chip can find me in the case of a kidnapping and about how “unremovable” it is.  The first claim is a bit premature.  The second claim sounds like a challenge I wouldn’t be too keen about extending to any kidnappers.

If anyone wants a real tracking beacon for use in case of kidnappings or other natural disasters, I recommend the Breitling Emergency.  Sure it’s big and removable, but camouflaged by a sufficient tonnage of other bling, it may escape your captors’ attention long enough to signal for help. 

Plus, you can use it as a cudgel.

Coffee Coffee!

In an effort to wrest more productivity from increase the happiness of our engineering staff, we got a Francis Francis! X5 espresso machine from Whole Latte Love today.  After trying one or two (ok, six) cups, here is my initial assessment:

Mmmmm, that’s good coffee.  Orange is a good color for something that bestows caffeine.  Clean-up is pretty easy with these pods. Ouch, something in there burned my hand. Oh, there are orange LEDs on the orange case.  Pity I can’t hold my head steady enough to read them. Mmmmmm, that’s good coffee.  These unlabeled buttons sure are fun to push.  I think I’ve had enough for today.

Unlike our fully-automated coffee machine, using the X5 requires a bit of operator intervention.  I’m a bit worried that even the minimal amount of clean-up may be too much for regular office use.  Tomorrow, I’ll put this sign over the machine:

 

Notice: Using the espresso machine and failing to clean up after yourself is grounds (ha ha!) for immediate termination.

Sincerely,
The mgmt.

We’ll see how it goes.

[BTW, I was going to write, “in an effort to increase the productivity^H^H^H^H^H happiness of our engineering staff…”, but decided that virtually no one would get it.  That’s the subject for my first ever blog poll:]

[Oh, and have any bloggers out there had good experiences with hosted web poll scripts?]

World Technology Digest 1 – Big and small

There’s an infinite number (well, I counted six before getting distracted) of on-line sources for gadget and technology news. How are you supposed to piece together all the information without being overwhelmed? How can you see the big picture? In this irregular new feature of Vastly Important Notes, I’ll pull together disparate technology trends into a cohesive vision of the future. I wouldn’t be a pundit otherwise.

Without further ado:

Miniaturization is a passing fad. I have proof. I forgot to snap this myself the last time I was in Tokyo, but the photo above is a picture of the world’s largest cell phone. Notice the antenna.

It’s so big, you have to stand inside it. Thanks to Anne Sullivan for taking the picture.

These cell phone booths are a great idea, but they will never succeed in the U.S. until we have an appropriate technical means to pay for the calls. Some say the answer is micropayments, but that may prove too complicated.  Luckily, Gizmodo reports that Toshiba, Hitachi and other Japanese manufactures are quickly ramping up the production of giant quarters:

You might recall that IBM invented giant quarters in the late nineties, but the Japanese are really pushing the envelope. It’s hard to be precise, but assuming that those reference hard drives are the same size, the Toshiba quarter (right) looks at least 33% bigger than the IBM quarter (left), and it probably costs less as well.

IBM is rumored to have a secret research program underway to engineer something even better than giant quarters, but I’m not sure that they’ve thought this through all the way.  Once again, the hard drive is shown for scale:

Giant cell phones? Check. Giant quarters? Check. Everything is adding up so far, but how do these really cool and tiny Sony Ericsson remote control Bluetooth cars (reported by Jonathan Schwartz) fit into the grand scheme of things?

Think of them as a pilot program; if an old fashioned pocked-sized cell phone can pump out enough Bluetooth to control one of these little cars, imagine what the walk-in type can control.  Defensetech might have the answer:

Of course, remote control robot attack helicopters will cost more than giant quarters to operate.  That’s why I predict that we’ll see someone develop novelty giant sized million dollar bills sometime soon.

So there you have it.  Invest in big wallets and leave it to World Technology Digest to keep connecting the dots.

[Nonsense blogging is a surprisingly good way to unwind from a week of staring at contracts.  Note to the Peppercoin guys: just kidding, your solution is really much more elegant than the giant quarters.]

A better tomorrow

Remember how disappointed you were when the year 2001 came and went and we still didn’t have jetpacks or instant-turkey-dinner pills?  You’d be less disappointed if you lived in Japan.

The taxicabs in Tokyo have passenger doors that automatically open and close, and big GPS systems that display real time traffic levels on the map.  For all these years, I’ve been opening cab doors with my own hands.  Like a sucker. 

Carwashes are fully automated and only about the length of a single car.  You park under it, and the carwash moves back and forth over your car bristling with nozzles and brushes and wipers and other, less identifiable, cleaning apparatus.  At subway and garage exits, there are machines that suck up your paper tickets or cash at impressive speeds and regardless of the input angle; then they bow at you.  The forced-air hand driers in public bathrooms actually manage to dry your hands with a speed and efficiency that show severe disrespect to the ornamental driers found in American bathrooms.

Don’t even get me started on the unforgivable lack of heated water jets on our toilets. 

A Japanese visitor to the US must feel like I feel while walking through the Neanderthal man dioramas in the Museum of Natural History. 

[This blog entry was filed during a Tokyo cab ride where the ubiquity of wireless broadband doesn’t quite make up for the oppressive distance and traffic.]

Earning electric karma

The life of my average gadget is not a particularly dignified one.  Many of my electronic purchases lie neglected at the bottom of random home and office drawers, dinged through careless handling, with missing accessories and batteries slowly leaking in their springs.

This was the fate of a Garmin hand-held GPS unit that I bought three or four years ago.  When I first took it out of the UPS box and popped in a fresh set of batteries, it blinked awake and displayed a world map with the cursor centered on Japan. “How cute”, I remember thinking, “it thinks it’s still home.”  A few seconds later, as the Garmin started to receive satellite signals, it realized that it was somewhere else.  It took a minute or two for the precise truth to sink in:  It was far from its carefree birth and testing lab; it was on the other side of the world in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  It might have been quietly sad.

Over the next few years, the Garmin has been driven across the United States, left forgotten under stacks of paper, wearily fingered by airport security guards, dropped into puddles in Stockholm and down stairs in Hong Kong.  Throughout it all, the GPS carried out its duties with stoic honor and never mentioned home again.

Yesterday, I finally turned it on outside my hotel in Tokyo.  The Garmin took some time to catch up with the months and miles since it was last awake, but it soon displayed the exact same map that had never appeared since the first few seconds of its professional life.  There was no happy animation or other outward indication, but I’d like to think that somewhere inside, a fuzzy-logic chip grew warm for a while.

I live vicariously

My first post-award act of “IT Heroism” was to talk my brother, newly ensconced in the information economy, into buying a proper television set.  He was going to get a puny yet backbreaking 36” CRT, but that disaster was narrowly averted due to my timely intervention.  This counts, right?

I fear for my job

My social contract stipulates that I buy consumer robots, so I was particularly interested in seeing how Wow Wee’s much anticipated Robosapien lives up to its hype.  The Robosapien is a $99 remote controlled toy robot aimed at eight year olds and their developmental equivalents.  I picked one up at BestBuy and brought it in to torment the office.

The Robosapien’s clever visual design gives the appearance of a lot more articulation than his seven motorized joints (two in each arm, one in the torso, one in each leg) actually permit.  His loud motorized grunts make him poorly suited for “desk toy” duty, which seems to be a demographical oversight on the part of the developers.  His programming mode is hokey – you can string together many actions but there’s no flow control of any kind.  Still, I’ve seen people refer to HTML as a “programming language”, so I’m willing to give Wow Wee’s marketeers a pass.  It’s no AIBO, but at 1/20th the price, it’s a fun and impressive diversion.

More disturbingly, the Robosapien can stumble around the room, pick up a coffee cup and respond to sudden noises.  That’s pretty much my whole management style, so I’m starting to feel inadequate in front of the staff.  Maybe I should look into enrolling in an executive MBA program to sharpen my leadership skills.  Either that, or Robo is going to have a nasty accident on the front stairs.

Why do we need electronic voting?

For a while, after the 2000 election mess, I remember being convinced that we needed electronic voting machines.  Then I remember being dismayed by the apparent lack of quality and security found in many new and existing designs.  Now that it’s almost time for the next big election, I can’t seem to remember why I thought we needed electronic voting in the first place.

The problems in Florida were mostly caused by poor ballot design and questionable adherence to procedure.  Do electronic voting machines fix either of those problems?  Can’t we just have less awkward paper ballots and better training for voting officials?

Total public transparency is absolutely crucial to election security, so any electronic machine that relies on obfuscation and secrecy for “security” should be automatically disqualified.  If I can’t know the exact path of every single electron or scrap of paper through the voting process, how am I supposed to have any confidence in the results?  Sure, there are plenty of ways to design a computerized voting system that doesn’t keep any secrets (although you wouldn’t know it by looking at the current crop) and real cryptographers have come up with some monstrously cool concepts for e-voting receipts and authentication, but is it really worth it?  If the machine is going to wind up printing out a paper trail anyway, why not start with the paper in the first place.  A good “old-fashioned” optical scan system with penciled in bubbles seems to be good enough in just about every category that’s important for voting.  Hire someone with a design and layout sense to put the ballots together and invest a third of your new-machine budget on training the staff, and you’ve probably got a pretty good system for 2004.

I’m a big fan of unnecessary technology in every other aspect of life, so this realization comes as something of a shock to me; but I really can’t remember why I ever thought the country should invest in computerized voting gizmos.  Somebody please remind me before my geek self-image suffers irreparable harm.

[Thanks to Freedom to Tinker for keeping this fresh in my mind.]

Decline of Western Civilization

If you have any doubts about the superiority of Japanese culture, just look at what they call Phillips and normal screwdrivers: “Plus” and “Minus”.  I feel like I’ve led a completely unoptimized life not knowing about this sooner!  How much do we have to spend on “No Child Left Behind” to get the U.S. to such a  pinnacle of technical clarity? 

Make it so.