Five Things (Plus One)

Tagged... sigh. Ok, here goes.

1 - I tend to take things literally. So, for instance, if I'm supposed to write five things you don't know about me, and I don't know who you are, well, that's a bit of a puzzle. To be safe, I'd have to come up with five things nobody knows, and to do that, I'd probably have to list five things I'd rather stayed that way. So, I'll settle for five things you (generally) (might) not know about me.

One more example: when I was in Kindergarten, the class was creating a recipe book to give to our parents for Christmas - "Everybody can put their favorite recipe in," says the teacher. So I go home, get my favorite recipe from mom, and bring it back. "No, you have to tell me the recipe," says the teacher. I was confused and upset - there was no way I could memorize my favorite whole recipe (I'm still not a big fan of memorization). In the end, I didn't end up putting anything in the book. Still, I took one home, wrapped it up, and put in under the Christmas tree. Come Christmas day, mom opened the book, and I took a look, curious to see what my fellow classmates had come up with - how come they could all memorize recipes and I couldn't? Alas, the whole book was filled with stuff like "Cold cereal: first pour the cereal in the bowl. Then add milk. I like mine with sugar." That's when I knew I wasn't quite like the other kids.

(Hey that wasn't so bad, one down already!)

2 - I came very close to dual majoring in history at college. I'm fascinated by the grand spectacle of our collective human story, and the ways in which it spins differently at different times, depending on who's doing the telling. Did you know, for instance, that one of the oldest pieces of writing (cuneiform tablets found in Egypt), are a letter from a father to his son, scolding him for hanging around in the marketplace instead of doing his chores? Nowadays, I satisfy my history urge with lectures from the Teaching Company - I have about 80 courses so far, which I mostly listen to on the way to and from work.

3 - I (mostly) taught myself how to program. Sure, having a dad in the field certainly helped. Back when games like Asteroids and Pac-Man were popular in the arcades, I'd hang around with a notebook and write down what the levels looked like, how the scoring worked, and what the main characters were. Our computer had a character-based moniter, and using peek and poke commands in BASIC, you could change what character was displayed where - I'd choose appropriate characters for whatever game I was working on (the @ symbol usually stood for a character, but <> worked great for the space ship in Defender), and code up the logic and maps for the various levels. Once I had as much of the game implemented as I understood, I'd move on to the next one. I wrote about a dozen of these - not because I'd really play them, but because I liked the task of recreating them. One of my original games was called ROTMA (Revenge Of The Mutated Androids). It was a top-level puzzle adventure, with forced perspective (so you could throw grenades in an arc, even though you were looking top-down). Why did the androids want revenge, and who mutated them? I still don't know...

4 - I dislike political parties. Mostly because they reduce complex decisions to 5 second sound bites and taking sides. They may be an unavoidable part of our political system, but that doesn't mean I have to like them.

5 - Coke or Pepsi? Given a choice, I'll probably pick whichever one I've had less of recently. Too much of the same thing leads to taste fatigue, and I prefer a bit of variety.

And just to be different, I'll add a bonus sixth item in place of tagging any others...

6 - My favorite color is green. Favorite things are not one of my favorite things, and I generally don't cater much to picking favorites (see #5). Still, after being pestered enough at school and home with questions like "What's your favorite color?" I decided that picking one was an easier out than complaining, so I picked green more or less at random. After so many years of sticking with that choice, I can now definitely say green is my favorite color (whatever that means).

More Fiidback

So, we got a few more people around to play with the Wii - taking turns because we haven't found any extra controllers. Some representative comments (not mine).

• "This looks like something from 10 years ago."
• "Why didn't they finish the game?"

The latter alludes to the Wii Sports game shipped with the console. The little dudes, which are already the simple "booger" design, don't have any arms. And in some of the games, no legs or feet either. (They do in the Mii design window, so if it was a design consideration, it wasn't applied consistently.) And although they're 3d models, sometimes they look 2d. Etc etc. When you hit the ball in the baseball game, the runners don't even bother getting off home plate unless they actually get on base. The catchers don't bother to throw the ball to get an out, the result is just reported.

The bigger problem, though, is certainly the control. As described in The Design of Everyday Things, the key factor in people learning how to use controls is feedback - you need to know why things onscreen happen in response to what you're doing. For the Wiimote, such feedback is woefully in short supply. Lacking that, it takes a while to figure out how to adapt to what the system expect.

For instance, when bowling, the ball does some extra spinning to the left. Why? Is it the tilt of the controller? The spin? It's hard to do controlled experiments to figure out exactly which aspect of your motion is affecting what. Same thing for pitches in the baseball game - what exactly differentiates a screw ball from a curveball when you're wiggling the controller?

Also, inherent to trying to map the position of the controller to the game play are some real fundamental problems. Watching someone playing Boxing and comparing their movements to those onscreen is an pretty jarring. Presumably as you learn how fast the game can track, and what they can tell you are doing, you can keep it in sync better. This was also an issue with the EyeToy games, but those weren't the default, integral controller for an entire console.

Another flaw, at least with Wii Sports, is the limited control altogether. Since you're waving the magic wand, that limits what effect you can have. In Tennis, you swing the racket, but all player positions are computer controlled (including yours). Running/catching in baseball is all computer controlled, you just throw or hit the ball. In general, there's not much you can do.

And the continued safety warning screens, plug in the extra controller, now unplug the extra controller (some games use the Nunchuck attachment, and some games require it be disconnected, for safety presumably), all become an exercise in obeying the system. In a peculiar way, it's reminds me of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, or Dragon's Lair, with simple branching points.

The best advice from the game: "Why don't you take a break and do something else for awhile?" Thank you Wii. Thii.

Glii or Flii?

I just picked up a new Wii from Nintendo today. First impressions? Well, rather than playing with it, I'm blogging about it - I suppose that should say something.

Rather than jumping into the games, of course, I did the geek thing and started installing system updates, entering wireless passwords, connecting to their store, linking my Ninteno account, and generally setting up shop. Their internet browser? Coming soon... News and Weather channels? Says I need to upgrade, then tells me I'm already up to date when I try. Maybe another day.

First stop after all that is to create a Mii - a tiny little avatar. Sadly, these little boogers have less personality than the much more enticing WeeMees. Oh well, they seem somehow linked to save files, so I'll make an ugly ol' version of me for now.

Next up, a little tennis maybe. After flailing around with the remote and a few rounds, time to calm down the dog, who seems to think I'm having a stroke. Overall impression... eh. The online stuff is so poor compared to my 360 it's not even funny. The account managment/security for multiple users, more or less nonexistant (and the parental locking is uber clumsy). To be clear, all I'm after is making sure my young 'uns don't accidentally nuke my files, charge my credit card, that sort of stuff. Handled slicker than a greased pig on the Xbox. Kludgy ick on the Wii.

Well, although it feels like I've stepped back a couple years in gaming rather than forward, I still have hopes for some of the first party Nintendo games. Next up will be Zelda. That is, if I don't just party on with the Xbox.

Will Microsoft control the seventh generation?

This last week was an important week in the Seventh Generation video system wars.

Sony's new PS3 got a bit of a rocky launch, due to the typical problems of availability of launch titles, kinks in the online play system, and so forth.

Nintendo's new Wii released with better availability (although I'm still waiting for the one I preordered), but apparently no online games whatsoever. A friend of mine who picked one up was disappointed with the initial set of games - the new controllers are apparently not instantly intuitive (more on that in a future post).

Meanwhile, what's Microsoft up to? Well, the last week saw the release of the Zune, which is both an MP3 player and an online store (kind of like that other company). Ok, the Zune is no iPod killer, but it's not a bad little device, and it does have a relatively large screen. And like other MP3 players, you can plug it into your 360 to supply custom playlists for your games, or just media to watch on your TV. Just a couple of days after Zune launched, the 360 added on-demand movie rentals/downloads for Xbox360, with TV shows, etc. The holy grail of digital distribution is continuing its painful birth, but having a networked box that's already connected to your TV and supports the growing HD market is a big plus.

It's hard not to look at the picture and think that Microsoft's got a good head start on the home entertainment market. Sony and Nintendo will need to play catch up for at least a year to come close to Microsoft's online gaming community, which has had a lot more time to mature. And Apple's new iTV will have an existing install base of all Xbox360's as a preexisting competitor, possibly one of the reasons Apple chose to announce it so far in advance of the actual release (although it's too soon to overstate this).

Still, I wouldn't call this one yet, not by a long shot. Here's my quick opinion on Microsoft's highs and lows, strategy-wise.

Pros

First to market - 360 wins this easily, although I personally believe the 6th generation gamers got short changed when Microsoft artificially accelerated the 7th generation.

Best online support - although 360 is the only service charging a fee for online play, they also have the only service actually worth paying for. See my Gamertag over to the right? That shows what games I'm playing, and how much I've accomplished in different games. Clearly I don't play as much as I might like to, busy guy, you know? But it's been a blast. The Xbox Live Arcade is a great way to spend time and money, media downloads are cool, lots of fun stuff.

Cons

There are a few biggies here, which is where I think Microsoft's positioning is going to not net as big an eventual market share as possible. I suspect this is intentional on Microsoft's part, as they'd rather have an ecosystem they control.

DRM - Both Zune and 360 have some ugly DRM issues. Zune abandoned the existing Microsoft customer base of DRM users for a whole new platform. Their cool new feature of sharing music wirelessly? Not so cool when any such transfer is automatically locked to three days or three plays, especially if it's your own track which you want to give away. And the new download system? Buggy, apparently - I get all sorts of errors on my 360 today trying to watch free previews. I assume this particular glitch will sort out after a few days. Still, I want to see my iTunes videos on my Xbox, my Xbox movie rentals wirelessly broadcast through my TiVo upstairs, or on-the-go with my PSP or Zune. (Nope, don't want to watch movies of my lovely iPod - the screen's just too small.)

More almost, but not quite there - Microsoft's announced the new XNA project, which lets users write their own games to play on Windows and 360. Fantastic right? Almost. First off, you have to pay extra to Microsoft to play games someone else wrote. And, you can't sell those games yourself. So Microsoft gets the benefit, but isn't really fostering the indie game market. Presumably the better XNA games will get offered sweet spots inside Xbox Live, but XNA will never go mainstream in the current form.

Limited/locked content - on demand movies (especially hi-def) rock. Unfortunately, the selection is still quite limited. And you only have 14 days to watch. That's not bad for a rental, but is it really essential to timebomb after 14 days? So what if it occupies my disk for a month - as long as the viewing time is restricted to 24 hours from when the movie starts, they know the movie hasn't been watched, and it's not sucking up their resources. This is just a blatant paranoid feature, totally unnecessary (but probably won't keep me from renting movies online).

My greatest hope is that Microsoft will open up their new ecosystems a little, and let more people play in their playground. (MusicIP Mixer on the 360 anyone?) If not, we're going to continue getting stuck in locked down entertainment silos, and that sucks.

Wicked Ridonkulous

In my previous incarnation as a developer for Parasoft, I designed a program affectionately known as WebKing (It's good to be the King!). Sometimes when you are working on a project for 5+ years, you get a little close to it, and fail to realize just how cool it is.

The new website we rolled out today for MusicIP gave me a chance to get reacquainted with some of the power of WebKing to help ferret out deployment issues with a website. In short, it's wicked ridonkulously cool. I can't imagine the effort we would have had to do to manually track down all the details WebKing popped out effortlessly. Very good stuff indeed.

I'm looking forward to trying out some of the updated versions of the other Parasoft tools as well - it looks like they've been doing some excellent work on Enterprise level testing tools.

Still Stumbling...

A little while ago, I mentioned the StumbleUpon plugin for Firefox. Well, it's still one of my top timewasters (when I have time to waste) - if I want to cruise around the web with nothing particular in mind, I just whack the ol' StumbleUpon button a few times until something interesting pops up. I've found all sorts of weird oddities.

But the real clincher: I just updated to the newest version, and now there's a hotkey to toggle the toolbar visibility (my only pet peeve with the previous version). This sucker's definitely here to stay now! (As long as it works with Firefox 2.0, coming out tomorrow...)

Patently absurb

This one looks like an Onion headline, or perhaps a well propagated hoax. Sadly, it appears not to be. (Somebody please tell me it is...) It appears the fallout from a 1998 decision to allow business patents (like the infamous 1 click patent), is starting to come home.

From Herald Tribune: Lawyers have come up with one more way to make life difficult for taxpayers: Now you may face a patent infringement suit if you use a tax strategy that someone else thought of first. ... At one conference where tax strategies were discussed, participants later got a letter warning that using one idea mentioned would be in violation of a patent.

This will almost certainly be an issue for the courts to decide - my hunch is rather than realizing that business patents were probably a bad idea in the first place, they'll just create some convoluted loopholes exempting patents which may violate consitutional rights, creating an even more complex legal system.

Click, Click, Click, Click, Click

I stopped by a local Coinstar machine today, to turn a big pile of coins into an Amazon gift certificate (so there's no "counting fee").

As I recall from last time I used this machine, it's a pretty simple affair - dump in the coins, listen to the rattles, and out comes a coupon for cash. Piece of cake right? Apparently not anymore. Someone decided there weren't enough options, confirmations steps, verifications, or explanations. For my little trip, I had to make 10 (yep, counted em!) selections before I could start dumping coins into the machine. Ten!

And when I was done, two more confirmation screens before waiting for the little screeching modem sounds indicating the Amazon certificate was being set up. That's a sad, sad piece of user interface design.

Targeting your customers

Surprisingly enough, more silly nonsense coming from Target:

Discount retailer Target Corp has sent a letter to major movie studios urging them to recognize that movies offered through electronic downloading services could hurt Target's sales of DVD's

(See the full text)

Heaven forbid, someone should sell something for less than Target, or that the entertainment industry should experiment with new ways to reach their customers than Target. I'm not opposed to the middle man, but it seems to me that when the middle man becomes the customer, the customer is getting lost.

There's a shift coming as things go digital, and the brick and mortar stores will inevitably need to change in response (assuming they want to stay in business). Wishing the problem away won't work.

Stumbling around the web

I just recently finished setting up Google Analytics on a bunch of web pages I wanted to track info on. Although a bunch of this info is also available from server log files, the Google interface is pretty slick (and free). I'm told there are even better options out there, we'll see.

One of the interesting things I found, was a fair amount of traffic coming from a site called StumbleUpon. This is a social networking site I wasn't previously familiar with (I've used Digg in the past). When you install it (I'm using the Firefox plugin), you get a little toolbar with the usual search widgets at ratings controls. There's about 1.3 million people plugged in to this system according to the StumbleUpon website.

Surprisingly enough, I'm actually enjoying this toolbar so far. If I'm in an exploratory mood, I just type the keywords into the search bar, and start "stumbling" around the web. (Click the stumble button to find a new site related to the search.) Giving even a little bit of feedback with the thumbs up and thumbs down provides more data for the StumbleUpon engine.

It'll be interesting to see how long this toolbar survives for me - I really hate giving up the screen real estate, so I'll need to find an easy way to hide/show the toolbar.

International Day Against DRM

Make sure you keep up with all the technology holidays - we follow up on GIF Independence Day with the International Day Against DRM.

Please give a moment of silence to all the technological innovations throttled in the name of security.

Adding my 2 cents

I recently receive this bill from Amazon for my S3 locker.

This e-mail confirms that your latest billing statement is available on the AWS web site. Your account will be charged the following: Subtotal: $0.02 (plus applicable taxes)

For those of you who haven't taken notice yet - you can basically buy disk space "in the sky" as it were very cheaply from Amazon. Pay only for what you use (as you can see, I haven't used much yet).

I'm still figuring out what I might want to use this for - I was thinking about possibly an off-site backup for digital photos. With a bit of effort, you can access them from anywhere with net access and never need to track down those files again.

For music, though, it's cheaper to use the Oboe Locker from MP3Tunes... for $40 per year, you get unlimited disk space, as long as you're only storing music files.

If you've never played with virtual disks that are always available, you are in for a treat. Of course, it's really geared more towards technical people at the moment, but this is the future we're looking at...

October Trick or Treat

As of today (October 1, 2006), apparently the GIF format is completely free of patent restrictions. (Check out today's UserFriendly for a humorous take on the issue.) The interesting thing about this is crusing around the web, I found much along the lines of this Wikipedia quote:

On June 20, 2003, the United States patent on the LZW algorithm expired, which meant that Unisys could no longer collect royalties for use of the GIF format in that country. Those bothered by the patent enforcement dubbed this day GIF Liberation Day. The equivalent patents in Europe and Japan expired on June 18 and June 20, 2004 respectively, with the Canadian patent following on July 7.

With patents expiring over the last three years around the world, it's only today that the Software Freedom Law Center feels the issue is finally and truly resolved. Maybe.

TiVo coders discover the Meatgrid

I alluded briefly to a TiVo gripe in my previous post. Ok, here's the gist - my TiVo is basically a special purpose computer, connected to the internet. It updates itself every now and then, and sometimes new stuff shows up. For instance, now if you accidentally delete a show, you can go recover it if if hasn't been overwritten yet. Pretty spiffy. So clearly, they've got programmers who can tell my TiVo what to do. And yet... A couple weeks ago, I get a mail message more or less like this:

If you have a subscription to "CBS Evening News", you'll need to change it to "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric"

Ok, leaving aside the obvious commentary on why CBS is monkeying around with show names, why can't my little TiVo box check my subscriptions, and update them itself if appropriate (I don't subscribe to CBS Evening News, so I didn't even need to see this particular bit of tv mail). This is a classic case of coding the Meatgrid - instead of writing computer code to work with the box, they wrote a serious of paragraphs to tell the human operators (the Meatgrid) how to update the box. Sigh.

Who's that blogging over there?

If you're a die-hard "gotta read whicken's blog" fan (and really, if you got this far, what else would you be, seeing as there's been no activity for months), you might want to check out the new Hear Here blog. This is a group blog for MusicIP, which will contain posts from different employees in the company. I'll still use this blog for random stuff, like griping about my TiVo, but things more directly related to MusicIP will be over there. So go read Hear Here there, okay?

Spam: It's not just for casseroles

Well, this blog has sat quiet long enough that the only thing happening is Spam in the comments. So, I cleaned out the spam, and decided to toss in another post. The best counterbalance for the evil of spam is to recommend something good and useful. Today's lucky winner is WinSCP. If you need to use scp or sftp from Windows, I highly recommend this tool. Not only does it make the whole thing super easy, but the attention to small details in the interface is much appreciated. On the music front, if you're into 60's and 70's Sunshine Pop, try checking out Sonic Past Music. They specialize in "unheard unreleased songs and performances missed by history"... hmm, make that previously unreleased music...

Stuff Behind the Counters

While the very public MusicIP launch was going on last week, there were a few other projects going on behind the counters as well... I received a phone call that the Scorched Earth project is well in motion (with accompanying video). Also, work is in progress for another new project which will be open to the public just as soon as humanly possible. I'll be pouring out clues in my blog, because it's fun to do. So bring your hardhat, pull up a stool, and wait for the construction to be completed.

Dealing with Superabundance

Well, we made it back from SXSW 2006, and the topic on the top of my mind is superabundance. Anyone who was at SXSW probably knows what I'm talking about - music, music, and more music. That's great, but how can you decide what to see and hear when there's so many options? Ok, ok, yes, this is a shocking subject for me to be covering. Obviously that's what MusicIP is all about. This post is more specifically about what worked and what didn't work at SXSW. - We added a nifty feature to the SXSW website, so that artists who had made sample tracks available also got a "Other songs and SXSW artists you may enjoy" link to similar sample tracks available. This was a cool little feature, but depended on the specific tracks being made available, and knowing where to enter the system. (You had to start your search from an artist that was listed on the SXSW site, and that had a track available there). - Right before the show, we updated the "Discovery" window inside MusicIP Mixer to show recommendations based on playlists in your collection. This was easier, because you could start from music you own and know, and access related bands you didn't. Still, you had to go to the extra step of making a mix, and you didn't know who was playing when or where without clicking through to the SXSW website. After a long day working the convention center, if you've got four people walking down 6th Street trying to decide which direction to head, it needs to be even easier. (For the record, we took the easy road of assigning a "Team Leader".) Some things I'd like to see next year (or maybe at NXNE): - Some way, preferably from a phone, to get personalized recommendations and directions about what's playing right now. SXSW did have a service to find bands from text messages ("Where are the Brakes playing"), but not the ability to say something like "Music like Morcheeba, within 90 minutes and 6 blocks". - Some way to created a limited, targeted show guide. For instance, compare my collection and listening habits to the bands out there, remove stuff that doesn't match, and just show me what's left. - And some way to do that with multiple users - sync up our iPods, and find the best recommendations where our musical tastes overlap. That's just for starters. Hopefully we'll be at SXSW next year, with even more cool stuff!

It's Time for MusicIP

Today's the day MusicIP launches as the new face of the MusicMagic technology. I'm in Austin, TX waiting for SXSW 2006 to begin, so I can start telling people what we've been up to. This is going to be fantasic. Listeners, Artists, and Enterprises will connect in a revolutionary way... today.

Oscar Buzz

Normally, I don't worry too much about the Oscars - this year, however, it seems I've got a relative up for an award. So here's hoping Amy Adams gets the Best Supporting Actress nod for her role in Junebug.