Phoebe B. Peabody Beebe
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
Some truly awesome (real) names, courtesy of Futility Closet.
DB Safari Extension
Monday, 17 October 2011
Wouldn’t the world be better with more Dan?
Click here to download the DB Safari Extension and make your day a happy one.
BMW Privacy Fail
Friday, 14 October 2011
Go to enter your contact details on the BMW Australia website, and by tabbing into the first field, you can get the addresses of everyone else who has entered their contact details.
“Computer…”
Monday, 10 October 2011
When I first heard about Siri, the new personal assistant technology built into the new iPhone 4S, my immediate reaction was, “Oh no, not again.”
People have been trying to put voice recognition and voice command into computers for years, but despite massive advances in the quality of these systems, and their ability to understand reliably a variety of accents and speech patterns – you no longer have. to. talk. like. a. robot. – they haven’t surpassed the keyboard as the primary means of communicating with the PC. Why? Well, I think it’s largely because people don’t like looking and sounding like a total dick, frankly.
Take a look at this introduction video. OK, I buy the guy talking to Siri in the car. He’s by himself. Fine. But the guy jogging? Can you imagine jogging next to this guy? Would you be thinking anything other than, “What a wanker!”
Mind you, I suppose that’s exactly what we used to think about people talking loudly on their cellphones before they became ubiquitous.
Perhaps this is just another somewhat awkward step forward. We’ll feel a bit like dickheads to begin with, but soon, when everyone is doing it, the dickhead factor will disappear and we’ll wonder how we ever lived without it.
Steve
Friday, 7 October 2011
“Hm. Steve Jobs has died.”
“What?”
“Look at apple.com.”
…
“Are you sure they haven’t been hacked? You know, they had that DNS hack thing during the iPhone 4S launch earlier.”
“Nope. It’s on CNN.”
________
And that’s how I found out. My forty-year-old self kept a lid on it – I was at a client’s premises after all – but my inner 8 year-old was weeping; really, truly broken up.
Why?
“I guess you do use a lot of Apple products”, said someone, trying to understand my absurd grief over an American billionaire.
Products? What have products got to do with it? That’s like saying, “Sorry your parents died, they sure had a nice house.”
Those of us kids in the seventies who were into computers when they were still a strange hobby, like stamp collecting or tropical fish, had few role models, still fewer heroes. We were picked on, bullied, called “nerds”. Our passion for this new technology was an abberation, something to be pitied, not celebrated. We formed “computer clubs” so we could geek out in private. At night, I used to dream of growing up and emigrating to California, finding these people that were making a whole new industry – these people just like me – and escaping the opprobrium of my peers and teachers who kept telling me I was a weirdo.
Steve Jobs was my hero. He was my hero because he just knew he was right, even when everyone around him was telling him he was doing it wrong. He was my hero because he alone knew that the key word in “personal computer” was “personal”. He was my hero because his evident delight in each new product mirrored that same 8-year-old delight I felt when I booted up my first Apple II. And he never lost it.
As I grew older, I began to appreciate more his specific approach to both technology and business – the seemingly simple idea of “humanity”. He spoke of taste, of style, of design – things that are quintessentially human qualities in an otherwise impersonal industry. And he took these ideas beyond technology and into the way he ran his companies. He proved that “corporate” doesn’t have to mean “inhuman”.
I’ve watched the ever-growing success of Apple in this last decade with an immense sense of satisfaction. Once again, Steve has been proven right. You can be human and be a success. In fact, if you embrace your humanity, perhaps you can be a greater success than you ever dreamed possible.
Thanks for being my hero, Steve. I guess I won’t be seeing you anytime soon, and for that the 8-year old me is still pretty sad, but the forty-year-old me is fired up. I will stay hungry, and foolish, and will try to live every day as if it were my last.
Raise
Thursday, 6 October 2011
To further counter my curmudgeonly post about Occupy Wall Street, here’s an Avaaz petition you can sign to show solidarity with their movement.
The media is trying to belittle this social movement calling it a fringe, extremist group of disenfranchised youth… A giant live counter of every one of us who signs the petition will be erected in the center of the occupation in New York.
Ask and ye shall receive
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
Someone asked Quora “What’s the best way to escape the police in a high-speed car chase?”. An actual patrol officer answered the question.
Sure, you’ve driven fast before – for a while. Then, for whatever reason, you got uncomfortable and backed off. Maybe your car made a sound you got concerned about, maybe you caught a glint you thought might be a trooper’s windshield, maybe you thought you heard the faintest pulses of a siren. Whatever it was, it weakened your resolve and you slowed down. You have no such luxury here.
[Full answer here]
Optimism, Take Two
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
</curmudgeon>
Neal Stephenson wrote a great essay recently over on worldpolicy.org, in which he questioned humanity’s current ability to do the really big projects.
Still, I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy, and the computer to name only a few… Little has been heard in that vein since. We’ve been talking about wind farms, tidal power, and solar power for decades… the real issue isn’t about rockets. It’s our far broader inability as a society to execute on the big stuff.
It’s a great essay by a great writer. Stephenson has founded Hieroglyph, a “project of science fiction writers to depict future worlds in which BSGD (Big Stuff Gets Done)”, having discovered something good engineers have always known: thoughtful, intelligent science fiction is not only inspiring, it is like prototyping – testing hypotheses and exploring possible outcomes in a consequence-free environment.
It’s that freedom from consequences, or perhaps the temporary putting aside of risk when planning the Big Stuff that leads to disruptive change. Stephenson argues that as the role of Big Stuff development moves from government to the private sector, the appetite for risk diminishes:
The illusion of eliminating uncertainty from corporate decision-making is not merely a question of management style or personal preference. In the legal environment that has developed around publicly traded corporations, managers are strongly discouraged from shouldering any risks that they know about—or, in the opinion of some future jury, should have known about—even if they have a hunch that the gamble might pay off in the long run.
And yet there are counter examples: Tesla Motors in the vanguard of emission-free motoring, SpaceX leading the charge into space while NASA faffs about, shuttle-less and without a meaningful destination. It’s true, neither of these is yet a success, but they prove that with the right leadership, the right risks can be taken. Here’s what Elon Musk wrote about the early “failures” at SpaceX in an article titled “Risky Business“:
Before that launch, I’d talked to everyone working on the project. I said that if flight four failed we’d do flight five, and if flight five failed we’d do flight six. I would never give up on something as long as I believed there was a reasonable chance of success.
Space is risky, and we knew it. The phrase ”It ain’t rocket science” implies that rocket science is pretty hard — and it is. Only a few countries in the world have gotten anything at all into orbit.
Now SpaceX stands on the cusp of launching their first test mission to the International Space Station, probably in early 2012.
Stephenson is right: we need to big-up the alternatives to risk aversion and baby steps. To do that effectively, we need an alternative narrative.
Just desserts
Given the lack of international media coverage of Occupy Wall Street and similar protests around the world, it’s probable the effect of the protests will not be significant. People speak of the power of social media, and of the Arab Spring and the – only half tongue-in-cheek – American Autumn. In reality, these two movements are very different. The former is powered by broad-based public outrage and unprecedented hope. The latter by proxy and unprecedented cynicism. These protestors are a proud, yet small number of individuals who refuse to stand by and do nothing, but whom the bulk of us seem quite happy simply to retweet.
Millions-strong worldwide protests against the Iraq War. Riots in London. Michael Moore. Inside Job. And yet it seems the people in control – the banks and the ultra-rich, just as much as our respective governments – know they can get away with doing just exactly what they please. There simply are no consequences.
As we prepare to enter the teens of the new Millenium, the American Boomers wax fat yet still unsated in their self-centredness, materialism and greed, ever eager to provide good modelling for the elite nouveau-riche of yet another country newly introduced to unfettered capitalism. These self-same Boomers, whom Kennedy exhorted to greatness because it was hard, not easy, have instead chosen the directly opposite path. The moral of the story is: You can get away with it.