Friday, March 14, 2003

Will the Real RSS Please Stand Up? Of course, I am meddling in matters beyond my ken, but it seems to me that this and this should at least look vaguely alike.  They don't, and yet they're both RSS 2.0.  Yes, I understand about namespaces and all that crap, but just because you can do it with RSS doesn't mean that you necessarily should.  The reason I am looking is that my Radio aggregator is acting up with FreeRoller feeds.  I though it was FM RadioStation but that doesn't appear to be the case.  Or maybe it still is. I don't know.  All I know is that I've got the same stories repeated over and over again in my aggregator, and it's buggin' me. 6:08:37 PM

No More September Elevens. If we are to take the administration's rhetoric at face value, can we conclude that there will be no further September 11 tragedies?  Once we have disarmed Iraq, we will once again be safe, will we not?  If Iraq is the source (or, as seems more likely, a potential future source) of weapons of mass destruction, can we then resume our old lives, in the dawn of its conversion?  Can we breath a sigh of relief? Ah.  I thought not.  It seems that there are further enemies, enemies elsewhere, enemies always.  Perhaps they will always be there. Why not have the bravery, the rightness, to say so.  Say that our way of life is a choice, not an option or privilege that we discard at the first sign of danger.  4:14:45 PM

Algorithm- and Randomly-disturbed Graphics. One of the things that's always bugged me about playing computer games is how square everything is.  It looks dumb.  You put a texture on that thing and it looks like a box with a crappy texture on it.  Sometimes the textures are pretty detailed, but it's still a flat surface.  Look around you.  How many flat surfaces do you see?  The thing is, nothing around is flat, not really.  You just need to look close enough to find something different. What I want to see is scene generation where increased level of detail is automatically generated at the polygon level, where you don't often have polygons.  You have algorithms for generating polygons, and algorithms within those algorithms, so as I get closer and closer to the rock wall of the cave, I can see more and more detail coming out, sparkles and stones and crystals and whatever else is in the designer and artists' minds. If these nested definitions of "what is" are formed into libraries, it becomes easier to specify the general shape of a scene, what objects are in it and how they relate to each other, and then much of the detail becomes generated automatically.  The designer can limit her influence to what is different about the scene, the special things that need to go into it as features, or areas of interest, or beauty. 12:39:32 PM

Icons and Panes. When we take a window and iconify, we are creating a "small version" of it.  The icon is a representation of the window, and to some extent, the contents of that window.  Some windowing managers support the notion of a "rollup", which is just a title bar.  I don't see any advantage to doing this over what I get by, say, minimizing a window.  I've got the title bar right there on the bottom of my screen, where it can't be covered by something else. Within an application's own views, in its more complex state, we don't seem to have progressed very far in finding intermediate representations of information.  By intermediate I mean something that is smaller than the normal, detailed representation, but doesn't take up the same real estate.  I have been wondering lately if this is due to constraining ourselves, in the large part, to rectangle-based interfaces.  Would other shapes such as ellipses make better use of real estate? There is a notion of the "thing I am focused on" -- that can live at the center of the ellipse.  I can see somewhat less information before, and somewhat less after.  I populate those "corners" with other information (context) of value to me. It's about focus and context again.  From a geometric standpoint, how do we most efficiently present multiple sources of information? The Haystack project is an aggregator showing all kinds of neato information on the screen at once.  I don't think that's very helpful -- after all, I'm about to do something with some of it, right?  Why do I have to constrain myself to a little corner of the screen.  Where are the smooth transitions from one focus-and-context to another? 12:26:20 PM

Indiscriminate. This Haaretz article tells the sad story of two Israeli security guards who were shot by their own army.  These two guys were "identified as armed" and then subject to immediate execution by Israeli army personnel.  It's sad that they were mistakenly shot, but I find it astonishing that the news coverage doesn't take the next step and ask an important question. Why is the threshold for killing so low?  They were identified as armed, sort of...trying to run away, trying to call for help...in a split second, Israeli army personnel became judge, jury, and executioner.  And execute they did. When this rather low standard of justice is applied across a whole population, we need to wonder.  Yesterday "11 suspected militants" were killed by the Israeli army.  How many of them were actually militants?  If the security guard story had not come out, would these men have been labelled "militant" as well? It seems to me that the working definition of "militant", within the occupied territories, is someone that the Israeli army has killed. 10:42:12 AM

CAPPS II. See this article for a bit of background.  Basically the TSA is going to use a bunch of information from various databases to determine how "rooted" you are in your community, and based on that and other factors, will determine how "risky" you are as a passenger on a flight. My initial reaction to this was something like, dammit, how can they possibly want to do something so intrusive?  Now that I've had some time to think about it, I'm not so sure.  Such as system is passive, which I think is an important quality.  Taking some basic information like how long you've been in the community, what you do in your life, and basically determinining a "rootedness" factor, seems on the face of it to be fairly sensible. I do worry about the consequences of being blacklisted by such a system.  If you have been graded "red", you're not allowed to fly.  If you're graded "yellow", you're subject to additional search.  People who are sufficiently "rootless" should be given ample opportunity, through voluntary disclosures, to improve their score.  Flying on commercial airlines is a privilege, not a right, I think. For the very vast majority of passengers, I think this can result in major improvements.  For those who get flagged, efficient and fair means of getting off the list should be available.  In the long run, we'll all be safer and air travel will be more efficient.  Substantial cost savings should be available as well. An immigrant from the middle east who's been here 10 years, has established residency, a family, a credit score, and a host of other roots should sail right through a well-designed system.  Someone who's just arrived here on a travel visa should not.  A green door/red door system like customs might help -- a boarding pass should be stamped with a security requirement so those who need additional screening can go through a separate line (avoiding the main lines) and be rapidly screened.  This could potentially result in the flagged people actually getting through security faster, which is totally fine by me.  I just want them checked! 10:29:31 AM

FreeRoller? There are a bunch of freeroller blogs I usually subscribe to, but it seems that lately they've been busting my aggregation.  I think something changed over there, or I've screwed with settings I shouldn't have.  Don't know.  Unfortunately I've had to drop the blogs in question -- just can't see the trees because of the forest of information that's been coming in (and duplicating itself). 9:51:44 AM