Pushing a different sky

Spectacular view from the new Mars rover Curiosity:

Jupiter, Venus and Earth in the sky from Mars

Jupiter, Venus and Earth in the sky. Amazing to think where science is these days, and the sheer achievement of landing that rover in the first place is a testament to technology and its advancements. How long until we land humans on Mars?

Order of the Stick Reprint Drive

In case you are a Order of the Stick reader but haven’t heard, Rich Burlew (creator of OotS) is doing a reprint drive, raising some cash on Kickstarter. In fact, of the original target of $57,000, there’s a stunning amount of overfunding. Almost $900,000 in overfunding, that is.

So: if you’ve ever read Order of the Stick, step up! Help us clear a cool million! You can get some great rewards, or pick up all the books for extra cheap while helping kick along this fantastic comic series!

Edit: Holy crap that cleared the million and then some not all that long after I even posted this. Insanity!

Video Game Values

Overthinking It reviews L.A. Noire, and realises it isn’t your run-of-the-mill sandbox game:

There are a few ways to play L.A. Noire:

  1. Do your best on the fly, looking for clues at crime scenes and making your best guesses, maybe taking advantage of the in-game help, but mostly just playing at the pace of the story to get to the next cutscene.
  2. Read or watch walkthroughs and do the things they tell you to get five stars on every mission.
  3. Puzzle out the specifics of the cases, which can be surprisingly time-consuming and require a whole lot of attention to detail.
  4. Focus on reading the characters’ faces and gestures, and use that to guide you through interrogations, rather than the evidence.
  5. Brute-force everything, clicking on everything in every search and restarting each interrogation over and over again until you get it right.
  6. Dick around, free-roam and do side quests and stuff.

[I]n video games, brute forcing is almost guaranteed to work — rather than a problematic chore for cryptologists, it has become the major driving force behind playing most games, ostensibly for fun. Let’s act like algorithms for a few hours until dinner-time. Ah, leisure!

The thing that surprises me the most aboutL.A. Noire is how badly brute forcing works

I’ve played L.A. Noire and that’s all absolutely true – the usual approach of try-it-and-see fails altogether, and the game definitely discourages attempting to replay right away. It’s frustrating in many ways to feel like you don’t get to see “everything” in the game, but I guess that’s the point being made in this article.

There’s some interesting observations in there about how the mentality of video gaming is changing mindsets of the younger generations, how video games subvert normal expectations of how to deal with situations and just general riffing on the whole issue of video games and human psychologies. Fascinating stuff.

Windows 8 Developer Preview

I’ve been an Apple user since 2006, but I’ve been a Windows user since 1993 – the sheer gravity of Microsoft Windows on the computing landscape is inescapable, and it’s given me a certain amount of perspective: you can’t be ideological about what you use to get your work done[ref]Or at least, it doesn’t help. YMMV.[/ref].

Last week, Microsoft introduced the upcoming Windows 8 at its BUILD conference to an audience of developers. In many ways, it’s almost the direct opposite of what Apple would do – introduce to devs and market to devs the biggest change in the user interface since Windows 95, instead of a consumer-friendly presentation. The key here is that Microsoft needs developers on board much more than they need the consumers – for all the hype Apple gets, it’s still only around 10% of the computing market, and the overwhelming weight of Microsoft in the corporate environment will give Windows inertia for years.

Windows 8 does something totally different, though: it pivots Microsoft’s market towards the consumer. This is a user interface that takes Windows Phone 7 and turns it up to 11 – everything is big fonted, with broad splashes of colour and blocks as the “icons” of applications, all geared towards touch. The traditional desktop-and-window application model that defines the name “Windows” is relegated to a “Classic”-style compatibility mode.

Microsoft is pitching this as the unifying OS, bringing tablets and desktops together, but what we’ve seen thus far of the OS suggests tablets and touchable screens are the way of the future as far as Microsoft is concerned, and the old-school of peripheral-based computing is a legacy to be supported.

To Microsoft’s credit though, that legacy is supported – as evidenced by the free public release of the developer preview build. You can go download it here, install away on any device[ref]Min requirements: 1GHz, 1GB RAM, 16GB HDD, DX9 Graphics – but it runs on virtual machines – I’m using VirtualBox[/ref] you so chose (with the obvious caveat emptor about being pre-release software), and have a play with it. That’s something you’d never see from Apple, and it goes to show – in my mind – the extent to which Microsoft is trying to get developers and cutting-edge users on board before this thing goes “live”.

Windows 8 is a complete rethink of how Windows works, and it will polarise. No longer are you opening programs from shortcuts to live in confined windows alongside other programs – you “tap” a “tile”, launching the program full screen. You do actions with swipes and taps, programs interact through “contracts”, and the idea of multitasking takes a bit of a back seat. Even IE 10 in “Metro” mode goes down the Apple route – no third-party plugins supported. This spells the end for Flash as we know it, if Windows too plunges the knife into Adobe’s back.

This is all not to say that touch is the only way to go – after all, this is a unifying effort. Windows offers the cop-out of Desktop mode, instantly familiar but also instantly dated in comparison to Metro-based apps. The desktop view is not designed for touch, so it’ll be interesting to see how this integrates into the wider Windows environment.

I’ve played around with the dev build in a virtual machine, and it really intrigues me as to where Microsoft is going with this. Metro really is a bottom-up rethink – it would be easier to get most people to understand the pivot from Windows to Mac than Windows 7 to Windows 8. Microsoft is taking that risk, willing to see the experiment through to ensure that a unified approach is being used for the OS. It’s admirable that there’s no desire to fracture the OS, but sometimes its unclear which will be the lead element of the design – for instance, Metro’s control panel doesn’t have half the options and offers the kick out to Desktop mode Control Panel to grant you full control.

All in all, I like it – it’s refreshing to see a fresh approach from Microsoft, and in taking the big & bold aspects of Windows Phone 7 to the full desktop scale, Microsoft has brought innovation back to the field. While Windows 8 currently feels built-for-touch, I’m sure Microsoft will refine this to make it more palatable to non-touch users prior to release. The Metro UI forces a total rethink on the developer, and some will thrive while others falter. This goes doubly so for software framework providers – Flash and Java appear to have their days numbered in the new format, and Microsoft are obviously pushing hard to enforce some control over their environment.

What does this mean for enterprise? I would suspect many IT managers are looking at Windows 8 with a lot of dread. Windows 7 tweaked the taskbar, but fundamentally you could follow the idea of programs and program management through from Windows 3.1. Windows 8 asks you to change your paradigm entirely, and those custom built VB6 programs from the guys you had spare after the Y2K bug was fixed are finally going to bite the bullet in terms of seamless experience. This is going to be a hard transition, and some users will be alienated along the way – I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft releasing a “professional” edition for non-touch devices where the traditional desktop remains the primary focus.

Finally, what does it mean for Apple? Simple: They’ve got a fight on their hands.

Mining is Making Aussies Lazy

Interesting post from the MacroBusiness blog: looks like the widely reported cringe about Australia’s workplace productivity declining is far too overblown. To quote:

In his speech Dr Parkinson quoted figures showing that Australia’s annual productivity growth slipped from 2.1 per cent in the 1990s to 1.5 per cent in the 2000s. It is far more illuminating, however, to describe the productivity performance of the non-mining and mining sectors of the economy separately. This can be done by removing both mining output and the hours worked in the mining industry from the national figures and analysing the residual.

When such an adjustment is made productivity growth actually increases from the 2.1 per cent cited by Dr Parkinson to 2.4 per cent in the 2000s in the non-mining sectors of the economy.Figure 2 provides a comparison of the trend in productivity in the mining and non-mining industries over the period 1995 -2010.

The results of this disaggregation make clear that the existing industrial relations and wage setting arrangements in Australia are not acting as an impediment to productivity growth. The measured decline in average labour productivity is being caused by the unprecedented haste with which Australia’s mineral resources are being extracted. That is, high commodity prices are encouraging mining companies to exploit mineral deposits that require more energy, more capital and more labour to extract an additional tonne of output.

In the meantime, the headline is being reported as a crisis for Labor’s Fair Work IR laws, when it’s really just the result of an industry growing at a bonkers rate.

Tim Bray on Blogging

This article prompted me to remember that I had a neglected blog:

Blogging is Healthy: It’s no longer the white-hot center of controversy it was in 2005; now it’s part of the establishment, and if you look at the numbers from the popular platform providers like WordPress and Blogger, still growing quite nicely thank you.

Freshness Matters: When you don’t update a blog, it gets stale fast. The natural tendency of the human mind to favor what’s fresh is reinforced by search engines leaning the same way.

Write For Yourself: Don’t try to guess what people want to read; you’re the only person whose interests you really understand. In particular, don’t thrash around trying to appeal to a larger audience; the only surefire way is pictures of celebrity breasts, and the world already has enough.

… so maybe just the occasional kick in the pants to remind me that this exists as a place to mind dump is worthwhile.

2010

2010!

I remember as a kid thinking 2000 was far away, and then a little older thinking by 2010 I would have this, or that, or the other thing over there. 10 years seems like a stupendously long time when it is as long as you’ve lived, or more than half your age.

If you asked me what I’d actually done in a whole 12 months, I think about the only thing I could say without qualification was that I changed jobs. It really has disappeared in a blink – I started off the year thinking I was on the verge of buying a house. I had a decent paying job, I had a loan pre-approved, and I was hunting houses. I even went to an auction or two, and even put my hand up for bidding… and was promptly blown away, my budget puny in the face of the realities of the house market.

A setback like that wouldn’t normally have broken my stride, but affected I was, and a coincidental slump in the tenor of my workplace meant I lost focus, pure and simple. Months dragged past, and I can hardly tell you what it is that I did from February through to June.

Finally, somewhere around mid-June, I got a mental kick in the pants. It was now June 2010. By all that was holy, I was in the middle of the future. And here I was, doing… what? Nothing of interest.

So I set off on a job hunt, to try to shake that feeling. And here I am, the other side, having moved jobs… and feeling curiously unsatisfied with 2010.

I hate doing a year-in-review for precisely that reason. Some years you can point to and go “wow, what a year huh?”, and others you point to and think, “umm… I’m sure there was something more…”

I think for the first time in years I have finally felt comfortable and settled – that my life is in my hands, reasonably predictable, and without any major upheavals on the horizon.

And I don’t know if that pleases me or terrifies me.

Election 2010

It says a lot for this election that I’ve waited until Election Day to say anything about it that goes beyond 140 characters. It has really been that kind of election campaign – a dearth of substance from all sides in an effort to come to power by attacking the other side. It’s not a contest I want to engage in.

Gillard (how could I not have written about this before?!) came to power under circumstances best described as controversial – though far from unprecedented. You don’t have to explain to NSW voters that the leader can be replaced at the drop of a hat. The Liberals have gotten good running out of this.

That said, I understand the reasoning and the political machinery behind this. Rudd was unpopular and with the mining tax was fast making new enemies.  The Labor political machine, spooked once before by Howard’s pincer with Latham over the Tasmanian forestry unions, certainly didn’t want a fight with the mining unions on their hands, especially after they saw what could work with the unions in the 2007 campaign. In a way, the replacing of an underperforming leader is a policy that would be well supported in the market, had the government been a corporation. As it is, the electorate is mostly stunned at the notion, and the “Faceless men” bogey is back.

With an election called so soon, there was no real chance for Gillard to have established herself as incumbent PM, and so we have a farce of a campaign where both parties are pretending to be oppositions. Each side is playing a low-risk, high-attack campaign which puts the leaders front and centre in a presidential-style election that bears no relation to the actual voting method. Most telling for me was a colleague filling out a postal vote asking where Gillard was on either the House of Reps or the Senate ballot – that’s not how the voting system works, but for many they can’t see this until they get a how-to-vote card in hand.

The Coalition has led with a simple slogan that Abbott trots out over and over, but fades from my memory almost as soon as it’s out of mind. Stop the boats, end the waste, pay back the debt, something something. Their policies are defined by what they will do to oppose Labor’s current actions, be it on the boats, broadband, or hospitals. The only policy that goes beyond is for paid parental leave, where Abbott comes in with a policy that is simultaneously left and right wing: maternity leave at full salary-matched pay. A tax on big business to pay for a social entitlement is left; paying people at their full salary, instead of an equal payment across the board (Labor’s policy), fundamentally right-wing. Breathtaking.

Labor on the other hand offers…. not much, really. Gone is the ETS in any reasonable time, gone is any pretence to a fair and balanced refugee policy. The policies being sold are the ones which already are in motion – the NBN, the Health Network, and further pushes on the education front. The attack has been focused on the straw-man of Work Choices returning, which I find unbelievable given the Liberals knew the extent of the rejection at the 2007 poll. Labor have been no more inspiring than the Liberals, offering the status quo as an argument while trying to campaign without their legacy due to their fresh dumping of Rudd.

Gillard stumbled hard after the election campaign started over the manner of Rudd’s replacement, and then faced derision over the Real Julia punt. Abbott has managed to skate through without any headline bumbles as he simply avoids anything where he could screw up. That the man campaigning to be future PM did not show at the release of two significant policies, broadband and, well, the entire financial plan shows the sheer opportunism. Here is a man and a party that cannot say that it has a full grasp of the policy it is relying on the attack their opponent’s key policies.

The media is no less to blame. The headline presidential show of Gillard and Abbott running around the country (in Abbott’s case, quite literally) attracted the media, while real policy debates at the National Press Club went ignored by all but the most serious. Perhaps the apex of this shallow focus was the attention given to Mark Latham acting as Channel 9 journalist – the focus was on the media process, not on the election process. I remember being told as a kid that if you respond to the bully, he will act up more – so why did Latham get any attention at all? I didn’t see a single contribution, positive or negative, from him.

There has been no meaningful economic debate at the highest level, the focus entirely being on the meaningless size of the budget. There’s been no debate on foreign policy beyond the meaningless focus on the boats. There’s been nothing on arts, science, defence, infrastructure, agriculture, or industry, all serious policy areas and key ministries. The debate on gay marriage has been shut out entirely.

The blame for shallowness of the debate and the election can in some part be put at the feet of our election system. The rule of the marginals, you could say – it would be in Australia’s best interest for every seat to be a marginal, the government at all times at risk of being shoved out. Right now though, the marginals are focused on the fringes of cities, suburbia filled with families. The nature of swinging voters in these seats is to simply ask, “what’s in it for me?” and wait to be rewarded. I now live in a marginal seat, and all the advertising locally has been focused on that exact question.

I don’t want to see Australia’s destiny ruled by the marginal seats. Self-interest has been the order of the day for far too long: what is good for the family in outer Sydney or Brisbane or Melbourne isn’t necessarily good for the nation. Population growth is not so onerous yet that we need to make a significant cutback and label the population ministry “sustainable”. Governments can borrow money in the order of billions and not struggle to pay it back over a reasonable time frame – the analogy I prefer is that we need to make a renovation, so we’ll borrow some money from the proverbial bank to build it now, and repay it later with a bit of interest. If you simply save and save and save, you’re going to be stuck in your shabby little house from the 80s for years.

The other analogy should come from business: capital investment. We’re investing this money now because it will pay off in the future. I’ve heard Gillard mention that term exactly once. Abbott would have you believe that Australia needs no public capital investment, and that the private sector will provide. It certainly hasn’t provided so far, so why should it now?

I’m pretty sure I’m going to vote the Greens as my first preference. They’re not perfect – many of their policies take a good idea and extend it to the left. Were they to play a significant role in government, these would need to be moderated by a sense of reality. Nonetheless, their policy platform sits far closer to my ideal than Labor or Liberal. A national broadband network without the stupid filter; investment in education through an increase in the mining tax; compassionate treatment of refugees; and of course, most of all, an ETS that makes some real difference – punish the polluters in order to make them change their ways.

Everyone pretty much knows a vote for the Greens is ultimately a vote for Labor, and that’s disappointing. Labor does deserve to be punished for its presumption of its support base. The Liberals however don’t deserve to be rewarded for blind opposition. I suspect if Turnbull had still been the opposition leader and we were still having the same election we have today, I would have wavered, but Abbott? Are you kidding me?

Here’s hoping for PM Gillard to be returned tomorrow, or we shall learn how truly self-centred Australians really are.

Updates for Everybody!

WordPress 3, iOS (nee iPhone OS) 4, iPad, and a new website, oh my!

Yessir, I’ve been just a tad bit busy with things, so here’s a consolidated update:

  1. WordPress 3: pushing the sky is now running on the latest and greatest WordPress has to offer. Usually warnings apply, if you see anything funny let me know etc etc etc. Apparently this now unites WordPress with WordPress MU (multi-user), so let’s see if I can’t get something going with that…
  2. I have an iPad! It is gorgeous and it’s replaced a subset of tasks my laptop once stood in for. The battery life is amazing and everything that’s been promised, and it’s great for general web stuff, though I’d kill for a basic adblock or something. More on this at another point.
  3. iOS 4 was released this morning, and I reluctantly let go of the jailbreak in order to play with it. The decision was difficult in some ways, as I’d gotten quite comfortable with my modifications, but the temptation to play with shiny-new-thing was too much. (Maybe I’ll get the best of both worlds shortly.)The main things I’d had jailbreak for were:
    • SBSettings – swipe the status bar, flick services on and off, adjust brightness.
    • Categories – put apps into folders, when you’ve got way too much junk and nowhere to put it.
    • Customisable appearance – background wallpapers, themes, just generally being able to make my phone look somewhat unique next to the other thousand iPhones out there.
    • Five Icon Dock – it’s just logical to me: Phone, mail, messages, web, and iPod. Don’t make me choose.
    • Weather Icon – update the icon for my weather app (PocketWeather AU) with an icon based on the conditions, and update it regularly.
    • SMS Character count – glaring omission from Apple, as some of us cared about going to 161 characters and weren’t interested in counting characters by hand.

    So naturally, there wasn’t too much that was going to sway me over… except shiny-new =) So anyway, here’s how the update went for those services:

    • Settings-in-the-app-tray – almost as good as SBSettings in the sense that McDonalds is almost as good as a gourmet steak from a Michelin-recognised restaurant, i.e. it does the job but it certainly doesn’t do it well. I want it back.
    • iOS Folders – excellent, apart from the 12-apps-per-folder restriction. I can see the reasoning, but dammit, we all know how to scroll. The “rejected” mechanics when trying to add the 13th app is also awful. Overall though, solid win over Categories.
    • Appearance options – background wallpaper: tick (it even carried over my jailbreak wallpaper!). Everything else: fail. Back to shiny app bubbles, back to bog-standard-translucent-blue notifications. To be expected, but I will say this much: Apple’s default icons are definitely amongst the most appealing. Don’t mess with the formula.
    • Five Icon Dock – unfortunately, folders-in-the-dock aren’t quite as elegant as a five icon dock. There’s room there, though I can see the advantage of spacing. Want it back.
    • Weather Icon – of course, no update here; Pocket Weather luckily has implemented (some time since I jailbroke at least) the badge, so I get that much, but still no glanceable information. Mitigated Weather Icon somewhat, but still not as good.
    • SMS character count – finally here! No need to go back for this.

    Of course, there’s plenty of other reasons to have jailbroken, not least of which was background apps, and the ever-so-tempting Lockscreen Info, but I never found much use for those. Other iOS 4 features like better spell-check, mailbox unification and message threading are great though, and perfect for that easier day-to-day use. In terms of the headline features, “multitasking” does make transitions snappy, and there’s other improvements that make it feel a bit quicker. We’ll see how it goes over the next few days.

Whew! and more soon hopefully!

Why I don’t go to the cinema any more

At the Cinema

Cost of two movie tickets to a standard session of latest hit: $36
Cost of a medium popcorn and two drinks: $16
(Optional) Internet booking fee to guarantee seats: $1 per ticket

At Home

Cost of a DVD on your giant flat-screen TV on your very comfy couch: 3 months from cinematic release date + $15
Cost of medium popcorn and multiple drinks: $3
(Optional) Seat guarantee: $0

Now, I don’t know about you, but is going to the cinema to see the latest hit really worth the extra $36 dollars? It’s starting to feel less and less like it is…