Baby duck syndrome

Submitted by yelvington on October 31, 2010 - 6:36pm

Screenshot: Text-mode Citadel interface, still working after all these years

 

I haven't heard the term "baby duck syndrome" in years. Back when I first started using online services -- in 1985,  before some of you were born -- I heard it a lot in conversations among programmers working on a system that I used a lot. It's a reference to a P.D. Eastman children's book. Although the baby bird in the book wasn't a duck, it's the same idea: the hatchling assumes that the first creature it sees must be its mother, and tries to become attached to it.

Applied to computers, it means we get attached to the first system we use and judge all others in that context. If you cut your teeth on Windows, you might find Mac OS X or Ubuntu Linux to be confusing, even though both of them arguably are easier to use. But it's not limited to usability. It's an entire set of expectations.

It also applies outside of computer-human interfaces. When something new arrives, we try to make it into something old.

When the Web came along, most newspaper people tried to make Web newspapers, and in the process missed revolution after revolution: portals, search, local search, and social media. Presented with a blank slate in the form of tablet computing, they're doing it all again. I could round up everybody in the newspaper industry who understands the implications of HTML5's geolocation services and fit them into one car. It might be a stretch limo and we might be crowded,  but I'll bet we could do it.

Sometimes the baby duck syndrome is useful, if you chance upon the right "mother."

I discovered the online world through software called Citadel that encouraged conversation. I got so interested in it that I wound up running my own dialup bulletin board system and even created a Citadel newsletter.

When the Internet opened up to commercial use nearly a decade later, I looked at it as a huge leap forward in terms of conversational opportunity -- not just as a one-way publishing platform along the lines of print and broadcasting. The pre-Web online service we built at the Star Tribune in 1994 featured integrated discussion forums and community group publishing.

As to why this didn't enable me to invent Facebook, I have no excuse.

The exact software that I used in running my 1980s-era bulletin board is gone, but a multiuser clone is still around. Today, Citadel is not just a bulletin board but has grown into an email, groupware, calendaring and scheduling tool with interfaces to the Web, special client software, and standard office tools. The old text interface from the days of 300-baud modems is still around, and I was surprised to find my fingers remember most of the commands. My current baby duck fixation is on Thunderbird, which works fine with it.

So my weekend has disappeared into moving my home email system onto software that I first discovered when I had a full head of hair. I've acquired a "new" server -- well, newer than the crusty antique that I've been using for my blog for about eight years now. My blog is moved to the new system and seems to be working OK. I still have more than 15,000 photos on Middle Daughter's gallery to migrate and all sorts of loose ends to attend to. Everything should be a lot faster now. 

 

A mixed review for a no-name Chinese Android tablet

Submitted by yelvington on October 7, 2010 - 8:39pm

For some time I've been convinced they're coming: tablets and netbooks in the $100 range.

Not quite. But I finally got tired of waiting and ordered a $150 Android tablet direct from Guangdong: the iMito iM7. At 7 inches, it's exactly half the size of an iPad and, coincidentally, almost exactly the size of a 15-year-old Apple Newton MessagePad (pictured here).

Here's a preliminary review and account of my experience so far.iMito iM7 with a 15-year-old Apple Newton

The source: LightInTheBox.com, which appears to be a global drop-shipper of various Chinese products ranging from bridesmaid's dresses to plastic dog poop, with some tech toys thrown in the mix. They have a very slick website and seem to be a respectable company, with prices only slightly higher than you can find on some less substantial-looking Chinese sites.  

I placed my order Monday, Sept. 27 and paid $151.99 for the tablet, $26.15 for "expedited" shipping and $1.99 for insurance, for a total of $180.13 via PayPal.

"Expedited" means after it's shipped; the order languished for a couple of days before a Shenzhen warehouse identified as "sunyogbo" gave it to DHL air express. I was able to track its weekend journey from Shenzhen to Hong Kong to Cincinnati to Atlanta. It arrived at my house the following Monday. I wasn't home, so it had to be redelivered Tuesday.

I posted photos of the unboxing ritual to my Flickr account.

In the shipping box I found a product box branded "Konseptus model K02 mini pc" and a U.S. plug adaptor. Apparently Konseptus is a Turkish importer's brand and these tablets get repackaged in many forms. There's no branding on the actual tablet and the splash screen announces it as an iMito iM7.

The iMito apparently began life as a Windows CE tablet around last March -- a doomed software platform wanted by pretty much nobody. Some WinCE versions are still available on the market under various brands. Android entered the picture later in the year.

Most of the currently available Chinese tablets are running Android 1.6 or even 1.5. On the iMito, Android 2.1-update1 (Eclair) is installed, running on a Linux 2.6.29 kernel. This brings most of the functionality benefits of a current release level but not Froyo's performance gains.  There's no place to download updates and Cyanogen doesn't support this odd Chinese hardware, so it's stuck at 2.1 for the foreseeable future.

The one-page "manual" claims it comes with office software, but none was included. However, it did include the Android Market software -- apparently banned for non-phone devices in the United States (I blame Google's sale of its soul to the devils at Verizon). This is important because, although there are some alternative Android marketplaces and rumors that Amazon will start one, Google's collection is the only one that really matters at this point.

I made quick use of the Market to install some free programs, including Kindle, which works fine, a better Wifi scanner and a couple of filesystem browsers.

The hardware is a mixed bag of good and not so good:

CPU: 700 mHz Telechips 8902. This is a moderately fast ARM-11 with a bunch of video extensions including built-in codecs. It's not as fast as the ARM Cortex derivative in the iPad, but then we're talking$150 here, not $500-$800.
RAM: 256MB -- the specs claim the system can accommodate twice that but there's no apparent way to expand it.
Storage: 2MB with most of that taken up by the operating system. There's a MicroSD slot, where I stuck an 8-gig flash card before installing any software.
Screen: 800x600, 7 inches diagonal, bright and readable. 
Accelerometer: Automatically switches between portrait and landscape mode, depending on how you hold it. 

Where things start falling apart:

Touch technology: Resistive touchscreen that's less sensitive than the Nokia I bought over three years ago. Some operations, including typing and even simple scrolling, can be maddening. There's a stylus (how very 1999) but it doesn't really help. The predictive spelling system made it even worse, changing words to all sorts of odd references apparently grabbed from my Google contacts. I turned it off. 

I expected the touchscreen problem, as it's commonly reported across all the cheap Chinese tablets. I wouldn't recommend them for general consumer use until capacitive screens are common. 

There's no multitouch. 

Webcam: Bug: It occasionally captures stills with bizarre video artifacts. User-facing, it's not convenient for photography. I guess you could make silent films of yourself.

No microphone: Seriously. There's a little hole in the front for a microphone, but there's no mike. WTF? A webcam and no microphone? I've used my Nokia N800 for calling home via Skype from Belgium, Spain, Germany, India and China. Without a microphone, I'll never do the same with the iMito.

No Bluetooth: I can't use my Blackberry for 3G Internet access, as I can with my Linux laptop.

No GPS: You won't be using this to drive around. But once you're connected to a wifi network, Google's spooky-good Wifi location database takes over and does a pretty good job of pinpointing your location. My house is dead-on. This works with Google Maps as well as the Web browser.

USB: The "OTG" hub is supposed to work either as a master or as a slave. It works fine as a slave, but doesn't seem to do anything as a master, using the provided cable.

Power supply: It came with a European power plug -- two round pins -- and, in the shipping box, a clunky adaptor for the two-blade standard used in the United States (and, strangely, in China). This works but it's ridiculously clumsy. I probably have an old Nokia power supply in a shoebox somewhere that will substitute once I find it.

I have no idea whether the micro-HDMI port works, as I don't have a cable to plug it into the TV.

Performance overfall seems to be a split verdict -- some things are noticeably faster than my old Nokia, which had about half the horsepower, but not everything.

My Nokia ran native code (Gnome-based HIldon interface, implemented in C on top of Linux) while Android runs a Java-like virtual machine on top of the native system. Some core components bypass that layer, and I suspect the Web browser is one of those components.

The Android YouTube application plays very nice quality video (native, not Flash), but half the videos I played halted after a minute or two and reported "unable to play."

I can't tell if this is a software error or just poor handling of my crappy Knology cable modem's habit of taking a nap for 30 seconds every five minutes. When I watch Hulu on my laptop, the Flash player buffers a huge quantity of data, avoiding most of the stupid network tricks.

The 7-inch screen size at 800 pixels of resolution is small enough that apps designed for phones don't look bad at all. Websites that detect browsers automatically switch you to the mobile version. If you use a regular website, it' likely that the page is designed for a 1040-pixel display, so the browser shrinks it to fit. This works fine in landscape mode. In portrait display, the page is not eye-friendly.

I installed a little app I created with Appcelerator Titanium. You don't have to jailbreak an Android device to install your own applications.

This is a tablet, not a phone. Android is really designed for a phone, so you'll run across some orphaned phone references in the user interface (the nonexistent cellular carrier is identified as "El Telco Loco." ) You may within the next year see really nice Android tablets for $150 that come with a 3G service contract. Do the math before you decide they're a bargain.

A tale of an unsuccessful suicide attempt

Submitted by yelvington on October 1, 2010 - 6:20pm

It was the summer of 1969. I was in Lawrence, Kansas, scratching chigger bytes, watching Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon, and attending journalism classes at the University of Kansas.

I was a high school kid attending a summer program along with a bunch of other high school kids. I was learning to write headlines and run a radio show. My roommate was studying fourth-dimensional math, something about turning a tennis ball inside out without harming it. Other kids were studying the trombone or, judging from observed behavior, card-playing.

For most of us, it was our first big trip away from home. It was the summer of all possibilities. It was the summer of growing up.

There was a kid down the hall that I didn't know very well. He was from Hannibal, Missouri. A slight kid, about two-thirds the size of his ox-like roommate.

The roommate liked to peel fruit with a machete that he kept hidden in his room, against dorm policy. Also against dorm policy, the roommate had taped "glamour posters" to the wall, moved all the furniture around, and made an aquarium out of a five-gallon carboy. He pretty much ruled the roost while the slight kid cowered.

One night several of us boys were walking down the dormitory hall when the slight kid came stumbling out of his room, red-faced, coughing, and clearly disturbed. No, the ox-like roommate hadn't done anything bad, at least not at the moment. But the slight kid had.

He had wrapped a belt around his neck. He had tried to hang himself in the closet.

It wasn't much of a suicide attempt. You can't do yourself in by hanging yourself from a closet pole that's at eye level. But he had tried.

Frightened and confused, he stumbled out into the hall. And there we were, wide-eyed and unprepared. When you go off to summer camp, nobody gives you a "dealing with suicides" kit.

Having been dealt this hand, we did our best to play it. For hours we walked round the KU campus, talking the slight kid through his forest of personal demons. After trying and failing to kill himself, things got worse, not better. His conservative religious upbringing had taught him that suicide was a sin. Now God would surely condemn him to burn in hell for his clumsy stunt with the belt in the closet.

Not being scholars in such things, we were not well equipped to engage in the argument, but we did what we could to calm him down. We walked and talked until curfew sent us all back to the dorm.

I don't know how the slight kid turned out, but he did survive his summer in Kansas. We all did.

I don't know whether the slight kid was gay. But his roommate treated him the way many bullies treat gay teenagers. Gay teens are not the only victims of cruelty -- anyone who's different is a target -- but they are particularly vulnerable.

I thought about the slight kid this week when I heard the news about Tyler Clementi, a talented young musician who went away to college at Rutgers and wound up jumping to his death off the George Washington Bridge. Tyler's roommate had set up a webcam that had caught him making out with another boy, broadcasting the encounter live on the Internet.

It happens, over and over again. Big kids, little kids. In Texas, a 13-year-old carrying the double burden of sexual orientation and religious differences blows his brains out. In Rhode Island, a college kid majoring in culinary arts hangs himself in a dorm room.

When we are young, everything is too big. Our joys may be too big. Our despairs are always too big. If our older selves could step in, they'd wisely advise us: "I gets better." But our older selves are not there, and if we make the wrong choice, they never will be.

If you haven't watched Dan Savage's video advice, you should. It's about being a gay teenager, and it isn't. It's good advice for everybody. Straight kids have problems, too. Adults have problems. We all have problems. It gets better.

Watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/user/itgetsbetterproject#p/f/0/7IcVyvg2Qlo

 

Has the paid-content bogeyman lost his bogey?

Submitted by yelvington on September 23, 2010 - 10:40am

A couple of months ago, when a small Pennsylvania newspaper started testing Press+ technology, there arose such a clatter in the online journalism world that you would have thought somebody had set up a Mapplethorpe exhibit in a church lobby.

Yesterday the Knight Foundation announced it was providing the paid-content tools to up to 10 of its local journalism grant recipients to "help set these news sites on a course of sustainability for the important work they perform online."

So far, I've not seen a peep of negative reaction.

Why not? Has the paid content bogeyman lost his bogey? Is it OK for nonprofits and local startups to charge for content, but evil for "legacy" media? Are people just beginning to get a little more sophisticated in their understanding of the issues?

I'm not sure. But I welcome a more calm and reasoned examination of the paid-content question, one that is not marred by ridiculous pronouncements on one side from doddering old fossils who don't use the Internet, and angry catcalls from bitter ex-mainstream online journalists on the other.

The idea of a  "paywall" is a terrible one. The metaphor is one of keeping people out. That's pretty much what Murdoch has done with Times Online, which is sinking like a boulder tossed into the ocean. The "paywall" greets the casual user with a hostility that's pretty much guaranteed to drive him or her away, permanently. Such arrogance is entirely in character for a newspaper industry still stuck on ideas from the fat-and-lazy monopoly era, but it's suicidal in an age where there are millions of alternatives begging for our time and attention.

But that's not the whole story.

For years I've been pushing the idea that we do not have one online audience; we have, instead, a couple of behaviorally different groups that are easy to identify. You can slice and dice an audience in as many ways as you like, but way I find is most powerful is frequency of use. 

On a local newspaper website, you have a huge audience of occasional users and a small audience of habituated users. The difference is stark. When I first documented it seven or eight years ago, crunching numbers from the OnlineAthens.com website, I was flabbergasted. The people who are occasional are really occasional, and the people who are loyal are really loyal.

Journalism Online's Press+ technology is specifically designed to recognize this. It's not a paywall -- unless you configure it to be one. It's actually a rate-limiting technology. There are a lot of free services on the Internet with rate-limiting in place -- Twitter, for example. Some services let you consume up to N units for free, and if you want more, then you should expect to pay. OpenCalais, a semantic metadata extraction service, works that way.

In theory, if you set the rate threshold properly, casual users don't know anything has changed. Heavy users -- the ones who presumably see the greatest value in the site -- are behaviorally identified and asked to open their wallets.

There is a risk, of course, that asking heavy users to pay will drive many of them away. They're not only your heaviest consumers of content. They're also the best audience for your advertisers. Clumsy pricing and poor marketing could turn the whole thing into a debacle.

I've seen the business modeling on this and I can say that it's not a slam-dunk either way. Depending on your assumptions and your guesses (and all modeling is built on assumptions and guesses) you can come out in the red or in the black by asking heavy users to cough up some cash.

But right now, we're in a horrible business climate that has prompted advertising customers to radically roll back their spending. Yesterday 26 people lost their jobs at the Florida Times-Union, which is run by my employer, and 20 jobs were eliminated at the Charlotte Observer, which is owned by McClatchy.  Reasonable people, including my old Minneapolis uberboss Joel Kramer, have said the advertising model for metropolitan journalism is pretty much unrecoverable.

With those facts on the table would be irresponsible not to discover, through experimentation rather than argumentation, whether there's any validity to the notion of user-supported online journalism. 

So in coming months you can expect to see a number of newspapers around the country -- as well as Knight's nonprofit local sites -- trying to get readers to pay. There are a million ways to get this wrong and maybe, if we're all very lucky, only one or two ways to get it right. 

As newspapers make their plans, the circle of decisionmaking naturally widens to include people who haven't spent much time thinking about it. There are big traps that can lead us all to bad decisions: wishful thinking, emotion, naivete, and the arrogance of both old thinkers and new thinkers.  There are a lot of technical questions and knotty user support problems. Yeah, I could write the necessary rate-limiting Javascript in an afternoon, but that's a speck on the surface of a whole planet of underlying issues.

I don't know if a rate-limit model will work. I do know that nobody is going to give us any money unless we ask nicely, and a good first step toward asking nicely might be to drop the bombastic declarations.

A tablet revolution: It's like it's the '70s all over again

Submitted by yelvington on September 22, 2010 - 10:22am

Blast from the pastI first became interested in computers in the 1970s, back when cars were big, hair was long, gas was cheap, and beer cost 25 cents a glass.

I was working at the Champaign News-Gazette as a wire editor while going to school at the University of Illinois. Most newspapers back then were produced on typesetting machines that cast type out of molten lead. Computers were big hulking things that required special air-conditioned rooms and trained operators. We were about to get one, our first newsroom editing system, to drive our fancy new phototypesetters. So I took a computer science course taught by Daniel Slotnick, a pioneering supercomputer designer.

What I discovered was that the priesthood of mainframe computing was about to get its world turned completely upside down.

The agent of this change was the microcomputer. There were only a few around. There was a Commodore PET, the first all-in-one microcomputer, in one of my computer labs, surrounded by terminals connected to the CDC Cyber-9000 mainframe. There were some early Apple II's, of course, and a really cool Cromemco in a campustown store window, drawing colorful patterns randomly on a TV screen. A revolution was in the air.

The geek wire-wrapping connections to assemble our newsroom computer snorted derisively. Toys, he said. Computers will never be reliable enough for regular people to use.

We all know how that turned out, but many of us don't know how much chaos ensued.

It was not Bill Gates versus Steve Jobs in those days. Not by a long shot. There were hundreds of companies with competing systems and software. Zilog was the big dog before Intel. CP/M was the hot business OS before DOS. Atari, Radio Shack, and a fleet of companies started in dormitory rooms were in the game. It was years before any sort of clarity emerged.

Now we're right back there. Tablets are going to change the world. But we don't really know who, or what, or how. The iPad is just an opening round. Watch for Android, WebOS (HP), ChromeOS, QNX (Blackberry), Meego (Intel/Nokia), and maybe even something from Microsoft if they quit doddering around like Abe Simpson. Some players (Canonical/Ubuntu) have already dropped out. Others will join in. And then there's the whole Apps versus Web question.

As so often is the case, this is a revolution long in coming. I saw my first tablet around 1995 at a newspaper conference in Berlin. It was built on a chip called the Acorn RISC Machine and ran software called RISC OS. The descendants of that chip power pretty much every smartphone today, as well as the iPad. With so much time for these ideas to cook, you'd think they'd be done by now,  but it doesn't work that way. Instead, we find today that we know less about the immediate future than we did five or eight years ago.

Some things we should have learned from previous revolutions and skirmishes:

You can't learn by sitting on the sidelines. Of course you should watch what everyone else is doing, but there is no substitute for getting into the action.

 Don't rush into a permanent committment. If you put all your efforts into the iPad, and it turns into a minor player (as so often happens to proprietary technologies, you're going to be hurting. Be prepared to play the field.

Great tech does not always win. If it did, we'd be watching movies on Betamax and computing with Amigas. Adequate open systems tend to beat great closed systems.

Overnight change doesn't happen overnight. The usual mistake is to overstate the short term and underestimate the long term. You get all excited that this will be the Year of the Tablet, and it turns out to be the Year of Astounding Hype. So you turn your back and get clobbered by the real wave.

You're doing it wrong. No matter what you do, it will be wrong -- criticized from every direction and ultimately crushed by something new. Be OK with that. Live to learn.

There's more than one way to do it. At the moment, there's a lot of excitement about iPad apps that transport print experiences into a digital framework. There's also a lot of excitement about completely new information experiences that don't even vaguely resemble old products. Both can be right, for different people and situations. 

Dynamic Web fonts: A long way from HTML 1.0

Submitted by yelvington on September 21, 2010 - 8:22pm

 

We've come a long way since I first started coding Web pages in 1994. If you read this post on my blog -- not on Facebook, Google Reader, etc. -- and use a modern Web browser, the first five words of this post are rendered in a font that probably is nowhere to be found on your computer.

If you're curious, it's called Lobster, by Pablo Impallari. It's probably a very fine font for the logo of a 1950s-style drive-in restaurant with roller skaters delivering your food to your car. Let's hope it doesn't get overused. And if you look at this page a year from now, I can't promise I'll still be displaying it here. Things change.

When I first created the Web pages for an online news prototype at the Star Tribune, you couldn't select fonts that were on the computer, much less refer to fonts that didn't exist. Users could select fonts (and colors, and backgrounds) but web page creators had nothing to say about it. The first pages I created on a Macintosh didn't even have tables for layout, much less stylesheets. Over the years we've slowly gained functionality -- smarter markup, stylesheets separated from the page, scripting that converts Web pages into applications, and finally dynamically downloaded fonts.

I'm prompted to write this post by the appearance Screen shottoday of Times Cheltenham on the opinion page of the New York Times website. The screen shot here shows "The Opinion Pages" in Cheltenham, but that's no great feat, because it's actually a graphic on the webpage.

But the headline below it -- "What I Didn't Find in Africa" -- is the first Web appearance of Times Cheltenham (a proprietary NYT font) in actual Web content. Previously, that headline would have been rendered in Georgia, which is a fine font, but not the same face as the Gray Lady uses in her daily print.

Technically, the way this works is an extra bit of HTML in the document head section tells the Web browser where to download a font. Once it's downloaded, you can refer to it using conventional CSS font-family instructions. If you have a license from the font foundry, you can host the font yourself. The Times is using a company called Typekit, which offers many commercial fonts.

In my case, I used a free service from Google and added a Drupal module to handle the details. 

I should be delighted that Web browsers are getting more powerful and that we now have reliable support of arbitrary fonts in Web pages.

But there's a cloud in every silver lining. This adds one more opportunity for something to break -- to hang a browser, to hold a connection open. It adds weight to pages, which already seem to be at war with our computer resources. And it's yet another way for people who love print to make the grievous error of thinking the Web is just another distribution channel.

We all know the adage, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." Let's hope these dynamically loaded fonts are used wisely and sparingly. There are a lot of fonts in the virtual type case. Many of them should stay there.

Beware, journalists: Apple is not your friend

Submitted by yelvington on September 19, 2010 - 2:03pm

Decades ago I read a business book by Robert Ringer called "Winning Through Intimidation." Ringer is a political kook (he's gotten much worse over the years) and more than a bit paranoid, but he sounded a warning that should be the first rule of commerce for every consumer and every businessperson: Everybody else at the table is out to take your chips.

Apple fanbois need to understand this. Apple is not your friend. Google fanbois need to understand this: Google is not your friend. Microsoft is not your friend. And so on.

But it's not just the fanbois. When you hear that Apple is working on a new service to "revolutionize" newspapers, the right response is to check your wallet and make sure the doors are locked, not break out the champagne. Journalists and publishers, Apple is not your friend.

We all make this mistake. Life is like a big card game. They're after your chips.

Steve Jobs may be a megalomaniac, but don't blame it on him, because this isn't his fault. This is how corporations work. It's fundamental.

A corporation is a legal "person" with many of the rights that you and I have, but having no conscience and operating only for its own benefit. If a human being acted like a corporation, we'd lock him or her up in a prison or mental institution as a psychopath. It has no care for others. Its only imperative is self-interest (to deliver profits to shareholders) and it will destroy others in its path in its relentless drive to get bigger and richer.

This is why we have laws that regulate corporations -- the laws that are constantly under attack by political forces that are funded by the corporations and billionaire investors through lobbyists, Washington "think tanks" and astroturf political movements.

This should not be new to us. Edward, first baron of Thurlow and lord chancellor of England from 1731 to 1806, had corporations pegged from the start. "Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?" he asked (as quoted by H.L. Mencken).

Did you see Newsday's wonderfully funny commercial for its iPad app? It gushes about how "the new Newsday app is better than the newspaper in all kinds of ways"  ... except for one, as the dad in the video smashes the iPad by trying to swat a fly.

It was all over the Internet for a day or so. Then, according to Network World, Newsday received a letter from Apple's lawyers threatening to pull "all of our apps" from the iTunes marketplace.

Fun's over. Abuse of power? Evil corporation? It's in their nature. Doesn't make any difference whether the corporation is Apple, Google, the cellphone companies, or even BP. They are not your friend.

I called Robert Ringer a political kook and a bit paranoid. You can check that out in a few minutes with Google and form your own opinion. But never forget: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

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