Hysterical Raisins

Nintendo's next portable should be around soon

lalo — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:58:00 +0800

The Nintendo DS came out in 2004; the GBA, in 2001; the GBC, in 98. See a pattern? The next Nintendo portable should be around any time. My guess is, it probably was already designed by late last year, and they aborted the whole process, to incorporate what they learned from the Wii, and hopefully the iPhone.

Here is what I predict it will look like, in no particular order — I'm privately calling it the “Nintendo DT”.

Two screens, like the DS, but both multi-touch, either 512x320 (more likely — that's “computer widescreen”, 16x10) or 512x288 (“true” widescreen, 16x9, might be chosen in order to make the device just that little bit narrower).
No physical buttons, except for power, and possibly L/R. All controls are via touchscreen (and accelerometers). Or maybe it's too early for that, since haptic tactition emulation isn't usable yet; in that case it may keep controls similar to the DS Lite, making the bottom screen smaller (4x3 — 384x288). Possibly an analog nub. Two, if they really really feel like one-upping Sony.
Video codecs and player built-in so you can watch your movies on the go (a must with the widescreen).
Camera either built-in or sold as an add-on.
Probably no stylus at all.
Definitely no GBA compatibility. (But the homebrew scene will have an emulator — VBA probably — up in weeks.)
Better Wi-Fi; at least 802.11n. And Bluetooth.
Browser built-in.
More built-in storage, maybe an SSD or even HD (hope not); WiiWare is making a lot of money, and for watching movies you'll need space too. Maybe an SD or MicroSD slot?
Maybe music player software built-in as well. (Can anyone say MarioPod? Or is it PokéPod?)
I wouldn't be too surprised if it uses Cortex CPUs.
“Slave mode” where it basically becomes a souped-up controller (with extra display area) for the Wii. Hacked in two or three months to become a “slave” to a Linux machine; practical application for the hack doesn't arrive for a long time, if ever.

Oh, and I'll probably buy one, install some Free Software, and use it as my “netbook”. Sounds great for media and writing on the go ;-) Unless, of course, the Pandora arrives first...

Olympics (and other sport nonsense) considered harmful

lalo — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:21:00 +0800

People who know me are often amazed at my lack of interest on sports, specially during the Olympics. The question of “why” does arise occasionally, although not as often as you'd think. So I figured, hmm, that's a reasonable topic for a blog post.

First, I don't like competitive sports.

The idea of physical activity for fun or pleasure, I can relate to. You feel exhilarated when you bike, hike, or row up a hill? Good for you.

And the concept of wanting to “improve” your body, stretch your limits, is to be commended. I think.

But competing for the feeling that you're “better” than your (often arbitrary) “adversary”, on account of some extremely abstract, and usually completely pointless accomplishment, like running a ball through a loop? That's just ridiculous. It's understandable, since it appeals to many of our baser instincts, but it's not the kind of behaviour I'd encourage.

In fact, maybe that's the point: encouraging. Many sports activities — in fact, generally the most popular ones — are really updated excuses to engage in many kinds of behaviour we really, really should be working harder on leaving behind. I'd even go so far as saying, in my opinion, the love for sports in our modern culture is one of the (admittedly many) roots of the predatory, every-man-for-himself mentality which is perhaps the greatest obstacle to our evolution into a fairer and, well, more reasonable society.

And there you go, we segue nicely into the Olympics. The whole thing is, as I see it, hugely hypocritical. Its proponents, like many supporters of sports all over the world, try to pass it as a symbol of union and brotherhood; but at the bottom line, it's all about “my” country getting more medals than yours. It's not only a barbaric competitive tribal war, it's also a reinforcement of nationalism, which is another thing we're overdue getting rid of.

Feel free, if you want, to invite me for a hike, or biking, golfing, or even, if I'm in the right mood, a baseball game. But please, please, don't invite me to watch sports; while I understand and share the pleasure of doing it, I really see no point in watching it. And above all, don't ask me about the Olympics, unless you really want to hear how strongly I don't care.

Mass unblocking in the Great Firewall of China

lalo — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 22:13:00 +0800

Seems a batch of sites got unblocked. Wiki.edia (marvel as I blog in regular expressions) is accessible (again), Wikibooks, Reuters, CNN, and a lot more.

Still blocked: blogspot, livejournal, wordpress (no surprise here -- lots of political blogs), BBC, certainly more; most importantly, Sinfest and CRFH :-( (why the f* is CRFH blocked? Zombies? Satan?)

Also, the web feels slightly faster in general!

Alterslash ftw

lalo — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:11:00 +0800

I changed my Google Reader and news clippings from Slashdot to Alterslash. Yes, it's some time behind Slashdot, but then again Slashdot is some time behind my other sources anyway... and Alterslash gives proper HTML, so you don't have to click Slashdot only to get the link to the actual useful article...

I'm not going to go back and retroactively change all old clippings, but I did that for the clippings of the last few days. Enjoy!

The Ballad Of Sir Href

lalo — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:03:00 +0800

It goes like this...

Take a page from Arthur's book
Join this body august most
Take seat at the round table
Where no knight a row will brook
Remain strong but never boast
Proper form makes you able
The Elysium Fields to fill
And submit all to your will
With your style and your skill.

Billy's old car

lalo — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 11:01:00 +0800

Billy has a broken car. It's broken mostly because he doesn't know how to run it, of course; and more importantly, because it's making Billy rivers of money even though it's broken, so there's no incentive to learn to run it right.

Then Jerry drives by with an incredibly shaggy, shitty car, with a few nice accessories.

Billy immediately thinks: I'll buy Jerry's car, and use the parts to make mine less broken!

Of course, Billy still not knowing what to do with a car, it will remain broken, or best case, be fixed for a short time before he breaks it again. And it will still be hugely profitable. So to be honest, I see nothing wrong with Billy's logic.

Yeah, there's a reasonable chance it will make zero difference to Billy's car in the long run. But it will make people talk about Billy even more, which of course, puts more money on his pocket. Maybe even more than he's offering.

Jame5

lalo — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:40:00 +0800

Yesterday I finished my new friend Stefan's book, Jame5. It's a read I recommend to pretty much anyone, but in particular intelligent people interested in the future. It deals with a concept that has been a hot topic in the last few years, the "technical singularity": an AI that's intelligent enough to improve itself.

There are a number of reasons why this concept is called a "singularity", a word borrowed from astrophysics (where it means black holes). Once it exists, it grows spontaneously, and at exponential speed. And no less importantly, we're unable to fully understand and predict what's happening in there, because all laws we know and live by are challenged.

It's the last thing humanity has to invent, because if done right, once it's there, it will invent everything else, at a pace that will seem instantaneous for us. And if done wrong, we won't be around to invent anything else.

The book is available online, on Stefan's site, and can be bought in dead tree form (links can also be found on Stefan's site). If you're in Beijing, you can also get one directly from Stefan.

Copyrights and cultural heritage

lalo — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 23:46:00 +0800

Here's an excellent post on the Python newsgroup, which I think anyone still not convinced that copyrights as they currently exist are evil should reflect on. Of course, this blog posting is a copyright violation, as I didn't ask the author (Steven D'Aprano) for permission to blog it. ;-)

He says (everything from here on):

> I'm glad it doesn't work that way here in the US.  Over here, something
> is copyrighted as soon as it's written (actually I think the phrase is
> "fixed in a medium" or something like that).

I'm not glad at all. The Change from an "everything is uncopyrighted unless explicitly copyrighted" model to a "everything is copyrighted unless explicitly exempted" model was only one of many deleterious changes to copyright law over the last half century or so.

It means the merest throw-away scribble on a napkin has equal protection to the opus an author slaved over for thirty years (although in fairness you are unlikely to win a copyright case over the words "Meet me at the bar" scribbled on a napkin then tossed in a rubbish bin... wink). It means that there is a serious problem of "orphan works", where rare and valuable films from the 1920s and earlier are rapidly decaying into an unusable powder because nobody dares copy them lest the unknown copyright owners descend like vultures and sue you for copyright infringement after you've done the hard work of restoring our cultural heritage.

(Although the orphan works problem is at least equally as much a problem of excessively long copyrights as it is to do with automatic copyright.)

I dare say that European countries which have had automatic copyright longer than the US have seen far more of their national heritage (early film, photographs and the like) rot away.

Discussions of copyright so often focus on protecting the author's privileges and ignore the opportunity costs of locking up works. When works needed to be explicitly copyrighted, something of the order of just ONE PERCENT of authors bothered to copyright their published works -- and just one percent of them bothered to renew it for a second 14 year term. That gives you an idea of how valuable copyright really is. For every Mickey Mouse, there are 100,000 or more works that don't have enough economic value to the creator to bother protecting -- but they're part of our cultural heritage, and maybe somebody else could build on top of it, like Disney built their empire on other folks' uncopyrighted stories and ideas. Even Mickey Mouse himself got his start in a derivative work of Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr.

This newsgroup is a perfect example of the fraud that is the idea of copyright. Every single post sent to the newsgroup is copyrighted, and yet they invariable have no economic value to the author. If they have any economic value, it is to the readers -- but they don't pay for it, and we authors don't ask for payment. In principle, anyone who forwards on something they read here, or uses a code snippet in their own work, is infringing copyright. We don't need copyright to encourage us to create works of this nature, and in fact this newsgroup can only exist by pretending copyright doesn't exist -- there are informal conventions that unless somebody explicitly states otherwise, any reader can forward on posts, copy and reuse code, and so forth.

(Disclaimer: for the avoidance of all doubt, I'm not suggesting that ALL creative works should be uncopyrighted, or that no creative works benefit from the encouragement of copyright.)

The Meta-Nerd

lalo — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 23:58:00 +0800

May just sent me a really nice article about “nerds”. After reading, I concluded I'm a “meta nerd”; I'm such a sad case that nerds would probably react to me the way “norms” react to nerds.

Let's take a look at it:

“Nerds understand computers.”

Actually, I'm not such a good programmer, or sysadmin, or anything. I know what computers can do, and I see ways in which they're not doing it. I like to design software, more than write it. In fact, if nerds program to solve a problem — in most cases, I lose interest in a project after I'm happy with the design, because I already “solved” the problem I was interested in.

“Norms” see me as a nerd.

“Nerds” think I'm full of vapour.

“Nerds live in a monospaced world.”

I like proportional fonts. I like moving, I'll move across cities, states, countries, continents if I can. I like changing jobs. Do I have control issues and need to live in an artificial “system” I build? Sure, like any other nerd. However, I like to build those systems too. When I get tired of my system, I tear it down.

“Norms” think I'm batshit crazy.

“Nerds” think I'm batshit crazy.

“Nerds love toys, puzzles, games.”

I rarely bother with it long enough to solve it; just long enough to understand how it works so that I could potentially design a variation. In fact, as I'm learning it, I'm already designing a variation in my head — which 9 times out of 10 gets discarded afterwards, as it was only a mental exercise.

“Norms” think I'm a nerd.

“Nerds” think I'm not.

“Nerds are fucking funny.”

Jury's still out on that one.

“Nerds context-switch wildly.”

Must... concentrate... and... finish... writing... post...

Ah screw it, I'll watch another 15 minutes of the movie first.

Ok, back. Anyway.

I'll do 10 things at the same time, and in a way, they will be related to me. Even if it's a way that's impossible to explain.

And yeah, I don't keep much in my head. I think my brain is full of hyperlinks by this point. About one year ago, I'd say I'd panic if I lost my browser bookmarks. Now, I can say I'd reconstruct them in about two hours.

“Norms” think I'm hard to follow.

“Nerds” think I must be dumb or something.

“Nerds ignore information that isn't relevant.”

The article says most nerds have a “flag word” that indicates he's not really paying attention because his system has already flagged the conversation as irrelevant.

I don't. I go do something else. Or interrupt.

“Norms” think I'm fucking rude.

“Nerds” think I'm fucking rude.

Meanwhile, life goes on.

Rediscover the web. Again.

lalo — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:01:00 +0800

I'm absolutely in love with Prism. It's like being set free.

See, the trick here, the main trick, is not running sites in separate, stripped-down windows. Rather, it's that each of those is a separate process, and these processes don't step on each other's feet. They're very light on memory, and if they do have all the Firefox 2 memory leak issues, I'll never know, because I have no reason to keep them open for extended times -- since they load incredibly fast.

The funny thing here is -- many people list tabbed browsing as the major Firefox innovation, or at least one of the top few. What we usually don't think about is how much that became a cage. Since all the sites I'm browsing run in the same process, any memory leaks or crashes become a big problem. I don't know about everybody else, but at least myself, and a few other "power users" I know, tend to leave 10+ tabs open all the time. When some of those tabs are heavyweight web apps like GMail... everything can get very slow very fast.

When I installed Prism, the plan was to leave GMail open on Prism all the time, so if I want to restart the browser, it won't affect my mail. But see... I don't need to have GMail open all the time. I did, because it takes a while to load, and because it was a bit inconvenient to get some new mail notification that integrated well. (If GMail runs in a tab, how am I going to know if it's already open or not?) Now I don't have it open all the time anymore, and I have XFCE's mail notification plugin on my panel, which launches the GMail webapp on Prism. It's brilliant; the speed and flexibility of a desktop app.

Absolutely worth trying.