Video Chat is a Breaching Experiment
For a while now, I've hated video chat. I've got a policy of more or less refusing or ignoring video chat calls. Now, watching the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference keynote, I understand why.
Because, just as Facebook's enforcement of unified identity is a breaching experiment, video chat is a breaching experiment too.
Now, video chat works acceptably in two situations: extremely intimate personal calls (i.e., spouse-to-spouse, or possibly grandparent-to-grandchild) — calls where the absence of staging and the creation of intimacy is itself part of the message — and videoconferencing for business, where each side of the call establishes a stage set, and people are prepared in advance to be on video. (I do think work videoconferencing misses subtle cues of great importance, but that's a separate issue.)
In other cases, however, video chat forces us to be who we are, for whoever is calling, whenever they call. If for example my mom tries to video chat me at 11:30 am, but I've just fallen out of bed and over to my computer, she won't see the me I want to present: active and engaged with the world, neatly groomed, and so on. Or maybe I'm at work, and a buddy from my D&D game calls. Do I really want to present myself to him in jacket and tie, surrounded by corporate beige?
Too bad that soon enough we'll all have the technology on hand that makes it more and more difficult to resist video chat. (Then again, I've kept off of Facebook thus far.) All of us seem to be engaged in that same giant breaching experiment, only without much of a control group.
[Update 12:21 pm PDT: Warren Ellis puts this more succinctly on his twitter: Videocalling deletes the most culturally adopted aspect of a telephone: its ability to facilitate lying.]
Have you seen this article?
Years ago, perhaps as long as a decade ago, I recall reading an article about the British Empire's control of the subcontinent.
Because the British could not actually control India, the article asserted, they collected statistical data about India instead. This statistical picture helped provide the illusion of mastery.
This has stuck in my head, and I use it all the time as a way of describing certain behaviors. But I'd like to point the article out to people, and I can't find it.
My memory is that I would have encountered it sometime between 1998 and 2000, possibly in either Lingua Franca or the Atlantic, but I read widely enough that those may be little more than guesses.
Can anyone help me out with this? So far I've failed with Google, and with an online periodical search on the SPL's web site.
Ubuntu Lucid upgrade report
Friday I upgraded my workstation to Ubuntu's 10.04 release, Lucid Lynx.
First, it wouldn't boot at all: it would hang while mounting USB filesystems.
Then I had to take extra steps to get VMWare server 2.0.2 to run.
Then my Konsole rendered colored and bold fonts incorrectly, which I'm working around by always using bold fonts.
But, overall, it works. It's polished — for a Linux distribution. If my Mac could drive the 30" monitor, though, I'd be using that as my primary workstation.
iPad interface quirk: scrolling frames lack scrollbars
The other day, my friend Geoff reported an iPad fail: an inability to scroll within a frame for a hotel login page, and similarly an inability to scroll in a Google Reader frame.
Geoff's as expert as they come, with computers in general and with Apple products too. He waited in line to get his iPad. But he couldn't figure out how to scroll these frames: scrolling by dragging a finger just scrolled the overall page, not the frame.
The solution is simple: scroll with two fingers in parallel, within the frame.
This is actually documented in the iPad user guide, which is bookmarked in Safari on iPad. One of the perils of a device this easy to use is that nobody reads the manual!
The interface is still quirky: no visible scroll bars even suggest that content overflows the frame. This does save screen real estate, precious on a 9.7" screen. But it can definitely lead to overlooking content, if you don't know that there even is anything to scroll.
Wanted: Serial console for iPad
The one thing I might still need my laptop for, on even a short business trip, would be to use it as a serial console for a headless system. I do that with some frequency, still, and a surprising number of sites just don't have a handy serial terminal.
I'd pay good money for the ability to use my iPad as a serial console, via a null modem and a terminal app as good as iSSH.
iPad: first few days with my fluffy computer
Despite its sleek shape and glossy screen, I can't help but think of my iPad as a "fluffy computer."
Fluffy as in lots of chrome. UI effects that go beyond the necessary. A slick, packaged experience as comfortable and unnecessary as a pillow-top bed in a top-end hotel.
Fluffy as in distracting. I long for the day when iPads, or other tablets, are commonplace. That way I can get work done instead of discussing how I might or might not get work done with the iPad.
Fluffy as in what can I do with this thing? It's obviously the greatest computer in the world for reading the Internet while on the couch, and an excellent if pricey replacement for both portable DVD players and eBooks like the Kindle. But it's not clear to me, yet, what I can do with an iPad that I can't do with anything else.
Like others, I've begun to notice that my iPhone now feels like a miniaturized light-on-features iPad rather than the pad feeling like an overgrown iPhone. That's a good sign. But if replacing portable DVD players and eBooks, and replacing laptops for light business trips is the sum total of its use, it's not going to be more than a niche player. I'm going to prefer it to laptops for short business trips, but if I'm on the road long enough I'll probably need to bring a "real" computer with me.
Most of all, though, the iPad is fluffy as in clouds. All of my contact and calendar data comes over the Internet, from Mobile Me and my work's Exchange server. The mail lives at Google and on Exchange, too. It's a great platform for blogging to WordPress, but saving local drafts doesn't count for a whole lot. Evernote works well, though I wish that there was a way to use and sync VoodooPad from the iPad.
GoodReader, 1Password, WebEx, YouTube, Maps — everything on the pad relies on, or at least syncs via, the cloud.
I'm not yet sure what the real "killer app" for the iPad will be, but I'm pretty sure it too will rely on network services.
iPad Killer App: Library Books part 2
After my experience reading OverDrive ePub books on an iPad, I got a little more aggressive: what about the Mobipocket books that I could check out of the library?
iPad Killer App: Library Books part 1
Purchasing books is nice, but I like going to my library and borrowing books. I know that the Seattle Public Library lends books electronically via OverDrive in the ePub format the iPad uses, but can these books be read on the iPad?
It is, eventually, possible to do this. The Mac documentation is a bit sparse, and you do need some Unix comfort to get it done.
First I tried to simply download and extract the book. This didn't work: the DRM that OverDrive uses to enforce library return dates isn't compatible with iBooks.
By this point I was obsessed. A little poking around revealed that the ADEPT DRM used by OverDrive has been cracked.
iPad should see iPhone over Bluetooth, and only one should alert
Having bought an iPad due to a combination of peer pressure and neophilia, I've encountered the first major annoyance: my iPad and my phone both chirping when an appointment approaches.
Wouldn't it be great if the devices talked to each other, and only the one you were using alerted you? Or, if you were using neither but they saw each other over Bluetooth, they could agree as to which device would sing out your meeting invitations?
Mac Syslog GUI
I know that Console.app is a decent if not stellar tool to view syslog entries on a Mac, but recently I wanted to send remote syslog entries to a Mac.
While I've found instructions for enabling remote syslog on a Mac, they're out of date. I can figure it out from these instructions, but it occurred to me this wasn't really what I wanted to do anyway.
What I really want is a database-backed syslog (a la syslog-ng) configured to accept syslog entries from remote servers. But I really want this with a powerful GUI to filter, colorize, and sort syslog messages by timestamp, host, facility, priority, and regular expression.
Now, this is a very un-Mac-like thing I want, at root. But it sure would turn my Mac into a powerful syslog processing machine.