Author: admin

Speaking of people as data, as an exercise I took from Wikipedia a list of all the actors on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and turned it into an interactive program.

Specifically, I’m interested in exploring the lives of the actors in an historical context. So I reordered the list to be in chronological order, and made it so that you could click on any actor to do a Google search on him or her.

The implementation turned out to be a very short Javascript program. You can check it out here.

There is something odd about thinking of people as data. After all, each individual human being is a vast entity, and essentially infinite vessel of complexity and possibility.

But for purposes of the modern on-line economy, people are data records. We are born in this year, and die in that one. We have preferred shopping habits, viewing preferences, favorite places to vacation.

Somewhere in a computer database, we are each reduced to a neat set of categories and a list of weights and values. From the perspectives of Amazon, Facebook, Google and their ilk, this is who we are.

Yet in our hearts we know better. For we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

I don’t wear shoes when I am at home. And I often don’t have my wallet on me. But both of these things are mandatory the moment I leave home.

But I do use my SmartPhone at home. In fact, I suspect people would be surprised if they couldn’t reach me by phone and I were to explain “Sorry, I was at home.”

Which makes me wonder — will we wear those future mixed reality glasses while we are at home? Will they be more like shoes and wallets or will they be more like phones?

My best guess is that we will wear them all the time when we are walking around on the street or shopping in a store. In fact, in pretty much any public place.

But at home we will wear them only when we specifically want to communicate with the outside world. Otherwise we will take them off, so we can enjoy some precious moments of peace and quiet.

William Wordsworth may have said it best:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Imagine it is ten years in the future. You may still be carrying around something around the size and weight of an iPhone in your pocket, but you never look at it.

The thing in your pocket is only there to help provide power and wireless connectivity. Your entire interface is contained in your hands, your voice, and the lightweight pair of glasses that you generally wear while walking about in populated areas.

I’ve been pondering the following question: What will be the equivalent of a homepage?

When you open up your notebook computer or Web browser today, you see, by default, a set of choices of things to do. You can customize your desktop or homepage, so that things you do most often are right at your fingertips.

Your SmartPhone has a similar set-up. You place the things that you access most often conveniently on your home screen.

But your “home screen or “homepage” or “desktop”, or whatever it will be called, will not be on a screen. It will be wherever you want it to be in your field of vision.

And it may not be called up by tapping on a visual icon, but by something you say, or by a particular movement of your hands, or a particular place you look within your field of vision — or by some combination of all three.

This may all seem exotic right now. But there will come a day, for better or worse, when we will be amazed that anybody ever managed to get by without it.

I am scheduled to give a presentation this week, in which I would like to include some new demos. Theoretically I could go back and forth on my computer between the demos and some kind of standard presentation software, like PowerPoint or KeyNote.

But the weird thing is, it’s just a lot easier for me to write my own software that does everything I would want from PowerPoint or KeyNote, and insert that into my demo program. Which seems odd, because those are major tools used by just about everybody for giving presentations.

The difference, I think, is that I know how to program. And just a little bit of programming goes a very long way when you want to give a custom presentation. For one thing, you can easily to things that are just impossible using commercial tools.

If everybody could program, I wonder whether those standard presentation programs would even exist. Hmm.

I was going to not post anything today, as a kind of April fool’s prank. Or else insert some sort of obscure cultural reference, just to see if anybody would catch it.

But that seemed way too meta (with a lower-case ‘m’). Maybe I’ll just go watch the snow crash instead…

The on-line widget I showed yesterday was a very simple version of a flashcard program. Which leaves me wondering — how would you add to a program like that to make it better?

A number of things are missing which might or might not make it better. For example, in the current version you need to refresh the page to see the next question. It would probably be better to have an on-screen button to do that.

Also, right now there is no penalty for wrong answers. I wonder whether there should be, and if so how much the penalty should be.

Similarly, I don’t currently provide any sort of running score. So you don’t know until you’re done how much progress you’ve made.

More seriously, I don’t tell you whether the answer you just provided was wrong or right. From my time recently playing Spelling Bee, I know that getting an answer right feels great, and people should be rewarded for that.

Also, there is no very easy way for somebody else to substitute their own test questions. In case you are curious, there is a file there called flashcards.js which contains the content of the test.

Right now the only way you could substitute in your own test is to copy the index.html file from my folder, and put up a copy of the flashcards program on your own site, with your own version of flashcards.js.

Ideally you shouldn’t need to do that. For example, I could provide a way for you upload your flashcards.js file to my system. Then people could take your test instead of mine.

So many choices, so many possible things to do! Maybe it’s good that I stopped where I did. Otherwise I might end up spending the next year working on flashcard programs.

I had such a good time implementing last week’s Wednesday widget, that I decided I’d keep going in the same general direction. This week I’ve implemented a little flash card program.

There are all sorts of facts that I would like to learn better, so I can really use a flash card program. One design consideration I thought was important was to make it easily reconfigurable.

For this example, I chose the State capitals, because that’s kind of a canonical topic. But the questions/answers themselves are in a separate file, so it’s easy to substitute a new set of questions and answers.

You can try it for yourself here.

I remember sometime back in the 1980s looking at my telephone and being frustrated. I knew there was a computer in there, but the phone company did not give me access to it.

“If only I could add to the software in that thing,” I would tell myself, “I could do make this experience so much better.” But of course, I didn’t have the needed access.

Skip forward a couple of decades, and now I can program my phone to my heart’s content. And so can a lot of other people, which is why there are so many cool apps on my phone.

But we haven’t yet gotten there with video chat. Zoom only entered the consciousness of the general public about two years ago, on or around March 12, 2020. That is the very definition of recent history.

So not surprisingly, there is, as yet, no way for those of us who don’t work for Zoom to program it. As we say in the software biz, there is no API for Zoom.

But inevitably that will change. If Zoom doesn’t provide an API, some competitor will show up who does. And those third party apps are going to make the experience of video-chat with your friend or your colleague or your grandma a lot cooler and more interesting.

Fun times ahead.

I listened to the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty album this evening. Just played it straight through.

I don’t really know what prompted me to think of it. Some random association from years ago, perhaps. But I’m glad I did.

It’s a beautiful collection of songs, with an amazing level of musicianship, and a great tribute to many American musical genres all at once. Yet back in 1970 that album was something else as well.

It was the center of a particular way of being in the world, one that today seems nearly incomprehensible. There was a kind of idealism there that I think has been long beaten out of us.

I am sure that a younger person hearing that album would appreciate it on a musical level. But the cultural language it speaks would probably remain completely opaque.

I wonder how many cultural artifacts become lost in plain sight. They remain available — transcribed from paper, celluloid or acetate, but they represent a cultural mindset that is either fading away or already long gone.

Without cultural context, a song can lose its deepest meaning — it’s a hand-me-down. The thoughts are broken, perhaps they’re better left unsung.

I don’t know, don’t really care. Let there be songs to fill the air.