perfidy

Last week, I had an epiphany of sorts. I was working on creating a document at work. To get to the finished product, I had to refer to and poach from several other documents. I had to edit several sections, and to bounce back and forth between sections to ensure that I was maintaining consistency of subject matter and voice. I needed to include several images, but I wasn’t sure until near completion exactly what order I wanted to use them. The beginning of the document needed a chunk of boilerplate text modified to fit current needs. Finally, there was some new text that needed to be created, and linked to existing documents in a meaningful way.

This is in most respects a typical work project for me, and for any technical writer. And Microsoft Word is uniquely unsuited for this sort of work. As is every other word processing application. What I am doing is not processing words. I am processing ideas, or at least concepts. Certainly, at a low level, there is a lot of word processing going on, but it is not the primary activity. I could just as easily use notepad for the word processing.

My frustration with the tools at hand led me to think. (Some of these ideas go back a ways, but the totality of the thing hit me like a bat to the head.) One can imagine a word processing spectrum running from notepad to pagemaker. At the one end, you find a rudimentary text entry application with minimal editing functionality. It exists merely to accept words, fiddle with them in a limited way and save them to a file. At the other end are desktop publishing applications such as Adobe Pagemaker. Programs such as this are awkward at best for purposes of creating text, but have truly remarkable abilities to format, arrange and prettify already extant text. They serve to prepare text for publishing.

Other programs exist on or near the spectrum between these two endpoints. UNIX text editors like vi and emacs take the notepad concept and take it to its logical conclusion. Their purpose is not merely text entry, but to control text files. Their search and editing capabilities are very powerful, but only for manipulating pure text – not for any sort of formatting. However, they have been specialized for use as coding tools. Word and other high-end word processors improve upon the text manipulation tools of notepad, but only slightly. What they add is a significant portion of the formatting powers of the desktop publishing software in an easy to use form. You can see what a letter will look like in Word, and print it. Word offers nifty templates for letters and other forms of business correspondence. It is designed for use by secretaries, though it has been adopted by nearly everyone else.

All of these applications either manipulate text, or its appearance, or some combination of the two. This is all very useful, but does not address the problems involved in creating any piece of writing larger than a letter or memo. The process of authoring is larger than the either the manipulation of text, or its appearance. When an author, screenwriter, technical editor, journalist, pundit or anyone writing anything more involved than a memo begins to write, they very rarely dive in and create a complete piece of work in one sitting. Often there is research. Notes about characters. References and citations. Background notes, or drafts.

All of this either exists in one large and unwieldy word doc; or in many, many collectively unwieldy smaller docs. In the former case, all the information is crammed together, and the larger the doc, the more complicated the task of quickly locating the desired information. Scrolling through tens or hundreds of pages of notes to find one thing is time consuming. The search capabilities of word are entirely inadequate to the task. If instead the author has broken his information into many smaller docs, the ease of use depends on how cleverly he has named and organized the documents. Any failure of attention may lead to crucial information being in a misleadingly named doc, or filed in the wrong place, or put in the wrong doc. This leads to exceedingly tedious opening and closing of word docs to find that little tidbit.

Neither situation is conducive to effective research or writing. Microsoft OneNote and a couple writing tools address some of these needs. But while OneNote can organize notes and information reasonably well, it does not make it easy to write. Software like the Writer’s Dreamkit help you keep track of certain information like characters and timelines, but are still poor interfaces for writing. And the help they provide in organization are strictly limited to specific types of writing.

What is needed is authoring software. Software that allows easy and intuitive organization of information as it is entered and easy and intuitive access to that information during the writing process. Software that provides a comfortable and powerful but not unwieldy text-entering interface. Software that allows searching your information and the web right from the text, with minimal interruption in the flow of writing. Software that does what you want but doesn’t get in the way. Software that I’d call the Octopus. Imagine a clever, friendly octopus logo.

This software would not provide full formatting and desktop publishing functionality. But it would be much more than a mere text entry device.

The primary enhancement would be a meta-interface. Imagine an octopus stretched around an invisible globe. Each arm would be a directory tree. On the arms, documents would hang like suckers. Click and grab the globe to spin the octopus in any direction. Docs near the center of the screen would be larger than those farther away – and the larger the doc, the more information in it would be displayed in this interface. Running the mouse over a doc would cause it to pop up to a larger size, so you can see what’s in it. Clicking on a text nugget would bring it to the front semi-permanently – allowing easy movement between several active windows. Text could be drag-dropped from window to window.

The octopus interface would allow easy, intuitive management of information. Assume that you’re writing a screenplay. You fire up the software, and create a new project – a new octopus. It starts as a simple node in the middle of the screen. What do you want to do first? Perhaps some notes about the characters that will be in your movie. You right click on the central node, and select create new arm. A short arm will appear to the side of the central node. You name it “characters.” You right click on that arm, select new nugget. A text window, full sized, appears. Here you enter background information for your hero, Bob. But what about Alice? Right click and select spawn new nugget. Another window appears where you can enter information about Alice. If you minimize the text windows, you will see two nuggets on the arm that you created. But what about locations? Right click on the central node and create a new arm, and a new nugget. Make some notes about where you want to film, and what sorts of sets will be needed. Another arm for more general notes. But hey, you realize, this is all background. Create a new arm, call it background, and simply detach the other two arms and reattach them to “background.” Now, you have a branching arm.

Now that you’ve sorted that out, you need to start writing. A new arm, script. A new nugget, scene one. Start typing. Move on to scene two by spawning a new nugget. Or you’re not sure what’s going to happen in scene two, but you do know how it all turns out. Don’t worry, you can always add a new nugget between scene one and scene three.

Wait! You’ve got a complicated plot, and you need to keep track of where everyone is at all times. Spawn a new arm off of screenplay, timeline. Write your timeline – but whenever you get to an event mentioned in your timeline, you can create a direct, internal link from that point in the screenplay to that entry in the timeline. If you make alterations in the timeline, you can easily track down where you need to make changes in the screenplay. Later, as you are considering casting, images of potential actors could be added in a string of new nuggets, or embedded in the character arm.

Or say you’re a historian, conducting research for a new book. Information you gather from your reading can be entered and automatically organized as you collect it. Bibliographic information can be recorded as individual nuggets on a reference arm – and linked when that source is cited in the text. Auto footnotes. Say your history is of the Second World War, and you’re discussing events surrounding the Battle of the Bulge. What was going on in the Pacific theatre? If you’ve organized your information as you entered it, you can go to the octopus navigator and skim over to pacific theatre arm, and quickly locate by context the information you need, copy some of it, move back to your active window, and continue without the hassle of a tedious search.

Better, say you can’t remember where that one tidbit is. Unlike word, the Octopus would have powerful search capabilities. Grep for terms, and a search window will pop up displaying results ranked by relevance. Each will link to that location in the appropriate nugget.

As your project becomes more complex, you can navigate the interface by dragging the octopus around. Bring the part you wish to focus on to the front, and those parts will become bigger. Move out a level, and you can navigate through all of your projects the same way. Import your old documents into the system automatically, and easily arrange them into sensible structures by clicking and dragging one arm to another, or one doc into another tree. The Octopus manages your creation. As you create, you create your own intuitive organizational structure. Octopus’ interface allows you to easily navigate your information.

The other major improvement is in writing. Word and other word processors have minimal editing and searching capabilities. And most of what they have is focused on editing format, and simple search and replace. Why not include all the powerful text editing capabilities of vi or emacs? They use basically the same concepts, but different commands to do them. Include both. For all the wonders of the GUI interface in general, when you’re typing you need two hands. Unless you happen to be a motie, you don’t have a third hand available to use a mouse. Building a comprehensive set of keystroke commands in allow you to keep typing.

The most powerful writing tools ever developed are the dictionary, the thesaurus and Google. Word 2003 finally made one of these directly available – right click on a word, and synonyms appear write there in the context menu. (I didn’t know about this until I actually looked, after I got the idea myself. At least they got something right.) But all of this should be available. Right click on a word, and the dictionary definition should appear in the context menu. Along with synonyms, antonyms, related words, and so on. Select a word or phrase, and right click to dump that into Google search as a search string. Dump the results into a new text nugget for later consideration. Build in writing and research tools. Templates for references and citations. Writer’s thesauri. Quotation libraries.

Right from the interface, you should be able to search the software’s onboard libraries of dictionary and thesaurus entries, quotes, grammar rules, and so on. You should also be able to search all of the text nuggets in your current project, and all your other projects. The search engine should be more powerful than the basic search in Word – something more along the lines of the grep tool from the UNIX world. Full on regular expression searching, once you get the hang of it, is very powerful. And finally, you should be able to search the web. Google is currently the best tool for that, and most people don’t use it to it’s full capacity. You could embed some of the more abstruse search capabilities of Google directly into Octopus’ search tool.

Once you have finished your creation, simply select the nuggets that you wish to include in your final draft. Octopus will convert those into a single file readable by Word, WordPerfect, PageMaker or any other software so that you can add the formatting before sending it off. That’s what those applications are good for – not for the process of creation.

Octopus thus has two key advantages over any other word processing application. First, it manages the totality of information connected with your project. All of the information, text, data that you have gathered is almost automatically organized in an easy to use structure. And Octopus’ interface allows you to quickly, intuitively and easily navigate that structure to locate the information you need, when you need it without interrupting the creative process.

Second, it offers powerful tools to manipulate and search the text as you create it. The tools of UNIX text editors like vi or emacs are available as keystroke commands. Regular expression searches of your data, and Google-style searches on the internet are available with a single click. Links between different nuggets, and the information within them are easily created with a single click and point. Built in dictionaries and thesauri display definitions and synonyms with a single click. You don’t have to leave what you’re doing to find the information you need.

I write professionally, creating software manuals, process documentation and so on for IT projects. On the side, I write screenplays, short stories, and novels that are getting almost readable. I also write non-fiction history. Every one of these projects would be made easier with software on these lines. Technical writers, authors, scholars, historians, scientists, journalists, and screenwriters could all use software like this. I described my idea to a developer friend of mine, and he said it would be very useful in organizing code and development projects. Anytime you need to not merely write, but keep track of what you write, the Octopus would be invaluable.

If any of you are developers (Ross…) I will work with you to develop this. Productivity software doesn’t have the same kind of overhead as games. No graphics except for making the UI slick. (Very slick.) Mostly, it’s just code. It could be done, and a lot of the tools are already out there, they just haven’t been assembled. If it were done right, this could be a hit. Because it would be useful, and cool.

In an article entitled, "Gamers turn cities into a battleground," the New Scientist explores the possibilities now unfolding in the world of urban gaming. Urban gaming makes use of cell phones, GPS and other technological gimcrackery to create virtual games played in actual meatspace. It's a fascinating article, and evidently some serious skull sweat has been expended to develop something that I have no interest in whatsoever. Undoubtedly, thousands will soon thrill to the prospects of playing a spy in a game based in DC, and I will have one more thing to contend with on my commute home. As if the tourons weren't bad enough.

However one aspect of this urban gaming seems rather disturbing and frankly, fraught with peril:

Games console makers are also embracing the trend. Portable console maker Gizmondo is soon to launch Colors, a gangland game where players play a conventional arcade game to earn credits and money. These are then used to buy turf in the real world - Soho in London, say. Walk into a Soho cafe and attempt to play Colors, and the GPS embedded in the console might tell you you're playing on another gang's patch, and you need to beat them in a virtual fight to claim the turf and continue.

How long do you think - in hours - after the launch of this game before someone gets knifed?

An Australian Journalist was released by terrorists after they confirmed his identity using Google. Apparently, what they found on the internet convinced his captors that he was not working for the CIA or an American contractor.

Nerd alert: This is an idea that I wanted to put in a public place, for reference!

One of the most common schemes on the big bad internet is called a phish. I'm sure you've received them -- it's an email that says something along the lines of "famous organization X would like you to confirm your account information, please click on this link and enter your credit card, etc". They're a pretty huge problem, and a lot of web users have been caught unaware, which is absolutely not their fault. It can be very difficult for even an experienced web user to verify that a given web page really comes from the entity described in the contents. Various web browser bugs have contributed to this, over time.

As a general rule, you should never click on a link in an email and enter any important information in the resulting forms. We all break this from time to time; as the schemes become more and more sophisticated, even an experienced user might get fooled.

So here's my idea. Credit card numbers, social security numbers, and often bank account numbers are unusual. They follow well known patterns. If you enter a credit card number that is off-by-one, it will often be rejected by a site because it failed to pass validation.

To increase security, we modify the browser to do the following: If the contents of any input field look like a credit card number (or social security number, or expiry date), we do not submit that information to the web site unless certain conditions are met. Conditions can include presence of a secure connection for the frame containing the edit fields as well as the target of the form submit; presence of the target ip address in a well-known database of acceptable sites, certified by credit card companies; presence of the site in a list of sites personalized for that user.

Credit card numbers can be broken up into multiple fields within the HTML. We check for this by combining all fields to see what's present. Further, we check all fields on the page, whether they have been submitted or not -- this prevents use of scripting languages to extract and encode information entered in one field and supply it to another.

This guides a user towards well-known payee sites, but still allows them to enter their own. When they do enter their own payee, we can thoroughly warn them that what they are doing is dangerous. We can also submit the IP address of the payee web site to credit card companies, so they know which sites are accepting credit card numbers.

I think this scheme is, if not bulletproof, pretty good protection against most phishing scams. It takes a measure of judgement out of the hands of the user and makes an evil site operator jump through quite a few hoops. If nothing else, it would likely result in a dramatic drop in the number of successful phishes.

If you have need to use a laptop in a sly, sub-rosa fashion, here is the perfect accessory for you:

A laptop-holding protective pizza box. Hand made in London! 

This should be right up Ross' ally - software and economics. A fascinating read.

LOOSE wire quotes Microsoft's and Yahoo's answer to questions about their use of email content to deliver "targetted" advertising. My thought of the day is this: google is big. Microsoft is big. The various content-oriented ad companies seem to be pretty capable.

Why doesn't google allow me to set ad preferences? I am fifty times more likely to click an ad for, say, a computer component, than I am for Sean Hannity's latest campfire-starter. Why doesn't the google toolbar, in particular, do this? (By the way, if you use IE, you need the google toolbar; perfect popup blocking).

I have no problems with ads being on the sites I visit. The reason their click through rates are so low is that they keep showing me stupid ads for crap I am not interested in . Sometime in the year 2029 this is going to sink in for these idiots.

So how do we fix this? Simple. Every PC in the universe, practically, has Flash on it. So let's start there, as a tech base. "Generic" advertisers (those who are paid by others to show ads on their site, who do not direct content), simply insert a link to a little Flash code, wherever they want an ad. That Flash code can connect to a server and pull in generic ads, or do content-driven advertising. So far so good. The bottom of that little Flash ad can contain "Interested" and "Not Interested" buttons, which can be used to influence further ad delivery. It can also link to a more complex UI (possibly manifested right inline), that allows more precise selection of general topic areas.

None of this particularly requires Flash, of course, but it can be made very unobtrusive by using it (as in, no web page alterations). None of this is particularly original, either. I am just completely mystified as to why a user's basic interests are not taken into account, and the only conclusion I can come up with is that it's been poor usability and functionality that has prevented it from really taking off.

Imagine how much more effective advertising would be if it operated the same way that Amazon's ratings do. You can click on "I already own it", or "not interested", and have a much higher chance of seeing something that you ARE interested in...

Took a day off yesterday from my real job to finish work on a side job. Once that was done, and before I started another side job, I decided the time was ripe for frivolity. And since payday was nigh, and I needed a new printer cartridge, and soon found myself in my local electronics retailery, I decided not to leave without a new game.

I opted for Aliens vs. Predators: Extinction , a real time strategy game that combines the carnage of the associated flicks with the frustration of units wandering about will nilly, characteristic of RTS. Not so much strategy, some tactics, but there's not alot of true command here so the tactics really don't go much beond ensuring a good mix of trigger-pullers and support people. At least for the Colonial Marines; I've not tried the other species yet. And more often than not, the fight is over before I can really see it all on the screen- the action's just that fast. One neat touch: I saw this in the tutorial- the predators get extra points for collecting skulls. All the sounds effects are true to the flicks, inluding the pulse rifles, the motion trackers, the Alien screeching and bursting, and yes the ripping out of skulls.

But before I left the store my eyes happened to fall on the Midway Arcade Treasures compilation. It was cheap, and I had to have it. Again, the sound effects were dead on, just as I remember them, and curiously it was the sound more than the look that really opened the nostalgia floodgates. I remember what people wore ca 1980-1984, the sights, the smells of the arcade... it was really a whole lot of fun. You know the best part though? Being able to continue at will. It's like having unlimited quarters, my dream when I was 12 years old. Even though I didn't necessarily need a reminder of how much I suck at "Defender", it was kinda neat to be reminded that I do.

Back in the day, when I was a Mac user, there was a game that I loved. When I switched to Windows, I thought that I would never play the game again. But a chance encounter in the Safeway led to a reunion... 

I was walking down the frozen foods aisle when I saw a guy wearing a shirt with this logo:

That rang a bell, but for a few seconds I couldn't place it. Then I remembered! 

Escape Velocity! Escape Velocity was a simple, yet addictive game. You start out with a small shuttle, with little cargo space and virtually no combat ability. But, if you're clever, you can make money through sharp dealing and avoid being killed or captured by pirates. You can use the money to upgrade your little shuttle, or save for a new and better spaceship. There were hundreds of planets, the Rebellion and the Confederation, pirates, aliens and bars.

All of what I just described would probably keep you occupied for a few hours. But the beauty of EV was the storylines embedded in an otherwise fairly simple yet wide open trading and fighting game. These kept your interest. It was a near perfect balance between the freedom to do what you want, and good narrative. A very clever game that focused on playability rather than snazzy graphics and eye candy.

For years, Ambrosia software vowed that they just wouldn't make a windows version of the game. But the guy in the shirt informed me that they had a new version, and that it had a windows port. One of the reasons (along with tax preparation) that I did little or no blogging over the weekend was the fact that this game now resides on my computer. So, for a good free (well, shareware) game, go right here and download it. 
 

Well, isn't this just the shit?

Victorinox, they of the massively accessorized cutlery, have teamed with Swiss tech company to offer a version of the Swiss Army knife featuring a USB flash memory stick, in 64MB or 128MB flavors.

In ten years I'm going to read this post and fall into peals of laughter over the tininess of 128 megabytes, much as I now scoff at the 1GB hard drive that was the SHIT back in 1995 but now isn't even big enough to run a Microsoft OS. But for the time being, look on in wonder at the utter sweetness of it all.

There may be some proof that Microsoft is behind SCO's recent raising of capital. SCO has been trying to suppress Linux usage through a series of highly doubtful IP lawsuits. But...a while back they were suddenly funded to the tune of $50 million. There is nothing that this company can conceivably do that merits that money, so many of us have been wondering about the thinking.

"I realize the last negotiations are not as much fun, but Microsoft will have brough in $86 million for us including Baystar. The next deal we should be able to get from $16-20, but it will be brutial as it is for
go to makerket work and some licences. I know we can do this , if everyone stays on board and still wants to do a deal. I just want to get this deal and move away from corp dev and out into the marketing andfield dollars....In this market we can get $3-5 million in incremental deals and not have to go through the gauntlet which will get tougher next week with the SR VP's."

If this memo is true, it all makes sense. The $50 million was nothing to Microsoft, who wants Linux damaged. The investors who supplied it are...not interested in their investment...

Is this anti-trust? Will this White House investigate Microsoft?

I note with a little sadness that Uru Live is disappearing, before it was even born. The Myst series of games have always represented the high-water mark for graphics and visual adventure games. Uru Live was an interesting effort...an attempt to bring this kind of game into the online massive multiplayer online space.

The company spent a ton of money to build this thing. The results, visually, were pretty astonishing. Great conceptual art, excellent engine...a lot of good ingredients were there. The best moments in Uru were "vista moments", where you would come across some new area, and be simply blown away by the beauty or concept of the thing.

So what went wrong? More than anything, I think, the problem was the underlying thinking about the game that was being played. Why do we play games, or read books, or watch movies? To see things that are beautiful; to see "new" things. We can do it to learn, to interact...or to compete.

Uru never had any sense of competition. One could be built, but it did not yet exist. In fact, Uru didn't really seem to have much of a sense of gaming at all. Clever puzzles that required cooperation could have been designed, and weren't. That really left only exploration. Uru Live itself never delivered that, either...the official version never came to be.

It strikes me that the marketing of this thing was screwed up pretty badly...to get the "buzz" you need to get an MMORPG started, you need a good burst of players. The single player game was fine, but it followed the general sales pattern of every single player game: Big initial sales, then a steady decline. MMORPGs are all about maintaining the franchise. You have this initial burst of players, and you need to retain them.

Uru Live didn't exist, so there was nothing to keep player mind share.

What's more, it was painfully clear in the live "prologue" that whatever plans there were for the online component simply hadn't worked out. If Live was somewhere near a true release, vastly more of the game should have been working during the Christmas timeframe. It might not have been ready, but it should have been dramatically apparent where it was all going. It was not.

I'd conclude that management realized that the Live part just wasn't going to work, for many reasons. They decided to milk the cash they could out of the single player version, and so they have. This is a sensible thing to do. There seems to be a lot of content that's been prepared for Live; this will be released as expansion packs for the original game. Again, this makes financial sense. For purchasers of the game it makes sense too -- and is probably less expensive than a monthly fee in any case.

Bold experiments happen, and sometimes they don't work. I hope the team is proud of their successes. They've really raised the bar in some areas. Deeper planning in the actual social/online game component might have given the project legs.