Guardian of the Non Sequitur

Wired Magazine had a very interesting article about the current activity in driving automation.  Written by Tom Vanderbilt, it reviews the large leaps that have been made in the field in the past decade.  It’s amazing that we really are so close, so much that it will be a legislative problem over the coming decade to catch up with the state of the technology.

On a week that my mother bought what she expects to be the last car she owns, not expecting to be allowed to drive (by me) after she’s 80, it looks like she might be able to buy a car that (mostly if not entirely) drives for her by that time.

Reading over the article, which is quite long, thorough, and awesome, I had several thoughts on the future of the technology and implications.

Stop n’ Go Traffic

I was reminded this week of an awesome example of the emergent nature of stop n’ go traffic in a non-bottleneck/accident environment.  A video of a circle of cars that begin equal spaced but because the nature of humans begins to undulate.

One would hope that the automation of driving would put an end to the annoying of such.  Prediction 1: I think it won’t (without legislative force or technical cooperation).  I suspect that the varying granulation of the differing softwares among cars, and also likely setting of comfortable follow distances will cause the same emergent fluctuation of speeds.  The best way to counter this, in my opinion, would be to recognize a stop n’ go situation and limit the allowed acceleration after a slow down.  Just a critical mass of cars taking that approach could cause the behavior to not manifest. Continue reading

I decided to perform a bunch of routine maintenance on my computer in preparation for installing the new OS update: Lion. I had already started downloading the 4th beta release of the iOS tools, and that was taking hours.  So, when that finally finished, I moved upstairs to connect my backup drive to the computer to sync the backups before I installed a new OS.

My backup drive has been filling up and deleting old backs lately.  Not really a problem, but it slows down backups.  So, I checked to see if there was anything I could clean off of there.  I noticed 3 and 4 year old backups of an older computer that I have already migrated important stuff off of (and now just runs my TV).  So, I “moved the files to the trashcan” which doesn’t actually delete files off a disk, then “emptied the trash” which does.

An hour and a half later I was still watching it count the files (350,000 at that point), it was well past midnight, i went to bed.  I checked and realized it was a 1 TB drive, so it definitely had lots of stuff that could be removed.  Upon awaking, it was still counting, but luckily finished soon thereafter.  Ending at 3, 696, 106 files to be deleted.  I know because it stopped to warn me that some of the files were locked and asked if those should be deleted.

So, it started actually deleting them sometime after 10am and finished a bit before 7pm.  (114 files deleted per second)  Freed up about 400GB on my 1TB drive.  Or if you include the accounting before the deleting 1am – 7pm = 20 hours (52 files a second).

In the mean time I took my jar of change to the grocery store, dumped it all into the Coinstar machine and ended up with a $24.01 credit for the iTunes store – that’ll mostly pay for the $30 OS X Lion upgrade and it cleaned out my change jar.  One über-corroded penny rejected.

Takeaway: i need to do maintenance on the backup disk more often.

p.s. i googled “terabyte” to see what the most odd image i could find – that’s the one above.  Available as wallpaper, a hoodie, and a mug, just click on the image.

p.p.s. “hoodie” so hipster my spellcheck doesn’t know it

Across my twitter stream recently came the following casual missive:

Facebook almost seem to make a point of making their app worse & worse with each “update”. – curlydena

Just a regular user of Facebook (I assume) making a very relevant observation.  I don’t follow curlydena (but i think i’d like to drink with her); it was retweeted by Damian, an iOS developer I met over beers and pool at WWDC 2009.  I’m sure it resonated deeply with him as it does with me.

It’s a truism in software that the more time and incremental development goes into a project the more fragile and ill-designed it becomes.  There comes a point that it’s worth it to dump the entire code base (or the majority of it, if you have well defined, implemented, and maintained abstractions).  Use the current project as a functional prototype and redesign/implement the product from scratch.

It’s hard to get middle and upper management to understand this.  The further away they are from being computer scientists the worse the problem is.

Apple is the only major software vendor that seems to appreciate this truism.  Time and time again they’ve reimplemented stuff from scratch and we are the beneficiaries of that.

It’s a lesson we can all benefit by remembering.  And perhaps Facebook should find a few good iOS developers (within or without) and reimplement their app from scratch.  (And ritually burn Three20 while they’re at it.)

art by fisher

I was listing to one of my regular podcasts on Saturday: 60-Second Science from Scientific American. [iTunes]  This particular snippet of science in the news was titled Box Jellyfish Eyes Aim at the Trees.  It seems that box jellyfish have 24 eyes, and four of them point above the water’s surface.  They use those four exclusively to navigate.  They live in mangrove swamps and use the tree limbs as navigation markers.

Box jellyfish, and most jellyfish, have minimal brains.  The multiple visual sensors allows less central processing by a brain able to pull out the variety of signals, redirect sensors to different targets when desired, and perhaps screen peripheral information to change task of a particular sensing organ.

For years, human language recognition tried to model language the way linguists understand it.  There were large breakthroughs in the area when massive computation became more available and we started treating it more like an engineering problem.  Solving the problem the way we thought we solved it seemed a good direction.  Early AI research has many similarities to this.

There have been a lot of robotic devices that have had one or two cameras for “eyes”, and we have done some work on image recognition from these.  Feeding this information (perhaps with other information from infrared or pressure sensors) to a central programming location.  Maybe an attempt to decentralize robot computation, and increase the number of sensors might lead to some interesting uses and solutions.

Just a thought.

I was working outside at 3622 Main this week, on a ladder, painting the trim on the windows I’ve been putting in.  I caught something out of the corner of my eye, a stalk on top of a car.  I initially suspected it was an art car, so glanced that way to see which one.  Instead, it was a Google Street View car.

Of course I couldn’t have been heroically lifting the glass into the window frames as I had been the previous day.  I was just painting them.  So, keep an eye on Street View and let me know when my back side shows up.

The New York Times was a bullet point in the iPad introduction.  The application they had already developed looked quite nice from a cursory glance, particularly with its lack of advertising.  The Apple Gazette recently discussed the pricing conundrum they are having at NYT.

There have also been rumors that most of the Times’ content is going to go back behind the pay wall.  Assuming that is the case, I think there’s an obvious strategy for moving forward with their iPad pricing.

Initial price: $10, and that covers 3 months of content.  Get everyone hooked!  After that start charging $10/month.  Also, strategize how you might include minor and strategic advertising content into the app.  Possibly set up a new pricing scheme for advert-less versions.

Also, make sure you build in a “you can’t buy next month’s content until you upgrade the app to the newest version available – it’s free”.  This would enable you to enforce any new restrictions you add to the app and keep the majority of your customers on the same version.

Of course, I would prefer if it were free.  But that’s not how businesses work.  If they keep the entry cost low enough, it might be enough to get me back into the daily habit of reading the newspaper again.