19 January 2012, 0:29 UTCGraphical programming languages on tablets?
I wonder if graphical programming languages might find a use case on tablets.
Inspired by seeing Turtle Art at the OLPC desk yesterday, with a touch screen on the OLPC prototype, followed shortly by someone else's tablet PC (actually an Asus Transformer). The juxtaposition hit me…
On desktop computers, it's always been ultimately more convenient to just type it in on a keyboard. Graphical programming languages have been tried, but the disadvantages have always ended up outweighing the advantages, with very few exceptions (such as the Turtle Art).
On tablets, though, typing is always at least a bit of a hassle, while dragging icons around the screen is the native mode of interaction. The balance might well turn out the other way.
I may have to see if I can put something together and see what happens :-)
[permalink] ‣ keywords: programming, idea
10 January 2012, 7:56 UTCThe Silk Railroad
Afghanistan is apparently planning to build a standard gauge railway across the north of the country, connecting to the Iranian system (which is contiguous with Europe) on the west and all the way to the Tajik border on the east. Meanwhile, China has built out its railway system (also standard gauge) out to Kashgar about a decade ago. The gap between the two is shrinking toward mere hundreds of kilometres (admittedly of rather mountainous country).
London to Beijing, no break-of-gauge.
Well, we'll see.
Would be interesting, though. It would go via Iran and bypass Russia. Plenty of room for speculation on the geopolitical implications and complications...
10 January 2012, 6:41 UTC20 FOSS applications for Education
20 FOSS applications for Education by Donna Benjamin and the team at Creative Contingencies.
[permalink] ‣ keywords: link, FOSS
6 January 2012, 7:25 UTCOn #riotwombles
Some time ago, someone somewhere remarked that #riotwombles may be more scary than #londonriots...
After all, hooligans rioting and looting is scary for the bystanders, but it doesn't threaten the established order as such. Governments have techniques for dealing with riots. Citizens self-organising clean-up rotas, on the other hand, does threaten the established order. If citizens can do that, what use local councils? What use governments in general, if a Twitter hashtag can do their job? That's the beginnings of a real threat to the established order (obviously it's not quite up to replacing all the functions of government yet). Maybe the new, replacement order will be better, maybe it will be worse, but it will not be the old order. That's scary for those in the old order in particular, but also to everyone, since change always carries risk to the population at large (maybe the new order will be worse).
5 January 2012, 11:52 UTCFOSS is political
Free and Open Source Software is quite political in some respects; it engenders radically different relationship between people compared with proprietary software.
Proprietary software is centrist, created (typically) by a multinational company (MS, Apple, to some extent Google). In the language of the day, it's made by the 1%, and the 99% can affect it very little. For now, the effects have been subtle and obscure — things like NSAKEY, DRM, the restrictions of the Apple app store — but they may well be bell-weathers, signalling more substantial effects down the road. After all, could not a SOPA-like arrangement apply to operating systems?
FOSS is a lot more egalitarioan in terms of power. Sure, you need skill to affect it — but that's all you need. The organisations and leaders that exist do so at the sufferance of the community; if the community feels they're not doing a good job, the leaders are replaced, sometimes with breath-taking swiftness (as Oracle found out some months ago with OpenOffice.org) and with very little impact on the software or everyday users. It's made for the 100%, by the 100%.
(There's also the copying thing, and RMS was right about that, but that's minor if this is in fact the scheme of things.)
[permalink] ‣ keyword: FOSS
14 December 2011, 23:49 UTCScientific Consensus
There's nothing scientific about scientific consensus.
Scientists have no use for a formal consensus... scientists work on the edges where the consensus is in the process of being formed or reformed. Actual written-down consensus basically consists of introductory textbooks, where it's generally left up to the self-discipline of the authors not to insert (too much) of their own take on less-settled questions, plus tedious hair-splitting rules about naming newly-discovered items (species, asteroids).
Engineers (in the case of medicine, physicians) have a consensus, but they don't do science — engineers work in terms of known principles, not new discoveries.
Traditionally, getting information from the scientists to the engineers was slow and haphazard.
Things like the Cochrane Collaboration are an attempt to get information faster from the scientists to the engineers (physicians), but it's a new endeavour, itself poorly studied and characterised, and generally concerns itself purely with medicine. That's great — I want to live forever — but it doesn't really help with other important questions, like the climate.
My impression is that given the degree to which the question of global warming has been politicised, it is impossible for our currently-primitive tools (systematic reviews and the like) to objectively discern what the scientific consensus is.
Which is a pity, because it's quite possible that something is there, and that something could be done, but we have no reliable way of knowing what or how much. All we can do is guess, as with the recent Clean Energy legislation, and hope our guesses are in the right ballpark.
8 December 2011, 2:05 UTCRipple vs the functions of money
One interesting aspect of the Ripple system is that of the three or four functions of money, it really only functions as a medium of exchange. The other functions (unit of account, store of value and standard of deferred payment) aren't really covered at all, nor considered in its design.
Of course, traditional money is also not doing so well on all those functions; with the usual practice of aiming for mild, steady inflation, traditional money isn't much good at all as a store of value and needs to be re-calculated to be useful as a unit of account (adjusted for inflation for past amounts, discounted for future amounts) for all but the most immediate of transactions. Despite traditional money not being directly useful for those functions, they still affect its usefulness as a medium of exchange, so that areas or communities with a lack (or surplus) of money in its storage function suffer suboptimal results in the medium-of-exchange function — sometimes to the extent of engendering local or community currencies in an effort to patch over the mismatch.
I wonder to what extent it would be desirable and/or possible to de-couple one or more of these functions.
[permalink] ‣ keyword: ripple
8 December 2011, 1:08 UTCRegistered for linux.conf.au 2012
Just registered for the linux.conf.au conference in Ballarat... Looking forward to it!
[permalink] ‣ keyword: LCA2012
29 November 2011, 0:05 UTCsvn vs bzr
One important difference between svn and bzr is ease of setup. With svn, to start a new project, you're always messing about on the server, which probably feels a bit excessive when you're talking about one file in a directory (two filles, counting Makefile). With bzr, to start a new project, you do "bzr init". That's it, you can start working. You can set up the server stuff and the shared repository and the system of branches later, when the project grows enough to warrant it.
Thus, with bzr, one is more likely to be actually using it when it turns out to be needed.
[permalink] ‣ keyword: programming
18 November 2011, 1:06 UTCIdea: self-driving toy car
I wonder if one could make a toy car that's self-driving, so that it goes around a play-carpet with roads obeying all the road rules... The technology is probably just about there, it'd be more than an Arduino project but well within current capability to do it all on-board (or you can use wi-fi and off-board processing).
[permalink] ‣ keyword: idea
12 November 2011, 10:51 UTCStructured Procrastination
10 November 2011, 4:56 UTCThe Social Graph...
20 September 2011, 8:43 UTCNFS setup
20 September 2011, 4:46 UTCFreight in the post-peak-oil world
16 September 2011, 13:05 UTCA couple of links
12 September 2011, 2:45 UTCA couple of thoughts
9 August 2011, 4:40 UTCUS health-care — the elephant in the room
7 August 2011, 8:30 UTCSweet potato peanut stew (recipe link)
7 August 2011, 4:12 UTCBread-maker cake recipe
13 July 2011, 2:24 UTCImperative-looking syntax for Mercury?
11 June 2011, 8:16 UTCSlow-cooker chicken recipe
5 June 2011, 13:56 UTCCitizen-individuals vs citizen-households
30 May 2011, 12:00 UTCWhat is science?
23 May 2011, 10:34 UTCmechanism vs policy
23 May 2011, 9:41 UTCDistributed Timestamping: bitcoin vs ripple
20 May 2011, 4:48 UTCpfh's autism hypothesis
26 April 2011, 12:41 UTCProgramming for Non-programmers
21 April 2011, 8:18 UTCFacebook misleading UI
26 February 2011, 10:29 UTCBitcoin founder advantage
28 January 2011, 9:56 UTCPiracy will be a bizarre concept
