The Betacantrips Travelogue

Seen on Planet Debian: a nice writeup of a debugging session with a user watching over his shoulder.

One thing to note about user empowerment: Fred isn’t a tech geek, but he can be curious about the technology he relies on if the situation is right. He was with me through the whole process, didn’t get antsy, and never tried to get me to "just fix it" while he did something else. I like that, and wish i got to have that kind of interaction more (though i certainly don’t begrudge people the time if they do need to get other things done). I was nervous about breaking out wireshark and scaring him off with it, but it turned out it actually was a good conversation starter about what was actually happening on the network, and how IP and TCP traffic worked.

Seen on LWN: a fascinating article about static analysis done using GCC plugins.

There are a few interesting plugins in the works. One of them is the LLVM compiler, which can be plugged in to perform the back-end functions for GCC. Another is milepost, which uses a brute-force approach to figure out the optimal settings of the command-line flags for a specific body of code. Then, there are "the hydras," which are Taras’s work. These plugins take an interesting approach, in that the actual analysis work is done in JavaScript scripts. The idea was originally seen as amusing – "wouldn’t it be fun to put Spidermonkey into GCC?" – but it has actually worked out well. JavaScript is a relatively nice, concise language which makes it easy to implement the needed capabilities.

On CNN, there’s an interview with the creator of a project called Blippy. The purpose of the project is to post credit card transactions onto a Twitter feed. You associate a card with your Blippy account, and then every transaction becomes public.

Some highlights:

CNN: Maybe we should just start with a question from one of our Twitter followers: What’s the point of Blippy?

Kaplan: Without getting too philosophical, I’ll just start at the beginning. The big answer is: We don’t know, which I think is funny but is also indicative of what we’re trying to do.

But I’m pretty far out there. People were saying well, "What if I bought a dildo or something and it showed up?" So I actually went to a store called "Does Your Mother Know." I said first of all, the store has to have a name like that so everybody knows what it is. So I found a store with a name like that in the Castro section of San Francisco.

So I went to that store and I bought a sexy gift for my wife, and of course it showed up on the site. And it was funny! I didn’t really care.

Fascinating volley in the exchange of what privacy means in the digital age..

Seen on JWZ: a short story described as "The Rapture of the Nerds from the perspective of a non-nerd", The Gentle Seduction.

I luuurrrvve A Softer World: episode 512.

Seen via crystallabs on Twitter: an article about Kickstarting your indie game.

"Crowd funding of the nature espoused by Kickstarter is a relatively new and unknown business model, and with such things, I’m somewhat realising that it’s best to start small and gradually ramp up to a larger scale. That most of the successful game projects I see on the site are in the low thousands seems to confirm this hypothesis, at least at this present time. I think it’s really a matter of how big one’s fan base is, since the vast majority of my backers are people I already know, whether in person or online, or at least people who have played and enjoyed one or more of my previous games. As such, I can see this fan base growing over time, as current fans spread the word to their friends about my work and they become fans themselves, but as we know, these things don’t always happen immediately."

One thing I would like to see more of in this kind of discussion is the relationship of patrons with the finished product. Most Kickstarter projects offer finished copies to their backers, but it seems to me that if I helped fund it, my "ownership stake" ought to cover making sure I can always play it, or play it on my platform of choice — in other words, source code. Of course, this cuts off business models based on getting funding from Kickstarter and then selling the product afterwards.

Of course, I think Kickstarter IS a really exciting development for the funding of art, and I’m really curious to see what will happen with it.

A neat review of the Pleco iPhone App on Sinosplice.

This is a big one. Pleco for iPhone has very impressive handwriting recognition. You really need to watch the video to see how it works, but the two-finger swipe is genius. Pleco has definitely improved upon Apple’s handwriting input, and it’s at least as good as nciku’s, as well.

There are also images of "having fun with it":

An interesting article on Slashdot about the predictive power of early reviews.

‘We now know that a remarkable percentage of consumers and businesses decided to spurn Windows Vista and stay with XP. But did the reviews of Vista serve as an early warning that it had major problems? I looked back at the evaluations in nine major publications and found that they expressed some caution–but on the whole, they were far from scathing. Some were downright enthusiastic.’

As futurists, we have to re-evaluate what we thought would happen if we are to get better at predicting. My feeling is that by and large, the things we expect to happen do not happen, and the things that take us by storm are the things we never saw coming. But that’s just a gut intuition.

This leaves aside the larger question of whether Vista sucks as bad as people feel it does (as is discussed in the Slashdot comments). What’s interesting is that nobody could have predicted the user outcry based on the press — maybe even based on the quality of the software itself!

Slashdot has an article about a side-effect of business in the virtual space.

‘As the use of virtual environments for business purposes grows, enterprises need to understand how employees are using avatars in ways that might affect the enterprise or the enterprise’s reputation,’ said James Lundy, managing vice president at Gartner, in a statement. ‘We advise establishing codes of behavior that apply in any circumstance when an employee is acting as a company representative, whether in a real or virtual environment.’

Seen via the Crystal Labs Twitter feed: a brief list of indie games funding development on Kickstarter.

Unfortunately Kickstarter has no tagging mechanism, and its search feature shows the first 16 results only, so it’s pretty hard to search for indie games on it.