depth first search

I know you probably don’t care about what goes on inside my head most of the time, but here’s a taste anyway. I was rehashing the iPad in my head while perusing my iPod Touch and thinking about the bezel size — a subject of some criticism and a certain amount of defensive posturing:

People are complaining about the wide bezel around the display, but without that, where would your thumbs go? You don’t want your thumb that’s holding the device to cover on-screen content or register as a touch. Trust me, it’s just right.

For some reason I really hate bezels. Well, maybe I don’t hate bezels so much as I admire places where we both expect them and they are somehow missing. The aesthetic I’m after is the infinity edge pool. This is a good example of the kind of random stuff I think about for no reason. Anyway what are the user interface implications of a bezel-less iPad?

If you’re worried about touch, then the solution is easy: no touch sensors in the “bezel” region. Or, better yet, allow touch in the bezel region for touch commands that originate outside the bezel. Even better, ignore touches that result from holding the device. (This assumes that it is possible to classify touches into support and intentional types.) As for obscuring the screen, the right kind of design guidelines could deal with a lot of the problem there. The problem of margin maintenance would move from the hardware to the app designer, shifting a bit of work. But the gain in real estate and the aesthetic power of the bezel-less screen would be huge!

This editorial on Microsoft in today’s NYTimes is interesting on many levels. Part elegy, part exposition, even the choice to run an editorial of this sort is in many ways a bit of a puzzle to me. I suppose I’m too far down the Ubuntu rabbit hole to remember how common Microsoft is for most people. In the eternal war between Coke and Pepsi, I’m drinking RC cola in the corner like some kind of deviant.

I don’t really disagree with anything in the editorial, but there is one sin of omission that is worth noting. Microsoft had (and may still have) a reputation among entrepreneurs as a place startups go to die the brutal death of being copied into obscurity instead of acquired. This led to a situation where people running startups would accept invitations to speak at Microsoft and end up giving comically (and purposely) misleading presentations about the various ideas they were trying to develop. (Compare this with the kind of talks given at Google, who’ve shown a real willingness to spend some serious money in pursuit of good ideas.)

This attitude and reputation extended Microsoft’s own internal problems with innovation out into the community at large. Microsoft was for a key period of time a cash rich but thrifty intellectual property aggressor. Change meant a threat to market dominance in the same way that internal innovation created threats to the working order of various company power silos. That’s probably why when web 2.0 became viable, Microsoft had such a small part in it. It’s also probably why Apple has such an easy time hitting out of the park on a regular basis. Microsoft’s business model created such a rut that just getting out of it was enough to guarantee intellectual capture among technological elites.

Unfortunately, I don’t see how Microsoft can change. They make a lot of money bringing poor user experiences to people on a daily basis, yet their mindshare among process oriented business people remains high. They’ve been doing anti-competition so long they’ve forgotten what real competition looks like (say, for example, that between Apple and Google).

• Ok. So web 3.0 is hardware. #
• Eagerly awaiting the iPad edition of "Will it blend?" #

I think creative people ought to avoid getting bent out of shape the second the sturm und drang of capitalism interferes with their cash flow. In many ways, the attacks on Amazon are getting so much purchase because many authors have sandboxes and and are not afraid of using them.

But here is another view. Amazon is facing serious competition in almost every business unit. Macmillan, on the other hand, is a constitutionally mandated and congressionally protected monopolist in the sense that they have the exclusive right to sell certain content.

Yet Jane Smith, Amazon engineer is not taking to the internet to whine about how her livelihood is imperiled because Macmillan is charging too much for e-books in an environment where fewer people are reading paid content, even though her personal security is possibly in greater jeopardy (iPad anyone?). Instead all we hear is John Smith, mid-list Macmillan author, describing how evil and anti-competitive Amazon is.

Look, the authors will be fine (at least modulo any future societal decline in reading), and if they turn out not to be, it won’t be because of Amazon.

Update: Consider.

The entire prefix-i naming scheme is silly in a way that all really excellent marketing is silly. The iPad device itself is not silly, and in many ways proves that freedom zero does not matter, nor do any of the inter-operable hardware or software ecosystems that drove Wintel.

What matters is design, capability, and price. The iPad is designed and priced to dominate. Apple is pushing out a premium product into a market dominated by un-premium products. Users will be driven by the need not just to purchase, but re-purchase leases on all kinds of intellectual content just to run an iPad instead of a Kindle or netbook.  Apple is hoping to expand on their virtuous cycle of content distribution and content creation. The upfront cost of the iPad may be lower than most estimates, but the tail cost is the kind of thing that can bankrupt a poor graduate student like me.

Freedom is always subordinate to incentive. Apple has captured mindshare and profits by offering a closed, curated technological experience. This will be great for content providers (DRM has a compelling foothold in closed ecosystems) with the exception of certain longstanding dynamics that have more to do with the idea of the Internet itself than any particular mechanism for fairly pricing intellectual property.

• I'm shuffling though SXSW showcases now that my portable music player has enough room to store them. #
• I need to do my annual RSS feed pruning of stupid but addictive feeds. Political blogs are right out. #
• Note to self: do not confuse dot and outer products. #
• So is California falling into the ocean or what? #
• @CBStober No, just a bunch of Twitter chatter about rain in San Francisco. in reply to CBStober #

The shorthand “WTF” is common among developers. It does not actually stand for “worse than failure” but I run a clean ship here people. [Hint: let's just say that WTF is a somewhat crude interrogative. Sample usage: "Dude, WTF?" or, if you prefer, comic form.]

I just spent two days looking for a bug in my code whose fix was simply replacing

A = A + np.dot(features, features - env.gamma * newfeatures)

with

A = A + np.outer(features, features - env.gamma * newfeatures)

In my defense, I didn’t spend two full days looking for this mistake, but the process was so demoralizing that I couldn’t find much willpower to do productive work when I wasn’t actively debugging.

Takeaway lesson, triple check your linear algebra. If you get something wrong, you’re likely to have a hard time figuring out why, or worse, you may mistake the junk for the correct answer. [Aside: note that I was really burned by the fact that '+' is overloaded in this case, and so is valid for both matrix, matrix addition and scalar, matrix addition. Despite the scorch marks, I do like this feature.]

My recent tweet about combining Emacs and Python generated a pointer to Pymacs. Clearly I have a penchant for wishing for things that already exist. Is there a rule for that?

I first heard about the church bombings in Malaysia on NPR a few days ago. The story, which is still not at all clear, involves Muslim and Malay opposition to the use of the the Malay word for God in newsletters for Christian churches. As I understand it, this particular term has been in common use among Christians for many years in that country. The transition from status quo of peace to a status quo of violence is so surreal that  I suspect some kind of tail wagging the dog style actions on the part of the government (speculation that NPR took pains to keep out of the story, but Al Jazeera doesn’t hesitate to air in the linked clip).

Even worse, maybe we have some kind of clandestine effort to destabilize the region or the balance of tensions between Christians and Muslims in predominantly Muslim countries. This seems like a strange story any way you slice it.

The next is this highly understated announcement by Google that cleverly accuses China of state sponsored cyberspace attacks on American corporations. Google’s response is to stop censoring their search engine and possibly shut down Google’s Chinese operations. This strikes me as the wrong response. For one, I’m not sure Google has the kind of dominance in China that it has in the United States, so as a practical matter, leaving the market may only generate  something of a “so what?” amongst the Chinese user base. If Google really wants to engage the Chinese on the issue of human rights, why give up such a valuable foothold for conducting counter espionage against the Chinese authority? Seems like Google is throwing away a valuable set of tools in exchange for some kind of glitzy PR.

• What if instead of LISP+C, Emacs was written in Python+C? #