TedPage

I've recently been in a discussion on the Inkscape list about a potential feature for Inkscape. In the end, it doesn't look like it will be implemented as part of Inkscape. While I never wish to discourage a feature or a developer, it seems that in the end, the user must win. We can't overwrite user's files without warning them, and we can't significantly alter the way that output file formats work. Both are bad.

This morning I got some support from reading Jef Raskin:

The system should treat all user input as sacred and -- to paraphrase Asimov's first law of robotics, "A robot shall not harm a human, or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm" (Asimov 1977, p. 44). The first law of interface design should be: A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.
The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin, ACM Press 2000, p. 6

It is nice to have support in making a user decision from someone with such renown for user focused design.

posted on Tue, 30 Aug 2005 at 18:59 | permanent link

I read a BBC article about growing world inequality which is based on a report by the UN. I was interested in the statistics that they had in relation to a World Changing story talking about terrorism as class struggle (I can't find the link right now, sorry). Could we look at the increase of an inequality index and compare it to a terrorism one? Would there be a correlation?

So I went looking for the report. The report is here. But, you can't get it. You can pay $15 and they'll send you a printed copy, but there is no way to get a quick electronic copy. Fine.

I realized that all I really wanted was the numbers that they used, and I saw a link for a UN statistics site in my search for the original report. It looks like exactly what I need, but I can't get data out of it. You need a log in, an expensive login. So, in the end I didn't get the numbers I wanted and the UN remains an unapproachable ivory tower. I think that the UN should encourage individuals to be interested in this material, encourage them to use this data to understand the global situation. Perhaps that's why there is more global inequality, the data can only be used by those with a $150.

That all being said, the UN does have some data online. But it seems to be a small, well digested set.

posted on Fri, 26 Aug 2005 at 21:00 | permanent link

We spend so much time making sure that scripting works inside Inkscape that I don't think much about others using Inkscape inside scripts. That's what made this article in Wyneken Journal so interesting. They're using Inkscape to subsample bitmaps and make them higher resolution. Cool. Unfortunately that operation doesn't use any scripting. If it did you'd have a script calling Inkscape, calling a script, calling... Wyneken looks like an interesting program itself.

posted on Wed, 24 Aug 2005 at 17:46 | permanent link

Today Google released their new IM service, and it uses Jabber! I'm excited about a protocol that I really like getting a major corporate backer. Now, instead of trying to explain to people why they should be using Jabber, I can say "use Google IM." Which they understand much better.

That being said, it seems that Google has limited it so that you can't add contacts that aren't using GMail addresses also. This takes away one feature of Jabber that I really like, the ability to communicate with individual servers all over the Internet. I'm not sure if they're doing this as the service is still in beta, or they are serious about locking out other Jabber servers. It would be unfortunate if that was their long term objective.

They do mention on their website that they "want to work with other willing service providers to enable their users to communicate directly with Google Talk users." One could guess that these include Yahoo! and AIM. I think getting all of these parties to agree to let their IM clients talk is roughly equivalent to negotiating nuclear disarmament. If it happens, someone deserves the Internet equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize.

One funny (but reasonable) response to Google's IM was Miguel de Icaza announcing that he's using the service. In his entry he mentioned:

Please only request to be added if we have IMed, talked in person or emailed each other in the past.

Heh, I guess he is much more popular than I am, I have no need to worry about that.

posted on Wed, 24 Aug 2005 at 14:03 | permanent link

It was pointed out on the OCAL mailing list that the project is a few hundred items away from 5,000! This is awesome. So, I figure that if everyone who reads this blog creates a couple hundred items (hi, Dad!) we can reach that goal. I even made a logo for it, post it and encourage others to contribute too!

You can click on the image to get the SVG version. Then go here and submit your work!

posted on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 at 15:22 | permanent link

I just finished reading The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. The book explains superstring theory in a very readable way. There is no excess math, I can't think of a single equation, and there are clever analogies for everything that he explains. He does a wonderful job of bring superstring theory to a more general audience (including myself). In the end, I'm still not sold on string theory.

String theory starts out trying to solve a very difficult problem in a very elegant way. It says that while we can't really see it, all of the basic particles that we know of today are made up of small, one-dimensional, strings. The different masses and charges that we see are caused by the different sizes of strings and different frequencies at which they vibrate. When making this key assumption, quantum physics cleans up and general relativity can be tied in. These are accomplishments that no other theory can claim. But, from these humble beginnings, things start to go awry and the whole theory becomes less... elegant.

It turns out that the math works out a lot better if there are ten dimensions instead of four. And, well, actually if you take out some assumptions that were made really 11 works better -- oh, and they're no longer strings but 2-d membranes shaped like rings. If we can have membranes, what about tri-branes, and di-branes, they're all possible in modern string theory. And, just if you were getting stuck on the only strings describing our universe thing, there are now zero-branes which are just like the point particles that string theory is trying to replace!

As with many intellectual pursuits there were differing camps in string theory, each having slightly different ideas for many of the core equations. Luckily, M-theory came along and said that they're all symmetrical and work together to describe the same phenomena, nobody is wrong. Nobody is wrong! This sounds like a theory designed by committee. Or, probably more correctly, everyone is missing equally the central core of what they should be getting at.

All in all, I think the most disheartening thing about string theory is how little experimental evidence there is. Basically there nothing that can prove the theory either way (at least in 2003 when the book was published). It seems that there are way too many theoretical physicists, to the point where they are working ahead of even the mathematicians, without the experimental research to back them up. In some ways this makes sense. To do high energy particle physics you need a supercolider. What this world needs is a good $10,000 supercolider. So most physicists are then stuck with theory, but it just seems there is so much risk that decades of work will become invalidated by an experiment in the future. But, that isn't to say that I know of a better theory, and it may turn out to be correct. I still don't like the theory itself.

After thinking about theoretical physics for a couple of weeks, I've decide that I don't believe in Quantum Mechanics. Yeah, that is kind of an odd statement, but I won't be the first or the last to make it. I'm not comfortable with the idea that we can't, in theory, make a model of what is happening at the sub-atomic level. I know, you're saying Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. I read the principle like this:

All experiments have error. If the number you're trying to measure is smaller than the error bars that you have, your experiment is useless.

But, that doesn't effect the theoretical ability of someone to do a thought experiment where all the momentums and velocities are known. With Quantum Mechanics we can't do that, only probabilities.

Much of this steams from the double-slit experiment which is thought to confirm wave-mater duality. I'm curious if there aren't other explanations on what could be happening here. I have one. Perhaps, as the electrons are hitting the phosphors they are creating a ripple in spacetime. So, as there becomes large numbers of these interactions, a standing wave in spacetime is created. The next set of incoming electrons now have a very different route as their paths are modified by these standing waves in spacetime. As they try to maintain a straight line, the interference pattern that we see develops.

To experimentally verify this, one would have to find a way to cause this ripple to effect another, independent electron stream. No slits. If this standing wave does exist, then hitting the wave perpendicularly should have no effect. Likewise, two parallel beams, both hitting a plane of phosphors perpendicularly should have no effect on each other (in the traditional model). If there is a standing wave created, the ripple from one would effect the other. Now, all I need is a physics lab -- if anyone has one and would like to try this out for me...

While I'm bitching about physics I'll talk for a second about the Big Bang. The Big Bang is developed from taking the equations of General Relativity, and working them backwards based on cosmological data that we've acquired. Makes sense. Except that we already know that General Relativity doesn't work well with very small objects, hence why String Theory is need to connect it with Quantum Mechanics (or why there is Quantum Mechanics at all). So, we're taking a theory, working it back to a place where we know it doesn't work well and claiming that is the answer. I don't buy it. I don't have a better theory, but I do believe that the Big Bang needs a little more work.

Although it seems that I've been very negative, that shouldn't be seen as a reflection on Greene's book. It is a great book. It takes a subject that is very complex, and brings it to a much more general audience. He makes common analogies and adds his own antidotes about the people involved to make it more interesting. Whether or not you believe in String Theory, reading Greene's book will give you a good introduction to a theory that is taking the physics community by storm.

posted on Fri, 19 Aug 2005 at 18:10 | permanent link

I finally got a new hard drive for my computer, something that was definitely needed. Going from 20GB to 60 will be liberating. Hopefully it will allow me to get more pictures online as I previously didn't have enough space for the working files. But, things never go as planned.

The first issue that I ran into was the fact that the Disk Utility in Mac OS X doesn't handle the Ubuntu ISOs. These seems like a major quality control oversight on the part of Apple as the program gets a segmentation fault. I submitted two bugs on it trying different things. Luckily, I found this blog entry which recommended using Firestarter FX to get around the problem. (which worked after one coaster)

Ubuntu installed flawlessly, and I didn't use XFS again after having so many problems on my last install. Now I tried to restore my data off my external drive. First pass, I messed up tar, not the end of the world, except the way that I found it. I found it by trying to undo my Subversion repository and getting a cryptic error. In my case this error meant that the revision file was truncated, but Subversion gave me no help in finding that. Once I found it, and did a proper restore, I got through most of the issues. Now I have another.

Now it seems that a later revision has a malformed delta. Bother. Again, subversion provided no useful information, but I've found the revision number and the delta that seems to be the issue. All in all, I don't think that subversion is that robust. Not that it looses data, but more from the perspective that there is no help when there is an error. I'm not very impressed. I'm sure I'll have more later.

posted on Tue, 16 Aug 2005 at 17:48 | permanent link

Recently, there was a discussion on the legality of taxes on the LULA mailing list. The author who was claiming that they were illegal made the statement: The government doesn't need taxes to pay for things, it can just print its own money. Normally, I'd write this off (pun intended) as someone who doesn't understand the modern abstract nature of money and economies. But, let's entertain this for a little while.

If the government was to print enough extra money (more than it destroys from use) each year to pay for its expenses there would be a deflation in the value of that currency. Overall, the economy would suffer inflation. For round numbers, let's say that taxes are 20%, if inflation was 20% also, what's the real difference? Every year I have 20% less than I had the year before, which is roughly what taxes do (except that they generally only effect income not savings). It would be a very even handed approach with businesses and individuals being effected the same, and would effectively impose a flat tax. But, it would reduce the costs of collection and remove the hassle of filling. "Taxes" could be easily be adjusted on a year by year basis to compensate for changing circumstances (e.g. war, drought, plague).

Making the change would be economically disruptive, and remove some of the good that can be done with tax law. The ability to encourage certain behaviors (e.g. home ownership) through taxes is unlikely to be a power governments are willing relinquish. But, in reality, the idea isn't as crazy as it first sounds (half as crazy).

posted on Thu, 11 Aug 2005 at 12:52 | permanent link

What a great use of SVG! Here is a Kana Quiz in SVG. The characters come up in training mode with the stroker order, and you can do a quiz mode where the characters pop up randomly. The whole thing is under a Creative Commons license so you can use the characters for other applications also. Now I have no excuse for forgetting my Japanese.

posted on Wed, 10 Aug 2005 at 17:42 | permanent link

del.icio.us has been around for a while, but I never got involved. I was beginning to get frustrated with having two sets of bookmarks, one and work and one at home, so I started an account. It is kinda fun, we'll see how long I use it. You can now see my bookmarks and even get my bookmark RSS feed. I also like that you can get RSS feeds from tags. Here is the Inkscape tag RSS feed, it has the base sites but also some of the tutorials. It will be interesting to see what people come up with.

posted on Wed, 10 Aug 2005 at 17:36 | permanent link

This year was my first chance to go to SIGGraph, something I've always wanted to do. SIGGraph is an intriguing meld between technology and art, an intersection that I find interesting and exciting. It's a complex mix of expressing data and expressing emotion. In the end, it seems to come off pretty well.

Emerging Technologies

Overall I found the emerging technologies exhibit disappointing. I expected some really crazy stuff, and found some interesting work, but very little that I would say was beyond my imagination (though I've been told I have a very active imagination). Most of the demonstrations dealt with increasing the interaction between people an computers, making the computer more responsive to the user. There were many ways to do this including everything from lighted gloves to a set of cameras using a phased-array type approach to realize when the user touched a plane to make a touch screen. None were bad, they just didn't meet my expectations for 'emerging technologies'.

The exhibit that I found the most interesting in emerging technologies was from a group in Japan. They created a device that looks similar to a set of headphones, but with ring instead of a cup. The ring encircles the ear and electrically stimulates the inner ear. This allows them to control the wearer's balance. They took two audience members, put the device on them, and asked them to walk forward in a straight line. With a control which looked like it belonged to an RC car they directed the path of the seemingly drunken puppet. His direction did shift. They also had an example of a racing car video game that was modified to work with the device and thus give the player the true feeling of acceleration. This is interesting, and has a tons of applications. Everything from training to medical purposes can be thought of. Motion canceling headphones. It is also a touch scary; when will people try and use this while driving?

Art Exhibit

The art exhibit is an interesting one, not because it covers the traditional focus of art, emotion, because it covers new techniques in art. And, in fact, I found the examples of involving the viewer more interesting in the art exhibit than the emerging technologies area. The techniques involving computers and interaction will be used to create some really impressive pieces in the future. Just as light has contributed to an art piece in the past, the viewer will be a more more central contributer in the future. But, if the viewers are creating the art, are artists becoming meta-artists? I doubt that the art community would ever define the viewers as creating the art though.

One of my favorite pieces consisted of a metal box on the wall. At first, I was very confused and in fact poked it. Then I noticed the computer next to it with a screen, which defines the 'license' for viewing the art and asks you to click 'ok'. The license is very restrictive, and I am violating it now by recording my thoughts on the piece. After agreeing a small window opens with a video playing. As soon as you are starting to watch the video the window slams shut, and the computer next to it reminds you of the license you agreed to. This still makes me chuckle.

Another piece consisted of a table covered in sand that moved a small ball, similar to a mouse ball (for those who remember the time before optical mice). It would listen to the ambient noise, and move the ball on the table depending on what was coming in. In the exhibit hall they had relaxing nature music playing and the ball was making a concentric shell-like pattern. I really wanted to put Nine Inch Nails on the speakers to see what would happen.

Stop for Lunch

Then I met Jon Phillips, Mark Bolger and John Tabor for lunch. We had a good lunch of SVG/Inkscape/Computer tech talk.

I learned that SVG Open cycles so that one year it's in Asia, then Europe and then North America. Since this year it is in Europe, next year it will be closer to home, which would be cool. Mark thinks that the best proposal so far is for Victoria Island in Canada, which is someplace that I'd love to visit anyway; but, it hasn't been decided yet. It would be cool of other Inkscape folks could start thinking about going. August 2006.

Another interesting thing was to learn more about what John Tabor's company, Trafmetrics is doing with SVG. They consult and make a program that helps with traffic planning. This includes maps, and models to determine what should be done to an intersection or street plan with growing traffic requirements. They use SVG for their graphics, editing the SVG to interact with the user's idea of where the roads should be placed. He said that he would write a case study of how SVG can be used in Civil Engineering, I can't wait to see it.

I also learned that the SVG 1.2 specification has been delayed again. Now that we've released flowed text in Inkscape, it would be nice if other SVG viewers could support it too. Err, bother.

Exhibition Floor

The exhibition floor was a fun place, with an absolute ton of people and companies. There were several companies with 3-d printers printing everything you can imagine. And, there were several companies with solutions for human motion capture. It was fun to watch the dancers dance, and then have computer models move with them. Wacom had their new mixed LCD panel tablet which was very impressive, I want one! Apparently there is a 4 month wait for them.

Tech Talk - Architecture of the Future

For those of us who couldn't afford the expensive SIGGraph passes, they had small sponsored talks called "Tech Talks". The one which I attended was sponsored by SGI and was a discussion of PC architecture issues. There were three speeches from Mike Doggett from ATI, Jim Hurley from Intel and Kevin McLaughlin from SGI.

I was late, I missed the speech from ATI.

In the speech from the architect at Intel the biggest point he made is that the bandwidth to RAM is becoming the largest bottleneck for their processors. And, really, more caching isn't solving the problems. They are limited by the board manufactures to 4-layers (surprising, as I know some consumer electronics use 6) so they can't add larger buses easily.

They are working (in research) on the ability to sandwich two wafers together to create a compound chip with the RAM placed directly on the CPU. This way they can use the entire surface as a bus, a short one at that. They use through hole vias to accomplish the connection, which surprised me considerably. The pictures he showed (which looked like photographs more than diagrams) made the walls of the vias look very sharp. I'm curious how they are making them as acid usually makes pitted, or wider holes in the silicon. Either their coaxing the path somehow, or are not using a liquid to do the cutting.

He also mentioned the fact that they are looking beyond dual core to larger numbers of cores on a chip. He mentioned applications like ray tracing as an example of a highly parallel task that would benefit from this. With Intel's Hyperthreading, this got me curious about why they were going the multi-core route. So, afterwords (see I've got more social skills than most of you think) I asked about it, and I learned a lot.

The biggest thing that I learned was that HyperThreading is not SMT. Basically when the CPU boots up in HyperThread mode it evenly divides many of the resources (reordering buffers, renaming registers, etc.) evenly between the two threads. It is, in effect, making almost two CPUs instead of one with multiple threads. There is less intelligence about which to schedule, and less dynamic optimization, so largely single threaded applications can get a significant speed hit. But, if the two threads are independent, and not competing (i.e. not both floating point intensive) the performance increase can be about 25%. But, HyperThreading was not successful much like the PentiumPro was not successful, Windows couldn't handle it. So, it seems unlikely that Intel will go that route, and instead put more CPUs on die. Bummer, I (and the theoretical research) like SMT better.

SGI came off as a company in transition, at least in the public perception arena. The SGI representative talked a lot about them becoming a data visualization company instead of a graphics company. They've always done data visualization, but people seem to have known them for graphics. One of the big things that they're working on now is providing ways for large machines to do the data crunching, and have your desktop do the presentation (or even your cell phone really). High speed connections and culling data should provide an efficient way to do simulations.

He also talked about how much data is being used today. Today, for many applications, several terabytes of data is not uncommon. SGI has sold over forty machines with more than one terabyte of RAM this year already. He continued to hit the bus bandwidth point that was made by Intel previously, mentioning (of course) that SGI machines do that quite well.

An interesting part of the questions was when someone asked if Intel was expecting graphics to be done in the CPU, or if ATI expected general processing to be done in the GPU. Both of the representatives looked at each other and said that they weren't, but it was a funny moment for neither of them would admit that they'll probably be at each other's throats in a few years.

BOF: Cinepaint

Cinepaint is an interesting project which initially started as part of The GIMP (more later). Now it is used in the movie industry, mostly removing dust on the scanned in negatives. It has also been used for some effects. Geeks love this. They love the idea that free software is being used for creating movies that their friends and relatives see. I would say that its history isn't that clean.

Robin Rowe (the current maintainer of Cinepaint) got involved by writing an article for Linux Journal. In it, he talked about an open source tool that is being used in the movie industry but how it really didn't have a webpage or a home. People e-mailed him to get the source code. They sent him patches. And then, they called him the project leader and he started making releases. A very organic ascent to a leadership role in the project.

I found Robin's version of the Film GIMP history interesting, I'm unsure of how much is true or not, but it is interesting. Basically, the movie industry was looking for a tool that could handle the tasks they used Photoshop on Unix for when Adobe announced it was end of life. They looked at buying one, developing someone else's, and decided that it would be easier to fund the development of an open source project. They hired all the core GIMP hackers, and asked them to add in 16-bit support, and they were happy. The movie industry always thought that this would be folded into the main version of GIMP, but instead the GIMP community orphaned the project. The movie studios took support internal, and would have stayed that way had Robin not started accepting patches.

Again, I don't know how much is true or not, but it is a different perspective. I'd love to hear from someone who was there -- but I don't even know who that is! Seems a touch odd, but sometimes reality is strange.

Today, Robin describes the GIMP community as hostile towards him and Cinepaint. While I could understand their disappointment with GIMP not getting the press, I also understand that Robin himself can be difficult to deal with. I'm not willing to look through the GIMP-devel archives to determine who is right here, but none the less, there is basically no ties between the communities today.

It was also interesting to hear Robin talk about his interaction with the various studios. They have Cinepaint, and they have the source code. When they need a feature they hack it in. In some cases, they clean up the patches and send them to him. It seems kinda like Open Source was supposed to be, everyone working together for the common good. The movie industry would have been the last place I'd have looked for that.

I would describe the future of Cinepaint as fuzzy. Robin has decided to totally rewrite the software from the ground up using FLTK and the BSD license. There is a university in Glasgow that has a research team helping with this, but it seems that there is very little visibility into their work. And, as with most rewrites, there will be extreme API breakage. I imagine that there will be a position open to maintain the older version of Cinepaint at some point.

Conclusion

SIGGraph was fun. Sorry the write up got so long, I hope you made it to the end!

posted on Tue, 09 Aug 2005 at 16:22 | permanent link

I ran across this set of UI tutorials on Treebuilder.de: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. It is a neat set of tutorials that goes into scripting with your SVG to accomplish things like drag and drop. Of course, this knowledge is helpful for doing other things with SVG also. I would love to see more sites making SVG easier for web developers, it will hopefully increase the importance of SVG support in browsers.

He also has a link to SVG icons his girlfriend did which are very nice. Lots of SVG goodness from a site with the tag line "everything SVG".

posted on Fri, 05 Aug 2005 at 20:18 | permanent link

Last night I went to the UUASC meeting and saw a really interesting presentation on Yahoo! Research. One of the projects that was highlighted was a project called The Buzz Game. Users get fake money to buy shares of words that might become popular. If they become popular, the price goes up and the user makes money. The person with the most at the end wins a prize. This got me thinking about prediction markets in general.

I think an interesting source for data would be using blogs. (which seems kinda obvious to me, but I couldn't find anything with a quick search) The game could work like this, you submit your blog to the website. By posting on particular subjects, you are effectively buying their shares. To even out frequent and infrequent posters you give a fixed number of 'points' per day, which are divided by the number of subjects you post on. If you are the first person to post on a particular subject then you are buying low, the last person, you buy high. At the end of the day, the blogs with the most points are the most accurate at predicting trends.

You could then come up with an interesting Cluster Graph of which sites predict which terms the best. I bet Slashdot is good for 'linux' but bad at 'fashion'. But, who knows, geek chic could be in.

posted on Fri, 05 Aug 2005 at 18:18 | permanent link

I've catching up on issues of Technology Review (those bastards sent me another one) and I noticed a piece on how Linux is hurting Microsoft. For the most part, it is the same arguments that most Linux people have heard for a long time. But, it did talk a lot about why people like Open Source. I liked this paragraph: (enough to share)

This because for all its flaws, the open-source model has powerful advantages. The deepest and also most interesting of these advantages is that, to put it grossly, open source takes the bullshit out of software. It severely limits the possibility of proprietary "lock-in" -- where users become hostage to the software vendors whose products they buy -- and therefore eliminates incentives for vendors to employ the many tricks they traditionally use on each other and on their computers. The transparency inherent in the open-source model also limits secrecy and makes it harder to avoid accountability for shoddy work. People write code differently when they know the world is looking at it. Similarly, software companies behave differently when they know that customers who don't like a product can fix it themselves or switch to another provider. On the available evidence, it appears that the secrecy and maneuvering associated with the traditional proprietary software business generate enormous costs, inefficiencies, and resentment. Presented with an alternative, many people will leap at it. -- "How Linux Could Overthrow Microsoft", Charles Ferguson, Technology Review Vol. 108 No. 6, p. 66

The issues also deals with the ideas of intellectual property with none other than Lawrence Lessig writing a piece. Richard Epstein does a good job of calling him on several points including making more of an emotional argument than a legal one. But, both are a good read.

posted on Thu, 04 Aug 2005 at 12:50 | permanent link