The computer for everyone else

March 7th, 2010 Comments


I’ve been thinking about what I wrote about beamdog the other day. Iphone store for the pc. It got me pondering what the 95% use-case for the pc really is. I have a friend (see his blog, acts_as_informative) who always claims apple does so well because they hit the 95% use-case really well and just let the others who aren’t in that use case just go do their own thing.

This makes sense, so I’ve been pondering what I think the perfect computer for the 95% really is.

  1. I think it’s managed, like the iphone.  People never really break their iphones because they can only install trusted apps through the apple app store. Most people don’t need access to all sorts of crazy computery stuffs, they just need to have applications that work. Here enters beamdog on pc.  I think the ipad is a very interesting device in this respect, but I don’t think it can replace a pc with keyboard… yet.  The smart people at MS better be keeping their eyes on the ipad, because if they don’t they may very well find the paradigm of computing shifting out from under them and not be ready to move with it.
  2. I think it’s mobile. Laptops overtook desktops because once people buy laptops they hang out wherever they are.  If I’m in the kitchen so is my laptop.  Maybe my desktop is a wee bit faster, but aside from gaming it doesn’t do anything that my laptop won’t. I’m just never going to walk to another room to use it when I can use the laptop that’s with me. The laptop is still not a mobile device, I need to carry it around with me everywhere in a backpack. Computers in the future will fit in my pocket.

Now, imagine if apple just stuck a monitor output and a keyboard input on an iphone, then beefed the iphone up a wee bit so it was a little faster. I could have my computer everywhere, I wouldn’t worry about it getting a virus, and for most people it covers what they do with their computer namely:

  1. Music
  2. Communication via twitter, facebook, email
  3. Possibly some word processing if I’m in school. (Ok, not yet, but not far off)
  4. Watching movies/tv
  5. Sharing media (for example pictures, which I can…  joyously even take with this device)
  6. Getting information from the internet like recipes or wikipedia use.
  7. Even better, with internet storage like dropbox I don’t even need a big hard drive so the small iphone hd is perfect

An iphone costs 200$ with plan.  You might want 1-2 monitors around the house it could plug into if I wanted to do serious browsing for say another 300$ for 2 + 2 keyboards.  500$ is about the price of a current netbook.  I think maybe this is what apple is trying to do with the ipad, but it misses the key point of being more mobile than my laptop and I’m still really not sold on an onscreen keyboard for all of my input, but it *does* plug into a keyboard.  Just a few thoughts I thought I would puke up while waiting my turn to get on the computer I need in the lab.

Joel

Launch Party

March 5th, 2010 Comments

A few days ago I attended Launch Party, a Startup Edmonton event which celebrated the young technology companies in our city. I thought I’d quickly chat about a few of the companies and my thoughts and excitement levels about them.

Beamdog: These guys want to distribute games online.  So they’re Steam?? If anyone from Edmonton has the clout to try and take on Steam it’s probably Trent Oster. I’m excited about beamdog because I think it can be so much more.  The model for distributing software that is based on walking into a store and buying something is eroding. Steam, the iphone app store and xbox live are all amazing demos of how successful an online software distribution model can be.  Making software easily accesible actually makes it cheaper as well because more people buy it so developers don’t have to  charge as much per copy to make the same profit.

If beamdog could become a windows app store that would be amazing. Right  now it’s a pain to find applications I want and I never know if the application I find is actually good so I have to ask all my friends if they’ve tried it. Managing software on your computer can also sometimes be a hassle.  Fingers crossed for beamdog!

Empire Avenue: Empire avenue lets you trade your friends like stocks. It seems like the final goal here is to create some kind of ad network that pays based on your “stock’s” value on empire avenue. If a lot of people read your blog then more people will buy your “stock” to get a piece of your advertising earnings driving the price of the stock up and ads on your site. It makes sense to use market forces to drive ad prices, and this is a really innovative way of doing this.  Despite this the site mostly feels like a gimmick because you can’t advertise with them yet so all you’re really doing is trading people stocks for no reason.  And doesn’t pay per click already solve the problem because if more people see your content online more people click?  Not sure how to feel about this company, but there is a *ton* of money in online advertising and if they execute this properly then they could be very successful.  On the other hand I already feel alienated because there really doesn’t seem to be any point to being on their site right now.

Seek Your Own Proof: They make an online sciency carmen sandiegoy game for kids.  It’s awesome and I’ll fight anyone who says it isn’t. In an age where we are moving more and more toward graphically intensive arcade games it’s refreshing to see someone making something fun and educational for kids!  Good work Ken & company.

Lots of other local startups were there.  To see them all check Mac’s blog post on the event. I’m not fully sold on Edmonton ever becoming a “silicon valley north” like some of the startup crew seem to be around here, but this kind of effort is at least helping raise awareness about good local companies and there is always room for good companies making good products in any economy in any location.

Design of ETS Ticket Machines

February 25th, 2010 Comments

On occasion I have been known to leave my student card in the gym.  For those of you who are unaware, in Edmonton, at U of A, this means that I have to pay for transit, which I generally do with whatever coins I happen to find lying around.  It’s not optimal that I spend an extra 10$ per month getting around, but I live with it.  What drives me insane however is when the train is arriving right as I walk into the terminal and I still need to buy a ticket.

Buying tickets is obviously a necessary evil, but how come I need to navigate through a ridiculous menu system to buy a ticket??  I am the 98% scenario, an adult traveling not during a special event.  Why can’t I just put money in and get my ticket??  Just in case I overspend on a kids ticket?  Poor.  Drives me insane.

Joel out

Team USA vs. team Canada hockey

February 22nd, 2010 Comments

Obviously everyone in Canada is flipping out about this right now. Apparently something ludicrous like 50% of all Canadians watched this hockey game. It may as well have been our Super Bowl.  And we lost. And everyone was stunned. One of the people I was watching the game with mentioned after the first period “I thought we’d be up 3-0 by now”.What I don’t get is why is everyone so surprised? Does Canada have a better roster than the Americans?  Yeah, obviously. Do the San Jose sharks have a better roster than the Edmonton Oilers.  Yes. But no one ever says “It’s absolutely stunning that the oilers beat the sharks”. Even on ice Canada was obviously the more talented squad. They dominated in time on attack, and embarrassingly outshot the Americans.  But Miller made Brodeur look like a rookie who didn’t understand the game of hockey and the Americans capitalized on their opportunities.  That’s it.  The fact of the matter is in one game elimination tournaments variance plays a huge role and the best team doesn’t always win.

So Canada, yeah, our team is stacked, but don’t count on anything.

Free software or the dawn of the small software firm?

February 21st, 2010 Comments

About a month ago I was chatting with a friend of mine about web-based software.  I was talking about basecamp, which I really like but was unsure if I could justify paying for as a starving Masters student.  My friend said “….  Wait, you are thinking about *paying* for a web app?!?”  The concept completely stunned him, paying for something on the internet when everything he used, facebook, google docs and gmail were all free seemed ludicrous.  Sometime more recently another of my friends mentioned in passing to me “I would never pay for software.”

Although linux never really took off as a mainstream operating system, popular web platforms and applications like wordpress, nginx and rails seem to be making a strong case that free software may be the way of the future on the internet.  Maybe soon we will never pay for things that people with college degrees who could easily have been highly paid engineers spent years working on.  I have only one caveat, and that is What The Hell!!?!

I was recently reading an article on “The developer as a starving artist“. This article claims that as tools for development make development faster, simpler and cheaper, developers will be churning out great projects for free for fun. There will still be money in software but it will be in providing these “for fun” applications, in the same way people make money using apache to sell web hosting. The excellent developers will make money while most will be like artists “scraping by”.

The issue with this is that to be a *good* developer you actually have to be really smart. Really smart people go to college and take degrees that are hard to get into and pay them money, they don’t decide to work for free. If we stop paying developers then the same really smart people currently becoming developers will abandon software development for other lucrative professions that require being very smart.  This will make software crappy and good software will once again be in greater demand.  (aka able to charge.)

What about my thoughts on the future of the industry? As software development becomes easier and cheaper smaller teams of devs can build more extensive applications faster. What this means is that something like ebay, which was written by and employs many developers, can be replicated and improved upon by a dedicated group of 2-4 developers in under a year. Amazon took massive amounts of money to develop, now I can build an online store in under a month by myself. the key being to do this well, you still need a group of *good* developers. I think more startups will start to challenge big complacent companies, and we will begin to see more competition across product spaces. For a developer to make 180 000$ per year, a pretty dang good salary, they need to make an app that only 1000 people are willing to pay 15$ per month for! Once upon a time starting a serious software company was a large capital and time investment, now it’s more like opening a McDonalds. Given these economics and the speed of creating good applications it almost doesn’t make sense to go work a full time job unless a developer *needs* a stable income because they have children or something.

Developers go forth and prove me right. Make good apps that people will pay for and let the free software enthusiasts be damned. Good software is worth money and always will be.

Maths!!

February 17th, 2010 Comments

Here’s a little problem for y’all, how do I decide if the following equation has a solution?

y1 < a1×1 + a2×2 + … + anxn < y2

or rather more generally Ax < y where A is a mxn matrix, x is a vector of size n and y is a vector of size m.  x is constrained to be all integers.

where all unknowns x are constrained to being integers but all y and a may be any real number.

Been pondering this on and off for a bit now and I finally found a solution and am in the middle of implementing it.  Answer to come.  ;-)

Who develops using Safari?

February 17th, 2010 Comments

All my macy web developmenty friends can never seem to get over the fact that I do all of my initial development and testing of site in firefox.  ”It’s so clunky compared to safari”, “It’s so slow” etc. etc.  And I have tries safari.  I have tried using it many many many times.  I would use it.  It feels nicer and slicker like they mention, but am I the only one or is the safari debugger bugtastic?  It is actually absolutely stunning to me that it ever made it through QA.  I find about 50% of the time when I put a breakpoint into my JS in Safari I get the following:Safari happily breaks, wags it’s tail and asks for a pat on the head, but it completely refuses to show me my code!  Where is the code paused?  I have no idea, somewhere in this blank screen.

So then there’s the webkit nightlies.  People swear by them up and down and promise they will do all the fancy things firebug let you do like edit css inline.  So on a few occasions I brave the nightlies.  The problem is they always work even worse than my vanilla Safari. Sometimes they don’t even show the JS files as existing.  The last time I tried webkit the debugger did the following mysterious thing basically making them totally unusable.I can’t read that!!!  That’s two files in one window…  It seems like you would have to *try* to make something that bad happen.

So for all the safari developers out there.  Am I missing something??

Top 3 signs you’re a jerk highway driver.

February 16th, 2010 Comments

1) You drive the whole way in the lefthand lane. The lefthand lane is actually known as a “passing lane”. This is not because they ran out of names for lanes that did not involve the word passing, it’s actually a description of what the intended use of the lane is. If you were unaware of this fact you may in fact be illiterately stupid. If this is the case try sounding the word out P-A-S-S-I-N-G. Now consider what you were doing in the lane the entire time.

Corollary 1a) People keep passing you on the right.  Yeah, those people are probably jerks as well, or at least some of them.  The fact of the matter is that you are clearly not paying attention to what is going on around you.  Is that big pickup zooming up behind you at a mind-blowing 4 kilometers an hour over the speed limit.  Maybe you should move over and *let them pass*.  Novel concept.

Corollary 1b) You keep passing people on the right.  Yeah, I get it.  Apparently you are the only one aware of the fact that the speed limit is 63% too low.  It’s clear that when this highway was designed no one whatsoever gave any thought to what a safe driving speed should actually be and the speed limit was totally arbitrary.  It’s a good thing you’ve come along to enlighten us all.

2) You leave your high beams on all the time in traffic.  …  Ok, seriously.  There is a big long line of cars in front of you. A long snake of red lights you can follow that will show you where all the turns are.  If you can’t see that line of cars without your high beams you are too blind ti be driving.  Which coincidentally is what the person in front of you is going to be any time now if you don’t start behaving like a respectable human being.

3) You drive at 70 km/hr on the 110 km/hr road because it is dark out and there is a little bit of snow on the road. Yeah, I know, you feel safe at 70 km/hr.  You feel all nice warm and cozy, like maybe you won’t go careening off the highway.  This is true. You know when else you wouldn’t go careening off the highway? Stopped.  Please don’t tell me you think it is a good idea to sit stopped in the middle of a highway in sub-optimal driving conditions??  It’s also not safe to go unreasonably slow.

God and Science

January 18th, 2010 Comments


Eye Of God??

The "Eye of God" as photographed by the Hubble space telescope.

I was recently an innocent bystander to a rather impassioned argument by a certain U of A microbiology undergrad as to why god does not exist.  Actually, to be more clear her argument was that as scientists the only sensible position to have on the existence of a deity is atheism.  I personally am not an extremely religious person and have not set foot into a church in over 6 years not, but the more I thought about this viewpoint the more it irritated me.  The premise of the argument was that as the existence of god was the most challenging of “the existence of god” vs. “the non-existence of god” to accept, the burden of proof falls upon the theist camp.

This notion is nonsense. The burden of proof falls on everyone. As scientists we have no right to call anyone wrong without being able to prove ourselves correct, and calling someone wrong without proof limits the possibilities of human imagination and as such the scientific process.  We now commonly accept many things that within the frame of reference of people at some point would have seemed ludicrous.  For example as one point the concept that the earth was not flat was nonsense. It contradicted everything our sense told us. The concept that time goes slower as we get faster??? Nonsense!!  That energy can only exist in multiples of distinct quanta??  Yeah….  That doesn’t make sense. How about the fact that the entire universe originated from a volume margins of magnitude smaller than the tip of my pinky finger? Laughable really. By calling views that don’t seem to correspond to our frame of reference wrong we inhibit ourselves from discovering truths.

So to all scientists out there, including the arguer in question, I urge you all to choose your own path when choosing whether or not to be religious. If the thought that in this universe, of which we have possibly barely scratched the surface of understanding, the thought of a being greater than ourselves having guided the evolution of this world and taking part in our day to day lives seems too ludicrous to accept to you than feel free to be atheists. If the thought that there is no way that having pre-marital sex will not send you to burn forever in the fires of hell seems silly than by all mean beat your bible fervently. Just do not force upon others the views that you espouse.  …  Unless of course you can prove god exists/does not exist.  In that case feel free to write me, I’m dying to hear from you.

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