Is Sarah Palin really a babbling idiot?

I tuned in to the Vice Presidential debate tonight but had to watch it with the sound muted--sometimes the sound from the TV upsets my 2 month old son. Watching a political event with closed-captioning and the sound off is an entirely different experience than with the sound on..

Immediately I was struck by how strange Sarah Palin's speech read over closed-captioning. It was filled with sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and awkward topic changes. It was very challenging to try and figure out what point she was trying to make. It read like she was jacked up on caffeine and/or extremely nervous.

After about 15 minutes I started to wonder if the person typing in the closed-captioning was biased--were they making Palin read worse than she sounded? Were they intentionally dropping words or periods to make it read like she was a babbling idiot? Are the deaf hearing our candidates through a biased closed-caption writer??? I had to un-mute the debate for a moment and hear for myself.

To my profound astonishment, I discovered that Sarah Palin sounded worse un-muted than she did over the closed-captioning. The person doing the closed-captioning was actually doing her a tremendous favor: In many cases they were actually completing her sentences or omitting repeated statements she made in her dialog. Although while reading the closed-captioning it was a challenge to decipher the point she was trying to make, you could find some context in her words, whereas in her verbal speech I felt like I was being talked-over by a sports announcer desperate to avoid dead air.

Un-muted the sentence fragments and rambling-on kind-of works for her, in sort-of a "I'm George W. Bush and I have invented-ed new words" kind-of way. (I just made up a new tense of "invent" right there). You interpret the rambling as coming from someone who's "Down to Earth" and has a "Nice Personality." For some people I'm sure they identify with it, because that's how most of us sound when put into a stressful situation.

But over closed-captioning, she sounds like a babbling idiot.

Broadband Data Improvement Act a bit of a misnomer?

It appears the Broadband Data Improvement Act which just passed the House is a bit of a misnomer. You would think from the title that the purpose of the legislation is to improve broadband, but after reading the version that passed the House it looks like Congress and I have different definitions of "improvement".

I thought "improving broadband" meant "making it better," but it appears their definition of improvement means:

1) Gathering better metrics on where to improve broadband (i.e., rural areas currently w/out high-speed Internet access)

2) Offering up funds to help states put broadband in more places

3) Increasing public awareness of child safety issues online and

4) Adjusting online child pornography laws

None of which really has anything to do with making broadband itself better. #1 and #2 will help make broadband exist in certain places, not improve it. #3 and #4 really have nothing to do with broadband and are just Internet regulation stuffs.

When I think of legislation for "improving broadband" here's what I would like to see:

a) Regulations that put broadband reliability on par with regular land-line phone service. This should include penalties for downtime similar to what we have for phone service, along with installation time requirements like what we have for phones. Currently this is handled ad hoc on a case-by-base basis. If your broadband provider goes down for 5 days (which has happened to me) it's up to you, the customer, to get on the horn and complain and complain and complain until they refund your money. If it were the phone company they would be required by law to automatically credit you 5 free days of service.

b) Regulations that force providers to compensate customers when advertised bandwidth isn't realized by customer. Currently this is also handled ad hoc on a case-by-case basis. We need laws on the books that say "if the advertised speed is 3Mbit but you actually get 1.5Mbit then you should only pay for 1.5Mbit." In many cases its handled by the provider saying to the customer, "tough noogies."

c) Grant programs for improving broadband where it already exists by making it faster and cheaper! In Japan and Europe you can get 10-100x the bandwidth of what we can get in the US, and in many cases for a lower cost. If legislators want to realize the second dot-com boom, we need to pump up the bandwidth so that a whole new category of bandwidth-intensive internet services can be made practical.

Vector Blaster now available for iPhone

My game Vector Blaster is now available on the iTunes App Store for iPhone. Vector Blaster is an arcade-style game inspired by Tempest.

For the iPhone version I ported Rude Engine over to use OpenGL to take advantage of the graphics chip in the iPhone. (Things actually ran fine just doing pixel painting, but it was a fun project..) I also redid the input system so that it works with the multi-touch interface. I think it turned out surprisingly well, sliding your thumbs around on the screen really feels like you're using an analog wheel like the old Tempest arcade game. For music I ported MikMod over to the iPhone and used the same great tracks I licensed for the original... they sound incredible on the little iPhone speakers.

Enjoy! :-)

Touch screens and gaming

I've been spending a bit of time experimenting with some game concepts on iPhone, and how a touch screen input system effects them. In some cases I'm impressed how well certain input schemes work with it, and with others I'm surprised how poorly they work.

When holding the iPhone in landscape mode with two hands your thumbs are free to tap and slide the touch surface. Sliding movements on the touch screen work very well--especially up/down gestures. One concept I was toying with mimicked a trackball and it had a great hand-eye correlation between sliding and the result on screen. Tapping the touch screen with your thumbs starts to break down when you're required to tap with any amount of precision. Without tactile feedback I find it easy for my thumbs to drift unless I'm looking directly at what I'm supposed to tap. Games with more than one button per thumb (i.e. two buttons) become challenging after a while.

My experiments really hit home for me how critical tactile feedback is for a game. The game is on the screen, but it's played with your fingers. With a game controller or keyboard or mouse, your brain instructs your fingers what to do. Your nerve endings report back what was performed. Your eyes register the game's response to the input. Your brain is then delighted or disappointed with the outcome.

With a game controller, if your brain is disappointed by an outcome in the game, it can evaluate the response against the signal sent back by your nerve endings based on what your fingers performed. Your brain can then adjust what your fingers perform for next time. But without tactile feedback, the only information your brain gets back is timing information. The sensation of hitting the left side of the d-pad isn't there. The pressure felt from the right analog shoulder button is missing. All your brain knows is when it touched the screen. A lot of the subtle feedback you get from playing a video game is missing, and thus at a very low level it's difficult to derive enjoyment from playing a game on a touch screen.

This is partly why sliding movements work so well... As with a trackball, the surface of the trackball pretty much feels the same the entire time you're playing it. The feedback you get when sliding on the screen is in the acceleration/deceleration of your entire thumb and part of your wrist--not just a finger--so it registers louder with your brain than a tap does.

Overall, I don't think touch screens are the "next" big thing in gaming. I'm open to new ideas, but today, I remain unconvinced...

And while we're on iPhone... I'm totally unconvinced of the usefulness of the accelerometer for gaming. I'm yet to see a good use of it and I haven't had any success with it myself. First, you have the same issue with tactile feedback. The iPhone isn't very weighty so it's hard to feel precisely how it's oriented in your hand(s). Second, the accelerometer feels kinda laggy. It might take the software a while to process the data.. (?) Third, the accelerometer is attached to the screen! You can't make any interesting movements with it without preventing yourself from viewing the screen.

iPhone battery life

I bought a first-gen iPhone a few weeks ago from a friend who had upgraded to the new model. Immediately I was dismayed by abysmal battery performance. Overnight the device would go from a 100% charge down to a 30% charge. Sometimes it would completely drain overnight just sitting idle on my nightstand.

Apple suggests a number of things to improve iPhone battery life, but it took a few days worth of careful experimentation to determine what exactly on that list was killing my iPhone. Turns out its two main things...

1) I live in a very low-coverage area, and some spots in my house the iPhone will ping-pong between "No Service" and getting service. Leaving the iPhone in these spots kills the battery very quickly. I've found that the only way to have the iPhone survive the night is to leave it in a spot where it gets one bar of service steadily.

Apple suggests you turn on "airplane mode" in these situations. Excuse me? I've had numerous other GSM cell phones over the years in this house and none of those drained themselves to death when they ping-ponged between service. The N-Gage would go for 4-5 days... Sony Ericsson P800 would go for 3 days... Panasonic G50 would go for 4 days... and most recently, my Nokia 6013 would go an entire week flipping between "No Service" and getting service. The polling frequency on the iPhone must be far greater than these other devices.

Actually, I don't even care about receiving cell phone calls while I'm at my house. Why can't I tell the iPhone, "if you're within range of the wifi access point named XYZ, disable cell service"?

2) Fetching my email over wifi kills the battery. Even if I leave the iPhone in a spot where it gets service, if I enable fetch mode the poor thing won't survive the night. This appears to drain the battery even faster than spotty cell reception.

Everything else about the iPhone so far I think is pretty dang awesome (and useful), but the battery life problems trump the utility of the device. I'd love to be able to leave the thing laying around my house wherever and checking my email every 15 minutes, but alas, I can't do that with it.

William Owen Rose

William Owen Rose
July 24, 2008
9lbs 4oz, 21"

Mom and Baby are doing well, and Dad is very excited! More photos of the little guy here!

Resistance: Retribution trailer

Is here

Bedtime for Miguel

Citation spotted

We interrupt this blog for a moment of self-congratulation...

I was checking google to see if anyone had made any links to a directory on my web server I was considering deleting, and I discovered a link to a lampoon article I wrote on the RIAA back in 2002, RIAA sues makers of black magic markers, from an unlikely source, the prestigious (because they cited me) Rutgers Computer & Technology Law Journal. Their article Harmonizing fair use and self-help copyright protection of digital music cites my spoof as one of three thorns in the side of the RIAA. Yes, they got the joke, and no, I did not actually read their paper before posting this entry.

Damn, now I have to maintain that link. :-)

Don't buy recycling code 7 products

You learn something new every day.

While investigating Bisphenol A and trying to figure out what bottles I owned contained it, I came across an article on the seven resin identification codes (or "recycling codes") put on the bottom of plastic containers. I had always assumed that if a container had the recycling symbol on the bottom that it was recyclable. As it turns out, that's not always the case.



Resin code 7, even though it is commonly drawn as a 7 within the chasing-arrows recycling symbol, is never actually recycled and ends up in the landfill. Code 7 means "other plastic", which means its not one of the typically found 1-6 plastics, or its a combination of plastics.

And even though resin codes 3-6 are recyclable, not all municipalities will recycle them. Check with your local recycling authority to see if they accept products with resin codes 3-6. But even if they do, according to this article, they might not actually do anything productive with it--they might just be putting them in a separate pile until they figure out what to do with them.

The only guaranteed guilt-free plastics you can buy right now are ones with resin codes 1 and 2. So next time you're in the store and looking at a plastic product, check the bottom. Give preference to products using type 1 and type 2 plastics, and definitely do not buy type 7 plastics.

Unknown password requirements prompt phone call from the bank

My debit card uses Verified by Visa, a service where online purchases through member banks ask you for a password to complete the purchase. One problem with this service is they have some lame password restrictions (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, no special characters) so I can't use my "common" set of passwords with the system, and I don't use the system often enough, therefore I'm always "forgetting" my password.

So I just did a transaction with a domain registrar in France, failed the password check, reset my password, and then completed the transaction. Two minutes later I got a phone call from Visa wanting to verify that it was in fact me who performed the transaction. It all could have been avoided if they had just posted their password requirements when you go to login. I wish all websites would post password requirements on their login screens.

I don't think posting password requirements would be that big of a security risk, since if you're trying to break into the system you probably figured the requirements out through other means (like another account you created on your own, or bozos like me that post the password requirements elsewhere--see above). Almost every single time I have to click the "forgot your password?" link on a login screen I didn't actually forget it--I just couldn't figure out which password I had used because I didn't know their password requirements. It usually goes like this:

"Oh yeah, this is the site that only allows letters and numbers, and you have to have at least two of each. I want these last two minutes of my life back thank you."

Sometimes they add insult to injury by forcing me to change my password when I click on the "forgot your password" link. When I pick a "new" password I end up discovering my old password when they say, "your new password can not be your old password."

Grrrr!!!

How do you define reentrant code?

I've found several places around the net where claims are made that Lua is reentrant, but I just found a case (on my platform at least) where Lua is not. I discovered a bug in our system where Lua was being preempted right in the middle of a number to string conversion and the end result was invalid. (Of course, this only occurred about 1 in 200 runs of the code, which made it challenging to figure out what was going on).

The number to string conversion is performed with sprintf(), and sprintf() is not required to be a reentrant function. I'm sure it is on major platforms (Windows/Linux) but unfortunately it is not on ours.

The problem occurred when this sequence of events took place:

* Thread 1: Call Lua, Lua calls sprintf()
* Thread 1 is stopped within sprintf()
* Thread 2 is started
* Thread 2: Call sprintf()
* Thread 2 is stopped after sprintf() completes, Thread 1 resumes

Lua script like this would frequently exhibit the problem:

for i=1,10,1 do
local string = foo .. i
end

The concatenation operation would result in foo + bar instead of foo + i, where "bar" is a fragment of the sprintf() operation left over from Thread 2.

A possible fix for this would be to have Lua use an ftoa() implementation instead of sprintf(). However I fixed it in our case by simply not performing sprintf() in the second thread (this issue was isolated to one portion of our execution fortunately).

If your code is "proven" to be reentrant, but you rely on another library that is not proven, can you still claim your code is reentrant?

Kinesis Freestyle is the best keyboard I've ever used

I'm going to "officially" endorse a product that I use, and love to use: The Kinesis Freestyle USB Keyboard is hands-down the best keyboard I've ever used. I've had the keyboard for about 6 months now and I'm 95% satisfied with it.

There are two things I like most about the keyboard:

1) Ultra-low force keys. The keys on the Freestyle are really easy to depress, but they still have a lot of spring to them and the perfect throw distance.

2) Low profile. There aren't that many adjustable ergonomic keyboards available that are low profile. I have a hard time typing without resting my forearms on my desk, and a low profile keyboard allows me to do that without bending my wrists back too much.

There's only one thing I don't like about the keyboard: The position of the Windows key. (I hate the Windows key. I don't know why, I just do. I wish it wasn't on any keyboard.) I wish the key was more off to the side, because I find myself hitting the edge of the Windows key when I'm trying to hit the Alt or Ctrl keys. If I could reprogram the keyboard to make the Windows key a second Ctrl key I'd be 100% satisfied with it.

A note to Kinesis: I almost didn't buy your keyboard because of this stupid ad you put on YouTube. In it you make fun of the Key Ovation GoldTouch Keyboard. The GoldTouch is my third favorite keyboard*, and I thought it was highly unprofessional of you to trash your competitor in that fashion. What did they do to deserve that? Did the GoldTouch team noogie you at the ergonomic products convention last year or something?

* What's my second favorite keyboard? The keyboard on the Aluminum 12" PowerBook G4!

Glad to be back on Firefox 2.0

I upgraded to Firefox 3.0 RC1 last weekend. That lasted about 36 hours... I didn't really care for the new UI enhancements, and there's no way to disable many of them.

* Who's idea was it to fundamentally alter the location bar's behavior? Instead of working like an address bar "auto-complete" it searches all of the meta-data related to the URL: address, page title, keywords, etc. This is totally worthless to me, a bit distracting, and a major shift in the way I'm used to working. Here's someone else with the same complaint: Awesome bar still a piece of junk!

* What happened to the "forward history" pull-down menu? I never realized I used that feature until it went missing in Firefox 3.

* What's with the RSS feed and glowing star icon in the location bar? Who cares? Get rid of it!

* I don't like the design of the new downloads window. Yes, it's more compact but no where near as aesthetically pleasing.

* I don't like the highlight delay when mousing over tabs. I want instantaneous feedback, and the 0.5s delay in there when mousing over a tab is distracting when your eye isn't immediately over it. Again, it's one of these things I never realized I did with Firefox, but I'll frequently switch tabs using the mouse without even looking directly at the tab, and that slight delay impedes my ability to do that.

In the end, the location bar alteration was the deal breaker, I don't have the patience to adjust to it at the moment. It seems like the kind of thing that needs to pop-up when you hit ctrl-space, or at the very least you need to be able to disable it and get the old behavior back.

I was impressed by one feature of Firefox 3 however: You can upgrade to 3.0, uninstall completely, reinstall 2.0 and retain your bookmarks and settings! Woo-hoo! That's quality software.

Why not tax oil imports?

Clinton and McCain have proposed temporary gas tax relief for this summer. Obama is talking about a windfall tax on oil profits, which seems appropriate given Exxon's record profits this year. Somehow through all of this the candidates are saying these plans will 1) give some financial relief to driving Americans 2) reduce our dependence on foreign oil and 3) reduce our oil consumption.

How, exactly?

I fail to see how reducing the gas tax would accomplish any of these three goals. The market is clearly able to withstand $3.75/gal+ gas prices, as is demonstrated by only a 1.1% decline in gasoline consumption this last year. Until consumption drops another 1-2% I doubt demand will have any influence on price. A federal tax cut of $0.18/gal would likely go into the pockets of gasoline distributors, not consumers. Even if the savings were passed on to consumers, the benefits to the individual would be negligible, and would only further increase demand. Failure on goals 1 & 3. No progress on 2.

I completely fail to see how a windfall tax on oil profits would help anyone. The pocket-lining standards have been set at the oil companies this year, and they probably won't want to give that up, so they'll just end up passing the new expenses onto the consumer and their exploration budgets. They'll cut exploration which will dry up supply even more, bringing oil prices up yet again and, if we can stand $4.50/gal gas (which I believe we could) then they'll be right back to their Spring-2008 profit levels again.

I can think of a simple way we could accomplish all three goals: nationalize the oil companies. We have nationalized electricity generating facilities, why not oil?

Short of nationalizing oil companies, I can't see a quick solution for goal #1: providing financial relief for American drivers. The bar has been set with $3.75/gal gas. If we didn't want to pay that much for gas we shouldn't have bought it. Now that we have, it's too late, the hook has been set.

A long-term play for fixing #1 would be to substantially increase the value of the US Dollar relative to the OPEC member countries' currencies. However this isn't something the government has much control over anyways, and would only increase oil demand and consumption in the long run.

The simple solution for #3 is to throw #1 out of the window. If you want people to use less gas, make gas more expensive. When I think about what price gas would need to be before I would seriously consider not driving as much, it's probably in the $5-6/gal range. If gas were $6/gal today I would likely ride my bike everywhere, even in bad weather. But it's not, I live 7 miles from work, and the temp has been around 40 degrees in the morning lately.

I was thinking this evening about reducing our dependence on foreign oil while simultaneously reducing our oil consumption, and I started to wonder: what about an oil import tax? A google search for oil import tax returns surprisingly few results, the only relevant hit being an article about a 1987 Harvard study proposing a $5/barrel tax. Most other articles are from the 80's. So are we doing this currently, or was this an idea that was long since abandoned?

Hydrogen fuel cells generated from nuclear reactor power. Send nuclear waste up space elevator and rocket at sun. Problem solved. :-)

I'm disappointed in my MacBook Pro

Preface: This entry was hard for me to write. I'm not an Apple die-hard, but I do recommend Macs all the time to family and friends. In the past, Apple hardware has been reason alone to buy a Mac. I don't believe that's the case anymore. Something happened to Apple, they lost their edge...

I got a new MacBook Pro about a month ago, and although I think I'd be even less happy with an equivalent PC laptop had I gotten one, there are a number of things about this laptop that either irritate me, frustrate me or disappoint me. Although it's bigger/faster in the ram/cpu department compared to my previous Mac laptop, a PowerBook G4 12", in many ways it feels like a huge downgrade.

* Irritation: The keyboard sucks. The keyboard on this thing is so bad I'm tempted to go "youtube" on it and make a video demonstrating how bad it is. There are places on some of the keys where you can press them down but it won't register a key press. I think the root cause is they replaced the mechanical lever/spring action of the previous keyboards with a cheap flexible rubber. The arrow keys still use the mechanical lever/spring configuration--they're the only decent keys on the whole keyboard. Because of the poor keyboard I find myself "punching" the keys and gritting my teeth unconsciously.. and then my wrists start to get sore.

* Frustration: The headphone output is simply unusable. There's no other way to put it folks; the headphone output is not usable, and I'm not the only one with this complaint. There's a ton of high-pitched noise that is impossible to ignore at lower volumes, it drives me crazy. Forget doing any audio work on the MacBook Pro. I was looking forward to getting intel versions of my favorite production tools, I guess that won't happen now.

* Disappointment: The display doesn't tilt back far enough. I used to use my PowerBook G4 on the kitchen counter standing up--I'd tilt the screen way back so I could see it easily. I can't do that with this laptop, I have to either sit down or bend over.

There's more:

* The light detector they use to control the keyboard brightness doesn't work in pitch-black. If I try to use the back lit keyboard with the light out it doesn't work. It picks up it's own light and turns off. Then it thinks its dark again and turns on. It oscillates on/off endlessly until I just disable it. I put a video of the illumination problems online here.

* This is likely a software issue, but it has problems going to sleep. Let me rephrase that--it won't sleep unless I tell it too by closing the lid.

* When I first got it the wireless didn't work after I upgraded to 10.5.2.

What the hell happened Apple? I'm so disappointed. Did Steve lose his fanaticism?

Did I mention that I sent the laptop back for repair once already? The first keyboard I received was even worse than the one that's on it currently. The replacement is *slightly* better, but still no where near as good as the one on the PowerBook G4. Going back to type on the PowerBook G4 is like night and day. I did an informal survey at work asking people to decide which keyboard they liked better, and 8 out of 8 people prefered the PowerBook G4 keyboard to the MBP keyboard.

Fewer mechanics, better game

Link

I've heard from many people that the ideal game is the one that has everything. It's a game where players are constrained by nothing. These people believe in a sandbox where their very imagination is the only boundary. They believe in game with no limits...