Robert W. Rose

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.

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.

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! 🙂

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.

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
July 24, 2008
9lbs 4oz, 21″

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

Is here

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. 🙂

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.