Author Archives: admin

China pisses off Google

From the official Google blog:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The not so subtle subtext of the post is this: why should Google play nice for the Chinese government and operate a special, censored version of Google, while Google’s infrastructure is under attack from what are probably Chinese government agencies?

A surprising interface

This quote from an ex-Apple employee about the rumored Apple tablet has got me thinking:

You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.

What could this mean? There are not many interfaces that would be “very surprising.”

A virtual laser keyboard would be surprising. But like a real keyboard, those keyboards aren’t very mobile; they require a flat surface, which you normally don’t have on the move. And a virtual keyboard doesn’t really seem like Apple’s style.

Voice control, or at least good speech recognition to complement keyboard input, is also a serious possibility. It’s something Apple has been interested in for a long time (via DF). A world where airports, subways and coffee shops are filled with people dictating emails and blog posts to their mobile devices is a little terrifying, but then again we already live in a world where people are have intimate personal conversations on their mobile phones in public.

A significantly expanded set of multi-touch gestures is the most likely. Taking advantage of the larger surface of a tablet screen to allow two-handed gestures seems like a natural choice. And handwriting detection would actually not be that much of a surprise from the company that brought us the Newton. Both of these are hinted at in recent patent filings.

While the article I link to in the previous paragraph compares Apple’s patent to the interface in Minority Report, the interface that article talks about requires the user’s fingers to be touching a surface, not in the air. A true Minority Report-style interface, where you gesture in the air to control the device, would be quite surprising. Being able to control a device without actually touching the screen (and getting finger marks on it) would make the tablet more attractive for full-screen uses like watching movies and playing games. This interface is a ways off still, though.

The economics of contributing to open-source projects

This adaptation of Elinor Ostrom‘s work on the emergence of self-governance to open-source projects can explain my decision to stop reporting bugs to Ubuntu. If this formula holds true, then an open-source project will thrive:

benefit of contributing > benefit of not contributing + cost of contributing

In my experience with Ubuntu, this formula does not hold true. The benefit of contributing is often zero, as patches are not accepted and bugs are not fixed, or close to zero, as it can take years for a bug to be fixed. And the benefit of not contributing is similarly zero. And of course, the cost of contributing, in terms of time spent filing bugs, is greater than zero. The cost of contributing is often very high, requiring arguing for the validity of a bug, re-reporting the same bug multiple times, or attempting to recreate a bug from several releases prior.

PottyMouth moved to BitBucket

I’ve moved PottyMouth to BitBucket.org, where you can keep up to date with PottyMouth releases, subscribe to feeds, request features, and contribute patches. (It’s also on PyPi.)

In the last few months, I’ve fixed a bunch of poor design decisions on my part around encoding and repr() within PottyMouth, and added new syntax suggested by users. The latest version is 1.2.0.