Is this thing on?

...was the day (today) when I got the message on yellow background that "your draft has been discarded". Exactly what led to this event I don't know, Gmail didn't tell, was it a keypress in the wrong area of the screen, or a connectivity glitch, or a Google employee deciding that "yes, I do want to be evil", I simply do not know.

Trust builds up slowly, once lost it is rarely regained. In those early days after the April 1 non-joke, trust came readily to Gmail. For me it started with my favourite four-letter word, "Undo". Commonplace client-side, web services rarely offered this basic functionality. That as much as latency made for an inferior user experience. Gmail was an exception. You delete something you rather wouldn't, you pick it up from trash. You did something you should't, you click on the "undo" link, and all was well again.

For a while.

I mostly prefer to use Opera, which has been troublesome with Google, but the two have mostly made up lately. Worse, I have been to many places with limited connectivity, using phone network or fritzy WiFi that drops. This means the "Basic HTML" rather than "Standard" service. Here in China I have little choice even when the connectivity is good, Opera+Google+China+Standard fails in most cases. Basic HTML is actually good enough, you lose some flash of Standard, but it the lack of connectivity, not the lack of flashiness that slows you down. What is worse, and I cannot say if it is Basic HTML as I have too little experience with Standard, but Gmail has become unreliable. Not unreliable as the well-publicised spat with Chinese government unreliable, which is annoying but not really damaging (it is better now, at times VPN was required, now it is only recommended). The problem was losing-your-email reliability issues. You write a message, the connection is lost, you press Send, and get an error message. No problem right, unlike IE6 (boo!hiss!) you can go back one step in history and retrieve that message, right? Wrong. Whatever script Gmail is running it interfers with Operas now-less-than-stellar history functionality so that chances are you got nothing.

This and other issues have caused a number of lost messages from me, and more often my co-workers (whether using Opera or other browser). My advice has been the old adage to save often, as well as the somewhat-stoneagey-but-safe "type it in in a word processing program and copy it into the browser" since all modern word processors/text editors autosave without any freakish AJAXy unreliability, or maybe the best "Use Thunderbird". I can't really say I like Thunderbird, but at least our data have been safe so far.

Two days ago I started a company-important document that I worked on and off on. Of course I should have headed my own advice and used a word processor, but using a browser is convenient. I did save (though not as often as I should, Gmail's autosave is not much), so I ran a risk of data loss, but nothing catastrophic. So I thought until the "discarded" message suddenly showed up. When Google say "discarded" they mean it. That is not a nice little "We moved your message into the Trash folder for you, do you mind?", or "We deleted your life's work. Undo?", or even "We messed up, all your changes since your last save are gone. Sorry.". It does mean "The message you have been worked on from the beginning through what we told you we have saved to the last changes is now gone and deleted. There is no way of getting it back. We are not telling you why we did it, and there is nothing you can do about it. Have a nice day."

Trust builds up slowly, once lost it is rarely regained.

XKCD recently published the future and found through a good number of Google searches that finishing up HTML5 would herald the demise of newspapers and the Third Coming of Christ.

Coincidentally the W3C declared that finally CSS 2.1 had reached Proposed Recommendation status, and surely, surely!, the end, in the form of CSS 2.1 as Recommendation, should be nigh. I recapped the story in an almost four year earlier entry, Cruelly Slow Slog, a slog that cruelly continued for four more years. 11 years of labour is not bad for what was intended as a quick fix.

Heaping on the irony, a new working draft of CSS3 Speech Module was published. While CSS 2.1 was bound to reach PR some day, the CSS3 Speech Module had been missing in action for seven years, if this module had been a person he would have been recorded as dead long time ago and his belongings spread among his inheritors.

Maybe it is time for me to revive the Audio module? While the Speech module is an aural equivalent to the Text module, how to style spoken text (generated by text to speech), there would be a use, arguably a greater one, for handling audio files. Audio is to speech as image is to rendered text. Properties of an audio module would be the likes of volume, balance, delay, speed, how to present the media in a given context.

In the intervening years HTML5 has happened, with dedicated audio and video elements. As is otherwise the case having more well-defined markup makes the case for styles easier, with the ability of everyone involved to adapt content to user circumstances, for audio as well as images.

Of course, given present form, Jesus Christ would have become a frequent flyer by the time such a module would reach Proposed Recommendation.

Urban planning and city architecture has traditionally been a closed process between the client and the planner, possibly with a public hearing (too) late in the process.

We are now at a stage technically, and sometimes socially, that this process could be organised differently. It could be more like the process for producing the HTML5 standard for instance, with early prototyping, public involvement with the stakeholders, scenarios and visualisations, and a transparent process.

Any area potentially under development could be put on Google maps, or local equivalents, as well as on a time line for any interested citizen to see or get involved with.

I am interested to know: What "prior art" do you know of in architecture along these lines, how was it done, what were the consequences and lessons?

"How unique – and trackable – is your browser?" To let a web site adapt the content to fit your needs a browser will make a number of configuration details available, what operating system you use (this shouldn't really matter, but that is a different story), which version browser you are using (for browser sniffing), what screen size you have (to let the site content better fit your screen), what fonts you have (to create fallbacks in case you are lacking the font the web site uses) and so on. This is well and nice, but there is a problem. These configuration details don't usually change very often and there are so many combinations of these configurations that it is possible, even probable, that your personal settings may be globally unique. In other words nobody else will have the settings that your browser has, even if you haven't personalised it. In the words of this site, your browser will have a fingerprint. Where ever it is used it can be identified.

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When you have "dinner at seven" it would be dinner at seven tonight unless that time has already passed, then it would be dinner at seven tomorrow night. If it were "breakfast at seven" then it would be tomorrow morning as most of us have breakfast in the morning and dinner in the evening. The way we specify dates is highly contextual and highly cultural, so artificial or natural intelligence will have a hard time figuring out what time it really is.

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The Norwegian Prime Minister, having been grounded in New York by Icelandic eruptions, did the natural thing for a politician in a modern democracy. He called in the press.

The feature in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet showed how he resourcefully had turned the hotel room into a makeshift home office, with the Lenovo Thinkpad neatly stacked next to a blue folder with "Confidential" handwritten in neat press-friendly letters. He was being a model Norwegian citizen by "working most of the day", but spending some time shopping, getting himself an iPad. Doing his work from New York was no problem, but he had to get up early due to the time zone differences. He wasn't too concerned about missing the Friday's Council of State, but hoped to be home for his daughter's dancing performance on Sunday. That covered the checklist, working effectively, but not too long, knowing trendy technology, while being relaxed and a good family man.

The American CNN had a feature as well, here the picture provided (by the Prime Minister's Office, no doubt) was the Prime Minister at the airport actually handling the aforementioned iPad, or at appearing to do so. The tagline here was Running a country? There's an app for that.

From a machine point of view the ThinkPad did all the work while the iPad got the attention. Though if truly seen from a machine perspective it would be the mobile phone, and all the hidden technology to make the human interface devices actually function, thus allowing the head of government of a country to stay away from home with nobody noticing. Nobody but Dagbladet, CNN, this blog, and a few hundred other media outlets that is.

This Is Your Brain on Kafka

Absurdist literature, it appears, stimulates our brains.

That's the conclusion of a study recently published in the journal Psychological Science. Psychologists Travis Proulx of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia report our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What's more, this heightened capability carries over to unrelated tasks.

In the first of two experiments, 40 participants (all Canadian college undergraduates) read one of two versions of a Franz Kafka story, The Country Doctor. In the first version, which was only slightly modified from the original, "the narrative gradually breaks down and ends abruptly after a series of non sequiturs," the researchers write. "We also included a series of bizarre illustrations that were unrelated to the story."

The second version contained extensive revisions to the original. The non sequiturs were removed, and a "conventional narrative" was added, along with relevant illustrations.

In other news, Reader's Digest files for bankrupcy. Hope for the human mind?

To transportinnlegg på fremtidsblogg.

Augustine-kommisjonen til Obama: Ingen måneferd før 2020

Kan høyhastighetstog bli ryggraden i vår megaregion?



Cat free 9/9/9? Great, but what about all the other days?

Denne uken kom det et opprop fra kunstnerdypet, iallfall noen av dem, som sa seg forfordelt, eller var det forforstjelt? At bransjeorganisasjonene ikke er velvillig innstilt til fildeling er knapt nytt, men denne gangen var kampanjen frontet av forfattere og utøvere. Gitt det 20. århundres historie gir forfatteropprop meg mange assosiasjoner, ikke alle like gode.

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Last issue of New Scientist published a paean to IPhone named Appland: How smartphones are transforming our lives. It follows a traditional NS pattern of being ahead of the curve for science and behind it with technology. The author was elated, and there is a crucial distinction between things that make you happy and things that don't.

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