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Crisis, what crisis?

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So the Irish vote was "Lisbon nil points". An interesting state for this virtual superstate I'm living in. The Lisbon treaty isn't necessary for the EU to continue, which may be seen as a good thing as Lisbon is dead.

The only way it can be revived is if the Irish somehow decide to change their collective minds. How likely do you think that is? Discussion at the forum.

While constitutionally the EU treaties isn't getting anywhere fast, the European countries and people are growing more integrated. Maybe it is time for the EU to swap the bike for a more stable vehicle,

A day in an Opera owner's life

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I am interested in the concept of employee ownership, and early on while working for Opera I set a goal of a 1/1000 ownership. I never quite reached that goal, the rest of the world has more money than I do and I have not been willing to borrow money to invest in shares, but still I am more economically exposed to the fortunes of Opera Software than anything else I own. So when Opera posted excellent results, the market reaction made me more paper money in a day than I can expect to make in real money in this year. ;cheers: I'd say.

This 17% rise in a single day and a similar fall earlier when a disappointing result was posted is fair enough, this can be seen as a reaction to real performance by Opera, but most share price movements have not been a result of changes in Opera's profitabilities or potential. My experience of Opera Software is as a serious longterm company, my experience of Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE), where Opera is listed, is the very opposite. OSE has had a terrible reputation in the past, and there is no indication that it is any better in the present. In my view OSE has been, is, and will be gamed, and there is not much to lead you to believe that the Norwegian government will apply the same rules of transparency to it as it does to itself. OSE is no more trustworthy than most emerging market bourses.

As an Opera employee I reflected that it was probably possible to make (or lose) more money on short-trading the Opera stock than what it would be as an employee. Due to insider trader consideration short term trading was inconvenient to say the least, but it was pretty obvious that the market had little understanding of the consequences of an event, reacting strongly to an inconsequential event and ignoring an important one. It was also a useful lesson in why not to invest in the company you are working for, not so much due to spreading risk as due to the delay in buyng/selling stock.

I could go into trading, at least on a hobby basis. Two things hold me back, high transaction costs and a distrust of OSE. That said, longer term fundamentals always matter, some of the time.

State of the Mobile Web

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Opera has published some stats on phone use with Opera Mini the first quarter this year (based on the URL this seems to be a front page rather than a quarter report 2008/I, so if you read this post later the content may no longer match). To what extent this can be generalised to phone browsing in general is less clear.

The first graph, cumulative users per month, isn't very interesting unless you're into marketing or wonder how well Opera Mini fares, even then it is less useful than the two other graphs for page views and data consumed that tells something about how much it is used as opposed to how often it is installed, and the use grows considerably faster than the number of installs. The consumption table is particularly freaky, what happened in December that almost doubled the traffic (and increased the number of pageview by almost a half)? In November Mini 4.0 was released. That the data consumption increased faster than the number of pages viewed would either mean that people were viewing more advanced (or bloated) pages than they did before, that the data compression is less efficient than 3.0, or both.

The bigger story is that five times as much traffic is handled this March than a year ago, and though the columns are too small to measure precisely that in turn was five times as much as March 2006. So will the current 1 terabyte of data every day turn into 5 terabytes by 2009? By the guesstimate that Opera Mini uses a quarter of Norway's bandwidth, they should be using five quarters of the bandwidth by then...

Of more general interest would be which sites are visited, but I am missing the PC top 10 for the different countries to compare results. The variability from a country to the next is pretty high, possibly higher than desktop. I also wonder how the sites are classified.

If social network sites are relatively more commonly accessed on a phone than on a PC, it would fit my tenet that a phone is a more social device than a PC. A high number of searches wouldn't be surprising either, you get the answer where you are, and now you have a fair chance of getting the answer before you forget the question too.


What is the use for ODF?

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This post is a reaction to xErath's comment to an earlier rambling.

Originally posted by xErath:

There's enough info online about the deficiencies of ooxml. I don't need to quote them here.
Just to have it over with, we agree. I may be a Microsoft groupie at heart, but I don't have time for OOXML. People who want to discuss OOXML should feel free to do so, elsewhere. More interesting is this part:
HTML5 is a big patch over HTML4, made to be backwards compatible with the complete mess that is the web.

ODF on the other hand is a clean approach to define an abstract model of document formats. Then ODF has many features that html5 will never have nor will make any sense. I doubt html5 will ever include native spreadsheets support, slide transitions, page footers and headers... you name it. ODF will not support local databases nor globalStorage.
First, I have come to realise that the phrase "it is a complete mess" is a shorthand for "it works very well, and I don't think it should". In fact the Web is a remarkably sane place. We have millions of monkeys making Web code every day, and it works. The Web is more like an ecosystem than an engine, you don't stop and "repair" it, it is survival of the fittest. If you look at Web code written today and ten years ago the old code was worse and still achieved less. The Web has evolved and it keeps evolving.

Read more...

How long will the web last?

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At least until tonight when we, if in Prague, will find out. Opera's Håkon Wium Lie (nice interview), will count down to its doom.

Leaving Opera

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That should more properly be "having left Opera", as I am no longer an Opera employee, but that doesn't work as well as a title. There is nothing dramatic about the decision, and I think Opera is an excellent employer, but I had been at Opera for seven and a half years and that was long enough.

Much of my work at Opera has been with standards, and standards don't matter. Having standards does, but as long as they are reasonably sane it doesn't matter what they are. The latest standards debacle in Norway wasn't related to browsers but with office products, word processors and the like, with the competing standards called ODF and OOXML.

ODF is not a good standard. You can read through the entire spec and will find nothing clever there. Anything ODF can do HTML5 can do better. Add cursor position to HTML5 and it could have been called ODF 2.0. What it has going for it is the absence of bad. Microsoft makes good standards, much of the time. OOXML is not one of those times, what it is lacking is the absence of bad. Could it be fixed? Probably, but to me it isn't worth it.

As for Web standards I think it should be an optional for Opera. Opera should encourage the presence of standards, and follow them unless they are bad, but it shouldn't necessarily form them. Opera should do what makes its users happy.

Opera Mini makes me happy. It lets me do things I couldn't do before. This entry was intended to be typed in on Opera Mini while I was on the move, but in the end it was typed in on a PC. It wasn't written in Opera Mini because Opera Mini isn't data loss safe, without copy&paste or save I can easily lose what I write, and data loss does not make me happy.

Being unemployed makes me happy as well, for now anyway. It's been a long while since the last time, as the last few times I changed jobs I went directly from one to the next. It is almost the same elated feeling as being homeless. I haven't actually been homeless in the sense that I own one flat and rent another, but I have adapted to a mobile lifestyle and from time to time I've not known where I will spend the next night and that is a strong feeling of freedom (until nightfall) — I can go whereever I want. I have used to claim that the bag in my one hand is my office, containing my laptop and other work stuff, and the bag in my other hand is my home, containing clothes and other private stuff. For now I can move with one bag less.

Ooh, shiny, shiny

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This Thursday May 8, was a local holiday, the liberation day for the end of World War II. Liberation day used to be the 9th of May, but perspectives change. It also led me out into the Prague suburbs as the latest, and last for a while, extension of the Prague Metro was opening. In the 18 years since I first visited Prague, the metro system has doubled in length, with 19 new stations (Oslo in the same period added 3 new stations). It is a fairly young system, it opened in 1974, and is efficient, convenient and pleasant to use.

While I am an early adopter in the sense that I quickly visited the new stations, I actually never have bothered to be there at the opening (not the official opening, but when it opened its service for the public a couple hours later). With the next station opening in 2013 at earliest I took the trip to the suburbs where the three new stations, Střížkov-Prosek-Letňany, were located, or at least two of them. The terminus, Letňany, is placed in the middle of an empty field. There's an small planes airport nearby and it is just between two large suburbs (Letňany and Kbely). Supposedly the location could come handy if Prague won its 2016 Olympic bid, which is not going to happen. The station is integrated with a nice new bus terminal, as well as a new Park and Ride, so the communications in this part of town still have improved.

What's more the station itself is pretty in blue-tinted glass and highly reflective chrome (at least for now). The most noticeable station of the three is still Střížkov. This dome looks like how the future could be imagined in the 1930s, or progressive architecture concepts from the 1970s. Open, light, and practical. Absent at the opening was commerce, no shops and no pubs or bistros. I can only assume that they will come later, one picture series indicates we can at least expect a hair dresser soon.

More pictures can be found in my album. Skyscrapercity has a relevant thread, and then there is the metro site if you can read Czech or just like to look at the pictures.

The evolution of language

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There have been many language threads and digressions; I should know, I have participated in most of them. Maybe it's time to start talking about talking: What is language, where did it come from and for what reason? How do languages compete, cooperate, coopt each other? Where are they going? Is one language better than another? What about dialects, sociolects, idiolects, jargon?
Follow the discussion here

More science, religion, ethics, and peer reviews

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It seems to be science week at the Debates & Discussions forum, and of course I couldn't resist butting in, be it peer-reviewed sinful science, or the study of armageddon.

A Prague Opera

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And so it begins... On the circuitous route from the outskirts of Europe to the centre, going from Oslo through Linköping and Wrocław, Opera has finally reached Prague.

Read more...

The Year in Browsing: The Little Engine That Could

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By the end of last year one long-standing competitor to Opera ceased to develop its browsing engine. No, I am not thinking of Netscape, that browser was dead when it was bought by AOL, but an old Opera favourite, iCab. From now on iCab will use WebKit as the engine, in effect turning it into a WebKit skin, like OmniWeb before it. This is more sad and nostalgic, OmniWeb was always about the UI anyway, while iCab showed that two skilled and dedicated programmers could compete in making a browser that (some) people actually wanted to use.

This is not to say that it wasn't a sensible, rational, and reasonable business decision. iCab can prosper more easily now that as tiny team can focus on the one thing closest to their users, and leave site compatibility to the much larger group of WebKit developers and evangelists. My next :beer: will be on them. However, this leaves the choice on the Mac platform to three, WebKit (Safari, OmniWeb, and now iCab), Gecko (primarily Firefox, but also Camino and others), and Presto (Opera). In general the trend on any operating system is less choice, not more, and this trend is likely to continue. There is unlikely to be a radical new browsing engine in 2008 or in 2009, the choice is instead going to be among the existing ones.

92% Complete (3 days until Party begins; 5 days until Party ends)

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This is my week off for the upcoming party, and it is really getting there. As am I, of course.

2nd Annual Street Conversion Design Contest

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I wonder how cities will change in the 21st century, and believe that it will generally be for the better. That is a good thing given that most people will be city dwellers. One problem which I expect to be solved is traffic as an environmental problem. As travel becomes relatively cheaper and more convenient (which I think it will in the long run) people will travel longer and more often, so the time spent travelling won't decrease even though the injury caused by it hopefully will.

Assuming that the car will retreat from ever-larger parts of our cities, that gives us an interesting problem, what shall we do with the spaces thus liberated? If you go to a city like Copenhagen many central streets seem curiously overdimensioned when the cars are largely gone. Of course there were streets long before there were cars, but in the middle part of last century the city plans were often designed for the car. What can best be done with streets like this when vacated by cars? The traffic and pollution might be gone, but the street is still not an integrated part of the city, and cities abhor empty spaces.

That makes some rationale for a design competion.
The value of human-scaled carfree areas is increasingly appreciated, both among urbanists and the general public. Yet how can we transform existing areas to create lively people-oriented spaces free of traffic?

Through our 2nd Annual Street Conversion Design Contest, we are challenging architects, artists and ordinary citizens from around the world to design carfree spaces from formerly car-oriented spaces. And where possible, we're also encouraging people to realise the designs on the ground. Update: Thanks to a grant from Artists' Project Earth, we are able to do further global outreach to announce this year's contest more widely. Therefore the deadline has been extended to November 15, 2007. The grant has also allowed us to offer cash prizes of €100-200.

The principle is that street space was once used for both transport and human interaction. But with the arrival of the automobile, street space has become monopolised by cars and other vehicles, resulting in a loss of community and livability. This competition aims to reintroduce a level of humanity to the streetscape, both on paper and by encouraging lasting on-the-ground initiatives.

We are asking participants to design carfree spaces from formerly car-oriented spaces, in three categories

Cruelly Slow Slog

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The CSS 2.1 specification was recently refused entry into the (almost) safe harbour of Candidate Recommendation (CR) status again (for what is it? the fourth time?). This means that the spec is still in a you-can't-believe-a-word-of-this Working Draft state, just like it was seven years ago. This can be summed up in the word frustrating.

To be fair the goalposts have not only been shifted from when Tantek Çelik originally suggested CSS 2.1 one Sunday afternoon, but completely replaced. Originally the idea was just to remove the parts of CSS 2 that nobody wanted to implement. This could have been done in months. It would essentially be a profile of CSS 2, "CSS 2—The useful bits".

Instead CSS 2 was fully rewritten in tedious detail, the goal was now the interoperable CSS 2. This in itself was a good thing. It is much better that the spec is unambiguous than having incompatible implementations of the same, vague, spec. The ones having already implemented CSS 2 would need to adjust their products, but for new CSS 2.1 user agents getting it right the first time is much cheaper, not to speak of the millions of web designers that don't have to make specific hacks for every browser in existence.

But there is a diminishing return. The optimal time/clarity moment was probably when it was first submitted for CR, three years or so ago. This is not to say that what was done after that was unnecessary, but the extra clarity we have gotten for increasingly obscure issues have simply not been worth the additional years. They would have to be resolved at one point or another, but are errata or CSS3 material. The fatigue in the working group and impatience in the designer community is also starting to show, those that haven't given up on it years ago.

It is also slightly unfair. SMIL 2.1 had its first (and last!) working draft in February 2005, and a finished recommendation in December 2005. Were they that more efficient? No, but evidently their goal was to push out a spec as soon as possible rather than solving underlying problems, and crucially nobody outside the working group cared.


With this as a background it is none too surprising that a discussion on wither working group, even in some cases whether working group, has started. One solution I find particularly unconvincing is the argument that the CSS working group should follow the lead of the new HTML working group which currently has 405 self-invited experts, and the number is growing. That is the classic "the project is late, let's throw in many more people" approach. This behind the scenes report may be the best summing up of the situation.

The other symptom is an earlier call for CSS 2.2, reminiscent of my suggestion in 2002 or thereabout of a CSS 3.1. The big problem was as evident then as now. CSS 2.1 may have taken way more time and effort than was originally intended, and now we suffer from it. But sooner or more likely later it will be done. CSS3 on the other hand is a monster many times bigger than CSS 2(.1), the chances of it being fully done, let alone implemented, any time soon is nil. So what about the designers that have waited patiently on rounded corners for a decade and now have the outlook of having to wait another decade so that at least their children will be able to specify it in their style sheet?

The Better TV, designing for Wii

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The better TV points to an entry I came across, Wii trumps Apple TV
This is the first time users can easily browse, find and watch YouTube videos right from their living room couch.

Alexis Gentry heard this statement yesterday when Apple CEO Steve Jobs formally announced the Apple TV product, which would allow users to find their favorite YouTube videos, pay a tiny fee, and stream them to watch on their television. She then thought something to the effect of, “Having I been doing that already?”

Back in December, Opera launched the trial version of their internet browser for the Wii. Since then, Wii owners have been casually watching YouTube videos from their couches - and for free.


Gloating aside, there's an article I'd recommend if you are interested in how your web site will work with Wii, Making Wii-friendly pages. From working with phones and similar devices it is interesting how the Wii, much more powerful than any phone, shares some of the characteristics of a phone, some of the characteristics of a PC, and some unique characteristics of its own. And I'm not just talking about the Wii wand.

Bohemian weekend

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Though scaled down from the original 11 day extravaganza, there is a party established this October in the Czech Republic.

The better mousetrap

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As you may have noticed by now Opera for Wii is out.

I bought a Wii of my own a month or so back, my very first game console. I don't mind playing games, but I've rarely got time for it. I tried a PS2 a few years ago and it was fine but really not too exciting. The gaming industry is far too focussed on graphics, which is much like special effects in movies: the experience may be more immersive but without a good story not worth much, and the gameplay seemed firmly stuck in the early 1990s.

Wii is fun, fast, and friendly, cute Mii avatars and all. That it is less powerful in technical terms than its competitors is actually part of the appeal.

The UI revolutions

Of course what it is really about is the Wii wand (or Wiimote as it unofficially is called) you wield. It is the center-piece in the user interface Revolution, as the device was code-named. The appealing Wii games are the ones where no buttons are pushed, but the wand is an extension of your body.

More ambitious phones all have UI inventions, not all successful. Siemens incorporated the phone camera in an augmented reality game setting, Apple iPhone will bring some improvements in tactile interfaces, a long-standing interest of theirs, other phones have included accelerometers before the Wiimote. Speech interfaces and handwriting recognition have been around for a while. Our mouse gestures had predecessors among computer games such as Black&White. In general games and mobile devices are good places for innovations.

Nintendo has done good work in not just making this a gimmick, but a fairly consistent environment. Some jar a little, the Wiimote is joined by the tail to the nunchuck game console interface (joystick and all), and their mental model are very different. The Wiimote is immersive, it gives you the illusion that your body is part of the game, while the nunchuck unit is manipulative.

Demoused

But most notable the Wii system is mouse-free. The Wiimote doubles as a true pointing device, you use it to point at the screen, and the infrared lights and Wiimote receptor triangulate to decide what part of the screen it is pointing at. The accelerometers sense motion and rotation, with "rumble" vibration and the speaker giving feedback to the user. There are some oddities. If you point the Wiimote qua pointer outside the screen area you get no indicator other than that the cursor disappears. This can be desirable when you've parked the Wiimote, but new, and sometimes experienced, Wiimote operators wonder where the pointer went. An indicator which direction it is pointing to when outside the screen would have been helpful, as would possibly be locking it into the visible area.

We are trained to think that the mouse is a natural user interface. It is not, as anyone witnessing someone learning to use a mouse for the first time can attest to. Outside the workstation the mouse is outside its element. It needs a flat surface and a designated working area where you interact with the application. But this interaction is continuously interrupted when you access the menus, the toolbars, or the scrollbar, and then you have move the pointer back to the starting position again. The one major advance in the fourty year history of the mouse is thus the scroll wheel, though the trackball inverted mouse also deserves mention for foregoing the flat surface and working area. The number of buttons may vary, but the mouse has hardly changed. While it has served the personal computer well, it is less than certain that the mouse has any future as an input mechanism for future devices.

Wiiboard

Speaking of buttons, a very common wish for Opera on the Wii is to get a keyboard to actually be able to create more text in reasonable time than most would be able to do on the virtual keyboard. I have no idea whether a wiiboard is in the works or not, though indications are that it is, but many have noted that it could use the Wii USB ports.

I for one hope not. It would be out of character, the user shouldn't be bondage to the machine like it was some PC. With the Wii Bluetooth capabilities the keyboard should be in the hands of the user where he is, and a Wii player would throw any attempt to tie him down with a wire out the window.

Going wireless adds a battery requirement though. The keyboard could be wired to the Wiimote, depleting the batteries even faster, but you are using rechargeable batteries by now anyway. It might also remove the need for a Bluetooth controller, as the Wiimote supports the Bluetooth HID profile. That would prevent other devices to attach to the Wiimote though. You could almost wish having the devices daisy-chained, with the Wiimote on one side and for instance the Nunchuck on the other. That would come handy for the nose typists among us.

While the mouse could be replaced there aren't really any current alternative for text input to the keyboard that wouldn't require even more training to use efficiently, so something QUERTY should be taken as a given. With that as a requirement there are several options. It would be nice to use a foldable compact keyboard, so you could have the same keyboard for your Wii as you would for your phone. But the overlap between heavy phone users (with Opera Mini or Mobile of course) and Wii users is probably not that great.

It would make more sense to consider the Wiiboard a gaming/entertainment controller. Why shouldn't the keyboard have accelerometers just like the Wiimote and the Nunchuck? While I'm not quite sure I would go for a Wiiboard cum frisbee controller, some Wiiboard gestures could be useful for text handling, user/system actions, and in particular gaming. Even without accelerometers it shouldn't have to underperform the Classic controller. Some dedicated or user-defined keys could make it quicker to do rote tasks (and rote and Wii shouldn't belong together). Many channels could benefit from that beyond the Internet channel, like for instance the Photo or Weather channel.

Wrocław declawed

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I have wanted to visit Wrocław for a long time, and as it is situated in the South-Western corner of Poland, it is fairly nearby Prague. Nearby geographically at least, it is quicker to get to Oslo from Prague than to Wrocław. There is only one daily train going directly to Wrocław, but it runs so slowly that IDOS will always find some other sequence of trains to intercept it, saving an hour or so for the trip. There is also a much quicker bus, but it leaves late and arrives in the middle of the night. The cross-border connectivity is poor.

My route was a slightly later sequence of trains, five of them in all, each one smaller than the previous one, until the shuttle train going from the tiny village on the Czech side of the border to the tiny village on the Polish side. It was a 10 minute ride and 15 minutes wait on the other side, more convenient than the 4 minute connection I had just done, but it was also a 20 minutes delay, to the consternation of myself and the other two people on the train (plus the driver) that were about to miss the train to Wrocław too. The connecting train had stayed, so we ran across the tracks not to push our luck, but in the process drew the ire of one of the customs officer whose passport control post we had neatly bypassed. A year from now we wouldn't as the Czech Republic and Poland both should be in Schengen by then. The Polish train arrived in Wrocław as it should, so all in all it was better than my previous crossing. Taking in in the first hotel I could find (hotels near the railway station are often cheap and sleazy, the way I like them), I got my surprise.

I hadn't come to Wrocław for tourism, but because we had just opened a new office there and I wanted to visit. Also Norwegian had opened a Wrocław-Stockholm route, making Wrocław a possible transit point when I had some business in Sweden.

This was my second attempt to get to Wrocław. In December, when I heard of the new office, I bought a Wrocław-Stockholm ticket in addition to the Prague-Oslo ticket I had bought earlier. Unfortunately I got the dates for the two tickets I had mixed up and only realised that while sitting on the slow direct train heading for the border, leaving me to jump off the train and head back for Prague instead so that at least I got one flight. That was one time I missed Outlook. I would never trust its mail client, but as organiser it isn't half-bad. In particular it could hold the few pieces of information I need together: From where and when is the next flight I am supposed to take (where to is less important), where and when is the following flight, preferably also how long will I be away and which countries will I be in, for packing reasons. Without that information I make mistakes like that.

I've found that I am not so unusual, most of the travel details are figured out on the journey (most, however, order hotel rooms in advance, something I've been loth to do as it limits my flexibility, but I have realised the benefits of planning here).

A couple days before leaving I got a mail from Norwegian about a schedule change, my plane went a day earlier. That was a little harsh, on an earlier trip I had gotten a message that the plane left half an hour earlier, fine when you know it, but this would cut my Wrocław stay in half, but that was still OK. But I hadn't read the message thorough enough until the next morning on the hotel, planning my itenerary. The plane didn't just leave early, it left from Krakow, an entirely different city. As Poland goes it was a nearby city, again in geography, the time to get there was the same as getting to Oslo. By the time I had gotten the information on how to get to the airport I had half an hour until the last train that would make it in time left.

Checking the web pages it turned out the Wrocław-Stockholm route had been cancelled, presumably not enough people were using it. Even so I was disappointed that they hadn't gotten seats from one of the two or three other airlines going to Stockholm (as there couldn't be that many people to reschedule). I've never encountered a change of city in any flight, and while they may have the right to do so, it was very poor service. It was also annoying that I didn't discover it until just before the train left (of course it would have been more annoying afterwards), giving me no time to yell and shout. If I had seen this I would have demanded a ticket from Prague, saving me two days on the train with barely any Internet connection.

I guess what I really want would be for the date and place for each leg to be marked up as such, using hCard or similar, so that my calendar was automatically updated. This would also need a reference to the original itinerary so that it is updated, not a new one added.

Stealing SVG Designs

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Just published my first SVG article on Dev Opera.

Entering a dark age of innovation

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I came across this report on a study by Jonathan Huebner showing that the rate of technological innovation is slowing down, and that by this rate we will be down to the Dark Ages level by 2024 (a curiously precise prediction, but presumably by comparing the technological advances of the millennium 500-1500 with the current trend).

There is no doubt this study is seriously flawed, the data picked can be seen as arbitrary and even misleading, but it is no more flawed than the other hypotheses and studies around. Self-styled futurists tend to be highly myoptic. It is a natural phenomena, you are highly aware of the changes happening to you, but less to to your parents and their parents' parents. In particular I admit a strong scorn of the singularitons claiming our world will enter a technological apocalypse in the near, but conveniently distant, future. My claim is that revolutionary, paradigm shattering, Oedipal changes are getting rarer as we live a longer productive life. Of course that is far from the whole story, but over time extrapolations always fail.

In a particular area the field may be stable or stagnant for a long time, experience rapid technological growth, and then fade into the background. This can be seen in the ages, we have had the non-starters of the Atomic Age followed by the Space Age, with the more successful Information Age which too will fade. The myoptic bias is to count the changes that are important to us now, and discount the changes that were important to us then, or will be in the future. We will have no greater problems living in our future than our predecessors have living in our present, as long as we can adjust to that change in focus. All that changes fast now will change slowly in the future.