maebmij’s blog

“We’re at a critical juncture in the evolution of software. The web is still here and it is still strong. Anyone can still put any information or applications on a web server without asking for permission, and anyone in the world can still access it just by typing a URL. I don’t think I appreciated how important that is until recently. Nobody designs new systems like that anymore, or at least few of them succeed. What an incredible stroke of luck the web was, and what a shame it would be to let that freedom slip away.”

–Joe Hewitt, On Middle Men

Let’s imagine you wanted to align the keys on your keyboard into a grid. How would you decide how to line them up? There appear to be two approaches:

1. ‘Nearest match’, where each key is assigned to the closest grid cell, like this Crayola keyboard:
   
2. ‘De-staggering’, where you imagine the keyboard as a series of left-leaning columns of keys and then straighten it, like the TypeMatrix keyboards:
   

As you can see, this results in the bottom row of alphas being differently offset, depending on your approach. Option 1 leaves the keys closest to where you expect to find them (W and Z are nearly lined up already on a standard layout, so the only significant movement is in the home row). Option 2 leaves the keys arguably better-lined-up for traditional touch-typing, though:

Standard qwerty fingering (image from Wikipedia/KTouch)

In the finger-memory of a traditional typist, there’s already a keyboard grid: The left-most column in the example above extends from 1 down to Z.

But nobody’s really making grid keyboards apart from crazy ones like the above, right? Not full-size keyboards, anyway. But mobile devices (where touch-typing isn’t practical anyway) seem to be really into the idea:

Palm (or HandSpring, I guess, since it introduced the keyboard) went with option 1:

Palm Pre (image source)

Meanwhile, Nokia seems to be hedging its bets (both of these devices are from 2009):

Nokia N97 (image source)

Nokia N900 (image source)

The rumoured Motorola Sholes Android phone (named after the inventor of qwerty?) uses a mutation of option 1 (the home row is also shifted to the right), unlike Motorola’s just-announced Cliq (which goes with standard option 1).

(And then, of course, there’s Dell, who apparently once offset one row of keys on a full-size, non-grid laptop keyboard, just to keep things interesting.)

But anyway, there hasn’t been enough cyberpunk in this blog post yet. Is a miniature keyboard really the best way to get text into a mobile computer? Here’s a real input device (originally from “Intelligent Image Processing” by Steve Mann, John Wiley and Sons, 2001):

Steve Mann’s septambic keyer

And yes, I’m mostly including that picture because it reminds me so much of Ghost in the Shell’s dismantled-cyborg imagery.

Cadets participating in ‘cyberwar’ games against the NSA (is that Wireshark up on the screen?)

(New York Times article)

Does your mobile browser have difficulty reading the ‘title’ attribute on xkcd strips? Is this a problem for you? Does your mobile device have command-line access to a unix-like system? If so, you may find the following title-extracting script useful. Call without arguments for the latest strip, or supply the strip number as an argument:

#!/bin/bash

if [ $1 ]; then
    URLPATH=$1/
fi

curl -s http://www.xkcd.com/$URLPATH |grep "img.*title" \
|sed 's/.* title="\([^"]*\).*/\1/'

The current anonymous-vs-scientology stuff has been reminding me of an idea from Ghost in the Shell: A “stand alone complex” which can result in people spontaneously engaging in copycat-like behaviour, but without an original. The director said he was trying “to underscore the dilemmas and concerns that people would face if they relied too heavily on the new communications infrastructure”. In the story, the complex manifests in many people claiming to be a famous hacker known as the “laughing man”, who hides his identity using a digital mask which looks like this:

Meanwhile, in reality, lots of people called “anonymous” have been protesting Scientology, wearing masks:

I’m not the first to notice a similarity, of course:

On a side note, if you like the idea of the laughing man, you may like this website, which automatically applies laughing man masks to detected faces in images:

…you know me so well:

You can read the whole thing here.

Fake Steve Jobs on Google’s mobile phone platform thing:

“Also, whenever you see companies start talking about being “open,” it means they’re getting their ass kicked. You think Google will be forming an OpenSearch alliance any time soon, to help also-rans in search get a share of the spoils? Me neither.”

Ouch.

I imagine the marketing-psychology stuff runs pretty deep here: I present for comparison a current Dell advertisement for their video chat system, and two Apple promotional screenshots of their video chat sytem:

Dell

Apple

And, to add some politics into the mix, I’ll just note that (allegedly) Michael Dell’s political donations are 89.4% Republican, while Steve Jobs’s are 99.6% Democratic.

It’s all iPhones at work at the moment. I got to play with one for a few minutes, so I finally got to try out my Fortune iPhone-web-interface, mentioned previously:

Something interesting that I hadn’t been able to visualise before was “viewport” scaling: The browser de-couples the physical screen resolution from the page’s virtual resolution. When you visit a web page, the browser simulates a relatively large window, and then scales the resulting page down so it fits on the screen, but is very small. If you’ve already designed with a small screen in mind, you end up with a lot of wasted space unless you tell the browser (via a meta tag) that you’d like it to pretend a smaller window size (resulting in less scaling). See Apple’s iPhone-Safari dev notes for a proper explanation.

Here’s Fortune with a specified virtual window width of 600 pixels:

And here’s what it looks like without a specified viewport width:

Incidentally, the viewport width seems to stay constant when the orientation changes: If you rotate to landscape, the page image zooms in somewhat so that it can still fill the screen without becoming any wider in terms of the virtual browser window (i.e. the viewport width is preserved).

It makes me sad to think that there might be a computing device out there incapable of running fortune. Since the iPhone doesn’t run real (local) 3rd-party apps, Apple wants you to write “Web 2.0 applications” for it instead. After an evening’s work (largely on the logo you see to the left – I’m very proud of it), I give you Fortune, the web app – a wrapper for the fortune-mod package from Debian.

A few days ago, reader.mac.com turned up, and was theorised to be an iPhone-only feed reader web app. Now that the device has been released, you can check it out from other browsers:

• Install User-Agent Switcher (or change your user-agent string manually)
• Use the iPhone user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
• Visit http://reader.mac.com/mobile/v1/http:%2F%2Fmaebmij.org%2Fblog%2Ffeed, or your choice of feed URL

Apparently, Safari on the iPhone sends RSS feeds to this app instead of processing them locally.

I’ve been having great fun (along with the everyone else) with the new Google Maps feature that lets you view certain streets from the point-of-view of a sinister, slow-moving surveillance van instead of a satellite/plane:

Some related fun stuff:

Robot Exclusion Protocol: I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower to find another one sitting near the drain. It was about 2 feet tall and made of metal… (via jwz)

Robots.txt 2.0 (via BoingBoing)