Time Heals All Wounds.. And Then Kills the Patient

Beyond the relatively uninteresting-but-important thing of being a search engine (I know there are some interesting parts but overall it is not flashy), I think Google's success at being more than a search engine comes down to three things:

• Designing and adopting software institutions for effective, low-management, high-efficiency distributed code. This is sophisticated and interesting, but it's not obvious why someone would want it until one sees what Google has done with it. The failure of other software-as-service vendors to do this as generally hampers their flexibility and leads to high development, deployment, and maintenance costs for any service they decide to one-off. Google has published at least some of the code to manage this - even considering that they don't publish everything, the risk is low that they're helping their competitors too much because alongside the software infrastructure they've built hardware to its spec for long enough that they have a good lead.
• Designing and adopting software institutions for a powerful user interface in the browser. This is also sophisticated and interesting, and also not obvious until one sees why someone would want it. Apart from the search engine itself and very high end applications (e.g. Google Earth), all high profile google applications rely on this and would be very difficult to imagine done without that toolkit.
• Keeping a simple design æsthetic. Other search engines and internet services have come and gone, many of which made their sites prettier than google's. We should understand that as vanity - google's software is low-frill enough that it feels like a utility, with the very occasional quirks kept to a minimum and nondisruptive (e.g. custom google logos per certain days of year). Except when the user's network is bad, the Google experience is as fast and reliable as flicking a lightswitch

Any of Google's competitors could probably have done these things and been roughly as successful - the other specifics of Google are not necessarily significantly helpful (or helpful at all) towards their goals. I don't believe Google can live up to its 「don't be evil」 motto when their primary source of revenue is advertisements (adverts being intrinsically harmful). The tendency not to charge end-users for products helps them get mindshare, but if software is good enough at some useful tasks, it can still be expensive and thrive (e.g. Lotus Notes).

I recently reluctantly moved some spreadsheets for our lab on campus from GNUMeric on my laptop (which I utterly love) to Google Spreadsheets. The collaboration stuff is well done enough to make me forgive the interface.

The concept of Mujtahid, from Islam, is a useful one to help us understand the role that value-philosophers (particularly but not exclusively trailblazers) should take on themselves to play in society. Similar scholarly and behavioural/character traits should be present, mixed as well with aspects of being a prophet/lawgiver. Appropriately secularised and with a greater emphasis on creativity and the risks of opposing existing social order (whether entering into the field of law (practically or theoretically) or focusing on matters of compatible value or not), it is appropriate to say that this type of philosopher should hold themself to that level of standard.

I am not certain if the Shi'a term of Marjah applies as well by analogy, but it is also informative.

Attn broadcast news media, (view full entry for contents)

Al Jazeera's article about institutional Christianity in the US military worries me. Also, I kinda like Bruce Schneier, but he recently had a post advocating an end to password masking that strikes me as being so horrifically wrong that it's left me pretty much speechless.

Portal was a lot of fun, but it was very good at making me queasy and upsetting my stomach. I imagine it would only be worse to be the main character - in the challenge mode at the end of the game, there should be a challenge to make it through the level without being sick all over oneself. I can't say I liked the timing-critical parts, but the puzzle aspect was quite good. I've played portal before now, but never more than a bit of playing around (and never enough to feel ill).

When I was younger I sometimes got this from visiting Omnitheatres.

Portal felt too easy, but I am not sure how one could make it harder without making it impossible - there were times when I had to think (mostly in the bonus levels), but not *that* deeply.

The downside to Portal sickness is that, like tetris, the puzzles pop back in my mind and even the memory of them is enough to make me feel sick again.

It is potentially just as interesting to imagine what we would design buildings like if we had portals and springshoes as if we had usable wings (which I often daydream about).

Wherein I try to constrain my mopiness and tell tales of animals: (view full entry for contents)

Oh, also, I have a very large collection of random documents that have caught my eye over the years, and occasionally I pick a random one and read it. I recently chose this one, and thought it was particularly cute (and a bit challenging) - it's about applied statistics in Monty Hall-type games. My intuitions on it were initially wrong (my approach to statistics is mostly based on intuition and while not very formal is generally pretty good), and so it took me awhile to translate the paper's logic into my perspective. It was a good exercise and feels like a full mental meal - I feel that it helps remind me about the right way of statistics so hopefully I got useful broader regularities out of it.

FC11 has some awesome stuff in its repositories that is not (but should be) installed by default.

"yum install padevchooser paprefs"

This gives you a widget called "Pulseaudio Device Chooser" which you can use to either publish your sound card on the local network or send your audio to other published devices on the local network. It's pretty easy to pipe all your audio to another machine - I don't yet see a GUI way to mirror your audio between local and remote. Bandwidth use seems to be pretty reasonable.

It's been possible to do this manually for quite a long time (with various sound servers), but maintaining different sets of configfiles based on where one physically is (for laptop users) is a shoddy solution. It takes some getting used to that your local volume control is not honoured - I am not sure whether it should be or not.

(this probably applies to those of you on other Linux distros too)

A quick cheat sheet to the Iranian Soap Opera (I have seen news organisations get much of this terribly wrong in the last few days): (view full entry for contents)

This has turned into a particularly difficult and lonely weekend. (view full entry for contents)

However, I did manage to make some Paneer Tikka Makhni that was pretty good. Paneer is in fact very easy to cook with, and there are some wonderful canned sauces (like tomato sauce in preparedness) at Whole Foods. I am not sure what it would take to actually make those sauces from their sources, but it might be good to learn - the sauces are not quite right (India Garden's version at spiciness level 8/10 is reasonably close to the way they should be but also not quite there). Whole Foods has a number of other canned indian sauces that look promising for other meals. I need to get some wild rice, as I like its taste better than white rice in almost all dishes. Apart from puffed rice, I really like most types of rice. I hope it's healthy for a vegetarian diet.

I really don't like father's day very much, a bit beyond not liking most holidays. (view full entry for contents)

Rereading Murakami's 「Wind-Up Bird Chronicle」, recently re-watched 「Pollock」 and 「Naked Lunch」. All three are among the best cultural products of recent times, I think.

It's also a little bit weird to be getting pseudopersonal email from Michelle Obama. Everything this administration does makes me wonder what's going to become precedent.

(view full entry for contents)

(Mohammad Khatami on the left, Mohammad Ali Abtahi on the right)

Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former reformist government minister under Mohammad Khatami, was recently arrested in Iran, according to a guest-blogger on his blog.

I have long enjoyed the candid commentary by Abtahi over the years I have read his blog, and wish him, Khatami, and Mosavi well in the ongoing political mess over there. I feel like I have a personal stake in this now as I've exchanged a mail or two with Abtahi and respect him. (In politics, you don't always get to design the people or the circumstances you like from scratch, but some people, regardless of how they would move things relative to where you are, are good people).

You may do a google news search and find your own story on him.

(I am still without power)

If I wanted to live somewhere where the power is unreliable, I'd move to Azerbaijan. Damnit. Second day of coming home to darkness.

Here's to hoping the cats remain afraid of the candles and that the batteries to my various laptops last me awhile.

I suspect that everything in the fridge is going to rot, sadly including the Paneer I was hoping to experiment with. Still, maybe the timing is not so terrible as being on a mood downswing makes me want to sleep all the time anyhow.

I also made the mistake of buying candles that smell like food, which make me hungry. These candles *really* smell like delicious pies. I suspect there is someone whose entire job is to make candles smell like food. Mmm. Sigh.