Key in the cognition

02:05 pm - Disambiguating roles

The notion of fluid roles than can be resolved to specific items can be applied across a surprisingly broad range of domains. The resolution process generally involves using contextual constraints to pin down the exact item filling a given role. Here are some examples: the role of head-of-state in any democracy can always be resolved to a specific person but usually changes every few years after an election; the 49ers home stadium is currently Candlestick Park (or whatever its being called these days) but if they were to move to another city then that role would start being filled by different stadium; noon is a time of day whose absolute position in time depends upon the timezone in which it is resolved; independence day is a holiday that falls on a different day in every country that celebrates it and doesn't even exist in some;

The process of disambiguating roles seems to involve the application of constraints in a recursive manner. For a given role, we can know in advance the constraints required to resolve it. However, some of those constraints may themselves be defined by other roles, which would have to be resolved first. As long as we can define a dependency tree for this purpose, resolution should be straightforward. Sometimes this may not be possible because a pair of roles may have mutually dependent constraints. Usually this can be avoided when constructing the tree if some of the problem roles have multiple options for their constraint set. Sometimes, however, resolution may have to be performed iteratively.

The advantage of using fluid roles instead of fixed values is that you don't need to manually update anything when the value assigned to a particular role changes because it can be dynamically resolved as needed. This is the same principle behind the use of DNS to resolve unchanging domain names to potentially volatile IP addresses.

Current Mood: calm

01:47 pm - Tony's spicy scrambled omelette

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
  
• half of a small onion
  
• 4-6 large crimini mushrooms
  
• a tablespoon of sun-dried tomato strips
  
• a handful of shredded cheese
  
• half a teaspoon of paprika powder, cracked black pepper and crushed red pepper
  
• garlic (half a teaspoon if powdered or 2 pressed cloves if fresh)
  
• a teaspoon each of powdered coriander (replace with a tablespoon of finely chopped leaves if freshly available) and cumin
  
• a dash of cayenne pepper and ground sea salt crystals
  

1. Slice & dice onion & mushrooms, then sauté them in oil with cracked red & black pepper until the 'shrooms have relinquished most of their water content.
   
2. Add a little more oil and reduce heat before pouring in the eggs while stirring contents of pan around.
   
3. Add in the spices and mix well.
   
4. When egg is no longer liquid, add shredded cheese and sun-dried tomatoes.
   
5. Cook on low heat for a few more minutes.
   

Current Mood: amused

09:08 am - Dear banks, please make your websites stop sucking

Over the past few days I've been using the websites of various financial institutions and have been frustrated by how terrible they are.

While trying to change my 401k investments at Fidelity, I was stymied by an error message that told me my fund choices could not be honoured by the website and I should call them instead. Upon calling them I was informed that one of my selections was no longer available and had not been so since 2004. Since 2004! Why then is it still showing up in my list of available funds!? And why doesn't the website let me know what the problem is so i can alter my selection instead of being forced to wait for business hours and call them?

Today I tried to log into my CitiBank account, only to find myself presented with the login page again. There was no error message provided. After retrying my password - the same one I'd used successfully yesterday - I called them and was told that the website was being updated and I should try again in an hour. Again, why don't they state these things on the website...? Bizarrely, I was then able to login using the current beta version of Opera, although not with Safari 3.1.1.

Even ING isn't that great. The ask you to provide a "Saver ID" but make absolutely no mention of the purpose that it serves. They then send an email thanking you for creating this ID but still neglect to mention where you can use it! Finally, they allow you to link one external account for ACH transfer when you create your account but force you to mail them paper cheques to add subsequent ones. Why!?

I remember when the websites of financial institutions sucked back in the late 90s but I figured that they were still getting the hang of this newfangled Web thing. Well, it's been a bloody decade and they still suck. No wonder so few people use online banking... So I'm offering up my services as a professional UI designer at no charge to financial institutions that want to make their websites suck less. Give me a test account (if I don't already have one) and I will tell you how to improve your customer satisfaction with online financial interaction.

Current Mood: annoyed

06:21 pm - View fom the other side

I hit somebody while biking home today. I was in the bike lane, proceeding at a good clip down a nice flat stretch of road. A large delivery truck was parked along the curb. As I zipped by it, a guy jumped out of the truck and into the bike lane, about 4 feet in front of me. Calling out to warn him, I braked hard and skidded into him pretty hard. Of course, I apologized immediately but not before he swore in surprise at being collided with. The great thing about bicycles, however, is that I didn't even knock him over and he seemed to be fine.

Current Mood: thankful

07:13 pm - Why we're all doomed

Imagine a game with these rules:

1. the game lasts for a finite amount of time (T);
   
2. any player can choose to opt out at any time, which is equivalent to losing;
   
3. the number of possible winners (W) is a small fraction of the total number of players (P);
   
4. when the game ends, if the number of remaining players (R) is greater than the maximum possible number of winners, they all lose, but otherwise they all win.
   

Current Mood: pessimistic

08:30 am - Official VMware Workstation blog

The Workstation team now has an official public-facing blog :-)

You can even read about a major project I've been working on for the past year or so.

Current Mood: excited

07:37 am - The economics of population control

Last weekend I had occasion to speak with an interesting young man who left China several months ago to learn English in Canada. He told me many surprising things about the inner workings of China, although I'm not entirely sure how biased some of his views are. One things that caught my attention in particular was his revelation that, despite all we've heard about China's infamous one-child policy, he had a younger sister. Apparently families are now allowed to have a 2nd child if they pony up a substantial fee and the 2nd child is a girl.

That's fascinating because it reveals that the ostensibly communist government has actually been applying a strange sort of market system to birth-control. In some parts of the world, people lack the knowledge or means to control the number of offspring they produce. In most industrialized nations women have a high degree of control over the number and timing of their children; a free market of sorts. In China, anomalously, the state has a monopoly on the right to give birth, although "the first one is free". Regardless of the frightening impact this implies upon individual freedoms, they can make a reasonable case for resorting to such a measure given their alarming population growth. Of course, cultural artifacts ended up biasing parents in favour of male children to such a degree that China ended up with a huge imbalance (dozens of millions). The effects of this on society are hard to predict accurately but I imagine they are unpleasant.

To solve this problem, the state threw in a deal that tips the balance in favour of female children. Of course, if they simply left it at that, it would unleash a flood of 2nd children and their iron fisted approach to population control would be thwarted. Instead they cleverly employed a market-inspired control: price. This gives them pretty fine-grained, albeit chronologically impaired, throttle on the number of "extra" girls that society produces. They could have tried a queue or a lottery instead but this approach has the appealing side-effect of raising the state's revenue so it's hardly surprising that they opted for it.

Current Mood: weird

09:14 am - Bugzilla needs a talk page

The current incarnation of Bugzilla uses a single page to display both the current state of a bug report as well as the discovery and discussion history that lead to it. For nontrivial bugs that have been around for a while this usually means that somebody who hasn't been following them since the beginning needs to read the entire discussion before grokking the current state. Although some of the current state may be captured in structured form using the fields that appear at the top of the page, that is usually insufficient information to properly understand the nature of the bug.

There is a solution to this problem that has been successfully applied to the domain of wikis: the talk page. This is a means of divorcing the state from the history so that it is easy to glean the currently known information about an issue while still having an avenue to continue investigation/discussion and preserving the history of this discourse. Applying such an approach to an issue tracking system like Bugzilla would eliminate the clutter on bug reports without requiring us to forgo the benefits of revising issue details as new facts come to light and opinions change.

Current Mood: creative

08:08 am - Disenfranchised

Since my official Canadian residence (where my mom lives) is in Toronto Centre, one of the 4 districts that held bye-elections yesterday, I wanted to cast my vote for Chris Tindall, who was representing the Green Party. I faxed in the appropriate form the day before the deadline but only received my ballot on voting day itself, thereby preventing me from participating. I suppose I could have sent the form in earlier but what's the point of having a deadline if it doesn't help get shit done on time...? Anyway, it looks like Chris did quite well even without my help.

Current Mood: annoyed

08:58 am - Observations on watching a kid use a computer

Yesterday I was helping a kid edit an essay at the Pirate Supply Store - it's a front for a writing clinic - and couldn't help but notice some interesting characteristics of the manner in which he used the computer.

Like many people, he was using webmail as online storage. Surprisingly, he was using his mom's Yahoo/SBC account instead of having one of his own. I've heard that Google was surprised to discover how many people type entire domain names into their search box instead of the browser's address bar but watching this in person is still pretty weird. The kid typed "yahoo.com" into the Safari search box, which brought up Yahoo as the top hit. That's when it got even more bizarre. Google had conveniently provided links to the commonly used subsections of Yahoo in the search result. The first of these was Mail, on which I expected to see the kid click. Instead he just clicked on the main link and went to the yahoo home page before eventually logging in and arriving at his inbox.

The next observation to surprise me was the difficulty he had selecting text with the mouse. I'd previously assumed that any middle-school kid in San Francisco would be an expert mouse-user and he certainly displayed no other signs of impeded dexterity so I am tempted to attribute this difficulty to unfamiliarity with basic usage of a mouse. My hunch is somewhat supported by his complete surprise at my introduction of the scroll-wheel to his arsenal of mouse-using techniques. Later on I noticed that he tended to backspace his way through multiple words upon realizing that he'd mistyped one instead of just repositioning the cursor. Admittedly, I have seen this behaviour in expert computer users as well.

Made me wonder how much exposure kids really get to computers in school and how many kids in this city lack access to one at home. Maybe desktop computers are just getting old though, since he seemed to have no trouble using his cell-phone. Finally, I can't help but wonder if there's a way to make the enormous number of people currently using webmail as storage to start using the more effective tools we now have available for storing dynamic textual documents on the Web.

Current Mood: amused

09:30 pm - A sad ending to an otherwise excellent tale

Last night VMware Workstation was inducted into the Jolt Awards hall of fame. To celebrate, my manager gifted each member of the Workstation UI team with a bottle of now-hard-to-find Jolt cola and then took us out to a pub. I stashed my jolt bottle into the side pocket of my backpack while biking home from the train station in the city. Along the way, one of my shoes managed to come off so I bent down to put it back on. Sudden;y there was a crash and fizzy liquid all over the street below me. My jolt had fallen out.

Current Mood: sleepy

09:18 am - Approaches to life

There are 6 approaches (that I can think of, anyway - tell me if I missed any) to approaching the problems one encounters in life:

1. Anticipate and avoid them.
   
2. Fix the problems.
   
3. Pay others to solve them.
   
4. Adapt to the new situations so they stops being problematic.
   
5. Run away.
   
6. Ignore or accept them.
   

Current Mood: contemplative

09:47 am - Democracy and me: from kites to teabags

My introduction to the notion of democracy dates back to 1988 when General Zia, then then military head of state, was assassinated in an aeroplane explosion. During the weeks and months that followed, the country was engulfed by the competition between various political parties to fill the power vacuum left in Zia's wake. Karachi, as the country's commercial centre, was thrust into the midst of this political maelstrom. Being a naturally curious child, I was fascinated by the fervent political campaigning and have a vivid memory of drawing the flags of various political parties onto kites and trying to fly them from the 3rd story balcony of one of my grandmother's neighbours. At the time, I could not fully appreciate the magnitude of what was going on; I just knew that it was more exciting than the placid existence I had known during Zia's regime.

Nine years and three ousted Prime Ministers later, I had a different taste of democracy when Jean Chrétien, mangling both English and French equally, thundered to a second term as Prime Minister. This election was an order of magnitude less chaotic than any I'd seen before and Chrétien was very popular amongst the people. I even voted for his party to elect him for a third term in 2000. Our faith in him, however, was rewarded by the sort of corruption I thought didn't happen in industrialized nations. A tad disillusioned but unwilling to betray my socially liberal values with a Conservative vote, unable to vote for the Bloc because they didn't run in my riding and uninspired by the NDP, I cast my ballot in favour of the Greens. Thanks to the regionally fractured electoral system, the Greens didn't even win a single seat out the 308 available, despite securing more than 4% of the popular vote (while the Bloc exploited the same systemic defect to grab more than a sixth of the seats with a mere 11% of the popular vote). It was around that time when I decided that democracy ought to be liquid not representative.

Fast forward another eleven years and I find myself living in yet another country and unable to vote (despite being taxed). Reviving an ancient tradition here, I threw some tea into the Boston Harbour when I was there recently.

Current Mood: artistic

10:26 pm - Introspection on the current dry spell plus a neat idea

I haven't updated this blog much in the past several weeks. In fact, this has been the longest dry spell since I started it 4 years ago. It's not that I don't feel like blogging any more or that I've been too busy to write. It's more that, after more than 2 years at VMware and a year in San Francisco, I've mostly settled into some steady patterns of life and there isn't as much novelty about which to write these days. While I'm not bored, I don't want to write about the minutiae of my life all the time because, quite frankly, it wouldn't be all that interesting.

I've considered blogging about ideas instead of events but there's no temporal cue to do so, which means that those posts end up languishing in the purgatory of my mind. While there's a small temptation to call it quits, there's no real gain from doing so. Leaving this blog on simmer, however, would allow me to make occasional updates to it when something particularly interesting does happen. That's probably what I'll end up doing.

pphaneuf

Current Mood: uncomfortable

08:44 pm - The year begins when we decide it does!

Went camping in Pinnacles national park for the New Year's weekend. What with 2 stoves and a fire-pit, I think we ate better while camping than I had at home the previous day. Spotted some cool animals: woodpeckers, turkeys, deer, various birds of prey, etc. Hiking with a 3-year-old is an interesting experience: mostly fun but slower than usual. Finally went spelunking for real, after hankering to do so for the past few years. Best part about spending New Year's Eve in the wild: once the sun sets, we just waited an arbitrary length of time and decided to bust out the champagne. Update: Although it was so cold at night that our water froze, being able to see the Milky Way band for the first time in my life made this trip well worth it.

On the train home there was a 'Nam war vet who was pretty disconcerted that the soldiers who were sent to iRack multiple times had managed to sue for 130 grand. My sympathy for him was tempered by his blatant racism.

Current Mood: sore

10:35 pm - Flying a kite

The last time I tried flying a kite I ended up crashing a $300 kite into a utility pole. So when some of my friends suggested we spend the afternoon flying a kite at the Marina green today, I was adamant that it be a cheap kite. We went to a kite store in Chinatown and I asked for the kite that was easiest to fly. With a knowing look, the proprietress directed us to a selection of kites whose prices ranged from $24 to $30. We ended up with one that looked like a turtle.

Upon reaching the green, we did our best at deciphering the vague assembly instructions and then began trying to get our kite soaring. It wasn't as windy as we would have liked but there was another guy flying a kite with no trouble so we kept at it despite making little progress. After about an hour or so, I guess the guy couldn't bare to watch any more because he came by and informed us that we had a piece of the kite assembled backwards. I've no idea how he could determine that from dozens of feet away but after we spun that piece around, the kite shot into the air and stayed there with minimal effort on our part.

Current Mood: satisfied

10:13 pm - Airline 2.0: my first experience flying on Virgin America

Virgin Airlines has a reputation for being innovative and customer-focused so, when they began operating in the US (as Virgin America) with direct flights between SFO and JFK, I decided to give them a whirl. They have an online flight booking system that's quite good and, like every other airline I've used, let me check in online. The flight I took yesterday afternoon was only half full, presumably because of Thanksgiving, so boarding was the fastest I've ever experienced.

The seats on the aeroplane were all new and shiny. They were also surprisingly comfortable for an economy cabin. And I was pleasantly surprised to be offered a choice between two different styles of complementary headsets (the traditional kind with a band that goes around the head as well as ear-buds, which I prefer). As it turned out, their ear-buds were awful and made a loud buzzing sound. Fortunately the audio port on the seat is a standard one so I was able to plug my Apple ear-buds in and enjoy their far superior sound instead. Virgin's safety instructions are the best I've ever seen. They have created a very captivating animated guide to the aeroplane's safety features and procedures that I enjoyed watching despite normally tuning that information out entirely.

But the key difference between Virgin and the other US airlines is their in-flight entertainment system called Red. It's apparently based on Linux, although the only passenger-visible evidence of this is that one of the games available on it has the word Linux in its title. I played around with the system extensively during my 5 hour flight and was impressed by its design, although they seem to have adopted the open-source mantra of "release early, release often" and it's still in beta so several of the features have not yet ben implemented. That said, the parts that were available for use did work quite well.

Virgin's approach to music, as you might expect from a company with experience in the music industry, is well thought-out. In addition to a diverse selection of channels playing preselected music, passengers can create their own playlist by browsing through an extensive list of songs organized by genre and artist. Removing the currently-playing song from the playlist did not cause it to immediately skip to the next song as I was expecting but instead it simply continued playing the song! A few times it also skipped to the next song before completely finishing the current one. Those were, however, the only bugs I encountered in the entire system during my flight.

On the video side, Red offers a few music videos and several live TV feeds sporting popular shows. While all of those are free, the selection of several new movies costs $8 a pop, which seems a tad steep. For those who chose to cough up, payment is very convenient via the swipe of a major credit card. In fact, you can also use a credit card to pay for food by ordering it through Red. The interface for doing this is simple and intuitive, although my experiences with it suggest that the staff are still getting used to it. I tried ordering a free drink of tomato juice but only ended up having it delivered when the stewardess came by in person to ask if we wanted anything to drink. Later I requested a bottle of water using the system and it got marked as having been delivered without me actually ending up with one. Slightly irked, I placed another order about half an hour later and this time was immediately rewarded with the delivery of three bottles! Personally, I'd prefer low latency over high throughput when ordering beverages.

Disappointingly, the email, e-zine and inter-passenger chat features were not available, although the stewardess did not seem to be aware of this as she encouraged us to use the chat. The flight status system is excellent, however. It is powered by Google Maps and allows passengers to interactively pan and zoom while the plane's current position and direction is displayed via a little icon. Being able to see the flight path would have been a nice touch but that wasn't an option.

Overall, I give Virgin America an A for design, an A for effort, a B for quality but a C for functionality. I hope to try them out again with better results in the future when Red is out of beta.

Current Mood: impressed

11:13 am - Here we go again

Despite having wreaked havoc by tampering with things we don't understand on countless occasions, it seems we humans just can't bring ourselves to stop. One of the 6 ideas that Esquire claims will change the world is the idea of sequestering the CO₂ we generate (from burning fossil-fuels to generate power) under the ocean's depths. They quote Kurt House saying "there isn't any major life at that depth" but there's no way that he nor anybody else can know this since we haven't been able to explore those depths yet.

Current Mood: cynical

06:47 pm - Crash boom bang

I've been pretty busy with work for the last few weeks and haven't had anything particularly exciting about which to write. That streak ended today when a pick-up truck backed into me while trying to parallel park. I was riding behind it when it stopped. I stopped behind it and was about to pass it on the left when I discovered, to my horror, that it was reversing. Although there were a few feet between us, it's impossible to backpedal on a bicycle so I tried to dismount as fast as I could but to no avail. The truck slammed right into my front wheel while I was still seated. In desperation I kicked off and flipped backwards off the bike and onto the road.

Almost immediately thereafter, the truck stopped moving and the driver got out to see if I was OK. My calves hurt from being mashed against the pedals but I was otherwise unhurt. [Ironically, I'd been hit right outside the best hospital in the city.] My bike's front wheel was completely destroyed and the kick-stand had been snapped off but the frame looked undamaged so I exchanged contact information with the driver, who gave me and my bike a ride home. I estimated the damage at roughly $200 so he handed me that amount in cash and said I could call him if it turned out to be insufficient.

I'll be taking the shuttle to Palo Alto tomorrow and will be in NYC until next Wed so I won't need to use my bike for another week, which should give me enough time to have the wheel replaced.

Current Mood: relieved

09:05 am - Professional sports as opiate of the masses

While watching a baseball game a few weeks ago, I wondered why people have affiliations with sports teams. What makes them care so much about the fortunes of an organization from which they receive no tangible benefit? More surprisingly, why is it that so many people care more about the progress of the sports teams they follow than they do about things that directly affect them in significant ways, like local and national politics or environmental dangers to their health and well-being? I have a friend who eschews the nightly news in favour of ESPN. Newspapers have long known that they could finance the rest of the paper by selling the sports section. Why is this?

Current Mood: surprised