Note that I didn’t say “The Great Redeemer”. The reality is that Obama hasn’t redeemed America – it largely redeemed itself by electing him in the first place, which is not to say that his ability and willingness to lead the country along the right path is not worthy of the highest praise – but he didn’t get there alone, and he knows it: “This election isn’t about me.” – how many times did you hear that during the campaign? I don’t think it was false modesty, he knew the American people were desperate for Change, and he was willing to offer it in no uncertain terms.

Still, after re-electing Bush, America has a lot to make up for. I cried that day back in 2004, and I suspect so did half the politically aware people on the planet (and we all cried again 4 years later, but for a different reason).

Realistically speaking, a huge leap has been made, but solid incremental improvements towards a return to international norms and good faith multilateral agreements, as well as strong leadership in progressive, non-military areas, followed by a public affirmation in the form of a re-election in 2012, are going to be required before the real skeptics, of whom I know plenty, will accept that America has truly redeemed herself and may deservedly claim some sort of leadership in the “free world” again.

Personally, I’m sold. The tenor being set by the first few days, along with the quality of the people going into key positions (more on some of them later perhaps) is going to make a significant difference to America’s standing in the next 4 years (heck, in the next 4 months), and I even believe they can sort out the economic crisis without the huge inflationary crash being predicted by some (probably some more on that later as well).

NB: This post grew from a comment I made on Jimmy Wales’ blog (which is currently in moderation but that may have changed by the time you read this).

I was thinking about New Years Resolutions, and how one of them ought to be that I should really post a few more things this year rather than just leaving half finished draft to finish off later. However, I got distracted, and never did finish making any resolutions! Since then, a dozen unfinished drafts seem to have turned up…sigh.

So, ok, I’ll make it official. Resolution #1: At least one half decent blog post per week, or 52 total, before the end of the year. I’ll start by finishing a few of those drafts!

…according to Typealyzer, anyway, which says that INTPs are:

“The logical and analytical type. They are espescially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagining far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.”

Most of that applies to me as well as my blog. Especially the “…finding subtle connections between things and imagining far-reaching implications” bit. I seem to be doing that all the time, and I really need to get myself into a position where it works to my advantage, rather than against it. The problem at the moment is that every new idea or insight is just another distraction keeping me from doing all the things people are expecting me to do (or, depending on the time of day, getting to sleep that night).

The initials INTP refer to Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Perceiving, and INTP is one of the 16 Meyer Briggs Type Identifiers (MBTI).

The last time I seriously looked into MBTI, maybe 4-5 years ago, I thought I was borderline INTP/INTJ. But after recently spotting Typealyzer (via Stowe), I started digging into MBTI again, and now it seems to me I’m well to the Percieving side of the INTJ/INTP divide. (eg, one classic INTP trait is to ignore the humongous to-do list and focus on understanding whatever currently has their attention, which in this case, is MBTI theory)

The Judging type, apparently, like to come to conclusions and move on, while the Perceiving type tend to suspend decisions until they have more information. If you could see my web-history and todo list, I’m sure you’d agree I’m a very P-type thinker.

Fortunately, Karl is very much on the J side of the spectrum, or Interclue never would have had a prayer. And perhaps with a little more self-knowledge and self-awareness I’ll be able to get more done in 2009.

Has anyone else tried Typealyzer? Did your blog’s personality match your own personality?

Oh, and Happy New Year everyone! May it bring great reward to us all, despite the, er, ominous signs and portents.

(more…)

The ’08 US election has re-drawn the American Political Map, put tears in the eyes of many (myself included), and surely changed the world. My father was pretty sure it couldn’t happen, and I think most Americans his age would probably have agreed, right up until the first results started coming in. Dissatisfaction with American politics was the major reason my parents ended up here in the early 70s, a year or so before I was born. History was made on the 4th of November, there’s no doubt about it. But enough has been written about Obama’s victory to stretch from hear to Mars if you printed it in 8 point Helvetica, so I’ll refrain from going on about that in this post.

In contrast, New Zealand goes to the polls tomorrow in what has to be described as a bit of an anti-climatic mood. Few seem to see a lot of difference between our two major parties – largely because John Key decided to adopt most of Labour’s policies, on the grounds that (a) they seem to be working and (b) the public seems to like them. The NZ public appear to have simply gotten bored of Labour, and frankly, I think they’re a bit daft because “boring and predictable” is about a thousand times better than what we saw from all the other NZ governments in my lifetime. But after 9 years everyone has managed to find at least one or two things they don’t like about Labour people or policies (Recent copyright legislation is a biggie for me and anyone else who cares about freedom and the internet), and since minor quibbles become more important when the other side isn’t promising to do anything much different, well, I can see how Labour is unlikely to get through this time. I’ll still vote for them, because they earned it, and I think in years to come we’ll probably look back at the 4th 5th Labour Government as one of the best we ever had.

However, one other notable point of difference lacking between our two possibilities for Prime Minister is their religion – or rather, their lack of one. In the last leader debate “Both said they did not believe in God or in an afterlife” – I quote from a report of the debate I read, because I missed the debate myself. Recently I’ve been regretting the lack of a TV at the office! So perhaps what they actually said was a bit more nuanced.

But if not, my assertion that this too is an historic election. I haven’t had time to research it, but it seems to me that Helen Clark vs Jenny Shipley was probably the first time two woman had fought for leadership of a western democracy, and this might be the first time that the fight is between a pair of atheists.

The reason this is possible is that the role of religion in NZ culture has been depleted to the point where no one really seems to have thought about the significance of such an election. Our separation between church and state is very much a “done deal”, and any talk of bringing the two back together is electoral poison. The fact that the last leader of a significant Christian party in this country is currently doing time for sexual abuse of multiple girls under the age of 12 probably may have something to do with that.

In America, on the other hand, it is almost impossible to win office, even at the state or local level, where they elect almost everyone from the local judge to the local tax collector, if you openly declare that you do not believe in God. It is a tragic, broken state of affairs and explains much of the pain that the country has gone through in the last few decades – through deliberate manipulation of their “flock” and of their favored politicians, the leaders of the religious right have prevented anyone from getting into power who was (a) smart enough to have decided there probably isn’t a God, and (b) honest enough not to have hidden their decision. And when you can’t elect a huge number of smart, honest people into even lowly positions of power, and it’s impossible for them to get into those particular positions of power through merit alone, well, what would you expect to happen?

US$700bn. A lot of money. As Jeff Jarvis says, that’s a whole lot of OLPC’s or college allowances.

Only one problem. The USA doesn’t have $700b. What it has is outstanding IOUs for ~$10.5t, and the credibility to borrow another ~$1t without anyone really thinking too hard about it.*

But if their entire investment banking sector and half their retail banking sector collapses through undercapitalization/overleveraging as a result of ratings downgrades due to the collapse of their credit default swap counterparties in a great big game of financial dominoes, that credibility might end up somewhat…strained.

As it turns out, the ~$70t CDS game is a global phenomena, so the collapse of American banks has the potential to indirectly cause the collapse of many other banks around the world, and since, quite frankly, I quite like being able to buy books from Amazon and cheap Chinese-made electronic gadgets (and on a more serious note, global economic depressions kill people, m’kay?), I’m really hoping the US Congress has it’s shit together this week.

On the other hand I tend to agree with Paul that it would be good if the US Taxpayers got some upside from bailing out their wayward Ibankers, although I fear that they really might not have enough time to work out the details. Perhaps a convertible bridge loan facility with similar conditions to the AIG bailout might be a suitable alternative to simply overpaying for distressed MBS to help the banks meet their Basel II obligations and hoping no-one complains too much about it.

* They’d better not think too hard about it, or they might remember the US Govt is currently on the hook for ~ $50t worth of unfunded Medicare & Social Security Obligations, and then start talking about a ratings downgrade on US Sovereign Debt, and frankly I’m not quite sure what happens after that.

Disclaimer: IANAB. No need to take any of this stuff seriously. I’m sure they’ll work it all out. But, you’d have to agree, interesting times.

Well, life’s been a bit of a roller-coaster lately. We have been averaging about 2500 Interclue installs per day in the last few months after becoming a Mozilla recommended add-on, which is about 10 times as many as we were getting before that.

On the other hand we also started getting a lot more uninstalls, mostly due to usability flaws that became obvious after we started getting users who really had no idea what they were getting before they installed – the ones who read the first paragraph of the description on addons.mozilla.org and hit “install” because if Mozilla was recommending it, so it had to be worth a go.

Obviously, you can’t please everyone, and it’s pointless to try. But we’ve been working hard to increase the general usability level of Interclue in the past few months, and also to make it fully compatible with Firefox 3 before the official launch, which happened last Tuesday.

As a result of that hard work we’re actually keeping most of our new Firefox 3 users, many of whom are installing Interclue right out of the Firefox 3 add-ons manager, with very little idea of what to expect. It’s impossible to tell how many we’re getting from the add-ons manager vs people visiting addons.mozilla.org – I’m guessing maybe about half?

Currently we’re running at ~ 6k/installs/day, after slowing to “only” 5k/day over the weekend (we always get fewer installs on the weekend). During Download Day we gained almost 13k new users, and peaked at over 1000 installs an hour.

Lots, huh? Not so many when you consider Firefox 3 itself was getting downloaded over 15,000 times per minute at one point during launch day.

The codebase that runs addons.mozilla.org (a.m.o) is called “Remora” – which isn’t entirely a fair analogy – Firefox is certainly a leviathan of a product and we’re benefiting hugely from being attached to it, but there’s a more symbiotic relationship than the one you find with real Remora. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a subsequent post.

I saw this post on O’Reilly Radar and it inspired me to go looking at the list of available Google APIs. There are a lot of them. Google just totally rocks in this regard. I quickly picked one of the many product ideas I have lying about that I’ll never get around to implementing, and tried to figure out how to implement it using a big pile of Google APIs. It would need mobile, so I started with the Android APIs. While looking at those pages I noticed there was a competition closing in 6 days that had some awesome cash prizes. We’re short on cash at the moment so I thought so I thought “can I come up with something we can build in 5 days that will crack the top 50?”. 10 minutes later I had a decent idea, half an hour later I’d fleshed it out enough to decide it was good enough to tempt some developers if I could find some with free time. Problem is most of the people I know who are good are also busy. I started writing letters to a few of them anyway. But next day, by bizarre co-incidence, a friend who had more or less the perfect combination of skills, interests and free time walked into my office, which I don’t think he’s ever visited before. This was sufficiently serendipitous that I figured it was a sign of something that had to be done.

To cut a long story short, Trond, Paul and I are now 4 days into our Android Hack-a-thon and we’ve made some reasonable progress, Particularly Trond who has been going great guns on the UI side of things. We have about 25hrs to go. Can we complete an app that will crack the top 50? Remains to be seen.

Part of me feels guilty because Interclue requires my full focus at least until we get to break-even on cashflow (which we’re not even close to on donations alone…), but I could see there was an overlap in the technologies we would need for the Android project and those we will be using for the subscriber extensions to Interclue, and although I come up with new product ideas pretty often, this is the first time I’ve allowed myself to get past the “idea” phase on a new one for over two years, and there is a definite cutoff point (30 hours away now) where my attention can switch back to Interclue, which I have been keeping half an eye on in any case. So I decided I could risk it just this once. I promise not to make a habit of it!

BTW there is some particularly awesome news about Interclue that I haven’t formally announced yet. Will do so soon. Let’s just say that it’s going great and I’ve got no intention of sidelining it in favor of a new venture in Android Application Development, but if we do win one of the 50 $25k prizes then I’ll have to at least give this at least enough attention through June 30th to have a crack at the $275k and $100k prizes, and based on the experience gained “Interclue for Android” will be looking good for the next $5m challenge contest happening later in the year!

PS: Rob O’Brien and Marek Kuziel, who were both sadly too overloaded with stuff to give me a hand with this, are organizing a Mobile and Identity Barcamp in Wellington near the end of the month. Go if you can, I’m sure it will be awesome.

Update: We did not make the top 50, but we were apparently in the top quartile for all 4 judging categories, which suggests we could have been pretty close. Not bad for <5 days effort when the competition had been running for 5 months, in any case.

Things have been going well, but it’s been extremely hectic. Have just recovered from Kiwi Foo Camp, which was awesome, and am now on the way to catch the end of Canterbury Faire. More details on those and the other things that have been happening after I get back.

So it was another night with the wild and crazy boys [1] of TVIC (The Valley in Christchurch).

TVIC is the second thursday of the month [2], but I’ve only just gotten the video I took off my Treo – I’ve been having problems with my sync softhardware, and with the impending launch of Interclue 1.5 [3], a bit too distracted to figure them out. Sorted at last, though.

For this particular TViC, Phil had inspired Marek to go hunting for dead CD-ROM drives we could take to bits in search of useful components. Unfortunately the call went out about a month after I threw out my own half dozen deaders, but Morris had a stack just as large, so the scene was set.

After dinner we went to the Bohemian, near the Incubator, got pints, and got out the screwdrivers. I’m really not sure what the rest of the clientel made of us, but the staff didn’t seem to mind us using their table as a workbench.

For a while it was “who’s got the 2nd smallest Phillips”, “did anyone bring one of those star-shaped drivers?”, and of course “who’s for another beer?”

The best things inside CD-ROM drives aren’t circuit boards (what sort of “boards” did you think I was talking about in the title?) but rather motors, gears, magnets, sliders, switches and LEDs. We found that the old drives were the best – less custom-designed plastic bits, more off the shelf components and metal bits.

The hardware hack of the night came after Morris used a DC motor wired to a CD-ROM tray slider as a DC generator to power a blinking red LED, when Phil suggested hooking up a green one with the opposite polarity…

Geektacular!

Marek took all the bits home afterwards. I have no idea what he’s going to make with them, but I’ll be standing well back when he demonstrates.

[1] Pssst! TVIC needs more girlgeeks! And well, more people in general actually. If you find this post amusing you’d probably fit in.
[2] Well, for the moment. It’s possible it’ll move back to Tuesday. Also, I think dinner needs to move to somewhere with an on-licence.
[3] It’s not too late to give us feedback on the new beta version

Here’s a screenshot of a link being previewed in the new Interclue 1.5 Beta, which you should install if you haven’t already.

See the hint next to the magnify cursor you get when you mouseover a thumbnail in a the new clueviews? When you mouseover the comics in XKCD you can usually see a little in-joke in the title hint. Sometimes, the titles are pretty long, and Firefox the tooltips don’t wrap. This has been a subject of some complaint, but thankfully, with the landing of the infamous reflow branch (count the dependencies!), this will be resolved in Firefox 3.

Yep, in the 1.5 Clueviews, images of sufficient size are thumbnailed, you can click to see the image full size, and then click again to go back from there. It’s pretty cool, and we think it’s a good compromise to showing no images, or a full size window with all the images, like Cooliris does (frankly, if I wanted to see the whole page, I’d just open a new tab).

I love this cartoon, and I wish he’d put it on a T-shirt, because Turing featured in one of my favorite assignments [1] while I was at UC, where I majored in Philosophy and Computer Science.

I was never a great academic, far too scatterbrained most of the time, and being up till 3am most nights running my BBS, playing Civilization, or online backgammon (FIBS 1700+, back when that was actually pretty good), sure didn’t help, but I do have my name in the credits of one academic paper, “On Alan Turing‘s Anticipation of Connectionism”, because our logic lecturer, who later went on to become co-director of the Turing Archive, discovered a mostly ignored paper by Turing from 1948, in which he definitely did anticipate “Neural Nets“, which is pretty amazing given that at the time there was only one non-specialized computing machine on the entire planet, ENIAC. [2]

Unfortunately, Jack couldn’t figure out how to make Turing’s “B Type” networks actually compute something, so in a brilliant combination of laziness, sadism and cunning, he gave his 3rd year students the option of skipping one our 20% take home assignments for the year, and instead figuring out how to make Turing’s type B networks work.

It was fun trying. In the end, I was one of about 3 students who instead succeeded in making a logical proof that these networks couldn’t work, (as specified by Turing, anyway). As I recall, I had to prove it 3 times, the last by structural induction, because Jack couldn’t accept that Turing might have got it wrong. He gave in eventually and I got full marks.

I put this achievement at the top of my list of 10 things I’ve done you probably haven’t, back in Feb 2005. Number 10 on that list was in fact Interclue, which was in the prototype stages even back then. It took a bit longer than expected to actually get it out, to same the least. I blame Hofstadter’s Law. But I’m really happy with the new beta so far, although it’s going to need some testing and tweaking, and we’d love your feedback. So if you’ve got firefox, go for it!

[1] And one of my favourite books, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

[2] Although others were under construction, and Turing had a hand in two of them – see Jack’s “A Brief History of Computing” for details).