Emo Start!

Life is too short for listening to music I don’t like.

Life is too short for reading painfully irrelevant news articles, blog posts and tweets.

Life is too short for correcting spelling mistakes in text messages.

Life is too short for creating reminders in Outlook.

Life is too short for email conversations.

Life is too short for long term planning.

Life is too short for filling in time sheets.

Life is too short for fast forwarding through ads.

Life is too short for 10 megabits per second.

Life is too short for flashback episodes.

Life is too short for fadey and slidey animations.

Life is too short for reading menu items.

Life is too short for dialog boxes and confirmation messages.

Life is too short for googling error messages.

Life is too short for correcting spelling mistakes in web searches.

Life is too short for scrolling to get to web page content.

Life is too short for reading useless forum posts.

Life is too short for installing drivers and codecs.

Life is too short for transcoding video files.

Life is too short for adjusting audio delay to achieve lip sync.

Life is too short for writing blog posts.

Life is too short for doing the dishes.

Life is too short for ironing.

Life is too short for reading books.

Life is too short for sleeping.

***

Gen Y is cursed to endlessly pursue happiness through a series of trivial distractions from responsibility.

Atheists are cursed to wallow in the paradox that free will is an evolutionary illusion for preserving a meaningless existance.

Satirists are cursed by the irony that the audience most responsible for perpetuating the cliches they so perfectly illustrate are the least likely to receive the satirical message.

I recently came across a post by Alan Snorkin which claims there are three types of people in software: computer scientists, programmers and developers. It’s pretty short and worth a read.

On the face of it the post seemed insightful. I could see myself as fitting best into the programmer category. But I fail to see the point of  this kind of restrictive pigeonholing. It may appeal to recruiters and managers who percieve it makes their job easier – but beyond that it’s largely counterproductive.

The article exemplifies an observed insudtry-wide lack of enthusiasm for software architecture and engineering. It’s a wonder the author can stand upright, with his knees jerking like that. I responded, paraphrased here.

Remember that software engineering is the most immature of all engineering disciplines. We’ve been building bridges and buildings for centuries – chemical and electrical systems to a lesser extent. But modern software development has only existed for about 30 years.

Add to that the much higher growth rate in software relative to other engineered industries, and you start to understand the lack of widespread adoption of engineering in software. Software engineering is still evolving as new systems come along such as the Internet, distributed systems, cloud computing, social networking etc. Many programmers, developers, project managers, etc. will hesitate to adopt a certain architecture or expend resources to engineer a system when there is a very real possibility that all their work will be out of date in 2 years as something better has come along or the industry has moved on.

So why then is rigorous architecture so ingrained in other industries such as mechanical, electrical and civil engineering? It’s a necessity. Without engineering, projects fall apart. There are no real consequences if your toy Web 2.0 app falls apart – maybe some commercial losses. But what if your un-engineered application was a control system for a nuclear reactor? A building, a bridge, or a train signalling system? Ouch.

I’ve done a bit of research into Facebook’s architecture. There are some brilliant videos and their engineering notes blog which describe it in detail, especially their focus on scalability. Services such as Google and Facebook could not meet their load demands without a scalable architecture. This kind of architecture will not “evolve” out of a consensus – it has to be designed.

The attitude of “Architecture is not used, therefore it’s not needed” is counterproductive and will only serve to reinforce the already observed industry-wide skepticism about engineering in software.

What’s missing from the original post is the acknowledgement that people can fit into one of the three categories but still be bad at what they do. Not all programmers “write awesome code”. Not all computer scientists “have 31337 math skills”. Not all developers have awesome people skills.

I have experienced first hand the need for consistency in system design in programming, but the principle also applies to IT support. In projects without the discipline of clean, modularised architecture, programmers will often revert to worst practices. If they have the time, they might do some refactoring but in reality, in high pressure environments with looming deadlines and no architecture enforced by management, programmers will be expected to achieve their task as quickly as possible – and this is often at the expense of code quality and thorough testing.

“Part of Apple’s success came from popular antipathy to Microsoft because it was so successful … Jobs cleverly made Apple’s journey, like his own, into a countercultural success story, playing off the Goliath that was Microsoft. But this year Apple’s market value surpassed Microsoft’s, making it the most valuable technology firm in the world … It seems Jobs is finding himself hoist on his own petard. Too successful in a capitalist sense, at a time and to a new generation for whom success is suspect.”

Devine also explores Jobs’ take on freedom, as exemplified in his recent email exchange with Gawker’s Ryan Tate:

”If Dylan was 20 today how would he feel about your company? Would he think iPad had the faintest thing to do with revolution? Revolutions are about freedom,” Tate wrote.

Jobs replied: ”Yes, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom.”

Well, finally, something Eric Schmidt and Jobs can agree on. We all deserve to be free from porn. This brings me back to the title of this post, which I have stolen from Devine’s article and have to include again because it’s just so damn insightful.

Too much freedom can be a tyranny of its own.

This applies not only to the incredibly important world of smartphones. It can also be seen in less important matters such as western society’s tyrranical attitude to implementing counter terrorism.

We seem to be fine with outsourcing the “filtering out of bad stuff” to any dictatorship who is willing to take on the task. In effect, we are happy to trade in our freedom to experience the bad along with the good, in return for being freed of the inconvenience of deciding which is which.

We are now getting to the crux of the Android vs. Apple dilemma. As observed by Craig Simms from CNET (my emphasis):

“The separate approaches of Google and Apple are interesting. Apple’s ridiculous level of control, strange regulations and amazingly closed system have severely limited what its platform can do, but has resulted in a much more polished, complete and integrated operating system. Most apps will actually work when you download them. It’s both its biggest strength and weakness.

Google’s openness and flexibility is equally its biggest strength and weakness: it allows considerably more capability than the iPhone, but to the detriment of platform stability and a more polished experience. We’ve lost count of the amount of apps that simply don’t work and need to be force closed.”

It’s also worth pointing out that Android’s openness for allowing almost any app onto the Android Market raises the possibility of wallpaper apps that steal your personal data. This brings us right back to the terrorism allegory: trading in freedom for convenience.

What is convenience?

In the smartphone space, one of the most important conveniences to me is speed: freedom from wasted time. I’m not just talking about the processing power of a device, although that is a contributing factor. The question of device speed involves many more aspects of the whole smartphone package. They can all be encompassed in the broader question:

“How much of my time is wasted in achieving my objectives on this device?”

Assuming for the sake of argument that activities performed on my smartphone are not intrinsic time wasters, I’ve jotted down some areas for potential inefficiencies for both packages in approximate order of importance.

Android still has a long way to go before it has anywhere near the polish of iOS, despite all its faults.

The evidence seems to suggest that an iPhone 4 would be the most efficient solution at the moment. Can I really allow myself the luxury of indulging my own principles by rebelling against the Apple alliance? Not really.

Am I willing to accept Apple’s tyrannical dictatorship if it saves me some time and potential heartache?

The answer is Yes. Suck it up Orwell.

Google appears simply to lack the ability to anticipate how its actions will be perceived. Or in the case of the recent Wi-Fi scandal, actually has no knowledge of what it’s actions really are.

“Oops, we didn’t read the code! Copy/paste, copy/paste! Coding is fun!”
- Anonymous Google employee (possibly a robot)

And Facebook has the social monopoly. There’s nowhere else for users to go, so there’s no commercial incentive for change. All its users can do is complain. You’re not seriously suggesting that people could ever leave Facebook, right? Don’t be silly.

However, things could be looking up. Last night, when I logged into Google Reader, it asked me whether I wanted my Shared Items to be public or “protected”. I chose the latter, allowing me to share only with selected groups in my Gmail contacts. This can be configured under “Sharing Settings”.

Logging out of Google and visiting my old shared items URL confirms this indeed works.

Then for some reason, I had the fun time of typing in all my friends email addresses one at a time to follow each of them. Thanks Google UI designers.

• Halo: When you die, time effectively snaps back to the last checkpoint, so everything in the game world including your ammo, health and enemies is exactly as it was when the game saved at that checkpoint.
• Bioshock: When you die time continues in the game without interruption. Your body respawns at the nearest Vita-Chamber with minimal health and plasmid energy but your ammo remains intact. Some enemies respawn.
• Prey: When you die time stands still while you’re transported to a place in the spirit world. Your aim is to shoot as many red and blue flying spirit piranhas with your spirit crossbow before a time limit expires. The more piranhas you shoot, the more health and spirit power you will have when you respawn. Respawn takes the form of your spirit returning to your body with all ammo and enemies as they were when you “died”.

On the surface, Bioshock’s death mechanic may seem similar to the traditional checkpoint mechanic but the continuous time aspect has consequences which aren’t obvious until you actually play the game. Below is a typical transcript of a Bioshock session which should illustrate.

1. Stockpile ammo and items that you find lying around.
2. Get to difficult part of level, such as a hard boss.
3. Try to defeat said boss, reducing your ammo and items.
4. Die and respawn.
5. Walk several hundred miles back to where the action is. Sometimes this takes over 30 seconds which is a long time in an action game.
6. Continue to stockpile ammo and items.
7. Fight boss again, using up your ammo and items.
8. Die and respawn.
9. Continue to stockp– Oh drat! There’s no ammo and items lying around anymore!
10. Try to fight boss with no ammo, no items, no health and no plasmid energy. Use your wrench to tickle boss with desperate futility.
11. Last about 5 seconds before you die.
12. Repeat from step 8 until you throw the controller across the room in epic frustration.

The problem with the continuous time mechanic is that the gameplay asymptotes to an unwinnable situation. It’s not “game over” but you’re trapped in an infinite loop like some kind of virtual Groudhog Day set in the sixties. What can you do? Enemies keep respawning but the ammo and items don’t. And God help you if your hard boss keeps running off to a healing station that’s beyond your reach. Your only hope is to pick off a couple of weak enemies whose corpse you can frisk for ammo.

The Halo and Prey gameplay mechanics are simply immune to the asymtotic death weakness by design. In Prey, ammo is plentiful, and Halo’s time reset means you’ll always have some resources at your disposal.

Prey has made an active effort to replace the tedium of trudging back to the action. So it may last 30 seconds but at least you’re given something to do. This avoids the dull action troughs that you experience in Bioshock while walking back to the fight.

In Halo and other checkpoint games, you may have to try over and over to beat a difficult part, but at least you’re given a chance. In fact your chance increases with every trial as you become more familiar with the layout and where enemies are going to respawn, etc. In Prey, your prowess at picking off piranhas is rewarded with an improved chance in the form of greater health and spirit energy.

Bioshock’s handling of death is not some kind of built-in puzzle. It’s not adding depth to the gameplay; it’s adding unbearably relentless tedium and frustration. To add insult to injury, Bioshock has one of the most spectacularly immersive, creative and suspenseful game environments I’ve ever seen. And the player is denied this unless they are some kind of masochist who enjoys wading through concrete. It’s like the player is being forced to earn their right to the Bioshock experience.

I want to love Bioshock. I want someone to tell me that I’m just impatient or I suck at the game. But I’ve never experienced this level of monotony in an FPS played on Medium or Normal difficulty. Half-Life 2: Episode 1 is close, but I’m playing that on Hard.

In Part 2 I’ll cover some of the more unique and groundbreaking death mechanics, starting of course with Braid.

***

Reconciliation in this country needs to stop being about what white fella thinks is best for indigenous Australians. As a nation, our reconciliation vocabulary only extends to telling this culture how to live their lives based on our own ideals. Has anyone ever stopped to ask the indigenous population what THEY want?

I’m not going to make a video or write a story. You are the journalists, that’s your job.

I want to see this on the 2010 series of Hungry Beast: a vox pop asking indigenous Australians the question “What do you want?” You can come up with more specific variations of this question in order to extract the kinds of answers you need e.g. “When will you know that true reconciliation has been achieved in Australia?”

And really ramp up the White Guilt in your editing. I mean seriously. Thrust that knife into our cold, shriveled, white hearts and rotate. Maybe interleave the vox pop interviews from white and indigenous Australians in a way that illustrates the contrast between our views on what is needed vs. what they actually want.

More ideas

Observation: There is an emerging trend for white Australians to vocally express their White Guilt. This may soon become a new mainstream form of Patriotism, replacing our previous forms: racism and getting drunk.

The kind of White Guilt I’m talking about doesn’t lead to action or solve practical problems. It’s more of a passive attitude that’s adopted by whites so they can wash their hands of the mistakes of governments past. Plant a flag in the moral high ground and one is free to enjoy life in the prosperous Australia we know today, despite the historical events that lead to its creation.

For successful reconciliation, the minority needs to feel like the engineer of their own emancipation. Epic bloody battles for freedom help with this. I’m definitely not suggesting we have one but Australia’s indigenous history is lacking this kind of epic empowerment that is present in other nations, e.g. USA.

Germaine Greer made an insightful observation recently: in indigenous youth culture, getting arrested is seen as a rite of passage. This illustrates my previous point. We can’t just tell indigenous Australians that reconciliation has been achieved. They have to feel it. This will sound ignorant but based on observations of analogous situations, I think it will help if the minority feel like they’ve earned it; like they had to fight for it. If equality is simply handed to them on a platter by Whitey, they don’t own it.

Maybe Investigate New Zealand. They have their own Maori TV station, the Australian equivalent of which seems a long, long way off.

It’s the classic “stalled elevator device” which is often used in film and TV dramas: trap your characters in a confined space to force character development. Simple. If you’re pressed for time, throw in a real annoying bastard (such as Robert Carlyle’s character) for some added tension to speed things up. However, after three episodes, SGU hasn’t moved past this basic device. If Wright and Cooper plan on stretching this to multiple seasons, no amount of pit stops on random, cliched planets, or dodging close calls with the Sun will make this format sustainable.

The next logical progression of the Stargate franchise became obvious to me after watching True Blood. Here’s a series in which vampires are “out of the coffin” as they put it, meaning the existence of vamp-kind is a fact, and also public knowledge. The series is thus speckled with parallels to historic struggles for minority equality. This results in a portrayal of the “vampires are real” world which is actually convincing, and believable.

The Stargate franchise needs to burn those NDA’s and just go public already! A few episodes in SG-1 touched on the idea, mostly via trips to planets whose Stargate program has already gone public. The challenge would be to develop this idea beyond “Stargates are glorified airports” while minimising the amount of political drama. District 9 showed us that seemingly far-fetched science fiction concepts can be handled with effective realism by drawing parallels with historical events (e.g. refugees).

At this early stage, I’m ready to applaud the creators for daring to diverge from the classic Stargate format: a power struggle between humans and an oppressive alien force. Defeat one, and another one comes along to replace it, and keep the series going. In SG-1, we had the Go’Ald, the Replicators, and finally the Ori. In Atlantis, it was the Wraith. If SGU reverts back to the power struggle format, I’ll stop watching.

Another potential direction, which would likely be more interesting, could be a prequel of sorts following the “Ancients”, their culture, technology (and the creation of the Stargates), and ultimately their path to ascension. If the series was different enough to its predecessors, it could work. It could explore themes such as “with powerful technology, comes great responsibility”, something we know defines the Ancients, who are always held up as the perfect race. With their superior genetics and technology, ultimate wisdom, and curious intervention restraint, they are an example of something we humans should aspire to become. So let’s see it, already! The ascension story arc could also deal with more “spiritual” themes, which would be something refreshing for the franchise.

Now don’t worry friends about this ever getting through parliament. The motivation is most probably a grab for conservative votes, and if it pisses too many people off, the lost votes will offset any gains. So we’ll most likely see some form of watered down filter, which may not be entirely evil.

In its current form, the filter simply has too broad a scope, which is the main point raised by  Google, and one I half agree with. While a tightly scoped filter (as used by Germany and Italy) which excludes specific material such as child pornography may appear to have benefit, it does not address the real crime, which is the fact that this material is being created in the first place. What are the governments of the world doing about that? Blocking child porn sites is akin to the government putting fingers in its ears and going “La La La! If I don’t know about it, it isn’t happening!”

If we can agree (UN-style) on specific classes of materials that no one should access, and if filtering does not impact speed, then It might be OK. However, when dealing with the Internet, blacklist filters simply don’t work. They are impossible to maintain and proxy sites pop up faster than they can be blocked. I’ve seen 10-year-old kids circumvent the NSW Department of Education’s filtering system like they were punching through a wet paper bag. The Department switched to a whitelist filter in 2008, but that doesn’t stop VPN’s and future loop holes that haven’t even been discovered yet.

In schools, it then becomes a discipline issue. Filtering students inside the school network is a requirement, as there is a clear duty of care and it is not feasible to manually police kids on the internet, just as one can’t police everything they talk about in the playground. But restricting the surfing of every adult Australian citizen is a completely different ball game and dangerous territory. We are responsible for ourselves; it is not the government’s job to decide what information we should and should not access.

UPDATE: This is the ultimate irony:

I recently saw J. J. Abrams’ film Star Trek and was left feeling slightly underwhelmed. I had heard good things about the film but left the cinema and was followed home by a daunting cloud of “meh”, which was quite disappointing. This puzzles me as the film certainly ticks all the right boxes. Abrams has got his formula down pat, now; his TV series like Alias and Lost were just warm-ups. Perhaps a parallel with one of the film’s main themes can help me here. It must be that logically, the film has everything required for a great experience. However, apart from a brief moment in the opening scene, the film failed to engage me on an emotional level.

Let’s see, it’s based on proven IP, which movie publishers love, as this almost guarantees a healthy audience size. Director J. J. Abrams on the ticket will attract the Alias, Lost, and Cloverfield die-hards (the latter includes myself). The loyal Star Trek fan base will go and see it out of curiosity; and the prejudiced die-hard Trekkies will see it simply to scoff at its inferiority. It has a great cast including Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg and Eric Bana. Casting a couple of knowns means you get the Heroes fans and the Shaun of the Dead fans for free. The addition of Leonard Nimoy added a warmly familiar nostalgic touch.

Now, I’m about to risk sounding very sexist, but I disclaim that I’m only pointing out the Hollywood attitude to demographic reasoning, and in no way justifying it. Casting a relatively unknown but predictably handsome lead (Chris Pine) means the girlfriends will have something new and pretty to keep them amused while their boyfriends can enjoy his various macho exploits. And there is plenty of action to speak of: a healthy seasoning of well-choreographed hand-to-hand combat scenes, most of which are staged on precariously narrow or dangerously high platforms…or both. We also see some Point Break style skydiving suspense which was actually impressively well-shot; achieving the best sense of speed that I’ve seen on film to date for scenes of this kind.

That brings me to the production values, which were exceptional as to be expected. Special effects were of high quality without being over the top. I was only disappointed there was not more emphasis on the epic futuristic Earth that we can all hope for. It was briefly alluded to by the teasingly occluded glimpses of a distant mammoth city we see in the background of a scene from Kirk’s childhood.

Abrams’ Star Trek also more than delivers on sci-fi cliché requirements. Look I have nothing against cliché’s; when used well they provide a comforting sense of familiarity, and even humour in a lot of cases. Here, these include a scene where the extremely impractically overdesigned, yet epically scary-looking spaceship appears, ridiculously dwarfing the puny Earthen ship.

On the topic of ships, there is adequate symbolism regarding alien races. Romulans as a race are characterized by their spikily pointed tattoos which mirror the design of their ships. In contrast, Earthlings are perfectly groomed and wear boring monochromatic outfits, and their ships are very sterile and pure in design. Vulcans, as the allies of Earthlings appear only marginally different than us, and as extra evidence, we learn early on that the two races can cross-breed.

The word “singularity” was used more than once, and “alternate reality” was also thrown in, for good measure. There was plenty of complicated alien tech including phasers (Pew! Pew! Pew!), faster-than-light travel, teleportation, gravity wells and a last minute escape. We had close encounters of the chase-scene-kind facilitated by improbably large terrifying alien creatures. On more than one occasion, a ship’s shields reach a percentage below fifty which is stock-standard sci-fi speak for “we’re in the shit captain”. What else? Hover cars/bikes; automaton Robocop-style law enforcement; a scattering of comically unspoken yet curiously framed miscellany of supporting alien cast members; indoctrination of children instead of education. Finally, (and yes this is a sci-fi cliché) humans remain primally human despite their world being saturated by technology.

Which brings us to… The angsty teen demographic is catered for with both protagonists defiantly rebelling against the destiny laid out by their parents. We also witnessed a good deal of enough “courtship” including some unrequited lust, which ensures those teens who are angsty because they are just too damn horny will be able to relate to the film.

Yes, overall, careful analysis confirms the Star Trek equation infallibly satisfies the criteria for “perfect film”. Yet something was still missing and I wish I could find it, but my Vulcan discipline prevents me.

Maybe that’s it! Could the film possibly have succeeded in creating such a powerful empathetic connection with the character of Spock that I was left incapable of acknowledging any emotional responses? Perhaps, for the entire film, I was just unconsciously discarding them as counterproductive anomalies…

*breaks down and cries*

www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-7XwboOx98