Jaanus

What is a “blog”? A silly question, yes? A blog is a site consisting of posts/articles, right?

Well… no. I’ve found that many people who are not comfortable with blogging or are new to it, tend to confuse the taxonomy, and are interchangeably talking about a “blog” as a site, as well as a “blog” as a post/article within the site. “I’ll do a blog today.” “Your latest blog was great!” “Should we do a blog?”

It’s a bit confusing if you’re used to thinking of a “blog” only as a collection and not as an item, but there’s no point in opposition. Just make sure you know what people mean when they talk about a “blog”, so that there’s no confusion if you need to work together. I guess this illustrates that the bloggers have not been horribly efficient in educating the greater public about the craft and the terms used, or that it just takes more time for the concepts to settle in.

UPDATE: at least part of the confusion is due to myspace. Look at these guys’ blog controls. They use “blog” both as article and collection.

FeedDemon is a very nice piece of software for RSS reading.

It has, however, one bug which drives me nuts. When adding new feeds, sometimes after entering the new feed address, the mofo just DIES on me. Like… totally. I have to manually kill the task and then restart all over. And it has messed up some of the unread data in the process, meaning next time I start, some of the stuff I already read are still marked as unread, and I have to go over it again.

What’s worse, looks like new feeds are only saved during exit. Which means that during the session, if I added two feeds and it crashed while adding the second one, the first one is also lost in void and I have to recall what it was and re-add it.

The problem has been there way back since 1.6. I hoped it would be fixed in 2.0 betas or final, but nothing so far.

UPDATE: haven’t had this any more with 2.0.0.22 or newer. I guess this got fixed under the “connectivity problems”.

I see so many bad interfaces and interaction models during my daily life and work that it is a real delight to come across a system that just works, manages to hide complexity and do what you need it to do. I’m happy that my car’s onboard navigation and entertainment system belongs in the latter category. Studying it provides, at least to me, a good lesson of how to work with human-machine interfaces in the future and how to design interaction for someone operating under stressful circumstances and limited comprehension, which driving at unknown/foreign locations certainly is.

I haven’t really used GPS- and map-based navigation systems myself before, neither in cars nor on terrain. I’ve only seen them in use in taxis and other vehicles. Thus I have no idea how this one benchmarks against „industry standard”. Maybe it’s as good as any, or even plain mediocre. All I know is that it works better for me than conventional map-reading – but the latter is certainly useful and necessary for backup and validation.

Since I knew I was going to cruise quite a bit around in Europe and driving to unknown locations, I thought I’d get a navigation system for my new car I was going to buy. Turns out it was the first Ford ever sold in Estonia with such a system, and people at dealership were equally excited as I was. One of the reasons for such low usage is that the maps don’t include the „new EU”, that is, they end with Germany, Sweden and Finland. But since I knew my way around Estonia anyway, that didn’t really matter.

I know there are standalone devices (PDA-s) and laptop software available where you can update maps and „patch” them yourself, and maps for Estonia and other countries are available from local vendors. I still decided to go with an integrated system because of:

• Display size and readability. It would be difficult to have an alternative device whose display would be as readable as the integrated system’s.
• Uniform interface. I don’t want to switch devices when I need to read maps, tune radio stations, change tracks on the CD or work with the hands-free phone system. I want to focus attention on the same device instead of switch between devices. More about how this works below.
• Voice guidance convenience. I’m not sure how the external devices interface with the car’s audio system, but to me, voice guidance is useful. When something comes up and the navigation needs to „talk” to you, it automatically lowers the volume of any other audio output (phone, radio) and loudens it back up after it said its thing.

So the system I’m talking about is an integrated entertainment, navigation and communication system. It has four main interactive functions: navigation, radio, CD/MP3 player and mobile phone hands-free, plus a bunch of other auxiliary “regular car functions” like climate, heating and airflow control. See “screenshots” and more discussion below.

The function that was the most novel to me and I’m concentrating on is navigation. To activate it, I just had to pop the map/data DVD into a special secondary reader hidden in the glove compartment, and it was up and running. I haven’t yet bothered to find out how often I’ll receive updates, which will mean „upgrading” the DVD.

The navigation unit combines map data from the DVD and location and direction info from the GPS. (I haven’t found out where the GPS transmitter unit physically is. Doesn’t really matter

Position display is pretty straightforward – it just shows you where you are on the map, and which way you are going. Guidance, however, is where it gets interesting.

Every time you switch to the navigation unit, you get this warning. I guess it could be due to some safety regulations? There’s no way to disable it, but it takes one simple “click” on the touch screen to move on from here.

To operate the navigator, you then press the MENU button while in navigation mode, and see the navigation menu where you can configure and set a bunch of things.

To activate guidance, you need to configure your destination, and zero or more waypoints on the route that you want to go through. The destination search is pretty comprehensive – you can search by address or intersection, or you can search by “point of interest” which includes things like tourist attractions, refueling stations, shopping centers, and hotels. So you can go “show me the hotels in that city” and then browse to find the one that suits you.

When you’ve found your destination, the system calculates you a route and asks final confirmation. It also shows you the distance and estimated time of travel, taking in account whether going in cities or motorways and all other details.

You’re now in navigation mode. Differently from the simple position display, the navigation system now always directs you towards the destination with both audio and visual directions. This goes on until you change the destination or cancel guidance.

Navigation involves going through a series of turns or other actions to reach your destination. There’s always the “next thing” you have to do until you get there. So the interface is focused on taking you through the next thing, and then the next, and then the next etc.

Here’s how one crossroad turn looks like. We’ve got pretty close to a crossroad. Our position is indicated by the directional arrow surrounded by dotted circle on the map, plus there’s a zoom of the current crossroad on the right. The green thing on the right is the driving path to take and it progresses as you go forward. Red blips are turns. At this point, the voice says something like „take the next left turn, and then turn right ahead”.

If you want to see more of the big picture instead of the current crossroad, you can click the button in the bottom right of the zoomed crossroad picture, which has a rectangle inside another rectangle. The zoomed view on the right-hand side is then minimized and replaced with a turn icon that you can see in the top right.

Here are some more crossroads. The second one looks a bit strange, but one lane actually becomes a mini-tunnel that crosses under the crossroads ahead. There are all sorts of weird crossroads and lanes in European cities.

The above two pictures also show what’s the general interface of the system and what’s outside the touchscreen. The whole thing sits in the car’s central console where you’d also usually find a radio, climate and other settings. Here they are all integrated into one logical unit. Across the top there are five buttons: “MENU”, “NAVigation”, “AM/FM”, “CD” and “PHONE”. MENU is a meta-button that opens additional options menu for the currently active function, which can be one of the four remaining ones. NAV is what’s covered elsewhere here, AM/FM is regular radio with news, traffic announcements etc, CD is just that – the CD player (you can see the slot and Eject button just above the touchscreen).

PHONE is the controller for the onboard Bluetooth “headset” where you can pair the car with your mobile – it’s wacko to see a car as a device in your phone :). You can also make outbound calls. If there’s an incoming call, then whatever menu you are in, it lets you receive or dismiss the call with a handy popup.

On the sides of the screen are controls for auxiliary functions. The red and blue buttons are for climate control where you set the desired temperature, also the rest of the buttons are for controlling various heating and airflow functions – icons should be pretty self-explanatory.

Below the touchscreen there are four buttons, two of which are “Detour” and “Info”. I haven’t quite figured those out yet. Detour lets you get a “detour” over the current route, such as if there are repairs or something I guess, but I never needed it. The remaining buttons are “previous” and “next” – useful for changing radio stations or CD tracks. The last big button is a big turn knob for controlling volume, you can see the top of it. All of the volumes can be set independently. There are quite many of those – regular CD/Radio, news and traffic announcements, phone ring, navigation voice.

So… back to navigation. There are also two icons visible in top left. One is TMC, which can be displayed as normal, crossed out or not at all. I think it’s the Traffic Message Channel that can receive updates from the FM radio network and map them as events straight onto the map. And the icon displays if it’s currently available or not. I’m not fully sure how it works, but something indeed works there because in Germany, I sometimes got „roadworks” icons overlaid straight onto the map, which were not typically there or hardcoded.

The other icon, mini-Earth with orbits around it, is “no GPS”, indicating there’s no straight visibility between the car and GPS satellites. When it happens temporarily, such as in a tunnel or parking house, the system still knows the direction and speed of the car, so it uses these to calculate estimated position until the GPS link is re-established. Can also happen temporarily in bad weather conditions.

One additional display is the mini-LCD right in the middle of the dashboard, between the tachometer and speedometer, which displays info about the next turn. So even if you can’t glance at the color display, it’s still there right in front of you. In non-navigation mode, this displays general info like time and outside temperature.

Above, there were only shots of city navigation. Navigation on motorways is pretty much the same, focusing on entry and exit points. Across larger distances, the algorithm usually takes you to the nearest motorway and then follows motorway until the exit near your destination, unless you’ve specified you don’t want to use major or toll roads.

This is what you always expect to see

There is another useful feature which is not covered with the above shots. We were stuck in a traffic jam on a German motorway. The system knows average/expected speed on motorways and regular roads. So it spotted that we were going at a significantly lower speed than expected and went “aha, there must be a jam” and suddenly I got a popup: “Reroute to avoid congestion?” Pretty self-explanatory. And it worked – when you hit YES, it takes you off the motorway through the nearest upcoming exit, takes you a bit further on the route across all those funny little rural roads and cities, and re-takes you onto the motorway about 10-20 kilometers further down the road. I guess it worked, as there was no jam any longer when we got back onto the motorway.

So there. I honestly have no idea how I would have driven in all those foreign places without the maps and guidance. Sure, a road atlas is useful, but if you want to visit a city, you’d have to hunt down a local map otherwise, and not know details like which are one-way streets, where you can or can’t drive and all that. A local map is useful for walking around once you’re there, but for driving, I find this navigation system immensely useful.

The only really missing thing is that it should get data about more Eastern European countries. I’m mainly interested in the Baltics and Poland. Perhaps with a future update.

Somehow I had not come across this series before. Trackmania is a fun arcade driving challenge on crazy tracks. There are no mods, no weapons, no anything that disturbs pure driving and stunt challenge.

It reminds me of quite a bunch of older similar titles. More than 10 years ago there was Stunts — one of the best arcade/stunt simulations ever and fun to play even 10 years later, regardless of how immensely the technology has gone forward. Then there was Indy 500 and TM Nations with its stadium setting feels also a bit similar to it. There was also another title even older than Stunts, whose name I can’t remember, where you had to hold spacebar to keep racing across high-rise tracks with big jumps with EGA/CGA graphics.

So Trackmania brings it all back. TM Nations is made specifically to promote the Electronic Sports World Cup 2006 and features heavy ESWC and Nvidia ads across the game, but nothing really annoying. Your mission is to drive across crazy tracks in a stadium setting, either in practice mode alone or in network with others.

I also tried the TM Sunrise demo. Somehow the graphics and look’n’feel were worse for me than with TM Nations, but it has a wider range of cars and settings. The tracks and stunts are similar.

I’ve been working on this little thing on and off a bit now. I didn’t want to blog it before because a) the layout (or rather lack of it) sucked, and b) we didn’t have anything for you to download and use and ping and contribute to the data. Both of these are fixed now so you can head over to the site and download the Pinger to contribute some data. Before downloading though, make sure you’re comfortable with what the article says. And bring on any feedback about any part of Moodgeist either to the Moodgeist blog or to myself.

I get a lot of scam emails and sometimes click on the links in them just for the fun of it. To see if the offending site has been taken down yet. To see how “well” they are done (recently it’s really impossible to distinguish a phishing site from a real one by layout, the scammers have got good).

So I clicked on a random PayPal scam again when this popped up. This is the first time that I saw this warning. I think it is a very effective security measure as it blocks newbies from proceeding any further and sends a very clear message. I’m not fully sure, but I think this comes from FF’s recent version of Google Toolbar that I have installed.

The only sad thing here being that I took that shot above while jerking around with window sizes to capture the complete forgery warning bubble before it could reposition itself. In its “natural” state, the bubble was as follows, which is a shame since the “report” link is hidden away.

Bruce announced a movie-plot threat contest.

Your goal: cause terror. Make the American people notice. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy. Change the political landscape, or the culture. The more grandiose the goal, the better. Assume an attacker profile on the order of 9/11: 20 to 30 unskilled people, and about $500,000 with which to buy skills, equipment, etc.

I’m not sure about what qualifies a movie-plot threat against a non-movie-plot threat, but this got me thinking about what I would do if I was evil to disrupt America. I don’t think these thought exercises are anything evil — sometimes it’s helpful to put on the black hat and see stuff from the “other side”.

Most of the “threats” posted on Bruce’s blog comments are boring or too high-tech and impractical. Some are marginally funny. This comment I liked

to kill the united states, you need only kill its one critical agency - the one that did not have a soviet counterpart during the cold war - the one that collects the means by which our government operates - the internal revenue service.

But really, if you were to do damage, what would you do?

I think the main goal would be to have long-lasting and widespread effects, instead of single local isolated incidents. Thus, while incidents like “lone gunmen go astray” are definitely movie material, they cause local setbacks at most. You need something which is more long-lasting and has more profound effects than a few dead bodies.

I would go with infrastructure and communications. In short: transport, water, power and telcos.

One peculiarity of the American lifestyle is the urban sprawl coupled with virtually nonexistent wide-area mass transit (public transport). In other words, people drive long distances in private cars to get to work. Hurt that, and life grinds to halt. Now there are many ways to do it. A spectacular one, but a difficult one to execute would be to hurt the “oil economy” — either attack the seaports from where imported oil enters from tankers to ashore, or the refineries/distribution centres. Oil price panic starts. People queue up in gas stations. One thing is just the price panic, but if there’s actually no oil to be bought, then things get worse.

There are several other low-tech and effective ways on Bruce’s blog to hurt the “urban sprawl” transport system. You can blow up oil-transporting trucks at highway interchanges. You can toss lots of metal spikes on the roads, blowing up cars’ tyres and causing massive accidents/jams (jams are already bad during regular business days, so this would just aggravate an already bad situation).

Water supply is key to the survival of all businesses and individuals. Contaminate or hurt it, and things get messy. As news have reported previously, there was recently an experiment which demonstrated that it was not a problem to get across US borders with forged documents about nuclear materials. I can’t imagine why it would be any more difficult to get into the water supply/purification plants. So get a van into one of those plants and blow it up trying to damage the supply pipes, possibly having a “dirty” element to it. So that supply is hurt and people can’t go in to reconstruct it because the area is contaminated.

The problem with the above two methods is their local nature. The attacks can be spectacular, but they’re not “scalable” across the country or beyond the metropolitan area you’re “working with”. If you execute several of these in orchestration in different places, maybe that qualifies as “wide enough”. But power and telco are the real killers.

There doesn’t need to be any terrorism at all to cause widespread panic and damage. The U.S. power grid is notoriously overloaded and there are smaller or bigger “organic” outages every summer, occasionally having catastrophic consequences if they escalate across regions and knock out the grids in a wider area. Just throw in a few “helping hands” by physically crippling parts of the infrastructure or people/organizations capable of fixing them, and off you go.

Telcos are what the modern economy is based on. These days, most communications are run off the same packet-switched networks. Although the Internet was invented to provide resilience through distributed processing in case of failures, the reality these days is that most of the Internet runs through centralised switches of a few commercial providers. Through a combination of covert (inside job) and open attack methods (destruction of infrastructure, contamination of facilities), you can cause communication disruptions for all sorts of networks — Internet, landlines, mobiles, radio and TV stations.

Plus: where things always get nasty is combinations of the above. Imagine being trapped at home because transport doesn’t work, without power and phone/Internet lines so you cannot contact anyone including emergency services, and without water for basic survival. How people begin to riot in that kind of situations we could see during Katrina in New Orleans — all the Superdome trappings and those things. Civilization is thinner than we think.

The good thing is that I don’t think any of the above will really ever happen on a grand scale. It’s all too straightforward and “by the book”. Thus other people have thought of it too and are at least marginally protecting against it. Successful attacks are something that don’t follow the common pattern, but all of the above are too simply imaginable. The next big bad thing will be something that none of us have really thought of, coming from an unexpected direction.

The moral of this exercise and the point of Bruce: terrorism is a symptom of some other cause. Successful treatment treats causes, not symptoms. You simply cannot protect against all the odds. As a defender, you need to protect on all fronts, whereas the attacker can just choose the “weakest spot”.

I tend to choose carefully what games to buy. First since it’s economical and secondly since I don’t have too much time to play anyway. Mostly I “get it right” but sometimes not. PoP Revelations is one I got wrong.

The main problem with it? It’s simply a recompile of Warrior Within for PSP. Cutscenes, flow, gameplay all totally the same. The intro says there are “more than 20 new levels and maps” but I haven’t seen any yet (ok, I haven’t made it horribly far either, but still).

So, if I already completed Warrior Within on PC, there’s kinda little point to bother with Revelations, since not that much new stuff here. Or maybe down the road there will be those 20 new maps and levels, but still, not so novel as you’d expect from a new game.

Another thing which is hurting the experience a bit for me is that the whole thing just isn’t great on PSP neither visually nor gameplay-wise. This is what you get when you just downscale all the gfx and stuff without proper aliasing and things like that — maybe I’m too PC-inclined, but I see too many pixelized borders to appreciate it. On PC, it was much nicer, and on PSP, there are many ways to make video/gfx nice too, so come on guys.

Gameplay-wise, the camera angles are sometimes weird. On PC it was great with two full two-axis controllers (mouse and WSAD), but on PSP, you only have the analog stick and the camera sometimes just moves “wrong”. True, you can rotate the camera too with the leftbutton+analogstick, but it makes it a bit clumsy. Plus as it’s a direct port, the character is often either too small or too big. If it’s too small, you can’t figure out wtf it’s up to and where exactly it’s facing. If it’s too big, then it’s hard to see the surroundings and plan the moves. Guys, it IS possible to do a third-person-perspective game on PSP properly — GTA Liberty City Stories has done it quite nicely. But you can’t just whack the PC (or full PS/console) code onto PSP and hope it’s all fine.

The French are just about to pass a new labour law that makes it easier to hire and fire people under 26.

I don’t know all the details, but on the surface, it doesn’t really seem right. The history of Europe and really the whole Western culture has been a history of fighting against discrimination. Abolishing wealth census on eligibility to vote and universal suffrage were great advances of democracy, as well as equal employment laws, laws against discrimination of people with disabilities etc, which are great achievements of the European thought. And now suddenly, here’s a classic textbook case of age discrimination???

Age discrimination is no different from race, gender or other kinds of discrimination — it is preventing one group of people from performing adequately in the society and gives an unfair advantage to the others. There are perfectly valid reasons to treat people under 18 differently from the rest, and in some special cases the age limits are even higher, such as being allowed to run for a seat in the parliament or becoming a judge or president or the like.

But in case of universal employment law, treating people below 26 differently from the rest to me just sends a signal that France is not really serious about its reform plans. It should be easy to hire and fire everyone, not just young people. Maybe they thought that if they only focus on the younger age group, they won’t go backlashes, because if they did it for everyone, all the workers go on strike and it won’t work? A welfare state is nice, but I myself really don’t believe in strong labour protection, permanent employment and trade unions — I believe that great individuals can stand up for themselves, constantly learn to adapt to new realities and make their own career choices without needing the state to bully employers on their behalf.