Terminally Incoherent

In the early 80’s William Gibson imagined that the young and still developing Internet will one day bloom into Cyberspace. He envisioned it as an abstract plane where your disembodied mind can wander, surfing on the streams of data, and traveling down the information highways:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding

This imaginative vision has sort of became a Cyberpunk staple, and nearly all novels and movies that aspire to belong to that genre try to include some sort of reiteration of Gibson’s idea. Almost without fail, your average cyberpunk story will include some sort of abstract datum plane, with ZX Spectrum era visuals, city like landscapes of glimmering semi-transparent text and scary looking spiky viruses, rigid geometric security programs and force-field like firewalls. With small variations your average Cyberspace session should look something like this:

In the 80’s Cyberspace seemed… Plausible. And if not plausible then at least not very far fetched. Most of us could imagine the technology escalating to the point where this sort of virtual reality interface would be possible to achieve. Of course today it looks a bit silly and anachronistic - a bit like Steam-Punk genre which is laughable unless you buy into it’s specific distortion of reality.

Let’s face it, browsing the web on your iPhone is about 100 times more convenient than obtaining data the way Gibsonian cyber-jockeys and netrunners did. First of all, they needed to strap themselves into an expensive cyber-deck usually using a neural shunt. While surfing they were pretty much a vegetable strapped to some electronics. You on the other hand have almost ubiquitous Wifi coverage, and Edge/3G networks all over the place so you can browse while driving or walking your dog in the park. Your average netrunner has to navigate through a labyrinthine glowing maze to find what he is looking for. You just fucking google it. And so on, and so forth.

There were many attempts to make 3 dimensional, more Cyberspace like interfaces for our computers but none ever caught on. Every once in a while someone comes up with a new, innovative way of visualizing search results, or organizing data on a web page. But nothing beats the simplicity and usability of a flat HTML page with links and perhaps some embedded multimedia. Why on earth would anyone want to jack in, and float in a world of abstract data visualization crap if they could just pull up a regular web page and read it. Gibsonian cyberspace fails the Ockham’s Razor test. It’s complexity does not translate into utility or usability.

I believe there will never be a virtual reality representation of the web. While we might one day be able to build VR simulations that will be nearly indistinguishable from reality (like out own Matrix) I highly doubt that the same VR technology will be used for something as trivial as browsing the web. The future Cyberspace is much different and probably not so much unlike what we have right now. I envision that one day browsing the web will look a bit more like a HUD display you have in many FPS video games.

You will be walking down the street while browsing the web and looking up directions on your internal HUD display, enjoying a ubiquitous free high speed Wifi blanketing most of the civilized world. There will be no neural shunts, or ugly Matrix/Ghost in the Shell like ports in the back of your neck. Your neural implant will be a tiny speck of silicone tucked beneath your skin and muscle with no physical ports - purely wireless bio-powered device with a biological hardware switch allowing you to switch it off or reboot it via muscle reflex or something equally simple.

I don’t envision a radical shift in the way data will be displayed or presented to us. Your typical website layout will probably change slightly because your HUD will have almost limitless adjustable resolution. Your average user interface design will probably change a bit too, seeing how we will no longer be using a mouse as our primary input device. So stuff like sidebars and tool bars may morph into more intuitive and organic elements since we will now click by thinking and won’t need to actually move any sorts of pointers (I hope).

Most of the web will still be text, because that is the medium that is so far easiest to parse, skim along, catalog and organize. Many SF and Cyberpunk movies and novels assume that we will at some point shift towards other media - that for some reason we will return to oral traditions and record our data on holographic displays (holocorns?) and etc. But let’s face it - text is just more convenient. Think about it - what would you rather have - a short one paragraph written summary which you can skim over in seconds clicking on relevant links in the text, or a 3 minute video of some dude explaining the same thing? When I just want facts or information and I need it fast I will take the textual representation every time.

IM and traditional Cell Phone may get replaced by sub-vocal VOIP like communication that will bypass your vocal cords and let you converse over the net without actually making any sounds. Then again it may not considering that texting and IM’ing is still much faster and more direct form of communication.

Future viruses and spyware won’t explode your head or make you go mad. They will simply fuck up your software and steal your identity the same way they do it today. I imagine that reinstalling the OS and software on your wetware implant won’t be terribly difficult. In fact, such devices will probably come with a pristine image of the OS encased in firmware so that you can roll back to a clean slate at any time.

All in all, we will be much more connected than Gibson could ever dream of without all the silly limitations and real-world abstraction he built into his vision of Cyberspace. Then again, in 20 my vision of the near future may be as silly and short sighted as Gibson’s Cyberspace seems right now.

Ok, by the show of hands, who has predicted that today’s post will be about Google Chrome? Seriously, I’m getting predictable here but I couldn’t resist picking it up and messing around with it shortly after it was released. My attitude about it was mixed. On one hand, I was excited to see yet another desktop application from Google. So far everything they touched was pure gold from the interface design perspective. I was curious to see how will they tackle a browser UI and will their creation do the same thing that Google Talk did to IM interface design.

The other side of me was a little bit upset. What about Firefox? Does it mean that my favorite browser won’t get any more Google love? I was a bit upset to see Google brewing up a product which would be in direct competition with Mozilla’s flagship product. Whether or not will this new browser become a real threat to Firefox remains to be seen, but Mozilla intends to keep a friendly relationship with Google and if nothing else they seem energized by this new contender entering the web browser market.

Chrome ships as a one-click installer and when they say one-click they mean one-click. It’s as if someone at Google read Jeff Atwood’s rant about complex installation procedures. All you actually need to do is to accept the EULA but you do that on the download page before actually running the installer. Once you accept it, there are no further questions asked. The browser is downloaded and installed for you. The age old question of “where do you want to install this software” is skipped, which is probably a good thing considering the fact that most lusers completely bypass the file system.

Once the browser launches you can immediately see that it is a Google product. It has the same trademark sleek, minimalistic look and feel as Google Talk. The look they were aiming at is something between IE7/8 and Opera but much simpler. It is light on buttons and menus keeping them to bare bones minimum. Google’s UI design principle seems to be less is more and it works. Microsoft tried to follow a similar paradigm with the simplified IE7 and 8 toolbars but it was a half assed attempt. Google designers took a typical browser UI and kept ripping things out until there was nothing left. It was a bold move but it pays off because Chrome looks at least twice as easy to use as Firefox or IE. Casual user is not bothered by cryptic menus or unnecessary icons while power users can still get to some of the more advanced browser features at will.

Personally, I like the placement of the tab bar over the address bar. I’m not sure why, but it seems like a good move. It creates a stronger visual association between the tab and the URL. In other browsers you switch tabs, and the address bar mysteriously follows. In Chrome switching tabs is like flipping pages, each of which has their own address box. This is one of these nifty features that won’t confuse anyone already familiar with tabbed browsing, but may actually help to teach new users about it. I know many IE7 users who still do not understand tabbing. Google Chrome UI may actually be more visually accessible.

I noticed that there is no “undo close tab” context option when right clicking on the tabs. I can’t tell you how often i use that feature in FF and it seems indispensable. I was about to complain about lack of this feature but I found it on the Opera like speed dial page which you see each time you open up a new tab. It combines the speed dial feature with web history, list of recently closed tabs (which you can use to restore what you just closed), list of your bookmarks and a search box.

The address bar itself is almost on par with the FF3 smart bar - it does the same smart lookup as you type thing. In addition it grays out all the parts of your URL which are not the domain name which is a nice touch. It also uses the well established convention of turning yellow for valid SSL connections. Similarly to FF3 Chrome produces a disturbing full page error message when you hit a page with an invalid SSL certificate - this behavior is quickly becoming standard these days. One thing that I hate about the address bar is the absence of favicons. It is almost criminal not to display them this day and age but alas - Chrome put the bookmark button where the favicon ought to be. At least the icons show up on your bookmark bar/page so not all is lost.

Continuing with the minimalistic theme the address bar doubles up as a search bar and can preface search engine queries with a ? to distinguish them from regular URL’s. Furthermore I noticed that all the common navigational shortcuts you know and love from Firefox work in the Google browser without a hitch. You can use Ctrl+T for new tab, Ctrl+W to close current tab, Ctrl+L for address bar, Ctrl+K for web search, Ctrl+G advances incremental search to the next match. This is perfect. Every time I switch from Firefox to Opera I feel like I’m half retarded because half the shortcuts are different. This is not the case with Chrome. IE users won’t be disappointed either because IE specific key strokes such as Alt+D also work in predictable ways.

I absolutely love the incremental search which puts colored notches on the scroll bar to indicate where in text match is located in the body of the page. This brilliant because it lets you evaluate at a glance how many matches are on the page, and gives you an idea of where you are in relation to other matching items! We need this in Firefox like tomorrow. I’m not sure if this is a WebKit thing, or a Google invention but it is awesome. I don’t recall seeing it anywhere else so I assume it’s Google’s but correct me if I’m wrong.

Chrome’s Javascript console simply blew me away. At the first glance it really looks like a Firebug clone but built into the browser. I haven’t had a chance to actually play with it or use it for actual debugging but it is very impressive. I really didn’t expect to see something like this in this browser which is yet another one of Google trademark tricks - a simple, minimalistic and sleek interior hides internal complexity and a lot of raw power. This browser may actually be a pretty handy tool for web designers in addition to being a great beginner browser to tech neophytes.

Sessions in this browser are naturally present (only IE doesn’t do sessions) but they are vastly inferior to Firefox sessions. For example, Chrome won’t preserve the text you typed into a text box after you close your browser window the way Firefox will. It also won’t restore your exact position on the page you were reading. When Chrome restores your session it simply reloads the URL’s - it does not restore them with their exact states from a cashed snapshot. Perhaps this is a webkit shortcoming - I’m not sure.

The internal features of Chrome are quite impressive. For example each tab is pretty much a self contained instance of the browser. Webpages run in separate sandboxes and there is no way for one of them to take over or crash your whole browser. Great feature but one must wonder how will that impact memory usage after many hours of browsing. Chrome gives you tools to track it’s own memory usage and the overhead didn’t seem that huge. Browser seems much leaner than Firefox in general, which is not actually a huge accomplishment.

What is more interesting is that you can now accurately identify what exactly is causing your browser to use so much memory. When Firefox bloats up and takes over half of your RAM you are forced to guess what is happening. Is it one of those infamous memory leaks? Is it one of the scripts running in a background tab that continues allocating memory? Is it something else? Chrome shifts the blame for memory bloat from the browser to the page creator which is an interesting development. Instead of saying “Firefox is a resource hog” you can now say for example “Youtube is a resource hog” instead.

You can detach any tab and turn it into Mozilla Prism like desktop application complete with desktop shortcuts. You can basically have your dedicated Gmail window which opens from Desktop or Quick Launch. I never really used Prism, and I don’t really see myself extensively using this particular feature of Chrome but I can see it’s usefulness.

Without a doubt the most innovative feature of this browser is the porn browsing mode… Um… Sorry, the Incognito Mode which launches a new instance of the browser which does not permanently store any cookies, cache or web history on your machine. Perfect for browsing teh porns. I have never seen the issue of privacy handled this way before. All existing browsers force users to clean up after they browse. Not only that, but they insist on an all-or-nothing approach. You either delete all your cookies, all history or all cache or none of it. There is no easy way to delete just the embarrassing stuff other than manually sifting through the web history or the cache folder. Chrome simply launches a new instance of the browser which is actually visually distinct from the regular non-incognito window and lets you browse embarrassing stuff without worrying about cleanup:

It’s a proactive rather than retroactive approach to privacy and one that can be accomplished with a single click of a button. It’s click, browse then forget rather than browse and then forget to clean up. I really hope this feature will catch on because this is a huge leap in making regular users in charge of their own privacy. I want it in Firefox but I’m not sure it if is possible to implement it seeing how the Mozilla browser will only let you run a single instance of itself ever.

Chrome did not disappoint me. Google took several existing ideas, mixed them with their own innovations and created a browser that not only looks pretty but is potentially more user friendly than anything that I have seen before. I’m not sure if it will ever catch on and become as popular as Firefox but it does have many features that I would love to see implemented in the mainstream browsers: namely the incognito mode, the Prism like desktop app detachment, the nifty textual search indicators on the scroll bars and the sandboxing model.

I’m sticking with Firefox. It has served me well for many years and it keeps improving. Besides, I’d be lost without my extensions which pretty much make the browser. But I’m keeping Chrome around so that I can continue messing around with it which is more than what I can say for most other browsers.

Here is a prediction: in the next few years traditional POP+SMTP email setup will become virtually extinct. I’m basing this on several factors. For one, no one actually remembers what these things are anymore. My students think that POP is what southerners call carbonated drinks (it’s soda here btw) and that SMTP is a made up acronym that I coined on the spot just to have more buzzwords to test them on. But that’s just one of the factors.

Factor number two, possibly the more important one is that providing users with a SMTP access is becoming less and less practical with every day. Port 25 is pretty much universally blocked across the board. Almost no company or public institution leaves it open these days. Many ISP’s do the same thing for their residential clients, insisting that they use their designated SMTP server or nothing at all. Of course if you go to the trouble of blocking outbound traffic on 25 you might as well also block 587 (which is designated as the official authenticated SMTP port and is the second most common port used for the protocol). Most corporate firewalls are usually set up to block all outbound traffic except port 80 and 22 (and sometimes 110 for email). The idea is that clever people will be able to get around the restrictions with SSH tunneling while the sheep can suffer in the name of combating spam and internet worms. Which, btw is something that I generally approve. I’m all for locking down firewalls, and protecting lusers from their own stupidity by not letting them do anything.

I’m merely making an observation here. Every day our society becomes more mobile with proliferation of wifi networks, 3G and other wire free technologies. Laptop sales are skyrocketing, and overshadowing desktop sales. Most of my students never actually owned a desktop. Most of my co-workers do not have desktop computers at their homes. Casual users buy laptops. Desktops are now primarily built for the business sector and high end gaming crowd. But while people are getting more mobile, the SMTP gets less useful. Let me illustrate this by example.

Let’s say a big company hires a promising young man named Bob. Bob is issued a company laptop since he will be expected to sometimes work from home. Since Bob is an idiot as far as the IT department is concerned his email was set up for himwith company’s POP and SMTP information ahead of time and he was trained to use it. As expected his email works perfectly when he is sitting in his cubicle, however when he takes the laptop home trying to finish an important project a disaster strikes. He can receive email but he cannot send because his ISP is blocking Port 25. So he spends 4 hours on the phone with his IT department trying to explain to them that his “Microsoft is giving him an error when he tries to send an email”. Then he spends another 4 hours on the phone with his ISP trying to configure his Outlook to use their SMTP server.

Finally he is able to send his super important email at 4am in the morning, catches 2 hours of sleep and he is back in his cubicle at 8am only to realize his email is not working again. It turns out his ISP’s SMTP server doesn’t relay emails from outside of their network. And even if it did, his company is blocking Port 25 anyway allowing only their own SMTP server to send emails out. The IT folks play rock-paper-scissors to see who gets to deal with Bob-the-Retard this time. The loser, makes a cheat sheet for Bob with each step explained in minutiae detail and accompanied by screen shots and then staples it to Bob’s head so that he doesn’t misplace or eat it.

Of course this story repeats itself whenever Bob visits a new place. Soon enough he has a cheat sheet for work, his apartment, his girlfriends house, his favorite coffee shop, the local park, the hotel he stayed at, a conference hall in Boston, and etc… Each time Bob moves his laptop from one location to another, he is required to first find out what SMTP server he can use there and then reconfigure his Outlook.

A lot of companies and institutions which employ many Bob’s get quickly fed up with this sort of thing. So what do they do? They migrate to webmail solutions. Exchange for example has a rich webmail client which looks almost exactly like Outlook and can be used by Bob’s when they work outside of the office. Other, more courageous folks make a leap of faith and migrate their email and calendaring to Google Apps or Zimbra.

ISP’s on the other hand don’t even tell their customers about their POP+SMTP offerings. They provide them with a webmail client instead. Those determined enough can find POP (or IMAP) and SMTP info buried deep in their online help documents.

Public SMTP’s will eventually get phased out and locked behind firewalls. ISP’s no longer promote them as it is. How many users will complain if they simply hide the SMTP server from them and request that they use webmail instead? Right now they may alienate a sizable chunk of their customer base but the majority won’t even notice. In 5 years the only people who will complain will be bunch of us geeks. And no one ever listens to us. We are almost never the target demographic for anything - we are the outliers which skew up the statistical analysis.

Here is a question for my IT/Sysadmin readers out there. When you get a user who has an apostrophe, or an unusual character in their last name, how do you go about setting up his or her email address? Do you:

1. Drop the apostrophe and special characters and/or replace them with the closest ASCII equivalent to keep it easy
2. Keep the special characters and force everyone in the world to struggle as they try to email that user

Apparently IT people at a certain bank that I will not name (but let me just say it’s initials are HSBC) think that option #2 is a good idea. Why? Let’s think about a hypothetical scenario in which, for example and apostrophe in the email could be a problem. Again, this is just a make believe situation that has never actually happened yesterday at my company.

So, hypothetically speaking a made up user JC calls me up yesterday and tells me that she can’t send email to one Frogurt D’mangello who works at the said bank. Why can’t she do it? Because Mr. Frogurt’s email looks like this:

On the surface this is ok - after all apostrophes are allowed to be part of the email address according to the RFC, right? I know this, you know this but apparently whoever hacked together SquirrelMail didn’t. So when you try to send an email to Mr. Frogurt via this popular and widely used webmail application his address becomes:

Yes, someone is running mysql_escape_string method on all input fields, even those which legally are allowed to contain MySQL unfriendly characters. I should be mad at SquirrelMail but you know what - they are doing the right thing. I sanitize all my input fields too when I work on a web application. Better be safe than sorry. Naturally, they could use strip_slashes just before actually sending the email but what are you going to do. It’s a bug (which might have been already patched in then newest release), but I can’t fix it because I do not maintain the SquirelMails server.

But the situation is now a conundrum because JC is behind some draconian firewall which blocks all outgoing ports save for port 80 meaning she can’t use Outlook to send emails. She also can’t use SquirrelMail due to this peculiar bug. So how do they communicate?

This could have been easily avoided if certain IT department simply had a policy which said “only dots and alphanumeric ASCII characters in usernames”. And not just because certain email packages may not support all the different addressing formats as specified in the RFC. It’s also because everyone thinks they know how to validate emails but they don’t. Half the validation scripts out there is just plain wrong. You actually need a 6.4K regular expression to cover all the different addressing schemes covered by the RFC. So if Mr. Frogurt wants to subscribe to some mailing list, or sign into some popular web application he might at one point be told his email is not valid. Remove the apostrophe, and even the most broken email validator will let it through.

Not to mention the hassle of emphasizing the apostrophe every time he tries to dictate his email address to someone over the phone. So really, other than blindly following the RFC, what other benefits are there of putting that non alphanumeric character in his email? Would Mr. Frogurt really mind if his email started with frogurt.dmangello? Would it really make his life a living hell, or would it actually spare him some potential hassles, misunderstandings and unnecessary tech support calls?

I too have a non-standar letter in my name. If I wanted, I could set up my email as: Łukasz@example.com. It would be legal under RFC but I would probably spend the rest of my days explaining to people what that “weird L” is and how to get it in Outlook. Oh, and no iPhone user would probably ever email me because these poor schmucks can’t copy and paste yet. ;P

I say stick to alphanumeric ASCII and dots. Anything more is just asking for trouble.

The internet is killing Microsoft these days. Ever since man climbed down from a tree, learned how to walk upright and figured out how to write AJAX apps, the number of chairs thrown at unsuspecting developers in Redmond has been climbing exponentially. Let’s face it - the interweb is the great equalizer. It levels the playing field - because it doesn’t really matter whether you use Windows, Apple or Linux to access your Gmail, Google Docs and your Facebook. Your desktop is slowly becoming a thin client for the ever-richer web applications.

This is a direct threat to Microsoft’s defacto monopoly - and they are fighting back, the only way they know how - by implementing a vendor lock in strategy. Silverlight is just that. It is an attempt to create a Flash like plugin that will run great on Windows, somewhat acceptably on Apple, and not at all on Linux/Unix based systems. Yes, I know there is Moonlight but I suspect it will always be lagging behind the MS releases, and it will come loaded with proprietary codex that won’t be bundled with the public releases.

Same old shenanigans - you know how it works. Besides, we have been there before. Remember how we couldn’t play Youtubes for a while there because we were stuck with Flash 7 while Windows and Apple folks enjoyed versions 8 and 9? I remember and I Adobe didn’t even have a vested interest in putting Linux down. They just didn’t care enough. Microsoft on the other hand is poised to profit if the plugin doesn’t work well on other platforms. The internet leveled the playing field, and they are planning to tilt it again by getting into these huge Silverlight contracts for the government, libraries and educational institutions.

I’m writing about this now, because my heard of nooblets (and I tell you, heading cats is an enjoyable past time compared to herding throngs of flabbergasted luserati) started asking about it. They want to know what the “Silver Lights” (or “Silver Flight” or “Sliver Lite”) are, and why do they “pop up on Microsoft” (whatever that means). And when they ask, I simply pull out my pocket version of this very image:

Yes, I keep Admiral Ackbar in my pocket especially for those occasions when I must condescendingly point out an obvious trap to someone. It also works for identifying tarps. I like the blue tarp the best.

It’s a trap my friends. Don’t be fooled by their promises of a 100% compatibile moonlight release. It’s called moonlight, because you will be up all at night, and will end up howling at the moon in despair if you try to compile it and get it working on a linux box that does not run some version of Novell on it.

This new and exciting technology is nothing else than a vendor lock-in for the web. And I’m worried about that because I’m a linux user, and my prospective progeny will also likely be linux users. And I don’t want to find out one day that I have to sit at the “gaming box” to access tone governmental or educational websites because Mono folks are dropping the ball on Moonlight.

This is not just some silly rant of a random linux loon. It is a real concern, and the great state of Cali-fornication is also taking it very seriously - to the point where in October of 07 they asked the District Judge to extend the Microsoft anti-trust settlement for another 5 years - precisely because of issues surrounding Silverlight.

I just want you to keep this in mind. When your boss asks you if you should invest in that “Silvered Lights” platform, you just whip out your Ackbar and yell at top of your lungs: “IT’S A TARP!”