Terminally Incoherent

It’s funny but Left Hand of Darkness is one of these books that seems to inspire one of two distinct reactions in it’s readers. Some find it interesting, thoughtful and intriguing while others think it’s hopelessly dull and boring. I find myself somewhere in the middle between these two extremes. I can’t deny the fact that the story moves at a glacial (pun intended - you see, the action takes place on an arctic frost-ball planet known as Winter to the outsiders) pace. The book doesn’t have any surprising plot twists, or deep impenetrable mysteries. Anyone expecting fast paced action and intrigue will likely be disappointed.

However there is also no denying that the novel is a very interesting commentary on the human condition. Ursula K. Le Guin creates a very detailed, and very convincing world populated by strange offshoot of the human species with unusual sexual characteristics. All Gethenians (inhabitants of the aforementioned ice ball planet) are androgynous hermaphrodites. Most of their lives they exhibit no external sexual characteristics whatsoever, have no sexual drive and are biologically sterile. The only time they are sexually active is a short period that lasts about a week of each month called kemmer. During that time they take on either male or female characteristic and are able to copulate and reproduce. The development of sexual characteristics is fairly random and every Gethenian is capable of both becoming a male or a female each month. If an individual just entering their kemmer phase is exposed to another individual in full kemmer (ie. with fully developed outward sexual characteristics) he will usually start taking aspects of the opposite sex to facilitate procreation. Thus, Gethenians in kemmer often take on female characteristics when around Genry Ai - the protagonist of the story, and a baseline human male.

Winter is a world where gender virtually does not exist, and sex is just a monthly call of nature that can be dealt with and put out of one’s mind. There is no sexual frustration, sex based crime, sexual repression or discrimination. Sex is not a taboo, or a source of power (or lack of thereof). All in all, it plays a minor role in the lives of average Gethenians. The are in many ways liberated from this additional baggage which stems from having two genders, and two separate sets of standards, expectations and behavioral patterns associated with each of them.

Genry is an envoy sent to this strange world to introduce it’s inhabitants to the other human populated worlds and to convince Gethenians to enter into a trade alliance with the intergalactic society known as the Ecumen. His often chauvinistic male outlook and attitude toward sexuality and gender may seem a bit dated now, but still rings true. While you may not agree with some of his characterizations, you can plainly see that Genry’s problem is not that he is sexist, but that our culture and our language is charged with and polarized by sexuality and gender. Simple words can often carry different connotations when gender enters the picture. For example, consider the words king and queen. While both can describe a head of state, only the first exclusively masculine one implies th this status intrinsically. The female equivalent of king is a queen which also the title given to a wife of a king. Thus the subordinate, secondary role is implicit though not necessarily intentionally. These words are of course a product of a patriarchal feudal society and more modern titles such as “president” do not have these gender based issues. Still, our language is jam packed with legacy of words that are sexually charged in a similar way.

This is why Genry is struggling when describing the feudal ruler of one of Gethen’s countries. Using the word queen doesn’t seem appropriate due to the leaders status. Thus he calls him a king even though it is not entirely accurate either. For one, the king is pregnant and about to become a mother. You can probably see for yourself that the language itself gets in the way here. Genry finds himself tripped by his own preconceptions about gender and sexuality time after time.

It is a quite an amazing look at the alien psyche of Gethenians which serves as a mirror to reflect an aspect of our own culture and society that we might not notice as readily these days. Some may claim that while Left Hand of Darkness might have been ground breaking when it was first published, but is a bit dated now. I don’t agree. I do not agree. I think that the book is still relevant. While our society is more progressive now, the double standards and gender based unfair and unfounded preconceptions still persist in our language and in our culture. We may not notice them, but they are there.

It’s a good read, but may be a tad slow at times. If you are looking for something with more fast paced action, and imaginative dynamic worlds grab one of Le Guin’s Earthsea books. Left Hand is not for everyone, but if you give it a chance, reading it may be rewarding. If nothing else this book will expand your geek vocabulary with a new made up word which you will be bound to use just like you have learned to use grok to indicate profound, thorough level of understanding of a particular subject.

Shifgrethor is another one of those words that has no equivalent in english, but may become useful. Literally it means casting a long shadow, but it is not really how it is used. You see, on Gethen shadows indicate meaning and intrinsic value. To know a thing you must be able to see it’s shadow. This is quite poetically exemplified by a passage in the book when Genry and his companion are traversing a glacial ice sheet. The sun glare reflecting from the ice is so intense that it obliterates all the shadows and without them cracks and crevasses in the surface of the ice are very difficult, if not impossible to see. Thus Shifgerthor - one’s shadow is a measure of prestige which lies at the core of Gethenian culture - especially in the nation of Karhide. It permeates all forms of communication and can turn even the most casual exchange into challenging verbal duel. Much to Genry’s frustration people of Gethen are almost never direct. Their conversations are full of shifgrethor positioning - either to avoid injuring one’s shifgrethor, or challenge him and force him to defend it. They much prefer talking around issues, hinting at them almost as if outlining their shadows in the snow.

This reminded me of the way a colleague of mine described the experience of being pulled over by the police on his trip to Japan. He marveled how the very simple conversation turned into a complex social positioning duel due to the complexity of the language with it’s complex system of honorifics and expressions implying respect, and/or familiarity. He marveled how he had to address the officer in a way that would put them both on an equal footing. He had to avoid “talking down” to him which would be a sign of disrespect, and also avoid sounding to subservient as that would shift the power relationship between the two and give the policeman unfair amount of control.

This sort of social maneuvering exists in English as well, although it may not be as pronounced. For example, how do you address your direct supervisor? If you preface his name with Mr/Ms, Dr or other honorific you inadvertently place yourself in a subservient position. If you are on a first name basis, the power relationship plays out very differently. The opposite is also true - the way your supervisor addresses you also indicates a power and prestige relationship. Consider being called by your last name, last name prefaced by a Mr/Ms honorific, by your first name or simply as “hey, you” and ponder the power/prestige charge on each of these methods. This is how we maneuver for Shifgrethor and it does influence the relationship you have.

Anyway, now you will have a new word to apply to verbal power play and power positioning whenever you see it.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons is a rather interesting book. It is really an analogy of short stories taking place in the same universe, and connected with common narrative. The individual pieces could be read alone, outside the novel without losing to much. You can think of them as flashbacks which help to develop the main characters, give them back stories, and show you different aspects of the portrayed world. Each of them also adds a piece to the over-arching mystery of the planet Hyperion.

This backwater planet lying on the outskirts of the galaxy spanning empire played a key role in the lives of the 7 pilgrims returning to it for the last time as the galaxy spanning is on a brink of devastating world. It is a home to some of the universe’s impenetrable mysteries such as the vast, empty labyrinth of unknown origin underneath it’s surface, mysterious monuments called the Time Tombs which generate anti-entropic field (which evades understanding by modern science) that seems to be propelling them back in time and the almost mythical, fearsome, bloodthirsty beast known as the Shrike.

No one really knows what the Shrike is, since almost no one who have seen it lives long enough to tell anyone about it. But the creature has been also known to grant requests to it’s worshippers who go on a pilgrimage to the Time Tombs and put their life on the line. When the story begins Hyperion is about to be invaded, the Time Tombs seem to be opening and the shrike goes on a rampage decimating the population of the planet. The cult of Shrike carefully selects 7 very special pilgrims and sends them to face the beast.

Since the pilgrimage is a long and ardours trip they decide to share their stories with each other and figure out what exactly makes them so special. Simmon’s takes great lengths to keep each flashback unique by giving it distinct mood, flavor, tone and language. The narrative style shifts quite drastically depending on the subject. So for example the Soldier’s Tale is told by a third person, omnipotent narrator in a very structured and linear way. The Poets Tale on the other hand is first person narrative with flowery (and often crude) language, with many tangents, asides and soliloquies. The end result is a curious but rather interesting mix that offers the reader wide variety of experiences.

The quality of the individual stories varies. All are well written and interesting, but some will definitely stand out and lodge themselves in your memory. My favorite was probably the Scholar’s Tale which was a mix of all the right stuff. Moving story about parenthood, terrible heart wrenching loss, crisis of faith and trying to cope with a mysterious terminal disease destroying life of one’s only child. The Priest’s Tale also made a great impact on me - eerie, disturbing and soaked in mystery. The Soldier’s Tale on the other hand left me cold. I felt like it did very in terms of character development, and the ending killed whatever suspense it managed to build with a rather pointless combat scene. Nevertheless it contained interesting insights to the Outster culture, the organization of military in the human Hegemony, it’s customs and strategies. The Poet’s Tale was good, but in my opinion was a bit jumbled and lacked a disturbing hook or twist evident in most of the other pieces. Still, it provided great background on the history of the Hyperion universe, the destruction of Earth (eaten by a wormhole produced in a LHC experiment btw) and colonization of the planet Hyperion. Even if you hate the main character, you will keep reading it to find out more about the universe.

I did not care much for the Detective’s Tale on either. It was essentially an old-school Gibsonian cyberpunk detective story, complete with the silly notion of cyberspace, scheming AI’s and a murder mystery in the middle of it all. While I do not despise this genre, I’m not a big fan of it either. But once again, while this particular part of the book was of average quality (at least IMHO) it did add new insights to what makes Simmons’ universe tick.

The book is closed with the Consul’s Tale which is a slight departure from the other other tales in the book. The focus is shifted off he planet Hyperion here and revolves around the issues of innocence lost due to progress, colonialism and features an interesting spin on the twin paradox. Instead of twins, however we star crossed lovers one of whom is a shipmate on a star cruiser traveling at relativistic speeds, while the other stays planet-bound. One stays young while the other one ages naturally. Strangely moving and sad piece. It is actually a verbatim re-print of Simmons’ short story which appeared in the anthology “Prayers to Broken Stones” and later became a seed for the Hyperion universe.

If you like a good Scifi with a dash of mystery and touch of supernatural I highly recommend this book. I believe that you will find at least one story inside of it’s covers which will either move you, disturb you or stay with you in some way.

I usually don’t review short stories here but perhaps I should start. I recently read a very short piece by Janusz Cyran, a Polish SF writer that struck a cord with me. The story itself was not all that spectacular, and especially the ending didn’t really do much for me but the central concept was brilliant. Very original take on a rather common theme. The story is titled Faster (original title “Szybciej”) and it has appeared in the September issue of the Nowa Fantastyka magazine. I don’t think there exists an English translation so I will just tell you about it.

The story takes place in a distant future, when human race attained immortality by shedding their biological bodies and moving their consciousness into a virtual universe. This digital world is cohabited by two offshoots of the former homo sapiens race. The traditionalists live in a hyper realistic simulation of the world which they left behind. They still have bodies that seem physical, they can still eat, drink and make love and etc. The post-humans on the other hand moved on, shed the remaining shackles of simulated physicality and exist as purely abstract intellectual entities.

This virtual world naturally runs on “hardware” residing in the physical world. As the amount of data produced by the system is constantly growing, the hardware must expand to accommodate it. Over the countless centuries the post-humans have managed to harness almost every single atom of matter in the universe to be part of the gigantic quantum computer network which hosts their existence. There first crisis comes when they realize there is no more matter available to add additional processing nodes or more storage. The are suddenly strapped for resources. They’d love to get rid of the computationally intensive simulation used by the traditionals but the system was designed to prevent them from doing exactly that. So they do the second best thing - they offer various Faustian deals to the traditionalists or trick them to voluntarily relinquish mental resources. Such unfortunate individuals are reduced to functional imbeciles and their storage and processing resources are repossessed by the post-humans in order to facilitate continuous growth.

Then they discover a second, even more disturbing problem threatening the survival of the human race. The universe is expanding! In the physical world the hardware components are hurtling away from each other through space at ever increasing velocity and the imminent Big Rip will eventually pull apart the galaxies, solar systems and then even individual stars and planets and even the individual atoms at which point even the quantum level communication which drives the virtual world will become impossible.

Traditionalist who live in their simulation are completely oblivious to this impending doom. Many of them simply have a eerie feeling that the time flies by faster as they get older. That’s because it does. As the universe is expanding, the communication between the hardware nodes becomes slower. So for example a simple 5 minute conversation with your neighbor may actually take years of real-world time to calculate process and generate.

The protagonist, a traditionalist, finds out about this and gets a clock which shows him the passage of the real-world time. He puts it in his bedroom so that he can observe this phenomenon. At first the clock counts time in hours, which the character notes spin by at astonishing pace. Much later he notes that the clock no longer uses hours, but now counts time in months. Then it changes to years, hundreds of years, millions and etc. To cope with the increased transmission times the post-humans must adjust the simulation. First it becomes black and white, then grainy and low resolution. The traditionalist society falls apart as individuals become trapped in their own houses no longer able to reach cities and public places due to data transmission bottlenecks and poor state of the simulation. Eventually the protagonist decides to simply stay in bed and observe the clock because anything else is an enormous hassle. He knows that soon the virtual universe will grind to a halt, but the final thoughts of all of it’s inhabitants will be preserved for eternity in the quantum states of the particles that will continue hurtling through space into the unknown.

Brilliant, and striking concept! The image of a dying virtual world and the protagonist lying in bed observing a widely spinning clock and thinking until his mind comes to a slow halt really made an impression on me!

Cygan however managed to work in a semi-romantic subplot with a rather disturbing ending, and a rather disappointing twist ending. No it does not turn out to be a dream, but the story ends on an odd spiritual/religious note which IMHO didn’t really add anything to the story.

Anyway, I thought it was a really interesting idea for a distant future SF story so decided to share it with those of you who might not be able to read it. It really made me think. I’m not entirely certain that it will ever be possible to accurately digitize a human brain. I’m still hung up on that consciousness interruption thing. There is some interesting discussion on the topic in that thread, and I also had some really insightful email exchanges about it with few people (hey Sam, how is that book coming along?). I sort of figured out a way I could imagine digitization of human consciousness without the interruption and creating a mental twin. Here is what I wrote about it back then:

We talked precisely about the issue you describe - if you digitize a brain, and upload it to a cloned body (like in Cory Doctorows Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom) or a virtual simulation of some sort you are really creating a “twin”.

I also read an interesting short story on this topic, but for the life of me I cannot remember the title or the author. The basic premise is that a guy goes hiking in the mounties and gets hit by an avalanche. He is rescued but looses a leg and bunch of fingers, and his left hand suffers severe nerve damage due to the multiple fractures so it will never be functional. His family tries to convince him to simply abandon this crippled body and restore himself from a backup he made prior to his trip. He doesn’t want to do it because in his mind this will mean death. He will die, and some other guy who looks like him, and has all his memories will wake up somewhere else and go to live his life. But he himself will be gone. So he refuses. His family and doctors decide to build a case showing in court that due to head trauma and severe emotional distress he is not in the right state of mind to make that decision, and want the courts to authorize the procedure to restore him to the state of full mental competence and physical health. So the poor guy decides to spring himself out of hospital and run away.

I wish I remember who wrote that. But yeah, it’s an interesting problem. I don’t know whether an actual “transfer” is even possible. With Cylon’s maybe, because they are artificial beings. But with humans…

An idea I had a while ago was to make it a gradual, long term process. You would get implanted with a “transfer chip” and some nano tech. The chip would then gradually map your brain and create exact digitized functional copies. Once a part of your consciousness would be mapped, the nano machines would “re-wire” your brain to delegate that functionality/memories to the chip, and deactivate relevant area of the brain. At some point you would be running on a fully digitized mode - at that point the chip can be extracted, and your body with non-functional brain can be discarded. That’s the only way I can image actually imagine digitization of consciousness without that “you die, but your mental twin lives on” thing.

I admit that the mapping chip was heavily inspired by… Yeah, Farscape. I bet freelancer (my fellow Gigi Edgley fan) knew exactly where this was heading when I used the expression “brain mapping chip” instead of neural implant.

So anyway, lets say that digitizing your mind is possible and you can upload yourself into a virtual simulation or even attain higher state of awareness as one of those post-human things (virtual singularity?). Theoretically this would mean that our dream of immortality would finally come true. But Cyran’s story shook me by showing me that there is no such thing as immortality. You can’t defeat the destructive forces of entropy! And once you are a digital construct in a virtual world, an eternity may fly past you so fast you won’t know where did all these centuries go. There is a definite end to our existence in this universe, and we can do absolutely nothing to prevent it. Deep down it really disturbs me, even though I know perfectly well that:

1. None of us will live long enough to see this inevitable death of everything
2. Human race is more likely to die by supernova than or a meteor than via Big Rip
3. I always knew that universe would end - Big Rip, Big Crunch, the Heath Death - all are equally inevitable

I guess what I find disturbing in this story is the very fact that humans in it have achieved virtual immortality (pun intended) but had it insidiously snatched away from them by Lady Entropy. We face death every day so ultimately we are much better prepared to face the end of the world than this fictional race of immortals who know no death or sickness.

I saw Live Free or Die Hard few days ago and I must say that I’m really glad that I did not actually waste money to see this piece of crap on the big screen. My gut instinct is to automatically pass on any movies that feature hackers or cyber-terrorism because Hollywood always gets these things horribly wrong.

Watching the new installment of the Die Hard was a bit like revisiting The Net all over again. The level of technical expertise and realism is about the same in both pictures. In all fairness, The Net is probably a better movie of the two simply because it contains Sandra Bullock in her prime, and does not contain Justin Long (who seriously needs to get punched in the face with a sledge hammer).

This is the plot of the movie: a bunch of evil terrorists (and you know they are totally evil because they all wear black) hack into the United States and shut everything down. You gonna ask me “United States what?” but no, I did not skip a word there. That is precisely the problem with this movie. These dudes hack into everything! They are such 1337 hackers that they can control anything: street lights, gas mains, tv channels, cell phone networks, the stock market, banking, trains, plains, on board avionics in military jets - hell, they can even take over that shitty $10 webcam in your bedroom and spy on your ass.

The movie is full or ridiculous scenes that look like they were inspired by The Net. For example, at one point the bad guy played by Timothy Olyphant (who we probably better know as The Asexual Hitman Man) goes “McClain, I just deleted your bank account and now I’m deleting your 401k - how do you feel about that? Muahahahaha” as he types something on his keyboard. Next thing you know there is an animation of a page with a big 401k heading and a table with some numbers that suddenly start counting down until they all reach $0 while you hear the ka-ching cash register sound effect. Really? I mean, seriously! Come one people!

The scene is silly in itself but it becomes even sillier when you find out what the bad guys are “really after”. You see, according to this film, after 9/11 the government created a secret facility with some totally awesome servers (and you know they are totally awesome because they like have a lot of blinkenlights) where all financial, banking and social security information from the whole country will be backed up in case of a national emergency. The terrorists want to steal that data because once they have it they will be able to (and this is a direct quote):

“Put it on a portable disk, take it anywhere. They will be able to make transfers, and will be untraceable! Or they could delete it all and send us back to the stone age!”

In other words, the terrorists pretty much shut down the country order to perpetrate some petty identity theft. I’m ignoring that stone age bit because it just doesn’t make any sense and I don’t even want to know what they were getting at. Why do they create a media circus instead of doing things quietly is beyond me. What is even funnier, you have to realize that they already took over computer systems of banks, investment firms, the NY stock exchange, social security systems and etc. It seemed like they already had access to all that information that was supposed to be in the super-secret backup facility. After all they were deleting people’s bank accounts and 401k plans and making untraceable transfers throughout the movie. So why did they needed the backups? I mean, it’s not like they could erase them and “send us to stone age” since every single institution they broke into is likely to have localized and/or off-site physical backups. No super-duper national backup plan would ever replace that. It makes no sense.

Live Free or Die Hard uses virtually every single hated computer cliche in the book. Hacking is done by vigorous typing and you can pretty much tell how hard one is hacking by how fast and hard he is punching the keys. No one ever uses a mouse, or the space bar for anything. Tracing the source of a video chat takes the same amount of time as tracing a phone call, and you must stall the person on the other side of the line making small talk. I mean, I’d just take the IP number and look it up in the whois database to get the address of the registrant but apparently it is a much more complex procedure that displays a big red “ROUTER DENIED” warning whenever you fail to trace the source properly.

It takes exactly 4 key strokes to pull up any information. It goes like this: a bad guy says “locate McClains daughter!”. A dude sitting at a computer terminal goes tap, tap, tap, TAP (you know, the last tap must be like emphasized) and goes “She is stuck in an elevator between 4th and 5th floor in the such and such building on the 34th street”. Then of course they pull up the elevator cam feed to look at her with exactly 4 more keyboard strokes. Justin Long on the other hand manages to reprogram his cell phone to use the super secret satellite network in exactly 4 keyboard strokes. It’s amazing really!

If you plan to watch this movie make sure you keep Clarkes’ third law firmly in mind. In Live Free or Die Hard technology is indistinguishable from magic. Hackers are wizards with unlimited power who can do anything the plot is calling for at the moment: reroute the gas mains, shut down the electrical grid, change stock prices, take over your GPS system, hack into your hamster and turn it into a time bomb (ok, I made this last one up) - you name it. They can shut down the country and bring about the end of civilization and the only person who can stop them is a grizzled, cynical cop who doesn’t know much about computers but can kick serious ass.

I find it funny how all the evil hackers are smart, educated, and well dressed. They all use big words, they enunciate and act professional at all times. You know, highly educated and well spoken people are all evil elitist bastards with their science, and their logic and etc. The good hackers on the other hand are lovable geeks - clumsy, oafish and mumbling cryptic stuff to themselves all the time. They might be smart, but the writers take special care to show that they would never survive without the big, bad McClain holding their hand and wiping their noses all the time. Both of these portrayals personally offend me as a programmer and IT professional but hell, what do I know.

I understand that no one in Hollywood hires technology consultants anymore - and if they do, they probably fired them on the first day when they start crossing out all the awesome hacker stuff from the script and replace it with boring stuff. I get it. I am not their target audience and I guess someone with less technical knowledge than me could overlook all the flaws I listed above. But the badness of the movie extends way beyond that. It is simply way over the top. You’d think that the 3 previous die hard movies were over the top but they are nothing compared to this installment.

It seems that there is some sort of pissing contest going on in Hollywood to see who can make a movie with more outrageous stunts. This trend peeked and culminated in the proverbial Nuking of the Fridge in Indiana Jones 4. Die Hard 4 is a clear runner up in the same league though. McClain destroys a helicopter by driving over a fire hydrant, blows up another driving a car up a makeshift ramp into it, outmaneuvers and destroys a Harrier jet while driving a tractor trailer. Of course before he destroys the jet he jumps on top of it, and manages to stand upright on one of the wings while the plane spins out of control. I mean, WTF is this? Jet surfing?

This sort of thing has to stop. The fact that CGI is dirt cheep these days doesn’t mean you have to use so much of it. The fact that you have a big budget does not mean you need to blow it all on explosions, crashes and outrageous stunts. The original Die Hard while still stunt/special effect heavy was much more low key. McClain had to use stealth and cunning to survive and dispatch the bad guys. The proportions between realism and ass-kicking action were maintained at a level where the viewer was kept on edge of his seat most of the time. There was just enough realism to allow the viewer to suspend his disbelief, and just enough of unrealistic stunts to make things exciting. In Live Free or Die Hard reality goes out the window as soon as the hero blows up the n’th helicopter, falls down from a 10 story building, dusts himself off and then tries to surf on top of a military jet plane while the pilot ejects from the cabin. You can’t build tension when your character pulls off crazy reality defying stunts every 5 minutes. You can’t escalate the special effects indefinitely and expect viewers to go ooh and ahh after each explosion. The more stunts you have in your movie, the less impressive they become.

This is exactly what was happening to the James Bond franchise - they kept escalating the special effects, and adding crazier and crazier stunts with each new installment and at some point people just started yawning and leaving theaters in droves. Then Bond was reinvented anew. Instead of having him jumping over a helicopter on a motorcycle they made him do some Parkour. Instead of an elaborate trap involving sharks with lasers attached to their heads, they used a bottomless chair and a piece of rope with a big knot on the end (and holly shit, that torture scene made me cringe). Lo and behold they scored a huge blockbuster success. I thought that Hollywood got the message after that one. But it is clear that they didn’t since we have movies such as Live Free or Die Hard or Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Suck still coming out these days.

I can’t really say anything about Bruce Willis’ performance because any respect I might have had for his character was instantly destroyed when he started doing the condescending “I don’t know about computers so why don’t you say that in English you pathetic nerd” routine every time Justin Long said something. Most of the signature Die Hard attitude and bravado was drowned out by the outrageous action sequences, and the pointless and tedious banter with Long.

Long pretty much plays the same annoying character he portrays in the Apple commercials - a smug know it all with some of the least favorable geek stereotypes. For example he delivers a rambling rant about how “the man” is controlling the media, makes inappropriate star wars references or uses nonsensical technobabble around McClain knowing full well he is a computer illiterate idiot.

Bottom line is that the movie is absolutely horrible. It is incoherent, inconsistent, badly written and nukes the fridge on average every 5 minutes. Plot is nonsensical, and the stunts become more and more far fetched up to the point where all suspense is gone and you can’t help but yawn once you get to the part when Willis is running on top of a flying harrier jet mid flight. Avoid at all costs!

Also, I propose a new rule: Hollywood is no longer allowed to make movies that feature hackers, hacking or cyber terrorism. We will all be better off if they stick to old fashioned lo-fi terrorism which most people can understand and comprehend.

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.