John Lindal’s Blog

It’s a Small World

My wife just took a writing course from Bonnie MacBird, the original author of TRON and the wife of Alan Kay, one of the inventors of the graphical user interface at Xerox Parc.

New MacBook Pro

This is my first blog post from my brand new, shiny unibody MacBook Pro. I like the no-hook lid. I love the trackpad without any buttons. When I was born, the mouse had barely been invented, and now my daughter isn’t yet five years old, and she’s already growing up in a world where the mouse is obsolete.

Update (2/21/10): Trackpads with separate buttons now feel really strange. And I love how far back the display tilts — much further than any other laptop I’ve ever used, and so much more comfortable!

The Future of UI is not boring

Scott Berkun’s tangent off John Gruber’s wistful piece about the Apple Newton is flat out wrong. The future of UI is here already, and it is anything but boring. 10/GUI was announced several months ago, and SixthSense has been under development for a while. Both have the potential to revolutionize how we use computing power. The former replaces the ubiquitous desktop mouse, while the latter makes the iPhone seem antiquated and clunky. While neither will be available by Christmas 2010, gestures are invading our computing experience. Apple continues to execute on its long-term plan by introducing more and more gesture recognition in every new model of laptop and mouse. Designers who are not already thinking about how to effectively use the expressive power of systems like 10/GUI and SixthSense will probably find themselves out of work by 2020.

Eee PC Back Online

I recently made the grave mistake of upgrading my Eeebuntu installation to the latest Ubuntu, after which support for my external monitor vanished. Ouch! I finally have it working again, after starting from a clean install off the Eeebuntu CD. This time around, it went a bit faster, since I knew that networking would not work without a kernel upgrade, so I downloaded it before the re-install. Thank goodness I put /home on a separate partition!

10/GUI

10/GUI is an amazing re-imagining of how we could interact with computers. They have designed a really clever way in which we can do basic desktop interactions with all ten fingers. After you watch the video, I would be surprised if you didn’t wish your current laptop touchpad were much bigger! Of course, for this to really go anywhere, application developers will need to figure out how to take full advantage of this, too. I suspect that will take some time…

Programming Languages

Hex is like starting with Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen to evolve sheep to get wool to make clothing.

Assembly is like starting with some basic, biological molecules, but you still don’t have RNA or DNA. You still have to evolve sheep to get wool to make clothing.

C is like raising sheep to get wool to make clothing.

Java is like using a loom to weave cloth to make clothing.

Your favorite framework is like using a pattern to make clothing.

But most people just go to Kmart, or Gap, or Macy’s and buy clothing because they don’t care about how it’s made. Even starting from a pattern requires knowing how to use a sewing machine.

So now you know why most people click the e to get to Google and then type AOL to read their mail!

Asus Eee PC — Part 3

It works! After tracking down a bunch of libraries, everything compiled and runs quite well. I now have a Linux development machine which runs silently and can start up in seconds (since I put it to sleep instead of turning it off).

The default window manager is somewhat annoying, in that window placement doesn’t follow the old rules, but the new rules appear to be the same as in the latest X11 version on Mac OS X, so I think I need to figure out the new rules, rather than switching back to fvwm2

Asus Eee PC — Part 2

I managed to get Eeebuntu installed today. It was a very smooth install, even if I spent a lot of time being confused. I deleted D: in XP, I created a 200M /boot, 10G /, and the rest for /home. Unfortunately, once I booted it up, networking did not work at all After digging around in several forums, I decided to install a newer kernel. This got wireless networking working, but it refused to connect to my router. The solution turned out to be that I had to turn on SSID broadcast. With that issue fixed, I could finally use apt-get to install all the development packages I needed. The next step is to actually try compiling something!

Asus Eee PC — Part 1

My ten year old tower finally died. The hard disk wore out. We had previously bought an Asus Eee PC for my wife’s parents, so I only had to research which model I wanted, not which brand. Despite the time savings, it still ate my 4th of July weekend.

After waffling between SSD and HDD for a couple of days, I finally decided to go with the HDD. It has more total space, and it’s proven technology. The only way Asus can keep the price of an SSD netbook down is to use the cheap stuff. Top quality SSD costs a much as a netbook!

Sadly, it is very hard to find Linux versions of Eee PC’s. The few that I could find were actually more expensive than XP! The option to get Linux appears to have driven Microsoft to slash licensing costs In addition, even Asus engineers tell me that the Linux version shipped by Asus isn’t any good. So I guess everybody gets XP and then either wipes it or dual boots. The CD included with the the Eee PC allows a full factory restore, so wiping carries no risk. I’m going to try to triple boot: XP, Eeebuntu, and Hackintosh. If I can get Hackintosh to work, I’ll buy a license of course.

Currently, I’m using the Eee PC as a processor/HDD. I’ve hooked up my Sony flat panel monitor and a brand new Logitech EX100 wireless keyboard/mouse pair. It feels just like a desktop computer, but it’s portable!

Tomorrow, I’m going to get a DVD drive so I can install Eeebuntu. After all, I can’t do much but blog from XP!

Google

My simmering indigestion from the articles about Google by Coding Horror and Whimsley caused me to burp up the thought that Google might actually be adjusting their search results to optimize revenue. I posted a quick comment on Coding Horror and wasn’t planning to mull it over any further, but then I realized that Google must be doing this. The only question is: To what extent?

If a site is displayed in the paid section, it is actually quite reasonable that Google does not show that site in the unpaid section. But what if moving a particular unpaid result to page 2 increases the number of clicks on the paid results? Almost nobody bothers to view page 2 of the results, so the result effectively ceases to exist! Even moving a result to the bottom of page 1 would have a huge impact, since many people probably don’t even bother to scroll down.

It would be easy for Google to do this kind of optimization. They have so much traffic that they could bucket test small fractions to look for significant increases in CTR without anybody noticing. So from the outside, this seems impossible to prove. Google is a black box, so who can say whether a particular result belongs on page 1 or page 2? But the thought that a particular site might effectively cease to exist in order to satisfy Google’s hunger for profit is pretty scary…

Update (2/18/10): I just noticed that Google does not filter out sites from the unpaid section if they are listed in the paid section.