Long Head

I have a long history with Infocom games (”text adventures” was what I called them as a kid, and “interactive fiction” is the new name). People still write these games, did you know that? There’s a big archive and an annual competition. I haven’t played any of the non-Infocom variety, though I think I ought to try one. I have copies of all the data files for all the original Infocom games from the 80s, and for years there has been an open-source program to load these files and let you play the games. It’s called Frotz. I’ve had a version of Frotz on all my computers for the last 12 years, including my various Palm PDAs. The only Infocom game I’ve ever finished in my life (making it one of like 5 games of any variety that I have ever finished) was “Enchanter”, which I played on the Palm. The latest incarnation of Frotz is for the iPhone, and so of course I downloaded it right away.

PDAs in general are not the easiest devices to type on, though, and there’s lots of typing in Infocom games. So it occurred to me that it would be really cool to speak the commands. After all, there is a limited vocabulary, which should be ideal for getting good accuracy from automatic speech recognition, and furthermore the engine should require a pretty small amount of data. On top of that, what if Frotz synthesized a (pleasant, configurable) computer voice to read you all the text in the game? Then you could set the iPhone down in front of you, close your eyes, and enjoy a nice bit of interactive fiction by having a dialog with thin air. All of a sudden the very stodgiest and oldest of technology leapfrogs three decades of competition and actually sounds futuristic! I patted myself on the back for thinking of such a great idea, and told myself I’d take a stab at it myself “one day,” since speech recognition is just a hop, skip and a jump away from machine translation.

But that’s not all, there’s a punchline to this story. It further occurred to me that I wouldn’t have been the first to think of this idea, so I did a Google search. The link I found is inside a code repository for Frotz itself, namely the iPhone version. Actually, this is just a branch of Frotz, so I checked the general Frotz SourceForge repository as well and the same file is there too. It’s a placeholder for future work on just this idea, but it’s super-vague and kind of creepy, what with the whole “commissioned by a presently undisclosed party” thing. The technology looks good, it’s all open-source stuff released by academics, which was where I figured I would start looking as well.

So who wrote this document, and when, and when do they intend to come out of the shadows with the result of their work? Who knows — but it sure is a weird end to my story.

The iPhone does not display any progress bar or countdown to let you know when the song you’re listening to will end. If you tap the screen, such a bar is temporarily displayed, but it isn’t there all the time. On the classic iPod, in iTunes, and in most other software-based music players, we’ve been getting used to having these indicators. I don’t like them because I think a song should set its own pace. I think it detracts from the listening experience to see there are 30 seconds left, because when I see that, I start thinking about how short a time that is, and will the rest of the song really fit because they have a whole other chorus to sing, etc.

I’m glad the iPhone does not show this information all the time, and I hope it becomes an option in the other players I use.

I’ve owned a Palm or Clie device (which used the Palm OS) for 8 years. I used them as my PIM and as an eBook reader. My very first blog post was about eBooks, back in 2001. But my needs for a calendar are slim (but not zero), and my need for contact information is confined to making phone calls, which my devices couldn’t do, or sending Christmas cards, when I’m at home. So eventually my latest Clie, the TH-55, sat on my bedside table as my bedtime eBook reader.

Now I have an iPhone 3G and Fictionwise has ported my eBook reader to the iPhone platform. I’m thrilled to say the phone has subsumed all the Clie’s functionality, plus it’s a phone and an iPod. Its screen is beautiful, it’s the same size as the Clie, and the fact that it’s a phone means it now matters that I have contact info. The fact that it’s always syncing with my computer means it’s a great home for my calendar data. I’m very happy!

Now I need to think of a useful app to bring shelfcentered functionality to the iPhone!

Farewell, Clie, we hardly knew ye.

I bought an iPhone 3G this past weekend (and waited 4 1/2 hours for the privilege). One of its functions is to play your music/movies like an iPod. You access this feature through a button labeled “iPod”. It has a picture of an old, non-iPhone iPod on it. This struck me as funny (haha funny). I think of the iPhone as subsuming the iPod in a device with extra functionality. But to explain to the user what this button does, it has a picture of an old iPod on it. And it’s not called “iTunes” or “Music and Movies”, or “Media” — it’s called “iPod”. So the iPod has become a piece of software, and the hardware has just become an icon.

I grew up assuming that people make their own way in the world. I thought it was up to me to make every decision, plan every move, open every door, and find my own way in my life and career. Only much later did I learn that I was doing it all wrong. Not only is my way much harder, it’s also completely miserable to be so isolated. Here’s an example. The place where I started making these wrong decisions was in college. I attended my classes, which in some cases were way below my capabilities, and in other cases were way above. Either way, at the end of class, I packed up my things and walked back to my room. I dreamed of being a scientist, just like I had since I was 10 years old. But all I did was go to class, I never spoke with any professors, nor was I ever approached by any. My talents started to appear in my sophomore year, but I was still doing things in this retarded way. Then in my junior year the first consequence of my nihilistic lifestyle happened, and I didn’t even really notice it for what it was until years later. I switched my major from Astronomy to Astrophysics, then I added a concentration (minor) in Math, and then I made Math a second major. This all happened within a couple of months. Even these bureaucratic thrashings didn’t raise any red flags in any administrators or professors. No one cared. So, I shifted my focus to math, threw away the pile of physics grad school applications I had, and requested a bunch of math ones. I went to graduate school for a year at Stony Brook, then transferred back to Columbia for the rest of my Ph.D., because my then-girlfriend, now-wife, was continuing on from Columbia undergrad to grad school.

OK, here’s the denoument to the story. In my second year or so, the reference librarian of the math library was leaving Columbia, and she was well-liked by the department. I had worked for her as an undergraduate, so I was invited to her going away party. At that party, there was a professor who was a fixture in the math department. He was the kind of professor who was very focused on undergraduates and mentoring. I had never had a class with him, and had never met him personally until I was a graduate student. We got to chatting, and it came out that I had attended Columbia as an undergrad as well as a grad student. He was shocked. “How is it that I don’t remember you?” he asked. My answer was “I do a good job of going under the radar.”

This story brings me a whole lot of pain. I know that I somehow failed to do “things” right as an undergrad. All those times I walked straight back to my room to lie on my back, have a cigarette, and listen to music, I suspected that I was doing the wrong thing. I knew I should be doing “more” or seeking more opportunities. But how do you do that? I have never been good at taking that feeling and turning it into non-ridiculous-looking actions. But I also suspect that others also failed me. The professors who taught me recognized my talent, I’m sure. A few years later I heard from a third party that one of them had called me “the best mathematician he has ever met.” WTF? Why weren’t these people looking out for me, then? Couldn’t they see that I had lots of talent but no direction? Professors like the one I was talking to at the going-away party do in fact devote lots of energy to nurturing undergrads. Just not me. So I waver between self-loathing and bitterness.

I am determined to make at least one good thing out of this part of my life story. I will be an excellent mentor, and I will always act when I spot talent. It’s happened plenty at my job, and I have been very vocal about singing the praise of new young employees who are talented. I have been instrumental in having them promoted and being assigned interesting work. I will do what was not done for me. The best would be if I ran across someone like myself, who was incapable of grabbing this kind of attention for him or herself. I will see their talent, and their reticence, and I will help them.

Microsoft Excel was released in 1985 for the Mac and in 1987 for Windows. Today I was using the 2007 version. After 20 years of work by countless engineers, it cannot open two files with the same name, and the dialog is quite shameless about it. That’s a good word: “shameless.” Details are everything. Click to see the full size.

As you know, I want to stream movies and music from my PC to my TV. I have an all-star lineup of tools:

• PC running Vista with Windows Media Player 11 (WMP11), iTunes, and Zune software
• Xbox 360
• PlayStation 3
• TiVo
• Airport Express

And a selection of Xvid, Divx, MPEG 4, MP3, and AAC files to stream. These are all extremely widely used formats, the most popular in their categories (the first three are video, the last two are audio). All the players I mentioned play these formats, at least after installing some popular codec packs.

The PlayStation 3 has the best and most responsive remote, the best music visualizations (cool effects that show on TV while you’re listening to music), and the nicest UI. And it natively supports all the formats I listed. So all I have to do is get stuff to stream to it! BUT…

• Zune will only stream to Xbox 360
• iTunes will only stream to the Airport Express, which is audio only
• WMP11 will not add MPEG 4 or AAC files to its library or stream them

So today I targeted the MPEG 4 portion of this last point using these instructions. It took lots of Googling and experimentation before I finally found those instructions, but it was worth it. I closed the loop, so that I can stream the things that “should” work to the device that “should” play them! Yay!

Alison was interviewed on one of our favorite podcasts, Jumping Monkeys. Here’s the episode page. She discusses home archives and how to approach saving your family’s stuff for the future. Cool!

Robert X. Cringely, my favorite tech pundit, had an interesting aside in this week’s column (which is otherwise about Apple and Blu-Ray). He ran across a use of the term ‘bug’ to mean a glitch in a technical system in a magazine article from the 1930s. I found this fascinating, since we always assume “we” invented the term when computers came along. He closes with this:

It turns out that “bug” was a common term for hardware glitches and dates back to the 19th century and possibly before. Edison used the term in a letter he wrote in 1878. This is no earthshaking news, of course, but simply reminds me how self-centered we are as an industry and there really isn’t much that’s truly new.

Read the full article.

Over this holiday break, I played through all the tutorials in one of my newer DS games Panzer Tactics. It’s a very engrossing turn-based war game, very much along the lines of Advance Wars. Panzer Tactics clicked much more with me, though, and I grasped how to deploy my units intuitively pretty quickly. I think I can take this experience back to Advance Wars as well, and have more fun with it, too. But first, I’m ready to start the real campaigns in Panzer Tactics. Then maybe I’ll go back to Korsun Pocket, which is more complicated.