Tag: Stuff that doesn’t fit

Lift09 — Change — Nicolas Nova — The Recurring Failure of Holy Grails [en]

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Videophone 1969 — so expensive that nobody could use it.

The Intelligent Fridge 1996

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Location-based services 1993 — a success in terms of communication, but not in terms of where people are *(steph-note: not sure I got that right)* — Google Latitude, but problems for privacy reasons. Not that simple.

Common characteristics:

– overoptimism
– reinvention of the wheel
– ignoring similar attempts

Issues:

– Trapped in the zeitgeist (designers, researches, engineers).
– Time is not stable. Innovations happen slowly.
– Short term, long term
– bad understanding of “users”
– the “average human” myth

Automating rituals (Where are you? Smart fridge that does the shopping.)

Virtual assistants in MS Office. Idea: technology should be more “natural”. Making things “natural” is difficult: what is natural, and how can technology really replicate it?

What is “natural” shifts over time. Eg. swiping travel cards that are in bags in the subway: natural for the people who are used to do it, but not for those who have never been in the subway. It’s difficult to define.

So, why is it important to explore failures?

Many failures are actually good ideas before their time. Failures can indicate possible futures to explore. More detailed critique. Source for design (Apple certainly learned a lot for the iPhone from their Newton failure).

It’s important to spot failures, there is a need to document them and turn them into a design strategy.

Lift09 — Change — Patrick J. Gyger — Science Fiction and the Future [en]

Lift09 021 - Patrick Gyger Amazing stories (pulp magazines). Looking into the future. Thirties. This is when SF started becoming a genre.

SF starts creating a new 20th century. SF zeitgeist, science programme. SF moves over to other media: films, radio.

Commercials start using SF backdrops for all sorts of commercial goods. Up to the 60s, the future is used to promote goods.

What will the future be like? (based on SF, predictions)

Home of the future. Revolutionary transportation. We’ll all have flying cars! But actually, flying cars did exist, in the twenties (René Tampier). <–photo–>

Despite the real flying cars, they remain in the realm of imagination, they are still an object of the future.

SF plants the seeds of dreams and desire. It has to stay in the realm of imagination. There is no place for the flying car in the present, because it is an object of the future, by definition.

Some objects have made their way from SF into our world.

– wrist pager / wrist phone
– cybernetics, artificial limbs (cf. Kevin Warwick last year at Lift08)
– robotics
– communications, videophone (Skype)
– jetpacks (want to see your neighbour soaring above your head in the morning, off to work?)

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Failures — or not there yet:

– invisibility doesn’t really work
– cryogenics (not too good)
– teleportation for transportation — we’re not there yet
– time travel

The future did not take the shape of our SF dreams of the past. *steph-note: not altogether surprising imho, as SF is really talking about the present*

Right now, we live in Utopia in the Western world — we don’t feel the urgency to dream up our Utopia. Some technology utopias have been realised, but have not brought what we hoped from them.

We also live in Dystopia — aware of the dark sides of technology.

“We live in the dreams and nightmares of our grandparents, at the same time.”

Belief of the grandiose views of flying cars: machines, not politics, will produce beneficial social change. We don’t believe that anymore.

Stuck [en]

All set to try importing old posts into a test database. Php.ini edited to allow big file size, long script execution times, etc.

But I get this:

Import WordPress

Sorry, there has been an error.

Failed to write file to disk.

I’m not the only one (google) but I’m stuck. Suggestions? I’m going to bed.

Here's the plan [en]

I have a wordpress export of my blog dated 24th october 2008. That’s good. I means everything published before that date will come back as it was.

The exception to that is the non-blog content of CTTS: the “pages” like the writing section, RSI page, About, etc. But I’ve got all those out of the Google cache (hoping I didn’t forget any).

Feedly, which I loved already, are saving my day by providing me with an export of my 1000 or so latest posts — more than enough to cover the bit that’s missing since October.

Backtype, as for them, have promised to get back to me with whatever comments they have for my blog, as they’ve been crawling it regularly for quite some time now.

So, I’ll have to reconfigure blog, theme, plugins, which is not the end of the world.

I have a copy of the last post I wrote and the ones before in case they hadn’t made it to feedly when I pulled the plug (haha). I also learned that you can access the cached version of a page directly if you know the url by typing cache:https://climbtothestars.org/writing/ in Google, for example.

Where’s the catch?

Integrating the exports I’ll get from feedly and backtype. Off the feedly export, I’ll have to:

  • remove delicious links posts
  • remove “similar posts” div
  • remove post language and “other language excerpt” from the top of almost each post
  • move the language and other language excerpt into the correct custom meta fields
  • find a way to integrate the comments gathered from backtype into the right place in the export file.

Thanks so much for everybody’s help. CTTS is going to be bonky for quite a few days, and not least during the Lift09 conference, which I’ll be live-blogging.

Oh well. Conferences seem to attract server disasters — in my case anyway.

Star News Update [en]

Thanks to my brother’s incredible organizational skills and encouragement, I am now sweating on the most wicked exam-preparation schedule. So let’s add that I am now also studying a little more than usual, and will most certainly be doing so during the next few weeks.

Star News [en]

Don’t worry, I’m not going on hold. It’s just that… well, y’know: “if you don’t have anything interesting to say, don’t say it.”

Exams are coming up, and as expected, I’m dreadfully short of time (and motivation) to prepare them. Other than that, my grandparents have come over from England for a couple of weeks [so I’m eating out more than usual] and I’m making friends with my “twin brother” [so I’m chatting more than usual too].

As for the more “internal” stuff, well, let’s say I’m having “identity issues” again (yes, the whole Steph/Tara thingy), and that the “KC mess” has shaken me up a bit deeper than what I thought [I’ll be writing, but not just now].

Blank subject bug [en]

After installing IE6, some emails started coming into Outlook Express with no subject or sender. The problem persisted even though I uninstalled IE6 – and was most irritating as it messed up all my email sorting rules. It seems the problem is due to a corrupt mlang.dll file. Glad to have the solution!

Notes [en]

Just what I expected the doctor would say: mild concussion, aspirin and rest for a week.

More stuff on online romance.

Still not solved all the re-coding problems.

Groan [en]

Last night I installed IE6. I thought I was installing it alongside IE5.5 – I wanted both the browsers on my system. After reboot, I realized IE6 had been installed over IE5.5, so I uninstalled it.

Now, in Outlook Express, I get emails with blank senders (some of them, not all), and my mailing list sorting rules aren’t working anymore.

And of course my news server has been down for days so I can’t leave piles of messages on usenet to see if anybody else has the same problems…

Class Dinner [en]

Yesterday evening, mexican dinner with my old class. It’s always astonishing to see how much people can change and nevertheless stay the same in ten years’ time.

All of a sudden, everybody has switched from student-life to working-life – well, almost everyone ; )

Two of us are still studying, and a third will join us next year.

Our class used to be exactly half-boys, half-girls. The boys would stick together and so would the girls. When the class was seated around a single table, there would be a dividing line between the sexes. Don’t ask me why.
Last night, we all mixed up; it was a pleasant change. I talked more with some of the boys of my class than I had ever done during the three years we saw each other every day.

Maybe the “boys” have grown up a bit in ten years. I, certainly, have.