What I found profoundly disgusting about the electoral process in Canada, and it seems to have become acceptable - is the belief on either/any side that the opposition does not first and foremost have the interests of Canada at heart.

Such disrespect is juvenile and intellectually stunted and it needs to stop.

No party is innocent in this respect; Harper and Dion perpetually exchange snide condescending remarks in the newspapers. This snarkiness tears the fabric of discourse and collaboration upon which the parliamentary system is founded.

I am confident that Sir MacDonald, a man famous for among other things a wickedly barbed tongue, would find the kind of invective interchange going about simply pathetically amateurish. Not only do they do it, they do it poorly - the party leaders in Canada retain the wit of an upset teenager.

Disagreement does not necessitate disrespect. I am a Liberal but under no circumstances could anyone ever get me to admit that a Conservative, by virtue of being a Conservative, has anything but the interests of the country as the primary motivation for her policy choices. Someone can be informed, rational, logically consistent, altruistic and yet still painfully irrevocably wrong.

Unfortunately for the parties in Canada, it seems that if someone disagrees with you it is because they are stupid, naive or corrupt. This is childish and cowardly - if one can’t reconcile that someone intelligent and informed can come to a contrary position, one has no place in politics - or really any intellectual pursuit.

One’s policy suppositions must rest soundly on the evidence used to develop them, not on some lentel of counterfactuals or a presupposed ideological framework.

So it is therefore difficult to introduce topics into campaign debate that are difficult to square with the attempted campaign narrative of each respective parties. As David Eaves points out, there is a gaping hole where foreign policy should be. I observed that technology has no place in the discussion, except in reference to the economy (it seems curious that something so important to all the campaign planks of all the parties gets no attention and is just presupposed to work as intended).

The Liberals cannot win with symmetric tactics - Harper can rout the painfully wooden, extremely francophone Dion in the battle for emotional connection. What Harper cannot hope to dominate is the world of reality and factual information.

Harper is drafting policy for the Canada we see on CTV; not for the real one. Basic, elementary facts, within the intellectual grasp of a child fly in the face of swaths of policy.

But here’s the tactic that will kill Harper - recognize some good ideas he has. Say loud and clear “We the Liberal party are not opposed to good ideas. The Conservatives, once in a while, have decent policy - when that happens we’ll use it - but do you want occasionally good policy? Or do you want the party that will pick the policy every single time?”

Of course, this is boil the ocean problem-solving lunacy on my part; but wouldn’t it be nice to hear SOMEBODY aside from Michael Ignatieff express an interest in picking the BEST policy options instead of slagging a party’s religiosity or haplessness?

Uncategorized | No Comments »

The web, social networks and the like are taking an unprecedented role in the current elections. Obama’s campaign was made in part by the massively successful online initiative his team generated. Marc Gendron, and others like him have made great strides in integrating the Liberal party with contemporary media.

However, using tech in a campaign isn’t enough. Technology with its ever expanding influence over everyone’s lives shouldn’t be a peripheral aspect of policy - it’s as important to the functioning of a nation as foreign policy, fiscal policy, health care etc. It affects every single one of these areas and many more.

Further, compared to many other areas, technology policy (if correctly implemented) is highly cost effective. Sadly, there are so many questions that haven’t been answered and likely won’t be during this election.

What is the government (whichever one) going to do about intellectual property? How do we protect and encourage both future and current innovators - the current law puts them at odds and the encumbants have the resources to crush invention. This cripples Canada and forces innovation to places like Taiwan and China.

What is the government going to do about our cell phone price-gouging? The oligopoly established by Bell, Rogers and Telus is verging on the criminal; the degree of collusion, price gouging and other infuriating activity is exactly the right kind of activity for government intervention in the market. The market actually bars many people for owning a mobile phone - the very same people who would benefit the most from having one.

What about the internet and net neutrality? We don’t have the same imminence of a bandwidth bottleneck that the United States is coming up against but we will sooner or later and the government needs to act now.

Our research is lagging - innovation in Canada is not growing at the rate it should. We are better than this, we’re one of the most highly educated countries in the world - there’s no good reason why we can’t be the most innovative.

What about technology in government. This has become a cliche of mine (and David Eaves) whenever we get on this topic. The Canadian government has barely caught up to 1994 in terms of interface with constituents. This needs fixing and it needs fixing yesterday.

Why am I paying to file my taxes online? I’m essentially losing a chunk of my return because the government won’t throw up a series of online forms and instead outsources to for-profit corporations. Why isn’t there an open API for this?

Why is are the precise responsibilities of any given government employee mysterious? Why can’t I know their activity for any given week? Why can’t I look up an hour-by-hour schedule of every member of parliament? The voters are their boss - every other job I’ve ever had, my boss knew my work schedule. I pay their salary - I want to know what my money is doing.

How broken is a system where the media is given privileged access to information? A privilege extended only if they play nice with the reigning party.

The Canadian government’s technology is comical - a high-school student could produce a higher quality product than many currently deployed across minitries.

The software powering the governmental directories, the national archives, the Treasury database and many more is older than many governmental employees.

Software is milk, not cats. If a month goes by and the code base hasn’t been improved something is terribly wrong.

The problem can’t be money - using higher-quality, more secure open source software instead of the calcified pathetically outmoded garbage-ware they run now is a cost-savings manuever.

Anyone who works in enterprise software can tell you that, over time, the most expensive aspect of software is support and legacy integration. Forcing employees to use ancient, unfamiliar applications with archaic interfaces is a recipe for a hefty support staff and a long legacy integration invoice.

I believe the difficulty lies in a combination of ignorance, apathy and political wisdom (like so many other things).

Your average politician is statistically likely to be a social science student and also likely to be a lawyer. Some are doctors, some are economists - very very few are engineers, scientists or software people. So their view of technology is very narrow in scope.

The same is true for the average population - techies represent a very small (but growing) percentage of the population and thus most people don’t (and shouldn’t) care too much about IPv6 deployment, fibre optic relays, net neutrality etc.

Admittedly, techies (and I include myself in this group) do a piss-poor job of making these issues relevant to people - our obsession with precision and accuracy in explanation cripples our communication. That, and we have a strong incentive to keep everyone ignorant about our domain of knowledge - just like lawyers and doctors.

So there’s a general ignorance about the ramifications of policy options - when you don’t understand the issue, the choices proffered by experts sound equivalent. Worse, the constrictive and destructive options frequently have powerful interests willing to craft the message at great expense - often making their option sound better.

Anyone in politics knows the best avenue to success is to find a parade and get in front of it. There’s no parade for technology policy - because it’s so univerally important it’s distributed across many disciplines. Unless you’re an expert it’s nearly impossible to aggregate all these different pieces into a coherent picture (and when you are an expert it’s just really hard).

So when discussion crops up regarding a national protocol for medical records that sounds like a health problem. When discussing electronic voting machines that sounds like an electoral issue. If I want to create a governmental social network that sounds like an HR problem - and so on.

Government is letting their tools define their solutions when the problem needs to dictate it. In other words, when all you’ve got is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail.

Many ministers are concerned about the cost - technology reform sounds expensive. Why does it sound expensive to them? Because when they want to find out how much something costs they get a quote from their preferred software vendors.

These vendors of course price gouge because they know the government can pay whatever price they quote. The largest software companies in Canada (aside from EA, BioWare and Ubisoft) all make software for the government - they rake in piles of tax money by over-charging for absolutely god awful software.

It’s often deliberately broken deprecated open source packages with a half-assed rebrand applied. They then of course license a support agreement so the company can be paid to fix problems they created in the first place.

The Canadian government needs a project managers office - an appointed, trans-ministerial body that handles software and technology related issues. They consult, gather requirements, draft RFPs and oversee externally and internally developed applications.

An important department in this office should be community management for open source initiatives - the default go-to resource for software development. If something needs to be made quickly or is unlikely to have a community surrounding it then and only then does the project gets outsourced to a private vendor.

Everything produced or purchased by the government must be open source - Canadians pay for it, so we should be able to get as much value for our tax-dollars as possible.

The job opportunities this creates are immense, the cost savings equally so. This also provides incentive for small software vendors to enter the market-place by providing value-add services to customers and the ability to compete alongside established players for government contracts.

By using a bounty-style system, scholarship and internship programs the government can get piles of high-quality code very cheaply.

Keeping everything open source means security flaws, bugs and other issues can be addressed quickly and integration issues will virtually disappear.

I’m not suggesting software solves all problems but software should never ever be the problem.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

Having had to wait until I could get back to Toronto to have access to a machine running Vista, I got my taste of a usable Google Chrome Beta about week later than I should’ve.

It’s rare that I deliberately catalogue the blogospheric consensus prior to using a product in discussion - I don’t want my experience cluttered with the biasing analysis of others (can you tell I’m a usability engineer?). However, in the case of Chrome I found the discussion surrounding it both too interesting and often surreal to with hold.

Tech Crunch IT, in an uncharacteristic bout of skillful prose,  proffered what I think is the most interesting analysis on the issue of MSFT & Chrome - juxtaposing it with both the American election and continued devolution of MSNBC.

While I won’t touch the American election material (being a Canadian, I’m yelling into a strong head-wind) I am a consumer of both Microsoft and Google products and feel I can speak to them, their business models and the effects of Chrome on each and others.

Chrome is an excellent core system from which to deploy web applications - the cited purpose of Google. I have a tough time believing that Google intended to deliver a value to customers other than the stated one,. That value is better performing Google apps and more responsive AJAX in general.

I think that Google Chrome should for the time being, be compared to similarly intended products - which isn’t a browser per se, but a heavily modified browser for a specific purpose. That means XULRunner and Internet Explorer’s Window’s in-situ renderer. Google isn’t a browser so much as a DHTML engine with enough UI bolted on to be servicable.

Having said that, the fact that people are mistaking it for a full-fledged browser this early in the game speaks to the quality and robustness of the system.

What I also find difficult to reconcile is the hyperbole surrounding the significance of the product’s release with regards to the corporate landscape. It’s yet another solid product in Google’s gigantic line-up of products.

Some have said this steps outside the core competency of Google. I would argue that it’s actually quite obviously within the scope of Google’s capacity even in the face of more intuitively obvious candidates.

I believe Google’s real strength lies in what it does better than anyone else in the world - understanding how people use the web.  They are brilliant at releasing truly disruptive products - they know what functionality is important to users and what isn’t; often better than users know it themselves.

As a long time Galleon user, its nice to see a browser that makes proper use of Webkit’s strengths. Chrome beats Safari as a browser hands down. Still, the best browser anywhere is still Lynx.

Much has been said about what this means for Microsoft - frankly nobody has said anything to convince me it’s a big deal. Microsoft is top dog still, despite people like me predicting its impending demise for nearly two decades. When looking at how to survive in a world with Microsoft one need examine only two companies - IBM and Apple. Which, in a strange way they stand as corporate analogies for fourth-generation warfare.

Microsoft is very comparable to its peer in a different sector - General Electric.  However I think Bill Gates has more in common with Jack Welch than Thomas Edison. Welch and Gates, unsurprisingly, are some of history’s greatest CEOs precisely for this feat. Microsoft was the first software company in much the same way GE was the first electric appliance company and they’ve consequently become concommitant with all its effects.

To suggest that Microsoft is going down because Google is growing akin to suggesting Bank of America is going out of business because Investors Group is gaining traction - it just doesn’t make sense and totally misses the point.

Google does not sell a hugely successful game console (and it can’t), Nintendo isn’t going to put Microsoft out of business. Microsoft’s peripherals are some of the best on the market - Logitech isn’t going anywhere but it isn’t a threat. The Zune may not be an iPod killer but it’s doing well enough for Microsoft to keep it going.

Microsoft isn’t about a single product or even a suite. Gates, and his paternal allegiance to Windows and Office, is gone. Microsoft is an everywhere company, just as GE is an everywhere company.

The vulnerabilities of Microsoft and GE can’t come from a corporation or its effects - they can huff and puff but this brick house ain’t going nowhere. The trends that uproot companies like this are generational - huge in scope and beyond the prerogatives of any particular agency.

That said, internal mismanagement can doom Microsoft - just as GE faced hard times. Tim O’Reilly sounds like early 90’s Steve Jobs when he beats up on Microsoft as an out of touch, dessicated and creatively barren company. While the pathos of this argument is entirely sound - the logos is diminutive.

Microsoft understands its customers very well - they are responsible for rafts of research on usability engineering and possess some of the most sophisticated testing apparatus and methodologies available anywhere.

I think what gets lost is the environment in which Microsofts constructs their products. Like NASA or the military - the constraints are bizarrely complex and the product that emerges as a result is often puzzling when that’s not taken into account.

This may sound like a pep talk delivered at a MS project all-hands meeting. Let me be clear, Microsoft can and does produce a mountain of garbage in addition to quality products. The point I’m (attempting to be) making is that Microsoft establishes the cultural paradigm in which we interact with virtually every aspect of the web.

They do, as a firm, what is essentially only possible elsewise via open source - there aren’t any operating systems on par with Windows that were built entirely by one company; let alone the myriad other products Microsoft releases.

Microsoft and GE internalized the concept of long-tail, just as any large production company has ( be it book, movie, video game) - you can’t guarantee a best-seller only influence it, so release as many products to as many people as you can in as intelligent and efficient a method as possible.

This is something Google, Apple, IBM etc. can only do in limited channels and on a limited scale.

It’s also something that in and of itself is valuable - thus I don’t think Microsoft is going anywhere (except into your fridge, tables, mugs, toothpicks, nose hair trimmers, toilet seats…)

Uncategorized | No Comments »

So we get to play along at home for the impending election. Ours of course will be comparatively banal, short and unimpressive. We don’t have a heart-rending primary to psyche us for a thrill ride leadership race.

Instead, we have a cadre of thoroughly vetted and utterly banal talking-heads vying to get their parties in power so they can be as facile and useless as Harper or Martin ever was.

Clearly, this is not an election about change. Certain Liberals sealed the fate of this election when they picked Dion over one Canada’s leading minds - Michael Ignatieff. Not once have I regretted my decision to support Ignatieff and Dion has done little to convince me otherwise.

There is a strong part of me that wants to see Dion soundly and resolutely defeated so he won’t rear his pointy head in Canadian politics ever again.

Dion has cost the Liberals another election - which would’ve been handed to anyone with more media presence, better speaking ability and the capacity to make fun of righty wingnuts.

A leader in as tenuous a position as Stephane Dion found himself that December must strive his utmost to win the loyalty of his fallen opponents. Dion has instead inflamed and goaded them, meanwhile he’s been utterly facile with Harper and his Conservatives.

With his hamhanding during bi-elections, childish response to the Green Shift suit and positively ridiculous attempts to criticize Harper in the media and during question period. Dion makes my Quaker grandmother look positively sharp tongued by comparison.

So, what is one to do?  My father, for one,  is utterly incredulous of this election - he’s far more interested in the race south of the border; one that would make Sun Tzu proud of the Democrats. They’ve forced McCain into a nasty position and followed the Napoleonic adage of never interrupting your opponent when he is making a mistake.

I’m not a political expert, which is what makes my position more infuriating to me because I have a hard time convincing myself to not be as uninterested as my father.

I remind myself of several things - Harper is a member of the Conservative party, a coalition of every non-Liberal they could pin down, calling them Tories is fatuous - they have neither the honor or history. Dion is a Liberal, and while I’m somewhere far south of enthusiastic about his leadership I believe in the party behind him. The hardworking and engaging individuals who could do a lot to make this country a better place if given the chance.

I know those people will get their chance eventually - but sooner is better than later.

I also know that the man who inspired me to get seriously involved in domestic politics, Michael Ignatieff, is still in this party. If after the disappointment he and everyone around him faced, can find it within themselves to remain loyal to the party and its promise - surely I can.

When faced with a coalition Harper had to get clever. He did, in the most damaging way possible. Instead of getting clever at innovating policy solutions and forging multi-lateral partnerships, he got very clever at tactical politics. He is better than ever at burying problematic media coverage, releasing effective ads and otherwise dominating public discourse of his House.

Harper hasn’t gotten any cleverer at writing policy. For a much purported “policy wonk” he hasn’t produced anything worthy of headlines - let alone the history books.

Imprisoned druggies and more guns is the Harper conception of tough-justice.

Invent more crimes rather than addressing the serious ones you’ve got. Fact, reason and expert opinion matter little - the Conservative answers to policy exist in only one book.

Allow men less qualified than a highschool student to approve laws that constrict our freedom of expression impose utterly unenforcable, draconian and universally damaging barriers to what can be done with media.

Instead of focusing on how inept Harper and the Conservatives are at doing their jobs - what does Dion choose to focus on? In the last three official party dispatches I’ve received the Liberal party seems fixated on connecting any form of scandal or controversy they can drum up to the Conservatives. They even go so far as to suggest Conservative culpability in the Listeriosis outbreak.

Something tells me Warren Kinsella isn’t being consulted on this - it seems to literally contravene everything he laid out in The War Room.

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that policy is never the (or even A) deciding factor in elections. Canadians can’t possibly be expected to make informed decisions weighing the calculus of the expansive, meticulously crafted Liberal plans against the narrow pamphlet deli menu of the Conservatives.

People want change - I WANT CHANGE DAMNIT!

So the questions one has to ask going into the campaign is which party is least afraid of progressive change? Which party has the biggest, most energized group of innovative, forward thinking people and is willing to help their ideas mature and see implementation?

As Taylor Owen and David Eaves, two of those promising, engaged and inspiring people, pointed out in their LRC article. Real change isn’t coming from our leaders, it’s coming from individuals all over the country.

These change-makers are not motivated by religious fervour or hatred of the opposition, duplicitous self-interest, or passionate support of irrelevant outmoded or patently idiotic causes. That is not something that can be said with the same truth about the Conservatives, NDP or Bloc Quebecois (it’s hard to tell which is the most ironic party name in Canadian politics).

As a progressive I am struggling to remain engaged. This is a hostile landscape for people more interested in improvement than partisan success. It is a very harsh environment for those ideas which don’t fit neatly into pre-existing entrenched political ideologies. However, Conservatives have proven themselves phobic of ingenuity, of principled compromise and of anything that might look bad to their pastors.

The NDP have, conversely established themselves as the petty, non-issue party whose guile is outdone by their cloddish mishandling of public perception. The Bloc faces much the same fate - it has bolted on some prefab policies and modeled itself as a disloyal powerbroker.

As much as my heart is Green, they are fundamentally undoing their efforts by subverting the efforts of the only party with the capacity to take an environmental agenda to the national level. I hope that the Green can find the pragmatism in themselves to seek results before principle - we need Green policies and they aren’t ever going to come from the Conservatives.

I was hopeful of Harper and the Conservatives - I saw them as a restoration of the Tories, a sharp antidote to the largesse of Liberals like Harper - Big Red’s Boogeyman.  Harper, however, has shown himself over these years to have more akin to the smug, red-faced neo-con GOP than the venerable and storied Tory conservatism and flint-nosed practicality.

If Dion is not the Liberals then Harper is not the Conservatives - so what does his party, in aggregate stand for? With Gary Lunn, Stockboy Burt Day and Stephen Harper himself it seems to be hairspray. Seriously though - their five point policy platform is catastrophic. Not a single one of the areas they hoped to address has improved and some have worsened. His party seems fixed on Calvinist moralistc fantasies rather than pragmatic, factually informed policies predicated on outcomes and quantifiable success.

It seems in the logic of federal politics, policy is successful by definition if it is implemented - I think anyone without a poli-sci degree can see problems with this reasoning.

So - it seems the choice is less vexing than it was - everyone in Canada except those living in Cartierville-Saint-Laurent needs to get to the polls and vote for their Liberal representative.

I wonder what the missing 40% of Canada hopes to gain by sitting on their hands? Whoever you are, know that you are embarrassing the rest of us.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

It’s been going on for over a week - I think I’m going mad.  At dusk through twilight, every night. I’m faintly aware of some rustling - a movement behind me or beside me. Focused, as I am, on the computer screen in front of me I only catch the narrowest of glimpses as I turn sharply to look where I thought I heard something.

I think I see things in the corner of my vision - darting hither and yon. I start questioning my grip on reality - things are beginning to crumble.

Then one night I awake in a start. Fully awake in that semi-panicked lucidness one experiences when alarms go off. Only, there were no alarms, merely a scratching. The scratching against cardboard. I thought it was coming from the alley-way outside my door. This was odd, certainly, but it seemed truly bizarre my brain could interpret that as a threat.

Then I realized, ominous, that the scratching came not from the out of doors but from my kitchen.

So, with trepidation I enter the kitchen and reach for the lightswitch. As soon as the lights blink on there is silence, merely the softest of thuds punctuating the cessation of the infernal “scritch scritch scritch”.

Nothing stirs. I cast about looking for a probable source - bleary eyed fatigue coming upon me rapidly. I find nothing. Frustrated and more than a little wary, I return to my quarters - closing the door and blocking the threshold.

This evening, I sat, aglow with the victory over a vanquished final exam.  Feasting on the finest muffins and donuts in all the land I luxuriated for an evening’s recreation on the internet.

My reverie was perturbed by the rustling of plastic - like someone stepping on a grocery bag. Then from the crevace between a Rubbermaid container tub and my counter something emerged.

From the shadowy depths it came, unhurried, unafraid. It came out, blinking, into the low-carbon footprint light and cast its gaze upon me.

I stopped what I was doing to turn and face my foe.

He was filled with trickery, he’s beady black eyes filled with the mischief of thousands of generations of his kin. I stared silently back at him. Neither of us knew what to say - so we said nothing.

We knew then, the war was on.

In this first phase I’m attempting an end-run. I hope to take him alive, so I may parade his shame before he is exiled.

As you can see here - I’ve made a fiendish entrapment device to capture my devilish adversary.

He merely alights atop my strategically placed box of Pirates of the Burning Sea CSG to gain access to the device wherein lies the butter of peanuts.

He simply slips through the aperture and his fate is sealed.

This is but the first phase in what may be a prolonged battle of attrition against a wiley foe.

While the odds are not good, I am confident that in the end - I shall be victorious.

The forces are arranged, gambits made - and so, the game begins.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

I should disclose that I do not own a television and haven’t read a newspaper with intent for at least a couple of years - I’ve perused some online articles of various publication (almost all American) but a physical dead tree hasn’t smuged my fingers in a long while.

Do I miss it? No - I don’t miss dealing with heaping piles of recycling. I also don’t like mucking about with the physical paper itself.

When the National Post publishes articles like this one (thanks David Eaves). It really cements some journalists as ignorant blowhards with an incumberance of verbiage and a dearth of knowledge and capacity. They still haven’t figured out that their job is easy, that’s why everyone is doing it.

I think people tend to forget that newspapers are assembled by former journalism students, not domain experts. People writing in papers are not exactly the brilliantly intelligent geniuses who go off and discover DNA, invent the world wide web or micro-loans - they write stories about stuff they saw or stuff other people saw. Hardly the premise for expert analysis.  How else could one explain the painful factual errors? The jaw-dropping oversimplifications, or glibness toward a force that will put every self-important key-puncher out of a job in no time flat? Either they are insane, stupid, or liars. They can pick, I’d believe any of the three.

Given that their job is to report on things it’s amazing how poorly they perform even that function - so poorly in fact, that readers are willing to forgo institutional authority to get the news they want rather than what some decrepit out-of-touch editor thinks we need to hear.

The pathetic ego-stroking exercises like the one in the National Post really drive home the fact that journalists actually think they’re smarter than the rest of us - when the simple fact is that journalists are at best as smart as you and me and probably less smart (after all, they’re clinging to a dying business model).

“the market place of ideas is going to be more superficial and unedifying than it already is.”

This is the kind of remark that would get one’s ass kicked in highschool, and for good reason. It’s astonishingly arrogant to suggest that newspapers stand between the world and some alarmist mythology of superficiality. Newspapers are the primary culprits of this insertion of idiocy - how else can you explain Margaret Wente?

Here’s the kicker, the evidence Kay cites in support of the web is regarding investigative journalism - which is the one part of newspapers not under threat. He also talks about resource investment; the whole point of citizens journalism is that they don’t need to invest resources - everything is cheap; that’s how it wins.

Who will be firmly unemployed by the blogosphere? Jonathan Kay and people like him - under-informed op-ed writers who think they’re smarter than their readers. Kay has demonstrated himself incapable of providing sound evidence for his argument, misinterpreting the reality of subject on which he is opining and capping off his demonstration of ignorance with a display of arrogance that puts mine to shame.

People like Kay are killing newspapers faster than the blogosphere - alienating audiences by insulting them is hardly a way to win their loyalty.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

It’s been a while since I wrote about something entirely frivolous so I thought I’d step into the eye of what is turning into a ridiculous storm of controversy - the reaction to the art direction of Diablo III.

One camp loves the new direction and finds it refreshing, original and polished. The other camp argues that it’s only one of those things and is, in fact, Diablo done in the style of World of Warcraft.

Firstly, anyone who argues against the latter is plainly not paying attention. The colour palatte, modelling methods, animation and textures all have a very distinctive Blizzard-fantasy esthetic. That to me, is a neutral statement regarding its quality - some people really like the Blizzard style.

I for one, do not like it in Diablo II. I find it verges on the cartoonish far more frequently than it should - it feels more in line with a saturday morning cartoon show, rather than an M-rated Gothic-fantasy horror RPG . A great deal of effort in Diablo II was placed in establishing atmosphere, place and a real sense of evil in the world around you. This seems like it’s disrupted severely by the design choices made by Blizzard creative staff.

This is hardly surprising, the Schaefer brothers (Creative leads for Diablo) are gone, as is the entire art staff. Chris Metzen and Samwise Didier (Blizzard’s creative leads) are not Diablo artists, and neither of them are particularly flexible illustrators. Each has a very definite style that either works or doesn’t for the material - StarCraft and WarCraft work, Diablo doesn’t. Further, the artists at Blizzard have honed a very particular art style - they’ve literally crafted an entire virtual world with dozens of creature types, scads of items, weapons and armour, mounts, buildings, doodads etc. One can’t expect them to suddenly latch on to a totally different style - especially if producing too much stuff that “doesn’t work” could cost them their jobs.

Good design cannot be rated in a vaccuum - execution should be compared to the message intent. If Blizzard intends to transform Diablo III into something it wasn’t before in terms of its styling, they have probably done the math and found people will like this direction more - Blizzard makes games that sell, if nothing else.

However, my hackles are raised when Blizzard employees claim that the look hasn’t changed - which is a patent lie. It has changed, drastically, to deny it is to deny that I have working vision. They’ve made some mutterings about not revealing content that might be more in keeping with expectations - the fact that this wasn’t what they released tells me it doesn’t exist yet and they’re scrambling to make it.

That’s irrelevant really, they’ve already locked themselves into a great deal of assets of a style inappropriate for Diablo as it was.

The fan reaction against the art direction has been, at best, painful. Too many young men who like loud music have posted on the internet various ill-phrased treatises that have diluted what is, I believe, legitimate concern over the repurposing of a beloved game-franchise.

I like cheese, quite a bit really - but liking cheese doesn’t mean that I want it with everything. The Azerothian art-style has a patina totally ill-equipped to deliver the moody foreboding and horror of Diablo.  Blizzard denying that they’ve WoW-ed Diablo took them down many notches, it’s difficult to respect a company that insults my intelligence. Their partnership with Activision clearly came with that company’s PR indeptitude.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

Many media sources, including MIT’s Technology Review,  arguably a best-in-class publication, believe social networks (like Facebook and MySpace) are not viable businesses. Some go as far to say that social networks don’t make money. (As it says on the cover of the August issue of Tech Review).

Obviously such statements are more supposed to piqued interest more than summarize the reality of the situation. Social networks make piles of money - MySpace will accrue $650 million dollars this year. I can do a lot with $650 million dollars, can you?

To argue that this is “no money” is insanity - the only rational argument that could be presumed is that this sum is less than the potential revenue. This is usually the reasoning of most analysts - using advertising performance metrics of social networks relative to other systems reveals that the CPM (revenue per thousand page-views (literally Cost Per Thousand)) of Facebook and MySpace is significantly less than other content sites.

For anyone familiar with online marketing this is hardly surprising. Any site or application which has a broad, general audience will have a significant dilution in value. Facebook isn’t Google, they don’t have literally everyone of all stripes using their product - they only have the demographic willing/wanting to use social networking sites. This demographic (very young, highly tech and media savvy) is notoriously difficult to monetize using normal CPC advertising - they don’t click on ads and if they do they don’t buy anything when they land; this is bad news for advertisers and lowers the willingness to buy ad space.

Google can benefit from network effects because they cast arguably the widest net on the internet - fat white financiers use Google and so do single-moms; the same can’t be said of MySpace and Facebook with the same degree truth.

Moreover, MyBook has fewer revenue dimensonalities than something like Google - there are advertisers and users - as far as I am aware, application developers can’t hook into MyBook’s advertising and must do it themselves (this may have changed since I last looked into it). So there isn’t a socially networked version of the AdSense, AdWords, AdRank system that creates this amazingly profitable cycle Google has perfected.

MyBook, needs to stop using their audience as the currency and start developing partnerships with application developers through revenue sharing of advertising. In the same way Google gives away approximately 30% of its ad revenues to partners MyBook should be able to accommodate application developers.

Following that they need to produce their answer to AdWords - anybody with 5 minutes and a credit card should be able to launch socially networked intelligently distributed advertisements across the platforms. With distribution based on user behaviour and profile data rather than keywords. If Facebook provided an auction system like Google’s AdWords keyword auction AND an AdRank system they’d see massive increasing ROI on their network - perhaps outstripping MySpace’s earnings due to their less “diluted” audience (MySpace tweens aren’t in command of Visas).

Many observers make an argument like this one. Essentially they argue that social networks need to develop a novel delivery system for advertising content - one that folds into their existing content stream. Curiously, they often cite Google as an example. However, I would note that Google is fastidiously careful about delineating paid advertising from standard content; there’s never any ambiguity. Google won its marketshare because of it had the trust of users (and it melted the stoney hearts of tech journalists) - it did this by not tricking anybody. Facebook contravened this wisdom with it’s disasterous Beacon project.

There’s also the simple argument from the side of advertisers - the administrative overhead of a novel (probably unique) delivery system adds cost to a campaign. They’ve got to re-engineer their creative, adapt to a system and negotiate details particular to just that campaign. Account managers want to make sales and get contracts signed - not handle the configuration minutia of a specialized system.

Deploying a system that uses existing creatives and traditional measurement metrics brings both a simplicity and credibility that a totally new system would lack. Anyone who works in business development needs to compare the opportunity cost of campaigns readily and will often avoid “misfit” campaigns because they can’t know if they’re succeeding or not.

Obviously something like Beacon needs to be deployed to realize the true monetization potential of social networks - but it will probably take the form of socially networked store-fronts embedded into the platform rather than completely external systems. In this sense users would assemble their own virtual shopping-malls by connecting themselves with brands and retailers.

This does not, however, eliminate the need for standard advertising - these methods need to be improved and optimized to leverage the kinds of things social networks know that other content sites don’t or can’t.

The revenue potential for social network sites is tied directly to the trust users have with their social network provider - which MySpace and Facebook have both failed miserably to engender to the same degree as, say, the omnipresent Google.

That said, if such attachment and loyalty can be engendered rather than enforced via walled-garden systems, the earning capacity of social networks is arguably the greatest of the current stock of content channels.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

Robert Lefkowitz - arguably the most entertaining speaker on software development processes, gave a vindicating (for me, at least) talk at OSCON.

As an aside, it is surprising to some that software process people tend to be very engaging, humorous people - given the material they think about. However, they’re often successful and reknowned precisely for this trait. Steve McConnell, The Three Amigos (Grady, Booch and Rumbaugh), Joe Spolsky, Fred Brooks, and recently Scott Berkun amongst many others - are men and women who while gifted engineers have distinguished themselves in their field by sparking ideation in and around how software is built (they’ve revamped the wetware of software). They could only get people talking about software process if they made it interesting - which means both fun and technically deep with the world of geeks.

Robert “roml” Lefkowitz gave a talk on the concept of an open source software development methodology - something I’ve thought about and written on and off for a few years now. Being a methodology nerd, the idea of bringing to bear the metrical niceties and rigor of a even a semi-formal process to open source development is very exciting. I think it’s the last barrier to entry for a lot of private enterprises who view open source communities as untamed, unpredictable beasts who may become hostile, recalcitrant or simply flee at a moments notice. Business prefer predictable pessimism over volatile optimism; which is the reverse of how open source works.

Without repeating too much what roml so cogently articulated (you can watch a video of his presentation at Blip’s OSCON coverage ) I’ll observe two salient arguments he made that connect to two memes I’ve hitched on to - firstly he talks about software methodology has being both a very old idea (about 2000 years) and most methodologies describe the same processes and merely quibble over the particular manifestation (rather than internal logic) of these different steps. Lefkowitz attributes the invention of this process to Marcus Fabius Quintilian in his treatise Institutio Oratoria, written in the last days of the Flavian Dynasty in 95 CE.

Quintilian agregated in this twelve-volume collection what he believed to be the step-wise process of developing formal rhetoric. That is the assembly of a coherent logic, its expression in language and finally its articulation in speech. roml makes the observation that this basic process maps pretty cleanly into at least three major development methodologies (roml uses Microsoft Solutions Framework, (Rational) Unified Process and Agile/eXtreme Programming as test cases - but I can attest that such things would apply to clean-room or any PM compatabile system).

What roml has really demonstrated here is not just that these processes have commonality, he’s outlined what it is to be a process methodology - these are the essential qualities of a process. Without the steps of inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria and pronuntiatio you’ve either got an incomplete process or something else.

roml also argues that open source ecologies cannot use a traditional “inventio” phase in the way UP, Agile, MSF and others envision it. The unspoken reasons are simple - open source projects aren’t directed and they don’t have clean states. Open source projects aren’t directed in the sense that contributors aren’t employees, by and large, and thus aren’t obligated to develop a specific piece of functionality or fix a particular bug; so requirements can’t be used as an imperative device, at best they are declarative and thusly used as a measuring stick of system process. OS projects don’t have clean states in that the project exists in all areas of the process at all times - there are always some people in each of the phases at any given time with any given section of the system. This breaks most methodology since they rely on a universal comprehension of the system and a mtutal understanding of a projects location in this process. By knowing where you are in the process you know who is active and what is being done - that is a huge part of its power.

The other meme of mine that roml informs is the nature of the relationship between policy development and software development. A huge stumbling block in the argumentation that two are fundamentally the same process is that the trappings of software development methodologies are all expressed using a software paradigm and vocabulary. By connecting software development methodology with the age of the abacus, roml has leap-frogged this issue by finding a common root origin.

This brings me to an interesting conclusion. To what extent can policy devleopment bodies be measured under the capability maturity model integration? The CMMI (ISO 15504) is a collection of tools for measuring the capacity and capabilities of organizations’ processes - how efficient is your “team software” for getting a product out the door is the question that’s asked.

The CMMI is designed to examine organizations who produce software at least as complex as the policy systems of firms - perhaps even some governments. Systems with greater formality (code versus “natural” language - natural is quoted since policy is about as opaque as it can get for human comprehensible language)

What if laws could be written as code? What if the tools that help us produce better software can be used to produce better policy? The key here is perhaps the pedantic argument separating law from policy - positive from normative. Code is unambiguously positive - it is a single solution and self-same takes no normative position (this normative stance is articulated in the requirements).

But, what if roml’s process were used? There are no requirements - everything is an exception. Now we’re getting somewhere closer to the reality of our legal system - a hugely complicated mesh of exceptions with normative guidelines applying only to highly localized sub-systems.

What if we had some of the contrivances of open source development for our legal system? A bazaar for law - with upstream interaction, branching, forking and constant evolution all arbitrated by module-owners/Ministers/Secretary/Senator/Congressperson etc. What if this process was entirely public?

The ideal of Homeric democracy became untenable when the populi couldn’t fit in a forum (power relationships aside) - now we have an infinitely large forum with an emergent organizational scheme.

This isn’t an alternative - this is the reality, this is the only possible method we have for fair law making - everything else is less democratic, less inclusive, more closed, more power-consolidating and thusly, more evil. The only excuse we have for not having done this before is that it wasn’t possible - something that’s not true any more.

I am excited for the day when people who reject systems like the above are viewed as outmoded duplicitous power-mongerers; it’s coming fast.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

I wasn’t too different in my highschool days than I am today - especially when it came to my relative love of all things digital. Arguably, mine is the first generation to have grown up with the web and probably the first to have ubiquitous computer access approaching what we have today.

I distinctly remember debating with my English teacher that programming or at least a conceptual understanding of how software and computers work wil be as fundamentally important an understanding of how good books are written - the same logic for teaching English literature will exist for computers in the not-so-distant future.

Many people analogize software people to mechanics - giving us terms like code-monkey from grease monkey. This makes some sense since a good deal of software concept comes from engineering disciplines. However it is flawed in the expectation of involvement from the user. A person who uses a car does not have to have even the most primitive understanding of how they operate to make use of one. A hybrid vehicle, from point of interface, is largely indistinguishable from a internal-combustion - any differences are deliberate choices rather than consequences (like having a start button).

The same is not true of a computer, and more specifically software. The more you understand about how software works the more predictable and sensical your experience will be and the more you appreciate well written software and can identify poorly constructed software as well - similar to our ability to recognize good writing and bad writing when we see it because we were exposed to literature at some point in our lives.

Moreover, software programming as a mental exercise is a useful activity of its own right. As someone who grapples with very severe cognitive deficits every day of his life I can attest that many of the concepts of software programming allow me to bring order to my life and activities in a way I couldn’t if I didn’t understand the same.

Also during highschool I made fast friends with a teacher who was supposed to be retiring that year but wasw instead picked to head-up a committee to revamp the provincial standards for the information technology curricula. This is a surprisingly complex process that extends far beyond a grocery list of “expected learning outcomes” including identifying resources, providing funding estimates for a given class, synthesis opportunities with other subjects, and a vast array of teaching resources.

The idea behind these packages is unnerving. It’s a tacit assumption that teaching is an isolated transferrable skill that requires no domain knowledge - thusly someone with an education degree should be able to teach any subject given the appropriate resources. Anybody who’s had a Math class from the gym teacher gets why this principle breaks down very quickly in reality.

Information Technology, to put it simply, was at that point a complete joke. It was too easy in parts, outdated in others, and simply entirely irrelevant in yet others - because, surprise surprise, the pace of technology outstripped the updating of the curricula.

One of the things I made sure to emphasize in my consultation was that kids should come out of the InfoTech 12 being able to write software - real, functioning applications in a language that is used in the real world. At that time we were being taught TurboPascal - a didactically useful langauge but not something used to power the Facebooks and eBays of this world. Moreover, a tonne of important concepts were missing from the curricula.

It covered the history and theory of the internet, the history of the computer from the microprocessor onward. We did not, however cover what an Operating System is and does. We didn’t the basic history of computer languages (nary a mention of the C-family or Fortran or any of that).

My concept, which was never fully executed, was to break up the curricula into “modules” which fit into streams. Students could design their curriculum ala carte provided certain minimal dependencies were met. The students would then be grouped based on their stream - providing an avenue for team projects and the like. All the teaching resources would be provided online and the in-person teacher would administrate and answer questions (we obviously couldn’t depend on that teacher having a comprehensive understanding of the material - they probably wouldn’t be working as a teacher if they did).

I developed a prototype with a limited set of modules using moodle.

The programming language we settled on was Python - it’s robust, feature-rich, offers both an object-oriented model as well as a functional and it’s something that is definitely popular and not going away any time soon.

My issue with the curriculum was its heavy dependence on proprietary tools - they weren’t something the students could go home and try without pirating the software (usually from their school). They taught Adobe Flash with ActionScript to do multi-media stuff.

It’s been nearly 6 years since this system was developed - what would I change/update?

Despite it being proprietary I think a really cool / highly attractive component would be teaching programming via XNA tools. Imagine the cred you’d have as a kid when asked what did you do at school being able to answer, “I made XBox games.”

Garage Games’ GameStudio and Torque might be other examples of proprietary tools useful for teaching - especially GameStudio because of its simplicity.

An important aspect I built into the standards was the fundamental axiom of high-techology - accretion. The rubric for all prototype assignments included a significant portion dedicated to how useful this code would be to other developers - documentation, commenting, formatting etc. Kids could still pass assignments with feature incomplete applications if their code and documentation was meticulous.

This means that each new cohort can have access to a library of code developed by their predecessors (if we could network schools and have a BCSchool’s SourceForget all the better)

I would introduce hardware programming elements - probably through Lego MindStorms. For those students interested in that kind of thing. I might even do a component on PCBs and basic electronics. If you could cross that with the mechanics classes or metal-shop, you can imagine there’d be some robotics happening pretty fast.

For the business minded kids I’d do something involving e-commerce; maybe a civic works activity including business plan model and the opportunity for execution. Another option would be to furnish kids with developer access to a stock data site and ask them to build technical analysis tools.

The artistic kids could build interactive fiction or mediascapes - or go with the hardware route and have interactive media installations or appratus.

Or a Facebook app development module for the entrepreneurial students.

The idea was to always have a collection of projects that students could pick from with each project being worth an amount of credit relative to scope and difficulty and the quantity of pre-requisite modules.

The “teaching” modules would allow students, who like myself, come equipped with a lot of knowledge of their own, to quickly demonstrate that capacity and move on to the “cool stuff” without disrupting the class or being bored out of their tree (I taught the latter half of year for my IT class if only to stop me from fidgeting or hacking the school network).

Moreover, by putting this all online and having the marking of the instructional modules automated there’s no reason why this couldn’t be opened to everybody. So a student of any age can do this work and (potentially) get credit for it if they haven’t graduated or accreditation if they have.

This is definitely a project I’d spend a lot of time helping to build - if anyone out there is interested in helping me, I’m all ears.

Uncategorized | No Comments »