Technology: October 2007 Archive Page

The New York Times has published more details about Google's plans to compete with Facebook:

On Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google's social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning.

The strategy is aimed at one-upping Facebook, which last spring opened its service to outside developers. Since then, more than 5,000 small programs have been built to run on the Facebook site, and some have been adopted by millions of the site's users. Most of those programs tap into connections among Facebook friends and spread themselves through those connections, as well as through a "news feed" that alerts Facebook users about what their friends are doing.

Web guru Jakob Nielsen risks the wrath of the grammatical bluestockings when he suggests that the passive voice might be useful for headlines, but he's really talking about front-loading web titles, so that the first two words of a web heading will contain words that will catch the eye of people scanning the page. Since people usually search for concrete nouns, rather than verbs, it makes sense to get those content keywords in a prominent place.

Words are usually the main moneymakers on a website. Selecting the first 2 words for your page titles is probably the highest-impact ROI-boosting design decision you make in a Web project. Front-loading important keywords trumps most other design considerations. Writing the first 2 words of summaries runs a close second.

Nielsen got plenty of attention for this claim, but it's a bait-and-switch. Passive sentences are not the only way, or even a particularly good way, of getting subject words to the beginning of web headings.  Consider "Passive Voice Can Boost ROI in Web Headings," or "Passive Voice: Surprisingly Useful in Web Headings." 

Also I cringed at one of Nielsen's examples of a good, scanning-friendly use of the passive voice: "13 design guidelines for tab controls are all followed by Yahoo Finance, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization."  If somebody alphabetizes all the page titles on a website, that page is going to be alphabetized under "13."  

Professional writers know that the most meaningful part of a sentence comes at the end, when you're setting up for the idea that follows.  So the most significant part of this particular sentence is not that 13 design guidelines for tab controls were followed, but rather that other design choices hurt the site's usability.

For the past year or so, my main job in our homeschooling family has been to teach Carolyn (5) how to read. Now I've picked up the task of teaching Peter (9) computer programming.  Last week I wrote a few simple BASIC programs to teach a very basic concept that some of my college students have trouble with when I teach interactive fiction programming -- the fact that when you write code, you have several different audiences -- not just the computer, but the user and also yourself (or some other programmer who inherits your code).

Last week we did a quick-and-dirty choose-your-own-adventure story, and showed Peter how to copy-and-paste blocks of code for editing, rather than retyping long sequences all at once. Several times I made a deliberate mistake, and pretended that I didn't know how to fix it. Peter picked it up quickly.  He was not so good at picking out problems such as missing punctuation or the difference between spaces and underscore_characters, so it was slow going at first.

I do plan on beginning each coding session with a little bit of text-based BASIC coding, but he has started saying, "Daddy, is this enough? Can we move on to Scratch now?"

Scratch is a wonderful 2D animation environment that is designed to introduce kids to programming concepts.  Think of it as Flash for kids. Each element of the programming syntax (an if/then statement or a repeat loop) is graphically represented like a puzzle piece, and the various elements of the program snap into the blocks, giving a tremendously satisfying visual feedback when the programming syntax works.  You'll never see an "error" message when you are working with Scratch -- the pieces just won't fit together if they don't go together. Instead of the "alpha" value, graphics have a "ghost" value, which is a far more sensible name. (I remember being very frustrated when I first started experimenting with creating textures for 3D games, because none of the tutorials I could find bothered to define such a basic term.)

Adding considerably to the charm factor is this collection of kid-produced Scratch tutorials that teach basic Scratch concepts. I downloaded one to see what it was like, and I downloaded a few more just because I think it's cute to hear the kids narrate the tutorials.

Students at Expo were beta testers for a new programming software called Scratch. Designed specifically for youth, it allows them to create their own stories, animations, fames, music and art. At the same time, they apply math concepts, design, problem solve and collaborate. To learn more about Scratch or download the program yourself, go to . One of our writing standards is to explain how to do something. We had so much fun with the Scratch program that we decided to make computer tutorials so others could learn the basics, too. Click on a link to see what you can do with Scratch!

Invisible Games:

The Phelps Telegraph Machine (pictured) was at that time in widespread use throughout North America. Oskar Karolson, an operator in rural Ontario, a young-to-middling man of Jewish-Polish extraction with a love of puzzles, who taught the wheat farmers' children mathematics and piano, had had a new Phelps delivered to his remote station sometime early in 1877. The telegraph traffic of dairymen and the odd dentist was low, however, and Oskar had little to do. In his boredom, he reached out across the wires.

[...]

The quiet telegraph upon which so much depended read as follows:

"I am alne. North-fire. South-water. East-earth. West-Air. Cme, fnd me. Execute."

Curiously, when the corresponding Phelps Machine's keys were depressed, a melancholy little melody emerged. The song echoed through Baxter Hobshack's office, and through trial and error, the asthmatic operator managed to return:

"I am cming. Head East in the evening."

Thus began the game of Karolson and Hobshack, in which Hobshack was led through a simple, charming world of Karolson's imagination.

And, yes, I admit, before I blogged this I googled Karolson and Hobshack -- just in case I had actually missed something. Almost as charming is the equally whimsical account of the origin of the Simon game.

Utterly pointless, and at the same time completely brilliant. You can only eat a few spoonfuls of cereal at a time, so why not keep most of the bowl dry, and soak only a few bites at a time? From eatmecrunchy.com.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun prints an assessment of the function of text in recent computer games. Some good discussion of the effect of talking movies, the fact that having good voice actors means you don't need to write as much dialog (which is a good thing since recording dialog is much more expensive than writing text) and some interesting predictions about the future of text in computer games. (IF authors Emily Short and Adam Cadre are quoted, and Graham Nelson is referenced.)

And the merits of the text adventure remain. They simply weren't necessarily supplanted by necessarily better technology - just more populist, accessible ones. "There's a great deal of beauty to be found in verbal expression," notes Emily Short, IF author of critically acclaimed games like Floatpoint, Galatea and Savoir-Faire, "This sounds trivial, I know, but many of the IF pieces I like, I like for the writing: the rhythm of the prose, the attitude of the narrator, the wit or grace of the phrasing." Having text as your only medium also changes the sort of experiences you make. "There are things you can write that you can't draw effectively," Emily adds, "The reverse is also true, of course: graphics are superior at conveying spatial relationships, color and light, a sense of scale. But words are better at showing the subjective and the internal. It's hard to draw into a picture what the viewpoint character feels about what he sees; it's much easier to imply in a verbal description." There's even simple utilitarian uses to text in play. "Words are handy for highlighting only the important aspects of a scene, and downplaying the unimportant ones," Emily adds, "In a text game you can say "There's something glinting under the water", and the player knows 1) that there's something there he should be thinking about and 2) that he's not expected to know exactly what it is yet. I've played a few graphical games where I was scratching my head trying to figure out what a pictured object was".

A brief MacWord item on Facebook security changes:

Facebook users can now report complaints about pornography, harassment or inappropriate contact either by clicking on links on the Web site or by sending email to the abuse@facebook.com address. The company will respond to these complaints within 24 hours, and it will allow an independent examiner appointed with the approval of the New York AG, to monitor the company's compliance for the next two years.

Sounds like Facebook is doing a good job acting on complaints from the wider community (that is, legislators and parents). Thanks for the link, Karissa.

TiddlyWiki is a complete wiki in a single HTML file. It contains the entire text of the wiki, and all the JavaScript, CSS and HTML goodness to be able to display it, and let you edit it or search it. Without needing a server.

I played with TiddyWiki a bit, but wasn't able to edit the pages in my browser, as promised. Perhaps the ad-blocker or some security feature on my browser is interfering with the operations. I'm blogging this so I can go back to it later.

I got an e-mail this morning from a multimedia developer who found my online version of Emily Short's Metamorphoses, asking some technical questions about whether it is possible to give web-based users tasks to perform in an interactive fiction game, and have the game notify the outside world when the task is completed. I'm reproducing it here with permission.

Dennis,

Hi. I write with something of a request. I wonder if you can help?

I've been able to find one of Emily Short's IF stories playing within a web page on your site <http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/gallery.metamorp/index.html>. This is the only time I've been able to find IF playing this way - most IF seems to get played as a self-standing application - and so I wondered if you might be able to give me some idea about how the web-based IF is accomplished?

As an old (in both senses of the word) player of IF, and now a self-professed multimedia developer, I am trying to see if I can use INFORM7 to write some "tasks" for users of a web-based 'community' site that I'm working with. The idea would be bring up a short IF task as an alternative activity for a user who requests one, on the  

web page, get the user to work through it, and get the story to send a message to the web server on successful completion (or on saving, etc.).

If you have time to reply, and if you can help, I would be most grateful.

Regards,

Denis Williamson

Hong Kong

I'm posting my response here, in the hopes that anyone with a better answer will share it.

The Inform system produces game files that run on the Z-machine, which is a virtual machine that exists only in software. When you see an IF game running in a web page, it is probably using Matthew Russoto's ZPlet, which is a Java interpreter for the Z-machine.  I wouldn't know how it is possible to send a message from within the virtual machine to the outside world, but my programming skills are very modest, so just because I can't imagine how to do it doesn't mean it's impossible.  I don't know all that much about the Z machine -- Andrew Plotkin or Matthew Russoto would be the ones to ask (both of whom read the rec.arts.int-fiction Usenet group).

It should be a fairly trivial thing to have a small stand-alone ZPlet program that ends with the player finding a magic word, which the user would then just manually key into some other program.  I embedded a few small IF programs in a web page designed to teach my students about exposition in interactive fiction -- that might give you some idea of what you can accomplish. I don't try to communicate to the outside world from within the sample games, but there is some crude interaction (in in the form of questions the web site asks about the in-game experience.)

The Glulx interpreter has some significant multimedia capability, and there is a Java interpreter for Glulx, Zag, by Jon Alfred Zeppeiri. Inform 7 can output gamefiles in the Glulx format.  (It requires the Java Runtime environment to be installed on your local computer, so it's not as point-and-click simple as ZPlet.)

TADS also has some multimedia capabilities, but it is a completely different system from Inform and I have not recently checked out its capabilities. It has had HTML hyperlinking for some time, so I imagine it should not be too hard to send a message to the outside world.

The website Homestarrunner.com created a flash-based spoof of text adventures called Thy Dungeonman. I don't know whether the flash code has been released, or whether some other text-adventure fan might have released a homebrew version of the code. But that game was released long before Inform 7, so my guess is the creation of such a flash-based game would be hackish.

I just Googled and found Flashonate, a flash-based z-machine interpreter, by Peter Rogers. He has released the code as GPL.

I hope you will share whatever you learn as you investigate the possibilities.

Update: I posted the question to rec.arts.int-fiction, where the IF gurus are.

A project called StupidFilter is trying to weed out stupid internet comments. Hoax? At any rate, it's amusing.

Do you really expect to be able to detect and filter anything that's conceivably stupid?

No, of course not. You'd need real AI for that, and beyond a certain point it's simply subjective; after all, a sufficiently advanced AI would probably filter out the whole of human discourse, which isn't the idea.

So what do you plan to filter?

The idea is that the most egregiously stupid comments will also be the easiest to detect while remaining ignorant of context; comments with too much or too little capitalization, too many text-message abbreviations, excessive use of "LOL," exclamation points, and so on.

How do you rate stupidity?

Since we're trying to build a detailed database that serves as a very verbose example of What Not To Do, we look for comments whose prose style we can point to and say, "I don't even have to understand the content of this comment to know that it's stupid," -- based on the gross prose style alone, its stupidity is self-evident. It is then useful as an example for our parser to integrate into its database of stupidity.

A Yahoo! developer reflects on the missed opportunities caused by the economic demands of the recording industry:

If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I'm not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I'll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won't let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don't have any more time to give and can't bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life's too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out. If, on the other hand, you've seen the light too, there's a very fun road ahead for us all. Lets get beyond talking about how you get the music and into building context: reasons and ways to experience the music. The opportunity is in the chasm between the way we experience the content and the incredible user-created context of the Web.

Mark Dery, on 10 Zen Monkeys

Reporting -- especially investigative reporting, the lifeblood of a truly adversarial press -- is labor-intensive, money-sucking stuff, yet even The New York Times can't figure out how to charge for its content in the Age of Rip, Burn, and Remix. To be sure, newspapers are hemorrhaging readers to the Web, and fewer and fewer Americans care about current events and the world outside their own skulls. But the other part of the problem is that Generation Download thinks information wants to be free, everywhere and always, even if some ink-stained wretch wept tears of blood to create it.

Lawrence Lessig talks a good game, but I still don't understand how people who live and die by their intellectual property survive the obsolescence of copyright and the transition to the gift economy of our dreams.

Inside Higher Ed:

Virtually all college students come to campus with their own cell phones, but for privacy reasons, telecommunications companies require their subscribers to manually opt in to any mass alert service. The result is that in many cases, the primary obstacle to widespread campus access to text alerts is the students themselves.

Game Career Guide has an interview with some writers who work in the games industry. Hurrah for the liberal arts!

I already knew in high school I wanted to work in entertainment, so I attended some special workshops called the Media Workshops in Hollywood. There I was advised to major in whatever I wanted in college because I would learn everything I needed to know my first six months in entertainment. Taking this advice to heart, I chose to major in Archaeology.

While I continued to study programming and art in college, auditing a class in C and taking more art history classes, the archaeology emphasis has had the greatest influence on me. Combining soft knowledge like art, history, and mythology spanning the globe, with hard knowledge like biology, statistical analysis, economics, and urban planning has helped me the most in my game career.

Philipp Lenssen and I had a bit of fun imagining what an early, early draft of the Google home page might have looked like.

Space.com:

Fifty years ago this week, Sputnik Chief Designer Sergei Korolyov watched as a modified Russian missile launched into space from Kazakhstan's lonely steppes carrying a very special payload. Sputnik 1 ("traveling companion" in Russian) was about the size of a basketball and weighed about 180 pounds. It was equipped with two radio transmitters and four long antennas that broadcasted a constant beep while circling the Earth for 21 days.