The spooky power of Google Suggest

Some people buy new cars every few years.

We drive our cars into the ground. Our 12 yo Subaru wagon won't start, so it's a goner. There's not much to salvage, except our uber-geeky SONY CDX-GT610UI MP3, AAC, USB, iPod etc car stereo.

I didn't know how to remove it, so I start typing "how to remove car .." and Google gives me several good options, including one that talks about doing without a "DIN tool".

Where can I buy a DIN tool? Google suggest throws up the Walmart.com: Scosche DIN Radio Removal Tool.

The searches themselves were anticlimactic. Google Suggest had already done the heavy lifting.

Amazing.

PS. Ok, so the reality isn't quite as magical as I make it out to be. I had the PDF installation guide and between it and some light Google work I figured out I actually need a special anti-theft SONY-specific "release key". Still, Google Suggest is seriously cool.

Update 1/9/10: Ok, so, in retrospect, my first search was wrong. Turned out that my 12 yo Subara installation didn't use the standard kit at all. Wiki Answers told me how to remove the unit from my 1997 Subaru Legacy. I did, however, discover something interesting about the business of selling answers.

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Archaic communications in 2010 - Gmail example

Dear Visitor from 2020:

I know you feel things haven't progressed very far, but you really need to take a look at how we did communications in 2010.

Believe it or not, in 2010 Google's Gmail could open 3 windows that looked like this ...

One was for something called email. Another was for something called "Chat" or "Instant Messaging". A third was for something called "SMS" or "Texting".

They all looked rather the same and did rather similar things, but they all worked somewhat differently with different phones and different computers. The SMS was the most restrictive, it was limited to less than 200 ascii characters! Despite being so limited, it cost much more than the others. It worked, however, with the archaic phones that persisted in the US until 2012.

Pretty bad eh? It gets worse. I'd tell you about Twitter, but you wouldn't understand it at all.

Aren't you glad you're not living in the dark ages any more?

john

Personal computing 2020: More and less

OpenDoc was ambitious (emphases mine) ....

OpenDoc was a multi-platform software componentry framework standard for compound documents, inspired by the Xerox Star system ...

...The basic idea of OpenDoc was to create small, reusable components, responsible for a specific task, such as text editing, bitmap editing or browsing an FTP server. OpenDoc provided a framework in which these components could run together, and a document format for storing the data created by each component..

... OpenDoc was one of Apple's earliest experiments with open standards and collaborative development methods with other companies...

... OpenDoc components were invariably large and slow. For instance, opening a simple text editor part would often require 2 megabytes of RAM or more, whereas the same editor written as a standalone application could be as small as 32 KB...

... each part saved its data within Bento (the former name of an OpenDoc compound document file format) in its own internal binary format...

OpenDoc failed of course. It's easy to say it was ahead of its time, but it may be more correct to say it was a part of a future that will never come.

In recent years even the much more modest Open Document Format seems to be fading away. The modern trend is to simpler user environments with smaller feature sets and fewer user demands. In many ways, we're returning to the pre-multifinder world of MacOS Classic system 6.

This makes sense. It's increasingly difficult to live in the modern world without net access, but it's obvious that the vast majority of humans cannot live in the world of Win 7 or Office 2010 or OS X -- much less the virus infested XP boxes in most homes. My best guess is that less than 15% of the American population can keep a single net connected computer running well - much less a family network.

So what will things look like 10 years from now?

Simpler.

This will be hard on us geeks. We aren't going to get DateBk 6 on our iPhones. We're going to have get used to a world in which computers are simultaneously more powerful and less capable. We will finally have a single integrated calendar view of personal and work calendars, but those calendaring and information management capabilities will be a shadow of what we once had in Ecco Professional or DateBk and other lost tools of the 80s and 90s.

I really don't know how the DRM wars will turn out; aggressive Digital Rights Management (copy protection) may ironically sustain the (rogue) classic personal computer.

Progress is funny. I think our computing world will be better and more productive in 10 years, but the geeks among us will have to get used to losing tools and capabilities along the way. We'll have to ... (yech) ... be flexible ...

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From iPhone users to Google: Thank you for the Nexus One

I love you Google. Thank you for the Nexus One Phone.

Sold unlocked even when subsidized. Google Voice baked in. Navigation. Location sharing. Speech recognition text entry. Speech UI. OLED. Removable battery. Memory on Micro SD card (to 32GB). Noise cancellation. Ogg Vorbis.

I've got six months left on my iPhone AT&T contract. I'm in no hurry to get a new contract now. You can buy this phone without a data plan, stick in a pay-per-use voice/data cash card, and, once Google announces their Google VOIP service, use it largely free with home and office WiFi.

Apple and AT&T will need to be very sweet to keep me.

Glad I am to have sworn allegiance to the House of Google.

Update: Arrington review online. The battery life is very short, but even with the iPhone I'm always near a charger. It's life.

Update b: As I read reviews on the Nexus One I'm a bit surprised by admissions of how weak yesterday's crop of Android phones truly are. If I'd bought one I'd have been b*tching big time. Sadly, most geek bloggers are too committed to defending their purchases. In my blogs, I savagely attack the things I own :-).

Update c: The very best sort of competition. Reminds me of the golden age before Microsoft crushed all competition on the PC platform.

Update d: The Nexus is up to 50% cheaper than the iPhone. I think this comparison overstates the gap, but it's technically correct. My bet is the Nexus is closer to 30% cheaper for most users.

Update 1/6/10: Pogue is not amused. I think he missed out on the advantage of using WiFi for data and a very cheap minimal voice plan for voice.

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You too can visit North Korea

I was intrigued by this book review ...

What to Read - Inside the Hermit Kingdom Salon.com

.... the bizarre spectacle of the vacant Ryugyong Hotel (aka the "Hotel of Doom") towering over Pyongyang...

... If you went out on a moonless night in the years after the nation's electrical grid effectively collapsed, the only way you could tell anyone else was around was by the coal of their cigarette burning in the dark. There's the writing paper sold in state stores, made of corn husks that "would crumble easily if you scratched too hard," so that people wrote on paper scavenged from the margins of newspapers. And then there's Vinalon, "a stiff, shiny synthetic material unique to North Korea," of which the fatherland was ludicrously proud. Vinalon takes dye so poorly that everyone's clothes (which were mostly uniforms to begin with) were limited to drab grays, blues and browns...

...With the factories and electricity shut down, the air over Chungjin is pristine again, and you can see every star in the night sky. Doctors provide herbal remedies, but only because they have nothing else; furthermore, they are required to spend weeks camping out in the mountainous countryside, harvesting wild plants. Some resort to growing their own cotton in order to have bandages. Most North Koreans have never seen a mobile phone and don't know that the Internet exists....

A cross between Shangri-La and Auschwitz, forever mysterious, untouchable, inaccessi...

Oh. Wait. What about Google Earth?

Yep, it works. You can visit the construction site of the Hotel of Doom, and tour Pyongyang from the air. You can even see the USS Pueblo, the only American ship in enemy hands:

There are many more Panoramio images than one might expect (blue boxes above), though only in the tourist parts of the city. There are several attractive sites; the infamous hotel is atypically ugly.

There are very few vehicles in the satellite images or the Panoramio pictures. One nearby city seems to have no significant roads and no vehicles in most of the residential areas.

The North Korean images are not very high resolution. There are no economic incentives to image North Korea, so you don't see anything like standard Saint Paul resolution ...

Within a few years though, even the low res treatment will show playground structures and perhaps pedestrians. The flying tours of North Korea will only improve.

We can see much of them, and they cannot see us at all.

It's an eerie sensation.

Which brings me to my first (and, thus far, only) prediction for the next decade.

The North Korean government will collapse.

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GrandView and idea management software - Fallows and more

A typically erudite post on great software by James Fallows linked to my old page on GrandView, MORE and other lost software gems.

James referenced a host of interesting modern software. Of the list he gave I can personally vouch for the very affordable OmniOutliner (which most closely resembles GrandView) and the terribly expensive MindManager. I'd also add Inspiration, which he omitted. Inspiration is still around, though it's now marketed only to schools and no longer actively developed.

There are several other OS X apps in this domain; Matt Neuburg used to write on this topic and Ted Goranson wrote "About this Particular Outliner" from 2003 to 2008 starting with a must-read history column. (Yes, one day there will be historians of software, who will write doctoral theses about the role of MORE 3.1.)

Today James points us to an excellent Oct 2009 essay on GrandView.

There are so many fine designs in these old products. Perhaps we need software archeologists to resurrect them for modern reuse. If you know of old copies, don't toss them out. Get them onto a hard drive. There will always be emulators to run them.

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Hotwire saved us $100 on a 1 week auto rental

Hotwire did far better than the competition on a recent car rental.

Including taxes and the like, our total cost is about $15-$16 a day for a 1 week rental.

Priceline, Travelocity and Kayak weren't in the same league.

American spine movement: Brooks signs up

Maybe it's the influence of Gail Collins, maybe it's disgust with the GOP's institutionalized hysteria, maybe it's just chance, but David Brooks wrote a largely sensible editorial today.

He's effectively joined the American Spine Development Association, a now bipartisan movement to bring a smidgen of the courage of past generations to our cowardly modernity.

Perfection is not an option. Planes will blow up. An America with a spine will lose fewer planes and spend less than eternity at war. Spineless America will elect Sarah Palin.

Spine is good.

What Saka (Indian civil calendar) year is it?

In 1752 America September 2nd was followed by September 14th. That's when the Britain and her colonies switched to the Gregorian calendar.

India still uses the Gregorian calendar, but, not surprisingly, they have many other calendars. The most official one is the "National Calendar of India, sometimes called the Saki calendar.

So what year will on the Saki Calendar when it's 2010 in America?

Calendar Converter

... A bewildering variety of calendars have been and continue to be used in the Indian subcontinent. In 1957 the Indian government's Calendar Reform Committee adopted the National Calendar of India for civil purposes and, in addition, defined guidelines to standardise computation of the religious calendar, which is based on astronomical observations. The civil calendar is used throughout India today for administrative purposes, but a variety of religious calendars remain in use. We present the civil calendar here...

This Fourmilab calendar page claims it's 1931, but elsewhere I've seen 1932. I hope the page is correct, because it has an awesome list of calendars including Julian, Hebrew, Islamic, Persian, Mayan, Bahai, French Republican and ISO-8601 (Y9K but not Y10K compliant):

ISO 8601 permits us to jettison the historical and cultural baggage of weeks and months and express a date simply by the year and day number within that year, ranging from 001 for January 1st through 365 (366 in a leap year) for December 31st. ... ISO dates in this form are written as “YYYY-DDD”, for example 2000-060 for February 29th, 2000; leading zeroes are always written in the day number, but the hyphen may be omitted for brevity.

All ISO 8601 date formats have the advantages of being fixed length (at least until the Y10K crisis rolls around) and, when stored in a computer, of being sorted in date order by an alphanumeric sort of their textual representations. The ISO week and day and day of year calendars are derivative of the Gregorian calendar and share its accuracy.

The Fourmilab calendar page is a very cool, very old fashioned web 1.0 page -- really a historic document.

So what, you might wonder, is Fourmilab?

Glad you asked ...

... This site is developed and maintained by John Walker, founder of Autodesk, Inc. and co-author of AutoCAD. A variety of documents, images, software for various machines, and interactive Web resources are available here; click on entries in the frame to the left to display a table of contents for that topic. Items which span more than one category are listed in all...

John Walker. A wealthy and eccentric geek of the first golden age of computing. Wow.

His personal web site is a blast from the past -- frames! There are links like "nanotechnology and eschatology", "consciousness studies" (including retrospychokinesis - martial arts students change past) and "Palm utilities".

Despite the charming HTML 1.0 feel, the site is not dead. He has a blog.

Funny world.

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Healthcare standards: how you know they blew it

You only need to know one thing to know that the frenetic healthcare standards efforts failed ...

Life as a Healthcare CIO: The Interim Final Rule on Standards

... The adopted vocabulary standards for procedures are the applicable HIPAA code set required by law (i.e.,ICD-9-CM) or CPT-4. The candidate standards are the applicable HIPAA code set required by law (e.g.,ICD-10-CM) or CPT-4...

CPT. Fully owned by the AMA, CPT is a rough collection of work descriptions sometimes loosely related to procedures. It's not a vocabulary, it's not a classification, and it has no stable semantics.

The adoption of CPT as a healthcare "standard" is not the only sign of failure, but it is the most telling sign.

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Thank you Mr President.

John Scalzi and Andrew Sullivan agree. President Obama has been a giant.

I say he's much more than American deserves. The roots of GOP rage are many, but one of them is that this man is so much better than they are.

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CARE.ORG for charity: four stars, never bugs us

We were very late with our 2009 donation to CARE.ORG. I just got it done.

We donate to CARE, and very little to anywhere else, for four main reasons:

1. Since they work with the most impoverished populations the reduction of human suffering per dollar donated is immense.
2. They have a four star Charity Navigator Rating - CARE.
3. Consolidating our donations to one organizations means less tax hassles and paper work.
4. CARE doesn't bother us.

The last is critical. Most of the places we've donated to in the past plagued us with spam, mailings, unwanted calendars, stickers, etc. With a very few exceptions, CARE does not. Once a year or so, often after our major annual donation, we may get an email. I respond by saying our annual donation is contingent on never hearing from them. That's been the end of it.

Strongly recommended.

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Cloud Lesson #72: The risk of letting Google own your web site

Google finally migrated our Page Creator site to Google Sites - six months late.

It's a train wreck.

Remind me again why we're supposed to trust the Cloud?

See also: Gordon's Notes: Nimbophobia: Why you should fear the cloud

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America, please grow a spine

Another mentally ill al Qaeda cannon fodder has tried to blow up an airplane. It's encouraging that they're still scraping the barrel to recruit suicide bombers.

Meanwhile, in America, there are rumors that we'll have to forsake electronics and all motion or access to personal goods for the last hour of flight. At one point it was rumored that we'd have to go without a book for the "last hour". We might as well scratch all children and many adults with medical, cognitive or psychiatric disorders from flying.

Oh, and I love they way they say "last hour" as though planes never spend 1-2 hours circling the airport or waiting for a gate.

Meanwhile anyone who's seen a movie or read a book about smuggling or prisons is waiting for the first bomb smuggled in by body cavity - or surgically embedded into the abdomen. The next generation of scanners will have to incorporate a rectal probe.

The TSA administrators can't be as stupid as they look. They must know there's really no practical way to secure an airplane (train, bus, public space) against a truly competent and determined attacker. The best we can do is balanced risk mitigation. As Schneier has told us so many times, the big changes post 9/11 were to secure the cockpit door and look to the courage of passengers.

So if the TSA administrators aren't stupid, where do these regs come from? They come from legislative pressure. Now, many of our legislators are stupid, but not all of them. So why do they do this?

Because they know if a plane blows up and they didn't max out on security theater they'll be out of office - because we American voters are who we are.

We gotta stop this. Voters and legislators alike need to grow an American spine -- before our fear and stupidity drives us off the deep end of history.

Update 12/29/09: Signs of vertebral development. The absurd early responses have been dropped. Also, rectal bombs have already been used in Saudi Arabia.

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In praise of cardiac risk calculators

I've always had annoyingly high cholesterol levels, but I recently hit both age 50 and a new high cholesterol (though also a new high HDL). I figured it was time to bite the Statins.

First, though, I made the rounds of the risk calculators. I stuck with those on US and Canadian government and educational sites. The results varied depending on where the modeling data was taken from, but I generally fell between a 5% and 7% 10 year risk of a cardiac event (Said even is not necessarily fatal, but certainly unpleasant).

Even more significantly the only thing that really shifted my risk was to change gender. Even a fantastic statin effect, such as taking my cholesterol below 190, didn't change my risk much (from 6% to 4%, for a 33% relative risk reduction but a mediocre absolute risk reduction).

Considering that the statins are unlikely to be risk free [1] I decided to wait until my personal risk tops an arbitrary 10% threshold. In the meantime I'll continue to focus on diet and (especially) exercise.

The key lesson here is the value of these dynamic, personalized, risk calculators. They drive home the lessons we were taught in the 90s about the difference between statistical and clinical significance and they are an early and practical application of the principals of "personalized medicine".

Now if we could only apply these basic principles to airplane security planning...

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Lipid guidelines: Sometimes the emperor really is starkers
• Gordon's Notes: The 2004 national cholesterol guidelines have no clothes

[1] We have good reason to believe that the published literature has a systematic bias understating the risks of high value medications. We also know these are powerful medications that act on a wide variety of lipid receptors. On the other hand studies of absolute mortality risk in the last decade have been encouraging -- but those studies were done on persons with much higher risks of cardiac disease than mine.

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