Integrated Life Management (by alaric)

I used to keep a todo list in OmniOutliner, with the help of an AppleScript that sucked up completed tasks into monthly archives, so I could easily tally the Time Spent column to generate invoices/timesheets for hourly-rate work.

However, then one client set up their own task management and timesheeting app, so suddenly I had to juggle their system for that client's tasks, and my own system for tasks relating to other clients, my internal projects, and personal tasks. Without one integrated list, it was then hard to produce a single prioritised list of what I should do next.

However, there was trouble even before then; lots of little requests to do work come in by email. I either do them there and then, reply with a reason why not (such as asking for more details), forward the message to delegate it - or flag it as a todo and come back to it later. However, those flagged todos tend to get lost amongst the drifts of spam and old emails. I really wanted a button in my mail client to turn an email message into a todo item. Most ideally, I'd want a RT instance, to manage correspondance relating to a task. But again, that would not be integrated with my todo system.

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NEON (by alaric)

NEON is the user interface system for ARGON. I've not designed what the UI will "look like", since I think that would be a stupid thing to do - different people need different UIs, especially when they have differing hardware (think mobile devices, wearable computers, and interaction devices for the blind, in particular). But what I have been designing is the UI architecture, by which applications will expose their interface in such a way that different UIs can map them to their available hardware.

Anyway, I've had some pretty similar ideas to Tuomo Valkonen - who has an idea called VIS. So I finally dropped him an email detailling my thoughts, focussing on how they differ from VIS: Read more »

Applications versus Documents (by alaric)

Applications suck.

Many individual applications suck, yeah, but the concept of applications as they're implemented these days inherently sucks.

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Liquid Explosives (by alaric)

Here's an interesting technical analysis of all this talk of taking explosives on board planes in liquid form.

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200608/msg00087.html

Where it really gets interesting, though, is towards the bottom. The author argues that stopping people from taking nail scissors and liquids on board planes is pretty stupid, since a clued-up terrorist could still hide plane-destroying materials in any metal object (sintered iron and aluminium = thermite, basically indetectable until it becomes a fireball), hide bombs in their body cavities, form hard plastic explosives into the shape of any object, convert a soft drinks can into a knife with just a couple of minute's work, etc.

The techniques developed by prisoners to improvise weapons from what they have to hand, or to smuggle and hide drugs, should give us some inspiration of what an organised terrorist group should be able to manage.

So should we give up and cower in fear? No. The fact that the terrorists aren't managing to make planes fall out of the sky can probably be put down to one of a few possibilities.

1. There just aren't enough people willing to die for their cause; motivating intelligent people to be suicide bombers is hard
2. Real security is provided by proper police work - identifying terrorists and tracing their networks to identify all the people involved in a plot, then arresting them - and that's working. Causing all this disruption at the airports in the name of security is pointless; once somebody's decided to down a plane, if they managed to recruit suicide bombers and get the materials and get them to the airport, the opportunity to actually stop them has already passed.

I'd like to see more money spent on actual policing - and less trivially-avoided, expensive, unpleasant, liberty-destroying measures like mass surveillance, laws against cryptography, and airport/train station/port screening. Sure, have an impressive-looking police presence at the airport to deter the weak-willed would-be bomber, but please, don't strip search me and make me spend an eight hour flight without my laptop.

Virtual machines (by alaric)

Once upon a time, computers were generally mainframes - mainly because we hadn't yet learnt to make small computers.

As technology progressed, computers became smaller, and more ubiquitous.

However, at the same time, the role of the network became more and more important. At first, the model du jour was that there'd be a PC on every desk, and as a bit of a hack, networks were designed so that you could shares files between the PCs. But each file still sat on one machine, and the others just accessed it over the network.

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