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Category Archives: Blogging

My thoughts, essays, and ramblings

Will people use Siri? I don’t think so

Siri screen capture

A screen cap from Siri

I’m interested to see if the new Siri voice command stuff on the iPhone 4S goes anywhere. I don’t think that it will, but it’s not because Android was there first or because I don’t think it works. It’s because I don’t think people will use it.

Yes, Android had voice commands first, but Siri is very different. It was created by a dedicated company based on military artificial intelligence research – not just a side project to take dictation. Siri was fully fleshed out before Apple bought it. Voice on Android works (if you speak slowly and clearly) but it isn’t “smart”. The breakthrough of Siri is that it works out what you want based on natural language and context, not keywords.

I don’t think people will use it for two reasons:

  1. It won’t work in every environment. Too much background noise, other people talking, television/radio on, etc. If you have to make a conscious effort to change your environment to use it, then you simply won’t. It’s not so convenient if you have to step out of a room or switch something off and you can accomplish the same thing with a few taps.
  2. People like their privacy. Artificial intelligence is compelling on television and in the movies because it is a trick to let the audience know what the characters are thinking. You are watching them problem solve.

In real life, people don’t want everyone else to know that they’re looking up restaurant reviews, creating an appointment to meet someone for dinner, or checking sports scores.

Voice interface and artificial intelligence are very powerful, but until you can subvocalize, I just don’t see it catching on.

This is the primary reason that I don’t think that computing in the living room on a TV work. People have an intimate relationship with their data and having the display across a room just feels too invasive. Sure, it works great to share Youtube videos with friends and do other consumption activities. But not research or creation.

Would you honestly feel comfortable writing an email across your living room where anybody could walk in and read it (or look in through a window).

Now how about on a train or in the office with everyone listening?

Edit: A counter argument from John Athayde on Google+

How about while you’re driving? How about if you’re in a private office?
I don’t think it will be ubiquitous, but I do think it will become more used, especially for certain circumstances.

My response

True. Baby steps. I just think for most people, if they don’t use a feature regularly, then they forget about it.
I’m very interested to see how it plays out and am envious that Apple bought it, when it was going to go multi-platform ;-)

Edit: The screen capture is from a series by Joshua Topolsky. The other queries he made are also excellent!

Who’s Your GoDaddy?

Certainly not mine any more!

A few months ago our websites underwent some significant down time. The dust has settled and my schedule has finally allowed a little time to write about it.

Here’s what went down: GoDaddy decided that something was wrong with one of my sites one day and initiated a move of my hosting account to the server ghetto. This is the place where misbehaving children are sent for a time out.

My dozen or so sites were reasonably up to date, but I immediately went to log in and update their code (several WordPress blogs that were in the middle of being consolidated under a single instance as well as some forums, photo gallery sites, etc.). I had never had any problems, so I wanted to check to make sure I wasn’t hacked or anything.

My sites were taken offline during the move to the ghetto, so I couldn’t check anything and people who tried to go to any of my sites got a big blank page. I called GoDaddy support to ask how long it would take, and they said the transfers usually take about 48 hours. I was only hosting around 8 gigabytes of data, so two days to transfer it in what should be a state-of-the-art gigabit per second data center baffled me, but I decided to wait it out and not argue the point.

I asked how long my account would stay on the ghetto server and they said a minimum of 30 days, then it would be reevaluated and moved back to the regular hosting server if everything was OK. I found this terribly insulting. Those ghetto servers are where hacked and infested accounts reside. They are given the least provisioned bandwidth since they are doing “naughty things”, but there is no way for me, a human person, to request my sites be checked and moved back in a timely manner. I get a 30-day “time out”, even though I installed from their tools, and stayed on top of patches. They wouldn’t even tell me WHAT my sites were doing that supposedly violated their terms of service and got me moved to the ghetto, just a generic “using too many resources” message. Did one of my sites just suddenly get too popular for them??

After waiting the 48 hours for transfer, my sites were still down. I called and they said that “something has gone wrong, we’ll look into it. Give us another 48 hours”. I gave it 24 and called back. Still no go. I called back every day. FOR.SEVEN.DAYS. A technician finally looked at their transfer script, fixed the hang up, and the sites finished the move to the ghetto.

Now that my sites were accessible, I checked them over, and nothing was amiss. A couple plugin updates, but nothing was tampered with, and there was no sign of anything going haywire. Things were slloooooooooooow though. I called support and got the runaround about having to wait the 30 days before they’d look at the site to clear it and then initiate the move out of the ghetto.

Screw that, I found another hosting company and had all of my sites moved away in a matter of hours and closed the GoDaddy hosting account.

Things go wrong sometimes, and the people on the phones are friendly and all, but 7 days to copy 8 gigabytes of data is insane. Moving you for no provable reason of wrong-doing is insulting. Leaving your sites on a festering hunk of silicon and steel with a bunch of degenerates for an arbitrary period of time for no reason other than “policy” is ridiculous.

On the recommendation of a friend I signed up for an account on imhosted.com and have been quite satisfied. There have been a couple minor down-time glitches, but all seems to be smoothed out now. I am getting to the point of seriously considering moving away from shared host plans to a dedicated VPS, so that will be the next bit of research to undertake.

GoDaddy’s marketing tactics have always left a bad taste in my mouth, but the prices were good, the bandwidth fast, and service prompt. A seven day outage and uncertain future stuck in the slow lane was enough to make me re-evaluate their value proposition and I am happy to say that the healthy amount of competition in the hosting space means I don’t need to take their guff!

Memo Nirvana

Since my life started including portable gadgets I’ve been striving for the note-taking Holy Grail: write a note on any device I happen to be using and have that note automatically sync to all of the other devices. There are plenty of solutions for this, but they all have restrictions on what devices, operating systems, or file formats that they’ll work with.

I have finally struck a balance of tools that meet all of my requirements and it is as if a great weight were lifted from my idea-cluttered brain.

First, my requirements:

  • Create, read and edit notes on:
    • Linux
    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Android mobile devices
  • Synchronize said notes to all platforms
  • Notes stored in a secure manner
  • Notes backed up/archived and have revisions tracked
  • Ability to export all of my notes so that I am never “locked in” to a single vendor or tool
  • Ability to search through my notes
  • Extra Credit: be free
  • Extra Extra Credit: be open source
  • Double Extra Bonus Credit: all notes use my own encryption keys

In pursuit of this tool I’ve tried Evernote, Tomboy, Google Docs, and older tools when I lived on a Palm Treo. As I said, each approach has it’s merits, but also has limitations that fall short of my requirements.

What I have ended up using is a combination of tools that surround the SimpleNote service. SimpleNote isn’t Open Source, but it is free. It is a very straight forward service with a good API. On the website you can securely create, view and edit notes through an SSL encrypted connection. You can tag your notes and share them with friends or family. You can search through your notes on the site or locally (more on that later) and all revisions are stored, so you can go back in the lifetime of any of your notes to see what changes were made and revert the changes if you want to.

One negative is that, as near as I can tell, your notes are not encrypted on their servers — so there is risk of your data getting accidentally leaked or stolen. I never keep anything terribly sensitive in my notes: no passwords, financial, or private data – just shopping lists, story ideas, and random notes of stuff to look into – so there would be low impact if my information got out. I wouldn’t be happy about it, since there are song titles, lyrics, and notes on stories in progress or planned to be written some day, but I’m willing to accept the risk.

SimpleNote itself is just a web site, but the API has made it possible for tools on different platforms to sync up to the mother ship. The website has a growing list of projects that use their API sorted by platform. They do offer a native application for iDevices and an official Android version is in the works.

My favorites are:

  • Android: AndroNoter
    • Excellent syncing
    • Search Notes
    • Free, though not Open Source
    • Does NOT support note tags
  • Linux: SimplenoteSync script
    • A perl script, so will essentially run on any platform with the proper perl libraries loaded
    • Syncs your notes into individual ascii text files
    • Free and Open Source
    • Sync only — does not support tags, search or any other features
    • All of the power of Linux can come to bear on your notes: grep, svn, VI, EMACS, gEdit.. they’re plain ascii files so the limits of what you can do with the files are endless
      • This allows me to automatically check all note changes into subversion and keep a local history of revisions on my own server. If Simplenote decides to shut down or go in a direction I don’t agree with, I’ll have all of my data (minus tags) so there is no vendor lock-in!
  • Mac: Notational Velocity
    • Sync to a local database
    • Optional encryption of local notes
    • Intuitive search/create/edit interface
    • Completely keyboard driven, no need to click on buttons
    • Spotlight integration
    • Free and Open Source
  • Windows: ResophNotes
    • Full tagging support
    • Import/export notes
    • Multi-pane format with notes list on left and content on right
    • Internal links between notes with [ and ] (wikilink style)
    • Self contained (portable) app option so you don’t have to install it. You can run it from a flash drive
    • Notes are stored inside of an xml file, but the content is encrypted
    • Option to save all notes as individual ascii text files
    • Free, but not Open Source

It’s certainly not a perfect solution. Notes are not encrypted end to end with my own keys and the tools on each platform are a bit different. But it covers enough of my needs to make me happy.

Actually, if Tomboy had a decent client on Android I would move 100% to it. I really like the consistent interface which is available for Linux/Mac/Windows. So far there is one Android project that enables you to sync and read your notes on Android, however you cannot create or edit them yet. Sadly the movement is very slow going as there are only a couple developers donating time to the project – but it’s getting there!

What are your favorite note taking / syncing tools?

Apps I Can’t Live Without

A lot of friends have been buying Android devices. Naturally, one of the first things people want to know is “what is the best app to install?” This is an open question, of course. The answer depends on what you are looking to do and since there are so many apps out there, it owes a lot to personal preference.

I’ve sent e-mails to some friends with lists of applications that I like. I realized that it would be a lot more efficient to write up a blog post of what my favorite apps are and just point people to it.

Therefore, below are the “Apps I Can’t Live Without”. Well, mostly. I’ve divided them up into a couple different categories. One list of must-have apps. A list of games I enjoy. A list of techie apps that most people won’t be interested in. Finally a list of apps that I could live without, but are way cool – and lets face it, today’s devices have so much storage space that there really isn’t a reason NOT to install an app and try it out! All of the apps on these lists are completely free, ad supported, or have “lite” versions available.

I do intend to update this list from time to time. I am still rocking a hacked and modified T-Mobile G1, but with our contract coming up at the end of October I hope to upgrade to the new hotness. Some applications that don’t run well (or at all) on my current phone will get a good testing once I have a more capable device. – new hotness has been achieved: Viv and I now have the beautiful Droid X on Verizon. I can’t say enough good things about this device.. I’m in love with Android all over again!

Also, when I get time I’ll add in links or QRCodes to the apps so that they are easier to find and install.

One final note for people new to Android: unlike other devices Android has a full refund policy. You can get a refund for ANY app that you install if you don’t like it as long as you uninstall it within the first 24 hours (they just reduced this to 15 minutes :-( ). So you don’t have to worry if there isn’t a demo or lite version of an app you want to try. Pretty sweet! On to the lists!

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