Dwell On It » Technology

The loss of a great man

Tateru Nino — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 08:30:33 +0000

This month, we lost one of the greatest technologists in generations. From humbling beginnings (and working with two other great men) he helped push the boundaries of computing possibility. His contributions ultimately helped breath life back into an ailing Apple Computer, brought us more powerful devices, better software, converted the Internet from a clunky hobbyist’s toy to the communications platform we know today, and reworked the infrastructure of telephone, television and even filmmaking.

Hands up anyone who thought I was talking about business magnate Steve Jobs.

Google pulling the plug on Labs

Tateru Nino — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:30:39 +0000

Remember Google’s Labs initiative? It’s all those odd little products and projects and prototypes that Google allows people time to work on for the sake of innovation. If it weren’t for Google Labs you wouldn’t have Google Reader, or Google Maps, or Google Groups, Google Desktop or Gmail.

Those were all products that just didn’t fit with Google’s product line-up at the time. Gmail? Maps? Who would want them provided by Google, right?

Well, now you probably can’t imagine things without them. Google, however, is pulling the plug on this innovative incubator, that has yielded some of its top products in an effort to “streamline” the product portfolio and its development efforts.


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Follow-up: Google confirms “real” names a requirement for Profiles/Plus … mostly

Tateru Nino — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:22:01 +0000

Last week, there was an apparent contradiction in Google’s recently published policy in the use of pseudonyms for Google products versus its actual practice. After obtaining additional clarification, that contradiction has gotten far more pronounced.

That is, you must use the name in your wallet as opposed to any other for Google Profiles and Google Plus … except where Google decides for some reason that you don’t have to.


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Google seemingly split on pseudonymous Google+ accounts and Google Profiles – It’s okay until it isn’t

Tateru Nino — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 13:05:05 +0000

It all comes down to what is considered to be an ‘authentic’ name. If, for example, you’re a member of the Screen Actor’s Guild, you probably never use your given name – as the SAG requires names on its rolls to be unique, and never used before. Thus if you have the same name as anyone previously on its rolls, you’ve no recourse but to register with the SAG under another and use it for all related activities.

Names being what they are, virtually nobody you see in the cast, crew or credits of a film are using the names they were born with. Many people increasingly use public profiles online, never leaving online traces of or using their private identity at all.

However, using a nickname, nom de plume, stage-name, professional name, or performance name might not be good enough for Google+. Google+ really seems to want your original name. The one that maybe hardly anyone actually knows you by.


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Gorilla arm

Tateru Nino — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 21:27:52 +0000

Human-factors designers use the term “gorilla arm” to refer to the vast gulf between cool design ideas and how they work in actual use-cases. At the beginning of the 1980s, touch-screens were just getting going, but gorilla-arm more or less killed off large-scale touch-screen research-and-development for many years to come. Only now, with portable devices and short-interaction kiosks are we seeing the resurgence.

But touch-screens aren’t the only technology that suffers from “gorilla arm.” Devices like Microsoft’s Kinect do as well.


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Reference implementations

Tateru Nino — Fri, 20 May 2011 06:36:17 +0000

In conjunction with a specification (or documentation, if you prefer the more inclusive term), a reference implementation is a good thing. Without a specification, a reference implementation is an astonishingly efficient way of propagating bugs into third-party software.

The Second Life viewer is in the latter category, alas.

You’ve got to take our word for it

Tateru Nino — Wed, 18 May 2011 12:36:25 +0000

When I think about service security – things like the recently broached Playstation Network, or any one of a number of such things that hold identity data, security credentials or that are trusted to provide critically important data (like the electronic voting machines in the USA). I’m persistently reminded of claw crane games.

Benefiting from the new

Tateru Nino — Fri, 13 May 2011 13:30:28 +0000

I’ll tell you one thing about new technologies, new models, new economies, new paradigms and new methodologies.


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What happens to payment info after it has been compromised?

Tateru Nino — Thu, 05 May 2011 17:53:38 +0000

So, you read about it a lot. Security breaches that ‘may’ have compromised the credit-card or other payment information of a lot of people.

Notice how people never say that payment information has been compromised. Only that it may have been.

So, what good does the information do for the villain? How do they get the money from the people whose information was compromised? Well, that’s where you come in.

Never buy security software unless…

Tateru Nino — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 10:12:14 +0000

Never buy security software from anyone unless the makers can write and spell correctly and grammatically. That’s my number one rule with security software, and it should be yours as well. This really applies to all software, but it goes double for security software.

Whatever you’ve heard, and whatever you’ve been told, 90% of programming is the chore of expressing ideas and steps into precise and exact grammar, with correct spelling and syntax in every single case.


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A most satisfying purchase

Tateru Nino — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:14:32 +0000

Despite weeks of waiting and annoying teases, I must say that the latest model Kindle is one of the best purchases that I’ve made that I can recall.


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What does it mean?

Tateru Nino — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 11:30:54 +0000

All my Web-sites are now accessible by IPv6. What does that mean for you?

London mugging scams continue

Tateru Nino — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:53:17 +0000

You may recall that – not too long ago – some Facebook users have had their accounts hijacked by scammers. The scammers then pretended to be that person, stuck in London without means after a mugging. The scammers used this to divert funds from friends and family.


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Modem wars, part 2: Eliminating a very common source of lag

Tateru Nino — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 09:58:10 +0000

Yesterday, I didn’t really have time to go over the network improvement that I posted, and explain it in more detail. Here’s the dope, starting with a little background.


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Modem wars, part 1

Tateru Nino — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:53:02 +0000

So, while doing some research on cable-modems yesterday, I discovered that they have notoriously large transmission buffers. Now, having previously determined that overlarge transmission buffers were bad, I set out to see what I could do about it.

Turns out that the answer is “a whole lot”.

No more Plan-Bs

Tateru Nino — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 08:02:38 +0000

About 15 years ago, an improved Internet Protocol was developed called IPv6. Among the improvements was an vast increase in the number of usable Internet addresses (IP Addresses) because – you know – we were going to run out eventually; and before very long, it seemed at the time.

However, being the ingenious sods that we sometimes are – as a species – we managed to cook up a number of “Plan-B”s to buy us more time in which to act.

And then we took that time, we squandered it, and ultimately we lost it.


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Email evolved

Tateru Nino — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 05:59:29 +0000

In a way, Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs – like Sendmail and Postfix) are somewhat like relics of our past.

They stand like great monuments to the baroque and arcane tasks that were once required to get an email from one person to another.

Like vast pyramids raised up just to inter some dead person, MTAs hint at the monumental complexity that used to be email.

Did you get gawkered?

Tateru Nino — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 07:17:51 +0000

Read about it. Follow the recommendations. Use the checker if you are not certain.

If you’re ever recycling a password for an online service… well, there’s probably Read more ...

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Dear Amazon

Tateru Nino — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 05:46:29 +0000

Dear Amazon,

Yes, I thought I’d divert some of the blog profits and get myself a Kindle for Christmas. Yes, I placed the order a few weeks ago, now.

Yes, I understand that the expected delivery time for this Kindle will be sometime in mid-January. Apparently about an 8 week wait – and like other things that I have ordered from you in the past, probably coming by surface-mail from France, on a ship, and packaged in a sack (no, not kidding – every one of my Amazon orders over the years has turned up in a sack tied up at the neck, and unaccountably shipped from France).


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Don’t buffer me, bro!

Tateru Nino — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 04:51:07 +0000

Under ideal circumstances the Internet’s TCP protocol finds the best effective throughput between the two connection endpoints.

Unfortunately, it turns out that numerous ‘improvements’ in routers have actually made conditions significantly less than ideal, leading to a situation where TCP isn’t able to achieve optimal throughput and – under real-world conditions – winds up operating in a very substandard sort of way.