Self System

The lecture on Thursday was pretty darn cool. One of the highlights was the video of the Sun Self System. It really sparked my imagination.

Basically, it's a programming environment with no edit/run modes. All editing happens in runtime. Objects can be deconstructed and their properties and methods dragged around like so many Legos.

The only problem in my eyes was that it was discontinued in like 1995. I wished there was something like it still. I searched around for keywords that I thought would result in projects in the same vein as Self. And, lo, what was the first hit but Self itself!

Discontinued means something very different in software as compared to hardware.

So, I quickly downloaded the Self OSX binary and installed it. I ran the demo snapshot and it opened an OpenGL window and I was in. It had the same demo used in the video, with gas particles in a tank, bouncing around.

Click for larger image

I played around with the controls a bit, but I couldn't get the hang of it. It's a very different method of programming from what I'm used to.

I don't think I'll ever use it again, but it's a interesting idea. I'm sure it will give me perspective in the future, if I'm tasked to design an interface.

Hyperland

Today's lecture put me in mind of a documentary I watched a while ago. Thanks to the wonder of Gooogle Video, I can share it with you.


"This is a fantasy documentary. The pioneering work shown in Hyperland, however, is very real."

Hyperland is a documentary from 1990, written by Douglas Adams and featuring fourth Doctor Tom Baker. It talks about a hypothetical future of interactive multimedia, where the world's information is collected and organized with hyperlinks. Tom Baker plays a smart agent, who helps Douglas Adams to make sense of the information available to him. The vision of the world wide web is highly visual and has a lot of video elements. This could have been to make it interesting for television, but it also makes it even cooler that I'm watching it on Google Video.

I haven't watched the whole thing in months, but about six minutes in, there was a list of hypothetical names for the world wide web that I quite fancied:

Dynabook
Hyperspace
Cyberia
Infinite Virtual Address Space
Intelligent TV
Interactive Television
Interactive Multimedia
Hypertext

It's hard for me to tell, in retrospect, which of these were meant to be facetious, if any.

Interview with Ted Nelson at 8:05. Vannevar Bush and Memex segment at 9:30. The whole thing is worth watching.

Hall of Shame: WebReg

For my hall of shame entry, I would like to nominate WebReg. It has irritated me from the first day I tried to sign up for classes, and it hasn't gotten better since. It serves a function that most people use only three times a year, for about four years. Because of this, it has given me plenty of time to forget its idiosyncrasies between registration periods. Every time, I have to partially relearn the structure, the process, and the pitfalls to avoid. The system is not obvious to new users, and it doesn't represent the most efficient way to sign up for classes, even for returning students.

First impressions are key, as usual. Upon logging onto TritonLink, the user is presented with the following screen:

This is a cacophony of information. There's two announcement blocks, one for deadlines and one for school news, no less than eleven tabs at the top of the page, some kind of alphabetical index at the bottom (which I'd never even seen until I started writing this essay), and ten boxes of links. The links are named in a way that doesn't make it obvious what you're going to be taken to when you click them. The mood of the page is best described as hectic, with a real designed by committee feel to it. The most indicative part of the page being the UCSD Emergency Status indicator.

I cannot think of a reason for anyone to need or want to know that we are experiencing a normal level of emergencies. If there was a more severe emergency, and the only way UCSD could get the word out was via the website, I would hope it would manifest itself as more than a differently colored triangle below the fold of the main page of Tritonlink.

So, the next step, in my mind, is to click on the academics tab. Clearly, adding a class is an academic subject. The user then sees this block, prominently located on the next page.

The obvious next move is to click on “Add/Drop/Change.” However, instead of being directed to the Add/Drop/Change function of the site, the user is instead given a list of help topics regarding class changes. There's two topics, “How to Enroll in Classes” and “How to Add a Class.” The user picks the first one, because it's first, and is show the following guide:

Notice how the third step for the “How to Enroll” instructions is “Enroll.” This action was obvious to the person writing the instructions, though I have no doubt that this was one of the same people involved in the original WebReg project. I experienced much frustration and infuriation the first time I had to sign up for classes, and again to lesser degrees each time I've had to do it.

There's more to the painful learning process, but eventually the user understands that the enrollment process is divided into two applications: One for finding a class to enroll in (Schedule of Classes) and one for enrolling in it (WebReg). As a result of this, the user has to keep switching between the two applications. For a novice computer user, this means actually navigating back and forth between two sections of the website. Even for an advanced computer user, comfortable with keeping multiple windows open and using them, this is a ridiculous situation.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the Schedule of Classes application doesn't talk to the database of class assignments. The only way to know if a class you're looking at conflicts with a class you've already signed up for is to either sign up for it and click the “Weekly Planner” button and check for conflicts or keep yet another window open with your schedule. There's also no indication of which classes will be helpful for the user to graduate. This shows the interface for searching for classes, which lacks an option to simply show classes that will help, instead overwhelming the user with a variety of search options for every possible situation.

The university, college, and major requirements are all on separate pages in other parts of the website, each of which will probably need to be referenced during the enrollment procedure.

This shows my setup for enrolling for classes. I have, in various windows, WebReg, the Schedule of Classes application, the Cognitive Science major requirements, the Muir college graduation requirements, the UCSD Graduation requirements, a list of classes I've taken before, and a calendar showing the classes I've signed up for so far this quarter. Even with two screens, I still have to shuffle through windows to organize my thoughts.

If I was tasked with recreating the class enrollment system for UCSD, I would integrate these two applications and create a smart wizard for picking classes that will help toward your degree. There would also be a more prominent “Enroll in Classes” button on the main Tritonlink page, and class search results would be tagged with what requirements they satisfy as well as whether they conflict with classes you've already enrolled in.

So, in conclusion, WebReg and its sister application Schedule of Classes are accepted only because people have gotten used to them. New students have a hard time grasping the system, and even returning students would benefit from a more streamlined system.

Multitasking

I've heard a lot about multitasking in regards to the "internet generation." Supposedly, we're able to simultaneously attend to numerous information streams and interact with all of them competently. This is mentioned in the book in box 3.1, "Sliced Attention." I have personal experience with this. I've seen students in class on laptops, looking very much like they're taking notes, when really they're reading email or looking at Facebook.

I used to bring my computer to class, to take notes on. The potential benefits are very alluring. It's easy to think that being able to take notes and organize them using any of the numerous notetaking applications out there would make the whole lecture experience more effective. Not to mention being able to reference the class website, look up confusing topics for further clarification, and record the lecture for later review. However, in practice, it falls apart.

I can't count the number of times I would start the class attentive, find something to look up, and spend the rest of the lecture browsing Wikipedia (invariably finding a path to something entirely unrelated.) It's far too easy for the computer to turn from a tool to a distraction. I've not found a mystical ability to focus on two things at once. If I'm doing something else, my work on a primary task suffers greatly.

That's why I now bring only a notebook and a pen to class. The only computer I use in class is the one in my skull. Using laptop in class is certainly an idea whose time will come, but current implementations aren't sufficient and are actually detrimental, in my opinion. Without the internet and its wealth of distractions, there's nothing that a laptop can do that a notebook can't in this situation.

Solutions would have to incorporate either a different teaching style or a different notetaking method, or both. Obviously, in a more project-based environment, there would be a great use for computers. However, in your average 200 person undergraduate class, there's not a lot of opportunity for project work without overtaxing the TAs' grading muscles.

Reading

I almost forgot to write a blog about the reading for this week.

I enjoyed the first two chapters. One part that stood out to me was the comparison of the modern spreadsheet application to its original ancestor. I had never really thought about the history of spreadsheets. I was surprised however to see that it was pretty much fully developed on the first iteration. Looking at Excel, there is no feature that I use regularly that wasn't in VisiCalc. It's very impressive how an effective interface design has such incredible staying power. It could have been changed at any time, and there's intense selection pressure to do so. A more efficient or easy to use spreadsheet application would be very popular. However, even Apple's new Numbers application doesn't differ much from the form set out by VisiCalc's designers.

Head Mounted Display

This looks super cool. There's a toy being sold that has a head mounted video display as a part of it. The headset can be bought as a replacement part for twenty dollars. It uses standard signals (NTSC or PAL) and can, with very little work, be hacked into a new role in a custom project.

This would make a neat little reality augmentation display or virtual reality display. Plus, there's nothing to stop a developer from buying two and making a stereoscopic display.

Obviously no commercial product would be tolerated with a black and white screen anymore, but this is a boon for hobby work and prototypes.

(via Hack-a-Day)

Casual Capture

Today in class, one of the things we talked about was the SenseCam being developed by Microsoft. This is an appealing idea to me as a photographer and obsessive data-hoarder. The idea is that you wear the camera (the example was on a lanyard, but that's not essential to the core concept) and it takes periodic photos. It also has options to take photos based on changes in sensor inputs, like accelerometers and ambient noise sensors.

I looked around and this is not a new idea. There's a CNET article from 2003 that talks about an HP project called "Casual Capture." It was based around a frame buffer that would store the last 30 seconds of visual information and, on some cue, process it and store it.

"You say, 'Something has happened, I'd like to remember that,'" said Phil Cheatle of HP Labs' digital media department. "It allows you to take part in the event instead of hiding behind the technology. The challenge is selecting what's interesting automatically."

This is a very interesting proposition. Obviously the hard part is figuring out what the most useful part of the 30 second frame buffer is to store. Simply storing all of it for later, manual processing is impractical. Having too much information is worse than not having any, in this case.

Another interesting paragraph was one that proposed more advanced automatic image processing:

The imaging software would also recognize when a sequence of shots could best be presented as a video clip, and would transform a slow movement of the head into a panoramic image, by stitching a sequence of related shots together.

The project seems to have fallen off the face of the earth without producing even a prototype. The Microsoft product is a very good successor, picking up the torch. However, the second paragraph of the CNET article describes a device that is more advanced than either the SenseCam or how the SenseCam is described in the rest of the article. Clearly, it seemed to be an impossible goal at the time, but four years later it doesn't seem so far fetched.

Casual capture is HP's term for a method of taking snapshots that involves a minimum of effort on the part of the photographer. Ideally, the consumer could don an always-on, wearable camera, visit an event such as a party, and afterwards find that the camera had automatically selected and cropped the most memorable images.

This kind of extremely smart documentation device is, I'm sure, ready to be made in the next few years. With a minimal amount of human influence, the device would automatically document and possibly share an event.

Of course, there's the same concerns that are raised whenever some kind of camera becomes ubiquitous. These tend to flair up at the introduction of a new technology and quickly dissipate as it becomes commonplace. Occasionally something will spark a controversy and cause greater attention to the use of the technology for a time, but the trend is towards acceptance.

If enough people wore one of these, it's impossible to predict how society would change. On the one hand, there would be a rich social history available at little to no cost of human time. On the other hand, it would produce a constantly surveillant and surveiled society. Everyone would be watching everyone else, and a great deal of personal information would become public knowledge.

But, with Facebook, Google street view, CCTV, and others, we're already well on the way there and most people don't seem to be alarmed, or even notice that it's happening. As privacy disappears (as is the trend), so will privacy concerns. Society will adapt to whatever new technology it is given, as long as it serves a purpose.