In the novel Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge describes a near-future world in which people wear contact lenses that can overlay displays onto reality. This virtual-reality world that exists within and is composited onto the real-world is called augmented reality. In Rainbows End, people are in constant communication, receive information from all sorts of sources, and can choose between a variety of overlays on the real world that anyone can create for information or entertainment, including elaborate multiplayer games. Vinge also imagines the economic consequences of the technology. The world is awash with information and careers are built on selecting and filtering it. If you want information fast, money will buy the efforts of anyone and everyone, gathering and sifting anonymously on the network. Meanwhile, entertainment companies vie for the greatest audience shares and compete with school projects that involve creating multimedia augmented reality shared experience extravaganzas. Do you want your local high street themed like Middle-earth or Caprica?

There are a few bits of hardware that would make this sort of technology work particularly well: a wearable input device such as one that detects small finger movements or whispered voice commands for control; a wearable display such as glasses or contact lenses that can either emit an image or transmit light from the real world; and some apparatus for detecting where you are and where you are looking to some considerable accuracy.

But we are already starting to see applications that might be part of this Rainbows End future. Google Maps on a phone with GPS is a good start. Yelp adds the ability to find interesting things nearby, with user reviews and photos. Foursquare, Gowalla and BrightKite combine location with other social networking features and game aspects like rewards which can businesses can interact with. All of these are ways of gathering and sharing information, and they have open APIs that mean information can be combined in novel ways by third parties creating new applications, sometimes called mashups.

There are pure games, like Pac Manhattan, Zombies Run and ARhrrrr. There is even a real model helicopter that can fly in augmented reality.

Layar is particularly interesting. It overlays 3D graphics onto an image from the phone’s camera. It uses the phone’s GPS to know where you are, and the phone’s gyroscopes and compass to know where you’re looking. Pick from dozens of layers to overlay onto the real-world image. Mostly these are labels providing information about the real world so you can, for example, look through your phone and see nearby places that have Wikipedia articles or user reviews. Some layers put 3D objects into the real world for games, art or information.

A lot of these apps, web sites and services will come and go, but it’s starting to look very much like a large number of people in the tech industry have read Rainbows End and are setting out to make it come true.

The first program you run fills the whole screen. The next program you run fills the whole screen too, and switching between the two is achieved using a familiar tab representation. But now it is also possible to split the screen horizontally or vertically into frames. Each frame can contain one or more tabbed windows, be resized, and further sub-divided. Each window can be sent to an alternative frame.

The result is a very neat and tidy windowing system, with the added bonus that keyboard shortcuts become practical for moving windows around the screen. Typically I have the main applications such as a web browser and email on the left, and small windows containing shells and editors on the right, as shown in the screen shot.

WMI is still very new, and there are a few glitches, especially with applications that display a lot of dialog boxes. It’s a bit disconcerting when an “OK” box suddenly fills the whole screen, but thankfully it is possible to convert these boxes into traditional floating windows. I’m sure if I rummaged through the documentation I would find a way to make “floating” the default mode for new windows.

In any case, it’s a whole new, refreshing way of working with a PC, and all the more fun for it.

Some investigation later, (which mostly consisted of consulting a friend who never misses a bargain), and I discovered Powweb. They seemed too good to be true, with ten times the storage and 150 times the bandwidth allowance, for slightly less money. This is probably possible because while XCalibre are in the UK, Powweb are in the USA where presumably overheads are lower and competition is tougher. But it’s a global market, and since I run this site as a hobby and have never had to speak to web host staff in person, I can’t see any disadvantage to being hosted in the USA.

It was during the move that I discovered how hard it can be to move a Movable Type blog from one host to another, especially when using the Berkeley database and the host you’re moving to has a different version of the Berkeley DB libraries.

And what with all the kerfuffle about Movable Type’s new licensing, which wouldn’t have affected me much if I hadn’t lost my original tarball for 2.661, and could only now get hold of of version 3 without paying, I started to look around for alternatives.

WordPress appealed immediately because it is released under a GPL license. Mark Pilgrim sums up some of the advantages of this quite nicely:

WordPress is Free Software. Its rules will never change. In the event that the WordPress community disbands and development stops, a new community can form around the orphaned code. It’s happened once already. In the extremely unlikely event that every single contributor (including every contributor to the original b2) agrees to relicense the code under a more restrictive license, I can still fork the current GPL-licensed code and start a new community around it. There is always a path forward. There are no dead ends.

I discovered that not only was it easier than I thought to transfer all my content across to WordPress, but I could also keep all my permalinks too. And WordPress is slick. It has an extremely nice interface full of simple touches that you may not notice until you start using it in earnest, such as the “Save and Continue Editing” button combined with a preview at the bottom of the edit screen.

Finally, while there have always been loads of add-ons for Movable Type, moving to WordPress has spurred my interest once more, and I have found plenty of cool add-ons that will appear here before long (once I’ve sorted out the template and style sheet), including Amazon Media Manager, email notifications (ok, Movable Type has this by default but it’s the only feature I used that WordPress hasn’t), WP Photos, and Mobile Edition.

Reading more on the site, I found a particularly scary attempt at extracting passwords from people’s computers. Simply by clicking on a link, Internet Explorer can be made to download a malicious “HTML Application”, write an executable to disk, and run it. In this case the executable kills off processes that look like anti-virus software, logs keystrokes, and emails the results back to a server.

I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked that this is possible, but I am. It shows the importance of not only keeping software patched, but also being careful what you click on. Even better, run an open source browser like Mozilla: Open source software is more secure by its nature.

Adding more than 150 files is not recommended. Windows may fail to add all selected files. Continue? Yes/No/Help

Why am I not brimming over with confidence in this tool?

Incidentally, clicking help took me to a page entitled, “Topic Not Found.”

Threat number two is from Microsoft working with hardware “partners” such as HP to specify hardware platforms, bypassing any kind of open standards setting. Or as Bill puts it, getting “rid of some of the impedance created by the organizational boundary between us and those partners.” The problem here is that the point of the excercise is to make sure Windows drivers are available first, and no information is made available for other software vendors or writers of open source software to provide drivers for their platforms. Windows wins because only it can support the hardware.

In the past, open source software authors have been very innovative when it comes to reverse engineering hardware to write drivers. But DMCA-like laws create a new problem, especially when hardware involves anything related to digital rights management. Writing a device driver may soon land you in jail, if it can be seen as circumventing DRM. Because if you write open source software, you’re stealing from artists, obviously…

Now what can I use my fantastic new toy for? Well how about I connect it to my TV with the built-in TV-out, and use it as a front-end client for something like Myth TV – a homebrew personal video recorder system. A server in another room with a huge hard disk records TV programs (and also has my CD collection stored on it as Ogg files), and the little cute PC becomes the home entertainment system. I could even have one in every room, each feeding from the central server.

Oh, the possibilities!

I trained SpamOracle with over 700 good emails and around 100 spam. This is slightly less than the recommended number of spams, which would explain the two that got through. Over time, with a larger sample, hopefully these results can be improved.

While SpamOracle is designed to work with Procmail, it is easy to set up for use with KMail, or any *nix mail program that can filter mail through an external program.

Does anyone know of a Bayesian spam filter for Windows?

And yet trouble is stirring in the Microsoft free paradise. My dad is starting to complain. He is starting to say things like, “it would have worked in Windows.” What can be going on?

The trouble is the web. More specifically, the web as it has been mutated and disfigured by those who do not understand it: corporate web designers. One of the basic principles of the web, is that pages are described in terms of their content. This means that they can be displayed on almost any kind of device, from a graphics accelerated supercomputer, to a handheld PDA, to a text to speech device for blind people.

Cue my dad, who on seeing the latest TV advert containing a web address, wants to see what all the fuss is about. He goes, for example, to www.daewoo.co.uk to look at their latest range of cars. And that’s where the trouble starts. Instead of a nice list of cars, some pictures and a pricelist, we’re met with a message saying, “cookies must be enabled to view this website.” But cookies are enabled, what is going on? We try another browser, Mozilla instead of Konqueror. This time the page loads, and it’s full of flashy animations and things that light up when you move the mouse over them. Beautiful. But what’s this. When we click on a picture of a car, instead of more details about that model, we see the message, “the URL you entered is not valid.”

There’s nothing for it but to boot Windows and start up Internet Explorer. Exasperation all round. And it’s not a rare occurrence either. In fact my dad seems to be considering returning to a life of expensive upgrades, re-installations and viruses, all so he can view the web pages he wants to see.

The odd thing is that I too use Linux almost exclusively at home, and lately at work. I too browse the web, much more than my dad. And I hardly ever meet a website that doesn’t work perfectly. What can be going on? The issues are numerous and intricately interrelated. I shall attempt to ennumerate them.

Most annoyingly, there’s the problem of corporate web designers. They have forgotten that the web is about content are forcing it into something that is about layout and design. There’s nothing in that Daewoo web page that can’t be done with image maps and server side scripting. All the browser ever needs to see is standard HTML. Instead what we get seems nothing more than an adolescent’s masturbation over Javascript. If you can actually find the frame that contains the content, a quick look at the source of the page will reveal how hideous it all is. Many corporate web sites are like this. Instead of using the web for what it’s designed for, businesses have become obsessed with turning it into a destop publishing suite for their tacky brochures. Look is everything. Content is quite secondary.

Despite being generally annoying, it is possible to make a desktop-published, animated website work in Linux. Barclays Internet banking works perfectly in all the graphical browsers I have tried, despite being quite fancy and despite the fact that most of its users are accessing it with Internet Explorer. Most problematic sites tend to rely heavily on Javascript. I’m not sure why Javascript behaves so differently on different browsers. Is there not a standard written down for these things? If so, who is not following it? The people who wrote Mozilla and Konqueror, or the web designers? Perhaps it is all Microsoft’s fault for including non-standard features in their browser. In fairness, without further investigation I cannot say which.

Most of the bugs could be ironed out if web designers would test their sites on different browsers. But it seems that they don’t care. This is partly understandable – why should they care if only 5 or 10 percent of visitors have problems? But by making as much as possible work using server-side scripts, compatibility problems wouldn’t exist at all. In fact the web is inherently multi-platform, it takes effort to make a site that will only work on one browser. Surely web designers know this?

Some of the trouble is caused by my dad’s taste in web sites. As a bit of a geek, the kinds of sites I visit are usually aware of people using non-Microsoft platforms, and care about these people and cater for them. By contrast, anything TV-advertised is more likely to be aimed at the mass-market Internet-Explorer-using audience. This adds one more barrier to the casual user wanting to ditch Microsoft. Linux developers have done their bit by making it easy to use, but web developers seem to be refusing to co-operate. It’s one thing for me to sit on my high horse and proclaim that, frankly, I don’t want to see a website if they’re going to make it require a particular browser, but this is of little comfort to my dad who just wants things to work and doesn’t care so much about the principles.

These problems will eventually go away. Thanks to the law of diminishing returns it will take a long, long time. I suspect that the solutions will not come from businesses demanding 100% compatible web sites, though. Rather, hard working hackers will be the ones who spend more time than should really be necessary supporting every non-standard feature of buggy web-sites that they can find.

• Typing commands can be faster. For instance, I can type “find /usr -name *.txt” faster than I can click on start, select find find files, wait for the find dialog to open, select “Browse Directory”, browse to “/usr”, and type *.txt into the name box.
• There is a lot of good command line software about that it would be silly to just ignore. My favourite is wget. You can type “wget -r http://www.website.com” to download an entire website into a local folder. I use it to put websites on my PDA. And because it’s a command line program, and command line programs are portable, it runs on my PC (Linux and Windows) and on my PDA. There aren’t many GUI programs about that run on all three. Also, I can write a shell script that will download all my favourite websites in one go.
• It’s quick and easy to write your own command line software. You can use C, Perl, or just shell scripts. You don’t have to learn a GUI library to do it, and you don’t waste time laying out dialog boxes. I write command line programs all the time at work to do all kinds of things, like testing the embedded software I write. At home I have scripts that do things like back up certain files.
• Command line programs are extensible. You can combine them together by piping their outputs into the input of another program, or by calling them from script files. For example, I wrote one program that could send serial port commands to a rack mounted box I was testing, then I wrote a series of batch scripts that would invoke various commands. It ended up being very powerful and solving lots of problems that weren’t forseen when it was written.

I’m not suggesting that command lines are the be all and end all. There are some things I wouldn’t want to use a command line program for: Reading email, browsing the web or writing this weblog. Anyone who only uses their computer for email, web browsing and writing weblogs is free to disregard all of the above.