PeterBraden.co.ukArticles Tagged "technology"

Apple's new product, the unfortuately named iPad, became available to pre-order a few days ago, and sold 51,000 units in the first 2 hours.

There has been a huge amount of excitement for the new device which some think will revolutionize the publishing industry the same way that the iPod revolutionized the music industry.

It's simple gesture based interface has many people excited about simplifying computing for the less computer literate.

And yet despite the allure of sleek glass and brushed aluminium, I can't help a slight feeling of dread about what this direction means for the future of our industry.

One of the key objections I, and many of my peers in the industry, hold is Apple's overly controlling distribution platform, The App Store.

At the moment, to create an application for the iPad or the iPhone, developers must sign up for Apple's developer program. After writing their app, they must submit it to Apple for an audit before it can be sold in Apple's monopolistic app store. The verification review is a black hole of conflicting rules, whereby apps may be rejected for 'Adult content', competing with Apple's products, or simply rubbing the reviewer the wrong way.

Apple clearly wants to position themself in the lucrative middle-man spot, where they can take a cut of each app sold, but in the process they have created an orwellian platform that alienates many of the people that want to create applications.

Great articles have been written about how the App Store kills hobbyist innovation and prevents people from tinkering with their software, one of the main ways people enter our industry.

I have a big problem with the ethos of the App Store, but there's another big problem that scares me with the iPad in particular.

The iPad's interface is incredibly simple, manipulating the screen with multiple fingers controls the content in an intuitive way — pages in the book application can be turned by stroking the screen, maps can be zoomed by pinching. Additionally, applications themselves are represented by a very simple metaphor, icons on the home screen.

The simplicity of this interface has been touted as one of the key innovations of the iPad. And yet, I cannot help but feel that the iPad does not just simplify computing, rather that it dumbs it down.

Consider for example the language of the marketing campaign, and count how many times the word magic is used.

Our society is moving towards a future where the use of computers is as fundamental as reading or writing. Some have suggested that 'Programming is the new literacy'. It is hard to dispute the fact that in an ever more technology reliant civilization the ability to manipulate computers, to bend their power to your will, will become an invaluable skill. In the future everyone will be programmers.

Traditional computer interfaces have supported growth in this direction. New computer users have been offered simple metaphors to help them understand basic tasks such as manipulating applications. But as they become more adept at using the computer, and as their confidence grows, the interface expands to allow the user more control of their machine. Applications can be scripted to automate common tasks. Interfaces can be modified. Ultimately the user will encounter the command line, a dauntingly powerful tool that allows complete power over the computer at the expense of learning some cryptic commands, and a basic understanding of the technology behind the operating system's friendly facade.

And from then it is only a very small step before the user is creating applications themselves. The learning curve is gradual, but eventually yields to complete control over the computer.

These steps are essentially the ones that I followed growing up, and that mean that now I can make a computer do whatever I want, and am in high demand as a skilled software developer.

That is not to say that existing interfaces are perfect, of course there is a huge amount that can be done to simplify them, especially at the initial steps which are the main stumbling point for the computer illiterate. The point I want to get across is that there is a constant opportunity to learn and increase your control over the computer.

The iPad destroys this ability. You can learn to use it's gestures, and indeed become incredibly proficient at using it, however you'll never be able to go further. You'll always be limited to using it in the way a few engineers have invisioned, you'll never be able to dive behind the magic that makes it work. The iPad treats you like a dumb user, and you can never reverse the roles and become it's master.

If the next generation learns computing on a platform like the iPad, we could be setting ourselves back years, by hiding the skills that we'll increasingly need in the future.

There is already a huge demand for programmers and people that can bend computers to their will. We need to be lowering the barrier of entry to this, as well as introducing computers to the older, less computer literate generation.

Today the URL shortener tr.im announced their demise. In a short statement on their website, they explain:

tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately. Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward. However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed. No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening -- users won't pay for it -- and we just can't justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.

Since the unexpected death of Ma.gnolia earlier in the year, in a technical failure which resulted in the complete loss of all users data, I've watched the rise in web applications with a mixture of excitement and unease. Excitement because the web platform is obviously the future, but unease because of our increasing reliance on the often unreliable cloud to store our valuable data.

When our data is on our own computers, the onus is on us to look after it, to back it up, to ensure it's security. But, barring our own incompetence or global thermonuclear war, we can be pretty confident that it is safe. With the rise of cloud-computing and web apps, we are handing over this responsibility to many companies, each of which we are trusting with the competency to look after our data, as well as the business savvy to stay solvent. And often we are expecting this level of service for free.

A typical business model for a lot of tech start-ups is to build an audience and then find a way of monetizing it. Tr.im have shown us that this model is not infallible, and when it fails our data disappears as collateral damage. Every time we use web applications, we are making a small investment in that company — an investment of time, but an investment none the less.

And while services like S3 have made it easier for web applications to maintain backups, there is always the risk of data loss. How many of the new web services provide guarantees over data. The standard policy seems to be 'you get what you pay for'.

Without a way to make local backups of web-service data (a service which is now offered by other bookmarking sites such as delicious), the information we put into the cloud is not safe. I wonder how many sites will have to fail before more people realise.

Via Wikipedia:

Dr. Bagger on precision and the mass of the Z boson at CERN: "The experimenters found that the Z boson got heavier at certain times of the day. This was a very high-precision experiment. They discovered that the patterns of the particle getting heavier corresponded to the tides. The gravitational adjustments due to tides slightly changed the shape of the collider over the course of the day. After adjusting for tidal effects, they found that the Z boson was heavier in spring and lighter in fall. This was because there's a lake in Geneva near the detector, that is drained in Fall to make room for the spring snow-melt. So the bigger lake in the Spring was making the particle heavier. After correcting for both of these factors, they found that the particle got suddenly heavier multiple times during the day, at the same times. This was because a train runs near the detector whose electromagnetic fields were disturbing the experiment. This is how precise the experiment was."

Monday morning I headed out to CERN. Having worked in a nuclear physics institut before, I have a fascination with cutting edge research and the incomprehensible theories it spawns. And as a web developer I was interested in seeing the place where the internet was invented. But mainly I was drawn by the certain masculine appeal of the biggest, most powerful machine in the world, designed to smash stuff up.

This is very precise destruction though. Built with Swiss acuracy on the Switzerland-France border, the facility sprawls around the 27km tunnel through which steams of particles are accelerated and then smashed together. In fact the experiments require such precision that scientists must compensate for the 1mm variation in length of the 27km circuit caused by the moon's tidal pull on the bedrock - that's right, rocks have tides too.

Magnet testing

The Museé Microcosm has the unenviable task of trying to explain why the particles must be destroyed in laymans terms. Begining by explaining that everything is made of atoms, within a few panels a live version of Rutherfords gold foil experiment takes place. The top half of the museum continues with the pop-culture statistics that you would expect (the LHC will produce enough data in a year to produce a stack of DVD's 15km high (No cases)), but still has no explanation of what the collisions will achieve. Instead it looks at the spectacular engineering feat behind the LHC.

For example, to bend the particle stream around the ring, electro-magnets are used to focus and angle the beam. If normal warm magnets were used, the ring would have to be 120km in circumference to provide the energies the LHC requires. Rather than dig that big a tunnel, the scientists opted to cool the magnets to around 1 kelvin to make them superconductors.

This of cource means that the 27km of equipment must be kept at -271 celsius, a feat which requires 500 tons of liquid helium. Each meter of magnet experiences the force equivalent to the weight of a jumbo jet when in operation, and if a single piece of the titanium-niobium wire is not accurately placed, then the friction generated by its movement can heat it enough to cause a 'quench' - where the metal loses it's superconductivity and immediately receives the resistance associated with the 7TeV travelling through it.

As far as I can tell from the scant information in the CERN journal, and by talking to scientists, this is what happened in the 'incident' which took CERN out of action last year. Apparently one of the thousands of solder connections between magnets was poorly made and caused it to arc. Normally quenches within the ring are handled by a subsystem which redirects the current into big copper blocks, but for some reason this didn't happen when the joint quenched. The magnetic field, combined with the superheated helium resulted in an explosion distorting the ring and damaging 37 of the magnets. These are being repaired on the surface, however they have also been replaced with spares. I heard rumours that the poor solder joints were due to a hurry to meet the deadline, this time around everything is being checked and double checked in a much more painstaking way.

Fancy Pipe

The bottom half of the museum went into more depth and attempted to explain a little of the science behind the CERN experiments, although it was dissapointingly disjointed, mentioning topics without introducing them and lacking a consistent narrative. Consequently I still have no idea of the difference between quarks, or understand the mass-energy relation in bosons.

The museum seemed a little small, and I really only came to see the real equipment, but apparently tours have to be booked a month in advance. Not having a month, I did what any self respecting person would do, and tried to sneak in with a Swiss school tour. Unfortunately I can no longer pass for a schoolkid and was caught, but a little bit of charm offensive and I managed to wangle my way onto the tour anyway.

Unfortunately the tour began with an hour long lecture, and as the school was from Zurich, it was in German. I passed the time by watching the students fall asleep - I don't know whether schoolkids in Switzerland are meant to know the difference betwen electron and tau neutrinos, but there was at least 10 minutes of passionate German on that slide, followed by one on antimatter - I think they understood less of the lecture than I did.

A lesser man may have given up after the lecture, but I figured they'd have to show us some cool stuff to make up for the lecture.

We were walked across the road and for one horrible moment I thought we would be taken into the 'Dan Brown' exhibit - yes that's right, the dude who writes airport trash about albino monks bombing the Vatican gets an exhibition at CERN. They claim it falls under their mandate of 'spreading knowledge' - I thought it interesting that they spread that knowledge, but prevented visitors from acessing their wifi - I mean, they invented the internet.

Luckily we turned towards the ATLAS facility where we watched a 3D film about the construction of the detector. The film was set to upbeat music; I don't think there are many funnier things than watching a room full of Swiss students wearing oversized earphones and polarised glasses dancing to a science video.

As I was beginning to despair of ever seeing real equipment (and a little tempted to peak inside the temptingly named and under surveilled "Control Room") we were taken inside the cavernous warehouse that sits atop the detector shaft. While the guide prattled on about the properties of some wire or something I peered down the shaft 100m down to the tunnel below.

Atlas Below

After the guide had finished his spiel we piled onto a bus and went to France. The French facility is used for testing the magnets, and like most scientific facilities, was a shiny pile of organised mess. I have no idea of what was explained here, the warehouse was filled with some extremely fancy plumbing - sections of the tunnel below us.

As we drove back to the reception at the end of the tour, I managed to talk to one of the guides in English. He told me about his research project which used technology developed for the detectors of the LHC to make better mammograms. So there we have it - the biggest machine on earth, made to smash stuff, and ultimately, if tangentially, save lives.