tech

The Economist on technology and North Korea:

Andrei Lankov of the Australian National University, an astute observer of North Korea, describes how a relatively minor technological revolution in China changed the lives of many North Koreans. Earlier this decade DVD players fell dramatically in price, so South Korean households quickly dumped their old VCRs in favour of the new players. Smugglers picked up the old units for next to nothing and sold them in North Korea for $40 or so apiece—a price that plenty of urban North Korean families could afford if they saved up.

The consequence was what Mr Lankov calls a “video revolution”: a flood of South Korean soap operas, melodramas and music videos entering North Korea by the same route and delighting new audiences. The impact of the astounding affluence on display—the stars’ clothes and cars, Seoul’s glittering skyline—exposes the central lie on which the regime bases its claim to rule: that South Korea is backward, impoverished and exploited. Korean-language programming from abroad on radio sets imported from China (and thus not tuned permanently to state radio) reinforces this discovery. Thus, disillusion and anger with the regime only mounts.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, this is a headline from a genuine newspaper site, and not from The Onion:

“Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer”

(Thanks to Albert for the pointer.)

Most of my friends have heard me rave about my brother Albert’s cool Wiremap project before, but it’s a difficult thing to fully grok without actually seeing it. Wiremap uses a single projector to project fully 3-dimensional images; instead of projecting on to a flat screen, it projects on to a series of wires strung vertically at varying depths to fill out a rectangular volume. By knowing which wire is at which depth, the single projector can project volumes 3-dimensionally; for example, one of the Wiremap demos involves a globe that floats towards and away from the projector itself.

Much of the impact is lost if you can’t see Wiremap in person. But if you live in New York City, next Wednesday you can do just that at Dorkbot NYC.

Dorkbot NYC
Wednesday, November 1, 7 p.m.
Location One
26 Greene Street (betw. Canal and Grand)

For a new media artist working solo, Wiremap represents a daunting technical achievement. The computer driving the projector has to have intimate knowledge of each wire and what depth it’s at; and just physically calibrating the volume to the projector is an exacting task.

If you want more info, Albert has a pretty extensive wiki page up, and a long, explanatory video on YouTube. But trust me, the online representations of this work pale in comparison to seeing the real thing.

From Dan Savage, whose Savage Love column also brought us the use of “Santorum” as sexual slang.

Because if the Führer comes back as a cat, we’ll need to be prepared.

Some of these are fairly subtle: I like the idea of someone at a bar trying to figure out what this one means.

This fake “Move to Philly” ad campaign is pretty convincing. Still, when we were chatting about it in #nyc.rb, David Black said “Whenever I see the words ‘Move’ and ‘Philly’ together, I just think of those buildings burning down.” Oh, no you didn’t.

My brother Albert recently graduated from theater school. He studied directing, but since getting out of school, he’s been tinkering with online video and dance—the stuff you’d see at a rave, not what you’d learn in a conservatory.

In last week’s video, Virtual Boxes, he combines planar movements with overlaid animation to manipulate translucent blue rectangles hovering in air with his hands. There’s an interesting connection here to mime or prestidigitation, and in fact Albert is pretty good at card tricks.

But I think my favorite is Finger Dancing, a closely shot video of Albert dancing mostly with his hands. Apparently this is a nascent style that goes by the name “digits” (or “digitz”), and he’s combining it with a more fluid West-Coast approach.

One curious takeaway from this is that it would appear that club dancing communities are starting to take root online through free video sites. Go to YouTube and search for terms like “digitz”, “tuts”, or “rave”, and you’ll find lots of people videotaping themselves dancing in their own bedrooms and living rooms, and then posting the results online for others to comment on. Possibly kids are now learning moves from YouTube, the same way they once did from American Bandstand or Soul Train—the difference being, of course, that now everybody can have their own show.

Secondly, videos such as these point to possible new directions for what we could term “microvideo”: videos with small budgets, small resolutions, and small durations, meant to be displayed through portable devices such as PSPs, cell phones, and video iPods. The tight framing of Finger Dancing makes it easier to watch on a subway ride than, say, an episode of Lost—and when the picture’s so tiny it’s not as noticeable how low-budget it is. Maybe this is obvious, but it would appear that the future of portable video rests mostly on freely available viral content, not clips from movies or TV shows that you download for a fixed price. On a 2-inch screen, a $50 million movie and some suburban teenage girls dancing to “My Humps” look different, but you know, not that different.

Bill Anderson reports that April’s meeting of New York City SPIN (that’s the Software Process Improvement Network) had a talk by Ed Yourdon about software litigation. Software litigation, Yourdon reported, is increasing, and as someone who’s often involved in these cases, he’s increasingly running into lawyers with backgrounds in engineering and computer science.

In lieu of a Powerpoint, there’s some sort of mind-map dump available which gives the gist of Yourdon’s talk. One telling note is under “Processes”: Beware XP, RAD, “agile”. This is a bummer, but not really a surprise. Large corporate software processes often produce massive documents, and one explanation for this is that people involved are trying to cushion the fall when they fail. When your project fails, you’re less likely to be fired at some companies if you can point to a massive spec doc as proof of your efforts to control the project.

The same risk aversion would easily be built into any legal proceedings. While it’s easy to imagine using massive documents to explain away failure to an inexperienced judge or jury, Agile methodologies would probably be a much tougher sell. Such methodologies, with their emphasis on human relationships and close communications as opposed to writing everything down to cover your ass, seem sort of tailor-made to fail in court. (What that says in general about the effect on society of explicit laws, as opposed to implicit human relationships, is left as an exercise for the budding anarchist reader.)

If such litigation continues to grow, we have to be concerned about law setting industry best practices for us—in an industry which is far too young to have any best practices at all. Computer programming isn’t like medicine or civil engineering; it’s only a couple of decades old, and we don’t really know what we’re doing, and the only way to improve is to keep trying new things. But if civil court cases ending up implicitly telling software vendors “you will be sued for these practices, but not these”, I can’t imagine that as a good thing for the field.

Japanese blogger Hirano posts a chart mapping which skills Japanese IT workers have acquired, and which skills they want to acquire. Not being able to read the study that this chart is based on, I can’t tell how much it attempts to overcome the fuzziness inherent in its questions. (Does it make sense to ask a tech worker if he has or hasn’t acquired the skill “Linux” or “Security”?) Still, the general arc of technologies seems intuitively right, and it’s fairly provocative.

I got this via Tim Bray, who says he’s not certain what it means. Personally, I wonder if such a trend is specific to the technology field, or is just a more general trend you’d see in any quickly changing field with highly skilled labor. If you mapped this out for financial services, would you get the same trend, with hedge funds in the top-left quadrant and corporate auditing in the lower-left quadrant?

One interesting way to look at the chart is to note how quickly a skill moves from being cutting edge to old-fashioned. COBOL and Mainframe skills would’ve qualified as an “Emerging Skill” only a few decades ago. And if anything, such rate of change is accelerating—meaning that a college graduate today who banks his career on, say, Web Services, will face a severe skills obsolescence in his working life.

None of this is new, but I feel like the tech industry, with its love of change and its optimistic view of the future, doesn’t talk about it much. I know from personal experience that this industry can still be fun after ten years. But what about twenty years? Thirty? Fifty?

I’ve met many veterans in the field who are successful and content, but I’ve met probably just as many who are fighting a constant war against burnout. In many ways it seems that long-term success depends on the ability to either become a manager or a consultant, specializing less in specific technologies and more in managing people, organizations, and processes. But some programmers can’t or won’t make that transition, and the field can be more difficult for them.

Me, I’m only a few years younger than the Unix epoch, and already I can feel myself getting curmudgeonly about the newest, shiniest toys. Take “Ajax”, for example: Since Adaptive Path coined this term in February, web programmers everywhere have been abuzz with discussions about its potential. I follow along with the discussion, particularly in cases where Ajax implementations are causing interesting conflicts with notions of RESTfulness, but I may never program a single line of Asynchronous JavaScript + XML myself. Not because I think Ajax isn’t interesting and potentially lucrative. But because the idea of learning how to jump this particular technical hoop strikes me as just too much work. Leave that stuff to some eager 21-year-old. I’ve got other things on my mind.