Minh’s Notes

Fixing the past

2012-05-16T17:45:00Z

Periodically, I still receive inquiries about the Atmosphere Community Server, which powered real-time, multi-user chat inside the 3D “worlds” of Adobe Atmosphere. Long before they pulled the plug on their copy of the server and discontinued Atmosphere development, Adobe released the server software under a very permissive open source license. However, obtaining the software has always been a challenge: Adobe no longer accepts signups to host the server, and it no longer seemed to be available for download anywhere online.

A few years ago, after searching high and low for a chat server to hook my world up to, I finally got my hands on the server source code. Joe De Costa was one of the few enterprising hobbyists who ran their own chat server. He meticulously documented the steps to setting it up on his Linux computer, but reading his tutorial easily dissuaded me from setting up my own copy.

The source code as it exists today is something of a game of telephone: as successive hobbyists have handed it down over the years, they’ve each jury-rigged the software to run on their Windows and Linux computers, not necessarily keeping all the features intact. The changes have all the hallmarks of guess-and-check, which is understandable given the disconnect between the server’s systems-style, multithreaded C and the DHTML-era JavaScript that most world builders were familiar with.

Despite my initial apprehension, curiosity got the better of me, and I sat down one weekend to get the thing up and running on my MacBook Pro. The result is an Xcode project that builds and runs in a 32-bit Mac OS X environment, with far fewer caveats than the package I received. You can download either package here. Of course, please respect Adobe’s intellectual property, which should be easy given their downright liberal licensing terms.

I’m under no illusion that Atmosphere will one day return to its former prominence. After all, the industry has moved on and there’s only so much a ragtag band of hobbyists can do to revive a dead, closed-source platform. But Atmosphere has a allure for me, as I suspect it does for the people who occasionally contact me about it. It was the one 3D platform that was never exactly a game, or a shopping experience, or a chat room, or an HCI research project. It was open-ended and decentralized, like the Web. Maybe that’s why it flopped. Then again, maybe another, more successful Atmosphere will come our way in the future. We’ll be ready to pick up where we left off in 2004.

Serendipity

2012-03-16T18:07:22Z

I have a startling admission to make: I never really used the Encyclopædia Britannica. My classmates and I instead feasted on the more accessible World Book, in all its photo-bound glory. At home, the only encyclopedias my family could budget for were the first two volumes of Grolier’s Encyclopedia of Knowledge, which randomly went on sale at Kroger one weekend: A–Ano and Ano–Bas. They were beautifully illustrated and typeset, but as you’d imagine, my school report on Alabama went on a bit longer than the one on Virginia. Later on, Encarta filled in the rest of the alphabet. The lack of a particular upscale brand of encyclopedia at a decidedly non-elementary reading level never registered as a problem.

So with Britannica’s print demise this week, I have a hard time understanding how an empty Britannica shelf would be the greatest of our concerns if the national power grid went kaput. It isn’t as if encyclopedias – even print encyclopedias – are done for. The ones that found their niche in the education market are doing fine. I also don’t buy the argument that our society’s reliance on Internet sources will deprive rural public libraries in the U.S. After all, a computer is half the price of a full Britannica set, yet the former’s value is certainly greater. Can Britannica walk you through algebra problems the way Wolfram Alpha does? Would you type on it?

The majority of nostalgic commentators seem to pin the blame for Britannica’s exit on Wikipedia and find fault with its directness. They remember sticking their fingers inside a huge book to keep their place across cross-references, and fascinating entries that happen to lie on the same page stealing their attention. And they lament that a search box can’t offer any of that.

To solve that problem, I’ve written Serendipity, a script that allows registered users of Wikipedia to bring the true encyclopedia experience to the site. Install it, and you’ll quickly notice that whatever you look up is preceded and followed by entries that just happen to fall next to it in alphabetical order. Because this model is so essential to cognitive development and intellectual curiosity, the script also disables hyperlinks and other aids to non-linear navigation.

Of course, the script is totally tongue-in-cheek. But I hope you’ll like it – for all of three minutes. In a few months’ time, we’ll mostly forget about the print Britannica just as we’ve mostly forgotten about card catalogs. Indeed, anyone younger than me won’t even know what they are. And we as a society will be alright. Digression is important for learning, but it doesn’t entail alphabetical order.

Ten

2012-03-09T10:51:42Z

Well into my freshman year of high school, extreme boredom led me to give in and start a “blog-in-kind”. Ten years later, here we are.

Tittles and flourishes

2012-02-22T12:00:00Z

(Oh, typographers and their silly terminology.)

One of the crazier projects I’ve begun recently has been to transcribe a 500-page trilingual dictionary from the 17^th century for Wikisource, the wiki document archive affiliated with Wikipedia. The dictionary in question, Alexandre de Rhodes’s Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum, defined what would come to be known as the Vietnamese alphabet.

In one of the first attempts to apply a European alphabet to an Asian, tonal language, de Rhodes had to innovate somewhat. For the Annamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary, he derived two additional letters and invented three completely original diacritical marks. He also mixed and matched from at least a few European languages in what his contemporaries must have considered cutting-edge phonetics. Yet, in the midst of the Renaissance, typographical flourishes – and typos – also abound in de Rhodes’ works, which were published by the Propaganda Fide, the missionary organ of the Catholic Church in Rome.

The result is a mix of traditional details and prescient quirks. De Rhodes’ novel, 17^th-century alphabet continues to the present day largely intact. But some of the letters and diacritics he invented have gone extinct or now represent different sounds. The rich display of ligatures and swashes, then common in printed text, appear only tongue-in-cheek or erroneously today. In particular, de Rhodes’ type designer sometimes kept the tittle on his accented “i”, depending on the diacritical mark.

As in most historical literature, these typographical details are easily lost when the text gets digitized. So to help preserve these anomalies, I adapted an existing, well-regarded medievalist typeface, Peter S. Baker’s Junicode, for archaic Vietnamese texts like de Rhodes’. I beefed up support for modern Vietnamese; trimmed the font down to just the characters in Vietnamese, Portuguese, and Latin; and added de Rhodes’ novel characters. The result is probably the first font to support the letter being proposed for inclusion in the Unicode standard as “B with flourish”. It looks as though someone meant to write a “b” but midway through started drawing an “@” instead.

The font is named Đắc Lộ, the traditional rendering of de Rhodes’ name in Vietnamese. Even if you can’t read Vietnamese, the font’s download page is worth a look. Intent on replicating the old-world book feel, I stuck to typography, rather than imagery, to make the case for a rich but sturdy typeface. There are no images. Đắc Lộ is embedded as a Web font, and (in Firefox and Camino) you can barely discern a completely textual table of glyphs on the back side of the page, thanks to some shameless CSS trickery.

With typography out of the way, it’s time to continue transcribing the dictionary. I’ve gotten to the Bs so far.

Thanks to Peter S. Baker for giving his font a generous license. My efforts in this space are trivial compared to his.

Full stop

2011-12-06T20:07:51Z

Google’s shutting down their Code Search service next month. Now how will I search the world’s outdated source code repositories for hidden Perl poetry?

Doghouse

2011-12-02T22:07:00Z

Traffic lights in Northern California are horribly inefficient. Whenever you want to make a left turn at an intersection, you typically wait up to a few minutes for the protected green light to come on for your lane. Protected greens are great, except they only come after protected reds, where the opposing lanes have no traffic and only your car is anywhere near the intersection. This arrangement is only a big deal because the area’s roads are so overarchitected: absolutely every turn lane has a separate, protected traffic light – or three – and there are turn lanes at every intersection large enough to require a traffic light.

Things were better in Ohio, where I learned to drive. There, traffic engineers used the protective/permissive left turn pattern that combines the straight and turn lane signals into a single, five-light “doghouse” signal. They make a lot of sense, especially at T-intersections. When you want to turn left, either there’s a protected green, or there’s a normal green in which you pretend there wasn’t ever a turn signal to begin with.

The various states of a doghouse signal at a T-intersection. (Animation drawn in PowerPoint:mac and composed using ImageMagick.)

Doghouse signals also have their drawbacks: depending how they’re programmed, they can lead to the dangerous yellow trap. Basically, the light turns yellow while you’re in the intersection, blocked from turning left by oncoming traffic, which continues to have a green light. That’s actually an issue with arrow-less, permissive traffic signals, too. But I don’t recall ever using any intersection in southwestern Ohio that allowed for a yellow trap: protected greens were always followed by normal green or red lights in both directions.

Doghouse signals have already been adopted in Merced. Hopefully someday they’ll make it out to the Bay Area.

Pointless blue button

2011-12-02T09:30:00Z

Minh’s Notes is now responsible for the most pointless use of the word “app” in recorded history. When posting a comment here, you can finally use your Facebook identity, thanks to a new Minh’s Notes app. “Studio” may sport an intimidating comment form, but there’s no resisting a tantalizingly blue Facebook login button – right?

In fact, this blog’s Movable Type installation allows you to sign in using a variety of services, including AIM. However, just like an unwieldy Facebook friends list, the list of services was due for a little trimming, so out went WordPress and LiveJournal.

LiveJournal met the cutting block because they’d just permabanned me for “search engine optimization”. Apparently that’s the polite term for meeting your readers where they read. Hey, I was chasing eyeballs, not search engines.

But enough about LiveJournal. The Facebook app does nothing but let you sign into this website. So nothing ever appears on your News Feed, and (as far as I can tell) your WPM typing speed doesn’t get submitted to the FBI for behavioral analysis. More importantly, there are no “Like” buttons. I can’t stand those tantalizingly blue buttons.

Movable Type administrators: Get this minimal Facebook integration with minimal fuss by installing the latest version of the Facebook Commenters Plugin from GitHub.

Human-readable chicken scratch

2011-11-27T07:55:00Z

From the department of what-was-I-waiting-for, Minh’s Notes got a much-deserved makeover this past Monday, with a new motto, “human-readable chicken scratch”, and a hand-made theme called “Studio”. Yes, you may find the stickies and index cards unbearably cliché, but at least it’s all printed on 100% post-consumer recycled bits.

“Studio” is a lesson in missed opportunities. The design made it from concept during summer 2006 to working demo sometime in 2007, but then it languished on my hard drive for another four years. This thing called “programming” kinda got in the way.

In the meantime, the browser industry marched forward with ever-increasing support for HTML and CSS, forcing me to rewrite the mockups several times. Ultimately, the hard work that produced “Studio” circa 2007 – all the triumphs of CSS wizardry – got thoroughly obsoleted by simple one-liners circa 2011. And it even mostly works in Internet Explorer! (But no matter which browser you use, make sure it’s up-to-date; otherwise, this site will be a mess.)

Of all things, it was Facebook nixing their Import Notes feature that finally spurred me to revive “Studio” and get it into working order. Although the redesign didn’t make Facebook’s deadline, I’ll still slip blurbs for Minh’s Notes into my feed once in awhile.

“Studio” goes public already a bit aged, but there’s still some novelty left in it. Hopefully the masthead reminds you of uncovering your reading assignment line by line with those paper “straight-edges” in second grade. And the comment form should remind you of a standard application form – unless you’re one of those newfangled youngsters who earned your first dollar via PayPal. Plus, those annoying half-boxes around each letter will throw off the spammers – for another half-second.

On the technological side, the archives employ dot leaders along arbitrarily long lines. Less typographically refined are the comment and TrackBack counts on entry archives, written as tally marks using a custom font that I cobbled together. It doesn’t automatically do the math on an arbitrary number, alas; instead, you have to write out an addition problem. If you’re using a browser that supports Web Fonts, you can see it here: 5+5+5+5+3.

There’s a long-winded colophon for this site now, if you’re into that sort of thing. In any case, I’m just glad it’s all done. Now I can get back to writing.

It fell in the woods

2011-04-14T06:00:00Z

Last month, Google began detecting faint 404 signals from my first website, the online presence of an effectively fictional school newspaper. The product of many fruitful hours in Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, The Loveland Schools Press ONLINE drew a whopping ten minutes of attention from my sixth grade class, in between teacher-mandated doses of ClarisWorks and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.

In 1998, a cheapskate like me couldn’t find a better host than Fuse Internet Solutions: back then, with a standard Internet subscription, you could get 10 MB of space, a free hit counter widget, and a URL that didn’t begin with some bizarre “neighborhood” name. So the choice between my ISP and GeoCities was a no-brainer.

The newspaper has since moved on and shuttered at one of those ad-supported hosts. But in a fit of self-deprecating humor, I kept its original Under Construction page online. May it serve as an example of what can go wrong at the intersection of amateur journalism and animated GIFs.

My fellow netizens

2011-04-01T09:45:00Z

Since you and I last convened upon this well-preserved relic of the 2000s, the world as we know it has changed dramatically, as evidenced by an incremented version number.

All major browsers now support , which will soon be deployed in the fight to deprecate radio">.

Wikipedia has turned ten – old enough to use a calculator in math class, which should help with credibility. Vandalism has been reverted. Spam has been deleted. (Applause from the Deletionists.) Citations have been added. More are needed.

Unfortunately, this occasion is also met with sour news. Our ally Movable Type, the once-scrappy personal blogging engine turned corporate content management publishing system framework platform framework, has regrettably lost. But its memory – version 4.35 of it – lives on at this blog, the state of which is strong. Thank you.

Silicon Valley for Midwesterners 1.0

2010-06-09T09:50:00Z

A hearty welcome to a good Midwestern friend of mine, self-styled “The Author” (especially in face-to-face conversation), who has followed me into the code-tourist trap apparently known as “Sam Clam’s disco”. You’ll love it here: it’s the most culturally and technologically advanced population center this side of the Asteroid Belt, judging solely by the number of iPhones in use at any given moment. (Honestly, Mars & co. aren’t much competition.)

You’ll probably appreciate these ~~useful~~ use-relative tips from a fellow Midwesterner who’s been stuck in these parts for the last few years:

The City and County of San Francisco holds a monopoly on all destinations in “the City”. Most of the other municipalities reduced their market share to a combined 5‰ after throwing their support behind the Raiders decades ago.
If someone asks what party you belong to, you’re in tricky waters: liberalism only extends roughly 50 miles from the corner of Jackson and Stockton in the City, near which point stands an X-rated fortune cookie factory. (Of course it’s relevant.) But beyond that, you’re in territory so red it makes those cheap plastic cups look downright green. Anyways, just say you’re with the Flat-Pluto Society, for if there’s one thing the locals love more than a partisan fight, it’s a lost cause.
Supposedly the cops here aren’t allowed to blame you for the enhanced framerate built into their standard-issue sunglasses.
Though this is Northern California, you’ll find plenty of SoCal expatriates who care deeply about definite articles. So to head off the 101 / the 101 controversy, just call it “Root 101”, nice and proper.
A visit to Costco requires a full day off work, just to navigate the crowds. Your manager may be able to provide you with a canned out-of-office response that consists of: “Costco run.”
Chipotle burritos don’t count as burritos. They aren’t served with habañeros from a kitchen on wheels for less than $5.
Snow is what you put in a cone, not what you toss into the street only to have Public Works shove right back onto your driveway.
Bookmark this page, so you know whether that shaking came from the rock a mile down or your neighbors a floor up.
Get a GPS, so you don’t accidentally get stuck in an infinite loop.
Cell phone reception is terrible, so ditch it and grab a landline. TV reception is fickle, so ditch it and read the newspaper. Local GPS data is poor, so ditch it and buy an atlas. Electricity is spotty some years, so ditch it and dig out your kerosene lamp instead.

Did I mention it’s the most technologically advanced population center this side of the Asteroid Belt?

AVIM doesn’t fool around

2010-04-01T08:56:42Z

At midnight, the majority of the world’s search engine users dumped Google in favor of Mountain View–based Topeka.

AVIM was ready. The little input method editor that could has supported Topeka since its first release nearly four years ago. It comes with full support for Topeka Docs, which is great news for those of you who edit corn yield estimates in Vietnamese.

An archival photograph of AVIM working its magic on Topeka’s front page Internet ages ago.

But enough about Topeka. AVIM excels at so much more. I always tout how it “lets you type so naturally you won’t even notice it”. As a user, you should never have to worry how a webpage was implemented in order to use it. That’s why AVIM works in every single part of every single application it supports. That’s why it automatically resolves conflicts with other IMEs and even pioneers support for Microsoft Silverlight.

Today, as the popular Web comic xkcd unveiled its state-of-the-art “unixkcd” interface, I couldn’t help but notice that AVIM continues to do the right thing. What’s more natural for a command-line interface than pure, unmodified VIQR?

But as a software developer, I can’t rest on the merits of releases past. There’s still plenty of room for innovation in the input method editing space. And while I can’t commit to anything specific yet, I will say that my new input method is rockin’.

A triumphant return… to spam

2010-03-01T00:10:00Z

So apparently spambots consider a blog abandoned after six months. At that point, they increase the flow of comment spam tenfold, hoping the blog’s owner is asleep at the keyboard and has kindly left the floodgates open.

What a refreshing nap. And what a wonderful way to return to the blogosphere: awaiting me were thousands of comments pending approval. As usual, there were plenty of entry-to-entry salesmen peddling See One Alice and other fine products. But the spambots have been getting increasingly desperate, burying their hyperlinks within gushing compliments. They hail the entries from my high school days as “good”, “great”, and “pretty great”, fully expecting to shove their way onto my blog with deafening courtesy. Moral of the story: never trust a robot to recognize good writing. Or to produce any.

I did get some old-fashioned, hand-typed feedback during my absence. A decidedly human commenter called me, to paraphrase orthographically, a “———kin virgin”, whatever that means. A thoughtful reader announced the obsolescence of some software I released years ago. But not to worry: soon, they too will be assimilated by the vast army of spambots roaming this blogosphere.

In six months, I’d forgotten what fun it is to drag my readers through hundreds of words of pointless drivel, seasoned generously with outbound hyperlinks. My sincere thanks to the spambots for reminding me.

What we watched before YouTube

2009-07-10T15:59:31Z

After I introduced the HeadSprout back in April, several people asked me how I came up with the idea of a bike- and head-mounted digital television system. The best answer I could give was that a TV antenna and a bike helmet found themselves both in my field of vision at the same time.

The other day, I read a BBC Magazine article asking a teenager to trade his iPod for a Walkman for a week. Feeling nostalgic as I always do, I went rummaging through a drawer at home and found my old Sony Watchman. Slightly before my time, portable TV gadgets were all the rage. At some point, my family purchased an FD-250 model, probably at Sears, and it became my favorite toy growing up.

The Watchman FD-250 has the size and weight of a small book, but the antenna extends well over a foot.

The Watchman was my poor-man’s introduction to DXing. Whenever my family took a summer road trip, I’d bring the device along with me and tune in to various stations along the way, collecting their call letters as we entered large metropolitan areas. On the way to New Orleans, I would pick up numerous Louisville, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Birmingham stations this way.

It still works, after you pop in a fresh battery or two. The first thing you notice is how much consumer electronics have changed within just twenty-odd years. Get it? Watchman, Walkman? You know, Walkman, predecessor to the CD player? Like large MP3 players? Um, before iPods?

The Watchman’s screen is angled downward and pincushioned inward. Shown here is some old movie on channel 38. Even if you watched it on a state-of-the-art digital TV, it’d still be in black-and-white, so no loss here.

This particular Watchman model had a black-and-white CRT display. Actually, to give the device a less awkward form factor, the screen is just a mirror, angled to reflect the image produced by the CRT tube (below the screen in the photos). The fact that the screen is black-and-white shouldn’t be that surprising: in the early 1990s, you could still find plenty of full-size, black-and-white TV sets at family-run electronics stores (another relic of that decade).

Since nearly all Cincinnati-area stations stopped broadcasting in analog sometime last month, the Watchman can only receive three stations: WLWT 5, the Cincinnati NBC affiliate; WKEF 22, the Dayton ABC affiliate; and WBQC 38, an independent station in Cincinnati that airs kung-fu movies and similar fare. As a low-power station, WBQC isn’t required to give up their analog signal yet, while the other two are airing nothing but DTV infomercials in a federally-mandated loop. The reception isn’t spectacular in any case – unidirectional VHF antennae never work well this far out from the city – but the Watchman was built for mobility, not kung-fu movies.

If I had the right cables, I could restore the Watchman to full working condition by hooking a converter box up to its A/V In jack. Then I could watch digital TV in glorious black-and-white, and it would be plenty more convenient than HeadSprout. But that’s a project for another day.

Introducing the HeadSprout

2009-04-02T04:30:00Z

For the past three months, I along with five partners have toiled in stealth mode to build a disruptive product that will revolutionize media consumption as we know it, by synergizing television watching with bicycle riding. Leveraging unparalleled loyalties to both recreational activities, it is our intent to forge a new market based on mobile multimedia and capitalize upon emerging opportunities.

In short: we have developed the HeadSprout, the world’s first fully-integrated bike- and head-mounted digital television system.

]]> Mobile television has been a tragically untapped market thus far in the United States. Because the vast majority of television viewers are accustomed to consuming broadcasting from the comfort of a living room, various companies have failed to make significant inroads in taking television out of the house.

Our approach is to start with perhaps the most mobile segment of the American population: college students. Typically without the resources to own a car, many college students are confined to their bicycles as their only means of transportation. Additionally, the college environment has historically seen less broadcast entertainment, since many students find themselves without the time to passively watch television or listen to the radio, and most do not have access to a living room. Paradoxically, individuals from this demographic tend to follow sporting events and other regularly scheduled programming more fanatically than younger or indeed older Americans.

In short: don’t you wish you could keep up with March Madness even while biking to class? Of course you do. Wouldn’t it be great to magically sprout antennae and continue watching the live coverage? Of course it would.

And that’s where HeadSprout shines. Using our patent-pending, non-invasive head mount technology, HeadSprout provides a quick and easy way to keep a bidirectional VHF receiver attached to the part of you that receives the best television reception: your head. This configuration transforms a previously frustrating process – adjusting the antenna for improved reception – into a very natural action: cocking ones head in various directions. The receiver is connected, via insulated wires or a coaxial cable, to a compact NTSC/ATSC tuning device clipped to the bicycle frame. A USB cord then runs forward to a mobile touchscreen device (sold separately), which is finally mounted to the handlebars via off-the-shelf components.

But what about controlling the television unit? Since our apparatus is designed to integrate with a mobile touchscreen device, the obvious solution would be to stop there and force cyclists to use the touchscreen while biking. However, we found key deficiencies in this model during preliminary testing. Specifically, I involved myself in a multi-bike pileup in the Intersection of Death while attempting to operate the touchscreen with one hand.

Instead, we focused on more deeply integrating the television interface with the bicycle itself. For example, we found that changing channels is analogous to the process of changing gears, familiar to all but the youngest of bikers. Therefore, channels and gears are now controlled using the same dial, typically built into one of the handlebars. We also discovered that bikers tend to shift attention away from the television screen when braking, such as at busy intersections. In our apparatus, live television is paused whenever the brakes are pressed with sufficient firmness.

It’s simple, conceptually, but the trick is getting it all to work together. We have pioneered a safe, durable apparatus that integrates all these parts into a package that can be easily installed onto an existing bicycle. With minor modifications, it will even be possible to support tricycles, tandems, and unicycles.

Our current design has undergone substantial testing, and we believe it is nearly ready for more widespread use. In fact, our team has used the system religiously for the past two weeks, with excellent results. (Namely, we know all about the latest soap operas and Power Rangers episodes. What an odd lot we are.)

Only two minor caveats remain: first, it is usually necessary to remain completely stationary (including holding one’s breath) in order to receive digital signals reliably. We believe this is an issue out of our control and a fault on the part of the ATSC. Fortunately, there is a simple workaround. Second, VHF antennae usually extend upwards by a few feet. We have noted a variety of responses to our unique design from passers-by, ranging from the playfully curious to the downright malicious, due to the antennae’s prominence. With the slight vertical footprint also comes a somewhat heightened risk of brushing into trees or having low clearances pull you right off your bike.

In the future, we hope to eliminate the HeadSprout’s physical footprint – already much less than that of 18-wheelers and earth-moving machinery – by engineering an UHF antenna into a specially-designed helmet. The effectiveness of such helmets has been proven in life-or-death situations. We also plan to contract with eyeglass HUD manufacturers. Soon, you won’t even need to glance away from the road to view television, thanks to an opaque image of the current channel superimposed onto your regular field of vision.

We concede that the world is not expecting an advance in blue sky technology from these quarters. But we are confident that it needs one. As such, we fully intend to take this concept to production by the beginning of April next year. If you or someone you know is a venture capitalist with hoards of cash and a love for sophomoric technologies, please get in touch. Also, if you are a licensed psychologist, we could probably use your help too.

If you would like to keep up with the latest news on our venture, please submit the short form below:

All the photos in this post are the work of HeadSprout photo wizard Agustin Ramirez. Happy April!