Kindle or iPad - the Battle of the Small(-ish) Giants

Obviously, at the time of this writing, I don't own an iPad. They are about to ship in a few weeks, though, and I think it's a good moment to reflect on eReaders from a reader's perspective.
I read lots of books, in the order of three to four each month. I bought a Kindle a year back, when it still cost $349, and was all excited when I got it. The idea was intriguing: you get a device that is a replacement of a whole library. You don't have to lug around books, and you can even download new books at a discount directly from the store.
The implementation, on the other hand, leaves much to be desired. The opportunity was definitely there for Apple to march into the field, and they certainly did. The low-end iPad is certainly compatible price-wise with the Kindle (the equivalent in functionality, with 3G module, clearly isn't), and the deals Apple has been pushing with content providers are working in its favor.
Let's review what's good and bad about the Kindle first:
Good About Kindle

• e-ink. The Kindle is amazingly easy to read, especially in conditions that are punishing for a normal computer display. I can take my Kindle to the pool, to the beach, on a train, and never have to worry about bright conditions spoiling my enjoyment. Especially because I particularly enjoy reading in the sun.
• Battery life. I can leave my Kindle unplugged for weeks before it complains it needs a charge. It's wonderful! Of all my gadgets, the Kindle is the only one that survives for the amount of time I expect it to, and that translates to reliability. A device that needs to be plugged in all the time, especially a device (like the iPods or iPhones) that come with a weird non-standard plug is totally useless to me.
• Online connectivity. The ability to download a new book or magazine once I am done or bored with the current reading is incredibly important and alone worth buying a Kindle. Imagine you are at the beach and suddenly in the mood for a tome on Non-standard Analysis. What to do? You are not going to run and get one, you are just not going to read.

Unfortunately, that's pretty much it. A few items could have been used strategically but weren't - for instance the fact it runs Linux could have been used to make it expandable, but that isn't happening. It was a really stupid choice and would have given a leg up to Amazon, especially considering what was going on in parallel on the iPhone, but Amazon slept through that.
On the negative side, we have a bunch of problems. Some of them are strategically addressed by the iPad, some others aren't.
Bad About Kindle

• Screen size vs. device size. An eReader is a device to read. All I want from it is a screen. All interaction with the eReader should be done via the screen. Not so with the Kindle: all interaction occurs with a keyboard at the bottom, buttons on the side, and a joystick menu. That's plain horrible, and I wonder what Amazon was thinking when they came up with that concept. For starters, the keyboard is virtually unusable: the keys are too small, the tactile feedback too weak, the keys spaced too far apart. Using that keyboard is so bad, I find even an on-screen keyboard a better solution. Then there is the joystick, which is unusable as soon as you use a protective cover - which is almost mandatory. You end up with a whole lot of useless buttons when all you want is screen. 
• Better annotations. It goes without saying that the terrible keyboard does its part in this, but right now the Kindle is quite bad at taking annotations. First there is the dreadful joystick you have to use to get to a particular section of the text, where all you want to do is point at it. Then you have to type the annotation using the crappy keyboard. Finally, the annotation is not saved in any format you could find useful unless you have it on the Kindle. Even there, then, the annotation isn't something whose visibility you can turn on and off, like in a Word document for revisions. Instead it appears as a footnote. Bleh. If Amazon realized how important annotations are, how wonderful it is for a reader to be able to scribble annotations on the side and to turn them on or off at will (something you cannot do in a real book), they might even do a little more work about them.
  
• Big Brother is Watching You. I don't think Amazon could have done more damage to the Kindle than what it did when it deleted legally obtained books from Kindles. It was a strange case: someone sold a book on the public domain market not knowing the book was still under copyright (understandable, considering the bizarre length of copyright claims). The people that bought the book didn't know this was against the law, but the books were still deleted from their Kindles without warning. One morning they were there, the next they weren't, and they could do absolutely nothing about it. For a reader, the problem is not technical or legal, it is emotional: I love books. When I buy one, it's mine. I treat them well: the text books I had in college 20 years ago still look like new, through something like 15 moves in three countries and across 12 time zones. I don't want to buy a "book" only to find out that it's gone. Even just the possibility of that occurring is horrible enough that it makes me extremely reluctant to ever buy an eBook on the Amazon store. Amazon should make it clear in writing that it is never under any circumstances going to remove a book from your device or your online storage without first obtaining my consent. It can generously charge me if there is an issue, but removing the book without my consent is absolutely not an option.
• More Stores. When you go to Amazon, they do a good job at offering you choices. You see the book at a given price, but then there are a series of "New and Used" books you can get potentially at a (substantial) discount. That's all gone when you shop for eBooks. Amazon is the only seller, and you are not even given any option. You buy the book from Amazon, or you have to go offline, download the book and manually install it onto your Kindle. You used to not even be able to read text files and PDF - fortunately I believe the latest software update does away with that oddity.

The iPad, of course, is not really an eReader. The short battery life makes it quite impossible to rely on (in that it's intensely different from a cell phone, since you are typically much less focused on your eReader and forget to charge it much more frequently). The price is too high, the screen makes it useless outdoors. To be sure, there are going to be lots of Apple freaks that will buy one, even stand in line to get one on the first day it comes out, but for a person that likes reading, the iPad is a bust.
What about apps? What about color?
I don't know about apps, mostly because I have trillions of other gadgets that offer better app experience than my eReader. I have my trusted N900 for everything gamey, my netbook for everything that requires a real OS. If I had to choose between using the Kindle for games and having two weeks of battery time, you know where my heart is.
On the other hand, apps that expand my reading experience and make it more enjoyable, those would be extremely welcome, especially if they do not significantly alter my overall experience. I could envision a forum app that functions as a virtual reading community, where I could discuss a particular chapter or phrase in a book. I could envision an Atlantic app that would tell me which articles match keywords in the book I am reading. That kind of thing. And, of course, crossword puzzles, sudoku, and scrabble. Online. Low bandwidth, low computing power.
Color is definitely a no-no. Yeah, sure, I heard a lot about text books and the need for color, and there is definitely a market for it. Just not for me. I find color beautiful, very important, but if I had to sacrifice the battery life, forget it. Once there are color e-ink displays with the same characteristics as black/white ones, I'd switch, but to go from e-ink to LCD: no way!

The Traffic Lights of UCSD

I love everything about living in San Diego, even after an El Nino winter. The one thing I absolutely cannot stand is traffic. It's not that my area (UCSD) is terribly congested, it's that the traffic lights have a perverse way of slowing you down for no reason at all.
It all starts with the people. San Diegans are your average Southern Californians, to whom being in a car is a way of life and the availability of distraction is a fundamental civic right. As a result, traffic moves in the strangest patterns, and people have the hardest time getting started after a light turns green.
The next thing that is unpleasant are the giant boulevards that make up most of the roadways here. Usually, that should speed up traffic, but since there are many malls and the weather is nice, there are a lot of pedestrians (good) that take up incredibly long to cross these inner city speedways.
Which gets us finally to the final piece in my traffic tragedy: the traffic lights. They were built some time in the 80s or 90s and have triggers that tell the light when someone drove up. The idea, back in the day, was that traffic was going to flow better if the lights turned only as needed. Sounds good, right? The light stays green for the main direction of traffic for the longest time, and only when someone needs to turn does the light follow suit. Similarly, as soon as the main direction of traffic is in a lull, the light turns and lets the "minority direction" pass.
That sounds plausible. Now imagine what happens when traffic is moderately heavy, like most of the day: car trickle in from all different directions at about constant rate. The enormous amount of time it takes to cross an intersection plus the slow response times of San Diegans conspire to creating extremely long cycles for the lights, which means there is pretty much always someone waiting for the light to turn.
Perversion comes in: you get to a light that is turning red. You slow down, you wait for the light to turn green again. Then you start, and you get to the next light. Of course, since you were waiting with everybody else at the light before, there is no traffic ahead of you. A lull. The next light interprets it as a lull in traffic and turns red. You get to the next light just in time for it to turn, and you wait at the next light, too.
The perversion continues: the same story repeats light after light, and to cover the short distance of UCSD campus, you take 12 minutes - three times as long as you would when the lights don't turn, or 8 minutes of waiting for 4 minutes of driving.
And that, dear folks, just drives me crazy.

YHIHF: The Open Society

Story from my youth: a family friend from Italy married a German lady. Italians tend to be lax about government, Germans punctilious. When time came for the yearly income tax declaration, the man prepared the forms at the very last second, as Italians are wont to do, and gave them to his German wife to submit the morning after.
Curious as she was, the German lady looked at the forms are shouted in disbelief, "Husband, that's not your real income! You make three times as much! You are a government employee, you can't declare to the government that you make less than the government pays you!"
I know what you are all thinking: what the heck was the guy telling his wife how much money he made if he didn't tell the government. But that's not the focus of the story. Instead, the husband looked at the German wife (whose strictness he may or may not have found slightly arousing) and told her, "Wife, if I declare more, then everybody in the tax office is going to ask why this one guy makes three times as much as everybody else in the office!"
It used to be indeed the case that information was something hard to come by. Not any more. Now, the government knows how much you make before you do, and information about you is available everywhere. For those of us that grew up in the past, this is a terrifying notion. In one of my previous jobs, I worked for a company that worried a lot about cyber-security, and I knew very well what kinds of threats there were and how you could exploit things.
This coming generation, though, the Millennials are going for a completely different approach. They are simply ignoring the risks. Sometimes they wake up with a bad headache, sometimes an old photo of their drinking under age, posted on Facebook a decade prior, surfaces to prevent them from getting a job as librarian. But all in all, they seem to be pretty happy the way they live.
Now, the thing is that the approach is not bad at all, not even really that insecure - it's just that you have to go all the way with information. You either keep it close or you open it all up, and the end result is the same. It's just in the netherworld of information openness that problems occur.
What do I mean? Currently, we have two economies that run in parallel and with a few exchange points: cash and electronic. Cash transactions are non-traceable (hence the information content is low). Electronic transactions are traceable. If all exchanges happened electronically, we wouldn't have to ever worry about theft, If something was taken from you, there would be a record of where that money went, who took it, and ways to get it back. It's only when you can turn electronic money into cash that problems arise, because nobody knows where cash goes.
That's not limited to money. Another example: GPS and the laws of the road. A "friend of mine" rode his motorcycle on I-5, from San Diego to San Francisco. Posted speed limit: 65. Minimum speed on the freeway: 90. This "friend of mine" was pretty much forced to drive at everybody's speed, since the freeway was congested and the greatest risk for a motorcycle is being hit from behind.
Now, with GPS in all cell phones, there is certainly the possibility and eventually the certainty that the government (in this case, Highway Patrol) will gain the right to track your speed. What happens then? Will the information be something we hold on to until we are forced to surrender it because of an accident?
Fact is, there is something deeply hypocritical about a law that everybody ignores. Posting a speed limit that is 25 mph lower than the average speed of traffic is a puzzling act. That we acquiesce to it is even more puzzling. We don't care, because it's not enforced.
Imagine what will happen, though, when law enforcement will gain access to your current location and speed: you will be automatically fined whenever you exceed the speed limit, which in current traffic is probably virtually everywhere and at all times, at least on California freeways outside of congested areas.
What about the lady whose drunken photo was found during a routine web search by her prospective employer? What about the man, just diagnosed with cancer, that was dropped by his health insurance because he hadn't declared a wart for which he had been treated? Are those urban myths?
It doesn't really matter: the essence is clear, information can be negative for you. Of course, the opposite is true, as well. Employers that discriminate (like in the case of the "drunken lady") will be noted for their bigotry. Health insurance providers that stiff the customers will be crucified.
Europe, always a little more backwards in time, has declared that it intends to combat information overload by making information private. I understand where Europe comes from, but America has always been an open society, and it's time to open it up even more. Where there have been circumstantial barriers, we should remove them as soon as they become visible.
Once the Highway Patrol notices that 90 mph is the norm on a stretch of highway without causing accidents, the legislature needs to notice. Once it is clear that a particular pattern is used for discriminating behavior, the legislature needs to act.

OpenServices.org

Well, the name is not that important - I use it just to conceptualize an idea. What the actual implementation should be named, well, that's up for grabs. The idea, though, is phenomenally good. I came up with it, after all. (Where is your sarcasmey when you need one?)

You know all about open source. One of the things you might know about open source that is not about open source is that most of the largest web infrastructure companies use open source software throughout their stack. Be it Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and what you have: if they are big, they use open source.

(The only major exception, for obvious reasons, is MSN/Live/Bing.)

The sad thing is that these companies (with the notable exception of Google) rarely give something back to open source. In particular, not even Google releases the source of their main site software. Of course we understand that (sort of). But if there is a market for open source software, why not for open source services?

What is the basic idea of openservices.org? It would be a site or a series of federated sites that not only publish all the software they are written with, but also function in an open source fashion. That means that, while they are run by a group of dedicated and security/stability-conscious admins, the software that runs on them is the result of open collaboration.

You'll say, but we already have something like that! It's called Wikipedia! And I say, well yes, that's exactly what I am thinking of. But more than Wikipedia. Slay the dragon and bypass all the stupid restrictions and costs of the sites you know.

Let's go a step back. In Internet Theory, we classify four types of sites:

1. Anonymous sites - sites that do not make use of the user's identity at all, like www.yahoo.com or www.google.com
2. Registered sites - sites that allow for and possibly require a registration, but that do not store information other than user credentials and preferences from that site, like my.yahoo.com or igoogle.com
3. Private sites - sites that store real world information about a person (instead of just a user), like mail.yahoo.com or gmail.com
4. Restricted sites - private sites that are behind additional protections required by law, by industry standard, or by company policy, like credit card processing sites

There is plenty software available for anonymous sites, and a lot of software for registered sites, but very few projects address the needs of users of private sites. On the other hand, much of the economic action in low-hanging fruits is happening in that very area.

One of the strange anomalies of the Internet is the kinds of sites that can attract large amounts of paying customers. There are porn sites, of course, but there are more free alternatives available now, so that market is drying out.

There are betting sites. They derive their attractiveness mostly from the fact they or their content are banned from several jurisdictions (most notably the United States or part of them). As a result, the demand for such sites can only be met by illegal or semi-legal operations, which as usual create a black market.

There are gaming sites. Here the attractiveness comes from the quality of the product alone, and from the fact that the games become dull after a while. I am talking about sites like World of Warcraft. But the amount of effort that goes into a good online game is way ahead of the pure programming, as places like OpenSim show.

Then there is the last one: personals sites. The application is simple, almost painfully so. From a programmer's perspective, it's a collection of profiles and some way to match them. On many sites, the way to match is simply by searching using a form that might as well have been created in 1994. I would call that the lowest-hanging fruit.

How would OpenServices.org work? There would be four arms:

1. Software development - the creation, publication, and maintenance of all the software on the services
2. Systems administration - the ownership of the servers and the installation of software updates
3. Creative and project management - pushing through the next generation of features
4. Quality - making sure that the new software works reliably

Why would anyone want to work on OpenServices.org? Because it's a great way to introduce yourself to the world. Right now, one of the biggest hindrances for young engineers trying to get into the workforce is lack of experience. I can understand (having been on the hiring side of things) how an employer would feel reluctant to give someone with no experience a chance. At the same time, I can also see that it's really hard to break through the vicious circle of being required to have some form of experience to be able to gain more experience.

Now, imagine a site that works with a volunteer effort. Senior contributors get fancy titles and supervise (which also means, mentor) junior members. Coming out of, say, college, someone might already have several years of system administration experience, or creative design experience.

The only thing required for this to work is enough money for servers and bandwidth. Seems a win-win scenario for everybody. With the possible exception of match.com and eHarmony.

Historica II: Google Sketchup

Leave it to Google to invent something incredibly useful. Sketchup is a site that Google devoted to 3D modeling of the earth. You go there to find models of buildings and whole cities, and you can contribute by creating your own models in 3D using the (Windows-only) Sketchup software.

The range of models available right now is fairly interesting, if not particularly large. There are models of things like Athens (and Vienna, Madrid, and a host of other cities), woodworking (furniture, etc.) and building pieces. It's all very good.

Google seems to have gotten into the business trying to get 3D models for its Google Earth application, which is the attempt at realistic rendering of the Earth in an application. It used to be the first application I used to get satellite imagery, until it was merged into Google Maps to give us the (infinitely useful) Satellite View.

Personally, I find the current state of the world a lot less interesting than the past. While Google seems to spend all this time and other people's energy to get a 3D model for use in one of its applications, the uses for Historica are much wider:

• Virtual tours for tourists (or people that want to visit)
• Historical reconstruction (research)
• Research for writers
• Education/teaching
• Realistic game play
• Planning and urban development

Historica I: OpenSim

One of the projects I've been wanting to start on is a reconstruction of the world as it appeared at different points in time, a sort of historic view of what places like Chang'an, Athens, Rome, or even New York City looked like in the past.

The basic idea is that the information is all there, but it's invisible. We have it piecemeal - there is the outstandingly visual model of ancient Rome in the Museum of Roman Antiquity, there are models of ancient and modern cities, there are maps, there are views. But there is no consistent model.

Now, imagine you actually created a place like Wikipedia, where everybody interested can create a model of a city, of a building, and add the time coordinates when it existed. Then you'd be able to walk through an ancient city, or through New York in 1928, or watch San Francisco the way it looked like in 1989.

I had been working for months on this, trying to get different pieces of software to play together. The last thing I worked on was delta3d, a collection of open source projects that are made to play nice with each other. It has an interesting Python interface with which it's a real pleasure to play.

The real jump in interest, though, came when I found OpenSim. I am not sure how the project started, fact is it tries to be as compatible to SecondLife as can be. You can download the whole thing, compile it, and make it work. It's quite useless right now, since there aren't a lot of compelling applications, but it could do exactly what Historica needs.

Here is a link to the software:
http://opensimulator.org/

Cloud Computing Your Self

We are getting used more and more to applications in the cloud, and we are getting more and more comfortable storing even private data on servers over which we have absolutely no control. It's quite risky on one hand, but on the other it offers enormous convenience.

We use web sites for all sorts of services, and more often than not this is done with no significant risk to our identity. I have successfully changed my address at the DMV site, paid the registration to my car, gotten a copy of my birth certificate online (from Italy, no less), and filed taxes. It's really amazing.

One thing that I find strangely missing, though, is a virtualization of my self. Of course, I don't mean the flesh thing that is hacking at the keyboard right now. I mean my preferences and personal data.

I am a computer junkie. I have more computing devices at home right now than you'll find at the nearest Fry's, and each one of them has to be configured over and over again. Pretty much any computer I get is immediately repartitioned, Kubuntu installed on it, and then I start the laborious process of moving my user preferences on it.

I went through a ton of different options, and ended up linking all the configuration files I need into a directory. The directory then is under version control, and to create the new environment I check out that directory and run a linking script in it.

That's great, but there is no provision for changes in format. When I switched from Pidgin to Kopete, for instance, I lost all my log files. Same would be true switching from one music player (Amarok) to another (Rhythmbox). Then there are the different formats for address books, etc.

Strangely, though, the one issue that most people seem to agree upon is the need to synchronize bookmarks. While the companies and projects that sync calendars and address books do both a crappy job and are fairly rare, the projects that offer automatic syncing of bookmarks are plentiful and outstandingly stable.

It's been a while, now, that these projects have started including online storage. The first one I've used was XMarks, a Firefox extension that has been meanwhile ported to other browsers, as well. XMarks allows you to synchronize your bookmarks and (optionally) your browsing data (including stored passwords) to the XMarks server. The data is protected using a passphrase (and one hopes the XMarks folks do as they claim and encrypt the data on their servers and do not store the passphrase).

I recently switched from XMarks to Weave, the corresponding Mozilla project. Like all Mozilla projects, it's open source, which means (a) I can read the code and determine whether it does as I think it should, and (b) I can run my own copy of the server software if I don't like the idea of Mozilla having access to my personal data.

Now, I recently got a new computer - a "gaming" laptop that I use to run intensive compilation runs. Well, I installed Firefox, installed Weave, entered my user info and - voilá! - the new Firefox looked like the old one on this computer. Miracles.

Of course you think, now, that it's something that never happens to you. Well, you are wrong: your personal info is something you typically enter into every new phone that you buy. As a matter of fact, I know people that stick with old phones just because they don't want to go through the pain of moving their phone book over.

Some phones (like Windows Mobile or the iPhone) make the transition easier. The cheaper phones typically don't. But there is absolutely no reason for it, and it should go without saying that your entire virtual persona is available online for you to download whenever you get a new phone.

Why is that so important? Because if you have no barrier to switching phones, you will be more likely to buy a phone that suits your needs of the moment. You could rent a phone more easily if you knew your information is on it, you would switch phones more easily if there was no pain involved. You would stop looking at your phone as a treasure trove and investment and more as what it is: a communication device.