The Revenge of the Sith, the Fallen and the Rising Cobra. Reloaded.

Behold, the incredible shrinking movie, not so much in length as in breadth and depth: G. I. Joe runs for 1 hour 58 minutes; Star Wars (1977) ran for 2 hrs 1 minute. The latter developed several characters (and two droids) in a good deal of depth, introduced a galactic empire, a mystical order of warriors, a psychokinetic power, an energy blade weapon, a moon-sized space station and a lot of other things (all new to the viewer) while telling a decent story. The former on the other hand, is a movie of a well known franchise with plenty of background that nevertheless spectacularly fails to achieve, well, anything. Anything, that is, except being a live action remake of Team America: World Police.

[Spoiler]

Amazingly, G.I. Joe covers the backstory of each character but the characters still remain essentially stereotypical: the Soldier (Duke), the Funny Black Guy who nevertheless comes through when it matters (Ripcord), the Tough General who cares but dare not show it (general whatshisname), the Babe (take your pick), the Cool Silent Guy (snake eyes) etc. The reason is that the movie rushes through the back stories, character development, explanations and basically everything that isn’t action, almost as if to say “character, schmaracter, now let’s get back to the ACTION!”. The Baroness’ and the doctor’s origins in particular could have been told much better — people just don’t turn evil on their heels like that. Also, the director doesn’t seem to understand the concept of pausing or slowing down – conversations and flashbacks cannot take place at the same pace as combat. There was no need to rush — they could have simply cut down on the action and told just one backstory, preserving some measure of mystery. Now they have nothing to tell in the sequel (yes, there is a sequel coming).

[End Spoiler]

The last three Star Wars movies, the two Transformers movies and the first of what promises to be several G.I. Joe movies were all clearly targeted at male teen audiences: thin on story, characters and complex issues, and thick on action, toys and scantily clad women (not that I’m complaining about the last three). Marketing and demographics have largely taken over the movie industry. It seems targeting a teenage audience not only maximizes revenue, but also cuts costs — younger viewers cannot sit in place for too long and therefore prefer shorter running times, which translates to lower production costs. Then of course you can fire the script writers, pull dialogs out of a hat and paste them together, sprinkle the whole thing with computer generated McGuffins, include all the boilerplate scenes (like the now hacked-to-death slow-motion Power Walk from The Right Stuff), hire the most-Googled actress of the year and Voila! Blockbuster.

All this has happened before and will happen again

On nothing more substantial than pure whim, I searched for “Statler and Waldorf heckle Obama” and “Joe Biden looks like Sam the Eagle” on the Internet. I found both. In a world where 1.6 billion (supposedly) intelligent beings generate and share information via an electronic network with over a trillion unique locations, it’s becoming increasingly easy to find people who have exactly what you’re looking for. Then I wondered what it would be like if there were a trillion people out and about (obviously not all on one planet).

There was once such a sci-fi novelette published in Analog called Tangible Light. In the heavily populated confederation of planets called the Reticulum, there is a place where people go to look for the life histories of people with the same phenotype as they. The statistics of large populations is such that they find five or six individuals who have followed almost exactly the same path through life, only specific details differing. The story is about one such individual whose father liquidates his entire estate so that he may get access to this information.

Stories aside, ours is a civilization that has existed for over 2000 years and has seen the coming and going of approximately 100 billion members. If we discount specific details owing to modern circumstances and technology, almost everything that you go through, somebody else somewhere, sometime has gone through before. The only problem is that we don’t have access to all that experience. Perhaps in the future we will. I hope for something far more advanced than Yahoo Answers or stackoverflow.com, something that will allow a person to search for individuals with similar phenotypes, especially those who have advanced beyond the point in life where he is at present, essentially giving him a glimpse into his possible futures and which actions will take him along which path. That’s the theory, anyway.

P.S. you may recall I put a negative spin on the same subject some time ago: You mean it’s all been written before?

P.S.2 the title is a homage to the Battlestar Galactica scriptures

How to kill off Word documents, Part II

Part I being I’ve got it! An Intraweb! Oh wait , where I argued against the notion of One True System for organizational knowledge management and instead in favor of:

a) Deploying a set of readily available free web applications,
b) Allowing users to post information wherever they prefer and,
c) Making all the databases searchable via a single interface

Some investigation reveals that Sphinx search can indeed be used to tie together several MySQL-based systems with text search capability. You might also noticed that I’ve added bbPress as the discussion group application, which I missed in the last post. This, I feel, is the bare minimum setup that can be deployed painlessly. It’ll cover personal blogs, microblogs, newsfeeds (via both blogs and microblogs), shared knowledge and discussion forums.

What it won’t cover:

1. Instant messaging
2. Access controlled documents
3. Maintaining and sharing diagrams
4. Social networking (?)

There appears to be a number of PHP based instant messaging applications about (such as php121) but I’m yet to be convinced about their stability and security. When I’ve tried out a few, I’ll let you know. As for access controlled documents, the solution is a content management system (CMS), but everything I’ve looked at so far tries to do too much and therefore puts me off. If I had to choose one, I’d choose modx.

Diagrams are the problem. This wouldn’t be much of a knowledgebase if it forced you to create your diagrams in something like Visio and upload as images. This would be especially problematic in my line of work where box-and-arrow diagrams are a must. Unfortunately, I know almost nothing about how to go about creating a web-based diagramming tool, except for the fact that the GD Library exists. And I’ve not come across any existing free diagramming tools built on top of it.

As for internal social networking, a few brave organizations have been toying with the idea of deploying their own internal “facebooks”. They do let employees get to know each other better, but as knowledge management tools, they seem to be rather redundant once the other services have been properly deployed.

Google Wave: Not as Expected

Having got hold of a Google Wave invite and playing with the application for two days, I must say Google has, for the first time ever, left me underwhelmed. I was expecting another one of their trademark minimalist applications with a fresh user interface idea. Alas, instead I got this:

 

Pros:

• It’s realtime – you can actually see other people typing (and even backspacing). Personally I’d put this under “cons” because I find it distracting. I’d rather have a comment do a slight blink while it’s being edited.
• Embedded rich content – as promised, images, videos, Google maps and other gadgets can be embedded
• It’s fast – for a rich application, it loads and works rather quickly
• Playback – you can play back the whole thing, one edit at a time, including your mistakes. Frankly I find this disturbing!

Cons:

• Microsoft-Outlook-like 3-pane navigator – I’m surprised they couldn’t think of anything better
• Clunky interface – Too many buttons and options
• Too much white space between comments (‘blips’ they call them?) - I can’t get more than a few comments per screenful
• It’s very difficult to locate unread items within a wave – you have to scroll all over the place looking for unread markers
• There is no access control – within a wave, you can edit and even delete other people’s comments
• You can’t just type-and-enter — you have to type and then either click “done” or hit SHIFT-enter, which sort of puts a damper on the whole real time thing

In my opinion, Wave does not replace email or chat or even discussion boards. If you’re using those services already, you’re better off sticking to them. However, if you’re using a Wiki or any sort of collaborative editing system, there’s something to be said for trying out Wave. If you want multiple parallel chat conversations, try something like Plurk.

In it’s current form, I doubt if Wave will become the ‘next-generation Internet communication medium’ it was designed to be. It will more likely be used for some specialized collaboration projects by professionals and will be largely ignored by everybody else. This, I believe, is what happens when a software project becomes more about showcasing technologies and programming skills rather than about serving the end user.

Trouble in the Cloud

Let me tell you something nifty about the application I’m using to write this blog post (that is, Windows Live Writer). It doesn’t bother me with files, directories or file names. I only have to deal with constructs of the domain — blog posts, post title and which blog to post to. Once published, I don’t have to worry about anything sitting on my hard disk. I can use it on different blogging services. If I want, I can throw it away and switch to a different tool (like w.bloggar) and still be able to access posts written with Live Writer (although that’s due to standard API’s, not cleverness on the part of Live Writer). If I want, I can throw away the desktop editor altogether and directly use the blogging service’s web posting form. I can tweak the presentation of the blog in enough ways that the only thing that remains constant is the raw content I submitted. Importing my posts from one blogging service to another may be a bit difficult, but not impossible.

I only brought this up to illustrate a few points in relation to a rather popular bandwagon — Cloud Computing/Software as a service (SaaS) , which, once the buzzwords are peeled off, is basically storing and working on your data on the Internet rather than storing them as files on your computer and working on them using desktop applications. Bear with me if you get a faint whiff of Web Services déjà vu, as I’m about to argue in favor of splitting the Cloud neatly in two:

1. Named data stores
2. Data manipulation services

Although it’s not strictly accurate to do so, let us compare the above to Google Docs, a poster boy of cloud computing, if I’m not mistaken:

It’s a monolithic web application — the service and the data are coupled. If you want to pick up your data and go elsewhere, you’re largely out of luck (unless you’re ok with downloading all your documents as MS Word/PDF files, after which you will need to find another service that’s willing to import in that format). If you want to manipulate your data in a way your current service provider doesn’t support, you’re again out of luck — they won’t allow other service providers to touch their (your) data.

Now consider this:

You have a service provider that gives you space to store named, structured data objects or data stores. It may be file-like (e.g. an XML object representing a document) or database-like.

You can work with the data in two ways — either you can use a locally installed application that directly loads from (and saves to) the cloud data service, or you can select a third party cloud application service that has functionality that can operate on your data format (e.g. a word processor service or a blog publishing service). You provide data access to the third party service by providing an access key to your data store. If you don’t trust third parties with your data, you put it in an encrypted store, decrypting on-the-fly on your desktop client application (and of course encrypting again before putting the data back on the wire). Some services will directly connect to each other (e.g. a word processor service may use somebody else’s dictionary service rather than develop their own).

Provided that data store formats and API’s have some semblance of standardization, you will be able to access your data with one service one day, another next and your PC or mobile phone the next. You’ll be able to move data from one storage provider to another if you wish. You will be able to embed/publish data from multiple data stores in different places on the Web without copying and pasting. And you will live happily ever after.

Here’s an admirable attempt by Google — you can access Google Translate as a function within a Google spreadsheet:

P.S. Those of you who have ever used sed and awk with a few Unix pipes to manipulate data and have wondered why the rest of the computing world can’t be so beautifully simple, raise their hands. The rest of you, go ahead and wonder how that could possibly be related to what we’re discussing.