I was taught that science is all about managing complexity by creating abstractions over different domains. A common layman's mistake is to anecdotally observe or hear that something is true at some level, somewhere, and assume that this fact or definition applies throughout every discussion. For example:
One hears that computers are “programmed in binary,” or that they “understand binary,” but in fact, programmers don't write in binary. Programmers work at a higher level of abstraction than binary encoding.
One hears that computers use “digital circuits,” that are simply “on” or “off”, but in fact, the physics of each electronic component is continuously variable. Device physics is at a lower level of abstraction than digital electronics.

So, what's a server and what is peer-to-peer? It depends on what 's being discussed?

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I'm old enough to vaguely remember Walter Cronkite forty years ago showing us hand painted “NASA Simulation” video of the Apollo spacecraft maneuvering in space. There simply was no way to position a news camera outside the Lunar and Command Modules to get the shot.

Now we have computer generated movies and commercials. I've seen computer simulations of plane crashes and of presidential candidates. But yesterday morning was the first time I'd seen computer-generated pictures of human participants in breaking news. I'm not sure I approve of the concept altogether, but given it's existence I do like the editorial decision to render the named humans in untextured solid red.

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We had had our usual weekly Engineering Meeting yesterday. Some slides, a couple of charts, some spreadsheet pages, and a bunch of folks arguing. Nothing exciting, although it was pretty cool for random attendees to change the slides and spreadsheet in real time, and to put post-its on them.

As usual, our weekly meeting was in-world. No one commented about the technology. No one commented about the fact that the meeting was lead by a manager away at MIT, some engineers were in Maryland and Oregon, and some folks were at home saving gas rather than in the office. Boring.

Pretty cool, no?

I like to think I'm particularly adaptable on those occasions when I happen to recognize that I need to be, but I perpetually feel inadequate in recognizing when the rules of the universe have changed. That's a pretty significant skill to be lacking when you're trying to invent the future.

So it is with even more than the usual range of emotions that I have come to “sell” our home in Wisconsin and will finally be moving to California. I am told that this is an extraordinary accomplishment, but I've “adapted” so much, the celebration has a Pyrrhic cast.

The US housing market has all but ceased to exist as a functioning market with any sort of liquidity. In my neighborhood, there should statistically be about one home sale each week. Ours was the seventh in the previous eight months, and I think all of those were the previous calendar year. The issue seems to be that every sale is contingent on having the buyers sell their home, which isn't happening, so the whole country is waiting for one big circle jerk. Many housing industry folks are claiming that prices have not fallen much, but that's disingenuous – the average selling price nationally and in most areas hasn't fallen much only because the average home size continues to rise. The average price per square foot of any particular existing fixed-size house is dropping like a stone in a still pond. (Areas that do not see average housing sizes grow have indeed been seeing a big drop in average selling price.) And with bankers knowing this and knowing that several hundred of their ilk are being carted off by the FBI – no I'm not making this up – they're not making a lot of bridge loans that would allow folks to buy one house before they sell the next.

So here's what we did: [Read More!]

My wife's XP computer died in a power surge and we bought an iMac. The thing I'm most intrigued by turned out to be completely different than what I expected. [Read More!]

In January, 2005, David Smith was on stage at Kyoto University, speaking in a panel on the future of Croquet. Slouched in his chair, he pulled an iPod from his pocket and threw it on the table, along with his old-fashioned styled spectacles. “In twenty years, that will be the computer. Maybe earlier. Wearable computers and micro-projection display already exist. Virtual Croquet worlds will be layered onto the physical world around us.”

At the same time, in San Diego, CA, author Vernor Vinge was wrapping up “Rainbows End,” a novel set in 2025 in which the common person's view of the world is augmented by wearable computers overlaying virtual worlds onto contact lenses. The central denizen of the worlds in the story is a troublesome white rabbit, which also happens to be a common avatar in the Alice In Wonderland themed Croquet worlds.

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I've been observing some automated testing of our virtual worlds, and my machine keeps dinging. My teenager said, “Someone's getting IMs.” Sort of. [Read More!]

I've been working with some test harnesses for our Croquet worlds. It's been a real pain working outside of Croquet: getting things to happen across multiple platforms. Moving data around. It's all so much easier in a virtual space that automatically replicates everything.

Anyway, we finally got it working enough that there are several machines in Qwaq's Palo Alto office that are all running around as robots in a virtual world, doing various user activities to see what breaks. Being (still!) in Wisconsin, I have to peek on these machines via remote. I'm currently using Virtual Network Computing (VNC), but there's also Windows Remote Desktop (RDP). These programs basically scrape the screen at some level, and send the pictures to me. So when these robots are buzzing around in-world, I get a screen repaint, and then another, and then another. And that's just one machine. If I want to monitor what they're all doing, I have to use have a VNC window open for each, scraping and repainting away. Yuck. If only there were a better way….

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I just turned 44, which kind of sucks, but as they say, it's better than the alternative. I think I've been old for a long long time, but now I have to admit it. Virtual World have been growing up, too, and my feelings are somewhat the same. Despite reports by Gartner and Forrester, articles in the Wall Street Journal, Business Week and Information Week, and even popular press like the LA Times, I still hadn't quite caught on to the idea that we now have an industry. But when I saw Christian Renaud's blog, I had to admit that “Virtual Worlds” is an industry category, and I'm in it. None of these articles are about the technology (what I do), but about what people do with it and how businesses make money with it. I guess it's better than the alternative. OK, it's pretty cool, but kind of weird. This stuff isn't household technology or household names yet. The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. It's an interesting life-span inflection point.

I think we normally speak of work being done “in Powerpoint,” “in Word,” and so forth. This morning I looked at a transcript of people discussing virtual worlds while in one. The words “Qwaq” and “Forums” appear once each. The word “here” appears 49 times. We are finally getting to the point of having discussion about the results, not the technology. The program itself disappears, in just the same same way as we usually discuss being “at a Web-site” rather than “in Firefox” or “in Safari.” (Internet Explorer users may indeed reflect their tool's relative intrusion by thinking of their activity as being “in IE” more often.) [Read More!]