It's strange, entering the new millenium, and leaving behind the jetsons future we were all expecting 30 years ago...

The Concorde is grounded until Spring, and possibly forever, while no viable alternative for supersonic civilian transport exists. The closest thing, the HYPR X-34 is at the same stage in development that the National Aerospace Plane (NASP X-30) was ten years ago, before the program was scrapped (or classified).

Bullet trains, finally making their way to the US, are slow in coming, and fraught with problems. The replacement for the Space Shuttle might never get off the ground. The world's largest hovercraft (and still the fastest way to cross the English Channel) is being taken out of service, and nobody's buying.

Multi-billion dollar sat-phone systems bite the dust as unprofitable, and are scrapped. Men on Mars get further away every year, and we couldn't make it to the Moon again within this decade if we had to. The workhorse of civil aviation is a model that hasn't changed fundamentally in 31 years. Airlines and Air Traffic controlers are both telling Congress that we'll have twice as many people in the air in 2010 and there's no place for them to land.

Cars have reached the balancing point between convenient and useless in San Francisco (and other areas), but viable alternatives aren't always that viable. Each year in SF the average commute distance gets longer, and the commute time gets longer still. The farther we're capable of traveling the more we want to bunch together in as small areas as possible.

I don't know, but I have the feeling that it's not too long before people realize they can do their job just as well (or better) 100 miles away from their client's offices, live in Davis (or anywhere else outside the urban sprawl), get the house of their dreams for less than they're paying in rent right now, have a place to park, a place to drive, and a place to raise a family, and they might not need jetpacks or personal helicopters to do it.

Could it be that telepresence will take the place of teleportation in our realization of the future? Maybe the true Star Trek takeaway is the holodeck, and not the transporter... If it's just the same as being there, why fling your atoms around at all?

So it's down to three... there was a tie yesterday on SURVIVORblog between me and Gerard and so Ernie, in his infinite wisdom set the following tiebreaker: The first person to post after 4am this morning would get to stay on the island. The other would be kicked off in the morning.

We both stayed up 'till 4 with stopwatches and gave it our best shots and I came up lucky. Now, after 6 weeks of weblogging it's down to me, Ann, and Nicci, and it'll all be settled this week. If you haven't been following it, take a look, if for no other reason than it's one on the only places on the web right now that actually has a picture of me.

Now, to sleep...

The Webdot Graph Server, hosted by AT&T labs, is amazingly cool... I can think of so many cool SQL-driven web applications for it that I can't even start, especially since I'm studying for tomorrow's two midterms and don't have time.

At some point (hopefully soon (okay, okay, after Cameo, guys)) I'll work this technology into the site, to create an active network of weblogger relationships, or related posts, if nothing else.

I dreamt I was in a coffie shop last night and someone was being really obnoxious, saying that the food upset their stomach and they wouldn't pay. I noticed they ate all the food though and I brought up the point, not caring about the consequences. He got mad and left, and I went to sit with his friends One of them was my friend Gary, an artist who used to draw Sandman and Books of Magic. The other person was Metagrrrl, someone I've never met or spoken to, and the guy who stormed out was Jason Kottke, who I've also never met, but missed by half an hour at a party last weekend.

Metagrrrl didn't know who I was, but was surprised that I knew Gary. She went up to get a cup of coffee and glanced at her laptop and noticed that Peterme was sending her a talk request.

Weird. Maybe this whole thing is part of the realization I had last night that I haven't met any of my fellow contestants on SURVIVORblog, and have only spoken with the creator, Ernie, on the telephone once.

(note: CLUI: command-line user interface, GUI: graphical user interface)

AA asks via email:

When using your url CLUI, are you letting the browser _guess_ at what url you want and fill in the rest of it? Is this still a CLUI? Are there smart CLUI's and dumb CLUI's? Is the real threat to the GUI, a really smart CLUI?

Very good questions. Right now I usually use Netscape Navigator 4.6 on Linux (I know, I know...), which has no URL guessing, and IE 5 on a Mac, which has too much (the popdown of recent URLs that match, prefilling the closest match (the one that needs the least to complete). While I like URL guessing, I've never implemented in the way that I would call 'right'.

URL matching should work the same way as file matching in bash (and a handful of other shells), with a few tweaks (that bash should have too): When you're typing in a URL, you should never have autocompletion done for you, forcing you to backspace if you don't want it (unfortunately, IE does this). If I've been to http:/fury.com/aoliza/, but I want to go to http://fury.com this particular time, it should work as follows:

While typing the URL, the system should look for possible completions, but only autocomplete if I hit [tab] (like in bash). If there are multiple possible completions, one of two things should happen. If all the possible completions share part of the path (say I've typed in http://fury and the possible places are http://fury.com/, http://fury.com/cameo/, and http://fury.com/aoliza/, the system should prefill up to http://fury.com/, because it knows at least that part is right. If there are multiple paths that immediately fork (have no commonality beyond what has already been typed) for example, the state after I originally hit [tab], it should show a list of the possibilities. The user should either be able to pick from the list or type more until it's unique and hit [tab] again. For example, having typed in http://fury.com/ and hitting [tab] I should get a menu with http://fury.com/cameo/ and http://fury.com/aoliza/ in it. Typing in 'a' and hitting tab again should autocomplete http://fury.com/aoliza/.

This is pretty much the way bourne shells (bash) work, except this allows you to click or elaborate when there's a choice, instead of forcing you to elaborate. I think both shells and browser guessing could be improved though. If the path, or part of the path, is unambiguous (that is, if by the above rules, it would autocomplete some or all of the url), that portion should be displayed in a ghosted form in the command line (something like this: http://fury|.com/ ) to let you know the consequences of hitting [tab].

Basically, so much effort has been put into designing consistant GUIs that GUI devices and mechanisms (menus, scrollbars, pointers, windows, icons) have drifted across all major operating systems. The same is much slower going in the case of new CLUIs, and I believe it's mostly because people adding some CLUI functionality to their software think of it as new functionality with no rules or conventions, a romping ground whee any little bit of functionality is a bonus, when in actuality they're reinventing wheels in their own images, to the confusion of the user.

Anyhow, to get back to the questions, I think there are definitely smart CLUIs, but that it takes a smart designer to make a CLUI that doesn't try to be 'too' smart. Taken to the extreme, the assistant in Microsoft Office is in some ways a 'too smart' CLUI. Type "Dear John," into a new Word document, and it will ask you if you're trying to write a letter, and do you want help. In my opinion this gets in the way, but this is a matter of preference. Certainly there can be smarter CLUIs than we have today. A CLUI is traditionally thought of in a pure text environment, like a shell window or dumb terminal. Rich visual information can be expressed in CLUI enviroments though, it just dictates that the command itself is given in typed text. I could see something as simple as a bash shell having robust contextual help. for example, if I type in 'egrep", as I'm typing, a window could pop up on the side showing me all the switches egrep uses, and possibly a list of special characters used in regular expressions. For the most part, I think making CLUIs smart is enabling them to better interpret what we mean (instead of what we say), learning from past experience, and providing nonintrusive data on the actions we're performing.

Will CLUIs ever replace GUIs? I don't think so, unless you see voice commands as being a CLUI environment, which they well might be. I think we'll continue to see a mix. There's always been crossover. Emacs, vi, and pico all have GUI attributes as well as command lines, and more and more often GUIs resort to dialog boxes that are really just prettified front ends for quick CLUI interaction within a GUI environment.

then of course, there are blurred distinctions: Is a WAP phone a CLUI or a GUI environment? It's a little of each. I think as time goes on we'll see more and more GUI for displaying information, and CLUI for inputting information. This, incidentally, is how half of the web works now. Go to askJeeves or amazon and focus on search, and you're using a CLUI for inputting information, then getting back rich visual data. Type in a URL and it's the same. Of course, there are always places where one wins hands down. Automated file processing (grep pipes and such) will always be the domain of the CLUI, and graphic arts will always be better served by GUIs. The most important thing is the understanding that each is better in specific environments, and that those environments are different from person to person.

As I'm writing a philosophy paper (my 'Proxy response' to Searle's Chinese Room argument), I'm often referencing the web, via google, or merriam webster or the like. I use bookmarks now and then, but mor often than not I jus type in the url (m-w.com, goolge.com, etc). It seems that this is the heart of a CLUI taking over from within a GUI...

If you share my earthquake paranoia fetish, you'll be fascinated by Berkeley's Memento Mori (requires Java). It's a realtime (actually, delayed by about 30 seconds) seismograph, displayed in morbid black and white. It's extremely sensitive. The 500 pixel height of the chart equates to 0.0005mm/s of actual accelleration, so there's always movement, even if it's just from waves hitting the coastline 5 miles away, or storm fronts passing through.

If you don't have java, there's also an animated gif of the last five seconds of activity.

If you played video games in the early 80s, you'll love this quicktime music video. If not, you probably wouldn't understand the attraction.

God I love nostalgia. It's what made the world go 'round.

You're officially pathetic when you resort to notes like this to get you moving in the morning...

Of course, actually going to sleep before 2am might help too... (By the way, the truly sad part is I'm leaving this on my home computer!)

I was looking up 'tautology' on Merriam-Webster's site, and got the following:

• 1.
  • a : needless repetition of an idea, statement, or word
  • b : an instance of tautology
• 2. a tautologous statement

So is 1.b an instance of tautology? Is 2 a tautologous statement? Who says entymologists aren't fun?