Y habit of playing computer games has slowly faded over the years. There was a ‘hiccup’, however, last year: A particular game that I played very heavily, almost for entire days at a time. The game to blame: Enemy Territory (photographics evidence). Then emerged the effect of obsessive compulsive addiction (see a collection of previous write-ups on the topic). The fact that I installed and re-installed the game twice or thrice meant something. It penetrated the mind and its negative effects are best realised in retrospect.

I use the computer as a tool that simplifies life, whether it is a PDA that rids me from the need to remember or an application that helps me communicate with friends, family, and a variety of new and interesting people.

Computer games have not seen any dramatic change for many years; nothing on par with the exciting revolutions in the 80′s and 90′s at least. CPU capabilities, as well as memory capacity, frequently doubled as Moore’s law suggested and games are of course built to exploit the resources available to the extreme. Apart from graphics cards, hardware has not had the opportunity to extend much. A certain barrier has been reached. Having said that, only a couple of days ago, a graphics card with 4 CPU’s was announced. Issues regarding heat dispertion have been omitted. Will such hardware lead to yet another breathtaking leap in terms of gaming? I hope not. [cynical /]

I have played enough for one lifetime. I feel as though any genre of games and any type of actions or strategic games was played many times already. Rendering more polygons or having a few extra inches on the screen do not help. They do not excite as much as growing up to see groundbreaking resemblances to reality approached year by year.

Final advice, which is motivated by personal opinion: Use the computer primarily for work. If you wish to play, better stand up and enjoy our real world rather than escape by entering the fantasy world of your choice. Nothing can be as stimulating as reality, yet. In circumstances when the reality is harsh, however, I can see justification for gaming. Addiction to games can be harmful nonetheless and is inevitable. Let us be careful.

AKING of efficient algorithms and use of more compact data representations have a cost in terms of complexity. They lead to greater coding and programming time, yet there is plenty to be gained.

Broad-scale example: writing of a good search algorithm makes it hard to understand, let alone algorithms that discriminate data. There is a reason why the Web was made available and practical throughout its decade-long extension.

One would say that the Web has been open. Its pertinent objects were also broken down rationally. It was also because not all pages and graphics are bitmaps, but instead the Web exploits wavelets that are based on mathematics or defined a palette and then use some conventions to refer to it.

Moreover, rather than poster-like Web sites, where everything is hard-coded, there emerged a language called (X)HTML which is concise, descriptive, and unambiguous. There are protocols which define how it should be rendered so a description — a code that is — makes it laborious to implement. Construction of pages becomes arguably easier and the end product much more concise, in terms of its size. Versatility (or flexibility) is yet another matter.

The take-home message: complexity in implementation or even specification takes its toll, but entails true benefits. ‘Lazy’ programming leads to inefficiency, whereas tactful complexity pays off in the long run.

I may be an exception and perhaps even an oddity. I lost interest in PDA applications that differ from the most fundamental PIM set. Alas, I sometimes wonder if anything beyond a reliable simplicity is truly necessary. I suspect not.

I bought a Tungsten over a year ago, but I need never do anything that I could not do on the M130, which is a low-end PDA I once owned. It now sits idly and serves no-one even though it works. It has a few minor defects, but workarounds can compensate for all of them. What was its contribution to the subsequent device in the ‘upgrade cycle’? A 32 MB memory card was inherited from the M130, among a few other peripherals. A larger SD card (quarter of a gigabyte) is now available, but it rarely, if ever, gets used. Same programs are used and the capacity required is similar. So what does it all come down to?

Palm rarely ever failed me where it mattered the most: data integrity. After over 3 years of regular use of the Palm I can only vividly recall two incidents of data loss which were a nuisance. Both incidents were not at all severe and they both date back to 2003:

• Incident #1: I was editing a large memo for approximately half an hour without applying the changes. A very rare crash of Memo Pad led to the loss of all changes. A lesson was learned following this loss. As I compose this item on my Palm at the moment, I do not neglect to periodically save it.
• Incident #2: Half a day of changes were lost after restoration from desktop-side backup. Fortunately, all that was lost included a few calender entries, which I could quickly restore from fresh memory

I have had an SD Card-based backup program for over a year, but never had the chance (reason) to use it. Well done, Palm, for preserving my data and preventing me from ever pulling my hair in frustration over data disasters.

Side note: I truly hope that Palm can deliver innovation shortly. They begin to lag far behind their competitors and I am tempted to swap vendors and move to Nokia’s Linux-based tablet.

Life involves accumulation of things, not always objects, money or recognition. Happiness, however, is dependent on the momentum (increment of pace) of this accumulation, so a step up may not necessarily entail happiness. This explains why perpetual happiness is a myth.

To close with a quote which I strongly agree with (from Dr. Kent M. Keith):

“The good you do today will be forgotten
tomorrow. Do good anyway.”

The pact which involves Google and Sun Microsystems arouses my curiosity, particularly due to recent speculation about the Google PC and its vocation. It is no secret that Java is having tremendous impact. Nowadays, Firefox incorporates almost everything one needs, either as a joint plug-in that resides next to core, or as Web-based software, which is accessible via Web sites. Such sites are interpretable using Gecko (the rendered) or various other plus-ins for Flash, videos and the likes of them.

It is all about extensions, it seems — merely JRE applications embedded as panes in Firefox, which makes them well-integrated like the centre of all. Thunderbird does likewise and so can OpenOffice. The main implication is gaps being bridges. No more platform dependencies and filesharing protocols. Firefox makes everything transparent, or so one might assume (albeit you never know for sure with today’s Windows-only Firefox/Thunderbird themes and plug-ins).

For those who haven not heard/read yet, Firefox will soon have P2P file sharing incorporated as a plug-in. Rumours about this add-on have been circulating around the Internet for several weeks, if not even longer. There is even a screenshot. All of this commotion could attract a huge number of users from an already troubled Internet Explorer and, as browsers are used by all, this would push copyrights infringement to very worrisome levels.

Update (05/01/2006): Google renounce low-margin PC speculations

Entering the virtual world (screenshot of
Manchester snatched in June 2005, Google Earth, click to enlarge)

The Internet is bound to make most sectors of traditional industry obsolete. Below are several examples, which have begun to prove more realistic than ever before.

• Telephone companies- suffer from VoIP for local and international calls
• Internet Service Providers (ISP’s)- giants like Google can gnaw at their revenue by appealing to a large userbase
• Newspapers – readers opt for the Internet, get access to blogs of many ‘flavours’
• Television – user opts for interactive content, not one-way communication with a finite number of channels
• Reviews move on-line – similar impact to that of digital TV (on-demand menus) on the TV guide — a river that have dried up
• Book publishers – the impact of Wikipedia and free books in PDF format; easy printing and sharing
• Film industry – media ‘ripping’, DRM
• Music industry – same as before with but increased levels of piracy, also due to P2P networking
• Classified services, real-estate (among other middlemen-type services) – superseded by eBay, classifieds service from Google, Microsoft, Craigslist, etc.
• Banking – online banks with neither concrete branches nor assets
• Groceries – as previously predicted (along with other wild guesses), warehouses may replace supermarkets and be managed and accessible via the Internet

What will be the outcome of this revolution? Nothing far-fetched, but nonetheless a noticeable transition. More free content, low-cost services and fierce competition among service providers, primarily left in the hands of giants.

A mixed message is delivered to site visitors

S time goes by, the needs of the disabled are better realised. The Web becomes not only a mainstream phenomenon, but it is also a necessity. To many, banking, shopping and even social aspects or life are dependent on the Internet. Currently, search engines tend to concentrates on content, not on style and graphics, let alone validity of code or issues pertaining to accessibility. Might this change?

It would not be surprising if a search engine emerge , which only bothered with pages that are pure text or are built to possess good accessibility traits. Blind and handicapped people, for example, could opt for this niche-serving search engine. Large players such as Google have already catered for specific types of searches such as localised search (Google Local) and blog-exclusive search. Accessibility-type search may soon become a reality.

Tools such as The SEO Analyzer would perhaps be valuable for ranking sites. Perhaps incorporating modules such as these into crawlers is a worthwhile move. Moreover, rather than separating the engine types altogether, the user could tick a box that says ‘display only lean, stripped-down pages’¹ or ‘rank pages for accessibility and sort by quality’. This will encourage better Web standards and open ‘HTTP cyberspace’ to a larger audience.

¹ This exists already, I suspect. Page size in the results page provides a clue as well.