Sorry I’m behind, but there is a _lot_ going on. First, the good news: as reported Muniwireless and elsewhere, the Indiana anti-muni bill has gone down in flaming defeat!
Score one for the good guys and reinvigorate my faith in democracy. For more, see below . . .
Older academics generally like Croquet demos, but they often give me the impression that they’re not quite sure what they’re looking at. We gave a demo this week to a young local reporter and she was much more enthusiastic. She wants to use it right now, as is. Julian tells me that anyone under 25 who sees Croquet goes nuts over it.
I was surprised. I assumed that younger folks would be jaded by video games. Our demos don’t have drop shadows or reflection. The fish world is not as cool as the one at the Boston Museum of Science. The avatars don’t walk and bend like the Sims. It’s a proof-of-concept, and the features and effects just aren’t like what you would find in a movie.
But I think people under 25 see Croquet and feel like it’s made for them. What school and office programs are really of their culture? Windows isn’t. (Maybe its for old farts that were too conservative to buy a Mac 20 years ago.) The closest thing to a mainstream generation Y app might be chat rooms, which are not rooms and you don’t actually chat, you type. Successfull, yes, but not exactly laden with Y culture.
From the day I first read about Croquet, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the secure, persistent object model. Building applications — or even understanding what applications can be built — depends on this model, which is still under development by the Croquet architects. Four months later, I’m still pretty lost.
I’m most interested in how the pieces fit together, and the abilities afforded by that configuration. Alas, I’m not clever enough to understand and express this entirely in the abstract. The more specific I get in components and abilities, the more specific I need to be as to a plausible way of implementing it. Otherwise, I get lost. I hope (unrealistically?) that no one takes this as a proposal. In fact, I’d be perfectly happy if the same abilities were achieved for Croquet with different implementations. I’d even be ok with a different set of abilities, as long as I understood what and why they were. But I gotta start somewhere. This is public because I would like help in improving my understanding, and also because my blog is from me personally. It does not represent anything from U.Wisconsin or the Croquet architects. Maybe by putting even wrong stuff into print, we can clear up misconceptions.
Lost in all the hoopla last week on the Multicast Must Carry Vote (which I can explain in a future column) was the FCC’s Broadband Wireless Report. It’s conclusion – Wireless Broadband Is Good. Policy recommendations: Stay the Course.
Well, it’s a _bit_ more than that, but not much. See below….
Ishkur has graced the world with his own idiosyncratic taxonomy of electronic music. It can be found here. Worth looking at even if you hate the stuff.
I’ve written before about how I’d like to never be forced to enter a name into Croquet. A consequence of achieving this is that you wouldn’t often need a keyboard. (A keyboard can be incredibly useful. I’m not proposing banishment. I just want to be able to get along without it. Also, there’s still access to legacy apps with their textual forms that need to be filled out.)
Croquet is built on the Squeak platform. This weekend I discovered that the older PlayStation II has an Ethernet adapter, the new one has it built in, that there’s a guy porting Squeak to the PS2, and that Croquet’s own Andreas Raab has demonstrated in the past that Squeak can be ported to the PS2. I’d sure love to have game boxes be Croquet information appliances.
Now add to that the ability to create content from within the Croquet environment itself, and think of kids creating their own connected persistent worlds. Screw the “information age”, it’s the “age of imagination”.
At C5, Croquet anchorman David Smith laid out a vision of Croquet running on an iPod-sized device connected to a heads-up display in your eyeglasses. (Never mind that by then, most folks who need vision correction will have laser surgery rather than glasses.) Noting that the basic technologies needed for this already exist today, and the pace of development and adoption over, say 20 years (c.f. the Apple Macintosh and what it has wrought), David feels comfortable looking at this sort of technology horizon. I’d like to see Croquet on a PS2 be a step in that direction.
The Citroën DS (pronounced in French day-ess, like déesse, or goddess) is about to celebrate its 50th birthday! Hard to believe.
Check it out :
Here are two fun links,in English:
http://vintagecars.about.com/od/historygreatmoments/a/citroen_ds.htm
http://www.id-ds.com/Pages/Citroen/DS.Barthes.html
The latter is an appreciation by Roland Barthes. Sample quote: “There are in the D.S. the beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembling, as if one progressed from a world where elements are welded to a world where they are juxtaposed and hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape, which of course is meant to prepare one for the idea of a more benign Nature.”
I assure you, without having read the original, that the translator was faithful to it.
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Some short impressions from my trip to Japan. Not directly about software or Croquet at all, but what the hell.
American companies and institutions tend to create projects based on either immediately practical applications or open-ended research. In Japan I encountered something else: comparatively long term application-oriented research projects.
Folks have asked me about using Croquet now, and looking at the source. I discussed part of the answer in Jasmine release, which discussed the currently available proof-of-concept. But there’s some more stuff that people should know.
