Category: Life

I’m 82 hours into this game, and while I’ve only just completed the main story, there’s still so much more to do. The assassins have invited me over to their sanctuary, a civil war rages on, and the leader of the thieves in the town of Riften is pressing me for something. Welcome to Skyrim, one of the most fantastic games I’ve ever played.

It’s a role-playing game, and a pretty one at that. All the images you see here I took during my virtual travels. You start off as a nameless chap ready to be executed. The town you’re in comes under attack, and before you know it, you’re making a run for it with another of the condemned. Once out of danger, the province of Skyrim becomes your oyster.

What you choose to do from there on in is entirely up to you. You could investigate the source of the attack, which leads to an epic plot line. Or you could become a merchant, purchasing and selling wares at various towns and buying yourself a nice home. Perhaps you’d be interested in becoming a mercenary, or study magic at a reclusive college in the northern reaches of the province. It’s up to you. Along your way, you’ll encounter a wealth of colourful characters that’ll make for a truly memorable experience.

I’ll let the pictures I’ve posted here speak for themselves. I’ll just say that if you enjoy FPS/RPG hybrids at all, do yourself a favour and pick this one up. You won’t regret it.

Not a season goes by where some person of influence, awed by the latest computerized wonder, announces the impending death of the desktop workstation. The latest catalyst for these views has been the market’s enthusiasm for tablets, an old concept made successful thanks to a paradigm shift in user-interface design popularized by Apple.

I do think tablets are here to stay, at least for the next five years or so. What I’m anticipating is a growth in tablet adoption at the expense of laptop ownership. The reason for this has to do with what these computers are used for. Laptops are generally a second computer, used for web surfing, e-mail, and other light productivity.

Tablets fulfill this mandate well. The obstacles that other technologies have had to overcome in order to penetrate mainstream consumer life have already been taken care of by the iPhone-led rise of the smart phone. By dual-purposing smart phone operating systems to tablets, as Apple and Google did, the ecosystem of applications was carried over. This remedied the issue of limited and device-specific applications. Today’s tablets also represent a paradigm shift in the form of simple, visually appealing, touch-based user-interfaces, providing a clear and positive distinction when transitioning from a laptop using a traditional operating system.

So I am of the firm belief that tablets are not a fad and will shift things around in the portable computing world. That said, I do not believe this signals the end of the desktop computer or of the laptop for that matter. The reason has to do with purpose and how design fits into all of this.

The current user-design paradigm for tablets and mobile phones is to present a single-purpose program with few options in a graphically-pleasing package. This is great for tablets and mobile phones, but there are times when such limited scopes won’t do.  Think Photoshop, or programming IDEs, or any other tool intended for use by an advanced user. There’s always going to be a need to do more than simple tasks, and until that need is met by other devices, the home computer and its portable analogue are here to stay.

An interesting development, however, is to have both the simple and complex experience available in one package. The people at Canonical, the creators of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, have a really interesting concept. Your smart phone would run as it always had, with an environment geared for mobile use. Connect that phone to a monitor, however, and a full-fledged desktop operating system would come up (pictured on the right.)

Microsoft meanwhile is making Windows 8 with two modes: one with a simple interface to run on tablets, and another that provides the fully-featured OS that we’ve come to know over the last two decades. KDE, GNOME and Canonical (with Unity) have all reworked their desktop environment to be friendlier to use on tablets.

All these industry leaders are seeing not the end of the desktop in the immediacy, but of a world where desktop and tablet co-exist while serving different purposes.

To summarize. The desktop computer isn’t dead, and won’t die for as long there lacks alternatives for what people use them for. Tablets are here to stay for at least the the next five years. Laptop sales will decline as casual users shift to tablets, but will not die off due to the large amounts that use them as desktop substitutes. The idea of a full desktop experience in your pocket, as Canonical has come up with, is damn cool but too exotic to make predictions over.

I’m working on Korgi, a program that will let you create your own software using a visual approach. Instead of writing lines of code to define how your application will behave, you’ll be manipulating blocks in a flow chart.

While what I’m working on will work on Windows, Linux, and Mac, the primary target for this software is the Raspberry Pi. The latter is a $35 computer the size of a credit card intended for the educational sector. As part of a deal with Nokia, I and about four hundred other developers will be shipped one of these in exchange for writing software using Nokia’s still-in-active-development Qt 5.0 platform.

Because of limitations with regards to what Qt 5.0 can do on the device, it came to be that I needed to write my own widget library before I could proceed. It’s kind of like of how GIMP necessitated the creation of GTK+. If you are familiar with Qt you’ll find this a rather odd statement, but the fact is that Qt 5.0 will only present an interface on the Raspberry Pi using QML or HTML via WebKit. Neither of these were intended for traditional desktop-oriented widgets or give the kind of flexibility I’d need. So I’ve been writing my own library, which runs on top of WebKit.

I chose HTML over QML because its behaviour is well defined and is not apt to change over the next little while, removing me from the volatility of Qt 5.0 specific features. The above diagram is the abstractions I’ve implemented in order to simplify and modularize the library. From the perspective of the coder using my library, adding buttons, line inputs, and all those things is the same as any other widget library. You define a window/form, add widgets to it, then start the event loop.

A coder can also use the lower abstractions of my library to simplify the task of directly drawing onto the canvas, or obtaining user input (mouse/keyboard events.) I’ve taken the headache out of the matter. It isn’t as good as other specific libraries, but they are better suited for my needs.

Once the widget library is ready, I’ll use it to design the interface for my program. Logic will be implemented in JavaScript, the back-end which will handle things one cannot do in a sandbox (namely writing to the filesystem) will be done in C++ using Qt. The web front-end and back-end will communicate using WebSockets. This also opens up the opportunity for Korgi to reside online with a Python+MySQL backend, but I digress.

I have a few external motivators to see this project through to the end. First and foremost is the Raspberry Pi project itself. Then there’s also the fact that my only other open-source project using web technologies, Solaire, would make any JavaScript programmer weep with shame. It’s not good should any prospective employer check out my past work. Korgi rectifies the matter.

If you want to keep tabs on the project, I have a repository set up on both BitBucket and GitHub. I’ve been using Mercurial for code revisionning and Google Chrome to debug the web portion of the code.

It’s interesting to look back on the last five years of my life, and see what has changed. Five years ago I was 21 and in university. I was still living with my parents; I wouldn’t move into the townhouse with two roommates for another seven months. I was selling DVDs for the On Piracy documentary, Rice Tea was in the form of this script idea for a movie called H4CK3R5, and Docks was in pre-production.

My first con was only the summer before, where I had gone to New York City to give a talk with Jason Scott. Not long after, I went overseas for my first time to visit my sister in the UK. I paid for my tuition by being a tour guide, and later, by being the guy who drove the tour boats up and down the canal. I would also get a job working at Starbucks.

I was single, and firmly of the belief that I was straight. I had two main interests: computer security and foreign affairs. I read everything I could on the latest exploits, attended 2600 meetings religiously, and was so proud of myself when I found a security flaw with the university website.

I didn’t read anything of substance on the side, other than PC Gamer magazines and mangas. I had caught the book reading bug, but the heavy demands of university killed it. I wouldn’t get it again for another few years.

Fast forward to where I am now. I graduated from university and got my first career job. I discovered I wasn’t straight. I found a wonderful man who I’ve now been with for some two years. I’ve been to a few more cons, did a few road trips including a gargantuan one, went to Argentina, France, the UK, and South Africa.

My creative projects have shifted from film to software, with a few larger projects such as solaire and korgi. My interest in computer security still persists, but level of devotion to it has not. I took a liking to the question of LGBT rights and cooking. My love of foreign affairs continues, and I’m currently reading Dancing in the Glory of Monsters which is about one of the world’s deadliest wars in the Congo.

Life is good. I’d like it more if I could be as productive with regards to my creative endeavours as I was in those university years, but I’m not complaining. And then there’s you guys, my friends and family. You’re as awesome now as you’ve always been. Life would be empty if it weren’t for the others that are a part of it, so I’m thankful for the wonderful times I’ve had cooking with you, going out with you, catching up with you at cons, and just shooting the shit.

To another five years.

I just finished So Damn Much Money, the 416 page opus on the rise of money and its repercussions for American politics by Robert Kaiser. Kaiser has worked for the Post for nearly fifty years and is currently its associate editor.

The author uses the fascinating narrative of the rise of Gerald Cassidy, a key player in the rise of contemporary lobbying in Washington. Cassidy started off as as a political aide to a Democrat with presidential aspirations before venturing off into the world of “government relations.” He spearheaded the use of earmarks to grant public funds to the specific projects of his clients. An institution paying Cassidy’s firm a monthly retainer fee could find itself the recipient of tends of millions of tax-payer dollars, the result of a government official inserting a few lines into an appropriation bill.

Intertwined with Cassidy’s story are the events that led to the ever-increasing costs of elections, culminating into the phenomenon of politicians being in a “perpetual campaign.” As new approaches such as astroturfing, polling, television ads and the political agents that used them came into play to win votes, the price tags of campaigns rose and rose. American politicians have now come to devote a significant amount of their time to soliciting funds, especially the large amounts that special interests can provide. In exchange for the investment in their campaign, politicians offer these interests influence over the legislative process. To the political actors, it’s a means to secure the potential for additional funding. Though transactions involving the exchange of private wealth for government power were nothing new, its pervasiveness was.

Kaiser shows, through his methodical reporting, that despite efforts to make it appear otherwise, money did buy policy. One of the more interesting cases in the book is the use of Washington lobbying firms by Taiwan to alter U.S. foreign policy to be in its favour. There is a fine line between bribery and campaign contributions, the author notes.

With politicians in a mode of perpetual campaigning, the interests of the people took a backseat to the interests of those that would give the politicians money. If only the poor were able to afford lobbyists, Kaiser quips through a quote, something would be done to help them.