The New New Desktop
Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Judging by Mrs. Feiler Faster, the big buzz coming out of the TED Conference a few weeks back was a new interface for your computer desktop. She hasn't stopped talking about it, though maybe this blog entry by my old classmate at Yale, David Pogue, might get her to stop:

A Canadian programmer named Anand Agarawala presented a new computer-desktop filing system that was, to say the least, novel. The audience spent quite a bit of time giggling, ooh-ing and ahh-ing.

The status quo, Anand pointed out, is a desktop filled with icons. “You can sex it up with a ‘lickable’ interface like the Mac’s, but basically it’s the same old thing: Point and click, icons.”

In his revised version, icons behave a lot more like actual sheets and bundles of paper. As you drag them around the screen, they tumble and pile up. They collide with other icons, tumbling and shoving them pell-mell out of the way.

You can drag a dotted line around a group of icons to stack them into piles, which you can then click through, flip through, or spread out like a deck of cards. You can then add another icon to a pile by tossing it with your mouse, and grinning as it flies to the top of the pile as though you have perfect aim.

You can make an especially important icon bigger by dragging it; once it’s bigger, it’s also heavier, so that it pushes other icons out of the way. You can even crease and fold icons, as though to dogear them. You can even crumple icons up and toss them into a corner of the screen.

The desktop, meanwhile, looks like the inside of a box—and you can actually pin things up on the walls of it, or make shelves.

You can see a less charming version of the presentation in this YouTube video. (This video seems to emphasize this concept’s use on a tablet computer, but the TED demo was done on a regular laptop.)

As you’ll surely agree, there’s a huge entertainment factor in Bumptop Desktop, as it’s called. Unfortunately, it’s not especially practical.

For starters, none of the icons have names. A pile of PDF documents is fun to ruffle through, but their icons all look identical. There doesn’t seem to be any facility for creating folders, either, which, despite their clutter and their crusty age, do serve a practical purpose: you can have several open at once and, because they overlap, still keep them straight. It’s not clear how you’d achieve a similar arrangement in the folderless Bumptop world.

I’m guessing that replacing what we see in Mac OS X or Windows is not, ultimately, the point. It’s to start thinking, start playing, run some experiments, to exploit today’s high-powered graphics routines to bring some new life to the crusty old desktop metaphor. The results of this tomfoolery may not bring Apple or Microsoft to Anand’s doorstep, but maybe the Bumptop fun will at least rub off on those much bigger players.

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:00 AM 0 comments

Where Is Mrs. Feiler Faster?
Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Even her own mother wonders. Here's the answer, c/o of Huffington Post (and an employee of the organization):

There has been some news coverage of TED lately. One month ago CBS put online a 10-minutes video report on TED, who attends and what's discussed. This week's BusinessWeek has a story headlined "Forget Davos. I'm booked up for TED", while yesterday's New York TimesWhere artists and investors plot to save the world". While both articles say great things about TED and compare it favorably to the Davos World Economic Forum however, it's worth pointing out that they almost contradict each other. BusinessWeek quotes a former attendee suggesting that TED has become mainly about connections with celebrities; the NY Times writes that TED is now mainly a do-good gathering discussing "photographs of genocide victims, environmentally sustainable AIDS clinics and water-purification systems". describes "

A partial list of speakers includes: venture capitalist John Doerr; demographer Hans Rosling (video); evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald; illustrator Maira Kalman; basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; Nobel Prize winner (for discovering the quark) Murray Gell-Mann; Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig; documentary producer Deborah Scranton; Microsoft's former CTO, dinosaurs hunter and intellectual-property controversial guy Nathan Myhrvold; singer Paul Simon. Ah: Bill Clinton will also speak.

TED was started in 1984 when founder Richard S. Wurman observed the beginning of a powerful convergence between technology, entertainment and design. The first event featured the unveiling of the Macintosh computer and of the compact disc, among other things. But the finances didn't go along with the great lineup of speakers, so it took several years before Wurman tried it again, this time with success. TED has been held in Monterey every year since 1990. For the last four years it has been run by British media entrepreneur Chris Anderson, who sold his publishing house and in 2002 bought TED from Wurman. Chris runs it now as a part of his non-profit Sapling Foundation.

The name of the conference is a bit misleading: the event has grown to be much broader than the three original fields of technology, entertainment and design, encompassing science, media, education, politics, literature, spirituality, energy and environmental issues, and more. The format of the conference is classic: speakers have 18 minutes each for a keynote, and there is no Q&A (most speakers attend the whole conference, hence there are plenty of informal Q&A opportunities during lunches and dinners).

If I'm lucky enough to get any good details, I'll post them here.

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:01 AM 0 comments

Blog of Arabia
Monday, February 12, 2007

One of my favorite memories from my trip to Iran a few years with my wife, which is described in WHERE GOD WAS BORN, was sitting in an Internet cafe watching a woman with fake fingernails emailing her lover, in English, across the country. (Yes, I admit, I read over her shoulder.) The Internet is, of course, highly regulated across the Arab world, but bloggers do have increasing power. The AP rounds up the situation:

Mideast governments for decades have dominated the media, trying to keep a monopoly on information and deter criticism of authorities. But bloggers are chipping away, writing about everything from human rights to the region's rulers to the most taboo topic - Islam.

Weblogs - or blogs for short - started taking off in the Mideast a few years ago as access to the Internet and technology for creating sites grew. There are now hundreds of Arabic- and Farsi-language blogs posted from the Middle East.

Many of the blogs are just personal musings. But many others strive to tackle political and social issues, and their authors are increasingly getting into trouble, with governments blocking their sites and throwing them in jail.

"I firmly believe that blogs now with normal people using them have become the fifth estate. They watch the watchers, especially in this area of the world, because there are no controls over them," said Mahmood al-Yousif, a Bahraini blogger.

Al-Yousif said his blog was blocked by authorities briefly last year after he published articles about an election-related scandal on the Persian Gulf island kingdom.

One interesting stat: Reporters Without Borders has five Mideast countries - Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Syria - on its list of the globe's 13 worst Internet freedom enemies that block Web sites and detain bloggers.

And another: Though the number of Internet users has grown nearly fivefold since 2000, only about 10 percent of the region's people have access to the Internet, according to the online Internet World Stats, which monitors Web usage around the world.

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:05 AM 0 comments

What Lawrence Would Be Reading Now

As part of its fascinating package on Blogs in Arabia, the AP includes a helpful set of links to blogs around the region.

EGYPT:

-- http://misrdigital.blogspirit.com Arabic-language blog by democracy activist Wael Abbas. Has been instrumental in bringing attention to police torture and sexual attacks on women, publishing videotaped accounts of both in recent months.

-- http://karam903.blogspot.com Arabic blog by Abdel Kareem Nabil, on trial for allegedly insulting Islam and causing sectarian strife with Internet writings critical of Islamic institutions in Egypt.

-- http://www.manalla.net Arabic and English political blog by husband and wife team, Alaa Abdel-Fattah and Manal Hassan. Abdel-Fattah held six weeks last year after being arrested during rally at Cairo court in support of other detained democracy activists.

SYRIA:

-- http://saroujah.blogspot.com English blog by Sasa Kajam. Called Syria News Wire, says it features ''independent news from the streets of Syria and Lebanon.''

SAUDI ARABIA:

-- http://saudijeans.blogspot.com English blog by Ahmed al-Omran, pharmacy student who writes about politics, social issues and trends.

IRAN:

-- http://hamedmottaghi.blogfa.com Farsi blog by Hamed Mottaghi, freelance journalist who lives in holy city of Qom and writes about human rights, culture and other social issues.

-- http://www.kosoof.com Farsi photo blog that publishes pictures of Iranian dissidents with their families after release from prison.

(Both Iranian blogs were awarded Reporters Without Borders prize during 2006 Deutsche Welle International Weblog Awards for taking strong stands on freedom of information.)

BAHRAIN:

-- http://mahmood.tv English blog by Mahmood al-Yousif, Bahraini businessman who writes about politics, human rights and daily life on Persian Gulf island kingdom.

-- http://www.mideastyouth.com; http://www.mefaith.com; http://www.inter-iman.com Run by Esra'a al-Shafei, first two are in English, third in Arabic. Focus on bringing together voices from across region, including Israel and Iran, to discuss politics, gender and religion.

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:03 AM 0 comments

Wikicoup?
Monday, January 22, 2007

Hard to know if this will amount to anything, but it sure is fascinating: Wikileaks, a user-generated leak blog for documents in oppressive regimes. Here's TIME's take:

By March, more than one million leaked documents from governments and corporations in Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Bloc will be available online in a bold new collective experiment in whistleblowing. That is, of course, as long as you don't accept any of the conspiracy theories brewing that Wikileaks.org could be a front for the CIA or some other intelligence agency.

The website claims that it will use the same software platform as Wikipedia, the wildly popular online grassroots encyclopedia, to let users anonymously post documents and analyze them. In theory, this system will protect leakers' identities while exposing government and corporate corruption worldwide.

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Posted by B Feiler at 6:51 PM 0 comments

Castro Is Not Dead

From the AP:

A spam e-mail with messages including "Fidel Castro dead" and "Saddam Hussein safe and sound" contains a virus which has infected thousands of computers, Spain's Association of Internauts has said.

With speculation rife about the Cuban leader's health, the association said that a computer would be infected by the virus if the recipient opened the message.

"The virus is affecting thousands of computers," the association said Monday.

Other messages sent with the virus include Venezuelan President "Hugo Chavez dead", "President of Russia Putin dead," and "US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has kicked German Chancellor Angela Merkel." Another read: "The (US) Supreme Court has been attacked by terrorists."

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Posted by B Feiler at 9:02 AM 0 comments

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