Tags: hard

Software Folklore ― Andreas Zwinkau

Detective stories and tales of bughunting in software and hardware.

Sometimes bugs have symptoms beyond belief. This is a collection of such stories from around the web.

Century-Scale Storage

This magnificent piece by Maxwell Neely-Cohen—with some tasteful art-direction—is right up my alley!

This piece looks at a single question. If you, right now, had the goal of digitally storing something for 100 years, how should you even begin to think about making that happen? How should the bits in your stewardship be stored with such a target in mind? How do our methods and platforms look when considered under the harsh unknowns of a century? There are plenty of worthy related subjects and discourses that this piece does not touch at all. This is not a piece about the sheer volume of data we are creating each day, and how we might store all of it. Nor is it a piece about the extremely tough curatorial process of deciding what is and isn’t worth preserving and storing. It is about longevity, about the potential methods of preserving what we make for future generations, about how we make bits endure. If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it? That’s it.

Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People (Part One, 1982) - YouTube

Wow! Grace Hopper has always been a hero to me, but I had no idea she was such a fantastic presenter. She’s completely engaging, with the timing and deadpan delivery of a stand-up comedian at times.

The Cost Of JavaScript - 2023 - YouTube

A great talk from Addy on just how damaging client-side JavaScript can be to the user experience …and what you can do about it.

PAST Visions of the Future - Future of Interfaces

Video visions of aspirational futures made from the 1950s to the 2010s, mostly by white dudes with bullshit jobs.

Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight

The positively steampunk piece of hardware used for tracking Alexei Leonov’s Apollo-Soyuz mission.

I was chatting with my new colleague Alex yesterday about a link she had shared in Slack. It was the Nielsen Norman Group’s annual State of Mobile User Experience report.

There’s nothing too surprising in there, other than the mention of Apple’s app clips and Google’s instant apps.

Remember those?

Me neither.

Perhaps I lead a sheltered existence, but as an iPhone user, I don’t think I’ve come across a single app clip in the wild.

I remember when they were announced. I was quite worried about them.

See, the one thing that the web can (theoretically) offer that native can’t is instant access to a resource. Go to this URL—that’s it. Whereas for a native app, the flow is: go to this app store, find the app, download the app.

(I say that the benefit is theoretical because the website found at the URL should download quickly—the reality is that the bloat of “modern” web development imperils that advantage.)

App clips—and instant apps—looked like a way to route around the convoluted install process of native apps. That’s why I was nervous when they were announced. They sounded like a threat to the web.

In reality, the potential was never fulfilled (if my own experience is anything to go by). I wonder why people didn’t jump on app clips and instant apps?

Perhaps it’s because what they promise isn’t desirable from a business perspective: “here’s a way for users to accomplish their tasks without downloading your app.” Even though app clips can in theory be a stepping stone to installing the full app, from a user’s perspective, their appeal is the exact opposite.

Or maybe they’re just too confusing to understand. I think there’s an another technology that suffers from the same problem: progressive web apps.

Hear me out. Progressive web apps are—if done well—absolutely amazing. You get all of the benefits of native apps in terms of UX—they even work offline!—but you retain the web’s frictionless access model: go to a URL; that’s it.

So what are they? Are they websites? Yes, sorta. Are they apps? Yes, sorta.

That’s confusing, right? I can see how app clips and instant apps sound equally confusing: “you can use them straight away, like going to a web page, but they’re not web pages; they’re little bits of apps.”

I’m mostly glad that app clips never took off. But I’m sad that progressive web apps haven’t taken off more. I suspect that their fates are intertwined. Neither suffer from technical limitations. The problem they both face is inertia:

The technologies are the easy bit. Getting people to re-evaluate their opinions about technologies? That’s the hard part.

True of progressive web apps. Equally true of app clips.

But when I was chatting to Alex, she made me look at app clips in a different way. She described a situation where somebody might need to interact with some kind of NFC beacon from their phone. Web NFC isn’t supported in many browsers yet, so you can’t rely on that. But you don’t want to make people download a native app just to have a quick interaction. In theory, an app clip—or instant app—could do the job.

In that situation, app clips aren’t a danger to the web—they’re polyfills for hardware APIs that the web doesn’t yet support!

I love having my perspective shifted like that.

The specific situations that Alex and I were discussing were in the context of museums. Musuems offer such interesting opportunities for the physical and the digital to intersect.

Remember the pen from Cooper Hewitt? Aaron spoke about it at dConstruct 2014—a terrific presentation that’s well worth revisiting and absorbing.

The other dConstruct talk that’s very relevant to this liminal space between the web and native apps is the 2012 talk from Scott Jenson. I always thought the physical web initiative had a lot of promise, but it may have been ahead of its time.

I loved the thinking behind the physical web beacons. They were deliberately dumb, much like the internet itself. All they did was broadcast a URL. That’s it. All the smarts were to be found at the URL itself. That meant a service could get smarter over time. It’s a lot easier to update a website than swap out a piece of hardware.

But any kind of technology that uses Bluetooth, NFC, or other wireless technology has to get over the discovery problem. They’re invisible technologies, so by default, people don’t know they’re even there. But if you make them too discoverable— intrusively announcing themselves like one of the commercials in Minority Report—then they’re indistinguishable from spam. There’s a sweet spot of discoverability right in the middle that’s hard to get right.

Over the past couple of years—accelerated by the physical distancing necessitated by The Situation—QR codes stepped up to the plate.

They still suffer from some discoverability issues. They’re not human-readable, so you can’t be entirely sure that the URL you’re going to go to isn’t going to be a Rick Astley video. But they are visible, which gives them an advantage over hidden wireless technologies.

They’re cheaper too. Printing a QR code sticker costs less than getting a plastic beacon shipped from China.

QR codes turned out to be just good enough to bridge the gap between the physical and digital for those one-off interactions like dining outdoors during a pandemic:

I can see why they chose the web over a native app. Online ordering is the only way to place your order at this place. Telling people “You have to go to this website” …that seems reasonable. But telling people “You have to download this app” …that’s too much friction.

Ironically, the nail in the coffin for app clips and instant apps might’ve been hammered in by Apple and Google when they built QR-code recognition into their camera software.

Shift Happens

Marcin’s book is coming along nicely—you just know it’ll be a labour of love.

You’ve never seen a book on technology like this. Shift Happens is full of stories – some never before told – interleaved with 1,000+ beautiful full-color photos across two volumes.

The Kickstarter project launches in February. In the meantime, there are some keyboard-based games here for you to enjoy.

Russell Davies: The internet of good things

An internet-enabled kettle sounds stupid, but this is a genuinely thoughtful piece of hardware.

Have I reached the Douglas Adams Inflection point (or is modern tech just a bit rubbish)? – Terence Eden’s Blog

This chimes with something I’ve been pondering: we anticipate big breakthoughs in software—AI!, blockchain!, metaverse! chatbots!—but in reality the field is relatively stagnant. Meanwhile in areas like biology, there’s been unexpected advances. Or maybe, as Terence indicates, it’s all about the hype.

Notes from a gopher:// site - daverupert.com

The result of adding more constraints means that the products have a broader appeal due to their simple interface. It reminds me of a Jeremy Keith talk I heard last month about programming languages like CSS which have a simple interface pattern: selector { property: value }. Simple enough anyone can learn. But simple doesn’t mean it’s simplistic, which gives me a lot to think about.

The computer built to last 50 years | ploum.net

A fascinating look at what it might take to create a truly sunstainable long-term computer.

The Optional Chaining Operator, “Modern” Browsers, and My Mom - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

This is something I bump against over and over again: so-called evergreen browsers that can’t actually be updated because of operating system limits.

From what I could gather, the version of Chrome was tied to ChromeOS which couldn’t be updated because of the hardware. No new ChromeOS meant no new Chrome which meant stuck at version 76.

But what about the iPad? I discovered that my Mom’s iPad was a 1st generation iPad Air. Apple stopped supporting that device in iOS 12, which means it was stuck with whatever version of Safari last shipped with iOS 12.

So I had two older browsers that couldn’t be updated. It was device obsolescence because you couldn’t install the latest browser.

Websites stop working and the only solution is to buy a whole new device.

Meet the Self-Hosters, Taking Back the Internet One Server at a Time

Taking the indie web to the next level—self-hosting on your own hardware.

Tired of Big Tech monopolies, a community of hobbyists is taking their digital lives off the cloud and onto DIY hardware that they control.

Robin Rendle ･ Everything that books ought to be

I’m with Robin. Hardback books are infuriating, not least because of the ridiculous business model of only publishing hardback versions to begin with, and only releasing a paperback when you’ve lost all interest in reading the damn book.

The Infrastructural Power Beneath the Internet as We Know It - The Reboot

I’ve lately been trying an exercise where, when reading anything by or about tech companies, I replace uses of the word “infrastructure” with “means of production.”

Brilliant!

Interplanetary Lobbing

League tables for the game of probe-throwing currently underway in our solar system.

The league covers expensive hardware lob matches held between planets in the Solar System. Two dwarf planets have recently been admitted to the league and lost their first matches against league champions Team Earth.

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML – Terence Eden’s Blog

I love the story that Terence relates here. It reminds me of all the fantastic work that Anna did documenting game console browsers.

Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they’re in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works. A small bit of simple CSS will make look decent. JavaScript is probably unnecessary – but can be used to progressively enhance stuff.

What Makes CSS Hard To Master - Tim Severien

CSS is simple, but not easy.

If we, as a community, start to appreciate the complexity of writing CSS, perhaps we can ask for help instead of blaming the language when we’re confused or stuck. We might also stop looking down on CSS specialists.

Hack the Moon

The history of Apollo’s hardware and software—the technology, the missions, and the people; people like Elaine Denniston and Margaret Hamilton.

(The site is made by Draper, the company founded by Doc Draper, father of inertial navigation.)