A Modest Construct

¶ Wednesday’s Word: obstreperous

obstreperous: adj. Noisily and stubbornly defiant; aggressively boisterous

I’m almost obstreperous, except for the noisy part. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I am obstinate or even obdurate, which mean basically the same thing.

All three words sound like they could come from the same family. In fact, obstinate comes from the Latin obstinatus, which means “resolute, inflexible, stubborn”; obsteperous comes from the Latin obstreperus, which means “clamorous”; obdurate comes from the Latin obduratus, which means “hardened.” Despite the tendency of the words to sound similar to us because of the initial ob-, that’s really just a prefix meaning “by” (former) or “against” (latter two). Otherwise, the words all have different roots. Ha ha! Latin, you’re so funny!

§1281 · July 26, 2006 · (No comments) · Tags: memes, Wednesday's Word

¶ YouOS: a screenshot tour

Receiving no active development since November 2006, YouOS was shut down in June 2008.

For those of you who don’t know, YouOS is a so-called “Web OS,” currently still in alpha testing, that serves as a sort of portal, except that it seeks to emulate a desktop environment of a modern operating system.

The Tour

YouOS

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I was able to snag an account, and after having to wait for a while because there were too many users logged it, I was finally able to log in, and was presented with a desktop with icons, and four opened programs. My initial impression was that the UI experience was a little rough around the edges: icons were pixelated, the portlets were poorly designed, and behaviours were a bit erratic (well, it is only an alpha). I would certainly expect that a finished product—if indeed it is ever finished—would have significantly more spit and polish.

I played with the sticky note app (which is just a blank text area to jot down notes or code) and then launched the shell. It is intended to mimic a *nix shell rather than DOS, but YouOS’s documentation says that instead of Perl or Python, the accepted scripting language for the YouOS shell is Javascript, a scowl-worthy datum to me. There aren’t a large number of shell commands to use, but one can browse the filesystem and monkey around with some of the basics.

Out of the box, YouOS includes an internal IM service which only communicates with other YouOS users, but while browsing the additional software list, I did catch that someone had written an MSN messenger—I can only assume that there are similar extensions for other services. Also displayed in the third screenshot is the process manager, which shows currently open applications for your userspace.

The Rich Text Editor enabled by default is a decent enough WYSIWYG application, but basically only creates HTML snippets. There are several extensions that make use of third-party services like Writely or ajaxWrite, however. I installed the Writely extension but was asked for a username and password, and never got any farther than that.

There’s a basic tree-style file manager that allows one to browse files (if they have them); in my case, I only have an HTML snippet made in the RTE and the PDF I generated from it; supposedly, one can upload any one of a number of things, and these would then be viewable within the file manager.

The default setup includes two different browsers—YouBrowser and BittyBrowser—which are both essentially the same thing: they open up an iframe or something like it and using my local browser to view the page within the YouOS “page.” Sure, a browser is a requisite for this sort of proof of concept, but at the same time, it’s tits on a bull.

In much the same way that the default IM system is internal, the integrated Mail app is as well. As you can see from the picture, it came with a stock message from the YouOS team. As with most other parts of this alpha, the functionality the user actually wants can be found in the user-contributed section, where I saw a Gmail watcher applet, and probably many other things as well.

Speaking of which, I’ve included a screenshot of the software installer, which offers one-click additions of novel little applications, which are then accessible from the main menu.

One of those novel little applets in an NES emulator written in Java, with a preset repository of ROMs to play. Included in a screenshot of Double Dragon III. Ironically, you can see that by the author’s own admission, the applet is a proof of concept, and one would be significantly better off downloading a real emulator and playing it locally. Ah, the fun never stops.

Last but not least, there’s the main menu, a mix of the Windows metaphor with some *nix style thrown in.

Additional Thoughts

YouOS is a novel project that still manages to fall far short of the wonderful UI experience of something like NetVibes. The ambition is there: trying to reproduce an entire desktop environment with Javascritp is a Herculean task, and the infrastructure needed to support such a project on a public scale would be enormous.

And yet, I fail to be impressed. What irritated me initially about the project was the name—YouOS, for those of you not following—is misleading: an operating system is a layer between application and hardware. YouOS is an abstraction of sorts, but it’s really just a fancy portal that tries to feel responsive like a desktop environment. We’re a long way away from “Web OS,” if such a thing could even exist in real terms. What the buzzword really means is a portal that allows for a lot more synchronization between it and external devices, and which allows the user his or her own little space in the server.

The problem comes in actually creating the infrastructure that would support the sheer number of people who want to do everything online. The Telcos have really dropped the ball in expanding their bandwidth, so the limiting factors in these ventures are going to be a) the crush of people who would flock to (hypothetically) YouOS like it was the next MySpace and b) trying to create a full-featured web application that supports all the various browsers and that isn’t so convoluted that maintaining it becomes impossible.

Interesting portal concept? Maybe. The Next Big Thing®? Hardly.

§1270 · July 24, 2006 · 2 comments · Tags: reviews, software, technology

¶ Muse • Black Holes and Revelations

Muse is the band that everybody loves to hate. Whether they’re too similar to Radiohead, too similar to Coldplay, too similar to [insert artrock band here]; whether Matt Bellamy’s voice is like a hot knife in the eardrum or the constant bombardment of out-of-place techno sound or the love of amplified distortion; whether the trite lyrics or the worse song titles, there’s a lot one can dislike, but it’s testament to Muse’s ability (it’s there, somewhere) that they still manage to make listenable records in spite of all.

For the record, I really like Absolution, or at least I liked a lot of songs from it. The opener, with its foot stomping and crashing piano (which sounded genuinely like a piano and not keyboard) and earnest, exuberant singing was feel-good rock with shades of singer-songwriters. Bellamy showed off his ivory-tickling skills again in “Butterflies and Hurricanes,” which had a short cadenza right in the middle of it. Pretentious, maybe, but art rock in full force, and genuinely enjoyable to listen to.

Black Holes and Revelations sounds to me like Muse is on autopilot. It’s a disc full of forgettable songs, to be sure, but what’s worse is that they didn’t bother to include anything that made the last album so good: everything’s disposable, and tainted with the constant inclusion of “techno,” in much the same way that Radiohead does “modern prog” by the use of samples and synthesized sound. The difference is that Radiohead pulls it off, whereas Muse sounds trashy and like some one-hit wonder from the 80s. If you need proof, just listen to “Knights of Cydonia,” which may just be the most awfully tacky thing ever put to tape, topped off by Bellamy’s Freddie Mercury imitation (don’t quit your day job, Matt).

There were plenty of tacky moments in Absolution, too, but Bellamy & Co. managed to dilute it with great moments—in this latest offering, there’s very little crashing piano (the little bit in the Radiohead-like “Hoodoo” doesn’t count), and very few feel-good moments that made me want to press the back button and listen again. After several runs through the album, the only songs I could pick out were the ones that struck me as gawdy and awful, like the aforementioned “Knights of Cydonia.” When the only songs I can remember are the ones bad enough to stick out, there’s something seriously wrong with the album in question. Over-the-top can be fun, but Muse tries to mix so many schticks the the only result is a muddled musical mess, hardly worthy of spending your money on.

That being said, I hesitate to call Black Holes and Revelations a bad album; it does, however, pale in comparison to others in the genre, and even to Muse’s own catalogue. Unless you’ve got money to burn, or a bittorrent client, you might want to pass this stinker up.

Postscript:

Funnily enough, I went to Pitchfork Media’s review of the album, and was amazed to see that I’m not alone in my analysis: Sam Ubi even uses some of the same adjectives to describe it. I think I made a friend.

§1268 · July 22, 2006 · 5 comments · Tags: music, reviews

¶ Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway

Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway by Dave Barry: Publisher: Ballantine Books; Year: 2002; Pages: 180

I’ve been aware for some time now that Dave Barry is a libertarian, but I’d never really given it any considerable thought. In part, this is because Barry’s humour, while fiercely libertarian, is just that: humor. So, when Barry lampoons the political process, the bloat of pork barrel politics, or the extreme encumbrance of bureaucracy, it comes off to the reader as mere shenanigans—comic hyperbole ha ha! What a funny guy!

Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway is a funny enough book at its strong points, namely when Barry’s libertarianism qua humor is rampaging through Washington. In fact, it’s when he delves into “so ridiculous it’s funny” stories rather than wholesale fabrications that Barry is at his funniest and most original.

The book lacks a certain cohesion, and feels like it was written as several long articles and pasted together under a vaguely political theme. It starts out with a brief treatment of the dawn of man through the writing of the constitution. It dwells heavily on giant prehistoric zucchini for a bit, and then more or less resembles a ghost of Dave Barry Slept Here: a Sort of History of the United States, which is hands-down one of his funniest books ever. But his cursory musings about early American politics don’t inspire mirth so much as a longing for the early 90s, when Barry was in his prime. Next in line comes a significantly funnier look at modern Washington and the scope of the federal bureaucracy, followed up closely by a thorough smear of political campaigning (including a short skit which I found hilarious). This section is funny enough, but the more I thought about Barry’s political stance, the less it seemed like humor and more like thinly-veiled punditry. Or, as Al Franken would say, “kidding on the square.”

The final section is a long diatribe about South Florida that veers from joshing about the 2000 election to a digression about Cuba and Castro to a long and detailed discussion of the various colourful politicians and their ever-present and ever-seedy lawyers that turn places like Miami into a living cartoon. Once again, this latter section was the most entertaining of its “I’m not creative enough to make this shit up” sort of nature.

And that’s it: a mere 180 pages, much of them filler, surrounding a few articles’ worth of decent material. I got this book for all of $3 (used book store), and I’m sure glad I didn’t pay full price for it, because it’s certainly not the treasure trove of humour that Barry used to put out.

§1257 · July 19, 2006 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, politics, reviews

¶ Wednesday’s Word: qua

qua: prep. In the capacity or character of; as

This is officially the coolest word I’ve learned in a long time. I’ve always had a tendency to talk about—for instance—Death As Abstract, but have never been sure of the canonical way to write it, such as the capitalization of “As,” or the possible hyphenation of the whole phrase. That was until I learned “qua,” which is the academic way of referring to a subject as something else.

It’s not a ten-dollar word, but it’s a handy little addition to any vocabulary.

§1251 · July 19, 2006 · (No comments) · Tags: Wednesday's Word