James's Weblog

There’s a phenomenon in robotics called the the uncanny valley. It’s also commonly used in the context of computer graphics, where cartoonish characters (e.g. The Incredibles) are more acceptable than those that aim for realism but fall short (e.g. The Polar Express, Beowulf). It’s also been used in the context of user interface look-and-feel. I think there’s an uncanny valley for “intelligent software” too.

Software is becoming increasingly complex, and it’s not uncommon for programs to provide knobs to control their behaviors. Providing too many knobs, however, can overwhelm a user with choices. Programs can combat this by providing fewer knobs and picking default settings appropriate for common use cases, and by trying to do more actions automatically for the user. They can go too far, however; programs that try to make too many decisions on their own become more mysterious, sometimes seeming unpredictable, out-of-control, and annoying.

The Microsoft Office Assistant (“Clippy”) seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was artificial intelligence gone awry. It tried to be smart to recognize when users needed help, but it wasn’t smart enough to know when it was unneeded or when its advice was off-base. Similarly, this is also one of the reasons why I hate Facebook’s “News Feed” (nee “Top Stories”). Facebook uses some unknown weighting algorithm to pick which items to show in what order, but it ends up seeming random; some items seem chronological, but some aren’t.

This is something we deal with at VMware; we provide a number of knobs to allow users to tune virtual machines for their needs. Some settings don’t make sense when used together though. At what point is this obvious, at what point do we take the easy way out and display a message explicitly explaining that enabling option X will disable option Y, and at what point does the message itself become an annoying obstacle?

I confess that I don’t know that it’s actually a valley, though; it could just as easily be a cliff. Are computers that act perfectly like humans really what we want? Humans often don’t do a good job of understanding what other humans want either.

We originally had a flight at 9:55 PM yesterday night from San Jose to Boston with a connection in New York. JetBlue calls us on Sunday afternoon to tell us that our flight is cancelled and to reschedule through their website. By the time I get home to get online, the next available flight it offers me is four days later, arriving the day after Christmas. Lame. The website also offers to give me a refund, which is useless with such short notice.

I call JetBlue to see if there’s anything else they can do (maybe put me directly on another airline?), but they say no and that the Thursday flight is my only choice. Sigh. (Can’t some of the passengers on the next day’s flight be bumped off to make room for us? Is it really more fair to screw some passengers a lot rather than screwing a lot of passengers some? Debatable, I suppose.)

After I hang up and start looking at other airlines’ offerings, I realize that I have two other major airports at our disposal: Oakland and San Francisco. The JetBlue web page for rescheduling cancelled flights doesn’t allow departing from a different airport, but attempting to a book a flight direct from Oakland to Boston shows that there are available seats on a 9:15 PM flight that night. I call JetBlue back, ask if I can be put on that flight, they confirm that will work and reschedule me, noting that the flight is delayed to 11:05 PM.

After I hang up, I decide to check the flight status to see if it’s delayed any further. JetBlue’s website says that it too is cancelled. What? Did the agent just reschedule me to a cancelled flight? The website still lets me book seats on that flight. I check again an hour later, and now it says that the estimated departure time is now 10:45 PM but still claims that it’s cancelled. (Why is the departure time changing to a supposedly cancelled flight?) I call JetBlue back and ask. One agent says that the flight does appear to be cancelled. Another agent says that it isn’t. I tell each of them about the conflicting information, they put me on hold while they double-check, but I get disconnected before either can get back to me.

I check with Oakland Airport. Surely they’re the final authority on knowing which flights are actually departing from their runways. Their website says that the flight is not cancelled and that it’s scheduled to depart at 11:30 PM; I call them to confirm, and the lady there says 11:05 PM. (She also explains that the flight was cancelled earlier that day but that they decided to go through with it after all.) Even when we show up at the airport, the departure time at the gate says 11:10 PM, but the airport’s computer screens say 11:20 PM. Wacky.

Our flight actually did manage to leave (at around 11:30 PM), and we did manage to arrive. Phew! It could have been a lot worse (and was for a lot of other people).

• I have no idea why CableCARD has such weird capitalization.
• It’s surprising how CableCARDs—solid state PCMCIA devices—seemingly can have such a defect rate. Most people I know who’ve tried to set up a CableCARD have had to exchange them at least once. Also, since CableCARDs must be paired with the device they’re connected to, it’s hard for Comcast to test them beforehand, and it’s easy for them to shift blame to the device manufacturer.
• I think it’s funny that the Fremont Comcast office has a wall of televisions in its customer service lobby, but they’re all standard-definition CRTs. There’s not a single high-definition television in sight.
• Comcast’s website is really confusing, and they do an awful job of explaining the differences between different plans.
• The non-local HD channels that Comcast carries seemingly are from Eastern feeds and aren’t time-delayed for Pacific time. What the heck? On one hand, I guess it (sort of) increases the available choices of what to watch when, but on the other, I think it’s confusing. It’s not like this is the Central time zone, which is accustomed to being the Eastern time zone’s gimp.
• It’s annoying that the TiVo HD lists hundreds of channels I don’t actually get; can’t the CableCARD figure that out? Or maybe Comcast intentionally wants to show people all the channels they could be getting if they signed up for a more expensive plan.
• TBS’s stretch-o-vision is lame. I don’t know how people stand it. Their argument about not confusing viewers with pillarboxing would hold more water if every HD channel did the same thing, but luckily most channels aren’t that stupid. So instead people end up with a mixture of pillarboxed 4:3 content on some channels and distorted 4:3 content on others, which is more confusing. If they want to avoid complaints about black bars, they could do what ESPN sometimes does and show big station logos on the sides. I’d even prefer (non-animated) banner ads.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is easily my favorite CS book (although I confess it is the only one I’ve actually read). Its exercises happen to utilize characters named with double entendres: Alyssa P. Hacker (“a Lisp hacker”), Cy D. Fect (“side effect”), and Louis Reasoner (“loose reasoner”).

When I was a teaching assistant at Berkeley for its SICP-based course, I created my own character: Oski M. Wizard (“a Scheme wizard”). The name was perfect since “Oski” is the name of U.C. Berkeley’s mascot, and SICP is also known as “the wizard book” due to its cover graphic.

Sadly, he never got much exposure. I tried to get Professor Fateman to use him on one of his exams, but I think he didn’t understand the joke. (I probably should have pitched it to Professor Harvey instead.) At least I managed to use him in some practice exercises I gave to my section (which is more than I can say for another character I made, Sue D’Coda).

Poor Oski. And he so desperately wanted to impress Alyssa.

I never really spent much time watching the Olympics, but this year I watched it every day, partly because it happened to be in China, partly because only recently have I been able to watch HDTV programming, so watching everything in high definition still seems novel.

• The opening ceremony was very impressive, but why did China have to taint it with the digital doctoring?
• The new gymnastics scoring system is totally broken. Laypeople can’t relate to the scores and have no idea what’s good or bad. This was even worse for the team and all-around competitions since not all gymnasts performed the same exercise at the same time and each exercise had its own baseline for difficulty scores. I also think the difficulty scores get way too much weight. And, of course, the tie-breaking system is a joke.
• The outfits that the U.S. women’s gymnastics team wore made them look like Coca-Cola cans with blond ponytails.
• The linesmen who run up to the javelins and shot-put balls as they’re landing are nuts.
• I think I liked it better when the Summer and Winter Olympics were in the same year. I think having Olympic games every other year is too frequent and takes some of the magic out of it; I remember the 1984 and 1988 games seeming more special. (Of course, that might be because they happened to be the first two that I have any recollection of, and the competition between the two sides of the Iron Curtain heightened some of the drama.) Plus, they got to distract everyone from all the presidential politicking.
• Isn’t this a perfect opportunity for NBC affiliates to do something useful with their other digital subchannels instead of showing around-the-clock HD weather reports?
• Why were events shown live in the Eastern Time Zone (and presumably in the Central Time Zone) but not for the rest of the U.S.? Meanwhile people on the west coast had three extra hours for various newscasters and websites to spoil results for them.

I always used to avoid depositing checks in ATMs. A few years ago, one of my friends got screwed when he deposited a check only to discover later that the bank had no record of it. I preferred handing them over to a teller and getting a receipt.

One Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, I realized that I forgot to deposit a rebate check that was going to expire the next day. The bank was already closed by the time I got there that day, and it’s not open on Sundays. With no other alternatives, I deposited the check through the ATM.

It turned out to be way better than dealing with a human teller.

This particular branch had newfangled ATMs that offered envelope-less deposits. I inserted my check, the ATM scanned it, used OCR (or maybe a mechanical Turk) to read the amount, showed me a confirmation screen to double-check the transaction, and printed out a receipt with a copy of the check. This is great:

• No more deposit slips.
• Minimal waiting in line.
• I get a receipt for each check. Since going to the bank was inconvenient (particularly for the above the reasons), it usually wasn’t worth making a trip just to deposit a $5 or $10 check, so I’d wait until I had multiple checks to deposit. Unfortunately I’d get a receipt only for the total deposit amount, which made it difficult later if I needed to determine if I had received and deposited particular rebate checks.

Procrastination pays off once again. Had I been responsible, I’d have deposited my rebate check promptly with a human teller and never would have tried using the ATM to do it.

My crotch is really sore, but I think I can sort of ride a bicycle now. I have a hard time getting starting going uphill, though.

I think the bicycle Mitchell lent to me is too big.

Things to do before I turn 30:

1. Learn how to ride a bicycle.

A little over one year after he passed away, my dad got an absentee ballot and a jury duty summons. Go, California.

I really liked The Bourne Identity. I thought The Bourne Supremacy was not as good. I had heard that The Bourne Ultimatum was better and was looking forward to it, but after watching the DVD this past weekend, I think it’s the worst of the bunch. Some spoilers follow.

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