epiphanatic » 2008» March

Posted on 03.26.08 by jstoner @ 11:00 pm

Went into Rush last Thursday for my most recent adjustment. It was the end of the study, they videotaped me, we ran through some questionnaires, same routine as at the start of the study. Then I got confirmation: I was in the experimental group. No surprise.

So, now I know what my settings are: the wires have four points of contact, where current can flow into my brain. The deepest one–”lead zero”–is the one with good results. I am running at .8 volts on the right side and .7 on the left. The pulse wavelength is 130 milliseconds, but they don’t mess with that. The pulse width–the interval of time during the ‘wave’ when the current is on–is 450 microseconds. I think it’s a square wave. I don’t know the amperage, I don’t think they can adjust that. I’m sure it’s a microcurrent. That deepest lead is directly above my optic nerves on both sides, but I’m not seeing any spots.

And it seems to be working. My walking and standing posture are substantially improved. My speech is distinctly better, though it might be just a bit worse since this last adjustment. My hands are a little more relaxed, though it’s a less distinct improvement. My neck is also a little less constricted, actually more spastic. I nod more, and stick my chin out when I talk. Actually that’s an improvement.

My balance is a lot better. Much more solid. I’m biking to work pretty regularly–three times this week, four if the weather cooperates Friday. I am a little tired, but it’s a good feeling. And my new layer of flab is diminishing again.

Just today I’ve noticed when I walk, the toes on my right foot curl in a bit. Not a problem per se, but something to pay attention to. And my right hand is still clenching, but a little less than before.

The other piece of good news: Medtronic is testing rechargables that are supposed to last ten years. They’re supposed to be available next year. My current ones are not rechargeable, and only last a couple years. Battery replacement is minor surgery, but still surgery.

So in a couple years when they replace my current batteries, they won’t have to replace them again till after I’m fifty. Now as long as the world doesn’t fall apart in the meantime…

Filed under: life
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intelligent software, stupid software, and Unix-philosophy software

Posted on 03.02.08 by jstoner @ 1:23 am

I had some experiences with some spectacularly bad software over the past few weeks. BMC Software markets this confusing ball of stuff, with some internal boundaries I don’t understand well. My interface to it at work is called Remedy–it’s how I make requests for stuff like a server to run software on, or an account on a new system.

It has some intelligence, or tries to. There are ways to route requests. How do I get this thing I need from the Company? Well, it comes from some part of the company, and the software assumes you don’t know where that part is, and it gives you a few abstracted ways to specify that. Sometimes it grabs it out of your description of the problem you want to solve.

Or, you know, tries to. In practice, you do know where things come from, or have ways of finding out, so you make your request, you email the relevant person with the request number, they go in and correct whatever mistakes you or the system made so the wrong people don’t receive it and cancel it and they get credit for the work, and then they get to work.

Anyway, I was struck by how poorly this works, and I reflected on my experiences with using intelligent software. There seems to be a continuum of intelligence:

Highly intelligent software: Google is the example that comes to mind. It spell-checks my most obscure searches, and can tell if I want to do a search or convert between units. Its intelligence makes it easy to use, like having an assistant. It also gives me the option of bypassing its intelligence.

Stupid software: the BMC example above seems to fall in this category. As does Clippy, Microsoft’s intrusive office assistant thing that popped up and annoyed you, before Microsoft woke up and killed it. As does Microsoft Word’s document formatting, which I find infuriating. I often spend more time battling it than I do writing my damn document.

Unix-philosophy software: software that relies on the intelligence of the user. It’s not trying to be intelligent. It assumes you are, and gives you tools to do what you wanna do without getting in your way.

The Unix command line is the canonical example. Unix tools like grep, find, and sed are examples of tools that do particular things, do them reliably and predictably. They put a burden of expertise on the user, but they make sense. The boundaries between what grep and find do make sense. The way they talk to each other makes sense.

As complex as they may be, they serve a powerful philosophy: simple tools that work together to accomplish complex things. Pieces of a puzzle that has a sensibility behind it. A consistency that allows you to make predictions about how they work, even if you don’t know their function exhaustively.

They eschew intelligence, by design. Grep knows what you can tell it, on what terms, in what language. Grep knows what you do tell it when you invoke it. It knows what the end of a line of text in its input looks like. It knows little else.

Wikis probably belong in the same category. They are simpler than Unix command-line tools, arguably better designed, but they do exactly what you tell them to. And you can integrate them with other tools in all kinds of interesting ways.

The intelligence here is also in the designer: not just in anticipating my needs, but also in an appreciation of the limits of their understanding, and the thought to give me power in flexibility.

Google, on the other hand, knows a great deal. Google sits on one of the biggest piles of data, if not the biggest, in human history. Google is actively analyzing that data, pulling intelligence out of it, making it useful.

And Microsoft? When Microsoft Word screws up the formatting of my spec, once more, there’s no way for it to learn from my frustration. There’s no accumulation of information. It thinks it knows what I want, and it’s usually wrong, and there’s no way to train it. Which is why I hate using it.

So we see a distinction between software that is stupid and software designed with no pretense of intelligence in the first place. And we see what it takes to make software that is intelligent: software that can collect information and learn from it. Whether or not it is using a process behind the scenes that humans would describe as ‘intelligent,’ the effect is the same.

It’s awfully hard to do that well–Google spends billions on making and keeping their one-line entry tool smart. It’s also difficult to make intelligently designed, powerful yet simple tools, that talk to each other in useful ways. I don’t know how much Microsoft spends making their document formatting engine, but I have a feeling most of it is wasted.

Filed under: computer and technology|vision
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