Movies I watched today

Movies I watched today: Outland (featuring Sean Connery) - bit of 1980's scifi wonderland- computers with green type and vector graphics combined with shotgun toting on a moon base (on one of Jupiter's moons no less) and a healthy dose of video-phoning.

It all made me think about the durability of sci-fi ideas- why does video calling remain such a common element within sci-fi when it's available now, cheaply (I can buy a £40 phone on pay-as-you-go with video calling now) and no-one shows no interest in it? People (who know better than I do) argue that it's because video phoning is a visually-rich movie toy which makes it good for directors and story tellers. Others argue the other half of the story by saying that in reality it's not convenient to video call- you can't do it on the move and it's not really benefical to show everyone where you are or even who you are.

I'd agree with both arguments- but I'd like to turn them on their head a little bit. Visually rich may be frustrating now- but in the future it could be a security perk. VOIP and IM has opened us up to a whole new level of spoofing and identity fraud- whereas video-calling has brought us a whole new way of verifying the identity of the caller.

It's still next to impossible to generate on-the-fly life like speaking avatars that could fool a human being in conversation so video could easily secure your identity when making a call- if you don't recognise the caller, you can simply ignore them.

Which makes me wonder- why don't we use pictures more in cryphtography and more in general with communication software. Imagine an IM app where you buddy list had to have pictures of the person (and not just a picture or motto) and showed them in a room together for multi chat- it's simple enough to do. Why don't we use a digital photography as hash for all our passwords (as long as we don't share that specific photograph too much!)?

My final year disertation looked at picture sequences being used for passwords, rather than key sequences users would pick "hot-spots" or sequences of pictures from a grid rather than type in input- and it proved be a significantly better way of working- there's a good deal of studies looking at similar stuff (including Microsoft stuff if I remember rightly) so I'm amazed no one's gone commerical with a full product yet - maybe if I'm wrong someone can tell me who does it in reality?

As for the movie- a great bit of sci-fi fluff - nothing too substainal, but far from awful.

Geology Field Trip/the importance of good input...

Natalie "made me" go out on her Geology society's field trip- wasn't sure what to expect of it to be fair, but I did get a good chance to play around with my Panasonic Lumix FZ-20 - and it's a cracking camera. Oh, and I found a shark's tooth- how cool is that?!

Back to my point (for today) - don't ever let anyone tell you that "a camera is a camera".

I guess having working in a camera shop way back (three years ago) when the digital era was peaking (as opposed to the steep decline it's in now as the snapshotters who originally drove people to digital compacts in the first place because they offered ultra-convenience (and brought back fun) to the art of photography are moving quickly onto mobile phones which provide the same power but with even more convenience) I suffer the photographer nerd's addiction to "pixel's aren't everything" and the "lens is king".

Having been out of the field for a bit though I thought going back to doing some "proper" photography would make me envious- I had a two-year-old digital camera from Panasonic (who were relatively new in the digital camera field back then) and everyone else was toting digital SLR's (Canon EOS's no less) and 12 megapixel compacts- making my mere five-million pixels sound positively low-res!

But the Panasonic still rocked - every shot it took (on automatic, with no fiddling or post tweaking) looked great to me - and whilst my camera was pretty bulky for a non-professional, non-SLR camera, I felt chuffed with the results.

The reason for it? Well, the image stabiliser makes every shot sharp and that helps a lot- most bad shots are those that are ruined by blur - typically the photographer's mistake (and don't let them tell you otherwise!) rather than the subjects- but the image stabiliser worked a treat- I can see why more and more manufacturers are picking this feature up and making it the norm.

But if I had to say what I think the real, main, reason that the shots looked great I'd have to say it was the lens. Sharp, bright, clear photos require light - lots of light- and that's what this one delivered. Decent wide angle, cracking zoom, these are the things that we can all easily assess with statistics and the things we spot straight away when we're looking at the reviews and tech-sheets- but what you really need are sample shots that show you the lens quality in the light and in the dark.

I'll post my pictures on the web in a wee bit - though I doubt many of you will be able to pick up the camera since it's long been discontinued (though I hear it's replacement is just as good). What I do hope though is that it'll encourage all to think not just about the pixels, but about the lens- I love technology's drive sometimes (in fact it drives me most of the time), but let's not forget that input is the real story- everything depends on the quality of input- be it software or hardware and that all boils down to the technology's interface with the world.

We've seen it in the I-phone- it captures input in a way people are enthralled by - touch- and gives highly rewarding output based on simple input. The bad "output" going around about FaceBook is based upon people's dislike of the high amount of "unconcious" input - the meta-data we unknowningly generate whilst browsing pictures of our friends and zombie-tagging each other - giving output in the form of advertising.

Good software, in my opinion, captures as much as it can that can be considered relevant and then a little bit more. But it also feeds back on that input with output that is measured and well processed. Some input is useless, can be thrown away, some can be used in really clever ways in the background to make the software better, but the really important stuff must be high quality- just like the lens on my camera. So make your input capture as good as you can - your program is only as good as the user's input.

Document Recovery - Recuva

Everyone's deleted something in error and cursed themselves - but most of see that data as being gone for good. Recuva (by the same people behind the excellent CCLeaner, and a rare-British small software house!) wins my award for being a life saving bit of freeware.

A simple, tiny download. Quick installation with no questions asked. Simply interface, quick scanning ability and a high recovery rate. It's simple and it works - I don't think there's much more I need or could say about a piece of freeware that you'll rarely use but the time you do use it you wish you could kiss it's creator!

My only complaint is I cant see a portable version currently - running it straight from a USB key would be excellent - but hey, if that's all I can fault it for, that's going pretty well!

Whilst I'm on the topic of deleting data- why hasn't Windows get any better at this yet? The Recycle Bin (as ever, stolen from the Mac world) was a great feature (once people remembered that stuff was put in there by default and disk space was no longer an issue- I remember in 1996 with Windows 95 everyone cursed the recylce bin for a time because people thought deleted items should just go straight away because it left people scratching their heads as to where all their disk-space was going) but seemingly after that we've had nothing.

No, I tell a lie, Vista gives us version control and recovery of document files. That's a good feature- shame it ain't obvious to normal users and isn't integrated into (at least Microsoft's) apps- e.g. you can roll back the document without dropping out of the program itself and digging it out through Explorer.

It seems like the future may be the world of Time Machine that Apple's introduced (again, leading the pack)- but we need it for Windows.

Some simplification/streamlining of the delete process would be great too- shift-delete and delete make sense to me - but I imagine it has caught a few people out- perhaps everything should go into the recycle bin first- but perhaps have stuff tagged for over-writing (e.g. it won't take up disk space but can be restored up and until the time that it's overwritten). How about making network deletition (and cut and paste actions) not result in data loss - how may times have you deleted something on a network share in error- then remember that it rather than going to your recycle bin or even the network resource's recycle bin, it's simply moved into the wonderful world of file oblivion?

And finally, since I've clearly got rage on the whole issue I might as well cover the final bit of the problem- where's the decent backup software? The simple stuff, that works on servers (because there simply isn't a good MS Exchange / DFS backup solution on the market) and is seamless to use for everyone. The stuff that is switched on by default (just like the security experts say the firewall should be, the usability experts should be saying the same thing), the stuff that means we can roll back software and changes without it breaking everything else...

Part of my rage on the issue is this- today I successfully installed recuva and pull back 20 gigs of data which, after being deleted from a network share, looked to be lost. It was easy. When I was asked the day before to recover something from a backup (woho- something which had been deleted was actually being backed up) made by a leading manufacturer's backup product (Symantec (cough) Backup Exec (cough)) it failed- and after doing a bit of reading it's a known issue- which means a serious change to the backup configuration to prevent it from happening again and a serious amount of effort (and, thus far, wasted time) trying to recover a single document (less than 5 meg!). Where's the balance, the innovation in the market? Apple, once more, seems to be leading the pack in making things which just work- why can't Microsoft/Windows developers be there when it counts?!