Helvensteijn.com

I was vehemently opposed to SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, DMCA and all those nasty four letter acronyms, but something made me realize that it’s all pointless. Let them implement all the rotten legislation they want. The Internet was designed to be immune to nuclear warfare, it sure as hell will survive some politically misguided attempts to curtail it.

The more governments try to regulate the Internet in their own (or rather, their lobbyists’) views, the more inventive the Internet community will get to circumvent said regulation. It has happened before, and it will happen again. If the people thinking this shit up have learned nothing from Napster and Kazaa and BitTorrent and Usenet, I’m not worried. In the long run, they’re just shooting themselves in their feet.

A few days ago, the White House issued a statement in which they oppose SOPA and PIPA as they stand now, but also call upon the Internet community to “bring enthusiasm and know-how to [the] important challenge” of combatting online piracy. They just don’t get it.

Online piracy isn’t the problem, it’s just a symptom of an industry that outright refuses to acknowledge the fact that a large part of its business is no longer relevant. You see, the Internet has reduced the cost of distribution to the cost of bandwidth. There just isn’t as much dough in that as, say, treating your customers like shit and charging them big money for the privilege. Maybe they ought to start innovating, after all. To quote Nat Torkington:

We gave you the Web. We gave you MP3 and MP4. We gave you e-commerce, micropayments, PayPal, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, the iPad, the iPhone, the laptop, 3G, wifi–hell, you can even get online while you’re on an AIRPLANE. What the hell more do you want from us?

The ball has been in the entertainment industry’s court for years now, and still they refuse to pick it up. It is 2012 for goodness’ sake. If you don’t let people pay for what they want, they’ll get it for free. And yes, you can compete with free, it’s called service. There’s massive value in that, and people are willing to pay. How many more examples is it going to take?

But hey, if these dinosaurs want to have it their way, why not let them? In the end, we’ll just decentralize and encrypt everything. Eventually, they’ll come begging for our money, and they’ll do anything to make us give it to them. We’ll see who has the longest breath…

Need I say more?

I have contact info and if you want to question my opinions publicly, post to (get?) your own blog and let me know.

I realize it’s just a tiny drop in the bucket, but given enough drops, the bucket will spill over.

Just petitioned the State Department to stop the internet censorship bill. You should too! americancensorship.org/modal/state-de… #usacensored #SOPA

— Colin Helvensteijn (@chelvensteijn) January 14, 2012

A long, long time ago, probably somewhere in East Africa, something interesting happened. Something that had never happened before, and has never happened again. It first occured to early humans that it would be advantageous for them to actually know things. Not just remembering previous experiences, but posing a question, finding the answer and remembering that. It is this concept of knowledge, and the ability to expand and share it by asking and answering questions, that I believe sets humans apart from all other animals, even those considered to be highly intelligent.

Numerous different animals have been trained to anwer our questions in equally numerous ways. With moderate success, I might add. Some of these animals have learned to answer fairly complex questions. But as far as I know, none of them have ever taken the next logical step and started asking us — or themselves, for that matter — questions. And why would they? Without a concept of knowledge, what benefit would it serve?

Domesticated animals definitely know how to ask for things, or at least make their whishes apparent to us. For instance, we have two dogs who have no problem communicating when they need to go, when they’re hungry, or just want to play. Especially in the last case, one of our dogs really appears to be saying “please come and play with me”, begging for attention while bringing some toy and being very excited and all. But nothing that would even hint at the posssibility that they want to know something.

All this is just my brain’s tendency to go all philosophical when I’m feeling sick and am otherwise incapable of being productive. It simply hit me that, while largely taken for granted, our understanding of knowledge and our ability to expand on it and share it, is actually quite profound. Just a sentiment I thought was worth sharing.

You were the crazy one who saw things differently.
You thought you could change the world, and you did.

Farewell, Steve. You will be missed.

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First of all, I want to make it clear that, while I have done a bit of research, I am by no means an expert on this matter, I just find it very interesting. This article is purely about my personal experience with 3D displays, and what I think is wrong with them, based on that experience.

Having said that, let’s clarify what I mean by “3D displays”. I’m referring to the stereoscopic kind, these flat displays projecting a different image at each eye. For this article, it’s not relevant how they accomplish that. What’s relevant is that they rely on stereopsis, meaning the disparity between what each eye sees, which gives us a cue of relative depth.

So, what exactly do I think is wrong with them? It boils down to two things: convergence and motion parallax. Both are fixed, which your brain doesn’t expect. There are other depth cues we see in everyday life that are still missing from 3D displays, but I think these two are most important.

To start off with convergence. This is the fact that when both eyes focus on the same object, they turn towards each other. The amount of convergence depends on the distance to the object. The closer the object, the more the eyes will turn inward. With a stereoscopic display, there really is only one distance, which is the distance to the display itself. To see things sharply, both eyes must focus, and thus converge, on the display. This fixed convergence conflicts with the stereoscopic depth cue that the display provides.

Then, there’s motion parallax. When you look at an object and shift your head, you should see the object from a different perspective. In stereoscopic displays, depending on the technology used, when you shift your head either nothing happens — again conflicting with the depth illusion the display is trying to evoke — or the 3D effect falls apart completely, which is even worse.

The parallax problem has, in fact, already been solved, at least with generated imagery (i.e. video games, computer animations). I’ve seen demonstrations of 2D displays creating an illusion of depth, by changing the perspective using head tracking. Such a system could relatively easily be adapted for 3D displays, at least those using special glasses. Auto-stereoscopic displays (those without special glasses) generally have a parallax barrier or lenticular lenses fixed to the display, so dynamically shifting perspective seems somewhat more complicated there, unless the parallax barrier or lenticular lenses themselves could be shifted.

In 3D films, motion parallax would probably require more than two cameras, or maybe two widely spaced cameras with a computer interpolating the in-between perspectives. In either case (3D films or generated imagery), two fixed perspectives (one for each eye) is one thing, providing a whole range of perspectives might not even be feasible for most applications.

As for convergence, I guess it would be a lot more difficult, if not impossible, to solve. The way I see it, as long as the display itself is flat, convergence will always remain a problem.

Then, there’s a third problem which I’ve observed on my Nintendo 3DS. No matter if an object is in the foreground or in the background or in between, everything is sharp. It’s like it has an infinite depth of field. While the stereoscopic effect in and of itself is quite convincing, it makes it feel somewhat unnatural to me. 3D movies are better in that respect. The foreground is in focus with the background blurry, or vice versa. Perhaps there are games that are more like 3D movies in that regard, but both the OS and the games I’ve played so far exhibit this “infinite depth of field” effect.

In any case, while personally, I don’t have much problems looking at 3D displays, I can definitely see how they can cause headaches for some. They give conflicting depth cues, and as with every other conflicting situation, some people cope better than others.

I’ve been using OS X Lion for a few days now, and apart from the obvious new features that were advertised by Apple or that are mentioned in every review, there’s a plethora of little things that are new or have changed. I want to highlight a few of those here, in no particular order.

• The grey Apple logo now remains on screen during the entire boot sequence and also got a subtle emboss to it. Also, no more blue while booting.
• It usually takes my iMac a few seconds after I hit Cmd+Opt+Eject to fall asleep. That hasn’t changed, but what has changed is that it now immediately turns off the display. The extra visual feedback it provides is nice.
• The grey top area of windows now has a very subtle grainy texture to it.
• The bottom corners of windows are now rounded.
• Quick Look now also works on stacks in the Dock. Simply hover over any item and hit space.
• Speaking of Quick Look, it now uses a light grey window instead of the HUD display. Also, click and hold or right-click the Open with [Application] button to open the file with a different application.
• Right-click a file → Open with → App Store... to search the App Store for compatible applications.
• The huge 512×512 pixels icons introduced in OS X Leopard are apparently still not huge enough. Some apps, including Launchpad and App Store, now have icons measuring 1024×1024 pixels.
• Almost everything is now 64 bits, including the kernel and even iTunes.
• The Special Characters applet got a face lift.
• The dictionary popup also received a face lift.
• DigitalColor Meter no longer displays hexadecimal values, which kinda sucks.
• No more Front Row.
• Safari’s content area can be resized horizontally even in full screen mode.
• Safari now has WebGL support and a “Do Not Track” feature, but they’re apparently still in beta. Both options are located in the Develop menu and off by default.

There’s probably much, much more I haven’t discovered yet. Apple seems to have touched everything in this release.

I’m just an amateur JavaScript addict, and I know virtually nothing about OS programming, but something occurred to me the other day. Someone probably came up with the same idea a long time ago and decided it wasn’t practical or something, but as a mere layman on the subject, I see no reason why it couldn’t be done.

So, my idea is to have the operating system keep some sort of record of processes that are allowed to run with root¹ privileges, and have software, upon installation, register with the operating system any such processes it needs.

To explain my point, let’s make the following assumptions:

• The operating system has a reliable way of identifying processes that are about to be spawned.
• The operating system keeps an encrypted record of processes that are allowed to run with root privileges.
• It requires authentication by a user with root privileges to install software that can obtain root privileges.
• Software must register any processes it needs root privileges for with the operating system upon installation.
• The operating system bluntly disallows any processes it doesn’t know about to run with root privileges.
• No (known) privilege-escalating exploits are present.

If those conditions are met, it seems to me that it would be nearly impossible for any malware to surreptitiously obtain root privileges, and thus do damage to the system. It could still erase, steal and/or otherwise abuse the user’s data, but that’s a problem that falls outside the scope of process privileges.

Again, I’m probably missing something here, otherwise operating systems would likely be doing all this stuff already. But if that is the case, I would be curious to know why then it’s not feasible. So if you have any comments on the matter, please don’t hesitate to leave them!

1. Or administrator, or superuser, or whatever. ↩

This post is in Dutch, as it mostly concerns current events in The Netherlands.

I’ve been using the nickname raptor, or when that wasn’t available, raptorNL for years now, but I just decided I’m getting too old for that nonsense. I already have a name that I’ve had since birth and which serves me fine, so I figured why would I need another? It’s not like a nickname offers any anonymity, there are other ways to accomplish that if so desired. It’s also not a given nickname, I just made it up myself, so I won’t be offending anyone by not using it anymore.

My first name is not that uncommon, so it’s already used by countless others. My last name is pretty uncommon, but I do have family I share it with. I already claimed helvensteijn.com, and I’m not about to go claiming our family name everywhere on the web.

That leaves me with just plain Colin Helvensteijn, but since many web sites and services don’t accept spaces in usernames, it’ll be ColinHelvensteijn then, because I hate underscores. As far as I know my first and last name pretty much uniquely identify me, so chances are no-one else will be using it. I’ve been using it on and off as a wikiname here and there (at Wikipedia for instance), so I already have precedent.

So, I’ll be changing my raptor/raptorNL nicknames everywhere to ColinHelvensteijn in the following days or weeks or so, at least if the site or service allows it. I could always re-register otherwise. I’m starting with Twitter right now.

Update: Twitter fail. Name is exactly 2 characters too long. Any suggestions?

Update, March 29th: Twitter Isn’t the only one wo thinks 17 characters is too long.
So, chelvensteijn it is then. If a site thinks 13 characters is still too much, I don’t even want to be registered there.