Computing with only one eye

My right eye has not been really functioning since 1982, when I was 17.

I wore cataract first in May 1982 while I frequently hit my right eye due to the strong itchiness caused by chronic skin allergy. Eventually I lost my sight from the right eye, and after a few eye check the retina detachment was discovered. I was immediately thrown into a hospital room, locked onto the bed with keeping my face up against the gravity (so that the gravitational force helped preventing further detachment) for three weeks, in June 1982. It was an awful experience for a young teenage boy.

I had to have another surgery on September 1982 because of the unfixed detachment again. Later I had another surgery to fix the squint in 1983, caused by the previous surgeries. And finally in March 1986, the swollen and white-colored lens cell (yes, the lens is a single cell) which had lost the transparency in my right eye finally got taken away.

Fortunately, the retina (not the Apple's high-resolution display) in my right eye is mostly functioning OK, though I really can't read anything with it, and I can no longer accurately identify the 3D depth any more. I usually ignore the sight coming from my right eye other than the level of the light.

I've been with the usability problem caused by the broken right eye for many years, long before I started professional programming. Fortunately I've learned how things get large and small when their distance changes, so I can sway to avoid getting hit from most of the things. I still can enjoy 3D movies, though I won't accurately focus anymore.

Things coming towards me from the right side, however, are hard to recognize. I've stopped operating any vehicles including bicycles; I don't have a driver's license either. You don't want to get into a trouble which you can easily expect, especially where the driver's seat is on the left side of the car, like in the USA or Canada. Japan is not, but that doesn't alleviate the problem.

During the age of 80x25 character terminals when DEC VT100 or VT220 terminals were popular in 1980s, my right eye disability didn't cause much trouble, because the whole screen fit very well in the visual space I could recognize. Even in the age of where 14" or 17" CRT or LCD displays, where the default aspect radio was 4:3 or 5:4, I didn't have much problem. I've written a lot of document and many pieces of code; fortunately none of them mandated me to tackle the three-dimensional loss of perception.

I have a few problems regarding my sight disability since the beginning of the 21st century, unfortunately. One of them is the color design; most web sites choose white as the background color, which interferes the black foreground characters I read. I try to choose darker background colors and brighter foreground colors as possible, but not all web applications allow to do so.

Another one of the 21st century problems is the change of default aspect ratio of the screen to 16:9; this is too wide for my rather narrow sight space. If you are watching a movie this wouldn't be a problem. I welcome high-resolution displays with crispier pixels and accurate positions. But when you write a text, this will be a serious problem, because you can't see everything at once. I always choose narrower horizontal size to keep the screen in my left eye's sight range.

So far I can manage the environmental change of computing in the past 31 years. I expect, however, the future computing models, including those require wearing glasses or assume three-dimensional recognition ability, may eventually reject me from the cutting edge of computing. Maybe I can ask Google to make a special Google Glass to compensate the loss of my right eye's lens and focus directly into my right eye's retina, with proper size adjustment so that I can see the things in two eyes again.

And I can assure everyone that you can write the code with sight disabilities; I know a professional programmer who has completely lost the sight too.

(Thanks Tyler Hannan, who suggested me to write this. I had been hesitating to write about my weakness on the web, but I thought this would be helpful to others.)

Moving away from heavyweight blogs

I admit I've been dormant on blogs. Instead I've been active on Twitter and Tumblr; you can be reactive and posting short messages on those so-called microblogging systems. Time is the most scarce resource for me, and I want something with smaller overhead to write.

I will not entirely remove the contents of this blog, but I will not post a new article here, without further notice.

FYI, the pointers for my microblogging URLs:
(Note: the tumblr sites have been deleted by July 2009)

• jj1bdx: quote of technology
  
• Cyberperiscope Reviews (in Japanese)
  
• Twitter: jj1bdx (in Japanese)
• Twitter: kenji_rikitake (in English)
• Concurrently Chaotic (in English)
  

My allegation of spamdexing is finally dropped

It seems that the Blogger admin finally dropped the allegation of spamdexing from http://macrofield.blogspot.com/. It took more than 2 months, but less than 3 months, to solve this issue.

Of course, I removed the suspicious META refresh tag from the alleged page.

Links:
The report of false detection of spamming
Meta refreshing considered spamdexing

The days of Neuro Net Recordings

Neuro Net Recordings (NNR), an online techno-music distribution project, is one of the most important music projects of my life. Many music files of NNR have been available at archive.org as a part of the open source music archive. It was founded by Tomotoshi "Ackie" Akiyama and other core members including myself, in 1994. I was the Internet Archivist, or the one who handled the online distribution channels over Internet.

NNR had the free online distribution policy from the beginning: NNR had the non-exclusive distibution rights of the music files in the various available formats on the Internet. It was quite similar to the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, which means preserving the author's credit, non-profit use only, and changes not allowed during redistribution.

NNR was not really a for-profit label, but most of the albums of NNR Active Potential Series were distributed by cassette tapes with reasonable price (JPY500 for Active Potential Number 0). NNR also released one CD album called Neural Networks Vol. 1 in 1996. So NNR was really an independent label, though NNR consistently distributed the music files towards the potential listeners on the Internet. NNR once had a redistribution agreement with FranceMP3.com. Jean-François Fecteau has been a long-time supporter of NNR activities, and he has played NNR tunes many times in his program Le Vestibule from CFOU-FM in Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada.

The distribution format NNR chosen were RealAudio, MPEG-1, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3 finally, because MP3 technology license owners allowed exemption of the MP3 technology royalty fee to the business with USD100000 or less annual revenue. Ackie kindly sent me the past DATs for mastering NNR cassette tapes, so I rebuilt and remastered the CD-R master discs from the DATs. I learned the remastering skills using Syntrillium's Cool Edit (now Adobe Audition) and other tools.

I also performed real-time streaming events called Neuro Net Radio twice on 1998 and 1999, which were actually DJing from my house over RealAudio streaming, playing only NNR tunes to avoid dealing copyright issues with the copyright holders.

Many professional music creators contributed to the NNR music archive before and during they became really professional. Some of the artists are: NISH, Leopaldon, Takuya Kitani, and Warping Allergen. I find many NNR contributors are still actively seeking their other opportunities in their lives.

In the age of iTunes and Amazon.com MP3, no professional musician can survive without distributing their music online. Streaming music radio stations like Soma FM are doing competitive business. Many people in the so-called music industry, however, still do not accept online media, and I feel quite sad about it. I've already been fed up with the stagnated copyright issues in Japanese music scene either. So I decided to quit distributing NNR files on my own in 2004. Fortunately, archive.org generously provides the storage space and other goodies to the free-music distributors, so I decided to put NNR and my music pieces there in 2007.

I know my talent on music is quite limited and is not competitive enough to survive as a professional musician. But I also believe that does not limit my rights to freely distribute my own music. I've learned a lot through my NNR activities and I appreciate all those who helped NNR.

Fumi Yamazaki suggested me to write this, as a case study of Creative Commons activities in Japan. Thanks, Fumi.

META refreshing considered spamdexing

I am writing this as a memo for myself, and a message to Blogger.com reviewers of my old (blocked) blog at macrofield.blogspot.com.

I realize the whole issue is about Meta refreshing of HTML. This has been a common practice for a long time to redirect users from an old page to a new page. The problem of this practice, however, is that users will have difficulties on intervening the redirection.

I embedded a Meta-refreshing tag in my old (now blocked) blog for an automatic redirection. As seen in the Blogger.com's definition of spam blog, this redirection is considered spamdexing, a violation of Blogger.com service terms.

I think no one likes spamming any more and neither do I, but I should confess that I didn't study well on how Meta-refreshing is considered abusive these days in the HTML writing practice. I will remove the embedded META tag as soon as Blogger.com allows me to reedit the contents, or to be specific, to reedit the layout HTML tags of the old blog of mine.

And I suggest you all to stop using Meta refreshing. Being misunderstood as a spamdexing is doing nothing good for you, whatever your intention might be.

Teleworking technology: we already have it

I've been thinking about months for what technology can help people to discover and get the most out of teleworking. I'm getting closer and closer to the following conclusion:

We've already built teleworking infrastructures, at least in my home country Japan, and many other nations and regions which have already deployed the Internet. Period. We need to focus on how to break the barriers and remove the impediments to people to embrace teleworking technologies as their own tools.

Let me simply put in this way: teleworking is no longer something special. For example, writing this blog itself is a very good example of teleworking technologies. All I need is a decent Web browser capable to run JavaScript for Blogger's writing environment; and I can publish and show you what I write, like what you read now.

Collaboration is getting more and more easier also. LUNARR allows you to flip back an electronic document and let you and other people write something on the back. This is a rather intuitive way to co-author a document, which I had never thought about until I saw it. Geeks will do the whole things in more geeky ways using SSH, rsync, CVS, subversion, or whatever else for software development, but it's not only for geeks anymore. Anyone who has to write a document can do it on a teleworking environment.

So let's stop saying "I'm not allowed to work from (wherever you want other than your office) because blah blah blah..." and talk how you can leverage your productivity from introducing teleworking into your lifestyle. If you and your employer think teleworking is something restricted for special people, that mindset is archaic, and no longer applicable to the 21st-century version of modern lifestyle. And let's not take commuting as a duty; it should be a choice and it has to be, to reduce the gross amount of time and energy wasted by being forced to commute.

But beware that teleworking is not necessarily a duty either; don't do it like this as in an xkcd article. Don't leave your partner alone just because "something is wrong on/with the Internet" (grin).

Simple access-control status display

I had a chance to talk to my business partners about computer networking security. One of the participants told me that a secure networks should not be mixed up with the unsecure ones. He said in a trusted operating system environment, you would see a red window and a green window, when you handle the different security levels of the information in the windows. You can't copy-and-paste the pieces between the red and green windows, unless an overriding procedure is accepted, and recorded. While I think you can do something more to assist visually-handicapped people, this simple definition of security models should be incorporated with many Web and other Internet applications as soon as possible.

A few years ago I had a chance to see a presentation of similar ideas [1], which described the difference between Microsoft and Symantec products on telling the security level of the Web pages to the users. I thought Symantec's simple color-based access control looked much better than the IE's massive pairs of (not necessarily trivial) parameters.

Access control is often very complex, but the ideas should easily get through to the users. This simple principle has not been popular yet in the world of computer software and Internet applications.

Related link:
[1]Steven Furnell: Fostering the usability of information security solutions, at OECD-APEC Workshop on Security of Information Systems and Networks, Seoul, Korea, 6 September 2005.