When it comes to web development, or technology as a whole, I want to be Julian Delphiki. You may expect me to tell you that Delphiki was a famous scientist or some brilliant engineer who created an enhanced beach ball, but in fact he was just a child when he had his greatest success.

Julian Delphiki is better known as Bean, the diminuitive greek kid who helped Ender Wiggin save the earth from the buggers in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. His specialty was being the problem solver. He thought of the stupid ridiculous over-the-top ideas and made them work.

I want to be the mad scientist of web design. Ask me for the impossible, give me the time and the resources, and I’ll find the way or I’ll blaze my own trail.

There’s a magical idea here, the seductive power of the infinite. Web design is an infinite canvas with infinite canvases available. But even in the infinite boundless workspace the possible can be hard to find. I love web design for that feeling, the same feeling a sculptor has as he digs his fingers through clay. The way that Edison felt when his light bulb lit and held its burn for longer than the flash so many others gave off as they went off.

Or when the Pirate Blackbeard first spotted his prey and then successfully overran them and began to pillage and plunder. The feeling of satisfaction and pleasure basking in victory. He created a victory where in many cases there should have been none. Now imagine if Bean had been a pirate, Somalia would have been deeply interested in that.

Invention is a wonderful and powerful thing.

If we decided what had won E3 for the most press and buzz, undoubtedly it is Xbox 360′s Natal (nah-tall). This project is bringing the next level of interaction and immersion in games. The ability for us to move past the Wii’s active level using a controller into an active gaming experience on our own.

Now the first thing is to share that a bit of this technology is bought or licensed by Microsoft, it isn’t their own. Johnny Lee, who is best known for the hack he did with the Wii, where he modified a pair of glasses to interact with the Wii and create an impressive experience where the screen reflected his location and orientation, allowing him to literally look behind objects and such. Also I saw a demo for some of the function where a person can control systems without any controller, such as we saw the flicking through movies etc.

Of the demos though, Natal’s Milo is the most amazing, stunning and unbelievable. The functionality shown in this demo is so smooth and realistic I find it very hard to believe.

Further, I realized halfway through the video that Milo had not fallen into the Uncanny Valley for me. Obviously he’s still clearly animated and not going for the 100% realistic look, instead going with a more artistic nearly anime art style while still staying somewhat close to realistic.

But considering even the animation as ho-hum, consider the AI we’re shown. The ability for the system to process natural language, detect inflections, and the creation of realistic audio. Just wow. This could be truly epic and if the game / system continues to develop in this way, I will definitely be acquiring an Xbox 360 for it.

Link shorteners have come under fire this week. Schachter criticized them saying they make the web more fragile as a single point of failure for hundreds of thousands if not millions of links on the Internet. Jason Kottke posted agreeing with him. And they’re right. There’s no disputing that. However I have two proposals for ideas which could strengthen the web while still utilizing shorteners.

First, what if link shorteners developed a similar framework to what Identi.ca is doing as a distributed Twitter clone? Meaning that there is a unified database between any number of link shortening sites.

There would be some coordination required such that sites would have to work hard to remain up to date in their databases to avoid collisions. But this would allow people to take ‘abc123′ and go to one of the multiple domains to utilize the link shortening. It would of course still be hampered by the fact that people would have to take the tokens to a new url to get redirected.

The second proposal I have is for a third party to backup the shortened links.

Imagine if Google indexed all the link shorteners (or rather, utilized the data they’re already tracking) and provided an easy way for people to access this information? Maybe as a single page people can go to that provides the expanded url and redirects them or as a plugin in Firefox. Now this doesn’t have to be Google or even a search engine, Twitter could do it, or perhaps someone else. And through this system the Internet infrastructure is strengthened.

Updated 8:31am: Changed ‘their’ to ‘they’re’.

Expectations are a dangerous thing.

On the one hand, when they are correct they can greatly speed up your process giving you somewhere to begin and allowing you to forgo many questions and tests in terms of figuring out the situation. Or, when your expectations are wrong, it can cost you valuable time.

Sunday I woke up, ready to edit and produce ManaNation for the next day, but I discovered something. My computer had frozen and would not boot, asking me for a bootable disk to be inserted, and I could hear one of the harddrives producing the ‘click of death.’ A small clicking sound that indicates the reading arm is broken or stuck and thus the hard drive is nearing death.

My machine (Mace II, named for Mace Windu, yes I’m a geek) has three hard drives. C: is the main drive where all the action happens. Operating System, program files, my documents, mp3 collection, etc. D: is my storage drive for movies, big apps, some backups. O: is for ManaNation stuff exclusively. I also use an external hard drive to run backups and for transporting ManaNation video files.

I shut the machine off and, assuming it was my C:, main hard drive, since the machine would not boot. So I ordered a new hard drive rushed from NewEgg. In the meantime I produced a low quality video with my Flip camera and had it run on Monday instead of the schedule episode.

Yesterday the new hard drive arrived. After work I got home and set up the new hard drive, booted with a Windows XP CD and installed the OS. It took about an hour, K and I took our evening walk during the time, and then after it booted up I went to install Mozilla Firefox only to see something peculiar.

It was trying to install Firefox to the G: drive. For those not used to Windows machines, Windows is almost universally on C: drive. This comes from the days when you would have an A: and B: drive for floppy disks, so C: fell to the hard drive. It’s not required but it’s the standard. When I investigated further I discovered that the drive I had just installed was indeed the G: drive and that the C: drive was my old main hard drive. The one which had died was my middle hard drive, D: drive.

This was good news on many counts: first it meant a quick fix. I just had to fix the jumpering on the hard drives and it would boot into the main drive again, restoring order to the universe. Second it meant a huge reduction in needed time to rebuild my machine and re-install the applications. And thirdly it meant that there was minimal critical data loss. I’m fairly good about backups, but I had gotten lax on backing up files that weren’t ManaNation or web projects.

The main thing that bugs me, is that if I had checked which drive was dead, I would have found out that I could remove it (temporarily) and booted the machine normally, thus saving myself the delay on ManaNation. Alas, lesson learned and I can only make a promise to myself to check which hard drive died before rushing to replace the whole operating system and drive.

But, all is well in the world. Mace II is back on his feet, with a bit more storage space, and I learned to always check my expectation when there would be over

One thing which is going to become even more central to our online existence is the prevalence of signal vs noise. We’re being bombarded with more and more information about friends, family, idols and news. I pride myself on keeping a fairly short (150) list of feeds in my Google Reader, of which I speed through the majority of them, skimming with liberal use of the keyboard shortcuts.

In my Twitter though, I’m wrestling with the issue as there are a number of people who I follow, but are not people I’m truly that interested in. In my personal Twitter app, TweetCore, I had come to a solution where it used a simple algorithm to hide tweets from someone past the first X, and thus remove the noise to allow me to enjoy my feed without too much noise. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than any other twitter app allows right now.

It’s also the single reason I haven’t killed of the TweetCore project. It has had almost no time devoted to it in the recent months, but I need it to manage this level of information and noise in my life.

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