Nike plus Apple equals iSmug

Imagine all the hand-rubbing and mani­acal laughter that greeted the arrival of this little beauty — the NikePlus iPod attach­ment — through Hocking’s let­ter­box this after­noon, just when I thought my eyes were going to explode from proofread­ing (don’t laugh; editing-related ocu­lar decom­pres­sion is a recog­nised phe­nomenon). Aha! I thought, fond­ling the par­cel. A method of com­bin­ing my innate geekery with a bit of exercise.

The par­cel was chunk­ily prom­ising and it did not dis­ap­point. Inside were two bits of kit: first, a tiny pedometer/transmitter that fits per­fectly into the trap­door within one’s NikePlus train­ers (good and, let me add, grief — into the sock it goes); second, a wee dongle that clicks into the bot­tom of my first-gen iPod Nano. Bosh. Nothing else to it. The iPod doesn’t even need to be restar­ted. A new menu item appears, and it is a simple mat­ter to enter one’s weight and start run­ning. Apple effi­ciency — it just works. Designed in California by Your Betters™.

The inter­face is a delight. Runs can be of a time, of a dis­tance. Calories are coun­ted. If the pedo­meter com­pon­ent doesn’t do a good enough job of accur­ately cap­tur­ing dis­tance, it can be simply cal­ib­rated. Once you’ve com­pleted the run, the iPod will sync the data (dis­tance, times, con­tinu­ous speed, etc.) with iTunes and you can review your pro­gress. The data are even uploaded to Nike, if you want, so you can com­pete with people called Chet.

This is so cool I could bust. When pre­par­ing for runs in the past, I’ve actu­ally resor­ted to driv­ing the route just to get an idea of how long the route is; now, all I need to do is select ‘half mara­thon’ or — gulp — ‘mara­thon’ from the list.

The uber-cool thing is that, peri­od­ic­ally, the music track quietens and a sexy American lady tells me how long I’ve been run­ning for. She’ll say things like “You’re half way,” and this is just solid gold inform­a­tion. That’s exactly the stuff you need to know.

A last thought: I can’t quite tell whether this next bit is freaky or cool, but as I fin­ished my run (at the door to my house; how’s that for tim­ing?), the sexy American lady told me how long I’d been run­ning for, cal­or­ies burned, and so on…and then I heard another voice.

“Hi, this is Paula Radcliffe!”

Nervously, I checked the bushes.

“You’ve just run your longest time. Congratulations!”

“Er, thanks. But that’s only because it’s the first time I’ve -”

“Be sure to check your stats online with NikePlus!”

“OK. Bye, Paula.”

“Goodbye!”

I stared, awe­struck, at the device.

Eighteen quid for geekery like this?

I got in, gave Britta a five-minute debrief­ing of all the fea­tures (in case she missed some­thing dur­ing the five-minute brief­ing I gave her on the way out) and went upstairs to my office. I put the Nano on the desk.

“That’ll do, Nano.” I wiped a tear from my eye. “That’ll do.”

Die, Windows, Die! And the Peripatetic Venetician

This blog is — let me check — entitled ‘This Writing Life’, but that doesn’t mean I can’t post on top­ics that are only tan­gen­tially related to writ­ing. So here goes. As reg­u­lar read­ers will be aware, I’m a card-carrying Apple Mac user. The priv­ilege of using such nice equip­ment was brought home to me recently dur­ing some enforced frat­ern­isa­tion with Microsoft Windows machines. Yes, I’m teach­ing intro­duct­ory psy­cho­logy at the moment and this means — because it’s a British uni­ver­sity — that Windows PCs are frick­ing every­where. Goodbye Firefox, hello Internet Explorer (the old ver­sion with no tab sup­port). Goodbye Pages, hello Word.

Jeez, I hate Windows. Leaving aside the fact that the IT ser­vices at Canterbury Christ Church have opted for lock­ing down their com­puters, it doesn’t take more than a few seconds for an incid­ent to occur where I think, ‘Oi! Computer! No!’ because a pop-up has appeared ask­ing me if I want to tidy up the desktop (‘None of your busi­ness’) or that Sophos Antivirus appears to be out-of-date (‘Guess what; it isn’t’). And it’s slug­gish. And I have to hit ‘Start’ if I want to stop the computer.

Hey, I worked in IT for eight­eenth months, and had a PC for ten years. I wrote my share of ASP and cus­tom­ised by com­puter every which-way but loose. I know my way around a Windows com­puter. But damn if I don’t hate Windows.

OK, the intro­duc­tion to this art­icle has rambled on some­what. What I wanted to say is that I’ve found a Mac util­ity that other Mac users might well be inter­ested to know about. Partly because of my travels through vari­ous Internet cafes (neces­sit­ated by the lack­a­dais­ical atti­tude of BT), I’ve been con­tinu­ally open­ing and clos­ing my shared folders, turn­ing on and off my Bluetooth con­nectiv­ity, switch­ing from ‘bet­ter per­form­ance’ to ‘bet­ter energy sav­ings’. What I really needed, I thought (and still to) is a good loc­a­tion manager.

Introducing Marco Polo. Like the peri­pat­etic Venetian, Marco Polo by David Symonds is built for travel. This free util­ity works with ‘con­texts’. A con­text might ‘home’, ‘roam­ing’ or ‘plugged into the tele­vi­sion’. Each con­text might have beha­viours asso­ci­ated with it. So, for example, when you’re plugged into your TV, you might want to dis­able the screensaver. Or, when you’re out and about, you might want to have your VPN con­nec­tion kick in just after you con­nect to a open wire­less network.

How does Marco Polo know what con­text you are cur­rently ‘in’? Well, here comes the sci­ence bit. The pro­gram uses sources of inform­a­tion prob­ab­il­ist­ic­ally. What that? Well, Marco Polo knows whether my com­puter is plugged into the main or run­ning on bat­tery power. This is called a ‘source of evid­ence’. I’ve told that, if this source of evid­ence shows true, there’s a high like­li­hood that I’m at home in my office. So there is a prob­ab­il­istic con­nec­tion between the evid­ence of the power cord set­ting and the con­text that Marco Polo sets itself to (and, on chan­ging that con­text, Marco Polo can fiddle with set­tings of the sys­tem like the screensaver).

Of course, that’s fairly straight­for­ward. Let’s add some­thing else into the mix: I know the name of my wire­less router (the SSID), and when this router is present, there is a 100% prob­ab­il­ity that I’m at home. I can cre­ate a new con­text, which is: ‘at home, but roam­ing’ (in other words, check­ing email in front of the telly or some­thing). With this con­text, I tell Marco Polo to use the absence of the power cord as evid­ence, plus the pres­ence of my home wire­less net­work. Marco Polo is able to com­bine the prob­ab­il­it­ies to pro­duce a best guess for the cur­rent context.

This means that, as I wander around my house, around Canterbury, into the uni­ver­sity and out, my com­puter is adjust­ing itself smartly to its environment.

Coolio.

When I’m in an Internet cafe, Marco Polo knows that (a) I’m roam­ing because the power adaptor isn’t plugged in, (b) that I’m con­nec­ted to the net, © that the net­work is open (i.e. unen­cryp­ted). So: it changes the con­text to ‘Oot and aboot > Unsecured con­nec­tion’. For this con­text, I’ve set up the fol­low­ing beha­viours: turn off Bluetooth, turn off all my file shar­ing ser­vices (iTunes, per­sonal folders, etc.), switch to ‘bet­ter energy sav­ings’, and con­nect securely to my VPN server so I can check my email with wor­ry­ing about send­ing my pass­words in the clear.

I know that Marco Polo is doing these things because the pro­gram­mer has been smart enough to include Growl sup­port. So I get a little mes­sage say­ing, ‘I think you’re in an Internet cafe con­nec­ted to an unse­cured net­work’, then one say­ing, ‘I’m now turn­ing off Bluetooth, and so on’.

I love this stuff. It’s inter­est­ing because some of my aca­demic research has been in the area of con­nec­tion­ist mod­el­ling (i.e. using groups of math­em­at­ic­ally ideal­ised neur­ons to solve mini information-processing tasks like gram­mar acquis­i­tion) and it’s quite sim­ilar in approach. Basically, arti­fi­cial neur­ons are very good at tasks where they need to place a bet on solu­tion to a prob­lem based on mul­tiple sources of evid­ence. The draw­back to this approach is obvi­ous: uncer­tainty, and occa­sional error. You wouldn’t want your email cli­ent to act like this. The dif­fer­ence between this approach and Marco Polo is that you don’t actu­ally train Marco Polo in the sense of start­ing with a ‘blank slate’, allow­ing the pro­gram to pro­duce its own prob­ab­il­ity val­ues; you hard wire the val­ues themselves.

But it’s a great pro­gram and a neat illus­tra­tion of some cre­at­ive prob­lem solv­ing. If you down­load and use Marco Polo, con­sider send­ing David a dona­tion.

What’s that you say? Is there a Windows version?

Bah, and — I might add — humbug.