Here's some of what you missed at The Thirsty Robot:
Technical Musings
Technology Topic - Nostalgia & Alternative Universes
Maybe it was the recent Summer Solstice, or the change of weather from 'too hot' to 'unsettled', or the leak of Windows 11, but The Thirsty Robot attendees were in a nostalgic mood. Microsoft's 'Bob' user interface was mentioned, because it is one of those fascinating 'roads almost travelled' that is probably dominant in an alternative universe - but not this one. The idea of making a computer a 'simple to use' device is an old idea, but there are few good implementations...
So, Bob was the classic 'use simple, familiar metaphors' approach. In this case, the inside of a house, where rooms were devoted to various tasks:
This was back in 1995, and so high resolution, lots of colours and many other 2020's 'standards' just didn't exist then. To help users along, animated characters would appear to help. Which brings us to possibly the most famous animated characters in Windows: Office Assistants from 5 years later. Nope, not Clippit, because that's too obvious, but Links, the cat.
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| Photo from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykGIcXKAXbI |
Just a minute, you may well be saying! An animated cat? In Microsoft Office? You didn't have to use the Clippit paper-clip? (You probably know it as the paper clip that popped up with speech bubbles like: 'It looks like your jaw is slack. Do you need help with that?')
Yes. The next time someone tells you that Microsoft don't have a sense of humour, that they don't go for cute, that they don't use sweet animations, then you need to show them this piece of YouTube memorabilia:
If you ever needed proof that WE are living in an alternative universe, then you now have it!
<applause> Let's hear some appreciation for Bob and Links! </applause>
Technology Topic - Speech Boxes
OK, so Alexa, Cortana and Siri, and lots of other speech synthesis solutions exist in your computing platform of choice. You probably think that these are 21st century inventions (ok, maybe 20th century), but you would be wrong, by more than a hundred years...
To blow your mind even more, did you know that there's a language where the symbols for the sounds are diagrams showing how the sound is produced by the mouth, lips, teeth, throat, etc?
So you can use written Korean as a guide to how to produce sounds from a Von Kempelen machine!
Before your jaw becomes slack again, think about the English letter 'o', and the sound it makes, and the shape of your mouth and lips when you make that sound.
Whilst you are contemplating that, how about the names of the days of the week? In English, they are Sun-day, Moon-day, Tyr's (Norse God of Fire)-Day, Wodin's (Norse God)-day, Thor's (Norse God of Thunder)-day, Freya's (Norse God, Wife of Wodin)-day, and Saturn's (another planet)-day. Ok, so a mix of planets and Norse gods.
In most European languages, then the days are named after planets (or lights in the sky!): Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, but the associations are much the same: Sun, Moon, Mars (Fire, Red), Mercury, Jupiter (Thunder and Lightning), Venus (Female), Saturn...
So how about in Japanese or Chinese? The days (and symbols) are named after the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn...
Yep, across most of the world, there's a common naming scheme for the days of the week...
Sunday Sun Sun
Monday Moon Moon
Tuesday Mars Fire
Wednesday Mercury Water
Thursday Jupiter Wood
Friday Venus Metal/Gold
Saturday Saturn Earth/Soil
Apparently, this dissemination of ideas happened because of international trading during the 4th Century...
Alternative Universe, anyone?
Technology Topic - Security Technology
The Thirsty Robot followed straight on from a joint OWASP event where four UK Chapters joined together for a talk by Clint Gibler of Semgrep . Semgrep is a very clever Static Analysis Tool (basically, it looks for security flaws in software) that neatly avoids the price and complexity of the high-end commercial tools, but also avoids the highly-focussed 'free' end. Instead, it has broad applicability, about as little syntax as is possible in this type of application, and fits very nicely into a middle ground where it should do a lot of good. And anything that helps makes software more secure is definitely good!
Clint was from the US West Coast, and so his slides and talk were confident, minimalistic and full of cool style: lots of demos of Semgrep actually doing useful stuff, lots of responses to 'questions from the online audience' where he showed how it could do just about everything you might want in this topic area, and a few of those 'we've been playing with that, and this is what we can do...' moments where you saw his love for the product and his joy in using it to do things that it hadn't quite been designed to do, but it works anyway. All a bit amazing, really. Fast, neat, useful, integrates into workflows nicely, and more. Recommended for anyone with an interest in security!
One thing which is interesting is the difference between a US audience and a European one:
Silence can mean that the audience is interested and listening.
Media: Is Marvel's 'Loki' anything like the BBC's 'Doctor Who'?
Episode 1: Lots of running around and fighting. Nothing much happens...
Episode 2: Lots of running around and fighting. Nothing much happens...
Episode 3: Lots of running around and fighting. Nothing much happens...
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A lot of discussion happens at The Thirsty Robot. This blog is an edited, biased summary of just a small fraction of the conversation, links/URLs and references that were mentioned. It is an imperfect record and is definitely not complete - for that you should visit The Thirsty Robot!
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The next online meeting at The Thirsty Robot is on Thursday 8th July 2021 at 7:30pm GMT.
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