The travel and visa agency my parents use already told us that there were no tourist visa for China anymore. This meant that we needed to replan our trip. We expected as much back in Holland and we bought a lonely planet for Central Asia to be able to come up with alternative destinations. Once we got final confirmation that it was impossible for us to enter china we spend a day divising a new travel schedule. This would take us to Shimkent, hiking in a neighboring nature reserve and, since Sierk never has seen a desert city, to Turkestan as well.

Next to Kazakhstan is the beautiful country of Kyrgyzstan. We were told that generally it is not a problem to get a visa for this country so we decided to include it in our revised schedule. We are on a tight schedule, since we both need to arrange our travel and travel it at the same time. This gives us little time to arrange a visa for Kyrgyzstan. To complicate matters further we decided to take the night train out of Almaty the 1st of May and that day is also a holiday here. We handed in our passports on Monday in the assumption that we would be able to get them back Tuesday evening, having one day spare before the 1st.

On Tuesday we learned that it would be beautiful weather and a good day to go up into the mountains. We woke up early in the morning and headed for the Ice Rink of Medeo and the mountains behind it. On our way to Medeo we were stopped by the police, who apparently took the good weather as a sign to check random cars at random locations. We were quite sure that my father, who was driving, didn’t break any law in the past few minutes so we were reasonably sure that it would be not too long before we could continue.

This was a mistake! My parents drive a company car and in Kazakhstan you need to have a permit to drive such a car. This permit is nothing else than a paper written out by your company which states (in Cyrillic writing) your name, the company name and that you are allowed to drive in the car, finished with some impressive stamp of the company. Obviously my parents have such a permit, less obviously, due to the Cyrillic only text, it had expired.
This was a grave error and my father was questioned by the police about this. While they were at it, they discovered that they couldn’t read both the driver license and the passport so he should have a translated version. There was something else as well but we never figured out what it was. The language barrier turned out to be rather high, which fortunately slowed matters this much that the police, annoyed by the lack of progress made let my father go under the pretext of him being 64. Not totally unreasonable since it would mean that he was just about one year from his expected death, life expectancy being around 65 here.

To prevent similar scenes at other police stops we decided to turn around and get the permit. Almaty is quite a big town and the traffic is thick and slow. So it took us the better part of the morning to get to the office collect the permit and get back up the mountain to Medeo. We ended up to be more than 4 hours later than planned and the weather was so lovely that we stayed in the mountains until it was too late to pick up our passports. We would pick those up the next day.

The next day was rainy and cold, the perfect day to do some shopping for our train trip and collect passports and get some plane tickets. We called Dima, the guy who runs the visa agency. He was not in the office, in fact the entire office was closed. Some calls later we learned he was in a very important meeting and would be available around 4 o’clock. We called at 4 and he wasn’t in there, we tried every half an hour. In the end we understood that they didn’t get the visa for Kyrgyzstan. They had been there several times over the past two days and every time they were told; not know, try again later. At the end they found out that the consul was gone and there were no visa written until the 6th of may. This means that once again we need to replan our trip, we need to come back to Almaty to try again to get a visa.

But those are worries for another day right now we are going to celebrate queensday with the dutch embassador.

Saturday morning at 11.32 sharp we locked my house and left for the far east. Since Schiphol is in the wrong direction we decided to take the train to Frankfurt instead. This option provided us with a much nicer lunch setting; sitting comfortably in the bistro-wagon cruising the german countryside. We managed to beat the Air Astana airplane to the gate, to the apparent surprise of our crew-to-be, who did expect to see an airplane being emptied at that point. An hour later than planned we had lift off and the strong Russian accent of the staff and the overwhelming amount of non-latin characters gave us our first impression of the weeks to come.

The next morning, or evening depending on your timezone, we found our selfs on Almaty Airport. We left our plane and followed the herd with on one side beautiful mountains and suddenly on our left side free unrestricted access to Kazakhstan. This turned out to be an error by our herd and within seconds several officials with large caps and walkytalkies guided us in the correct direction. We had to pass a very serious looking official who stamped three times on our visa without moving anymore muscles then strictly necessary. Once this was done nothing real was between us and our freedom/holiday. We collected our bags and walked to my parents who were already waiting. Almaty is a reasonable big town and (un)fortunately the airport is at the diametrically opposite side of Almaty in respect to my parents apartment. An half hour drive showed us the beautiful townscape of Almaty *ahem*.

After refreshing ourselves (power nap FTW) we went for the sightseeing point of Kok-tobe. An old soviet cable car, with serious lack of lubricating oil, brings you a few hundred meters above the city. From here one can see the entire town of Almaty and the very stunning mountains that tower above it, weather permitting that is. Luckily it was reasonable clear so we could see the rain clouds rolling in from quite a distance.

The walls of mordor

Once the rain started we went down and head for the Russian Orthodox Cathedral. Here we stumbled into an Eastern service which included the head-honcho of the Kazakh division. The red carpet, which was rolled down all the way to the street, was strictly forbidden for everybody but the (presumably) arch-bishop of Kazakhstan. Once he had entered, the red carpet was removed and the people could flock in to attend the service. The service itself consisted mainly of singing. To be able to enter the orthodox clergy you apparently need to have strong vocal skills since the priest’s song, without aid of music or amplifiers, filled the entire Cathedral. The choir, which answered the songs of the priests, had spread themselves over the Cathedral to make their job slightly easier, though not less stunning. Since it was apparent custom to enter and leave the service at will we left before the end, once the priests disappeared into a secluded area of the Cathedral.

Evening was already approaching so we left for home. Since information of my parents told us that China is a no-go for backpackers we have given up on China and are now planning our new travel schedule. Hopefully this will include a few days track high in the mountains and sleeping in yurds. Tomorrow we will investigate our options at the Ecotourism agency here in Almaty.

Well, the light bit is yet to be determined by the airport. I’ve started packing for my holiday. This is most of the stuff I will bring along on my holiday and it all needs to fit in the blue backpack in the front. I now notice that the three fuel bottles and the 5 books are missing from this picture. But the books go into the hand lugage and the fuel bottles will be divided between Sierk’s and my backpack.

The power of compression bags: all this fits into one backpack (except the couch obviously)

As of 18.30 local time I’m on holiday. I’m going to visit my parents in Kazakhstan and friends in Nepal. I’ve created a very detailed travel schedule here. Which is mainly this detailed because we don’t know yet if we can enter China, which is exactly in between our starting point (Green) and our end point (Red).

I’m traveling with Sierk and we hope to update this blog and maybe even update our beautiful travel schedule. However, my house is rented to foreigners which might trip over my server and accidentally disconnect it from the internet. So if suddenly this blog ceases to exist, that’s probably what happened.

BTW the map is using the data from the OpenStreetMap project. As you can see it is slightly lacking, especially in China. Unfortunately I don’t have a GPS datalogger to fill this gap.

Lynn pointed out earlier; ‘two handed interaction IS useful for many things‘. Bill Buxton has written a chapter on two handed input in his work in progress book on human input to computer systems. Here he states that the common view that human manual actions are generally unimanual is mistaken. Handwriting for instance is almost always seen as a one-handed activity, but in practice the non-dominant hand is used to hold the paper and as such forms a frame of reference. This bimanual task is asymmetric; the dominant hand is doing the precise work and the non-dominant hand frames the location. So I’ve been thinking how to implement two handed interaction.

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Apparently falling down a few stories doesn’t scare a cat, or at least it doesn’t scare Bastet. Since spring is finally starting I’m sitting quite often in the evening in the sun at my balcony. Bastet loves to do the sun-back dance when she’s out. Her main task however is to check what’s happening down below.

If you look careful you can still make out the spot on her back where she was shaved. I’m wondering what will be fixed earlier: her hair or her back. Right now she still can’t jump but other then that she’s fine. She’s going to leave me this weekend because I’m off for a 5 week holiday. I hope to find her jumping about when I’m back

Unfortunately I discovered today that the Hard Disc Shock Protection of my MacBook isn’t too solid. Since I’m moving around with crutches at the moment I do have a hard time carrying my laptop  around the house. When I tried to put my laptop on the counter in the kitchen it slipped and fell down. It smacked nicely horizontal on the floor and I had some hope on HDSP, since this is exactly the situation it was designed for.

Unfortunately my screen showed a lovely horizontal stripe pattern which made me cringe, amplified by me involuntarily standing on my injured leg. Switching off and on gave a spark of hope when I heard the familiar startup sound of OS X. However after a few minutes it was still a gray screen. Verbose mode showed my that it was booting nicely until it was stopped by repeating occurrences of ‘disk0s2 0xe0030005′ messages which according to Google should prompt you to backup everything and get a new HDD. Unfortunately the backing up bit is too late, but next thing tomorrow will be the new HDD. I always assumed that nothing important on the laptop wasn’t backed up, so will see the coming days. I already discovered that I do have a backup of my taxes, unlike the ‘belastingdienst’

The whole point of interface design is to create a natural/intuitive interface. However, since computers are not natural by definition it is hard to decide what is natural. In the classic WIMP interface the desktop has been used as a metaphor to design the interaction with the computer. Commonly a traditional desktop is horizontal and a computer screen is vertical. This and many other shortcomings of the metaphor creates a mental gap which has to be bridged by training. This training has altered our perception of ‘natural’ or intuitive interfaces for computers. For the trained user it makes sense that pressing the right mouse button pops up a context menu. Also it is only possible to move a window by dragging its handle bar and it is not possible to rotate a window. Obviously the desktop-metaphor can only go so far. There is no such thing as a menu on a classic desktop, not can one resize a piece of paper easily. It is not hard to point out the short comings of the WIMP interface, nor is it very difficult to create a ‘better’ interface. Unfortunately the average user is used to the Windows interface and invested a serious amount of time to be able to navigate it. So any new interface that works with similar in-/output devices as the standard PC has to unlearn the Windows way and learn the new way. Obviously this is quite a hurdle for people and as such new interfaces seldom survive let alone go main stream.

Enter tabletop computing…

Since tabletop computing hasn’t developed a standard interface, yet, we still have a chance to create new metaphors which will stick. Apple has managed to get a serious grip on multi-touch interface design. Many people believe that the multi-touch interface has empowered the designer to create such a novel interface. However it is my believe that only a few actions really need multi-touch, zooming being one. I don’t think people really want to use two hands to control a computer when they can do it with one hand. Since tabletop computing is much more akin to the classic desktop we can have another look at this metaphor. To rotate a piece of paper you don’t put your two index fingers on the sheet of paper and start rotating. If you want to rotate it 180degrees you probably don’t even try to turn it out of your wrist. Instead you grab it at a corner and give it a twist. - To be honest, since you can manipulate the piece of paper in 3D it is most likely that you grab the piece of paper from the table and turn it in the air -

However if we stick to the concept of 2D manipulation we can use it to enhance the current metaphor. Even if you don’t know Newton’s laws of motion, you still expect them to work. Turning a piece of paper by putting a finger in the corner and moving it, whilst counting on the inertia and drag of the paper to rotate instead of translate the paper doesn’t require any degree in physics. Few people would know which forces are at work on the paper, even fewer do care, only the result counts. Why does one not use a multi-touch gesture as used in the iPhone? Basically because it is more complicated. Look at the very simple animation below. The upper user is using physics to turn its object, while the lower user is using multi-touch. As you can see the upper user can keep on spinning if he likes, while the lower user runs into a wrist issue.

manipulating object with and without pysics

While in real life we don’t need to understand the Newtonian laws to be able to use them, in the software world it is not that simple. Since there is no natural gravity within the computer, the Newtonian laws don’t apply naturally either. We need to introduce physics into the GUI. Fortunately physics is very important in current games and a lot of effort has been put in creating physics engines which recreate the Newtonian world of physics in the virtual world of the computer. We are planning to use Farseer, since it is both open source and runs in C#. Having physics at our finger tips we can create much cooler interfaces. Instead of having two seperate actions to translate and rotate an object, you can do it in one fluid motion (upper user). Moving an object is also much easier, just give it a push in the right direction (lower user).

Using physics to manipulate objects - please note that the third hand of the lower user doesn’t touch the table anymore -

Cycling in Amsterdam, however common, is dangerous. Every year a few cyclists get killed by trucks turning right; the so called ‘blind spot incidents’. Luckily most of the (other) bicycle-accidents don’t end up with dead people, just injuries. According to an ambulance brother I once spoke the most common injury where they are called in for are head traumas. Most of which could be prevented if the cyclists wear helmets. Currently the dutch pride and self esteem ‘forbids’ helmets. Apparently it’s such a non-issue that the dutch wikipedia merely acknowledges the fact that they exist without any further discussion or information (unlike the english one)

Obviously since there are a tens of thousands cyclists in Amsterdam, so injuries are bound to happen, even deadly ones. I’m not sure of the statistics involved: whether everyone buying and wearing a helmet would have a big impact in the total population of cyclists. However if one ignores statistics I’d argue for compulsory shin-protection as well.

As it happens, this morning I was cycling to my work, managing all the busy intersections with trams, trucks, road construction etc without any incident. Just before I arrived at the office, I cycled through a quiet little street, here, where a van was parked in the middle of the street. To avoid the van I had to squeeze my self between the van and the underground garbage containers at the sidewalk. However one of those was mysteriously not totally underground leaving a sharp metal plate at shin level. It happened to be able to slice both through my pants and my leg. Resulting in this very nice gap in my shin (gore-warning!). Right now I’ve got 7 stitches and am pretty much immobilized by a non-functioning right leg

When opening a perfectly valid visual studio solution from my local harddrive, Microsoft Expression Blend came with the following dialog:

I like the new focus on security; I’m waiting for the moment that it will warn the user when booting Windows: ‘Warning: Turning on your computer might allow the execution of malicious software ….’