Have you seen the 80s movie WarGames? Well, I’m old enough to have seen it in the movies. Here’s the trailer:

Here’s why I ask if you’ve seen this movie. Kent Chamberlin, Erika Clifford and I were discussing ongoing and future datacasting technology evaluations by Project54 at UNH. We’re interested in using datacasting in first responder operations. One aspect of the evaluations is finding out where, and under what conditions (weather, moving or stationary receiver, etc), can the datacasting signal be received. Here’s a post that discusses work using stationary receivers on how weather events are related to datacasting reception. We’re currently planning a study evaluating a technology that allows receiving datacasting signals while moving, e.g. in a car. We plan to install datacasting receivers in vehicles and create coverage maps for (parts of) the state of New Hampshire.

It occured to me that this planned activity is very similar to wardriving. Wardriving refers to driving in search of Wi-Fi networks. The result is the map of an area with Wi-Fi networks shown. Wardriving was named after wardialing, the term used in WarGames, that means dialing a list of phone numbers in search of lines hooked to computer modems. Here’s what this looked like in the movie:

So, should we use “wardriving” to describe data collection for our datacasting work? Or maybe find another term? Also, I wonder if there are any wardriving maps of Durham, NH?

Andrew Kun

“Manual user interfaces? We don’t need no stinkin’ manual user interfaces!”

This could be the new tagline for Project54 (which introduces speech user interfaces in police cruisers), if we followed the cliché popularized by the Mel Brooks movie, Blazing Saddles: “Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” In fact there’s a simple formula we can follow to create a new cliché from the Blazing Saddles line: “X? We don’t need no stinkin’ X!”

As it turns out, there’s a name for such formulaic clichés: they’re called snowclones. The term was introduced by Glen Whitman on his blog Agoraphilia (here is the link to the post). I read about it in the February 2008 issue of Spectrum, in which Paul McFedries gives several good snowclone examples (link). And to make it clear that this term is for real, it has its own Wikipedia entry.

So, now we know how the time-honored engineering cliché “Manual? We don’t need no stinkin’ manual!” came about.

Andrew Kun