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Doug 3:46 am on June 30, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: computing

I spent some more time reading up on the subject of sentient computing that I blogged yesterday. Sentient computing sounds sexy, but I think I prefer “ubiquitous” or “pervasive” computing - words that don’t have the connotations of Artificial Intelligence that “sentient” has.

The official Project Oxygen page has some good overview information on their various projects. As an end-user, it’s difficult to get a taste of the hardware-dependent projects around networking and environmental computing, but the adventurous can download a prototype of Haystack, a universal information client intended to serve as a potential UI for pervasive computing information appliances.

I think most of the Project Oxygen ideas are mostly evolutionary improvements on existing technologies. It isn’t difficult to see the path to pervasive computing from the maturation of modern operating systems and applications, smart phones, WiFi, and sensors like RFID. It’s not so much doing things differently as it is doing them more easily, everywhere.

Thomas Friedman observes today some of the same process in an op-ed piece Is Google God? where he discusses the impact of pervasive searching and communication capabilities created by the intersection of the web, Google, and WiFi.

I’m re-reading Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime, which postulates even more advanced stages of pervasive computing.

I also can’t help make the connection between Project Oxygen and Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept of years ago.
Doug 9:00 pm on June 29, 2003 | 0 | # |

Alwin wrote this morning a plea for the feuding camps around the RSS/Echo debate to get their acts together and to remember the cost to the user of their antics:

I’m tired of people spending time doing webwork (the web version of wet work) and not coding. I’m pissed off at people trying to assure their place in the spotlight while not taking TLC of the stuff that put them there. Most of all, I’m tired of all the grandstanding and breastbeating.

Isn’t there anybody man (or woman) enough to give a little bit without taking a cheap shot in passing?

I just want all this stuff to work together. Doesn’t anybody get that? Anybody?

I couldn’t agree more. I posted this comment in reply to his post:

Hear, hear. This entire bus load of prima donnas needs a good bitch-slapping. I’m sick to death of the egos and the politics and the posturing. A lot of people I had a lot of respect for have sunk in my esteem in the past couple of weeks.

Okay, so maybe Echo isn’t going to be that tough to implement. There’s still a cost for switching horses mid-stream, no matter how trivial. RSS adoption rates have really ramped up in the past year, much to my delight and benefit. Now, because a bunch of social retards can’t work and play well together, that’s all going to get broken. Even if Echo feeds only take an afternoon to implement, multiply that times the number of people using custom CMS’s and hand-built syndication feeds, plus all of the aggregators and weblogging code that’ll have to be modified, and you’re looking at some serious change that doesn’t have to be spent.

How many news outfits that only just started feeding us RSS or only just upgraded to RSS 2.0 are going to look at this and say “fuck it, all these assholes want to do is bicker and play with new technology, and they have no clue about the costs. Didn’t we get shafted by these guys back in ‘99 already?” and scrap the whole works. Put aside the politics, grow the fuck up, and hammer out a natural, evolutionary means of moving forward from the existing spec.

Do you get it guys? We, the users, are getting tired of this crap. Remember us? We’re you’re customers.

Where’s Doc’s opinion on all this. He’s always ready to jump on the old establishment when they forget who their customers are, but he’s been strangely silent to “call Cluetrain” during the current fracas.

Update: Doc calls bullshit here, in his usual measured, calming manner:

I say was because I’m concerned right now that blogging risks centralization. A year from now, don’t be surprised if everyone with an AOL, an MSN or a .Mac account automatically has a blog, and if those blogs use noncompatible means to interoperate with each other. Just like we’ve seen with instant messaging since the beginning.

And don’t think that other companies with an interest in blogs, such as Google and IBM, won’t find their own ways to defeat interoperation for both competitive and idealistic reasons, no matter how well-intended they may be. They want to make better blogging tools, sell better blogging back-end systems, better ways to put advertising on blogs and better ways to do other stuff. But better isn’t always best. Often (though not always) the better imperative includes protocols, formats and standards that get bettered all the way to isolation and well-rationalized non-interoperability. So, instead of an open market with lots of interop, you got a bunch of isolated silos. It’s not a long trip, and it’s often travelled unconsiously.

Back to blogging. As I understand them, standards like RSS and XML-RPC, as originally conceived, and as still largely implemented, have the virtue of POGE: the Principle of Good Enough. Big-vendor-driven standards like SOAP have a way of going off into non-interoperable directions, based on the compeitive ideals of their participants.

Good stuff. Go read the whole thing.

Updated 7/2/2003 to include Doc’s material.
Doug 8:23 pm on June 29, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: art and architecture

I’m a bit at loose ends today; Terri and the kids are off to Cincinnati to visit my sister and go to King’s Island. I have to stay here so I can go to class tomorrow night. So, after grabbing some lunch, I drove around town and snapped some pictures of the local architecture. Knowing that my (limited) readership includes a few librarians, here are some snaps of local library landmarks:

The new Carmel Library, built in 1999. Much of our architecture around here dates to the early 20th century, and they did a good job of designing the new library so it fits with the rest of the downtown buildings:

Here’s the old library, built with money donated by John D. Rockefeller in the 1920’s. Very Arts & Crafts. Now a restaurant.

You can find more of the snaps I took today here, here, and here.
Doug 12:21 am on June 29, 2003 | 0 | # |

Here are a few of the things that have occupied my attention today:

The sentient office is coming - an interesting article from The Economist discussing projects in ubiquitous, or sentient, computing. This led me to:

A fresh breath of Oxygen, a weblog entry discussing the Oxygen project at MIT, an attempt to develop various forms of sentient computing.

My news aggregator tossed up When it’s smart to outsource, an article concerning research into the “buy vs. build” equation for manufacturing facilities. Seems like this isn’t as easy to solve as a lot of MBA’s would like it to be:

In an economy that mercilessly penalizes inefficiency, outsourcing production seems like the obvious choice. Indeed, it often it is, which is why contract manufacturing of electronics and pharmaceuticals has long since passed the $100 billion a year mark. But solving the build versus buy equation poses difficult strategic and tactical questions for outsourcing original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), say Stanford Graduate School of Business assistant professor Erica Plambeck and Columbia University assistant professor Terry Taylor.

In a series of soon-to-be-published papers, the researchers demonstrate that outsourcing to contract manufacturers may ultimately harm some OEMs (and market development) by reducing incentives to innovate.

We made a trip to the bookstore today; I picked up Altered Carbon. I also added Practical RDF, The Golden Age: A Romance of the Far Future, Eyes of the Calculor, Interface Culture, and Revelation Space to my list of books to acquire. While at the bookstore, I took a picture of my daughter.

While catching up on the flames being cast back and forth about the Echo project, I ended up spending some time on Tim Bray’s weblog. I found his series of articles about web search interesting, particularly On Search: Intelligence.

Tim’s comments on any truly intelligent search engine being able to pass the Turing Test reminded me that I didn’t yet have a collection of notes yet in Tinderbox addressing the subject of Artificial Intelligence. I started one, and included notes on a variety of subjects and people, including Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel.

I’m tossing nearly everything that piques my interest now into Tinderbox. With just a couple of agents, I can easily tell everything I’ve looked at or had an interest in in the last day, the last week, the last month, etc., as well as having it all in a category-based outlined, all hyperlinked together. Sort of a poor-man’s MyLifeBits.

Update 6/29/2003 - Corrected link for “The Golden Age.”
Doug 9:32 pm on June 27, 2003 | 0 | # |

Jon Udell pretty accurately captures my feelings about this entire Echo/RSS thing in “My conversation with Mr. Safe.”:

“Mr. Safe : So what’s the safe choice?

Jon : I don’t know. Would you feel better if this Echo process were a continuation of RSS rather than a recreation of it?

Mr. Safe : Yes.

Jon : Me too. “

From an end-user and technical perspective, RSS pretty much just works, and I’m not real wild about having to change all of my stuff to output the new Echo format. I’m not real wild about my aggregator breaking.

This seems to me to be mostly about politics, and that worries me. Screwing with something that’s just gaining considerable traction as a de facto standard for political reasons has real potential to blow up in people’s faces. Unless this is done well, i.e. it’s pretty transparent to the end user, there’ll be a lot of folks with egg on their faces, and a lot of pissed off users.

Maybe there’s some real justification for doing this. I’m not convinced. Bottom line - you’re going to break my stuff, and you haven’t yet given me a good reason for doing so.

(In the interests of full disclosure I should mention that I don’t use Radio, am not particularly fond of Userland’s software, and am fully aware the Mr. Winer can exhibit some challenging behaviors. I still don’t think it’s a great idea, even if we do get to use cool tools like a Wiki to develop the spec and talk about how transparent our process is.)
Doug 9:22 pm on June 24, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Personal

Fourteen years ago on this date, my blushing bride and I stood in formal attire under a blazing sun and exchanged vows while we watched the minister’s head turn beet red.

Thanks for fourteen wonderful years Terri!

Also congratulations to both the Ragers and the Hawkins‘, who also have celebrated anniversaries in the past week.
Doug 1:05 am on June 23, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: site news

For further mobile cam fun, check out my new camblog, Erehwon Moblog.
Doug 8:37 pm on June 22, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Personal

Here are some test shots from the Nokia 3650…

Terri and Ian waiting to be seated for brunch at Le Peep, our favorite weekend breakfast hangout:

Rhiannon at the other end of the bench:

The view outside Le Peep:
Doug 8:28 pm on June 22, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: computing

Aside from a well-equipped iBook, the other tool critical to running my businesses is a decent mobile phone. About 90% of my time is spent in sales, marketing, and networking tasks, so I’m calling people and receiving calls all the time. I’m also out and about a lot, so I need that connectivity, both voice and data, from just about everywhere around town.

Not quite a year ago, I bought a Sony Ericsson T68i GSM/GPRS phone. At the time, this was a pretty cutting-edge phone, and certainly the most advanced phone available from my provider, AT&T Wireless. Generally speaking, the phone has served me pretty well. Recently, I’ve started running into some problems, however. The phone seems to have developed an annoying echo, for one. Worse, as the number of contacts, appointments, and to-do items I need to track has increased, the limited memory on the phone can’t hold them all. That’s created a problem when I try and sync the phone and computer - the phone refuses to take all the information, and, on the next sync, iSync decides that I must have deleted the missing information from the phone, and therefore, it should be deleted from the computer, too. The only way to avoid the problem is to tell iSync to reset the phone on every sync, which leads to long sync times and means I can’t do neat things like voice dialing anymore, since all the data on the phone is erased during a reset, even if it didn’t come from iSync.

Usually, I keep a phone for about two years or so. Given the problems I’ve been having with the T68i, however, and after reading articles like this one from Dan Gillmor, I thought I might start looking into some of the newer, more capable phones.

Phones have come a long way in just a year. Last year, I spent $149 for the T68i. I could have purchased the optional camera attachment for an additional $149, but opted not to; that was too rich for my blood. Yesterday, after doing a bit of investigating, I settled on the Nokia 3650. Again, I paid $149, but I ended up with a whole lot more capability.

The Nokia 3650 is a GSM/GPRS phone with Bluetooth and IR connectivity. It e-mails and web browses. The browser is XHTML compatible, rather than the annoying WAP browser the T68i sported. It’s also a camera phone, capable of taking some pretty decent quality 640×480 stills and 3gp format video clips. It runs on the Symbian OS, and has an altogether nicer interface than the T68i, or any other phone I’ve had, for that matter. The screen is also much larger at 176×208 pixels and 4096 colors. It runs Java apps. Most importantly, it has 3.4Mb internal memory, which is expandable via MMC memory cards. Mine came with a 16Mb card.

For the first time, I can sync all 200+ contact records in my database, and shoot across all my pending appointments and To-Do items without the phone throwing a fit. Getting the phone and the iBook talking via Bluetooth was a snap, even simpler than setting up the T68i was thanks to Apples recent Bluetooth update. I even have the photos I associated with contacts in Address Book transferred over to the phone’s contact manager. I’ve also downloaded several MIDI files to use as ring tones, a few pictures I want to keep around and show on the phone, and some video I shot of the kids, converted from Quicktime format to 3gp.

In terms of usability, the Nokia beats the T68i hands down. In my book, Nokia has always been the Apple of mobile phones. Tasks I would have winced at doing on the T68i due to the difficulty of navigating the menus and entering text I don’t think twice about on the 3650.

Frankly, I’m astonished at the leap in technology from the T68i to the 3650. It’s only been a year! It seems Nokia is actively driving this, as described in Dan Gillmor’s Sunday column from earlier today.

Once the glow of playing with a new gadget is past, I’m curious as to how the 3650 may change the way I work. I’ll post more as I have a chance to put it through its paces in real work situations.
Doug 3:15 am on June 21, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: computing

I should also note that two of my favorite pieces of software, Brent Simmons’ Net News Wire and Mark Bernstein’s Tinderbox, both have new beta releases available, and both continue the tradition of introducing innovative, incredibly useful features to the core software.

The new “combined view” in Net News Wire is absolutely lovely. When it was first proposed a few months back I thought it was a neat idea, but I was surprised to find how much it improves the usability of the application when actually reading news. Brent has tossed in a few other bug fixes, as well as improved blog posting support in this version, too. Even though I don’t use NNW to post to my blogs, the added functionality of NNW over the free version makes paying for this software a no-brainer.

Tinderbox 1.3 also promises to be a real treat. I’ve been using the last couple beta versions for daily work for the past few weeks with nary a hitch. Performance has been optimized considerably, and the application feels speedier overall. Beyond that, Mark has also implemented improved weblogging functionality, including the ability to ping weblogs.com when you update. There’s also a new “wizard” architecture that allows the creation of step-by-step interactive guides for performing common Tinderbox tasks, like setting up a new weblog.

This version has also made significant strides towards interacting with wikis - “camel-cased” text can now be clicked on; if a note exists with a name corresponding to the camel-cased text, Tinderbox will open the note. If an appropriate note doesn’t exist, Tinderbox will prompt you to create a new note, using the specified title. I’m finding that these “WikiWords” aren’t quite as useful as Tinderbox’s real links, but for folks who are used to the wiki way of doing things, they make for an interesting alternative. This also is part of the plumbing for enabling Tinderbox as a wiki editing tool.

Once again, these two prove that small, independent developers are more than capable of creating useful, innovative applications in spaces the big guys aren’t all that effective in.