November 21st, 2007
The news of interest this week is Amazon’s launch of their eBook service, Kindle. Newsweek published an article about it on Monday and Amazon made the Kindle available on Tuesday. From the technical and use perspectives, it’s intriguing. It looks as though Amazon has arrived at a good physical design: The feel is reported to be ideal, the electronic paper is easy on the eyes and, since the device is focused on only a handful of tasks, interaction seems simple and intuitive.
It’s interesting to note that on Nov 20, 2007, the Kindle had received 275 reviews as of 8:30AM. On Nov 21 at roughly the same time, the review count totaled 438. Given the launch happened this week, I am not sure how useful the reviews are. Even at both counts, the reviews average to 2.5 stars out of 5 with a 40% rating the device with one star and the remaining 60% being evenly distributed from 2 to 5 stars. Really, though, the reviews seem to be based on speculation (some outright wrong) or based on the Amazon provided documentation. But it is entertaining reading.
I have some mixed feelings about the thought of going to a completely digital format. I like the tangible. It’s perhaps an artificial comfort but one that I can’t deny. Also, the habits from years of pre-internet activities make the potential paradigm shift uncomfortable at best. This isn’t to say a digital world isn’t without its advantages but it is certainly a trade off.
In thinking about whether or not I would find a Kindle worth purchasing, I started to weigh the pros and cons of a tangible library, one with physical books, versus the Kindle-brary.
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November 15th, 2007
copyright O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Ambient Findability
by P. Moreville
2005 O’Reilly Media
Rating: 
This review was several months in the coming. To be honest, I found the book difficult to engage at first.
The first four chapters of the book were difficult to experience. The tone of the author was a bit self-indulging in the sense that the discussions seemed to be unnecessarily drawn out and the examples and references felt to be a tapestry of hip: quoting William Gibson and Chrsitopher Alexander, including various du jour technologies and well as the liberal sprinkling of buzzwords. One extreme example was the term ‘ubicomp’. It was never defined in the text. There was a specific mention of ‘ubiquitous computing’ but it was after several instances of the abbreviation and the formal connection between the two was never made (or so is my recollection).
Starting in chapter five and through chapter seven, the book’s focus shifted enormously and the discussions went from cool technologies to the impact of socially defined metadata. That is, information on the web is tagged (classified) by any user (folksonomies), rather than experts (taxonomies), via bookmarking services such as del.icio.us, blog aggregators like Technorati that catalog tags bloggers use on their posts as well as vendors like Amazon where users tag items the service sells.
If the book had developed the content of chapters five through seven, dropping the glamour of the previous chapters, most of which didn’t particularly go anywhere, it would have been a better read.
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September 10th, 2007
I recently ran across a rather significant AJAX application. Perhaps “meta-application” is the better term. Ajax13, a company that has pushed the envelope with what is possible with Ajax and web-applications, has developed an Ajax-based desktop environment called ajaxWindows. There is a demo mode that is accessible and is worth checking out.
ajaxWindows provides a virtual desktop. Ajax13 describes it as a virtual operating system, as well as webOS, but I’m not sure I would agree with that description. From the point of view of needing to describe what it is to the general public, it is probably a reasonable moniker but it is rather misleading. An OS has so many more responsibilities than providing a user interface. It is missing many of the elements that make up an OS such as process/thread management, memory management and hardware management.
What I would call ajaxWindows is a framework. It enables (certain) web applications to work within its context. In addition to displaying the user interface in the virtual desktop, the application can access the virtual file manager to let the user organize and save files.
Whether you view ajaxWindows as an OS or a framework does not diminish it’s capabilities. For the most part, users will not be interested in anything more than being able to access and manage their space and applications from anywhere. And it is certainly an insanely extraordinary demonstration of what the web can be. Below I give some thoughts on the features and behavior of ajaxWindows.
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July 10th, 2007
This has been a back-burner issue for me for a while and I haven’t been able to resolve it for myself nor have I found any good articles/discussions. Specifically, when using embedded links, where should you place the link? That is, when linking via embedded links, how do you decide what word or phrase should be contained in the <a></a> tag?
For example, in the second sentence in the above I decided to link the phrase “embedded links” to a description of “embedded link”. In this case, the decision of what phrase to use as the link was rather simple. However, consider the following sentence from a recent post:
In this month’s issue of IEEE Computer, the article, “Replacing Proprietary Software on the Desktop”, by Don Hardaway, discusses…
What word or phrase should link to the article? The word, “article”, or the title of the article itself? Should there be one link that starts at the word article and terminates at the end of the article title or should both be distinct links?
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July 3rd, 2007
In April, I attended CCSC-NE 2007 and the keynote on Saturday was given by Dr. Mary Jane Irwin who is currently the Chair in Engineering in the Penn State Department of Computer Science and Engineering (among other things). Her talk was titled, “Impacts of Moore’s Law: What Every CIS Undergraduate Should Know About the Impacts of Advancing Technology” which essentially discussed three basic issues: the use and advancement of multi-core processors, the supplying and conservation of power and the “inevitable increase in hardware faults”. (The talk’s abstract on the main conference page as well as access the presentation slides.)
Moore’s Law was a conjecture that the number of transistors contained on a processor chip will double every two years. This has essentially been the case and has further been extrapolated, by Ray Kurzweil, to identify the “quadrupling of computational power” (see Kurzweil’s “The Law of Accelerating Returns”, which is an interesting read itself). As is probably quite obvious, and has been explicitly noted, the shrinking of transistors can only progress so far since atoms are only so big. (Kurzweil, in his article, identifies 2019 as the target date.) The inclusion of more transistors gives rise to power and heat problems. As Irwin points out, developing multi-core processors is one alternate way to make improvements.
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June 13th, 2007
Google recently (in last two weeks or so) announced the beta release of Gears. In previous post, I discussed some of the issues with replacing desktop applications with server-based solutions such as those offered by Google (such as gmail and docs). One of the key problems was the requirement that users have network access. Gears intends to be a solution to this problem.
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May 19th, 2007
This is post is a bit behind the news but it’s something I felt worth posting – if for no other reason than to maintain links to relevant discussions: virtual crime. Specificially, I mean crime commited in Second Life.
The issue that brought a lot of discussions to the foreground about this virtual world was the virtual rape of a Belgian woman which has resulted in the Brussels police having a presence in Second Life. (Note: I don’t know Flemish but am assuming the title of the article is self-explanatory.) While whether or not it was an actual rape is open to debate, the general consensus is that it was a problem and it does have direct consequences in the real world for the “victim”. As Wired commentator, Regina Lynn, describes,
But in a game, you don’t want to lose the long-term investment you’ve made in your character. And these days, your real world income or professional reputation can depend on your online self.
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April 30th, 2007
InformationWeek recently posted an article that was the result of analyzing their annual Salary Survey. The article also references and provides a variety of stats derived from the survey. (They also produced a graphical summary of aspects of their survey or you can cough up the sizable chunk of change for the entire report.) The article would be useful for those looking to soon enter the workforce as well as those currently there with perhaps uncertain career direction.
There were a few items I found of interest. First, the article discusses the impact of certifications on your career. As I have been advising students for some time, the article promotes certification as a smaller piece in a large puzzle. Depending on your career path, certification may be necessary but it only is as useful as your experience. Picking the right certification prior to applying for a position might help bubble your resume towards the top of the pile but it is certainly not a deal maker. Much like obtaining a bachelor’s degree, you need to be able to back of the credentials with knowledge and experience.
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April 12th, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut died last night. It’s an odd notion to me. There are few people I have just pure admiration for an Vonnegut is one. I’ve read most of books and identified with the struggle and perceptions of the characters. Dark? Yes. Social commentary seems to rarely have a delightful sunshine quality to it. Personally, I don’t know that I would be drawn to works that pointed out the glossy finish. Authors such as Vonnegut, cynical and wry, wrote with a philosophical flow that examined the contents behind the varnish.
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March 29th, 2007
In this month’s issue of IEEE Computer, the article, “Replacing Proprietary Software on the Desktop”, by Don Hardaway, discusses the various options facing enterprises that want to evolve away from expensive vendor products and perhaps look to open source solutions. He suggests that most enterprises will probably stay with the common denominator that is the PC and will be more likely to consider alternatives for their applications.
This sounds reasonable. In fact, a group of students in my capstone class a year or so ago performed an analysis for a large organization which investigated the feasibility of migrating the entire corporation, PC’s and servers alike, to Linux – specifically the enterprise version of RedHat – and open source productivity tools. The study determined, for that particular organization though it would probably be true for similar organizations, it wasn’t feasible (financial or otherwise) at that time. (Before the Linux zealots start foaming at the mouth, this isn’t suggesting Linux can’t work for certain organizations. It was a statement about the needs of this organization, and organizations like it. Plus, since I can’t really get in to the details, it’s a bit anecdotal. I realize some time has passed as well so the conclusion today might be different.)
Religious wars aside, the article’s point was that there are options available and tried to categorize the options. In addition, it talked about the fact that web-based applications, as with traditional desktop ones, have both proprietary or open source flavors. The attractiveness of web-based applications goes back to the “dumb terminal” concept: We can maintain a single instance of the application and its needs in one place. Users point to the application location and run it, i.e., thin clients rather than thick. Administration becomes significantly easier as upgrades do not require an upgrade on every machine, just the server.
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