Skunkworks

It’s the Bigdog evolved

“ From your 202 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 3,055 items, starred 28 items, shared 30 items, and emailed 0 items “ . This is what Google Reader trends say about me. What this means to me is that from what I read I consider valuable and worthy to be shared less than 1% of all the posts.

From the 202 subscriptions most of the noise comes from Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Scobleizer’s Twitter Favorites, my own alltop page feed and my own readtwit feed.

What annoys me most are the low percentages that I get from Readtwit and Alltop. I would have thought that if I choose my domains of interest (websites on alltop) and people I follow ( on twitter ) carrefully I woud get a noise to signal ratio a lot bigger. It doesn’t seem to be the case.

From all the websites (services) thar are trying to improve the situation (noise to signal ratio) it seems to me that only Postrank and Feedly are having a little bit of succes (I do use these 2 services on a daily basis). The others such as Lazyfeed, Daily Perfect are still far behind.

I see a possible solution to this mess and I will try to describe it below.

I am pretty sure that Postrank filtration alghorithm can be tweaked on a per person basis, but I am almost sure Postrank doesn’t have the resources right now to support this.

I am sure that the aggregation (clustering) technology that Google is using on the News site can be used on the Google Reader but I am also sure that Google has no interest in doing that since their scope is to have their ads displayed on as many pages as possible.

I imagine that Feedly which takes into account at the moment what I shared on Reader and what I twit in the last 30 days to decide what it’s more important to me could base their recomendations also on what my friends on Google Reader network and on Twitter promote.

Now if somehow someone could integrate all these 3 technologies together I know I would pay that company a small amount each week in exchange for a much better signal to noise ratio.

This is what real programmers can do in 4096 bytes. Keep in mind that most probably the homepage of Skunkworks now is around 70-80Kilobytes

The demogroup website is at R G B A

I saw a lot of very impressive stuff done in 4K or 64K in the last 10 years but this is without a doubt the most spectacular one.

BTW do yourself a favor and go to Youtube to see the HD version of this clip.

I’ve got the news about the new Google endeavor from their official blog yesterday morning. After reading all sort of comments on the net I’ve realized that I don’t see any need for Google Chrome OS and most probably is just a preemptive strike against Microsoft at one level and probably Facebook at a different level.

Let me explain. Most probable Google Chrome OS will consist in a Linux kernel, a new window manager and Google Chrome browser on top of all these. Keep in mind that Ubuntu as of 9.04 has an official release for ARM processors. If you need a similar experience today you can get Ubuntu Mini iso (which is a 12 MB download) for x86 architectures. Most probably starting with 9.10 release it will be available for ARM architectures also.

Then, check the instructions from this ubuntu forum . Idea is that you need to install a few packages from the command line:

sudo apt-get -y install gnome-core gdm network-manager-gnome fast-user-switch-applet human-theme x11-xserver-utils tangerine-icon-theme gnome-themes-ubuntu ubuntu-artwork jockey-gtk gnome-screensaver gnome-utils

apt-get install laptop-mode-tools ubuntu-laptop-mode wpasupplicant # this one is for supporting a laptop

apt-get install maximus # this one is for achieving the maximizing effect from the Ubuntu Netbook Release .

Then using Ubuntu Tweak and Add / Remove Programs from Ubuntu desktop environment you can install Firefox 3.5, Google Desktop (with gadgets support), Google Gears, AWN and Firefox Prism . I’ve also installed Pidgin and VLC. The bottom line you get an web oriented OS which takes around 80 MB of RAM (at idle) and is very responsive.

On the other hand take a look at all these links:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10282037-56.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10280270-56.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10006582-56.html

http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/3a1eac42/why-did-google-announce-chrome-os-this-week-well

And all these announcements from Google related to Google Apps out of beta this week and Google Chrome OS makes more sense.

So the way I see things Google won’t be able to change the status quo in the OS world.

But if Google some how succeeds we will run a Google OS on a Google aproved device using only (is going to be only a matter of time ) Google services (no Facebook or Twitter for you). And btw you will probably have Google Analytics at desktop level .

For all these reasons I will stick with the Web OS option that I described at the beginning. If I am wrong in my assumptions let me know in a comment.

If this is going to be at least half  as good as the advert, I know what’s going to be near my Wii in the very near future .

Another way the technology will help you in the very near future. Don’t mind the fact that the software is slow or the fact that the screen takes 2 seconds to do a refresh. The important part is the hardware behind this gadget. I am sure that in less than 2 years time we will have an ebook reader which will have colors, very good refresh time (maybe even video capable) and if we are lucky will be subsidized by the content providers (the same thing that the communication companies are doing now with the phones).

Take a look at the video below

and then read the review from Techcrunch. I am inclined to say that the company behind this piece of software is going to be big in the very near future

The moment I found out Wolfram Alpha is online, I knew I had to ask the computational knowledge engine 2 questions. First one comes from Arthur Clarke’s Fountains of Paradise:

“What was the rainfall in the capital of the world’s smallest national state on the day when the second largest number of home runs was scored in college basketball?”

The questions is related to the main character of the story and the answer sadly for the time being is:

“Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.”

The second query comes from Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and is the standard:

“the meaning of life, the universe, and everything”

at which the engine gives the correct answer : 42 .

Because I had the time, this week I played with all the latest ubuntu distros in a VMware computer. The guest computer had one core, 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB HDD. The host computer is an Intel Dual Core E2180 with 3GB of RAM and an ATI 3450 video card. I am interested in how productive I am while running the distros. Also I am interested in how efficient the hardware resources are used (but this is more for the geek in me).

Ubuntu installer is flawless and very fast. Overall in less than 10 minutes I had a functional computer. The installer gave me the option to auto logon and also told me that my password is too weak. Nice touches for someone coming from the windows world. The initial boot took around 45 seconds and the following ones took around 30 seconds. I am sure that my virtual ubuntu boots faster than my one year old real installation of Windows XP. The first impression is a very good one. A slick desktop with very few idiosyncrasies. I really liked the fact that I can add / remove software very easy. I didn’t like that I wasn’t able to remove Evolution and Gimp ( I understand that are deeply integrated into Gnome) but when my primary email is Gmail and for calendar I use Lightning I don’t need Evolution. Also Gimp for me is overkill because I am not doing any big photo editing on my computer.

Something that doesn’t make sense for an average user is the fact that I have to go in multiple places if I want to change the look and feel of the desktop. For the window content I am going to a place, and for window decorations I have to go to another place. Again I understand why for a developer makes perfect sense to do that, but for average Joe this is something that can be done in a better way. The fonts are looking as good as in windows with the exception of Firefox (even if I installed the windows fonts and made the changes). Other than that after I installed ubuntu-tweak life was even more beautiful.

Overall I was very happy with the way I can do most of the things that I regularly do on a computer (browsing, using web apps,  writing, downloading, chatting, listening to music and watching videos) but I was less happy with the fact that even if Ubuntu is very fast it seems a little bloated. I had anywhere from less than 200 MB up to 750-800 MB memory usage.

On a side note, while searching the forums for a way to remove Evolution and Gimp without destroying the Desktop I had the feeling that there are people in the community that are “hardcore” . Their take on the questions asked on forums was something on the lines of “If you don’t like it don’t use it”. Somehow this doesn’t relate well to the Ubuntu credo.

Right now I think Ubuntu 9.04 is a very good operating system and the changes that still needs to be done are minor and mostly usability related.

Next on the list was Xubuntu. Without copying the entire first part of the post I just have to say a few things.

• It’s very difficult for someone to say if you are running Gnome or Xubuntu by just looking at the desktop.
• Something that didn’t make sense to me was the fact that I still have gnome services running.
• The settings part of the OS is even more weird than Ubuntu.
• On a plus side, the apps are lighter and the system is even faster that Ubuntu. Something to be expected after all.
• Ubuntu-tweak is working on Xubuntu also, so I strongly recommend to install it.
• The compositing engine works even with the non accelerated default VMWare video drivers.

Overall I was happy with the OS but I still think there is a lot of room for improvement from usability standpoint. The memory usage was anywhere from around 100 MB to less than 500 MB no matter what I did.

Last on the list Kubuntu. KDE 4.2 looks amazing. I think is better looking than Vista but is so buggy. Kubuntu was the first distro where I didn’t felt the need to install a different theme or make big changes. I had to change the start menu to the standard version (years of using Windows XP) and I had to manually set the fonts to 96 dpi because the fonts were so big on my 1680×1050 desktop that I thought initially that my computer knows I had eyes problems (it was just another KDE bug). Again the settings seems to be all over the place but here the added bonus is that the add remove software is not slick at all. It seems more like synaptic from gnome.

Another surprise was the fact that Openoffice was still here. KOffice 2.0 beta is not installed and also KOffice 1.1.6 is not here. For a KDE based distro this is a little weird but somehow understandable ( 2.0 is very buggy and 1.1.6 lacks functionality ).

Not sure when, but someday KDE won’t have bugs anymore and at that time Kubuntu will rock. For the time being I wouldn’t recommend it for more than just testing, playing with it, learning and helping the community.

In the 30 months since I tested Ubuntu 6.10 a lot of things happened in the Linux world, but for an average user like me the most important aspect is the fact that I don’t have to use command line anymore if I want to do minor changes to the OS looks and functions