Skunkworks

Samsung Prototype Notebook with OLED Screen

admin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 06:20:08 +0000

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Biped robot from Boston Dynamics

admin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:57:17 +0000

It’s the Bigdog evolved

Another interesting robot

Information Overload

admin — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:49:39 +0000

“ 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.

Subscription	Posts per day	Percentage read
Digg	134.5	3%
Reddit	72.6	4%
Delicious	46.8	5%
Scobleizer’s	68.7	8%
My alltop	149.7	3%
My readtwit	22.4	5%

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.

4K Demo

admin — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 05:21:12 +0000

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.

Google Chrome OS ? Thanks, but no thanks.

admin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:33:38 +0000

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.

Xbox 360 Project Natal

admin — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 06:07:17 +0000

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 .

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Plastic Logic Ebook Reader Demo

admin — Thu, 28 May 2009 08:37:42 +0000

plastic logic ebook from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

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).

Siri – Virtual Assistant

admin — Thu, 28 May 2009 08:25:47 +0000

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

Asking questions to Wolfram Alpha

admin — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:39:15 +0000

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 .

To open source or not to open source

Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu 9.04 Impressions

admin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:11:37 +0000

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

For Geeks Only

admin — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:01:42 +0000

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Honda Walking Assist Devices

admin — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:46:42 +0000

Legs On: Honda’s Walking Assist Devices from Vimeo.

Asimov would have liked it

admin — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:40:58 +0000

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I don’t get it

admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:03:58 +0000

I consider myself a very knowledgeable person in relation to computers, software, Internet and basically everything that has a remote connection with those concepts. I am using a lot of web based services. I am using instant messengers, email, RSS readers, I am sharing photos using Picasa and Live Photos, I am using online storage and Google Docs but I am not able to get any value whatsoever from the social networks that I am part of. I am on LinkedIn, Facebook and a few others. I don’t have too many connections on any of the networks, but this is because I choose to be very selective.

I don’t see any value in being up-to-date with what everybody in my network is doing. I don’t see myself updating my status every few hours with what I am doing. It’s not in my nature to be that open. At the same time I am reading a lot about how cool is to be on LinkedIn, about how trendy is to use Twitter or how productive you can become by using an app that is available only on Facebook and I don’t see myself doing what all the “cool” people are doing it.

Because of all of the above, I am getting very annoyed some time and this is one of those moments. I do have a reasonable explanation for the fact that I don’t get it, but for the moment I refuse to accept it .

Google Notebook Offline Replacement

admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:12:00 +0000

It took me a while, but now I have a very good and I hope future proof solution for keeping all my information that I gathered in the last few years. Below you’ll get a succinct account of what I had to do.

After I saved all my Google Notebook information as complete web pages (one webpage per notebook), I ended up with around 70 MB of HTML, CSS and images which were indexed by Copernic Desktop Search but I was still lacking the functionality that Google Notebook provided to me. So I downloaded:

Autoit (for some small scripting that I needed)
Tag2find (for all the tagging needs)
TextMaker Viewer (for a fast open document format viewer)

I created a folder list using this small autoit script:

Dim $year , $month , $foldername
MsgBox(0, "Create Folders", "Script Start")
$year = 2004
While $year <= 2009
    $month = 01
    Do
        If $month < 10 then
            $foldername = "C:\Test\" & $year & "0" & $month
        Else
            $foldername = "C:\Test\" & $year & $month
        EndIf
        DirCreate ($foldername)
        $month = $month + 1
    Until $month = 13
    $year = $year + 1
WEnd
MsgBox(0, "Create Folders", "Script End")

The script is self explanatory. I used it in order to avoid manually create all the folders that I need from the month of 200401 to the month of 200912.

Then I used copy paste extensively between Firefox and OpenOffice and saved all the individual articles from Google Notebook as OpenOffice documents. The documents were saved in the folder corresponding to the month of their creation. Also in each folder is a document called bookmarks that contain all the bookmarked sites from that month. After I finished with Google Notebook I saved all my Scrapbook information in the same format.

Probably using Autoit someone could automate this step also. I preferred to do it manually because I wanted to see what I am going to keep going further. So far I spent close to 100 hours doing this and I ended up with almost 1.5 GB of articles (more than 4000 documents)

Now I am tagging each document with the appropriate tags using tag2find . Probably at the rate that I am doing it is going to take me probably another month. After that I will have a complete tagged database of information which is portable, offline and backed up. Is good to know that the entire taxonomy from tag2find can be exported as an XML file and the actual files are in ODT format.

Now I am still using Scrapbook for capturing web pages that are of interest to me, but I will spend probably 2-3 hours each month moving information from Scrapbook to the offline repository that I created.

We all live in a …

admin — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 07:02:31 +0000

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

Google Notebook Is No More

admin — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:46:30 +0000

This morning I got the news that Google will close many services. The one that affected me was Google Notebook. I had a lot of information in it and even if Google says that I can still use it and add information to the notebooks, I do not feel at ease with that. So, I decided to export all the information out of Google Notebook and import it in Scrapbook . I don’t think is the best option, but I know the information is on my hard drive. The export was relatively easy to do, and once the export was finished I realized that the amount of information that I have on Google servers was minuscule (less than 70 MB archived).

For the moment this service closing is just a minor annoyance, but should be an alarm signal. Trust is something that is very difficult to build and very easy to loose. Probably in the higher levels of Google hierarchy they decided that the amount of information that the users are storing in the notebooks does not improve the relevance of the adverts served to those users in Gmail or in the Google search pages. So they decided that Notebook is not needed for their plans. Once Google chooses to close some services, it’s obvious that if the situation is going to be even worst they could choose to close other services. I know the service was free, but I would have like to have a better export option at least.

On the other hand something else to take in the account. Because Microsoft is making a lot of money with their offline software (Server, Windows, Office and so on) they can afford to loose some money with the online division, so they are able to still offer a lot of things for free. The most interesting to me is the 25GB Skydrive storage space. I start uploading some non vital files for testing purposes and it seems to work pretty well. Once Microsoft announced this some months ago, I expected that Google will match this, but nothing happened. This was my first alarm signal that maybe not everything is nice and dandy in the Googleplex.

Now I am looking for an offline RSS reader that would match Google Reader capabilities and if I will find one, then Gmail is the last thing that still has me linked to Google Services.

I know I can replace Analytics and Feedburner anytime with other options for skunkworks.ro

It appears that all good things are coming to an end. And I am sure now that in the next months a lot of free services from other Web 2.0 companies will dissapear. Probably is best to start thinking offline software again and somehow find the means to maintain the collaboration level and community feeling that the Web 2.0 services are offering

Google Reader – How I use it now.

admin — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:40:51 +0000

Some time late last year I’ve realized I do not have enough time to browse through all the information available to me in my Google Reader setup. I was getting anything from 500 to 1000 posts each day. I had a hierarchy of folders based on my interests, folders like gadgets, blogs, Romania, politics, news and so on. I was planning to use the AideRSS Firefox extension but until December 2008 they had performance problems. The long story short, I was getting overwhelmed with the amount of information available and I wasn’t able to actually process the information and derive knowledge out of it.
So I’ve took a step back and over a few days of browsing I’ve changed the folders to Daily, Weekly, Monthly, SomeTime, Podcasts . I put in each folders the feeds based on my reading habits and the importance of getting the information in a time. For the Weekly, Monthly, Sometime the AideRSS is displaying only the great posts. Now I am going to Google Reader only once per day in the evening during the working days for at most 30 minutes and read only the Daily folder. At weekend I spend maybe 1 hour reading the Weekly and Daily folder, and once a month I will spend another extra 2 hours for reading the Monthly and SomeTime folders.
For the moment the only issue I have is the fact that for the the Digg and Reddit feed, the AideRSS extension is not working properly. And these 2 feeds are having the worst signal to noise ratio from all the feeds I read.

Google Chrome vs Firefox

admin — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:08:38 +0000

Today I installed the out of beta Google Chrome to see if they improved since I’ve looked at the software. It seems to me that Google Chrome is in a worse state than before. I am not seeing any speed advantages over Firefox 3.0 with a lot of extensions and the worst part it actually uses a lot more memory than Firefox. Below you have 2 screenshots to prove my point.

In both browsers I opened Google Reader, Notebook, Gmail, Docs and Calendar.

As you can see the Chrome processes are using a total of around 167 MB of memory and almost the same amount of Virtual memory.

Firefox and Firefox Portable use around 120 MB of RAM and around 140MB of virtual memory.

When I have 3 GB of RAM on my Windows XP computer, these differences are nothing more than just a little annoyance, but I really do not like the fact that Google is going the Microsoft way of doing software. And when you think there are people that are saying that Firefox is bloatware since version 2.0

It seems to me that Google rushed the product. Not sure the reasons behind, but Chrome is still a long way from being a Firefox replacement or at least competitor and for the time being Firefox is the browser to beat.

Again like the first time I uninstalled Chrome in under a hour since installation. Now I am waiting for the Google Update process to kill itself .

Google Advertising and Me

admin — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:57:25 +0000

Last week, I used GMail from a computer that allowed all the adverts from Google. So I’ve read around 50 emails which exposed me to maybe 250 adverts. To my surprise I ended up clicking on probably 15 links that were interesting to me. The interesting bit is that the links were not related to the content of the email, but somehow the datamining that Google does, payed off because the links were interesting to me. After around 3 years of using Gmail, Google Reader and all the other services it seems that I am a very open book to them. I was trying to anonymize my broswer habits using different Firefox extensions but I am not sure it’s worth the effort anymore. As long as I am using Google Reader and Notebook, I have a cookie from Google for as long as the session is open. For the time being the cookie is sweet and I will enable the adverts in Gmail. I am not sure if in the long run I am at ease with this “lack of privacy”. I know it was my choice and in my case an educated one.

Rendezvous with Rama

admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:55:54 +0000

Rendezvous with Rama from Aaron Ross on Vimeo.

I found this gem on Vimeo. It’s incredible what an undergraduate student was able to create back in 2001. One of the best work I’ve seen. I think Arthur C. Clarke would have liked to see this very short movie.

Spatial Operating Environment

admin — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 08:31:41 +0000

This morning on my Engadget feed I found a possible future gem. So far it doesn’t do much, but the concepts are very interesting. Still thinking about the implications.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

The Matrix Runs on Windows :)

admin — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:07:57 +0000

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Azure vs AppEngine at first glance

admin — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:24:57 +0000

Today, Microsoft launched Azure which is the Microsoft OS for the cloud. I am not going to enter into technical details or compare Azure with AppEngine or Amazon Web Services. Something else grabbed my attention.

Take a look at these two links AppEngine and Azure . Is so easy to read and understand Google’s language and so annoying to read the corporate language of Microsoft.

An excerpt below to prove my point.

What Is Google App Engine?
Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it’s ready to serve your users.

You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can share your application with the world, or limit access to members of your organization.

App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account, and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see, at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.

What is the Azure Services Platform?

The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises.

Azure reduces the need for up-front technology purchases, and it enables developers to quickly and easily create applications running in the cloud by using their existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the Microsoft .NET Framework. In addition to managed code languages supported by .NET, Azure will support more programming languages and development environments in the near future. Azure simplifies maintaining and operating applications by providing on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web and connected applications.

Both companies are presenting similar services, but somehow Google language is easier to read.

Google products login page lack of consistency

admin — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 18:06:13 +0000

I am using a lot of products from Google lately : Gmail, GCal, Reader, Docs, News, Analytics, Adsense, Picassa. One thing that annoys me a little is that the login page for each of these products is different. I understand the need for the different text in the page, but I would like to get the login box in the same position all the time. And also I would appreciate if the layout of the login page would be identical across the different Google products. It’s a very small touch that can be easy implemented and can make a difference. It’s one thing when your products are geared towards geeks, it’s a different thing when you want that everybody use your products. This lack of attention to detail is annoying when you deal with Google.

What’s next for Apple?

admin — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 08:21:35 +0000

After looking at the latest Apple media event and reading most of the comments from different pundits around the web I had a small revelation. Everybody is talking about Steve Jobs leaving Apple due to his health, but I think no one has come up with the real reason.

If you take a look at the Apple hardware line you realize that except for the Apple TV and maybe the Iphone, is very difficult to improve hardware wise the products that are already there. Think about it. How would you change the latest notebooks? Maybe replacing the LCD with OLED? Maybe replacing the battery with some fuel cell battery? I thought about it for the week and came with no other improving options. The same can be said about IMac, Mac mini, MacPro or the Apple Monitors (it’s obvious that the old 30″ will be replaced sooner or later with an LCD based on the technology from the 24″ monitor just released). For all these (let’s say the MAC division) there are going to be evolutionary hardware changes but I do not think is going to be something revolutionary in the next few years. (I know that making a prediction like that in this industry could be seen as coming from a crazy non educated person )

Also it’s clear that IPhone is also almost perfect hardware wise, but here because the technology is still evolving rapidly we could get revolutionary things in the next year or so.

I am sure that the next differentiator for Apple is going to be software based and most probably we will see the first steps in the Snow Leopard release. If you are agreeing with me so far let’s speculate further.

Without new products (not evolutionary but revolutionary) some time in the next 24 months Apple won’t be able to grow anymore. And I am almost sure that the income coming from the Itunes and the Iphone app store won’t be able to compensate. When you have your vision completed (in this case Steve’s vision) is very easy to get bored and work becoming less fun that it used to be. Combine these 2 reasons with Steve’s age and most probably these are the combined reasons which are making Steve thinking about leaving Apple.

The alternative scenario is that Apple is going to be able to open new markets and I am not talking now about a tablet mac or an ebook reader. I hope to get something totally new maybe something related to domestic robots. I am sure that if the job is interesting enough, Steve will stay at Apple forever. It will step down from the CEO position but for sure is still going to be involved in the product design.

Organizing All My Information

admin — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:06:17 +0000

Since 2004 I’ve saved a lot of information in different formats and systems:

I have 2482 pages saved in Scrapbook ( Firefox extension ), around 320 MB of HTML and photos
I have thousands of documents on my hard disk in doc, odt, pdf format
I have a monthly notebook on Google Notebook since April 2006. In each notebook I saved anywhere from 10 to 100 pages.
I subscribed to around 150 websites using Google Reader and I am labeling for future use around 15 to 20 items each day.
I have an Outlook PST of around 6 GB from which maybe 1 GB is very useful information and also I have a Gmail account with more than 2 GB of useful information.

My problem lately is how to create knowledge in an easy way from all this information overload. I’ve tried all sort of web based systems for organizing information, but no luck so far. And I know that search such as Google or Copernic desktop is not enough for creating knowledge.

I am dreaming of an intelligent agent who is capable to create short briefs based on my interests, to answer some basic questions by accessing all the info that I have, to analyze calendar data (ical format), to be location aware. I know that this is what semantic web is all about it, but this web is still 1-2 years away, and I am sure that as long as I have non structured information is going to be impossible for the semantic web products to generate knowledge out of the information chaos.

It would be great if this kind of agent would run on a smart phone and be with me all the time.

On a side note the more I use Google Reader, Gmail and Google Notebook, the more I feel the need to get all my acquired data from their systems, but I didn’t find yet the right app that could that for me.

Ubervu

admin — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:37:39 +0000

Finally I can write about a Romanian company that seems to have a nice web 2.0 product or at least a demo. For the record I have to say that I found out about them from a foreign news site which is kind of sad. Anyway, below you have a video demoing their product and if you want to find out more you should go to Ubervu . I hope they won’t disappoint me .

uberVU presentation – Seedcamp demo from Vladimir Oane on Vimeo.

Software as a Service Pros & Cons

admin — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:38:02 +0000

Software as a Service (SaaS) is getting a lot of attention lately. SaaS has many Pros and some Cons as well. This piece outlines both the good and the bad, tries to answer the question: “By going the SaaS way, is IT just trading one set of problems for another?”, and suggests that the benefits outweigh the shortcomings.

The development of web based applications has decoupled the user interface from the business layer as well as its software and hardware. As a result, a user working at a personal computer (or a smart phone) with a web browser can access a variety of business applications for the cost of the Internet connection and the subscription to the service.

The number of companies embracing the SaaS model has grown steadily, especially in the last couple of years, with small companies leading the charge. The SaaS applications that most companies are using are messaging (email, instant messaging and calendar), marketing, project management, time and billing, accounting / financial, customer relationship management, inventory management and payroll.

By purchasing a software service the company has no up front acquisition costs, no hardware or software to buy, and no support staff to hire and train. The cost of acquisition is reduced to the cost of training employees on the application and converting existing data. The low acquisition cost of software services makes the access to those services affordable to a broader range of companies. This affordability gives small companies the opportunity to use the same feature rich software solutions as those of larger companies. Going into details the pros are:

Lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Hosted software carries a set price per user per month
Financial predictability. It is much easier for a company to predict monthly IT expenses in a subscription based model then on a licensed application model.
Lack of over provisioning or under provisioning of the IT infrastructure needed to run in house the licensed application
Scalability. Hosted offerings are designed to scale seamlessly for large numbers of simultaneous users. As such, they are able to easily maintain performance levels and up time as your company grows and the volume of data expands over time
Frequent upgrades. Updates are made frequently and for the company effortlessly. Because the software is delivered over the Internet, SaaS providers have greater flexibility in upgrading applications and rolling out changes to customers.
Accessibility. Hosted software can be accessed from any web browser around the world. Users in different countries can access the same information in real time without the delay of synchronizing changes as is the case with a client server on premise solution.

Before a small company decides to select a hosted application it should have a sense of the limitations also. Yes, there are limitations, but if the model is used correctly, the limitations will be very small compared with the benefits. Using a software service prompts several concerns about integration. The chief concern is data security. This stems from an uneasiness people still have about sending confidential data across the Internet, though this concern is starting to wane. The other concerns surrounding software services are : system security, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery. In addition to these concerns, a company looking at a software service should also ask: ” What would I do if the service provider went out of business? Will I be able to retrieve my data, and how long will it take me to get data back up and into a new system where I can access it ? ” The software service is providing both hardware and hosting, s the loss of the provider means the loss of both services. This creates a single point of failure, a sizable risk. Also accessibility can also be a Con if one does not have access to the Internet.

In the last part of this piece I will try to describe a SaaS implementation process with all the steps involved.
Let’s stard with planning and design. The first order of business is to evaluate the features offered by each SaaS provider. Once you have a SaaS application pilot running you should have a GAP analysis which should compare the company’s existing needs to the functionality of the application. The analysis may reveal limitations that have to be made up by licensing one or more additional applications from the provider, or building custom code.

Next comes the analysis of the service level and license agreements. The SLA discussion will include up time guarantees, penalties if those guarantees aren’t met and the mechanism used to measure up time. You should realize that the smaller you are, the smaller your negotiation power is in relation to a big SaaS provider.

Next you should try to get informations related to the security of the provider’s data center and the application servers that reside there. Whether your SaaS provider runs its own data center, or leases it from a managed hosting provider, the facility should have strong physical and logical access controls. You should ask if the provider engages in regular third-party audits of its apps, including web app vulnerability scanning and manual penetration testing. You should also be aware that most of the time you will get a “No Comment” as an answer to this question.

If you are happy so far, the next step in the implementation is existing data migration to the SaaS provider. At this stage if the provider really wants you as a client, it should do all the necessary steps to help you.
At this stage you should be a reasonably happy user of the SaaS application of your choice.

While I do not consider software services appropiate for all of a company’s application software needs, they can fill many of those needs.

Software idea

admin — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:07:13 +0000

If you want to know what I am thinking lately, take a look at the diagram below. I still have to figure out the content of the red rectangle from the middle. You can pan and zoom the diagram the way you want it.

Graphics Alghoritms

admin — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:59:26 +0000

Below you can see 2 videos. Both have to do with using photos for creating nice videos. The alghoritms behind these 2 demos are the actual interesting part, and the even more interesting part is that these kind of alghoritms are getting into the comercial space.
First video

Second Video

PicLens – Software gem

admin — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 12:20:02 +0000

I have PicLens installed for my Firefox browser for more than 6 months now. I used it from time to time for Picassa or Flickr and I really liked the way the slideshows were displayed and the feeling of the visual search.

The reason I am writing this post is because today I had a small “revelation”. I noticed this week the automated update of the extension to 1.7, but today I used it for the first time. If you click on the Discover icon on the top left you will see something similar with Google News, but focused on photos and videos that can be played inside the interface. If you go to the top right you will notice the search box that gives you access to the search engines (Amazon, Google and so on) . You should use it

Is clear to me that PicLens can evolve anytime in the perfect 10 ft interface that can take over your internet enabled living room tv.

FanWing

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 02:55:56 +0000

A new way of propulsion for standard airplanes. It looks weird, but if flies very well.

No related posts.

The second coming of the Iphone.

admin — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:19:22 +0000

I’ve watched the Steve Jobs keynote from a few days ago that culminated with the Iphone 3G presentation. My take is that this is going to be my next phone . This being said, below you have my critique of the device and the associated software

The device seems complete and the reason for the missing things it seems to me that it has to do a lot more with the marketing part than to the real technical dificulties. I am sure that if they really wanted they could have implemented a front camera with ichat video capabilities but that would have been a direct attack at ATT.

Also the way Apple is solving the multitasking issues is pure genius. Not from technical point of view but from business point of view. Apple will be able to control what and when goes to your phone from all the apps that will run on the Iphone.

I am not at all happy with the way Apple implemented their Mesh version (btw now it makes perfect sense why Microsoft had choose to preview the Mesh in advance, even they didn’t had the mobile support implemented). It seems that Apple is not able to make up it’s mind. If the syncronisation works so well why are you duplicating Google’s work and create a suite of web based apps? At least the way Microsoft is doing it you aren’t presented with duplicated way of doing things. Also it seems to me that Microsoft has the edge on this one from technical point of view. I am sure I am not going to pay 99$ per year for something that I can have for free one way or another.

Not sure if something can be done related to the video and audio codec support. I hope that the VLC for iphone project is completely succesful. Also it seems to me that the storage capacity is too small. Because now I am sure that a good part of that storage capacity is going to be taken by the application data.

Last point that I want to make is the lack of device level encryption. I may be wrong but so far I am pretty sure that you can not have something similar with truecrypt in the Iphone firmware. I know thath you can nuke an iphone remotely but I would be happier if I know that my personal data is encrypted and unavailable if I loose my phone

B2 Guam Crash Video Footage

admin — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:46:49 +0000

No related posts.

Not your usual concert

admin — Thu, 15 May 2008 05:56:22 +0000

I am pretty sure that this symphony orchestra actually follows the conductor and not the first violin (backup conductor ).

Not my usual kind of posts

.Mac vs LiveMesh

admin — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:35:31 +0000

Lately I tried to go through all the buzz that LiveMesh generated. After watching all the videos on channel 9 and channel 10 (microsoft videos) I am disapointed. I don’t denied the posibilities that livemesh could generate. But if you go to .Mac and to LiveMesh you will see that at this moment LiveMesh is not able to do what .Mac is doing it. The only advantage is that you get LiveMesh for free.

Business Startup Thougths

admin — Fri, 09 May 2008 02:28:50 +0000

Because lately I got interested in what it takes to succeed in a startup environment, I got to see this presentation by the David Heinemeir (ruby on rails creator) . A lot of common sense advices but sometimes it helps to be reminded of those advices.

Second Life Matrix Style

admin — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:44:48 +0000

What do you get when you combine Second Life with some new hardware? Check the video below. I am still thinking of the possibilities….

Another interesting robot

admin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:30:26 +0000

MAKE @ RobotBusiness 2008 Segway RMP – Watch more funny videos here

Strange Mechanical Creature

admin — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:27:00 +0000

You should take a look at the video below. First time in a long time when I got an uneasy feeling in relation to the technology. At first glance it seems to me that this robot is much more advanced (in relation to walking) then the ASIMO japanese robot. Also I think the “robot brain” would allow walking on 2 legs only if needed.

Random Thoughts about Iphone SDK

admin — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:05:57 +0000

After watching the Iphone SDK related presentation these are some random thoughts that come to my mind:

If you want to see how Iphone SDK compares with the rest of the mobile platforms SDK you should check this chart from Engadget
Adobe is on the loosing side because flash and Air won’t be on the iphone. Adobe can try to add them using the SDK, but nobody is going to use that additional layer. There is no killer app for Flash or Air for the Iphone. Also on a side note is worth to mention that Silverlight 2.0 from Microsoft is providing support for offline apps.
Google really has to improve Android and some how talk the developers into using their SDK instead of Apple’s.
Nintendo and other mobile console makers will be on the loosing side also because is so much better having only one device in your pocket.
I wonder if other video codecs will be available on the Iphone. Most probably Apple will find a reason not to allow Xvid or WMV to run on the Iphone.
Probably Iphone was rushed to the market, and they didn’t had time to actually make their software really stable and create an SDK. This was probably the main reason you get access to native apps only 1 year later.
Probably if Apple is going to add HDSPA and GPS to Iphone in june, is going to be the best device ever. Also it needs bluetooth and some accesories like video googles.
Scott Forstall, the guy who did the SDK presentation has a very similar style of talking and acting on stage with Steve Jobs. Not sure if the similarities goes further than this, but if Iphone is going to be huge, this guy could be the next in line for the CEO position. It seems to me that Scott has the same attention to details in relation to the interface like Steve does.
Not sure how Apple will address the fact that they sell Ipod Touch in almost all the countries in the world, but you do have acces to Itunes store only in around 20 countries. How I will get apps for an Ipod Touch sold in Romania for that matter?
Apple will have a problem with the Ipod Touch. By switching the focus from Iphone being the best ipod ever to Iphone being the killer PDA phone, Apple created for them a problem. Nobody will buy Ipod touch for getting apps that are really useful only when you have acces to the network. Probably Ipod Touch will get a bigger screen and evolve into an ebook reader, but again this is just educated guessing. Will see what’s happening in june at the developers conference.
Didn’t see in the demo if you can actually edit your calendar apointments when you get them from the Exchange server. I hope you have full functionality and not read only.
By getting so many apps running on the Iphone, the battery will become a much more important issue. Most probably with the update in June, if any, Apple will provide a user replaceable battery.

Public Service Announcement :)

admin — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:02:31 +0000

This post should be in romanian, because it has to do with the romanian daily reality. I choose to write it in english to keep some sort of order in the blog.

Around 2 weeks ago I went for an interview to a top 5 bank here for middle management position. The interview went more than ok, I asked for a certain amount of money, the interviewer was relatively ok with the amount. 4 days later I am getting a call from the interviewer in which he said to me that I am the person for the job, but he can not offer me more than 85% of the amount I requested. Next day I accepted the offer, and the interviewer told me that he needs to have this amount approved by a VP because my sallary is bigger than their approved sallary grid.

They called me to the office next monday at 11 to sign the papers. I was there and after 30 minutes discussion between the interviewer and the HR department I was told to come back at 16:30 the same day because the papers weren’t ready. Knowing the way things are here I suggested to them that I should come back next morning at 9, which I did.

So tuesday I met with a HR person which presented to me all the papers except the sallary which still wasn’t approved at this stage. She told me that by the end of the day, she should have the approval and she will call me to establish a meeting next day for signing the employment papers. Tuesday around 7PM she called, told me that the sallary is not approved yet but she will call me when it is ready, for me to come and sign the papers.

One week later I got a call from the interviewer asking me to meet him next day to discuss the offer. So I met him this morning in his office and he told me that the initial money weren’t approved by the VP and offered me 60% of the initial amount that I requested. I declined the offer politely.

End of the public service announcement.

PS I still have to figure out if I am allowed to make all the names public or not.

WorldWideTelescope hype

admin — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 09:24:52 +0000

When I read about this 1 week ago, and the NDA Robert Scobble had to obey, I thought that what Microsoft is going to show is going to be huge. After I watched the video presentation at TED I am dissapointed. Maybe my expectations were too high but from the video it seems that this software is not able to do much more than pan and zoom . I would go as far as saying that I am still more impressed with the animations and the tours that you can create in Celestia which is and old opensource software which runs on every OpenGL enabled computer OS and creates amazing graphics. The difference between WorldWideTelescope and Celestia is the fact that in one you get the images by downloading them at the time you are doing the zoom and in Celestia you already have the images and objects downloaded as textures. Without actually seeing the software would be wrong for me to go any further with the criticism but I will say that most probably this software is not going to be much better than Google Sky. Also I am sure that the marketing money of Microsoft will prevail this time.

The wonderful world of online advertising

admin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 09:25:49 +0000

One of the reasons I started this blog was to see if is possible to make a living from online advertising. Short answer: The way I do it, it isn’t . If you browse my site without an adblocker you will see that I have a sidebar with google adsense. You will also see that the sidebar is not respecting almost all the best practices in placement, format and so on. Without going into details is sufficient to say that in the almost 2 years since I have this site, I didn’t got any money from Google yet, because there are not enough in my adsense account . Also you need to know that the site is costing me almost nothing. Is something like 25 Euros per year.

Now that you have the facts let me give you some insight.
Some time ago I got an offer to publish some adverts on my site. I told that company that depending on the types of sites and the money offered I may be interested. I got an offer back. I presume is a decent offer, but I choose not to go further.
Why? Try to spot the adverts on these sites: http://www.rubyrailways.com/ and http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/05/10/70-expert-ideas-for-better-css-coding/ . I did not put the actual links here, because I do not want to back link to those sites. I am pretty sure what that company is doing is legal, but I am 100% sure is not moral.

I am sure you will have a hard enough time to spot the adverts. If you can’t just let me know in a comment and I will put you on the right track.

Why an Apple Iphone SDK ?

admin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 09:21:17 +0000

Everybody would say because the customers want it. After I have seen a demo of the Google services page optimized for Iphone I am sure that Google is the real reason. Is clear that by using the same web browser like Iphone (webkit) any Android based device would have access to any Iphone optimized site the same way the Iphone does. Apple had to release an SDK to try to match Google efforts in this area.

Semantic Web for Dummies

admin — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:20:54 +0000

I am not sure how well the technology below scale, but in the worst case scenario would be the base for the ultimate enterprise level knowledge management system and in the best case scenario would replace google as the main search engine.

Google Android Explained

admin — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:11:03 +0000

No related posts.

There is something about Google

admin — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:34:01 +0000

Google isn’t launching products anymore, is launching platforms. Last week Google launched Open Social,this week Google launched Android. These two platforms have two things in common:

both appear to be not ready yet and rushed to the market. Probably this has something to do with getting the value of the shares as high as possible. If these technologies would have come from any other company, most probably would have been treated as possible vaporware.
both are based on open source technologies.

If Open Social is Google’s move in trying to beat Facebook (it seems that Facebook is going to be able to target the adverts in a much more precise way then Google), Android is potentially a paradigm shift in computing experience. Is not clear to me yet if the software stack is based on Java or J2ME but Google will have an OS that will be able to run on any computing device from mobile phones to standard desktops PC. I can’t wait to have a device similar with Asus 399$ notebook or OLPC or something similar with the Ipod Touch or Nokia Tablet which will run Google OS and access Google or google compatible web services. (you should try to remember “google compatible”)

Slowly different pieces of the Google master plan are seeing the light and it seems that they are executing their plan almost flawlessly.

The most interesting thing of these 2 announcements is actually going to be the reaction from Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, Sony-Ericsson and Facebook. Is obvious that Google is forcing these companies to play it’s game and these companies are in reacting mode which diverts important resources from trying to create something new and force Google to play their game.

If the game continues like this probably sooner or later the EPIC story will become true. Not sure if this is a good thing or not.

Thought of the day :)

admin — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:33:09 +0000

Is so funny how Gmail goes directly from Beta to 2.0 .