Blogging is fun, but it is also a time sink, especially if your closet nerdiness takes over and you start fiddling with the design of the site, as I have done lately. It is now ready: Fairly conservative, with three columns, Google AdSense installed, comments and trackbacks and other details taken care of. Remaining: Adding some images and logos, with links. Downside: Fiddling with code takes time. Upside: I am now beginning to understand CSS, have established backup routines (which, incidentally, ought to be a part of MT) and the experience from that part can be used for my real home page, perhaps also for my courses. Definitely for my Norwegian blog. Time to ditch frames. And to get productive on other things…..
Incidentally: Minor irritation: The editing screens for MT have buttons for adding hyperlinks, images etc. – but these seem to only work in Microsoft IE, which is Not a Good Thing, especially given this article from Techdirt.
Incidentally II: MT Blacklist seems to be working – the amount of spam does not do down much, but at least it is a one-or-two-or-occasionally-three-click operation to get rid of them. Anklebiters.
Author Archives: Espen
Tablets tabled for a while?
Simson Garfinkel is right on the money when, reflecting on the Tablet PC Nonrevolution, he says that “it seems that tablet PCs spend a large part of their lives serving as traditional laptops, with the stylus snug in its holster while the keyboard gets a vigorous workout.” Definitely my impression and experience as well.
I have a Toshiba T3500, which is a Tablet PC with a keyboard and a swivel screen. When deciding which model to get, I was torn between the tablet model and the sleek M100, an “executive” machine without tablet functionality, but lighter, with a slightly better screen, and slightly larger keyboard.
Do I regret the choice? I am not sure, I have used the drawing functionality of the tablet a bit, have tried to enter and edit text (still too clumsy, as Simson says), and have occasionally surfed in tablet mode, especially when reading long documents on the web. Playing FreeCell using a pen was great, but I have deleted that game to up my productivitiy a bit…..
The technology is not quite there yet – kind of like Windows 2.11, which gave an inkling of what would come (with Palm playing the role of Apple), but with too slow response time and not enough well-behaved programs. OneNote needs to be an integral part of Windows, the editing facilities need to be more intuitive (backspacing with a pen is too cumbersome, I want to scratch things out) and the drawing format must be more integrated into file formats, especially in Powerpoint. (I tried making a “handwriting” presentation in Powerpoint, to illustrate using new technology in traditional ways, but the drawing interface was too cumbersome and lacked pressure sensitivity. Pasting in things from Windows Journal took too long….)
Aside from that, the Toshiba gets suspiciously hot and has developed a rattle in the fan. Time to back up and call Toshiba customer service…..
Self-evaluation and the real world
In one of my courses, I set participation grades by asking the students to rate themselves – tell me which grade they think they deserve, why they should have it, and what they could have done better in the course. (I snarfed this idea from my colleage Bill Schiano at Bentley.)
So – how do the students do? Not too bad, actually, as seen here:
A few outliers, but most students either hit it right on, or, in a spirit of optimism, gave themselves grades slightly better than they got. The biggest difference was in the expectation of a “standard” grade (that is, for someone who shows up and is prepared most of the time, but doesn’t say much.) For me, that is a C or C+, for the students that was a B-. Not much of a difference when things are added up, though. No prizes for guessing the genders of those who stongly overrated or underrated themselves….
(note that the table is not complete – it misses those who did not send in a self-evaluation sheet.)
And the summer stretches out before me….
The perfect use of an iTrip
Engadget has an article about the perfect use for an iPod with a modified iTrip FM short-hold sender – using it to shut down that irritatingly loud car stereo next to you at stoplights. Not to mention on the beach and other places…..imagine what fun you could have on the subway, or, as mentioned here, at health clubs. Pity you can’t do something similar with CD players….
Guns and sails and what they did
Cipolla, C. M. (1985). Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion 1400-1700. Manhattan, Kansas, Sunflower University Press.
This excellent study documents how the evolution of artillery (many, small and flexible guns) and naval shipbuilding (oceangoing, maneuverable, guns in hull, non-imposing) enabled the Europeans – particularly the English, Portuguese and Dutch – to expand their empires at the expense of the Arabs and Chinese, who used different technologies that could not be removed without disturbing social order and power relationships. A stellar example of the disruptive technology process at work – comparable to Barbara Tushmann’s A Distant Mirror or James Utterback’s description of the Norwegian/New England harvested ice industry (in Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation), not to mention Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. Highly recommended.
Excerpts:
To admit the new role of field artillery in battles of movement and to adopt new strategies accordingly, the Mamluks had to sacrifice the role and prestige of their feudal cavalry, namely the social position and prestige of the dominating class. This in its turn presupposed the disruption of feudal structures and a profound social revolution for which the kingdom was totally unprepared. Before accepting Western techniques, the Chines had to undergo “a wholesale change of the world-view, a Copernican revolution of a minor order”. Powerful socio-cultural factors were opposing the assimilation and diffusion of Western technology. In Europe the situation was vastly different. The European knights of the early Renaissance nourished ideas in regard to fire-arms which were not different from those of the Mamluk horsemen, but by 1500 European affairs were coming more and more under the control of new social groups that had a taste for organization rather than splendour, for efficiency rather than gallantry. And such groups could count on an increasingly numerous class of craftsmen with a taste for mechanics and metallurgy. the very factors that had originally favoured the development of the new technology continued to operate and fostered its further progress powerfully: as has neen indicated in the previous chapter, European shipuilding and manufactur of ordnance moved rapidly ahead during the centures that followed the first direct contact of the Portuguese with the peoples of Asia.
It has also to be said that with few exceptions, when an innovation is first introduced, its advantages over established traditions are not always very obvious [my emphasis]. The first European field guns were certainly not conspicuous for their efficiency. The attitude of the Turks toward early field artillery, as the attitude of the Venetians toward the early galleons, cannot be simply discarded as a piece of human stupidity. At their first appearance, innovations are less valueable for their actual advantages than for their potential of future developments and this second quality is always very difficult to assess. [my emphasis]
The result of the interplay of all these and other factors and circumstances, whatever their respective weight, was one and unequivocal. After the end of the fifteenth century the original “disequilibrium”between Europe and the rest of the world grew larger instead of levelling out. And for the less “developed” countries things turned progressively for the worse.” (pp. 130-131)
Nigritude Ultramarine
Nigritude Ultramarine. Because bloggers beat search engine optimizers whenever they want to……
XP WiFi problem
Eirik Newth mentions having trouble with failing XP WiFi connections, and Wired writes about the same thing.
I had the same problem: If my wife turned on the her Toshiba laptop, running XP Home, at the same time I had mine on (running XP Tablet), or vice versa, our home WiFi connection would disappear (though reported as fine by XP and Toshiba’s networking software). Our children’s computers, running older versions of Windows (2000 and 98) were not affected. This problem had me stumped for a few months, with my wife and I hollering to each other about needing to get on the net. In the end, the solution was upgrading the WiFi router (from a 3 year old Linksys 10Mb to a rather newer Linksys 54Mb) and now the connection is rock steady. Still, the lack of support or even mentioning of the problem (attributed loosely to driver problems) was very irritating, as were the constant search for finding updated drivers, BIOS, networking configurator software etc.
Chair of integration….
Currently, I am writing up a report on the Concours Group research project DBI: Driving Business Integration – and was wondering how to illustrate the concept of integration. Well – here is a picture that gets my prize: Jake Cress‘ Ball and Claw Chair.
Picture a corporation trying to reign in a fragmented business unit, and you have an idea…..
Incidentally, there are other interesting pieces of furniture at Cress’ website as well.
Excellent article on outsourcing
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Daniel Drezner writes an excellent article called The Outsourcing Bogeyman, which ought to be required reading for everyone interested in the subject (especially if combined with Wired’s on-the-ground version of the same topic.)
Favorite quote: “[..] believing that offshore outsourcing causes unemployment is the economic equivalent of believing that the sun revolves around the earth: intuitively compelling but clearly wrong.”
As usual, the problem is political – the reaction rather than the action.
Disruptive technology in progress
Last week, Bob Cringely wrote about how you could reprogram a WiFi router to become the neighbourhood ISP, thanks to a small software house in Sweden. This week, he details the reaction, with the story of an entrepreneur that took him up on the idea, a VoIP company that got interested, and a pretty nifty idea to provide semi-mobile communications for homeless people in San Francisco.
This is literally how disruptive technologies come about – someone comes up with a cheap way of providing good-enough service, initially serving a market that nobody else cares about. If it is good enough for the homeless – the ultimate mobile person, at least within the confines of a city – it should eventually be good enough for us regular users. As said by FCC Chairman Michael Powell – if you are an incumbent PTT, you ought to be terrified at this point…….
Calendar collusion complexity
Simson Garfinkel disusses the emerging standard iCalendar in the latest version of TechReview. While this may go some way in exchanging data between calendars, I fear that calendar standardization and exchange is still some way off – chiefly because of lack of functionality on the client side. Our requirements are simply, still, too complex for the software.
The chief problems lie with weak handling of privacy rules, especially when the user of the calendar crosses domains. For example: I use calendar software, and work for two organizations that also use it – the Norwegian School of Management, and the Concours Group. I also have a family life, with wife and children that demand calendar coordination. Being able to synchronize all this would be simply wonderful – but the functionality is not there yet.
For example: At the school, we share our Lotus Notes calendars – except I don’t because I don’t want my private activities to be broadcast to all and sundry. Notes does not support a default setting where an outside user could only see the time, not the content of an entry. That would mean that for every entry I put in, I would have to change the privacy setting manually – so I don’t bother. My calendar is therefore closed to outsiders, and and people who want to know whether I am available will have to call my secretary. If it was possible to set default “private” – so that outsiders could see what time I was busy but not what I was doing – I would share my calendar in an instant.
A further problem comes when you cross domains – for instance, I would like to have a calendar where I could have a setting of “Concours” (where Concours people could see both time and content, others only “Concours business”), “NSM” (ditto for my academic colleagues) and “family” (guess what). I realize I can do that for a single calendar client – but sharing the settings reliably across clients and networks is just not possible.
A third aspect is that time zones tend to be badly implemented in between-calendar standards (if not in all clients), and since I work in many different time zones, I frequently run the risk of misunderstanding timing for teleconferences and such.
The solution, of course, is constant vigilance and a great secretary. And constant search for a calendar client where the depth of the software matches the complexity of the life of the intellectual mercenary.
e-t-a-o-n-r-i Spy and the F.B.I.
The following story by Les Earnest is one of my favorite pieces of writing on codes and cryptography – and is worth repeating for the uninitiated. Les Earnest has also written a number of other interesting accounts of early computer systems and organizational dyfunctionalities associated therewith – but let’s start with this one:
Moore’s law in practice
Wikipedia is updating its servers after a very successful drive for contributions. The page describing the hardware of Wikipedia is very interesting, especially the list of transactions per second, which is very similar to what SABRE (American Airlines famous CRS) had in the early 1990s (about 250 transactions per second). Highly unscientific and all that, but SABRE was the largest real-time system (unless, I think, you count the SACs SAGE system) in the world at the time and Wikipedia is a non-profit, run-by-volunteers encyclopedia.
It is easy to see the effect of Moore’s law on your own laptop or in the proliferation of single computers, but Wikipedia is a demonstration of the concequences for centralized computing. Neat.
Blogspammers and other environmental hazards
I just installed MT-Blacklist to get rid of an increasing amount of blogspam – we’ll see if it helps. I think the MT-Blacklist approach should work, at least until the number of blogspams increase to regular spam levels and we have to shut down the comment feature, meaning that only people with blogs can discuss with each other (via trackback) or discussions have to move to the closed forum of email.
Spammers – and we are beginning to see these bozos (such as Multicontesta) even in small, overviewable Norway – are really an environmental problem, and should be treated as such. Hiding behind a misinterpretation of the right to free speech and pursuit of riches, they pollute common resources for shortsighted gain. Incidentally, in Norway you are rather well protected as a consumer against these creeps, but not if you run your own company. This has led many small companies, including mine, to forgo having a fax, since most faxes are offers for catalogue entries or display material or other “business services”, anyway.
I am beginning to think that the right governmental agencies to deal with the problem perhaps are those that regulate pollution. The problem is very similar in structure and consequences – and at least in Europe, the environmental authorities are pretty good. And nobody respects a gratuitous polluter.
(This entry was meant for my Norwegian blog, but I misposted. Easier to translate than to fiddle with trackback recalls. My own sort of pollution, perhaps. Apologies – it was inadvertent.)
Don’t buy Gevalia coffee
I just received a spam from Gevalia coffee (PDF here) – courtesy of spammer Optinrealbig, who tells me that I receive that message because I somehow have registered for it. I have never registered to receive junk mail about coffee, of course (in fact, I have never registered that email address for anything).
But how to get rid of this problem? I can, of course, follow the link to opt out of something I have never opted in for. But I think we need to simply hit back. As long as advertisers pay spammers, spam will proliferate. So here is my suggestion: Boycott any identifiable company that use email marketing, opt-in, opt-out or not.
So please, fellow bloggers and Internet users:
DO NOT BUY GEVALIA COFFEE!
Their seemingly legal use of email marketing encourages pollution of inboxes all over Internet. Just get some other coffee. It’s easy….just spread the word!
(update below)
Update Aug. 8 2006: Before you start posting comments here, note the date of the initial entry – and read Will’s comment of Aug. 8 2006.
Tony as columnist
My former and occasionally current colleague, friend and partner in highly vocal discussions (we were once asked to pipe down by an intimidated colleague who thought we would go for each other’s throats, when we both thought we only had a friendly exchange of views) Tony DiRomualdo has snuck off to become a columnist at the Wisconsin Technology Network. Tony’s articles reflects his deepfelt passion for giving people a fair deal in a world that is increasingly globalized and outsourced – without denying the economic benefits of sensibly done outsourcing. A much better argument than a lot of the populistic protectionism that seems to dominate politics these days – this middle ground is what we need if we are to make sense of globalization and offshoring, rather than make wars about it.
Tony is also a gourmet (responsible for a number of travel allowance discussions at our former place of work) – and he does talks, too….. Make sure dinner is included, and you might learn something, and not just about the food.
Gladwell’s articles
After reading about Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The tipping point (a great explanation of network externalities), in Dan Bricklin’s blog, I discovered that he had a website with an archive of his articles in the New Yorker. Well worth a visit – great stuff on the myth of talent management (or, rather, why what worked for McKinsey did not work for Enron or, for that matter, for Swissair), on recognizing whether people are lying based on their facial microexpressions – and why SUVs are a bad thing because people think they are much safer than they are. Excellent writing, as with most things in the New Yorker, highly recommended.
Paul Graham with new book
Wired has a review of Paul Graham‘s new book Hackers and Painters. The book is (apparently, since I haven’t read it yet) a collection of Paul’s essays, some of which have been available on his (stylish and minimalistic) web site for some time. Paul Graham, of course, should be a hero to every Web user for his popularization of the “Bayesian” spam filtering technique, now employed in Mozilla and almost every other email reader.
I haven’t managed to get hold of the book yet, but Paul’s essays are great – and you really can’t beat a quote such as “If you think you’re designing something for idiots, odds are you’re not designing something good.” Far too many applications today are user-friendly rather than usable (Blackboard, which I currently suffer to reach my students, is one example, though less bad than ClassFronter, which is too awful for words and what grade school teachers in Norway are forced to use).
So this just might be a book to get. Or, at least, a reason to go back to Paul’s site (which does not offer an RSS feed) and reread some of his excellent writings.
Set it and forget it
When in San Francisco a few weeks ago, I bought a Buffalo Linkstation which I finally got around to install. Before buying it, I had a lot of trouble finding out whether it would work in a European context, even calling tech support at Buffalo. They said it needed a 110V connection, so I resigned myself to having to get a transformer. Then it turns out that it is 110/220 autoswitchable, so basically it was just plug it into the power slot, connect it to the router – and presto, 120Gb of file server. Truly a set it and forget it device, now hidden away in my home network closet. Excellent.
I haven’t tried out its print server facilities yet, but will do shortly. In the meantime, European friends, this is the thing to get for your small network the next time you are over in the States. It is not available this side of the pond – or at least not in Norway, as far as I know. And Buffalo said they were not going to sell it in Europe (then again, they told me it only would work in the States…..).
This is, incidentally, my first “production” Linux computer – that is, the Linkstation runs on (as far as I know) a limited version of Linux. (I have had a few PCs with Linux to play with, but haven’t really used them.) At the recent CIO Staff call on Open Source, this way of using Linux – device frosting – was seen as one of ways Linux will make it into the mainstream. The TIVO is running on Linux in the same fashion – so you may run Linux and not even know it.
Ahhh. Technology. Sometimes it Just Works.
Moore’s Law and economics
Bob Cringely is arguing that Moore’s Law will slow down, not as a consequence of technology limitations but because further extension after a certain point becomes too expensive. So, rather than demanding a faster processor, just get more of them – or perhaps it is time to start fiddling with software to make it faster again.
Makes sense to me – interestingly, this is one of the chief threats to Dell Computer, whose business model is founded on customers demanding technology that is up to date and customizeable. When the demand for more processing power diminishes, so should the demand for customizability – people can add stuff to their computers rather than getting new ones. Will take some years, though, but the signs are definitely there.
Applied Abstractions 