Category Archives: Nerdy ruminations

Mothership Internet

Jon Udell has an interesting discussion of social network software: That it will be subsumed into the general Internet over time. LinkedIN, for one thing, is now a fairly well closed off professional network, useful if you want to get in touch with someone at a particular company, and free of spammers, unless you count the headhunters with 5000+ connections. Incidentally, just like the early academic networks, back in the 80s.

The trouble with networks is keeping them at the right size and with the right nodes. When it grows to large, smaller groups will secede and form subnets, often with dimensions added to the connections between them. That’s the way it is with LinkedIN as well: It started off with very strict limitations on what you could do. Then, if you pay for the premium account, you can send emails that shortcircuits the chain of connections and ask questions that pop up on people’s home screens.

I have 287 connections on LinkedIN, and have been pretty stringent about keeping them to people I have actually interacted with, enough so that I would remember them. The network is useful, but the growing size of the overall network means that some sort of differentiated contact settings are needed. Eventually, LinkedIN will be too large to manage, the ratio of useful information to crap will fall, and people will ignore it, except for certain subnets, tightly interlinked and with many mutual recommendations. Just like the blogosphere three years ago, the Well in early days, and the various nets back in the 80s.

Hang on to you own website, I say. Manage it well. As long as the network management tools keep getting overwhelmed, make sure you node is polished, well lit, and carefully selective where its links goes.

Jeff Bezos at MIT

Excellent presentation by Jeff Bezos on Amazon’s three new services: S3 (cloud of storage), Mechanical Turk (cloud of humans, sort of a small-task Google Answers), and Elastic Compute Cloud (cloud of processing). Bezos is an unapologetic geek – then again, in that crowd, he can be. Fun.

I want one of those!

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/271543545
Read more about this technology and the company behind it here.

Jacobson on the data overlay web

Van Jakobson gives a great talk at Google about the need to create the next generation web, this time in the form of an overarching data exchange protocol. His argument is that we should do to the Internet what the Internet did to proprietary networks: Overlay it with a higher degree of abstraction. This time, it is the data, where data self-authenticates and you can use any distribution mechanism, any kind of underlying network. http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-6972678839686672840&hl=en
(If in-post video doesn’t work, try this link.)

Great history of the web, excellent abstraction. Here is his concluding slide:

  • IP rescued us from plumbing at the wire level but we still have to do it at the data level. A dissemination based architecture would fix this.
  • Many ad-hoc dissemination overlays have been created (Akamai CDN, BitTorrent, Sonos mesh, Apple Rendevous) – there’s a demonstrated need.
  • If we are going to have a future, we should rescue some grad students from re-inventing the past.

 (Via Paul Kedrosky, who notes a wonderful little anecdote about Copernicus and his early predictions from the heliocentric system. Not a bad example of a disruptive technology, as it were.)

Free software for almost anything

Hard to think of anything else you would need when you are done downloading this list. I am going for note-taking software first, Firefox and Thunderbird are already my favorites, and I have used Audacity and a couple of others. What a collection. Anyone with experience of Clamwin? It can’t possible consumer more resources than F-Secure, which is what I currently have installed.

(Via Marginal Revolution) 

Extatosoma tiaratum

Seth Godin found an insect for which there was no entry in Wikipedia, and made a prediction about how long it would take before it was fixed.

There. The rest we can leave to the expanders.

[insert obligatory Yochai Benkler social production comment about here]

Web versions

In the current discussion of Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 vs Web 3.0, here is my quick and not particularly clean definition:

  • Web 1.0: Streams of information
  • Web 2.0: Streams of interaction
  • Web 3.0: Streams of interpretation

That’s all for tonight. You may go home now.

The Mile High Blogging Club

I am writing this from an SAS flight between Copenhagen and Beijing, somewhere over Siberia. Boeing’s Connexion service is available (though this is an Airbus A340) and since it is free for now, I just had to try it.

I don’t know about you, but I think it is pretty damn fascinating that you can read and send email messages 10000 feet up in the air somewhere east of the Ural mountains. The response time isn’t that bad either, and the sorry excuse I have for a mail server actually sends the messages from up here, as opposed to from the Copenhagen SAS lounge, where I spent a few hours delivering i talk via videoconference.

Anyway, I am on my way to Beijing to teach at the Ericsson China Academy, four days on IT management (with a translator, since only half the class understands English.) Wish me luck. I’ll need it.

Blogging a mile high. I just can’t get over it…. 

Chris Short to the rescue

Chris Short in his workshopI have previously written about Tobi Oetiker, who fixed a Palm software error, then made the fix available on the web as a service. I have now found someone who fixes Palm hardware: Chris Short, pictured here at his workbench. When I was in the US in November last year, I bought a Palm M505 (I think, the color version) from Chris (on eBay) for daughter no. 1. She is using it (with a fold-out keyboard) as a note-taker in her International Relations studies.

My wife has had a Palm Vx for ages, also with a keyboard. It was dying (battery wouldn’t hold the charge, the touch-screen was responding only intermittently,) so I fired off an email to Chris on the off-chance that he might have another Palm for sale.

Chris responded immediately, saying that a better way (especially since I didn’t want to shell out for a new fold-out keyboard) would be to mail the Vx to him, recondition it (new screen and battery, clean-up) and then he would send it back. I so did, sent if off two weeks ago. It arrived back here in the northern corner of Europe yesterday. Screen and battery is new, all the old peripherals work great, and the total charge comes to $49, including international postage.

It turns out Chris is running this as a business, and has gotten good reviews on the web. I can only declare myself in agreement, and start to think about whether I don’t want to exchange that Ericsson P910 I am carting around with a used M505. You just can’t beat the form factor and usability – and the service from people like Chris. 

Highly recommended. Incidentally, Chris hasn’t gotten around to setting up a home page yet, but his email is ips at chartermi.net. And if you Google for "Chris Short Palm" you’ll find find him easily.

Causality and Zipf’s Law

Chris Anderson has an interesting post about Zipf’s law, which posits that the frequency distribution  of words in the English language follows a power law. He shows that if you set up a process that generates random sets of characters, you end up with the same distribution.

I am wondering if we aren’t putting the cart before the horse here – might it not be the case that the words we use more often have become shorter, precisely because we use them more often? If language evolves over time with an aim to increase understanding and reduce bandwidth consumption, this is what we would expect.

The words "mama" and "papa" are common throughout many languages because when a baby starts babbling, that is what he or she will say first. So, we made words out of babble, representing what proud parents would want them to represent. Similarly, we reserve the shortest words (single vowels, diphthongs, or combinations of one vowel and one consonant) for the concepts we need most frequently.

Saves bandwidth. Just ask any kid with an SMS thumb.

Forking Wikipedia?

Nick Carr sees no reconciliation between "deletionists" and "inclusionists" over how Wikipedia should continue to evolve.

Wikipedia was originally started to generate content for a more traditional encyclopædia, called Nupedia. It seems like it worked according to plan. Perhaps it is time to generate Nupedia.

For my part, I remain a "delusionist" a little longer, betting on people’s ability to vet out incomprehensive or incorrect information. It seems to me that people deal with information differently when they are in search mode – and that what Wikipedia needs is some sort of disclaimer to alert people that, though it may have a very high Googlerank, anyone can write and the vetting process taking place is the one done by those who read it before you. Given simple and powerful search, however, the process of validation should be quick and simple. I can live with that.

iPod Nano redux

Eirik Solheim is is trying to pull a Nigritude Ultramarine on behalf of all frustrated, if competent, electronics purchasers out there. The operative phrase is "Kjøpe en iPod Nano".

More power to him, I say…. 

The VC version of Tech adoption

Cover of Coburn's The Change FunctionCoburn, P. (2006). The Change Function: Why some technologies take off and others crash and burn. New York, NY, Penguin Portfolio.

Picked this one up on a lark from Amazon. Written by a venture capitalist, it breezily argues that the many technologies fail because the perceived pain of adoption is too high.

I found this one hard to get into – my suspicion is that it is (like Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars) one of those books where the title suffices for understanding the main idea. In this case, the title doesn’t, but Coburn helpfully provides this summary in the introduction: 

ISSUE 1: High-tech failure rates stink
The commercial failure rate of nominally great new technologies is troublingly high. That failure rate is consistent with the hatred and distrust most normal human beings – which I like to call Earthlings – tend to have of high technology. That hatred and distrust is a bummer since our little planet can use all the help technology might provide.

ISSUE 2: Suppliers think they are in charge but in reality users are in charge
The technology industry operates according to an implicit supplier-oriented assumption. That assumption is that if one builds great new disruptive technologies and lets cost reduction kick in, markets will naturally appear. This is known as "build it and they will come."

He then goes on to provide a semi-mathematical formula of the "change function" with, I think, the likelihood of success (or, at least, technology adoption) as the product of "perceived crisis" and "perceived pain of adoption".

OK. The perceived pain of reading the rest of the book from that point on became a little too much for me, especially since a quick glance awakened reminiscences of 140-page PowerPoint presentations and hastily grabbed examples. Plus, my perceived crisis is in too much adoption. So I disengaged.

Eddie Bauer customer service

My colleague Frank Capek at the Concours Group is running a project collecting outstanding customer experiences, with a view to analyzing them. He asked for examples – so here is my favorite:

Photographer's vestBack in the early nineties I lived outside Boston, as a doctoral student. The children were small and required a lot of small items whenever we were out and about, so I used to wear one of those photographer’s vests, with lots of pockets and good ventilation. Now they are hallmarks of the elderly suburban dork, but back then they were moderately fashionable.

One day I needed a some new shirts, so I called Eddie Bauer‘s order phone. I ordered the shirts, and then (since I am a certified nerd, known to do that kind of thing) struck up a conversation with the Eddie Bauer lady at the other end:

Espen: By the way, I bought one of those photographer’s vests about a year ago – that thing has been great, very practical, use it all the time.
Eddie Bauer Lady: Great – is it still OK?
E: Sure! Well, come to think of it, there was a small tear under one arm, but my wife mended it, so it’s fine.
EBL: I’ll send you a new one.
E: But .. I am not complaining, it is fine!
EBL: They aren’t supposed to tear like that.
E: Well, but I have been using it a lot…
EBL: Still, that’s not supposed to happen. Hang on a second [sound of furious typing in the background] .. hm… here it is, yeah, you bought it last summer, at $49. [more typing] Seems we don’t have that kind any more, we have a new one, costs $54, I’ll send you that.
E: Er..well, thanks!
EBL: No problem. Anything else, Sir?

A few days later the new vest arrived. Later, I was told that the customer service representatives at Eddie Bauer have a certain dollar amount, per customer, that they can use at their discretion. In this case, it cost Eddie Bauer a garment.

On the other hand, I have mentioned this incident in many presentations around the world, and now also in my blog, so I think Eddie Bauer got their money’s worth in customer satisfaction and free advertising. And I still shop there.

Anyone else with similar stories, or other outstanding customer experiences you want to share? 

MS-supplied goodies

Here is a great list of downloads for Windows XP from Microsoft – I saw my favorite tool FolderShare was on the list. The Alt-Tab replacement looks interesting, and does many others.

(Via Scoble.)

Update Aug 24: Installed the Alt-Tab replacement. Shows a thumbnail of each application as you go through with Alt-Tab. Works great on my fast machine, not sure I will install it on my laptop.

Get rid of Caps Lock

There is an underground movement forming aiming to rid keyboards of the dratted cAPS lOCK kEY, which, when you accidentally hit it, screws up your typing and occupies valueable real estate on crowded keyboards.

Hear, hear. Move it to Ctrl-Shift or some other multi-key combination. And give me back that large space bar and a key (on a Norwegian keyboard, that is) for @, $ and perhaps €.

Come to think of it, my Das Keyboard has one fewer key than a Logitech keyboard, and when it is set to Norwegian, I have trouble writing HTML code. Now, if I reprogrammed CapLock and ShiftCapLock to "<" and ">", life would be simpler.

Now, how do I do that – there are files for turning CapsLock into Shift and other things. But to a regular character?

I’ll be back….

(Via Engadget and Slashdot.)

The transparent propane container

Statoil komposittbeholderBoingboing makes noise about a transparent propane container, made out of fibreglass, which allows you to see how much gas is left for your barbeque.

Well, puh-leeze, the Norwegian oil/gas/hotdog company Statoil has sold a propane container with this feature for at least 10 years (that is, it was available here in Norway when I moved back in 1996.)

That being said, my view is that the main benefit is not being able to see how much propane is left, but the fact that the fibreglass container weighs much less than the traditional steel one. I have a bad back, and really appreciate this feature.

The funny thing is, no other company than Statoil sells this version – since propane gas containers have a return deposit – meaning that you have to shell out serious money to get a new one – it is very hard to break into the market with new technology. Hopefully this is not a problem in the US, though that remains to be seen.

UPDATE 7/30: This is indeed a Norwegian invention, it seems, from a company called RAGASCO.

Dragonspeak

Dragon NaturallySpeakingThis is a test using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to dictate a blog entry.

Language recognition technology has been seen as promising as long as I can remember.  When I started studying in the United States in 1990, one of my fellow students came from IBM, where she had worked with language recognition technology for 12 years.  Six years later, I purchased my first language recognition system myself, IBM’s ViaVoice.  It cost the whopping sum of $ 89, and you had to pause between words when you dictated.  I used it for a few weeks, but the slow pace of dictation and the frequent errors, partially a result of not having enough computer, was frustrating.

Now, 10 years later, I read about Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Kevin Kelly’s blog Cool Tools. Apparently, language recognition has progress, thanks to more powerful computers and better software.

I have now fiddled with Dragoan NaturallySpeaking for about an hour, and I must say some progress has been made.  You can now speak rapidly and fluently, and there is an autopunctuation feature, which inserts commas and periods as best as it can.  It kind of works.  I could see myself using this for instance to record speeches I give on telephone conferences, or to dictate blog entries and essays if my carpal tunnel syndrome flares up again, a friend of mine has used language recognition technology to meet into the computer long reams of text and data without having to type them.  

Nevertheless, the technology still has a way to go before it can do it very hard task of taking dictation.  Correcting errors is rather cumbersome, you have to select words, and then laboriously tell the computer what you want to do with them.  Also, the system has problems interpreting what I say occasionally.  For instance, I tried to say laboriously, and it came out labor asleep.  Hopefully, dictation will do for my diction what Graffiti did for my handwriting — train me to make the computer recognize it.

Whether this works or not remains to be seen.  I will report back when I have learned how to insert a Colón cola call on….

That word again

Not only brillantly written, but laugh-out funny without (overtly) trying to be: Fuck by Christopher Fairman (March 2006). It will be interesting to see which journal, if any, will publish this. Not to mention, who will debate him?

On a side note, I missed a reference to Bill Bryson’s brilliant discussion of fuck in Mother Tongue, where he lays out all the various ways the word can be used. Brilliant, indeed.

(Via Feld). 

Apple is just Microsoft with a sense of style

You have to like Bob Cringely – if nothing else, he is colorful and direct. So also in his latest column, with gems like

Apple is just Microsoft with a sense of style.

and

IBM is a disaster-in-the-making. Big Blue as a total enterprise is running primarily on customer inertia and clever advertising, which definitely isn’t enough.

His point is that IBM and Microsoft have increasingly obsolete business models which will be disrupted as Google comes along and basically organizes the Internet by slicing off the important part of the infrastructure package (that is, the one that is changing) and monetizing it by lots of small ads rather than large and rather opaque licensing and service contracts.

And there, of course, he has a point. Except, of course, that Microsoft and IBM have changed in response to external pressures before, and should by no means be counted out yet.

Fun, though. Interesting times.