Category — technology

Kenji is entirely like and actual human (except that he only uses cat and dog noises to communicate):

“Despite our initial enthusiasm, it has become clear that Kenji’s impulses and behavior are not entirely rational or genuine,” conceded Dr. Takahashi.

Robot Programmed to Love Goes too Far

[clarification: the original article is a fake]

Beautiful photographic summary of preparations for Obama’s inauguration tomorrow:
Inaugural preparations – The Big Picture – Boston.com

In the end, this is cultural.

The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. We're now witnessing one aspect of that generation gap: the younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats – until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers– we aren't fully an information age society.

When everyone leaves a public digital trail of their personal thoughts since birth, no one will think twice about it being there. Obama might be on the younger side of the generation gap, but the rules he's operating under were written by the older side. It will take another generation before society's tolerance for digital ephemera changes.

Schneier on Security: The Future of Ephemeral Conversation

Jesús Díaz posted last Friday an article on Gizmodo that has been making the rounds on the TechMemes and Diggs of this world. In A Call for Revolution Against Beta Culture, Díaz writes:

I’m tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The “This will work in the next version.” The “It’s in our roadmap.” The “Buy now and upgrade later.” The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn’t tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I’m tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years, starting with software from Google and others and ending up in almost every gadget and computer system around. We need a change.

[...]

Clearly, the problem is the development process and the time to market, with product cycles shortened and corners cut to keep a continuous stream of cash flowing in. The rush to feed these cycles with increasingly more complex engineering seems to be at odds with shortened development and quality assurance processes, resulting in beta-state first-generation products. This beta culture, the same one that already plagues the web, breeds people who are willing to accept bugs in the name of cutting-edge gear.

Essentially, Díaz proposes that we shed any vestigial sense of responsibility, and blame it all on the greedy companies and the lazy engineers. Because all those (free) beta web apps twisted our fingers to use them. Because Steve Jobs chased us into Apple stores and forced us to buy his iPhones and iPods.

It sounds like Díaz would benefit from having a look at Bruce Sterling’s proposed ethos for the early adopter.

If you’re buying weird tech gizmos, you need to know what you are trying to prove by that. You also need to tell other people useful things about it. If you are truly experimenting, then you are doing something praiseworthy. You may be wasting some space and time, but you’ll be saving space and time for others less adventurous. Good.

Bruce Sterling – The Last Viridian Note

More from The Last Viridian Note:

• Glocally nomadic life
• A design education
• Encourage the best industrial design

You should be planning, expecting, desiring to live among material surroundings created, manufactured, distributed, through radically different methods from today’s. It is your moral duty to aid this transformative process. This means you should encourage the best industrial design.

Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely “non-materialistic.” There is nothing more “materialistic” than doing the same household job five times because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking black holes of mechanical dysfunction. That is not civilized.

Bruce Sterling – The Last Viridian Note

More from The Last Viridian Note:

• Glocally nomadic life
• A design education

Most IT projects don’t make it on time, and neither does the Tesla:

Well, five years after its founding, Tesla has shipped about 70 electric roadsters, and the car does in fact turn out to be a classic Silicon Valley product—it’s late and over budget, has gone through loads of redesigns, still has bugs and, at $109,000, costs more than originally planned. Tesla’s first 40 roadsters went out of the factory with a drivetrain that needs to be replaced. (Tesla will do the rip-and-replace for free.) Its second car, a sedan, has been delayed until 2011.

Perhaps the point of bleeding-edge technology is that it is not well understood and hence impossible to plan for?

The use of Electricity for lighting is in no way harmful to health, nor does it affect the soundness of sleep.

Next Nature, Your grand-grand-parents new media

‘You know what your trouble is?’ he says when we’re under the bridge, headed up to Fourth. ‘You’re the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it’s new technology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won’t play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of. Like Lise.’

Cory just posted over at Boing Boing the best brief description of DRM that I’ve read so far:

DRM — Digital Rights Management, or Digital Restrictions Management — is technology that prevents you from using some files by taking over part of your computer so that it won’t obey your requests. DRM is always proprietary. Before a DRM is released, it is infected with “Hook IP” — a patent or trade secret that is introduced to the technology so that the only way you can implement the DRM is by licensing the Hook IP. Anyone who licenses the Hook IP is forced to promise to make their DRM behave as intended, preventing uses and taking over computers and devices. Without Hook IP, a company could implement the DRM but leave out the restrictions, shipping products that allow all the uses their competitors’ products deny. Hook IP gives the DRM maker something to sue over if this happens.

More on DRM:

• Wikipedia article, with a more detailed description
• EFF’s site on DRM, including discussion, court cases, pointers to related issues, links, etc.
• Defective by Design, the FSF’s campaign against DRM. From their website: “There is no more important cause for electronic freedoms and privacy than the call for action to stop DRM from crippling our digital future.”

Via Boing Boing I find a post on the thoof.com blog where they discuss some interesting stats on their users’ behavior.

Particularly amusing bits:

It seems that Windows users are 20% more interested in stories about religion than Mac users.
[...]
Mac users are 6% more interested in intellectual property law, and 5% more interested in fitness.

A couple of weeks ago I subscribed again to the RSS feed of El Pais, the biggest (and, supposedly, ‘best’) Spanish newspaper. Reading the headlines and some of their articles has become my daily dose of irritation with the so-called professional media. The articles are often misinformed, and at times show the utter ignorance of the authors and their unwillingness to do a little bit of basic research.

Take, for example, El Pais’ coverage of the OOXML vote.

The article’s headline is “Microsoft doesn’t give up in battle for OOXML”, and it is signed by Aitor Riveiro. The only external source referenced in said article is Héctor Sánchez, CEO of Microsoft Iberia. Mr Riveiro does not bother to mention which countries and organizations opposed the vote, and what are their reasons for voting ‘no’. Clearly Mr. Riveiro is of the opinion that it is of no interest to El Pais’ readers why countries like UK and Canada and France disapproved of the standard, or why the Spanish standards body, AENOR, decided to abstain.

Another El Pais article on the topic, linked in the sidebar of this first one, mentions in passing that Microsoft had “put pressure” on some countries. There is no mention of the accusations against Microsoft of trying to buy off its Swedish partners, or the uncanny correlation between corrupted countries and countries that voted in support of Microsoft’s proposal (not that I am suggesting that Ivory Coast and Trinidad and Tobago don’t have a stake in document standards, but you will agree that their sudden eagerness to participate in the ISO and approve OOXML is suprising).

Compare this coverage with an article on the same topic from the IHT: Microsoft’s bid for ‘open’ document format is unexpectedly rebuffed. This article quotes Microsoft’s manager for interoperability and standards, discusses Microsoft’s “agressive lobbying” that “reached into high levels of government”, gives hard numbers on the opposing/approving votes, and details on the upcoming final vote on the issue, which will take place in February.

:: sigh ::

In case you didn’t see it already, silicon.com has an interview with William Gibson (aka the father of cyberpunk) that has been making the rounds.

silicon.com: You’ve written much about the way people react to technology. What’s your own attitude towards technology?

Gibson: I’m not an early adopter at all. I’m always quite behind the curve but I think that’s actually necessary – by not taking that role as a consumer I can be a little more dispassionate about it.

Most societal change now is technologically driven, so there’s no way to look at where the human universe is going without looking at the effect of emergent technology. There’s not really anything else driving change in the world, I believe.

When I see things like this I am reminded of how very cool engineering is. It is amazing the stuff we can build when we want.

It is a 20m-long truck that will be used to move giant antennas weighting 115 tonnes each up the Andes to a plateau at 5,000m. The antennas will form the Alma telescope.

Full BBC article: Giant truck set for sky-high task (via Boing Boing)

Catching up with my feed reading, I see that lately there’s been some buzz in the ’sphere around Let’s All Evolve Past This: The Barriers Women Face in Tech Communities. It is indeed a very insightful article.

In particular, I am pleased to see someone talking about the differences in handling sub-optimal communication and how it affects the whole ‘women in tech’ issue. The bit under the heading Men are generally very good at ignoring bad behavior is spot on.

But even though the article gives some good advice on building communities with better communication patterns, it does not give any advice to women as to how to help themselves to better cope with difference in communication modes. For example, it would help if more women were aware of these differences and would try to contemplate harsh things said by their colleagues in the context of the colleague’s overall behavior and character, and avoid over-analyzing these comments.

Quite a few of the problems faced by women in tech could be addressed by working on women’s self-efficacy. Among other things, people with higher self-efficacy are more comfortable taking harsh criticism, are more likely to voice their opinions, have higher motivation, and are more willing to take some risks and experiment. So maybe we should all be working on that. I, for one, will try to work on mine.

I want one of these for my desk. Pretty please?

More on Bathsheba’s homepage.

Boing Boing talks about a company that automatically rejected all candidates that applied for an “internet expert” position and provided a Hotmail address. Why? Because you can’t pretend being an internet expert and use a Hotmail account at the same time.

A great idea, this one, that should be expanded to other position/technology pairs.

I, for one, find it disturbing to have to look at CVs of coders that insist in sending them in Microsoft Word format. WTF, people? If you want to come across as an IT professional, give me something that I can read on any platform, and make it non-proprietary, while you are at it.

(Disclaimer: these opinions are solely my own and in no way represent those of my employer or its hiring practices.)

I just finished reading a most excellent book: Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning… Was the Command Line.

The title might seem to indicate that this is a very nerdy book, directed at very geeky people that are interested in the history of computer interfaces. But it is no such thing. It is, in fact, a highly entertaining and thought-provoking essay about the dangerous tendency that the so-called modern western culture has to over-simplify things.

Semi-random quote here:

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself – and more than just graphical. Let’s call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces and embracing graphical or sensorial ones – a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney?

Of course, in this book Stephenson talks also about the history of OSes so far (well, that far, because the book was written in 1999, so according to this book Apple is still on the brink of bankruptcy), the fickle nature of users and their irrational behaviour, and why selling OSes is a bad business idea. But that is not what really caught my attention.

What interested me most were the bits about how we (i.e. citizens of the ‘civilized western world’) are increasingly giving up our ability to make choices and judgements in favor of easier-to-digest, simplified versions of life, the universe and everything. It almost made me feel guilty not only for owning an Apple machine, but also for actually *using* the sexy OS it came with. Luckily, in my old age I am becoming less and less dogmatic about OSes, life, the universe and everything, and even editors (!), so I am now using whatever system suits best my current mood and needs (in that order).

But I am babbling. I just meant to say that it is a cool book, and you should read it if (a) you are interested in computers, or (b) you are interested in modern culture, or (c) you enjoy easy-flowing, witty writing. (NOTE: the ORs in the previous sentence are inclusive ORs, not XORs.)

For the outstanding female engineers-in-the-making out there, here is a snippet from the website for the Google Europe Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship 2007:

Through the scholarship, we aim to encourage women to excel in computing and technology, and become active role models and leaders.

Scholarships will be awarded based on the strength of candidates’ academic background and engagement within the technology community. A group of female BSc, MSc, and PhD student finalists will be chosen from the applicant pool. The scholarship recipients, selected from the finalists, will each receive a €5,000 (or equivalent) scholarship for the 2007/2008 academic year.

In May 2007, all finalists will be invited to visit Google’s European Engineering centre in Zurich for a networking retreat. It will include workshops with a series of speakers, breakout sessions and social activities, and will provide an opportunity for all finalists to meet and share their experiences.

Application form opens next Sunday, 1st of October. More details here.

Kathy Sierra shares some interesting thoughts about how “Success” should not mean “Management”:

Isn’t it about time we quit measuring professional success in one dimension, vertically, and start considering how much your actual work matches your desired work?

And isn’t it about time more companies started offering multiple career tracks, where management is no more valuable or important than the highly-skilled work of an individual contributor? (Sun is a good example of a company that offers two clear paths–one for management, and one for individual contributors who’d rather bathe cats than be a boss.)

What happens when a company gives an employee no option for growth other than management? Yes, lots of individual contributors (even programmers) want the challenge of a management role, but some of the best feel forced into trading the work they love best for more “advancement opportunities”. How senseless is it to take a star programmer and make her do Gantt charts? How lame it is to take your best designer and make him run budget meetings, review TPS reports, and consolidate time sheets?

I am lucky enough to work at one of those companies that, like Sun, offer two separate tracks for individual contributors and managers. Sadly, there are whole cultures (e.g. what seems to be the predominant Spanish corporate culture) that think that only losers stay for long as individual contributors.

Hopefully with more posts like Kathy’s folks will start to wake up and make career decisions that will actually make them happier (as opposed to making them own more stuff).

Soon in a Firefox near you: freenigma is a Firefox extension that will allow you to encrypt e-mail that you write in your regular webmail service. However, initially it won’t allow you to upload your own keys, but will instead generate a key for you and do the key exchange for you (you will need to ‘invite’ your correspondes to use freenigma).

Looks like an interesting attempt at simplifying mail encryption. It will start rolling out in a week or so (August 21st); I can’t wait to see if it catches on.

Now, how weird is this: Heatseek just launched. It is a browser for porn. Yes, exactly, an internet browser designed for the sole purpose of surfing for porn. Apparently it has a ‘panic button’, lets you create ‘playlists’, and encrypts everything you download.

It is Internet Explorer-based, and runs only on Windows. No safe porn surfing for Mac users.

From TechCrunch.

You really really need to see the new Mac ads, featuring a laid back, young Mac, and an old-school, boring PC discussing their differences and similarities. I specially like the ‘better’ and the ‘network’ ones. These ads reflect exactly my own perceptions about the respective styles of Mac and PC (or Apple and Windows). In an age where computers and other tech gear are becoming more and more lifestyle statements, and not mere productivity tools, style is certainly important.

I just made the mistake of entering “paco bello” in the Amazon.co.uk search box. The results say:

We found no matches for “paco bello” . Below are results for “pack bell” . If you prefer, you may try another search.

And neither “nauta” nor “doctor grillo” yielded any results on Amazon. And no results on iTunes music store, either.

This confused me so much, that I went and bought Take That – Greatest Hits. Someone please get me a new brain for my birthday. Pretty please?

A little over two weeks ago I got an invite to beta-test TailRank, a site which promises to give you recommendations on blogs and other web content based on your personal interests. I suppose the idea is to turn it into something like Last.fm for blogs.

As soon as I got the invite I registered, and share a couple of links. But I found it difficult to understand how was I supposed to use the site, and what should I do in order to get better recommendations. Also, it seemed to me at most recommended items had been shared by Kevin Burton, the creator of TailRank himself, who seems to be the most active user, as well. It didn’t seem too interesting to read items shared by the same person, so seeing no clear value in spending more time playing around, I decided to wait a bit and try it some time later.

This morning I decided to give it another try. First, I couldn’t log in because I couldn’t remember the username I had chosen. So I used the ‘remind password’ form, twice, but with no luck: no e-mail came, and no message on the site. Frustrated, I registered again, with same e-mail and different handle. So now I have two accounts, but the profiles seem to be somehow mixed up, presumably because of the identical e-mails. Clearly something that needs fixing. At least now I have two working TailRank accounts.

Next I explored the site a bit more again. To my great surprise, one of the links I shared in my first round of the site now appears as shared by Burton, and not as shared by me. Weird.

Then I tried to upload the OPML from my Bloglines subscription, but no luck. Got a Java error. Thrice.

I tried to get some recommendations, but once more, the content seems to be monopolized by Burton, and the recommendations don’t seem enticing.

The idea behind the site is a good one, but it still needs some work. There seem to be a few bugs, and the interface could use some refining. For example, there is no clear link to update your profile, and the ‘logout’ link does not appear on all pages, just on some.

In general, I would enjoy a cleaner interface that made it easier to use the site. As I see it now, it is difficult to understand what is going on and how are you supposed to use it. And the ‘home’ page is way too overloaded with text; it makes my brain ache when I look at it. A logo would be cool as well.

It would also be nice if TailRank incorporated some kind of ‘automatic’ harvesting of what a user is interested in, so that you don’t need to go through the tedious process of inputing links manually. For example, it would be nice if TailRank could pick up automagically my del.icio.us subscriptions and ’share’ them in my TailRank account. It would be something like an Audioscrobbler plugin, but for web-surfing instead of for music. That would be great.

A very nice feature of TailRank is the possibility of include in your own website the results of TailRank recommendation. I suppose that can be a very cool thing to have, say, on the sidebar of a group blog that keeps a TailRank account.

Summarizing, I think that the TailRank idea is cool, but it still needs some polishing (but hey, that is what a beta is about, isn’t it?). I think it has lots of potential, if only it would become a bit more user-friendly. Keep up the good work!

UPDATE 2005/10/25 The OPML bug seems to be fixed, but for some reason TailRank only imported 37 feeds from my 63-feed OPML. No reasons given. I am still finding it difficult to understand how to use the site. For example, it took me a lot of clicking around to find out how could I tag the feeds I just imported. Read Kevin’s comment below for some more information about TailRank development. If TailRank is the result of just five weeks of work, I am impressed!