Powerline ethernet and HW design

Powerline Ethernet is a relatively new concept, that uses the existing electrical wires within a house to deliver wired networking capabilities to different parts of a house. I had been following the development of the standard with anticipation for a few years now, but I was not apparently paying attention as the technology was commercialized relatively quickly.

I came upon the commercial implementations anew, when I was looking for a solution to help extend the wireless range of my ageing router. Wireless repeaters were a potential option, but the idea of taking a degrading signal to re-broadcast it was not something that I appreciated for just an aesthetic point of view. Further, that would also constrain the location of the repeater and leave me open to the need for additional repeaters.

Enter Powerline networking and in particular a company called TP Link. After a bunch of research, I figured I was not sure if this would even work in my house and was not willing to pay the premium of a recognized brand. TP Link was a good balance between positive reviews and price.

Turns out, using the electrical wires in the house to transmit Ethernet signals is ridiculously easy.

You need a couple of pieces of hardware to get things going. The first is the base unit, that plugs into a power socket next to the broadband router. The port on that base unit plugs directly into one of the router ports. This essentially makes the entire home “live”.

You then need a client unit, that you can take anywhere in the house and plug into another power socket. Now, on that unit is an Ethernet port that effectively works as a live network port, that can route packets through the electrical wires, through the base unit, the router and out on the the internet.

If you were only looking for an extension of your wired network, you are done. If however, you are looking to have the second unit act, also, as a WiFi access point you have additional work to do.

The additional work is because the default access point is a cryptic SSID, running an unencrypted signal. I wanted it to have the same SSID and authentication parameters as my original WiFi router, so I could roam upstairs and downstairs between either access point. Figured I'd just configure the TP-Link Powerline client access point that way.

And all hell broke loose.

TP-Link essentially hard codes the configuration IP of the second access point. The address unfortunately was the same as the base of my home network. This resulted in a few hours of mental and networking gymnastics, just to be able to configure the second access points with the SSID and authentication parameters that I liked.

Which brings me to the second point of this post - good core technology but crappy hardware design. The two Powerline plugs were not elegant by any means, but they were functionally simple and effective. But an underlying assumption that one would be OK with default access point parameters, led to some questionable hardware design choices ultimately rendering an otherwise attractive product cumbersome. If only these smaller companies took some of these underlying assumptions seriously enough, there is almost no reason why their products cannot easily compete with the big dogs - in not just the marketplace, but also the social marketplace of the star counts on Amazon.com.

Seriously guys, you should just fix it.

Nokia's near and distant future?

If you need a break from all the bad news that seems to be following Nokia everywhere, there are things afoot with the Finnish giant, suggesting all is not done with the company after their momentous decision to hitch their wagon to Microsoft Mobile.

The first one is a story of Lumia 800, a product of the above decision. Finally a focus on design, that GigaOm calls Nokia's iPhone moment.

The second is more esoteric. A phone that will probably never see the insides of a retail store, but as a concept is somewhere between intriguing and stunning. I cannot quite make up my mind on which it is.

For someone who grew up with the brand being synonymous with mobile phones, any sign of Nokia fighting, is a welcome sign indeed.

+1 and the persistent Like

+1 is Google's latest attempt at cracking social. After the famously obscure Orkut, and the disaster that was Buzz, it was about time Google got it right.

With +1 Google seems to have gone about social differently. +1 is a highly scaled down version of a social network - the opposite of Facebook. Facebook built the interaction feature-set first, then used the Like button to spread it. Google's approach seems to be focused on building out the +1 button and eventually coalesce the rest of its sharing services around it.

+1 has two things going for it - it is persistent and contextual. Persistent because unlike the Like button, the core idea for +1 is not to broadcast the action to everyone. When you "like" something, that act itself is shared by Facebook. Which works for Facebook, because communication is what Facebook is all about. But +1 is more persistent; it hides in the sandwich layer between web-content and you - the search engine.

Persistence is important, because this shifts the playing field away from conversations - which Facebook and Twitter are good at, to algorithmically mining history - something Google is great at. This is where context comes in. Google owns your landing page on the web: the search results. It is a powerful page, and is also contextual. Unlike the static Facebook, Google's use of +1 can morph itself to add context to what you are in the mood for at that time. Unlike a cacophony of likes, you instead get the few +1's that are highly relevant to what you are doing at that time.

This is the strategy that worked for Google in ads, and the bet is that it will work for social as well.

The problem for Google's social has not been building out social feature sets. The biggest impediment has been changing the nature of social to fit with Google's strengths. +1 could well be the game changing strategy that Google so desperately needs.

Technophobe John

John apparently is a technophobe. And so his phone is as bare-bones as it gets. Unfortunately, John is only a moniker. Fortunately, it is also a company that makes the most simplest of cell phones - no camera, no operating system, no apps, not even text messaging. In fact the only thing you can do with the phone is power it up, make calls, hang-up, and (if it tickles your fancy) set the ringer volume level.

The phone clocks in with impressive specifications. It comes quad-band unlocked, includes a screen at the top edge to display inbound and outbound calls. The 1200 mAh battery stays on standby for about three weeks. The best part is that the phone comes in with two ways to store numbers - either linked to speed dial or noted on a paper phone-book embedded at the back of the phone (slot available, paper and pen sold separately at 3x for €9.95). Thankfully, it uses a micro-USB cable for charging, reducing your charger clutter. The question of course is, if you were technophobe John, why would you have a charger clutter.

By first impressions this seems to be a phone designed for John and Jane, the technophobes. But there is potentially a bigger market out there. Standard issue for sensitive workplaces - like the army or defense installations. A daily-swap program for contractors having access to classified information. An unbreakable version for every kid. And the list goes on.

But that is not going to happen at €69.95 (euros). Here to a solid demand that drives the price of this puppy down. And just maybe, John will need to buy a blackberry to keep up with the explosion of demand.

Uncanny Valley

Hiroshi Ishiguro is an interesting man. He is a Japanese roboticist who works on trying to create extremely life-like humanoid robots. And in doing so, he is bravely testing the depths of the uncanny valley.

Which begs the question - what is the uncanny valley. This is an idea, proposed back in 1970, that states that the more realistic a robot is, the more empathetic a response it evokes in humans. At some point, when a robot begins strongly resembling a human, this empathy changes into sharp revulsion. The empathy returns as the robot becomes indistinguishably human. This is the reason why the kid in the movie Up looked cute and Jolie in Beowulf was creepy.

Which begs the question, why bother trying to leap over it? And that is where, I think, a lot of the promise of robotics seemed to have been frittered away. There seems to be an inordinate amount of effort spent to replicate the human anatomy, when it may not necessarily be the best suited for “robotification”. If form follows function, there are very few functions where the human form is best suited to perform optimally. The human form is built for versatility not optimum capability. For any specific action that needs to be performed, there probably is a non-human form better suited to act. Why them spend the time re-creating the “jack-of-all-trades” human form?

Then there is the human face - a really versatile communication mechanism - that Hiroshi Ishiguro wants to recreate as a robot. For that purpose, he created the Telenoid R1. Now the idea of this robot is to have an overgrown embryo in your hands, that would re-create the expressions of a person far away. In effect a telephone that displays the expressions of someone far away. But did you look at it? Is that something you want to hold in your hands while talking to a loved one? And what is wrong with a video call?

Coming back to the reason for the post, there are some valleys that need to be crossed. There are others that need to to stay put, so that they can act as a moat between robots and humans.

Wave waves Goodbye!

That was quick. Last year, I had written about a new technology from Google, which was - as usual - going to change the world. The Google Wave. The unified replacement for email, IM and social networking with an immersive collaborative environment.

Apparently Google recently pulled the plug on it.

There are a number of reasons outlined in the post by Google, still more by pundits all over the interwebs. But something else struck me - the time-line. For a company that was comfortable keeping the beta tag on a core services for years, it took just 14 months before pulling the plug on something that didn't work. And that after opening it up to general use hardly 2 months ago. This seems to suggest a growing business savvy to the company, with an increasing ability to take hard decisions fast.

Combined with the rumors of Google going back on Net Neutrality, this seems to reinforce their increasingly pragmatic business outlook. And when hard business sense conflicts with philosophy, guess what wins.

Review: Enterprise 2.0

A little while ago, I was able to get my hands on a signed copy of Andrew Mcafee's Enterprise 2.0.

The book starts off talking about the key idea behind the 2.0 tag, introducing the power of "emergence" in social networking. It then goes on to introduce 2.0 technologies, illustrating their impact on businesses through four case studies. A couple of quick frameworks to think about social networking technologies are introduced next, along with the key benefits of the Enterprise 2.0 space.

Part two of the book takes a more pragmatic look, cautioning that most of the benefits will be available over a long haul. The book also covers some key failure scenarios, ending with a road map for businesses in the 2.0 world. The last chapter deals with the question of organizational behavior and its relationship to tools and technologies offered by Web 2.0

The book was an illuminating, sometimes thought-provoking and relatively light read, even though it felt like some of the pit falls were pooh poohed quite easily. Also, while the framework of tie-strength bull's eye was a useful way of articulating the need for 2.0 technologies, it didn't feel as involved with the actual plan for taking a business down the path to Enterprise 2.0. A couple things I felt strongly about:

Legal discovery risk - One of the precepts of the book is that moving from a channel of communication (e.g. email) to a platform (e.g. wiki) doesn't necessarily increase discovery risk related to litigation. The support? Andrew did not see any in the large number of businesses that have thus far implemented 2.0 technologies. Put this way, I am sure the argument seems shallow. Emails has been around for the good part of three decades, and only now have they really started to become the target of discovery requests and increasingly part of legal proceedings. Flippant emails form great news headlines, and even if the legal risk was zero, reputation damage would not be inconsequential. There is no reason to think a platform would fare any better.

Uncertainty - 2.0 emergence takes time. Social media presumes a flat user base, that is largely unconcerned with direction, that seemingly generates something awesome from thin air. There is too much uncertainty in that vision, uncertainty businesses do not like. Uncertainty of deliverable, time, order, ownership may work well when the stakes are lower. But when having a job is critical to taking care of the kids at home, it is too much to hope jobs stick around long enough for something awesome that may emerge out of uncoordinated actions. Again, I am sure that sounds extreme, but it does illustrate the oxymoron Enterprise 2.0.

At the end, the approach that the author lays out for a company to implement 2.0 technologies is tellingly similar to that of a pre-2.0 IT implementation. Identify problem and vision > don't expect dramatic wins > communicate > redesign processes > and measure. I believe, 2.0 technologies are answers to specific questions, as opposed to revolutionary tools just waiting to deliver multi-pronged increases in productivity. It seems more to be a case of 2.0 enabled Enterprise, than Enterprise 2.0.

Alpha | Wolfram

When I first posted about Wolfram|Alpha, I was kicked by the capabilities offered by the new search engine. Despite its limitations, it looked like the beginnings of something great. Considering it was just in alpha...

Then I realized that the name of the tool itself was Alpha, not version Alpha of something big that was still come. Then, it was not a search engine at all, but a computation engine. Third, the data for the tool is not assembled by hyper-intelligent programs. Instead it depends teams of individuals to 'curate' data that can then be used by Alpha. What that means is that the extent of Alpha's knowledge base depends entirely on a validated data set provided to it by someone.

The coolest part of Alpha, therefore, seemed to be its natural language translation capability. The ability to translate speech into precise mathematical commands against a defined data set. It was still good, but far less impressive than a tool that was going to search the web, separate signal from noise, and perform massive computation against said signal.

The reason for the post is two-fold. First, I met folks from Wolfram|Alpha during a corporate event recently. When we started to look at the tool for internal use, I was struck by how the conversation seemed so very similar to the sales people of just another Business Intelligence (BI) tool; not magic whatsoever.

Then I saw the the video from TED (after the break), by Steven Wolfram. The talk is of course a pitch for Alpha, Mathematica and A New Kind of Science. But it slowly devolved into a made-up term-fest punctuated by too much I, and use of highly presumptuous language. Like the “co-evolution of users and machine” after the release of Wolfram|Alpha.

I guess I am put off from Alpha for the moment. Take a look and see if you agree.

Enterprise 2.0

Andrew McAfee, author of a new book called Enterprise 2.0, spoke at an internal conference today. Very energetic persona, with an interesting pitch. And on a side note, that allowed some of us to grab a signed copy of the book for further study.

The upshot of the pitch was that the same forces that caused the shift of the web from 1.0 to 2.0 are awaiting a shot at transforming corporate information management culture. Historically, the way to think about information management in a company has been built around the structured, hierarchical approaches. Moving to tools and processes of the 2.0 web, includes a culture shift of leaving the controlled process paradigm and instead accept a more free form style, that almost required faith that it will work. Some companies that have already moved to this culture have started reaping benefits. And companies that adopt these technologies and cultural tenets stand to gain a many-fold increase in productivity.

Reading the book is, therefore, next on the agenda.

How cell phones work

Everyone has a cell phone now. Dialing a number and having someone answer seems so ordinary, it is almost considered routine. But, a lot needs to happen behind the scenes for that call to get through. After the break, a graphic explaining how this works in more detail.

Removed embedded image after email request from linkremoval@cellphones.org. To the team from cellphones.org, if you really did not want me to link to your image, maybe you should have not included a “use this code to embed into your site” option on the site. Thanks!

Sensory overload

Holy cow!

A couple of really good videos, from TED. Repetitive, so you need not watch both. But what it boils down to is the ability to better integrate the natural world and the digital world. A combination of off the shelf camera and projector, with the processing power of a mobile phone gives the ability to project information on everyday objects and use natural motions to access and manipulate digital information. More after the break.

Google Wave

WOW. If you have an hour and 20 minutes at some point, this is a must see. The Wave is Google's ambitious replacement of the email, instant message, tweet, blog and pretty much every other means of communication and collaboration currently available. But Google's approach to do this is not by providing yet another replacement, but by linking to these means of communication and extending them transparently.

At its heart, the Google Wave is email done right. Updating the current paradigm of point to point communication bursts offered by email, Google Wave offers a centralized client-server real-time collaborative alternative. What this means is that email is no longer delivered to your Inbox. Instead, your Inbox is a sort of a window into a central location, that essentially hosts a dynamic, ever changing web page which is your email. As people contribute to this web page - called the Wave, the client (in this case a HTML 5 compliant browser) automatically updates itself to reflect a common shared view.

If that is all that Google Wave was, then it would potentially have ended up as an optional Google Labs widget for Gmail. Instead, the Wave team took this further. They added real time - character by character refreshes; provided drag and drop functionality for rich media like photos and videos; enabled collaborative edit features for all content; and provided a means for existing communication mechanisms to interact with the content and updates. Suddenly the Wave seems much more than just a handy email gadget. Instead, it is a new way to think about communicating, sharing and collaborating.

The best part about Wave is that it forces you to think differently about communicating, by providing fundamentally different tools and mechanisms. A particularly enlightening moment in the presentation is when an old Wave was dug up where participants initially began communicating serially like an email, and realized mid-way through the process, that there was a potentially more productive way of continuing the same conversation through the editing features provided in the tool. It is this ability to simultaneously apply two diametrically different paradigms, that is the real potential for Wave. Users will no longer have to choose to learn a new paradigm - instead they can choose to stay the same, and wean off at their own pace.

The second major feature has to be its extensibility. The opening remarks encapsulated Google's approach to Wave - as a Product, Platform and Protocol. True to looking at it as a protocol, Wave developers seemed to have incorporated several real-world requirements into it. One example that sticks out is the ability for multiple Wave implementation to keep each other abreast only of updates that they really 'need to know'. Such an approach reflects today's Legal discovery requirements really well, and demonstrates Google's commitment to making this a broadly acceptable protocol.

The potential issues that Google will face in trying to establish a Wave based communication platform will probably not be technical to Wave at all. Google Wave assumes that ubiquitous connectivity, which seems to be the direction they have been driving with all their offerings. Of course, the Wave is going to use HTML 5's cache functionality to provide offline usage, but connectivity is still going to be critical in Wave's acceptance. HTML 5 brings another item of resistance for Wave's acceptance. It was only recently that Firefox finally overtook IE6 in terms of usage. Browser adoption has and will never be as cutting edge as Google will want it to be. Not having a HTML 5 compliant browser will effect Wave's adoption.

The second issue will be user acceptance. People have gotten used to email in the traditional sense. For the vast majority, thinking in terms of email is as far of a change as they can fathom. Forcing a truly dynamic paradigm upon them, may not be very successful.

The third issue is corporate acceptance. Large scale user and technical acceptance of new technology has always been tied to acceptance in the corporate world. Your company pays for you to learn something new, like say email, and you then take it up on your own. Wave offers collaboration aimed at smaller, widely dispersed teams. Unless companies are convinced about the benefits of Wave-ifying their email or IM, it may end up remaining just a geek's toy.

But Its Not Google - more Search News

BING is the new name for Microsoft's search, formerly part of their LIVE suite of services. This seems to be a good few months for search. Just a few weeks ago we had the inauguration of Wolfram Alpha, and now the Bing.

Microsoft purportedly was very focused on verb-ifying their new offering and therefore had to go with the 'ing' ending. But Bing? As Chandler would say, Bing is Gaelic for 'Thy turkey is done'.

Bing has been live for a while, and it is not really all that bad. My bone of contention with its predecessor, Live search, was the super-heavy pages used to display results, and not so much the quality of the searches themselves. That seems to have changed with Bing. The pages seem quick. Not much of a fan of the changing main page background, but maybe that is just a matter of getting used to it. Of course, if you want to see the previous photos, you have to install Silverlight.

I guess for me, that is what makes Microsoft so annoying. It is like a car salesman that just wouldn't give up. It is always a matter of, 'I will give you this if you want that'. Microsoft properties online seem to acutely make you aware that you are a guest and therefore need to mind your manners and clicks. The constant struggle for one-up-manship reminds one of a petulant child, unhappy about the attention being showered on younger sibling Google.

One more matter of annoyance before I move on. This one specific to Bing. I don't think I am much of a fan of location assumptions being made by the software and then filtering my results without really letting me know about it. Seeing local search results surreptitiously is almost like those sleazy ads one sees online, from ladies starved of physical affection who magically know where you live and want to make a tryst with you. I may be using a proxy - did Bing think of that? Filtering my results for Indianapolis, Indiana when I am not even in the same state, isn't smart as much as it is annoying.

Bing seeks to bring travel into the search engine. As an example, they trot out the ability to book flights to Hawaii. Apparently, that is all there is to it. Try booking a flight to Milwaukee, and you are back to Expedia or Travelocity. So maybe, Hawaii wasn't so much as a feature, as it was a demo. Maybe we need Silverlight to be able to book tickets everywhere else.

Overall the search is in there somewhere. The interface is definitely better, and worth checking out. It has a few new demos of potential new features to come. Otherwise, it is pretty much same old, same old.

Wolfram Alpha live

It has been a while since there has been something new on the search scene. There was one highly publicized, incomplete junk that came out a few months ago called cuil (pronounced cool). As the name portends, it was not. At all.

Anyway - a new site called Wolfram|Alpha (name rather unfortunate) - is the new kid on the block bringing forth a really different approach to search. Instead of searching through pages to suggest potentially relevant pages, WA tries to answer quantitative questions with just the answer. If you need to know the population of the world, you just ask 'world population' and you get the answer of 6.53 billion people.

Search is tough. Understanding and algorithmically analyzing human fuzzy interaction is inherently difficult. And WA is trying to do two things at once - understand the fuzzy world-wide-web and obtain facts from them. This has long been the goal of a semantic web, that is nowhere near reality today. At the same time WA is trying to understand user searches to generate quantitative queries that can then be applied to the data that it has collected earlier.

First impressions - WA seems to be doing an ok job on the two entity intersections. If you are looking for 'world + population', you are good. Or you are looking for 'India + mobile phones' you are good too. But trying to do an intersection of 'world + population + mobile phones' seems to trouble the search engine.

Another disappointing aspect is its inability to interpret date and time as a dimension to queries that seem to work well on 'today'. For example, searching for gold + price works well. But trying to search for gold + price + any date doesn't compute. This seems to work for dow jones + any date, but not for gold + price. See similarities to the third level intersection problem observed above?

What it seems to be doing a good job is on the roll-ups. Try searching for Asia + cellular phones. You not only get the total estimate for Asia, but you also get a list of all the countries with their estimated cellular phone populations. Pretty interesting eh?

All in all, WA looks like a good for an alpha. It seems to be able to do simple queries and roll-ups. Not really good with anything complex, not to mention numerous glitches in the UI of the site. Also interesting will be the response from rights holders to their data being used by the engine. Granted 'facts' do not fall under the purview of copyrights. But what would happen if, say, results from surveys started to be incorporated into search results? That is if WA can one day show you the percentage of all people in United States, having cell phones with AT&T service expressing satisfaction with their service in a survey. What will the survey owners think of that? What will AT&T think of that?

All in all, am really excited to see where this goes. Here to the semantic web, without having to work hard at it.

The Office of the future

I have been just checking out some of the AJAX stuff. Needless to say, the techie junkie that I am, I am pretty much blown away.

What is more impressive is not just that ability of the browser to act really like an application container than a markup display module. The movement of the web towards righer media looks more possible from the AJAX point of view rather than the world where everyone watches all their movies online. This is the rich media of the future. Simple applications, centrally maintained and accessible from everywhere.

Of course this means that you need to have connectivity everywhere. This may not be as tough as it seems. A mixture of wired and wireless access is already providing connectivity in most places - bar natural disasters. But, bandwidth is a problem that will not disappear - not overnight, not in a while. Simply put, it is not economically viable to provide high-bandwidth connectivity to everyone. Yes, a big chunk will have access to it, but not everyone.

The software world is going through its pangs of simplification. There is still a while before the dust settles and the winner is predicted. But what struck me was the relation to the hardware world. Take for example the office desktop. Even with the laptop, the desktop today is not truly mobile.

The next step is the integration of business communication with the laptop. All the elements are here already. Laptops are shrinking - they are small enough that any more shrinking can only affect productivity. VoIP is available. And most business users are already connected through adequately thick pipes. What is to prevent an integrated phone in the laptop - a tiny bluetooth enabled headset and an VoIP phone number that goes with the laptop.

That is the next generation of the business laptop. Intergrated communications - data and voice over the same channel through the same end device. You heard it speculated here first.

damn-where-is-that-phone-when-you-need-it
-- ravi

The Alternative Desktop

One of the biggest selling points for Open Source and/or Free software has been the alternative desktop -- an alternative to the Microsoft desktop. There has been a great gig and dance about how Open Source can replace Microsoft on the desktop. However it is something that has not materialized and might not in the near future too.

The problem with the statement "replacing the desktop" is that it is so vastly oversimplified. It is a statement that assumes the desktop to be a single monolithic entity, held hostage in a fortress, guarded by a dragon. But that is not the case, there is no single dragon that can be slain in order to own the desktop -- rather there are a variety of komodo dragons, dogs, falcons and lizards that guard different strong holds in the desktop. An understanding of the future of the desktop is in understanding the map of the desktop topology and the wars that are in the offing.

Office applications is the biggest fortress of all -- guarded by the fiercest of all dragons. Office applications - we are defining as text editor + spreadsheet + presentation. The second bastion is email + PIM client. The third biggest fortress is the browser -- and in particular the starting point of browsing, namely search. The next biggest war ground is the multimedia - this is less of a fortress and more of a live, action-filled battle ground. Then there are thousands of other forts, small and large, strewn all over the place.

For some reason Open source has decided to publicly attack the biggest and strongest of all fortresses - the Office applications. By choosing to replace word, maybe, FOSS has chewn more than it can swallow. The reason is simple. The fort is not only the best entrenched, but the dragon protecting it is desperate enough to do anything protect it. MS Office is very strongly entrenched with its users because of the hostages it carries - user data. There is a large amount of user data held inside the proprietary formats of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. People have written macros in Word and Excel that run business processes now. Everyone has their favourite powerpoint templates.

This fact is acknowledged by FOSS alternatives like Open Office and Star Office when they provide compatibility with Microsoft formats. However that is like dragging the donkey by its tail. Providing compatibility, allows existing users to afford continuing with their chosen FOSS option. It is not an incentive to get new users on board. And it is no reason to be an 'alternative'. A true alternative would have to be indistinguishable from MS Office with respect to file formats, macros etc. And any such option is no longer an "alternative" - it is the thing itself. The sheer gigantic wall of having to work with existing data makes FOSS options a non-starter in the Office applications part of the desktop.

Then we have email. Outlook, apart from its infamous record in security, has a major disadvantage working against it - SMTP. Outlook has to, whether it likes it or not, work with SMTP. And SMTP being an open protocol, alternatives are a lot more possible with Outlook. Further, with options like GMail, yahoo and hotmail it is possible to use email without even having a client. And data already existing with Outlook is also exportable and is only a one-time activity in almost all cases. The uniformity of existing data, medium dependency on tool, and an established existing open protocol makes email a good breeding ground for alternatives. Also given that corporates typically go for entereprise-wide implementations, any tool can be implemented across the organization, and provide the same rich set of functionality, without haveing to worry about breaking compatibility of those outside the organization. Inter-organizational data transfer happens using SMTP, which will continue uninterrupted.

The browser is the other major fortress, which is very vulnerable. By the very nature of the web, proprietary-ness is forced to marginalize itself. Formats are more or less open, accessible and available to user regardless of tool used. There is nothing other than the sheer laziness of users preventing a switch from existing browsers to a new browser and from there on to a third browser. The little data, such as bookmarks, that needs to be migrated is typically handled by the installables of the new tool that is replacing the old. The only barrier offered by the incumbent, IE, is the use of ActiveX. However given the stigma already attached to ActiveX, this is not completely insurmountable.

The next battleground is that of multimedia. The field here is data heavy. However this is also the land of the DRMs, restrictions, proprietary standards, incompatibility, RIAA and lawsuits. This is as yet undefined a field, with everyone desperate to corner a pie for themselves. There are fundamental questions about the existence of multimedia on the desktop that have not been answered.

That brief survey over, it is time to look at where the alternative is going to come from. The current Office-focussed FOSS methodology does not look very promising. They seem to be answering a question alright, but it is starting to look like it is the wrong question they are grappling with. The Google approach on the other hand is a lot more viable. Rather than take on the biggest bastion on the desktop, they are going for the rest of them. And rather than seek to replace any of them, they are building powerful allies, making friends, offering services and building a base that they can trigger at any time to provide a true "alternative" on the desktop.

Google is uniquely poised today. On the web, the majority of users start from its pages. It has acknowledged that search is something everyone wants - so it is searching for everyone - news, ecommerce, images and even user harddisks. They are quietly getting into corporations, with their ubiquitous search button. They are aligning themselves with all the new technologies on the web -- keyhole, blogger -- all with a view to providing users the ability to search on it. They are one of the biggest buzz words on the email scene with their touted GMail. They are browser independant and have quiet links with the challengers to IE. When multimedia wars settle into some semblance of order, Google will be there, searching away, pointing people to the multimedia they need. And most importantly, they have shown themselves to be quite unmoved by the existence of MS Office.

It is this wide footprint and their reluctance to touch the word processor that is uniquely equipping Google. In the coming years, Google will be all over the place, either directly or by buying companies out. And when it decides to, it will be in the perfect position to push for the "alternate desktop" -- a desktop that will enable users to do everything they want to do except perhaps create documents. How will this "desktop" look like -- I dont know. But knowing Google, they'll think up of something simply awesome.

Heres to the Googletop
-- ravi

Teaching Technology

I dont know why people dont understand technology. Mebbe, it is the same reason people dont like mathematics, or logic or thinking. Because, technology is the closest one can get to naked logic and mathematics.

I guess it is okay, if most of us dont really understand technology, because a great part of technology also carries with it the responsibility of not needing to understand it. Technology is geared to have technically-impaired customers.

But technology needs technically qualified implementors. And technically qualified people dont grow on deciduous trees. Rather they are grown in classroom farms. And the quality of these implementors is directly dependant on the quality of the teacher teaching them.

The teacher forms the jugular vein of the entire cycle of technical resource development. A technically-impaired teacher is probably the worst thing that can happen to cloud the entire cycle of getting technically competent personnel.

Being a teacher is not easy. Being a technical teacher is even more difficult.

A teacher is not one who can merely transfer information to the student. A book can do that. A video can do that. A teacher is not merely an interactive data source either. A website would have been enough. A teacher is a live person, who can talk to a class, raise awareness of the subject in the class, raise interest about the subject in the class and get people to fight and argue about the subject.

The problem with our teaching system is that it is just that - a teaching system. The focus is on teaching, not learning. The focus is on completion of portion and not on the insights into subject. The course structure gains importance over class structure. Content delivery gains precedence over contect acceptance. But the most importantly the difference is in the time limits. A teaching class is complete when the class or course or test is done. A learning class is for life.

Many people have written about the inadequacy about our teaching systems. And to make things better most have identified that interaction is that aspect that is missing from modern schools. Interaction between students to learn from each other, to gain form others insights and to give a rather subtle point which others have missed. In a way, it is like taking the mantle of teaching away from teacher and putting it with each student.

But the method is still teaching. When all is done and the stove grows cold, all that the student is left is with what he has managed to learn. A half baked knowledge of the world around. A confusion of ideas learnt, and ideas idenfied and conflicts between then all.

But no smoldering desire to learn and to know more.

That is the crux of the difference between a teaching class and a learning class. A teaching class teaches. An interactive class betters some, worsens other and teaches a little more. A learning class, ignites a desire to learn, a desire that takes knowledge to beyond classes, courses and exams. That is the way to teach.

And that is what is wrong with teachers in general. But most teachers might get away with it. For knowledge changes at a pace that would not seriously challenge a snail. Hence teaching is not very handicapped by its inability to ignite a learning attitude. But that is where technical teaching is affected. And affected badly.

We are dealing with a rate of information upheaval that would leave the most ardent followers breathless. A technical subject is having its bases and roots rapidly obsoleted and wasted and revised. Such is the pace of change that teaching would not really teach anything. There is only one way of teaching and that is a learning class.

But that is where most of today's technical teachers lack.

A technical teacher needs to love technology. And get other to feel passionately about it.

The teacher needs to understand technology, not just a concept, but the core. Needs to be friendly enough with technology to be able to introduce it as a friend to any audience. The teacher needs to realized that implementation does not matter, what matters is the core concepts. And understand these concepts.

A teacher needs to be able to get the students interested in technology, not just in how to work it or even in how it works. But the interest should spread and encompass the idea, the implementation and form a seed for new and unheard of solutions.

And a teacher needs to be able to enthuse not just technologists but every lay man to understand and love technology.

That is what we need form a technical teacher.

That is what we lack in a technical teacher.

We have technologists who love technology. We may have some teachers, who can make students learn. When will we have a technologist teacher?

blogging is blogging, writing is writing, don't confuse the twain

~!nrk

long time no C

Listen to a group called "Jars of Clay". If you are one of those that loves ROCK. But dont mind the occasional strings. This is the group that will freak you out. Real kewl music, somewhat yucky but appropriate vocals, and the best of it all, acoustic riffs only. Sometimes a little other strings thrown in. Really good mixture.

What kind of a user are you? What do you use in those innumerable online forms that want you to describe your level of computer usage? Where do you fare on the four point scale - Beginner, Advanced, Expert, Guru. Actually how do you define where you stand? And how do you do that with respect to somethin as abstract as "computer usage"?

You know what I feel. When it comes to computers I think we are living in a dream world. I somehow have the feeling that I will just wake up, and all things that dont make sense to me suddenly wont exist anymore. Here is a sample of what baffles me. "What dont we have an introductory course to computers".

Wait. I know most of you would be really ready to click that small button on the right top corner of your browsers. Hang on for a sec. Think about it, there are no really introductory courses to computers. There are a lot of people out there, people who offer course, people who understand computers, who make the mistake of totally screwing up an introductory course. Who make the mistake of giving content that has little or no meaning to end users. Who dont respect the difference between an end user, and a budding programmer, or an entry level system analyst, or a rooky business administrator.

Most (okay, all the course that I have been exposed to, the most is only a disclaimer) of the courses I have seen suffer from one of the two problems.

• The course has the wrong content for a focussed audience
  
• The course, introduces the end user to the computer, not the computer to the end user

Take a course that is typically floated in academic institutions, CS101 Introduction to Computing. More often than not it will have some bit of electronics, some stuff about decimal and binary systems, then it goes on to programming logic and problem solving and generally end with a project in C. WHY??? The next course would be somewhere in the second year CS204 Fundamentals of OOPS. Again, WHY??? What is this course seeking to achieve. Just tell me how many people are actually enlightened by such a course. I personally dont think anyone would be. If OOP really tiltillated you, you would have read Bjarne Stroustrup anyway. So what is this course doing for you. Of course pedagogy is abysmal. Mostly you have professors who learnt OOPS when it was still an embryo, teaching you that course, who in a nutshell, suck.

Cut. Go to a beginner course in a professional Computer Academy. The course reads like: C/C++. Introduction to RDBMS, Internet technology, JAVA. Hey, hold on. The guy does not know what a bloody computer is for god's sake. What the hell will he use a database for?

Cut. Go to a Introductory seminar in a Corporate Place. C/C++, Word, Excel Functions, Macros... WHY? Hell, darling, your user does not know one error message from another. All errors are the same to him. Word is fine, but he is afraid of the computer dammit.

Cut. An introductory course in a Business Management Institute. Internet, eCommerce, SAP and other tools, Networking, XML, Web Protocols. Gurgle, gurgle aaah. Hey do you know what a nincompoop he is going to prove himself to be. The information you give him will be all that he is ever going to know regarding these topics. And to his dying day, he will assume that he knows computers. Do you have any idea about how much damage you are doing?

Will some course teach someone, who does not yet love computers, to love it. Will some course teach a person that a computer is an extremely logical unit, and that all you need to know is a few principles and everything will make sense to you.Will any one teach users what to expect from a machine and what not to. Will someone tell users the incredible beauty of computing, the power of C, the modular C++, the vastness of the Internet. Will someone break open a computer and show people, that inside it all, you just have some dumb wires. Will someone help the beginner, not feel threatened by the machine. Will someone help the beginner, not feel threatened by anyone who is not an beginner?

I sure do hope so. Will put out a 10 important things in a Introductory course soon...

~!nrk

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

I remember. When I was a kid, there was this great desire in me to learn. I was one of those kids whose hands itched whenever they saw screws, bolts, clips and any other mechanism that allowed you to take a peek. Toys were amusing. They did their part of entertainment, but then they also provided great mechanisms to open and play with. I loved simple toys, not because I like simple things, but because they were ingenious and used simple hacks to come up with brilliant mechanisms.

Then I grew up, and this craze to know stuff got translated into reading technical stuff. Reading about obscure things became a passion, a fashion. Things mundane were out, exotic was in. Things that were worth reading were either the too big or the too small. Deep Space or the string theory. Anything else was mere time-pass. And anything remotely emotional / human was - bah.

Then I grew up a bit more. And I started reading Slashdot. This was a take on the words 'slash' and 'dot' used as part of any standard URL that is pronounced. Today I will introduce you to slashdot and will introduce you to some of the people who reside on this online space. And I will also talk about something slashdot is proliferating, in the sphere of self moderated expression.

Slashdot (henceforth known as /.) is a news link posting site. This site has a huge fan following, which it has built over the years. Now these users of this site submit stories, as and when they happen all over the world. There are a set of authors of the site, who go through all the submissions and choose the ones more suited to be published on the site. Typically something between 10 and 20 stories get posted in a day. The idea of the site is not to be an exhaustive collection of links, or to be a detailed discussion on various topics. The site couldn't care less about such objective. The site is driven by a need to make a good omlette of news links each day, which makes sense and generates interest in all sections of its diverse users.

So how does this work. Imagine. There are millions of eyeballs, who are reading a similar number of sites and stories all the time. Anything that happens is immediately sent as a story to /. And stories are accepted within hours. Thus each day, there are a host of stories, related to various categories of interest to the nerds, at one place. The efficacy of the system is such that, Slashdot starts becoming a starting place for people to check up on important happennings, rather than keep track of hundreds of news services for anything remotely interesting or spectacular or out of the ordinary.

The aim of posting such news links on the site is not just to provide work as a clearing house for links. Slashdot provides for discussions amongst the members on the various stories that are posted. Although this is commonplace now, slashdot was one of the pioneers of this method of discussion boards. And by-far it remains one of the most powerful mechanisms of self-regulated online discussions. We will talk about the method of moderation soon.

The moderation of Slashdot is a two step affair, carried out entirely by the user community. The first level of moderation is the moderation, done by the moderators. The second round of moderators is the meta-moderation, done by the community to the moderation of moderators. Now the best part of this two step moderation is that none of these moderators and meta-moderators are not fixed. They are dynamically selected and allocated tasks automatically. This happens like this.

Moderators are selected randomly from the entire set of serious users (seriousness is tracked and kept record of). Each such selected user is given 5 points which he can use to moderate user comments. A comment can be moderated positively or negatively. Positive moderations are more visible to other users (users can view messages according to the moderations) Thus better and more important messages are seen by a greater number of people.

These moderators are automatically checked by the meta-moderators. Every metamoderators is given 10 moderations each day and asked to rate it as fair and unfair. This not only corrects any errors, but also reflects on the fairness of the moderators and will decide when they will be given moderator status next time.

Hence the entire setup is a great experiment on the self moderation capability of online communities. So far, so good, (so what).

I will talk about the kind of people on slashdot, in another post.
~!nrk