TechNayak(mirror)

I just finished trying out the Microsoft WorldWide telescope and it just simply blows your mind away. Its awesome as it takes interactive applications to a new level. The application has images from a lot of telescopes which include the likes of the Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra. For a person interested in astronomy, its a dream come true.  The application provides bookmarks to places worth seeing and the best part is the guided tours which does a very good job with the resources at hand.
   The software is a must use for all teachers and schools who have a really great way of explaining the wonders of deep space. The tours are a really innovative feature as its always fascinating to watch and learn than to just browse around aimlessly not knowing what you are looking at ( which is what Google Mars was like, never really got the point of looking at the surface of Mars). Anyway, for scientists, astronomers, academicians, schools , universities, the worldwide telescope is a must have.

 The best part is you can connect to an actual telescope and get pre-collected images from those telescopes based on your navigation. Its virtually a real experience. Reminds me more of the iLabs project where universities gave remote control of expensive laboratory experiments to people across the world.
 Microsofts Worldwide Telescope

There was an interesting concept put forward to me by my professor - Open World Computing. A software that is not bound by any restrictions or constraints. A software that learns and adapts to its environment. Think of a person who is taken from a metro and put in a village. Does the person fail and give up like a computer program ? No. the adaptability of living beings is something so hard to understand that it can take probably another 1000 years to just simulate a living being, let alone learn its qualities.

Think of the same thing in software. A software that is programmed based on generic constraints and the software dynamically learns from its environment through input devices like sensors and then adapts to the changed environment. The classical shortest path problem can be taken as an example. If a crawler running through the shortest path is lifted from its path and put somewhere else, will it be ale to comprehend the change and then quickly adapt or will it be lost. What if the graph changes and produces a lot of cycles or what if the problem statement changes during the course of the program.

I know that a very few people are relating to what they are reading, but the belief that a machine can learn and adapt is what scientists are trying to prove everyday. Machine learning is taboo after movies like iRobot and Terminator, but trust me, we are far far away from something like that. If we can solve a subset of problems of adaptability through an expert system, that will be an achievement in itself.

But how do you go about designing software with such requirements. I would go one step ahead and call it no requirements or changing requirements with no defined thresholds. No current methodologies like OO or aspects can cater to such a requirement. Probably a new scheme of designing learning software has to be developed. Taking tips from AI and the Turing thesis, a perfect turing machine is what is required. Its a hard call but we will get there one day.

Note : I blog on my personal space at riteshnayak.com/blog . This is a mirror of the content.

I suggest : Use the internet to make your international calls with VoIP calling service. You can download free VoIP software or get a VoIP phone to get started. You can even become a VoIP reseller selling VoIP service.

How do you define evolution on the internet ? When experts predict how the internet will evolve and what the future trends will be , what are the factors that are taken into account. 10 years back, no one could have predicted Social Networks and blogs , but look where we stand today. Evolution can mean a lot of things we could evolve with respect to …..
Technology. The core technologies can change. From HTML to web services to Flash , the technologies that make the foundation of the internet can change. The methods in which we access the internet can change , course, its the technological aspect. We have wireless internet, we have BPL - bandwidth through power lines. The means in which we access the internet can change. We access internet from PCs, laptops, mobile phones, handhelds, kiosks. Widgets were probably never even though of 10 years back.

How about usability ? the way people use the internet has changed dramatically. Tons of data being uploaded everyday. Almost all of information of a person can be found on the internet. Thats why any criminal is always looked up in myspace or other social networks. Also how people interact with internet applications is also a factor to consider. Today we have IM, telephony, music players, media libraries, wikis, photo sharing services, blogs, and many other ways to interact with the internet. Who knows? probably in three years time you can transfer money from one account to another by just sending an IM through your favorite client.

Its not just we who perceive the internet. The way the internet perceives users has also changed. Its not just X searching on google, its X who lives here, likes this, hates that, has searched for Y before and is more probable to buy Z. The future could hold machines that can identify with you, relate to you and even deliver specially tailored content to you. The web has also become extremely customizable with every site offering you the concept of skins and templates.
What bout user behavior and usage? ten years back double clicking on the browser wasn’t even a concept. Autofilling textboxes and combo boxes were a fantasy. and Drag Drop, well it wasn’t available for some the best desktop apps, forget the web. Today people use them like they have been around for ages.
what about user evolution ? I have gone on from becoming a mail checker -> sleeze surfer -> information hunter -> programmer -> webmaster -> blogger and I have missed out probably tens of roles. How do we account for user evolution and experience.
Its pretty fuzzy for me. How do you define evolution on the internet ?

Note : I blog on my personal space at riteshnayak.com/blog . This is a mirror of the content.

The craze for offline web has just started and we will see more and more momentum in this area. It was Brad Neuberg and the Dojo’s offline toolkit that started offering a swf based mechanism to access files offline, it was followed by some hacks and some other mechanisms. Now its the goog in action, with its Google Gears. The OS plugin needs to be installed in your system to be able to access some Google services like Greader offline, in fact thats where I first noticed it. I am still yet to checkout a working demo, but I am not completely convinced about an installable plugin, it just ruins the experience of the web. Think about it for sometime and you will realize that you will probably never go offline, online except for on your personal laptop or PC, but still a plugin independent implementation would have definitely be rocking.

I am a big fan of new technologies, right from js frameworks to flex to apollo to silverlight, I have always taken pleasure in checking out possibilities. I have even made proof of concepts whenever I could. But frankly speaking , adding download and install plugins like the flash player, silverlight runtime etc is seriously an overhead. The web dev team in my office still develops for IE 5 and Netscape Navigator; you really cannot expect to deliver next gen apps to such people. Whats more depressing is that a majority of the populous consists of those people . I think the success of js frameworks like dojo, yui , prototype was the fact that their model didn’t require any new tricks to your usual browsing habits. In fact, many of these frameworks gracefully degrade down based on your WYSIWYG’s configuration. I don’t think its safe to call these overhead based technologies like gears, sliverlight, apollo - web technologies. But , thats just my opinion.

Well how about a install all pack which contains all the runtimes required. A single update patch on XP Service pack 3 and Vista Service pack. That should make at least 60 to 70 pc of the world ready to receive these technologies. But back to the point , Google Gears . Will update after checking it out. I like the promise of space, the reader promises almost 2000 articles and thats a lot of space let m wait it out.

Note : I blog on my personal space at riteshnayak.com/blog . This is a mirror of the content.

Inspiration for this post : How much textual information we consume everyday

Text makes the web. Those characters that are 1s and 0s in their stripped down version form the basis of what we call information. Right from websites to search, feeds to news, wikis to chat they are all text. Its unquestionable that people consume a lot of text on an everyday basis and a simple look at your bandwidth bills will show you just how much. Why am I ranting on about these things ? Well, it so happens that the textual information that we consume actually help in realizing a very big dream, the dream of personalization.

Personalization, the word is one of the hardest to define and yet very simple to perceive. Its the need of the hour, no matter where you go, there are people craving personalization. As developers, our view of personalization is very limited. We tend to be more involved in the visual aspect of things like the color, the theme or at best the layout. These are akin to having balloons and glow bugs on your workplace , nothing more than visual appeal. What we must strive is the personalization of information and not its presentation.

Thats really hard : no it isnt. Take a look at my RSS reader and you will be able to judge what kind of information I am interested in. Why restrict it to only blogs. Take a look at my mails, my socionet profile, my friends data , my search results. All these have some details of the data that I consume everyday.

Why do we need that : Its a time saver, in terms of finding the information that I need. My search results can be more inclined towards the information that I am interested in. My social network can show me more like minded people rather than an arbitrary selection. Why even the ads can be targeted more towards things that I buy. I find the biggest ROI in terms of advertising. Let me explain with an example: Supposing i bought an Ipod , I download the itunes software, read abotu the instruction manual, next search for some popular tricks, themes, games etc. Now supposing I were to go to ebay and click a button “Show me things to buy” , based on my previous surfing trends its not hard to predict that I would want but accessories and other iPod related stuff. Now isn’t that what personalization should be about.

How do we do it: Its not practical to expect a Google or a Yahoo to do all the personalization, of course Google is taking serious strides towards personalization in its truest sense. The system has to be decentralized, it should be ip based, even if multiple users use a system, there is more likely a chance that their geographical location has a pivotal role to play in their surfing habits( take a hostel for example, more often that not you find people with similar necessities on the web) I think an OpenId like implementation of a personalization filter would definitely help a lot. You have distributed servers that keep relaying information about a certain persons information consumption habits and then when you ascertain certain patterns, you writeback to the server the pattern. Upon querying or any other action, you get a collated version of your pattern and then make decisions based on your content vs the required content. Aint it a cinch ?

Truly 2.0 has been about You but 3.0 will be about me….. everything me.