The semantic web is here...again

The O'Reilly Radar is at work again. Tim is focusing his attention on what I found to be the most compelling point in his web 2.0 manifesto...data.

There is a lot excitement on the web these days relative to the old topic of the semantic web. The term used is metatagging. It has been popularized by websites such as del.icio.us and flickr where you can ascribe your own meta data to information (bookmarks or images) that you are posting to an online database. Now the idea is being taken further by some folks at a company called MetaWeb (lead by AI guru Danny Hillis). Their project Freebase is a free database of information, a lot like the Wikipedia, where users can assign their own metadata to entries and also dynamically help create the ontology. Other companies have similar projects in the works, like Google Base, and Open Directory project.

Technology rarely wins

Someone had forwarded me this. I found it to be an interesting discussion on the state of "web 2.0". In particular, how quickly the marketing machine kicks in to capitalize on the promise of new technology (e.g. read discussion on Michael Arrington from Techcrunch, the anointed "Godfather of Web 2.0")

"...technology rarely wins. I'm a technological optimist who believes that great technology always wins, and if the planet is to continue spinning properly, great technology must win, less there is no justice. And, naturally, I'm constantly disappointed. Technology rarely does win, and when it does its normally the result of a lot of marketing that shouldn't be required. Because at the end of the day, in the real world, people don't care about technology but rather what it enables them to do."

Perhaps in the end the biggest impact of web 2.0 (ignoring all the hype) is that it actually enables people to do things they care about.

Flex is the future

Bruce Eckel writes that Java has lost it's edge. In particular, he sites the very old problem that Java applets never capitalized on the promise of rich internet applications (RIAs). Instead of embracing AJAX (in fact he rejects it based on his disdain for Javascript), he is recommending Flash/Flex. It appears he is now working for Adobe (literally, he says "Full disclosure: I’m in the process of working out a consulting contract with Adobe, to help them teach people about Flex. But long before this, I became convinced that Flash, and Flex in particular, was the best solution for the user-interface problem, and I began writing this article long before Adobe expressed interest in my assistance.") I also find it funny that he rejects Javascript, but is embracing ActionScript (on which Flash is based) when they are both derived from EMCAScript.

Should we trade carbon emissions for nuclear waste?

This commentary suggests that nuclear power is the answer to the IPCC's report on global warming. That the U.S. should lead by investing in nuclear power plant construction as a bridge from our carbon-based energy economy to future uses of renewable-based energy. Should we simply trade our carbon emissions with dangerous nuclear waste? Have we really learned any lesson if we continue to pollute our environment? Only this time instead of greenhouse gases we will be producing waste that lasts thousands of years without any form of safe disposal. Yucca Mountain is not the answer for disposal. It's suggested the issue of disposal can simply be overcome by showing a political will to resolve "not in my back yard" complaints. Is Mr. McNeil suggesting that he'd be happy to host a nuclear waste disposal site in his backyard? Until physics research brings about a truly safe method of disposal, we as humans are being irresponsible to our future generations by generating this nuclear waste.

The economics of the argument are not convincing either. It is suggested that nuclear technology is available in the short-term, while renewable energy would take more long-term investment. When costs for a new plant run from $3 to $4 billion and time for construction is 7-12 years, this seems like neither a cost effective, nor a timely solution. Wouldn't this money and effort be better spent on truly renewable energy research? Or perhaps investment needs to be made in nuclear physics research that can lead to safe disposal methods?

Procrastination

Interesting piece on a new study on a subject almost everyone is familiar with...procrastination. Interesting take-away for me were that technology, instead of being the savior of productivity, is apparently the culprit causing chronic procrastination. Most procrastination is caused by temptation. Temptations that are more pervasive and accessible because of technology (tv, videos online, the internet, cell phone, iPods, etc.)

The other take-away was that people incur more credit card debt when doing last-minute Christmas shopping, due to procrastination. Sort of an obvious observation, but worth noting the added economic impact of procrastinating.

Best quote:

"That stupid game Minesweeper— that probably has cost billions of dollars for the whole society."

Your laptop has free will...

...by one definition anyway. Interesting NYT article explores the concept of free will.

If by free will we mean the ability to choose, even a simple laptop computer has some kind of free will, said Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum computing and professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Every time you click on an icon, he explained, the computer’s operating system decides how to allocate memory space, based on some deterministic instructions. But, Dr. Lloyd said, “If I ask how long will it take to boot up five minutes from now, the operating system will say ‘I don’t know, wait and see, and I’ll make decisions and let you know.’ ”

Something to think about next time you boot up.

Comic Life

I got an unexpected surprise with my new MacBook. The software bundle included a cool little program called Comic Life. It allows you to take your digital photos and create a comic strip affect. You cut-n-paste photos into cells, add ballons and text, you can even include the "Pow!" type of words. Perhaps the funniest feature is the sound effects that come with each action while you're running it. Usually I find sounds like this annoying, but in this case they add to the fun of the package.

I put together this holiday card version for fun.

Bagel Man the Movie Star

Found out that my semester project from my 3D animation class was chosen for display on the video wall in the new ATLAS center at CU. Sorta cool. Here it is posted on YouTube.

Hard Times in the Arctic

It's a hard time to live in the arctic.

Ancient ice shelves the size of Manhattan are falling off into the sea. And if you are a polar bear, you are now a candidate for listing as a threatened species due to shrinking habitat (sea ice).

Do you suppose this has something to do with that global climate thing Al Gore has been talking about?

iBook Repair

I just did my own repair of my old iBook G3. I used this site, ifixit.com. I got my parts (hard drive and battery) from them and used their incredible Fixit Guide. Including a wonderfully useful screw guide that you print and use to keep track of the 20-30 screws you will have to remove to get to the hard drive. For those geeky enough to want to take apart their own laptop, it's highly recommended.

Colorado, Hawaii and Water

Learned from an interview with outgoing governor Bill Owens that Colorado and Hawaii are the only two states that are independent in terms of meeting their water needs. Every other state has to share water from elsewhere outside their state. I didn't listen to the whole interview, but I really thought that was an interesting fact. Hawaii, the issue is obvious. They have to be independent because there is no pipeline. Colorado has an abundance due to the Rocky Mountain snow and the associated rivers.

Bagel Man

Earlier I had mentioned my 3D animation class. I have not posted much of my work in progress throughout the semester. Perhaps, I'll go back and post some of my more interesting stuff. But the main thing was my "final project" for the class. It's Bagel Man. He is based on silly notes I put in my daughter's lunch (when I'm packing a bagel). Here you can see him in all his 3D glory. I used Maya's tooning effects to render him as a cartoon with purple shading. His eyes come from Muppets characters like Cookie Monster (bulgy eyeballs on top of the head). And he's got arms and legs to give him full action. I used the biped skeleton built into Maya to give him life-like movements. Ray-tracing was added to give a reflection on the floor and shadows. Finally, I added music from Dave Brubeck, "Take Five", for the dancing fun.

dotMac crashing Finder

I got tired of problems with Finder crashing when connected to the .Mac (dotMac) iDisk. iDisk is actually just a WebDAV server and there are a number of options for connecting besides iDisk:

• Goliath - this is an old OS9 app (available on OSX too) that acts like an FTP client app would except for WebDAV.
• Transmit - in addition to FTP, WebDAV is supported.
• cadaver - for command-line fans.
• most web-site tools (GoLive, Dreamweaver) come with fairly robust WebDAV browsers.

Your WebDAV address for your .Mac iDisk is http://idisk.mac.com/username and authenticate with your .Mac userid/password.

Also, if you're tired of paying for for .Mac, check out notMac Challenge and Joyent.

Lightbox for displaying art photos

Ever since I heard about the Lightbox script a while back, I thought it would be cool to use for my father-in-law's artist website. Lightbox displays a modal dialog of images (or other content) overlayed on top of the current web page. I explored Lightbox Gone Wild, which uses prototype for asynch rendering (AJAX) of any type of content in the lightbox. In the end, I settled on Lightbox v2.0. This version is from the original group that coined the term. It uses prototype for the AJAX as well, but what really sold me was the "fancy pants transitions" from script.aculo.us. Check out that bling! :)

To see how it works, check out the beautiful art at Michael Wagner's Paintings and click on any of the art work to zoom in.

Sci-Fi and Hollywood

Wired News: Hollywood Eats Sci-Fi's Brains

Good piece on the doldrums that sci-fi movies are in.

Engineer It!

What a fun time. Took the kids to see the Engineer It! exhibit at DMNS. We built earthquake-proof structures, an arch, paper rockets, and a geodesic dome (design by Buckminster Fuller).

It was also great to have a new way to explain my work to the kids. The tag line for the exhibit is "Think it, build it, test it." And I can explain simply that this is what daddy does, only it's inside the computer. The "think, build, test" cycle is what my day at work is all about.

"Gmail This" Bookmarklet (in a tab)

I picked up the "Gmail This" bookmarklet a while ago and use it alot (also see Lifehacker). But I noticed two things recently when I upgraded to Firefox 2.0.

1. The popup window does not focus in the front when activating the bookmarklet.
2. I realized I don't like popup windows in the first place! I noticed the new "Email This" Firefox add-on opens a new tab. I wish I had a simple bookmarklet that opened a tab (without installing an extension).

So I realized I ought to modify the javascript in the bookmarklet myself, to get what I want. This version will simply do a document.open() and if "New pages should be opened in: a new tab" is selected in your preferences (which is the default), then Gmail will open in a new tab. This version also includes any selected text in the new message.

Here it is. Drag this bookmarklet -->Gmail This, to your bookmarks toolbar.

p.s. This was all tested on Firefox. I have no idea if it will work in IE, but it might with IE7.

Lightbulb with reflection

More samples of my amatuer work in 3D using Maya. We have been covering all the details of modeling and lighting, so I built a lightbulb casting light but also reflecting the objects it is illuminating.

I created the bulb by rotating curves for the glass and top parts of the bulb and then assigning associated materials. Then there are three lights:

bulbAreaLight - a mental ray area light that illuminates the bulb from the inside. I adjusted the transparency, translucence, and glow intensity (special effects) on the blinn material for the glass so that this light comes out of the bulb and makes the glass glow.

topLight - lights the top of the bulb so we can see that detail. Used light linking so that this light only illuminates the top parts of the bulb, not the glass. Otherwise you get weird shadows.

realLight - this is the real light cast by the bulb that illuminates the red balls. To get the glass of the bulb to reflect the objects, I set mental ray to emit photons and blinn automatically reflects.

Google is not a software company

Very interesting Slashdot discussion (Good Agile — Development Without Deadlines) on Google's approach to software development. Steve Yegge, who works for Google, has written an extensive blog entry on how software development is done at Google. I didn't read the whole piece, but you get a good taste of it from the Slashdot intro:

"In a recent blog entry Steve Yegge, a developer at Google, writes a fascinating account of life at possibly the coolest development organization in the world. Steve lays out some of the software development practices that make Google work. Go on, say you are not even a little bit jealous. ;-)" From the article:

* Developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.
* There aren't very many meetings. I'd say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week.
* Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously.
* Google tends not to pre-announce. They really do understand that you can't rush good cooking, you can't rush babies out, and you can't rush software development.

Yegge also does a fine job of skewering what the author calls "Bad Agile."

But what is the most interesting is the following comment (Just keeping the talent happy...), that I think hits the nail on the head:

"Google is not a software development firm, but an ad sales firm (check their 10-K if you have any doubts). It uses software to attract viewers in the same way television networks use programming and magazines use articles. Under this model, it makes sense to give developers a large amount of freedom to develop whatever they want. The final type/quality/status of the software doesn't matter nearly as much as the fact that there are new features appearing on the site from time to time to attract new viewers..er, users... and keep old users. Most of the applications probably won't amount to much, but just like with any media company, you only need one or two big hits a season to keep people coming back.

Google develops a large amount of its content in house in much the same way old movie studios developed all their films in house. For Google, the talent is not actors and directors but developers. Movie studios learned that you treat the talent well to keep them around and Google has taken that lesson to heart. Developers tend to want complete freedom to work on what they want with no deadlines and giving them this is the easiest way to keep them happy. Call it 'good agile development' or whatever else you want, it's really just keeping the talent happy in the hopes that they'll keep developing content to attract users.

Unfortunately, software companies that rely on software or service sales for revenue cannot take this extreme approach to agile development. They need to deliver software on occasion or someone else will replace them in the marketplace. Agile development is still the best way to go, but unbounded development only works if software isn't your primary source of revenue."

Google is the preferred destination for software developers today. College graduates scramble to make an impression at on-campus Google events. Developers struggle through rigorous interviews, just for a chance to work there. And why not? If you could develop in such a utopian environment? But is it a true test of agile development? I would agree with the comment. No. It is not, because it's not a representative software development team.

Imagine the college grad whose first job is at Google, who only knows software development like Google does it. Imagine that he/she has to leave Google and go to a real IT shop and actually answer to customer requirements and meet specified deadlines. Bit of a shock I suppose? ;)

Dying Aspens

I love aspens. They are one of the coolest things about living in the West. The shimmering sound they make as their leaves quake in the breeze is magic. They are also cool because of how they grow. They sprout suckers from these huge interconnected root systems, making aspen groves one of planet's largest organisims.

The mystery is, why are so many dying (Scientists Say Aspens Are Dying Out West)? My fear is that human activity may be to blame. Many of the theories suggested can be drawn back to man.

• fungus - climate change may have made the stands more vulnerable.
• drought - again climate change.
• human interference with the natural cycle of forest fires.
• resurgent herds of hungry elk nibbling saplings to death - caused by lack of their natural predator.