Google Gears: Browser up, OS down!
We all knew this was coming and it has finally come. The final problem of offline access to web-based services has been addressed by Google Gears which was released last week. Today, I saw the first instance of it being available to the end user via the Google Reader.
You can have consistent, transparent access to all your favorite websites/web applications through the browser. The OS becomes less important now and the need for natively installed OS specific applications is greatly reduced.
It would be interesting to see the changes this will bring in our world!
What’s that under my skin – an RFID?
I have always been very excited about this but have been putting it off. However, the IEEE doesn't want to let us on-the-edge engineers rest in peace – they went ahead and dedicated an entire issue of Spectrum magazine on embedding RFIDs inside human bodies. Reading about the experiences of the few people who have done it helps reduce the anxiety around it and very strongly tempts me to go ahead and get it done. I have already looked up online about where I can order the RFID chips and readers from. I am at the last step – I need to order it and schedule an appointment with a doctor to perform the 3 minute insertion procedure.
I suggested this idea to fellow students at SI and have got many concerned responses – why do you want to make it easy for the Big Brother? Is it safe? What's the point?
Big Brother (Privacy): It's a passive device for identification and authentication, just like finger-prints, so it is not as scary as the potential scenario of a GPS enabled chip that radios in to Big Brother at intervals. Safety: well, the IEEE seems to endorse it, they haven't made active and scary disclaimers about the risks involved, if any. And animals have been RFIDed since a long time now. The point: Well, to be honest, there is no point. It's only a cool thing to do, like getting a tattoo; just a more geeky tattoo. There is absolutely no compelling reason about why the RFID should be under my skin – can I really not be ok with it being in my pocket?
Well, we will have to see what I end up doing!
Amdocs 7
Amdocs' latest offering is Amdocs 7. When I read about this, I got an instant flashback of the time I spent working in Amdocs. Always on it's heels, always thinking ahead, prepared well in advance. It was a very good experience. I am glad I am still very much in touch with many of my former colleagues.
Perceptive Pixel – Multitouch Touchscreens
Remember these touchscreens from "minority report".
A real version of this will be commercially out soon:
[via Gizmodo]
Microsoft Robotics Studio Released
I had referred to this before and I was eagerly waiting for a release. Well, there you go, Microsoft has released the commercial Robotics Studio (1.0). It is quite exciting and I hope to be able to play around with it some time soon.
Yes, you can download it for free for personal use:
That means if you are student, educator, academic researcher, or hobbyist looking to try out or use the software without the objective of making money or running your business, the software is available for download for free.
Go ahead and play around!!!
Microsoft Zune – A new social experience?
So Microsoft has finally declared that the Zune will be priced at $249. They make a bold statement there on the press release:
“On Nov. 14 we’re delivering not only a device, but a shared, social experience that will be shaped by the collective imagination of consumers,” said Chris Stephenson, general manager of global marketing for Zune. “We’re infusing the spirit of discovery and sharing into everything we do — from the experience we crafted around the device and service to pre-loading music and videos on every device to expose people to something new.”
We will only know for sure once we experience it, but this sure has me all excited. So now you know what I want for Thanksgiving.
Not just another Google – Microsoft comparision
I am tired of people saying how Google will eat away into Microsoft, and how the software Giant will be overshadowed by the new 'revolution'.
I want to clarify some things. Most often than not, Microsoft has always been very active in either bringing about, or capitalizing on any new revolution.
Microsoft has smart people. Very smart people. They know what they are doing. Just take a look at the research pages of Microsoft and you just have to respect the kind of stuff there. It's really nice. If a company has invested so much in such varied and futuristic research areas, you can't elbow them out the way we think Google will.
Things as varied as Virtual Wi-Fi to concurrent programming. That's the role of a software giant. It sure is giving back to the community. It's putting so much money to research. What's wrong if they want to get rich while serving the intellectuals.
Check out the Research Projects Downloads section. If you are my kind, you will find yourself with a lot of respect for M$!
USB Powered Sewing Machine!!!
Brother corp Japan has launched the Innovis range of sewing machines which connect to the PC via USB and can be operated via the PC.
There are two models the "Innovis M200" and the "Innovis N150".
Size is common 436 x 204 x 292mm, the M200 weighs 11.7 kg and the N150 10.0 kg. The M200 costs $ 2375 and the N150 costs $ 1800.
P2P for premium content: finally.
As I had mentioned in my previous post, P2P can be used to explore new economic models.
It's nice to know that there's formal work in that direction as can be understood by this post.
They are doing exactly what I wanted them to do. It's nice to know the world is becoming a better place. And it inspires me to coninue my speculatory existence.
Personal Fabrication – not too distant reality
If you could make anything you wanted, what would it be?
The Dream Factory
The concept is simple: Boot up your computer and design whatever object you can imagine, press a button to send the CAD file to Lewis' headquarters in New Jersey, and two or three weeks later he'll FedEx you the physical object. Lewis launched eMachineShop a year and a half ago, and customers are using his service to create engine-block parts for hot rods, gears for home-brew robots, telescope mounts - even special soles for tap dance shoes. "Designing stuff used to be just for experts," Lewis says. "We're bringing it to the masses."
Katsuya Matsumura’s PC Cases
Katsuya Matsumura makes PC cases which are very "different".
Take a look here
A Good GPS device
A GPS Device
I really want a GPS device. I have a smartphone, so I want a bluetooth GPS receiver so I can use them together. Read a lot about them, SIRF chipset or XtracSIRT chipset. Finally liked the Fortuna Clip-On, but its not available easily in the market Am attaching a Doc file which shows a real-size comparision of all the Small GPS devices available in the market. Take a look at it to see how big (or small) these devices really are.
Don’t Repeat Yourself
(Don't Repeat Yourself. Don't Repeat Yourself.)
Context:
Duplication (inadvertent or purposeful) can lead to maintenance nightmares, poor factoring, and logical contradictions.
Duplication, and the strong possibility of eventual contradiction, can arise anywhere: in architecture, requirements, code, or documentation. The effects can range from mis-implemented code and developer confusion to complete system failure.
The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost due to a semantic contradiction: part of the system was working in Imperial units, another in Metric. There was a duplication of knowledge (implicit units), and the duplicates were out of step.
One could argue that the most of the difficulty in Y2K remediation is due to the lack of a single date abstraction within any given system; the knowledge of dates and date-handling is widely spread.
The Problem:
But what exactly counts as duplication? Copy-and-paste is generally cited as the chief culprit (see OnceAndOnlyOnce, etc.), but there is more to it than that. Whether in code, architecture, requirements documents, or user documentation, duplication of knowledge - not just text - is the real culprit.
Therefore:
The DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) Principle states:
''Every piece of knowledge must have a single,
unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.''
It's okay to have mechanical, textual duplication (the equivalent of caching values: a repeatable, automatic derivation of one source file from some meta-level description), as long as the authoritative source is well known.
Differential Web Pages
Anyone who has used an HTML based navigation system for a web-application of any sort realises that there is too much redundant information that has to be loaded each and everytime one navigates to a certain part.
e.g. when you are checking your Yahoo! mail:
The regions circled in red stay the same throughout our usage of Yahoo! Mail.
Now each time you click on a link, all those non-transient parts of the webpage too get loaded again. After each navigational click, we have actually reloaded all the 30kb or so of the webpage. The server treats each page of the application as expired-as-soon-as-rendered and so repeated browser requests will re-load the entire page.
Suppose you are waiting for some important mail (and you don't have Yahoo! Messenger). Then you sign into yahoo, wait at the inbox and keep refreshing the page every 5 mins. For each refresh, you are using re-downloading the 30kb of HTML (the images & css & js will come from the browser cache). This is the worst case of re-downloading redundant data.
As a more general case, around 20% of the webpage is always redundant. The redundant part mainly consists of the header, footer & navigational system.
Diff File: to a direct example to understand what a diff file is:
[file1]
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
[file2]
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!
[diff_file:file2-file1]
(43)-(.)+(!)
(note: this is just an example to highlight the concept. An actual diff file would have a different format)
The only difference between [file1] & [file2] is the punctuation mark at the end of the line (43rd character).
So the diff file only contains the changes that have to be made to [file1] to get to [file2].
That's how web-pages should be.
The server should just send a diff file rather than the entire web-page.
So only the information needed would be transmitted and the rest of the web-page can remain as it is.
So coming back to the e.g we had started with:
You are refreshing your page every 5 mins to check for new mail.
If you have not got new mail, then the server will return a "null" diff file. finito.
No need to re-download the entire web-page.
Ofcourse, this needs the browsers to be able to read & apply diff files. Might take time. But this technology would respect bandwidth.
Me
The human mind learns by relation.
To learn something new, I relate it with something I know. That way I can learn
anything new. If the amount of overlap is more then I retain it better.
So that means, probably everything I know must be related in some wierd way to
the first flash of a red toy that my eyes registered. Say I saw a red bell.
registered. then i saw my mom. not red. larger. registered. and so on.
but what did i relate the red toy to? i related it to my mom as soon as i saw
her.
so the relation is interdependant. I wud find it very difficult to retain an
absolute image of a red toy, had it not been for something else i remembered by
relating it to it.
So that means that relational memory works both ways.
So it becomes tough to understand things you cant relate to. I have drifted
into a different state of consciousness since 2 years now. Life looks
different. Its like a huge paradigm shift in my relational database. The same
things appear different. Since I have experienced it I know its possible. It takes a lot to ignore the atoms inside everything I see. I find it difficult to be oblivious to the iron hand of the system around us. I feel blissed to be a part of it. And i feel glad to have the heart I have. And my heart makes me feel glad. There is no want. no room for any want.
Its impossible to be able to relate to the me I am. I would have considered myself a freak 2 years ago.
I just look at myself from an aquaintance's point of view.
this guy is always smiling. Always busy. doing something. And he always helps. Why? Whats the big picture here? What does he have in his mind? What is he thinking? Whats the intention behind this?
These people lose out on knowing me. They cant understand me. because they cant relate to me. I am the red toy they need to relate everything else to. Only then they will be able to retain the red toy.
there are some people..some of my close friends who have great minds. they are able to "know" me .. without being able to relate to me. I wudnt be able to do it.
There is only a one line defination for me. I do what i feel.
Recent Posts
- Comparing lack of insurance deaths with traffic accident deaths
- Thoughts after reading the 1,990 page health care reform bill H.R.3962
- Do you monitor your energy consumption?
- Can you think your way to sharper TV picture quality?
- Returning to the Ordinary World
- Interesting urban geocache in Vancouver
Recent Comments
- Deepak Pande on My IIT JEE Notes and Books
- Kokil on Adobe: The next hijacker
- sanjana on Facebook friends visualization tool for Many Eyes
Tweets
- RT @bettywriter: Reverse privacy thinking. Not each provider determining how it works, ramifications. Standardize the model for privacy. ...
- RT @namtrok: Users have an expectation of privacy that don't match up with reality -- Obasanjo from Microsoft #realtimeweb #sxswi
- RT @hungtruong: Seems like there is a market for a super-uber-private social network. Kind of like email but with a new name #realtimeweb
- Pen and paper tools to go from research to design (@ SXSW / ACC - Ballroom B w/ 40 others) http://4sq.com/9ZWeBM