Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Morning Coffee Firefox extension

Via this post at Web Worker Daily, I learned about Morning Coffee extension for Firefox.

Keeps track of daily routine websites and opens them in tabs.
This extension lets you organize websites by day and open them up simultaneously as part of your daily routine. This is really handy if you read sites that update on a regular schedule (like webcomics, weekly columns, etc.).

I haven’t tried it yet, but it sure sounds promising. I don’t close my browser very often these days, but I know a lot of people who do. Many of those people also don’t use any RSS readers to keep updated. Instead they revisit their favourite web sites once in a while. Morning Coffee seems to be the perfect extension for them.

If you are still not interested, check the link above for excellent screenshots, which show exactly how this thing works.

The Microsoft experience

I smiled after reading this post.  It reminded me of the fact that in our office, designers use my laptop to test web sites on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.  We have two guys doing the designs, and one of the uses Windows Vista, which runs MSIE 7.  Another one uses, I think, Windows XP, but with MSIE upgraded to version 7 too.  I heard it’s possible to have several versions of Internet Explorer running on the same Windows installation, but nobody around here knows how to do it or cares enough to experiment.

But the funniest thing in this whole story is that my laptop is running on Fedora Linux.

The future is expensive. Very expensive.

Again, news from Slashdot:

“The City Car, a design project under way at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is envisioned as a two-seater electric vehicle powered by lithium-ion batteries. It would weigh between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds and could collapse, then stack like a shopping cart with six to eight fitting into a typical parking space. It isn’t just a car, but is designed as a system of shared cars with kiosks at locations around a city or small community.”

Here is one of the ways I see it:

  • most families won’t be able to afford children (“two-seater electric vehicle”)
  • most families won’t be able to afford petrol powered cars (“powered by lithium-ion batterries”)
  • most families won’t be able to afford their own cars (“shared cars”)
  • most families won’t be able to afford parking spaces (“six to eight fitting into a typical parking space”)

I’m glad that science in general and MIT in particular are here to help us survive in the future.

P.S.: by the way, most families won’t be able to afford university education either, so MIT is giving out for free already – MIT OpenCourseWare.

P.P.S.: yes, I’m just kidding.  The stuff linked to from above is cool.

What is the future of communication?

Nikos pinged me just in time about the MicroMedia 5 minute meetup.  That’s basically a virtual meeting of a bunch of people, who each provide their own answer to one specific question.  Since the meetup is virtual, the answers should have been provided virtually as well.  And since it was all about micromedia, it was logical to expect micromedia tools to be used.  The question this time was: “What is the future of communication?“.

That’s one broad question if seen from all perspectives.  To avoid a non-stop thinking exercise, I limited myself to a version like “What is the future of communication from micro media point of view?“.  For those of you, who don’t know what micro media is all about, here is a quote from the meetup wiki:

  • Text: Microblogging tools like Jaiku, Twitter, Pownce, or Text messages
  • Audio: Twitter Gram, Utterz, Audioblogger, or other
  • Images: Get creative here, can you tell a story from photos?

These tools rushed into our digital lives recently, and got a large and important place there.  The applications of these tools vary from personal notes to corporate meetings, but most people use these for communication purposes.  So, here are the questions that I got thinking about:

  • How are these tools going to change in the future?
  • Will we get some new ones?  Will the old ones stay?  How much will those that will stay change?
  • What kind of tools will people prefer and why?
  • How will these tools be utilized?
  • How will people’s lives change because of these tools?

There is a lot that I can say  answering these, but most of it will be just water with no proof or reason to it.  For me it’s mostly based on personal experiences and feelings, rather then any specific studies or statistical data or anything like that.

Before I go on, here is the short answer the meetup question that I posted to Twitter.

Twitter-type short text services with open API and mobile/SMS integration will rule the future for a long time.

Now, for the long story.

I think plain text will dominate images, video, and sound for a very long time.  That’s not going to change in any foreseeable future.  I think so because:

  • Text is way easier to produce. Most of electronic devices these days have some sort of keyboard attached.  Text can be easily produced in a number of ways – full featured keyboard, simple mobile phone like keyboard, one button keyboard with a cycle through the alphabet, mouse/joystick pointer, speech to text conversion, etc.
  • Text is way easier to search.  Modern search engines are at the point of extracting meaning (when you tell them “car”, they understand that you mean “car”, “automobile”, “vehicle” and so on. When you tell them “the sound of bass”, they understand that you are probably talking about music rather than fishing).
  • Text is much easier to consume.  Most people won’t have troubles recognizing parts of the texts without reading them through letter by letter.  Most people skip chunks of texts when reading longer pieces.  Most people won’t have any troubles reading several texts at the same time.
  • Text is more portable and accessible. Read it from the screen or print it out or even re-write it by hand.  Devices that are needed to move text around are much cheaper and simpler than those for sound and video.

Now, most people will prefer short chunks of text to long chunks of text.  I’d rather read two sentences and move on to the next news section or topic, than spend three days trying to figure out what the author is trying to say.  Most people I know will have hard times writing an article one page long on any subject at all.  All the same people will have no problem spitting out a sentence or two.  Again, on any subject at all.

Because of the above, I think that short text services will blossom.  And they already grow  pretty fast.

Which of these are better?  Those that are simpler to use.  Twitter is doing a really good job here. One large text box, one submit button, and a counter of how many characters you have left for this message.  Nothing more.  It’s difficult to make it even simpler.

But ease of use shouldn’t be only for the end user.  It should be from all sides of the service.  And again Twitter is doing a pretty good job of it.   It has a simple and straightforward API, which allows programmers to create applications for this service in just a few lines of code (a few is as in one or two lines of code).  It has an RSS feed for everything, so it’s easy to get things out of it.  It has plenty of automation – TinyURL integration, direct messages, tracking, etc.  It has SMS integration, so it’s easy to use on the move.

Stuff like that will be at the top of micro media, I think.

Of course, other technologies will move forward, as they always do.  It will be easier and easier to create and move around sounds, videos, and whatever else is there.  Devices will get smaller.  Connections will get faster.  The content will get richer.

But, as with many other things, the limiting factor won’t be in the technologies.  It will be in people.  Think about images for example.  Those were with us for thousands of years.  Yet, only a few of us can draw a semi-decent picture.  And photography is of no help here.  Millions of terrible images out there show as to how effective we are with cameras.  We see things in 3D.  Images are 2D.  The software will hardly ever do a proper conversion.  And humans will hardly spend the time learning about the topic to do it themselves.  Videos are even more complex – we can’t manage static pictures properly, and now we have a full power to work with moving images.  Sounds aren’t much different.

People are buying multi-core multi-CPU hi-end machines and use them to play minesweeper mostly.   You give them a mobile phone which can control half of the universe, and they won’t even bother about an address book in it.  I don’t think this will ever change.  Things might improve both from the people’s and technology’s sides, but the huge gap will always be there.

These are my thoughts on how this whole micro media communication will play out in the future…

Learning about Markov chain

I’ve been hearing about “Markov chain” for long enough – it was time I learned something. Wikipedia seemed like a good starting point. I have to warn you though, be careful with scrolling on that page, because you can easily end up looking at something like this:

partial Markov chain

If you aren’t a rocket scientist or someone who solves integrals for fun, by all means, use the contents menu or jump directly to the Applications section.That’s where all the fun is. Here are some quotes for you to get interested and for me to remember.

Physics:

Markovian systems appear extensively in physics, particularly statistical mechanics, whenever probabilities are used to represent unknown or unmodelled details of the system, if it can be assumed that the dynamics are time-invariant, and that no relevant history need be considered which is not already included in the state description.

Testing:

Several theorists have proposed the idea of the Markov chain statistical test, a method of conjoining Markov chains to form a ‘Markov blanket’, arranging these chains in several recursive layers (‘wafering’) and producing more efficient test sets — samples — as a replacement for exhaustive testing.

Queuing theory:

Claude Shannon’s famous 1948 paper A mathematical theory of communication, which at a single step created the field of information theory, opens by introducing the concept of entropy through Markov modeling of the English language. Such idealised models can capture many of the statistical regularities of systems. Even without describing the full structure of the system perfectly, such signal models can make possible very effective data compression through entropy coding techniques such as arithmetic coding. They also allow effective state estimation and pattern recognition

Internet applications:

The PageRank of a webpage as used by Google is defined by a Markov chain.

and

Markov models have also been used to analyze web navigation behavior of users. A user’s web link transition on a particular website can be modeled using first or second order Markov models and can be used to make predictions regarding future navigation and to personalize the web page for an individual user.

Statistical:

Markov chain methods have also become very important for generating sequences of random numbers to accurately reflect very complicated desired probability distributions – a process called Markov chain Monte Carlo or MCMC for short. In recent years this has revolutionised the practicability of Bayesian inference methods.

Gambling:

Markov chains can be used to model many games of chance. The children’s games Snakes and Ladders, Candy Land, and “Hi Ho! Cherry-O”, for example, are represented exactly by Markov chains. At each turn, the player starts in a given state (on a given square) and from there has fixed odds of moving to certain other states (squares).

Music:

Markov chains are employed in algorithmic music composition, particularly in software programs such as CSound or Max. In a first-order chain, the states of the system become note or pitch values, and a probability vector for each note is constructed, completing a transition probability matrix

Markov parody generators:

Markov processes can also be used to generate superficially “real-looking” text given a sample document: they are used in a variety of recreational “parody generator” software

Markov chains for spammers and black hat SEO:

Since a Markov chain can be used to generate real looking text, spam websites without content use Markov-generated text to give illusion of having content.

This is one of those topics that makes me feel sorry for sucking at math so badly. Is there a “Markov chain for Dummies” book somewhere? I haven’t found one yet, but Google provides quite a few results for “markov chain” query.