Explosive information intake

Sometimes what you read or watch can be very powerful to shape your state of mind. And sometimes this final shape is very detrimental to your well-being.

Last night, it was a combination of receiving 1 email every 15 minutes with an alarm that I couldn't check what was happening, reading "The Future of Management" and then watching "Mr. Brooks". Why? It was one of the things I spent some time thinking last night while I couldn't sleep (which is a VERY rare state for me). Here is my current theory:

NOTE: This might contain some spoilers about the movie, so if you haven't watched the movie and want to fully enjoy it when you do, you might not want to read any further.

Reading TFOM puts you in a state where you stop trusting management in general, in which you believe that the most important thing for any company is to post what needs to be accomplished and let people do it if they want to. It's all a matter of how to correctly give incentives to the non-management workers so they they are happy and don't backstab you when you are not looking. And that's the connection to the movie: the main protagonist helps his daughter but at the end of the movie he has nightmares that any day his daughter might stab him in the back to take over his business (or, well, maybe because she just can't help it).

That all comes back to the alarms I've been receiving. I was out of the office yesterday afternoon enjoying an afternoon with a friend from High School that decided to come to visit for a couple of days. I've even left my computer at the office, so that I couldn't check what was happening, just receive emails through my BlackBerry. And apparently while I was out something stopped working correctly and because it still isn't working, I was given the impression that the person that was supposed to care about it doesn't care at all and, thus, things are still broken.

Anyway, that's the theory. You don't have to accept it. But I have to leave to catch a bus and go to work.

Back from Hawaii

So I'm back from Hawaii. It was a very nice trip. O'ahu is a nice island, with nice beaches and steep green hills. It's also quite small, allowing you to go and visit most of things without having to spend too much time just driving from one place to another. A huge plus!

Got way too sunburnt, learning that those spray sunscreens are evil. Using them about two days for two people we almost finished with the whole bottle but still got sunburnt on some places. The tricky thing is that you can't really tell how well you have sprayed your skin. Maybe with some experience it's better, but for now I'll go back to my normal manual process.

And, no, I wasn't lying at the beach somewhere. We went kayaking to the sunken island on Monday. So the part that suffered the most were my knees. I was barely able to walk in the evening and next day. Today it's much better.

Now I'm back and very annoyed and disappointed with what happened while I was out. I kind of feel the same way I felt when I went to Brazil and when I got back everything didn't make much sense at work any more. At least this time it was only 3 business days, so I shouldn't be too worried.

Time to go to sleep. I had plans of starting to organize my pictures tonight, but they didn't quite work out. I don't have that many pictures, but it still takes way too long to organize them. My computer keeps reminding me that I need an upgrade. And I feel like I could live with only a memory upgrade, but I'm falling for the "Mac Owner Syndrome" and am tempted to just buy a whole new laptop. I'm even still running an old PowerBook G4... No Intel chip for me yet.

What a disconnected post...

From Hawaii

Here I am in Hawaii posting a short message from my BlackBerry... Not that much to write about yet. Hawaii doesn't seem as impressive as I was expecting. I'm at Waikiki Beach in Oahu and it just feels like a small but well developed beach city. Things are not so clean, people are not very educated, but the scenery is nice if you are looking the right way.

Anyway posting from a BlackBerry is annoying, so I'll just go and enjoy the nightlife, which really somehow exists here!

OpenLibrary.org

Another late-night blogging. I was reading and replying to emails today and, although I've started reasonably early (about 11:15 PM), it's already 12:45 AM! Time flies when you are trying to write useful emails, huh?

Anyway, this post is not about writing emails, or my lack of ability to write emails quickly, but about my second experience looking at OpenLibrary.org

I have to start by saying that the project itself is great. I'm always excited about open content anything that leverages information that exists out there (book catalogs) and tries to add less structured content on top of it. Apart from all that, what I find interesting about this website is actually its problems: finding anything!

Their goal is to have a page of every single book ever published. Which means, multiple pages for books that have been republished multiple times. And so far with no concept of "work" that would group those books together. To exemplify where the problem is, I decided to do a search on all their catalog and see if I could randomly come across a book that had not only the library card part, but also contents. For that I needed a book that has been around for long enough that it would be in public domain. The book that came to mind was Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" (don't ask me why).

So I started by searching "a tale of two cities"... Terrible mistake. Received 26 results. On the first 20 results, only 1 said it was written by Charles Dickens:

Dicken's A tale of two cities by Dickens, Charles
(American book company, 1911)

I found odd. So I clicked on the author. I was then sent to the page of the author and all the books. No counts of the total number of books there, but I found 12 in the first 10 pages. Not grouped at all, so I had to look page by page and find the book (and note that for some reason Firefox didn't like the page and when searching it would only find the first occurrence of the words and then be stuck there).

It was time-consuming and yielded no scanned versions. Yes, it's still a beta site, but apparently they still have a long way to go there before I can say that I'll start using it for something.

I re-found this website after listening to this week's TWiT. Brewster Kahle was there to talk about the Internet Archive and mentioned this website he was working on building. What I found nice is the apparent motto behind the internet archive: "Children today are being educated on the internet. However, the internet today does not contain the quality that you were able to find on books of the past. So we are just not providing them with the opportunity of a high quality education." Very interesting point.

Random links for the day

I've spent some time trying to think of a theme for this post, but couldn't find any. I was just reading news around and came across the following articles that were quite odd in some ways:

The Miracle Fruit, a Tease for the Taste Buds: Interesting and well-known fruit from West Africa that makes acidic things taste sweet. It certainly changes the taste of a lot of things. I'm now very curious to check it out...

A tragedy: New Challenge for Space Station Crew - A Broken Toilet. This reminds me of some research I saw a long time ago on rapid prototyping. they claimed it's the only possible solution to longer-term space travel, because you never know what is going to break, so you can't keep spare parts for everything. Thus, they need some technology to just build the part you need. The only problem of the technology last I saw it was materials. The only reasonable materials they were able to use for rapid prototyping was a type of paper and a type of waxy glue. None of them are very good for things that are supposed to be used in real-life. Oh, well... At least the space station is not that far, so people can send things over to them.

Finally, it seems like everybody is behind multi-touch:

Windows 7 will be multi-touch capable: I don't trust Windows any more, so I'm not really concerned.

OLPC XO-2 to include multitouch and possibly haptic screen from PixelQi: This is actually pretty cool if it's not vaporware. Have to remember to keep an eye for this one. Much more interesting than the recording pen!

Playing with ideas

I was going around today playing with Exploratree... It's a project that has been around for some time now (since sometime at the end of last year). It's quite neat in its goal of creating frameworks in which you can organize your thoughts and plans. It's focused on educational use, so that you can actually ask people to add information and then you see this on the web.

The UI is quite slick. Quite interesting to see what people can do with Flash on a browser. However, it's kind of annoying in many ways too. For example, I tend to be a little too verbose on what I write on each entry and it doesn't really try to resize and text-wrap things for me. So I end up spending most of my time actually trying to make the text fit in the places. Also it doesn't seem to be a model behind the UI. So if there are two elements that are supposed to have the same text, you have to enter the text twice.

Oh, well... It's an interesting idea anyway. I wished I could see somebody using it for real, and not only the fishy demos on the site.

And talking about education-oriented products, I was also looking at Livescribe's Pulse. It's a product that I've seen an ad for a long time ago, but apparently now it's for real. Nice concept, but I'm a little worried when they show that the only use that they have thought about right now is taking notes of classes and then referring back to the audio that was going on during the notes by clicking on the notes. Not a bad idea at all!

However, there should be some other things that this pen should be able to do... It can't be used to digitize things that are written on a whiteboard or something like that, because it needs the special paper with special location dots. So that restricts the interaction to something quite "private". Maybe if it could be used to write music or something... Or when you are trying to review something that somebody wrote and you are one of those people that need it printed, you can print with the dots, review and then digitize the review of the paper to send it back to the writer.

Anyway, it's a cool technology. If I could find a half use case for the things I do right now I would have already ordered one. So I'll keep looking!

Labeling images for Google

I was given a link the other day to Google's new image labeler: http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

What is interesting about it is that everything is done in pairs and then the pair is given images to label and points for how many labels they can come up with, more points for more specific labels.

Then what do you do with all those points? What do you get from being on Google's website and say that you have "24300260 points"? Not much, but there is a lot of evidence out that that some people might just have too much time in their hands. Better to ask them to do these things than them being out and about playing with friends, don't you agree?

Anyway, that's not the reason why I've decided to post this here. What I found interesting is the names of the people that I saw on the "today's top pairs" section. I'm not too worried about pasting them here because they are quite anonymous:

1. Wonderful Now 3K - mY record 2980
2. BSPECIFIC - Me 2 GottaGoNow 2880
3. Me 2 GottaGoNow - Lds Labelmaker 2620
4. guest - guest 1950
5. Monster - DoubleDogsRacing 1790

They seem like people use names to communicate their intentions with other labelers. Like "BSPECIFIC" or "Wonderful Now 3K". Also there are some that look like an automated system: "Lds Labelmaker", which might relate to the Low Density
Separation algorithm [1] or maybe Limited Discrepancy Search [2], or maybe it's somebody from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints... Who knows?

The fact is that eventually Google will figure it out and decide if their little points-giving experiment will help or hurt their image search. I bet on the latter. I actually bet that just adding humans to the loop will not really help you in general. but might provide enough test data to then add an automated method and have an idea of how well it's doing.

[1] - Chapelle O., Zien A., (2005). Semi-Supervised Classification by Low Density Separation, 10th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, AI STATS 2005, Barbados]
[2] - L.D. Whitley, A.E. Howe, S. Rana, J.-P. Watson, and L. Barbulescu. (1998) "Comparing Heuristic Search Methods and Genetic Algorithms for Warehouse Scheduling." In Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 1998.

On writing

Hah! I should have read this before:

Blogging -- It's Good for You

The article itself is not very scientific in some parts. It relates to the study that says that writing is good only if you are writing about a bad experience, but bad if you aren't (also from Scientific American, but you'll need to pay for it to read it - appeared on Scientific American Mind, August/September 2007), but it seems like they don't seem to reference it for some reason. If SciAm was a scientific journal, the editor wouldn't allow this to happen.

Independent on missing references, it's still an interesting reason to convince people to write! Maybe:

"[...] blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to stimulants like music, running and looking at art."

Ah... I feel so much better right now! :-)

Playing with trueknowledge.com

I've received a beta account for [true knowledge] and decided to play with it a little. So far it's been interesting (although I can't say I've done much yet). Here is what I've done so far (I'm not adding any exact quotes here, just an idea)

My first question: "What is Earth's diameter?"

Answer: "Question understood, but the object that was recognized is not a circle: Earth, third planet in the solar system; Earth, the location of everything in this planet. Do you want to add a circle?"

Odd... Can't spheres have diameters? And yes, Earth is not a sphere, but people still have references to the diameter of the Earth. But, instead of trying to enter data on this debatable subject, I decided to simplify it:

"What is the diameter of a tennis ball?"

Answer: "There was an error processing the question."

ok...

"What is a tennis ball's diameter?"

Answer: "I don't understand what a tennis ball is, but it must be a circle or a sphere. Do you want to enter a tennis ball?"

I decided then to do it and it goes through asking you to write:

1) a short description of it to disambiguate the term for a human reader,
2) the plural of the term and the short description,
3) write synonyms of the term (I couldn't figure out synonyms for tennis ball),
4) A parent class (sphere? I tried ball, but they suggested sphere),
5) Questions of whether the "tennis ball" class is disjoint with other sphere children which I found quite interesting, but not as interesting as what came next
6) Is a sphere something intrinsic of an item, or something that an item can become and cease to be?

Very interesting set of questions. The sad thing is that when I finish all this, it forwards me back to my question and the answer is still the same: "I don't know what a tennis ball is". The classic UI problem of how to make users feel like they contributed with something by seeing what they did directly affect their experience, or clearly state that it might take some time to do so. Negative points here.

Anyway, I'll continue playing around and maybe I'll document more if I find something interesting. It's quite nice and disturbing the amount of projects out there hoping to leverage people to build structured data. Why can't they just collaborate with each other and specialize on answering the types of questions that they care about? Maybe they can even have different ways of you entering data, but it would be so much easier if they could just add this information to somewhere like freebase while they are at it!

Yes, I do feel guilty for choosing sides, so I'll add information about tennis balls in freebase too. The problem on freebase is that now I have to decide whether I call a tennis ball a ball and assume all balls are spheres (so have diameters) or consider a football a ball too and so there should be spheric balls and oblong/ovoid balls. ARGH!

Flying

I want one of these:

VIDEO: Rocket Man Makes Debut Flight

Or maybe not... Crazy idea, but we need some crazy people out there to keep us entertained while we are sitting safely in our houses.

HTML escaping bugs

Yes, I know I mentioned that this was going to be a personal blog only. But this is actually something I consider personal: my own annoyances about things, including technology. So here we go (it's actually funny):

I thought that I had already posted this, but couldn't find it anywhere. So I'll assume it's one of the eternal drafts that should be around somewhere.

If you go to Google Reader and you have a feed that has some HTML-escapable character, and then you try to edit the name of the feed, you get some very interesting effects. I found this out because when Google Reader imports the feed name, it escapes it, even when the name is html-friendly and already escaped. Here is an example, I decided to import "NYT > Home Page" feed. When I imported it, This is what I've seen on my feeds:

"NYT > Home Page"

Then when I click on "rename..." I see:

"NYT > Home Page"

If I just click "save" and don't do anything else, I get exactly what was in the edit box. Then I click on "rename..." again and, as expected, I see:

"NYT &gt Home Page"

Hilarious! And what is more hilarious is that I need to double escape my text so that you can see the problem. How I love HTML! NOT!

Me and my blogging hiatus

From time to time it seems like I can't finish a post. I start accumulating drafts, but can never finish them. Now it seems one more of those times. So I'll try to keep this one short, hoping that I'll finish it.

First on life status: I've been thirty for a week now, and I can still feel that my back is starting to hurt more, my hair is getting whiter, I'm getting crankier... Yes, I'm getting old.

Yesterday Amy and I went to see Cirque du Soleil - Corteo. It was not an inexpensive way of spending Thursday evening, but it was quite impressive. They certainly do a good show. It's funny that they try to have a storyline and... well, it's just a way frame the show and doesn't really define it. Kind of a strange way of using a theme.

This weekend there is the Seattle Cheese Festival to go. I went last year and it wasn't that interesting, but I got to try a couple of nice cheeses. And it takes me to the Pike Place market, which is never a bad thing. I've been there twice in the last month already with all the visitors I've been getting here.

Oh, yes, I probably never blogged about my visitors, huh? Well, it all started with my aunt coming here to visit me and staying for 5 days. Then, last weekend, as a surprise birthday gift for me, two of my best friends came to visit and spend the weekend here (with wife and 8 1/2-month old daughter). It's always great to receive visitors, even without much planning ahead of time.

Alright, I should stop here or else I'll end up leaving this in my drafts again and never sending it out.

I've decided that this blog will be focused on personal stuff from now on. I'll create a new blog for non-personal stuff. Will let people know when it's ready.

The Accidental Time Machine & a little Sicko

Last weekend I finished reading another book that actually took me about 5 days to read: The Accidental Time Machine by by Joe Haldeman.

In general I'm not a big fan of "light sci-fi" books that you can read easily like this one, but there were two points on the book that I found interesting. But first for a short synopsis, trying not to spoil much: this student from MIT accidentally builds a time machine that only moves to the future and decides to use it to travel. That's it.

So, what is interesting about it? Well, he goes about 200 years in the future and ends up in a corner of the US that has become deeply religious, organized by a president that invented that Jesus came back and went to speak to him. Technology was abandoned (except to make Jesus look real) and everybody stopped really studying anything except religion.

Then he moves another 2,000 years in the future and ends up in a society that has become fully immersed in technology in which they don't do anything any more except for merchandise trading. All development and research was done by computers. Everything in the city was controlled by one major computer.

In both futures there was a common theme: humans in the future decide to stop learning. They converge into a society that has other things that decide for them: religion or technology. I found it kind of funny, but it doesn't feel too far off. I think we will always have people thinking and inventing things. But maybe this elite will just continue to shrink worldwide until they are stuck in some island by themselves, while the whole rest of the world enjoys "eternal mental vacations". How exciting!

Anyway, I've also finally watched "Sicko" yesterday. It was interesting. I've posted most of my concerns about how broken the US health system is, so I won't repeat myself. However, I do think that he missed two very important points (well, most probably many of them, but I'll cite two):

1) There is a reason why many companies in the world decided to move away from France. The social cost of having employees there is just too big to make it worth it.
2) He never mentioned my greatest pet peeve about American health culture: Americans, with poor education, go to the doctor thinking that they know better what they need than the doctor. They only go there because they can't give themselves a prescription. And then some people complain that sometimes doctors don't really pay attention to what patients have and only push drugs to them... Well, that's what their patients are expecting them to do anyway.

Anyway, I think that's all I have to say. Time to go to bed.

viewzi

So I just got an invite today to check out viewzi a search aggregator with a very strong visualization focus. I haven't had that much time to use it so far, but it seems neat. It would be interesting to see, as it grows, how much it will focus on being a framework for search visualization, start taking feedback from users (like, I want this page and everything related to it to be grouped, or removed from the results or things like that) and aggregate past user behavior to the results (which can be pretty cool).

A good introduction to what they have right now is available on their site as a video (just click on "Watch the video" on their main page). Not everything on their video is available for me right now, which shows that they are still investigating more sources and way to visualize those sources.

I should right now give some examples of queries and what I thought about the results and whether I would prefer to use it instead of normal search engines. However, I'm not going to do that just now. I don't really have anything exciting I want to research, so I'll wait until I do. Yes, I know that this might mean multiple months might pass before I get around to doing it, but I still think I would be more comfortable waiting to play around with it a little before writing a real review on the service.

Time for another Shelfari review

I've been in and out of Shelfari for the last year or so (it's actually a Seattle company, but I don't think I know anybody that works there). It's a nice idea with a lot of flash and neat integration with book databases (that's quite easy to do). However, as I never got into the social networking aspect of it, I never saw a reason to really use them. I can look at my bookshelf and know which books I have. I never found the use of knowing when I read a particular book, or how well I rated the book.

Today I went back to them, though. They decided to add a new feature allowing adding and editing information about authors. This caught my attention because that means that they are starting to add structured information to their database that is beyond book information. But when I got to it I realized that they didn't seed this data with anything. Also, they have very limited and static set of fields that define an author:

• Date of Birth
• Place of Birth
• Gender
• Nationality
• Official Website
• Genres

Kind of depressing. And on top of all this, their search is being very slow today and I can't even add the books I have read recently. Time to move onto something else. Maybe I should go back to the huge LibraryThing. I gave up on them because I felt like a very small reader in the middle of the cattle. Maybe things are not like that any more. I'll give some examples of books I've added in both and the number of other members that have those books.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (my most popular book):
Library Thing: 13,187 other members
Shelfari: 12898 members

Sunstorm (A Time Odyssey) by Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter (a more recent hard sci-fi book):
Library Thing: 236 other members
Shelfari: 116 members

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (more general, but not as popular):
Library Thing: 2,824 other members
Shelfari: members

So they are all in the same order of magnitude.

Also there were some very odd bugs on their system. This I just saw when looking at the example books. They don't list Stephen Baxter on the list of authors for Sunstorm. Well, maybe I should look at the other options out there:

Goodreads (apparelly huge, but their numbers seem a little misleading, like saying that "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" had 46,791 reviews in one place, 4,400 in another and 38,724 in yet another)
BookJetty (quite tiny, only 30 people with "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time")

Oh well. Or I can get local and use Delicious Monster, a Mac only program that you can catalog your library by using a camera to read bar codes. Too many options!

Just because I mention weather

I mention weather on my blog and then it starts snowing... Quite enjoyable. And it's not snowing just a little, but at least it's not below freezing so everything should melt if we wait a little. Until then, well, I guess I'll be staying home and figuring out what I can find for dinner. No gym-ing today, I guess... But at least I made some dinner. Good stuff that I had to finish because it's not Passover-friendly.

Busy weekend ahead! Cooking, cleaning and going to seders. Most probably no time to work on any of my new project ideas.

Seattle and weather

Seattle people are hilarious when it comes to weather. Yes, winters can be quite cloudy and rainy around here. But when we get one day of sun, it becomes the subject of conversations for many days... Last Saturday we had one of those days: sunny, even warm! Then Sunday afternoon the rain came back and that's what we are getting and will be getting for at least another week (with chance of snow and rain mix on Saturday even). But people are still talking about "the amazing weather on Saturday". Makes me laugh!

For me, Saturday was good. I did a lot of work on the garden. Got our new irrigation system up and even was able to turn on the water to see how long it takes to correctly water the beds. But I do enjoy us having the cool and rainy weather again. I'm not sure why. Maybe I just like it so that I can enjoy myself when I hear people longing for the single sunny day of the month... :)

Gym sales people

I've just joined a gym last weekend, LA Fitness. Joining a gym for me was quite a complicated process, because there are no real good, convenient gyms around home or on my way home, as there were when I lived in Bellevue. So it took me more than an year to convince myself that I had to do it even if it wasn't as convenient. So I joined one that is about 12 minutes from home by car.

When you join a gym you start with people trying to convince you that it's the best gym there is and that it's very convenient and easy for you to use. Then they schedule you for an introductory "personal training section" where they would set my goals and give me a review of the gym. But what they do is set you up to paying for personal training sessions. And they do it in ingenious ways:

- They go through your goals and try to convince you that they know the best ways to achieve those goals
- Then they take you around for a quick "training" that is aimed at making you feel like you are weak and have to work a lot, and, especially, that they can help you by pointing out the correct techniques, sets of exercises and around to help you not to get hurt.
- Then they try to sell you packages of personal training sessions and keep trying to make you say that the price is too inconvenient so that they can do the "evil" move of lowering the price so that you feel like now you have to buy it (thanks Wally for the Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials) book)

So I ran away from all this and just joined the gym. The upcoming weeks, with Passover, my aunt being here for visit, then my birthday, are going to be busy. I don't want to add more scheduled events any time soon. And, yes, those personal training sessions are expensive.

gmail annoys me

Slowly all my main non-work email moved to my gmail account. But more and more I'm actually concluding that using gmail is actually giving me more problems than solving them. It starts by CPU use. When Firefox is open with an open gmail tab, it's usually using at least about 7% CPU. Idle! When I turn off gmail, it drops to about 2-3%.

Then there is memory use. Leaving gmail open I can see my memory used by Firefox slowly growing without any sign of "garbage collection". Soon my computer is out of memory and I have to restart Firefox.

Then goes to organization itself. I'll have to agree that probably gmail has the best online user interface for email. Yahoo has drag-and-drop, which I use all the time, but it's dog slow. Gmail's simpler UI is much quicker and provides a lot of nice features, like tagging of email. That's why I moved most of my email to it. Also the 1GB free was a great push.

At first I used POP3 and Mac's Mail, but that didn't quite scale very well to the amount of email I received (Mail becomes dog slow with too many emails). Also gmail doesn't mark downloaded items as read, so when I had to access my email from work, I wouldn't know what I've already read by just looking at what is marked as read (like Yahoo does). So I tried to move to the IMAP, but that was quite slow too and very confusing with the tags becoming folders and repeated unread folders. So I went back to only using the web UI. And now I'm stuck.

Oh, well, choices you make in your life. If I had a better option out there I would try to take it, even if the transition is painful. But it doesn't look like there is one, so I'll hang in there and buy a bigger machine with more CPU power and memory. Maybe this will hide some of my annoyances.

Buying things on physical stores is certainly safer, huh?

This article today on ComputerWorld made me "laugh":

Hackers open new front in payment card data thefts

This time they've intercepted payments to local stores as they were being sent to credit card companies for charging. Great job for those hackers! Just shows that there is no way of having safe money transactions. Maybe we should just build walls around our houses, grow our own food and build our own tools. No more dealing with other people, as somebody in the middle of it might use you or steal your goods from under your nose! :-)

So that's how the world is right now. Am I scared? Actually not at all. People stealing things from other people is part of reality. If we are careful and pay attention to where our money is going, everything eventually gets to a good steady state. If credit card companies feel they are paying too much money due to fraud, they will invest on replacing those cards with way more secure technologies. These mostly include "active" cards, like smart cards, which perform the encryption through the card and allow for credit card numbers never to be sent out in the wild. Things have to change, but there needs to be way more financial incentive for it.

More Windows criticism

It's funny to keep reading more and more people complaining about Microsoft's Windows tactics. This time was again at ComputerWorld:

Windows is 'collapsing.' Gartner analysts warn

They make some interesting observations about adoption of Vista and how little people perceive as being a better operating system. I don't have that much exposure with Vista. At work the deskside people that deal with computer setups told me that Vista just doesn't work very well in an enterprise environment.

I'm not sure I really believe in that, as there are lots of different editions of it, but there are two things that I've learned from it:

1) This person is paid to do this analysis and make a decision on whether to do a complete company flipover to Vista. One of the things that Microsoft claims Vista is much better at is security. Apparently the security improvements that it provides are not that important to offset the cost of flipover.

2) From what I've used Vista, on my future brother in law's computer when I was taking the computer to Brazil, it's really not much different. Yes, you can search on the "start" menu (that doesn't have "start" any more), but this doesn't really impress me. What made me unimpressed is their new organization of expandable folder on the "all programs" list. They wanted to reduce the amount of real-state the the menu took, but apparently just made navigation through it way slower. You can't just hover over menu items and see the sub-menu showing up. You now have to click on it to expand it. Way slower.

3) Talking about screen real-state, having the dashboard items on the background makes it not very useful at all. It just makes background more confusing.

All the rest seems hidden under the trunk for me. So, no I'm not getting Vista any time soon. Maybe I'll wait for Windows 7.

Yahoo! - just a desperate company

After Microsoft decided to slap Yahoo with an offer to buy it, Yahoo seemed to have decided to go crazy and not really wake up, but snap and go crazy with major business changes: merge with AOL and experiment with using Google's adsense in their search results instead of their own. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch suggested that they are using a scorched earth technique to not leave anything behind for Microsoft to get. It's a shame. I can't say I'm a huge fan of Yahoo, but I think they have good products and have been able to create (or purchase and not destroy - which is a huge feat) a system of niches that empowered the internet.

It's going to be sad to see it all go away with this apparently spooked company. Damn you Microsoft! Just use your very capable workforce and get it right!

Being followed

Being on twitter is quite interesting. I'm still far from using it for anything useful, and I'm glad of that (I've heard of way too many people that were concerned that they were actually addicted to it and were spending way too much time trying to keep up with what his "followees" were saying). But, little by little, odd things appear. Today, I was just added to the following list of ACLU of Washington. Very odd... I think Twitter is a good example of civil liberties... :-)

For the rest, I'm just a little annoyed lately that I haven't been feeling that I'm doing anything really interesting. I've spent some time reading the Fortress spec and being quite impressed by it, but I'm not sure it's anything really related to any of my current possible interests.

I've been paying my taxes (another painful year - apparently I've made some money buying and selling stocks last year), and reading things around. But I just can't seen to find something that really makes me excited when I wake up in the morning. Probably it's nothing related to anything at work or even anything about the state of technology during economic recession periods, it's something deeper and way more complicated.

Flashbacks of Amapedia

This weekend I had some flashbacks about my time adding content to Amapedia... I was playing around with Twine and seeing if I could organize things using a combo of Twine and Freebase, so I was creating Twines and then trying to add links to freebase from there.

It was a good thought, but it didn't quite work. Freebase cannot be accessed without login, so Twine wasn't able to correctly generate previews. Also, Freebase's URLs are a little worrisome. Things like:

http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000007dca33d#mce_editor_0

Not easy to see what you are pointing to. So I gave up on this and will change my playing attention to Twine's RDF and Freebase APIs. Let's see what I can use from those.

So sad it's Monday already. Another busy week ahead.

Trying out Twine

Finally I was able to be invited to join Twine! I was going through my rounds of reading blogs when I found this post by Shelley Powers, sent an emails and a few hours later there I was!

My first impression of it so far is: oh, it's quite powerful. Lots of things that you can do but all around one thing: you create a subject, called a twine, and post links to pages on the web that have to do with this subject. You can subscribe to twines, post to whatever twines you want, add comments to sites other people post, and that's mostly it. Posting can be through those funny links on your browser or you can send an email with the link to a special address @post.twine.com.

I'll keep on analyzing it and see how I could use that to reorganize my collection of bookmarks in a way that they might become more discoverable. Currently I'm mostly using del.icio.us, and there are a few things that bother me about it:

1) The big bucket of bookmarks with tags - I have work bookmarks (that point to Amazon internal tools) and external bookmarks. I would love to be able to partition them better. I like that I can share things I found at home with work and vice-versa, but I can't say I like when I'm at home and get "spammed" by work links when I'm searching for something.

2) The integration with Firefox for special keywords and things like that is not that good. Sometimes I set it in one computer and the other one doesn't really understand it. Then I create a new one o the other computer and suddenly I start getting warnings that there is a keyword conflict between the current computer and del.icio.us. Annoying.

3) "That's it": it's all what del.icio.us does for me: it organizes my links. It doesn't really offer much of a discoverability path. Yes, I can click on my keywords and find what other people have tagged with the same keywords and even read new things that come to those keywords as an RSS feed, but there is no de-duping, no discussion, just a stream of mostly noise.

Certainly Twine doesn't currently offer any integration with a browser, so I'll probably still use del.icio.us for some time, but if I can start transfering a minimum amount of information there and see how it turns out.

Initial reactions to R.E.M.'s new album, Accelerate

So, yes, of course I now have R.E.M.'s new album, Accelerate. I can't say I had much time to listen to it yet, but it's quite interesting. They seemed to have decided to get back to the way they were in the older times. Or a mix of all of it. You probably can list each song and tie to a different album they remind me of. Like "Living Well Is The Best Revenge" reminds me of "Monster". "Supernatural Superserious" reminds me of newer stuff, like "Around the Sun". "Accelerate" reminds me of something more like "Life's Rich Pageant"... And so it goes...

It's a short album, with most songs under 3 minutes.

I wished I had more to say about it. I'll leave you with a good article on Time magazine about this album that I read last weekend and made me excited about it: R.E.M.: Finding Their Religion

I'm happy!

Trying to get back to being myself

It's interesting how easy it is for you to lose what you consider to be your greatest sources of happiness. One of them was to be able to play around with things. Spend hours doing something just for the sake of doing it and learning in the process.

Today it was listening to discussions on Agile Programming (more on this some other day) and playing with Processing. So I'm happy!

The only thing that is not as happy is that I need to rescan my whole passport again, now in black and white, so that I can send it for my green card application. It's a lot of work involved there. I'm hanging in there because once it's done I don't have to worry about the silliness of the US consulate to renew my Visa any more. And that's worth even walking barefoot on fire!

Ok, maybe not that much...

I think it's time for me to go to sleep. It's been a long day of iteration planning (from 10 AM to 7 PM) and tomorrow is going to be time to get back to work. More importantly, tomorrow I won't be on call anymore! I keep telling my team that I shouldn't be allowed to be on call, because terrible things happen when I'm on call!

Evening activities

In the past two days I have been trying to relax a little in the evening. Yesterday I actually arrived home sort of early (like 6:40 PM), read and wrote some emails, made a dinner plan then went to the grocery store for getting the missing ingredients. Cooked from 9 pm to something like 10:30 pm, and had dinner. It wasn't that great, but quite fresh. Then, not to end the evening like that, I decided to watch Transformers. Certainly something that wasn't worth staying up until almost 2 AM for. It was cute with lots of meaningless computer animations and very weak storyline.

Then today I didn't arrive this early any more. Made dinner, watched Top Chef (not really my idea, but it's a good way of wasting time) and then played some Geometry Wars: Galaxies on the Wii. I found the game quite bad. Didn't like the use of the Wii remote to point to where you want to shoot. But one thing was great: I've unlocked the galaxy on my DS! I thought it was going to allow me to play between the DS and the Wii, but apparently not. They just connect so that you can unlock the galaxy. Lame!

That's it. Now it's time to sleep as I haven't been sleeping much in the last days. It's not that I have a lot going on at work right now, but I can always find something to do better when I'm not tired.

Vegas

So, yes, I'm back from Vegas. It was quite a good trip. I met some very interesting people, had fun with them talking, playing games, and just hanging out. Vegas was mostly just a backdrop to the people, providing us with things to, ways of staying up until very late.

So, what I thought about Vegas? It's flat, with mountains on the backdrop. It's dry and sunny, quite a pleasant weather except that my lips are all chapped. I forgot about these oddities about dry weather. It's bright and full of drunk people walking around and being "happy". The only depressed-looking people are the ones playing on the slot machines. Made me not even want to give it a try.

Ah, and staying off the strip reminded me a lot with living in Oklahoma: large city blocks full of strip malls with large chain stores... Everywhere! We even ate at some, like Sonic and Marie Callender's. I can't say I'm very proud of that, but, as I said, it was all about the people.

Alright, I thought I was going to have more time than this to write, but I guess I have to go now. Not much more to say about the trip. Maybe more to talk about the people on the trip, but I'll leave this to some other time. I'm not sure I have enough data points yet for a full description. But I did find at least someone with a twitter account! With cryptic sports-related messages, which made me not try to follow him.

Twitter Day

It's funny how things sometimes happen all at the same time. This morning, for no particular reason, I went back to look at twitter and see if there was anybody I knew there... Nope... I had looked at twitter some time ago when I heard mentioned probably on TWiT (actually I remembered that it took me some time, for some reason, to figure out how to spell it correctly).

Then, on my way to work, I was listening to TWiT and they had a whole section on how twitter is huge among the Tech reviewer people. I didn't find it too strange, as they always mention twitter on their shows.

Later, when I was going for lunch, I heard somebody mention that somebody else said something on twitter. At this point I was already finding it very suspicious. Then, finally, on the bus coming home, a couple sits behind me and the guy turns to the girl and asks: "Do you know what twitter is?"

With all this, I had to post something on my blog and write my first twitter (saying that I'm writing this post).

So, what do I think of twitter? It's a very simple concept that, if executed correctly can be fun (thus, addicting), and if not it can be just a huge waste of time. Fun waste of time, but completely non-productive.

Choice of words

Choosing what you write and how you write it is extremely important. Sometimes you might have a very important thing to say, but nobody is listening because you are not saying it in a way that makes people pay attention to you. That's well-known, so why am I writing it? Well, it's just that this morning I woke up at 6:30 AM and couldn't sleep any more (after staying up until almost 2AM last night reading) and was reading some articles around. Suddenly two articles popped up and really exemplified this concept:

1) On Communications of the ACM, one of the cover articles named "Patterns, Symmetry, and Symmetry Breaking" by Liping Zhao, the author tries to explain how we can look at programming and using of design patterns as breaking and generating this symmetries in programming languages. It's an analogy that I found quite hard to follow but was trying to hang on to it hoping that it was actually useful when I read the following phrase:

"In biology and physics, the imperfections and irregularities in the arrangement of cells are more interesting because they pose deeper questions to scientists."

WHAT? What kind of observation is that? Odd things make us more intrigued? This phrase was so strikingly meaningless to me that it completely made me lose interest on the article and I stopped reading. Just one phrase...

2) On the other hand, I was going through some articles on ComputerWorld and found Just-patched Excel makes calculation mistakes. Just the title of the article made me have to have a look through it (and I have to claim that the title of Zhao's article also drew me to it). Fortunately it was a short article and talked about a bug introduced to Real Time Data on Excel 2003. If they had actually said something like "New Excel 2003 Patch Adds Bug to Real Time Data" I wouldn't have even looked at the article. Sure, articles about bugs on products that you have or had access to are interesting (especially when the whole Excel 2007 Bug was doing its rounds), but Real Time Data on Excel 2003?

Ok, time to move onto something else for the day... Maybe organizing my Brazil pictures? Or perhaps cleaning up my office... I just know that I've read enough for the morning. Including struggling through articles in German (quite depressing, actually).

Back from Brazil

I'm back from Brazil and I still haven't had the time to write my impressions. I'll just write a summary here and then leave the impressions for maybe the weekend when I hope to start going through the pictures and remembering the things I've done and seen.

The trip was great. With moments of happiness, learning, surprise, stress, sadness... Quite a complete trip! São Paulo continues crazy with traffic and violence nervousness. Salvador was sometimes annoyingly touristic, with everything built to foster tourism even when it is to the cost of losing uniqueness. It was great, nevertheless. Morro de São Paulo was relaxing.

There were only two very negative memories from the trip. One of them I'm not really going to discuss here. It was related to discussions I had with my family. The other was the joke about my visa. I almost had to postpone my trip back because the American Consulate doesn't really seem to care about people's needs to have a visa. The summary is that they say that it takes 6-10 days for you to receive your visa back. The consulate is very close to my parent's place, so I asked if I could expedite the process and pick it up myself instead of shipping it using Sedex. The answer was "no". So there I was waiting... I went to the consulate on a Friday. The next week nothing happened. The other week I was in Bahia, so I kept somebody verifying if the visa arrived... Nothing.

I was starting to get worried, so my father asked his secretary to call the consulate and check what was going on. She called on Thursday and they told her that the visawas issued but it hadn't been shipped yet. Shipping, because it was local, was supposed to take only 1-2 days, so I wasn't worried. Came Friday - nothing. On Sunday we arrived back to São Paulo. Our flight left on Tuesday back to the States, so on Monday morning I called the consulate just to confirm that it had been shipped and what they told me is that it hadn't been released yet! And that's all they could tell me!

I went back and forth on discussing with people with more experience on getting a visa and they told me to send an email and fax to a certain place. I did and received a prompt response that my visa was still on "processing" and that's all they could tell me!

More back and forth of discussions concluded that I had to show up personally with confirmation of my flight to beg them to give me my visa. Note that this pretty much was killing my last full day in Brazil. So, that's what I did... I got to the information booth (after getting there at 2:15 PM and finding out that it's only open from 3-4 PM) and the woman told me that the problem was a software glitch with their image recognition system that was unable to recognize my face! I asked her what to do and she went inside to ask some people and after 5 minutes she came back saying: "Oh, it was just released! Just go to the back and pick it up!"

This "just go to the back and pick it up" took another 30 minutes, but I did get it. This was on the 10th. Reading the visa what does it say? That it was issued on the 7th! Why do they do that to people?

Anyway, that was the really exciting part of the trip for me. Amy might be able to tell her excitement trying to be vegetarian in Brazil... Recipe to starve or to only eat very healthy things like french fries or fried yucca balls (especially in the northeast). And what a waste, as the fish and seafood in general was so good...

Well, now that I'm back, what do I have to talk about? Well, I'm trying to get back to being productive. I'm still ramping up back at work, feeling a little by the sidelines of what is going on. So I should be getting productive at home. Reading technical magazines, planning on projects that I'll be hopefully able to start now that my wrist feels fully recovered. Lots of things to do... So little time...

Laughable

Sorry, I was going to write something about my impressions of Brazil so far, but I read this and I can't help but laugh at it and pass it on:

Microsoft execs struggled with Vista too, say internal e-mails

It discusses that even Microsoft understood the mess that they were creating releasing Vista "this early" (although it was very late according to their initial plan). Very tragic, but funny at the same time.

Microsoft is a great company that needs a paradigm shift. It's stuck to this self-centered world of major releases that aim on putting out a piece of software that is easy to obtain (it comes inside your operating system when you buy a new computer) that just has parity to the basic of what is out there. Their hope is that people will be lazy to go and get the better things, just because they aren't that behind anymore.

I've felt this when I got home and realized that all my parents' computers had only IE7. I just couldn't deal with it, so one of the first things is that I've installed Firefox, mouse gestures and ad block and now life is so much better and faster. Yes, you can claim you can do it all with IE7 and I did try some of it. I just thought that, from my limited experience, the large amount of very mature solutions that exist for Firefox are just easier to use. IE7 has things like IE7Pro that does a lot of it for you, but it is a huge bundle of different things and not only what I want.

Finally, I was discussing this today: the future lies on integration. Building solutions and hoping everybody in the world with integrate with these solutions is not the direction to go. Even if you open your formats (like Microsoft did with a lot of its Office products). The winner of this fight will be the one that is the most proactive about it, hunting to understand the other and be understood by others. This is an aspect that I actually admire Google for. Look at their Google Docs and Spreadsheets... You can import and export to many formats including MS Office formats and OpenOffice and StarOffice. Do they have a format of their own? No!

My dream is still on a paperless world. But I feel like there are still way too many integration obstacles to get to it. I can share files and sometimes printers between two computers. But any other type of sharing that I want to do (event based things like "open this document, generate a PDF and let me see it on this other computer") takes a good amount of work. Without those seamless integrations we can never achieve the basic infrastructure that I consider needed for getting rid of this isolated interface that is the paper.

Ok, wrote too much already. Time to go to sleep and hope that I'll have time before my trip to Salvador to finish my post about my impressions of Brazil/São Paulo.

on the plane

I'm blogging right now from my BlackBerry waiting inside a plane to go to Brazil. Something about bad weather delaying flights and we staying here waiting for the other passengers to arrive from late connecting flights. And they seem to want to wait because the flights tomorrow and Friday are full. Today's flight so far is only something like 60% full. Odd. Anyway, there are more people coming right now, so we may be leaving soon. Time to turn my cell phone off.

Under the influence of yellow fever vaccine

So last Friday I took vaccine for yellow fever, in expectation of my trip to Brazil in 3.5 weeks. During the weekend everything was alright but today, now that I had to go back to work for a 5 hour workout meeting, it finally hit me. No fever so far, just a general weakness that is actually a little funny. You feel like you are getting sick, but, at the same time, it's just different. Great to focus for enough time to write long phrases or discuss things. So, I'll keep this short.

Lots of things are going on right now. To add to my general not feeling very good, two weeks ago my wrist started hurting. I was working during the weekend at home and probably my keyboard wasn't set up very well... So my right wrist decided to finally complain with me. I gave it a week before I start to worry about it and it started feeling better. Maybe because it started feeling better I started using it more so at the end of last week is was almost feeling as bad as it did when it all started. No time on Friday to call the doctor, but I finally did it today. The sadly odd thing: I'll only see him next Monday, which means that who knows... It might be better already when I get to see the doctor. Nobody ever claimed the US health system was any good!

About my trip to Brazil, the one Amy is going too, it's going to be quite fun, I hope. Lots of things to still organize and gifts to buy, but I'm looking forward to it. Will keep me away from very odd times at work right now. Not bad times, just times of change. Times where it becomes hard to predict people's reactions to things.

Just to make my wrist feel better, on Sunday evening I went volunteering at Teen Feed. It was interesting to work on a more industrial-like kitchen with 90-second dishwashers (yes, it can do your dishes in 90 seconds!), 4 ovens, plenty of prep-space, plenty of chickens to cook. Fun! No, I wasn't doing any of the cooking, just helping with some prep work, cleaning and serving food (actually butter for the dinner rolls and filling up the cups of juice, water and milk). Sometimes it's just good to feel like you are helping.

Last night we had snow (again!). Not all around the city, but we did get a couple of inches around here. Enough to have to be careful walking around this morning. Didn't fall this time, though (I did fall when it snowed last, two weeks ago, just after I hurt my wrist - joy!).

I think it's time to get away from my computer again and lie down. Working on this computer doesn't feel that great on my wrists. Oddly, at work I have a much better setup. Larger table, more space to support my wrists by having my arms on the table. That's the best position that I've found so far. Makes me not want to go home.

Happy 2008

This is actually my 300th post, according to blogger (that has in the past [sorry for all the broken things on my old blog] not been able to count number of posts). So it's a celebration! A celebration of a new year looking back a year to see what has changed:

Actually, 2007 was an odd year for me. There were a lot of subtle changes that compounded in making my thinking different, but everything not as much. Let me try to enumerate things:

1. I was promoted at work: with great power comes greater responsibility, right? Well, I don't have great power, but I can somehow feel a greater responsibility. I'm not going to get to details, as this is not the forum for these kinds of details, but there were quite a few psychological changes in the work environment last year. And there is a Piñata at the center of them all.


2. Video games and video game communities: I've bough my Wii and a DS (two, actually) and have been going to friends' places to play video-game. I've never been away from playing things on video-games and computers, but I haven't bought a video-game console in a long time. What have I felt as different: I have new things to talk about, like I've finished Super Mario Galaxy yesterday (more on this on some other post, perhaps). It hasn't yet affected my blog, but I think it should sometime soon.


3. Less emails: this is probably one of the worst things of the year for me. I have been sending less and less emails to friends and this has been quite psychologically painful. You might be thinking: if it's painful, why don't you just write? The sad thing is that I don't think I have an answer for this question. Every time I sit at my computer to write an email, I end up wasting a lot of time and not actually finishing it. Writer's block, or I don't know.


4. Less of everything else: thinking of less emails, I've realized that not only I've been writing less emails, I've been working less on side projects, I've been reading less research articles, I've been continuously posting less and less on this blog (probably also related to the "writer's block" mentioned above), I've been doing less productive things on my idle time. And I can't really put the blame on video games, as except for a few games here and there*, I haven't been playing that much. But I'll try not to point fingers at things.


5. Pets: well, a pet lizard is a pet too, huh? Needs food and cleaning up. Also needs me to coordinate with friends every time I take a vacation of more than a couple of days. When I go to Brazil I'll need to take her to a friend's place for whole 3 weeks!

So, it's been a year with some changes. What to expect from this year? I'm not really sure yet. I only know that I have two trips to Brazil ahead of me and one to Hawaii. The rest will be trying to do some catch-up with all that didn't happen last year! Maybe...

*games that used a lot of my time this year (not in any specific order):

• Super Mario Galaxy
• Bioshock
• Mario Strikers Charged
• Fifa Soccer 2008 for Wii
• Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
• Mario Kart DS
• Brain Age DS
• Tetris for DS (not because I've played it, because I've spent a lot of time looking for it before I concluded that I had lost it somewhere)

Seeking entertainment by looking at technology failures

Sometimes going to a website and seeing web technology working to make your interaction pleasant is interesting. But more and more I've been enjoying myself looking at when things fail. Today's example is an old one: Google News.

Google tries to do the almost impossible: match news so that you can look at one single headline and then follow the details on many different news sources. It works well on a number of cases, like when all the news sources get the information from the same place. However, on less-covered areas, it has always tried to match stories that have very little in common. Unfortunately links are hard to provide, as all stories are kind of dynamic, but I'll give a hint: look at Science and Technology. As I'm looking right now, here are some things I see:

Headline: This year in technology
Link 1: Mountain of discarded mobiles grows at 'frightening' rate
Link 2: Record mobile phone spending in 2007

Interesting connection there, huh? Here is another one:

Headline: IPhone Sales: 5 Million Down, 5 Million to Go?
Link 1: Apple's Jobs May Surprise With Slim Mac, New IPhone (Update1)
Link 2: Firms settle annuity

It's interesting that's a technology that was in "Beta" for many years. Now it's not in Beta any more, but seems to have still exactly the same problems. Maybe people just don't care enough. As long as it still makes people click on their ads, it's valid. I've actually learned that sometimes having a bad experience in your "local" system makes people click on ads more often. Maybe people just want to find an excuse to run away from your site into something potentially better.

Deeply annoyed with Netflix

I'm a Netflix subscriber, but not a very big user. I don't watch that many movies, so I visit their website quite infrequently. However, tonight it's the third time that I try to go there to add or remove something and I get the wonderful message:

"The Netflix web site is temporarily unavailable due to scheduled maintenance.
It is anticipated that the site will be available again at 2:30 AM Pacific time.
We apologize for any inconvenience this causes you. You can contact Netflix Customer Service at 1-888-638-3549.
Please visit us again soon."

Excuse me, but I'm a client. If they have a "scheduled maintenance" they have to schedule it with me! That's how things should work. That's how things are done where I work. And that's why Amazon does not have "scheduled maintenance" of their website. You just keep it up. Shutting a website down for over 2 hours!!! That's just a sign of bad engineering. No wonder when I interview candidates I see that people have very little knowledge of how to design systems with high availability. Performance, sometimes. But availability...

Anyway, if I was the only person that used my Netflix account I would be very tempted to just cancel it tonight. It's convenient, it's really not very expensive, but I just don't like to support bad engineers.

Online purchasing - hard?

Sometimes I'm amazed by how some people just can't get the online purchasing experience right. Today I was renewing my IEEE membership and... It was hard! They pre-set everything that is in your current membership and then they have this "promotions" page that for each entry and sub-entry, there is a potential dropdown box (that is actually a popup) to let you choose promotions that are relevant to your purchase item. However, I think they forgot to include the manual on what each promotion means. For example (unfortunately I have finished the process already and I didn't really capture a real example):

By my IEEE Computer Society membership, when I opened the promotion popup I received a list that looked like this:

Name - Description
ACM-CS - ACM for CS
JJ-994M -
JJ-98B -
ABC-09 -

Huh?

Anyway, I just gave up on trying any of their promotions and checked out with exactly the same I currently have: IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Intelligent Systems Society, print version of the Transaction of Knowledge and Data Engineering and the Intelligent Systems Magazine.

I haven't been reading papers lately as much as I did in the past, but I still do from time to time. So, I'll stick around until maybe I decide that I'll become poor and buy a house, then I won't be able to spend $600 on that any more.

Surprised

It's actually interesting when you do something or look at something with very low expectations and they surprise you. I had this happen to me twice yesterday in completely different things:

1. Tchaikovski's Nutcracker: Talk about over-played pieces, especially during holiday season... So yesterday I went on a concert with the Seattle Symphony and they played excerpts from the Nutcracker. So, not only it was a piece I just heard too many times to be excited about, but they were doing one of my pet peeve: only playing "selected parts" of it. Yes, I know the nutcracker is not that "consistent", but in any way... It was actually a very good performance. Conducted by Rossen Milanov, the guest conductor for the concert, it was like listening to professionals do something that you've only seen done by amateurs. And note that I've watched the Nutcracker at the Teatro Colon before. Everything was in tune, note transitions were precise, and specially, note duration and dynamics were very noticeably clean. Very interesting.

2. Amazon's Kindle: Yes, I don't have one and don't plan to buy one any time soon (well, it's sold out right now anyway). I have been hearing about it for quite some time and when it released I have to say I wasn't very impressed. It didn't seem very user-friendly. But one thing dawned on me when I was comparing it to the best seller in this industry, the Sony Reader: it has a much larger selection and, more interestingly, it's a self-sufficient device, much more like a book. In the other readers you had to really buy your book on the computer and then connect the device to the computer to upload the book to the device. With the wireless option in the Kindle, this is gone. And that's what probably will be the winning feature.

The new iPod touch, with WiFi, has also the same behavior of being able to buy and get music without needing a computer. But it is missing the "free wireless" component and the fact that music you want to accumulate much more than books. So you will quickly hit the barrier of the device size.

Anyway, it's time for me to go for a long day today.

My life

It's been some time I haven't written too much about how my life is going, huh? Well, I still won't write much here, but everything is moving alright. It's always easy to find things to be stressed about; things to be annoyed about; and not necessarily that easy to find things to be excited about. But I'll try to focus on the excitement (although people say that writing down what you are excited about is actually bad for you):

- It's winter here, so it's fun!
- Trips, trips and more trips ahead.
- No more activity on my credit, so it means that whoever stole a piece of my identity didn't do much with it (besides spending $18)
- It's 1 AM and I'm still awake!
- I've been reading a lot of interesting books! More on them some other time.

Yes, I do have a life. It might be isolated from many people, but it's still moving forward. And now I should go and... have dinner.

The two lives of social networkers

Lately I have been amazed about what kind of features social networking sites are adding. This includes things like, as I've mentioned before, showing what you have done on the web automatically to your friends. This assumes that your friends will be influenced by it and do the same, thus generating advertisement for the company and money on the social networking site's pocket.

But what I think people don't quite understand yet is that there are lots of types of social network connections, and each works differently. It's not sufficient for me to say "he is my friend". I have to say "he is my friend, but our relationship is only work-related. So that if I befriend somebody from work, I don't start to spam them with messages like "hey, I bought my new lizard!" or "I wished I could afford this new Mac laptop...". But it would be alright if they saw that I'm currently reading something like "Tapping into Unstructured Data: Integrating Unstructured Data and Textual Analytics into Business Intelligence", which most of my other friends wouldn't care about.

What is the consequence of it? Fundamentally: people get afraid of actually doing stuff online, because you don't know how people will interpret it. People get bored by the 90% of the things you do that aren't that interesting (and each person's 90% is different) and stop paying attention. The final conclusion is that the business just doesn't work very well any more.

Solution? If I was a semantic web guy, I would say: add semantics to your friendship connections. Then, by gathering semantics of your activities, you can create more powerful and robust "filters" to partition your life correctly.

But I'll pretend I'm not a semantic web guy and say: just let people choose. Create a few types of categories, like "professional", "personal", "family", "fan", "joe that I decided to accept in my network" and then allow mutual filtering (not only I can filter somebody out of some types of data, but somebody can choose to be filtered out of some type of data). Give people simple choices and help them choose. There is lots of money to be made in this business.

Telling the difference between MP3 compression rates

If you feel like you have a few minutes to spare (something I don't, but I spent them anyway), you should give this a try:

Are all MP3s Equal, by Dave Munger

It's an interesting experiment on:

- The quality of your speakers/headphones
- Your ability to see the difference between audio compression parameters for the same compression algorithm.

A more complete study would include:

- More types of music (I remember hearing quite a difference between music that has too much silence and music with too much equal noise)
- More compression algorithms (this makes it even harder to judge, but it's interesting to put them side-by-side on different types of music)

As most people, it's easy to tell what is the 64K compression. The rest becomes more subjective. I found that I was barely able to tell any difference between the other two using my speakers, but with my headphones (Sennheiser), I was able to sense something. Not very huge difference, but there was something there.

The funny thing would be to find out that there was no difference and people were making it up because he said there would be three different compression rates.

Facebook in the news

It's disturbing how much social networking systems are the center of all attention right now. It's like the keynote speech that I've heard on last year's SIGIR: the way you see the world will change, because everything you do and everybody you meet will be transparent to everybody without them having to ask you for it. I've talked about this in the past. But some people are taking this concerns to a different level:

In Facebook's Brilliant but Evil Design, Joshua Porter points out that because Facebook ulterior motives are financial (they can tell what, out of the things you've done, should be told to your friend because it will generate more money to them), the experience sharing might actually hurt your social status. And because you don't have much of an option with all the great "you are opted in by default" behavior of social networks out there, you can't really control it.

Makes me a little scared to tell you the truth. Our society is changing in front of us. Initially, we were exposed to product ads based on word of mouth only. So things that came to you were filtered by your friends based on their experience with it. Then came the newspaper, radio and TV, where everybody would be exposed to ads that were considered effective to a large population. It was a very messy "weapon". But we had still the word-of-mouth to filter out this mess and still give you good suggestions.

Now we are moving towards a world where word-of-mouth is being automated for you based on what is more likely to affect you. It doesn't mean that it will always give you bad products. Not all products will be using the fact that you like to buy things with shiny boxes. But it will increase the noise in the word-of-mouth channel. Then what is next?

Some interesting stories

Again, I don't have much to talk about. I've been annoyed most of the morning by crashing eclipse, so I decided to read some articles. Every time I do that, I find interesting things. So I decided to keep the interesting stories for myself and post some that might not be as interesting, but will hopefully prove to be valuable for your day:

Yellowstone is rising - Gives me a complete new perspective on what was happening under me when I was there.

DBpedia - Yes, not really an article, just something I wished worked better than it actually does. the "promise" of combining OpenCyc and Wikipedia (and some other data sources) with semi-well-structured data is exciting. I just don't think the data is there. You can query for information about the Eifel Tower, but when you query simple things like the list of all universities in Brazil, you get something like 25 hits. There are way more than that

Moving on... I've tried to write my thoughts about OpenSocial, but it's quite hard to write something with such an abstract API. I think that it will just turn quickly into a mess when social network websites start to actually expose their data and people will realize how different the data from each website is and how hard it will be to actually write any code that will take advantage of that and will be portable across sites. But we'll see. I don't plan to be a widget builder. I'm actually always annoyed by UI building when I have to do it...

Just to finish with something to keep people busy, one of the most interesting "blog posts" I read every week is Talis's Week in Semantic Web collection of links. It's interesting what they find and collect there. Worth visiting (if you care about it).

FriendFeed continued

So I actually got a FriendFeed account! You can check my feed at:

http://friendfeed.com/michelgoldstein

My current "services" are:

• This blog
• del.icio.us
• Google reader
• LinkedIn
• Netflix queue
• SmugMug

Now you can see how boring I am.

FriendFeed

Why haven't I seen this coming:

FriendFeed

It's a site (currently in private Beta, so I can't really give too many details) that aggregates all the public information it can get from people you consider your friends. You can see what this person added to their Amazon wish list, what they have posted on their blogs, YouTube... And even some things that I didn't even know you could monitor: shared links on Google Reader, favorite songs on Last.fm, things that you dug on Dig... It's quite scary the amount of personally-tied information available out there.

But the concept of the site is quite good, in my opinion. If you have a bunch of friends that are highly connected and use web tools all the time, it would certainly be quite cool to get a feed on what they are up to. I know I miss blog posts from friends of mine all the time (well, ignoring the fact that most of my friends gave up on their blogs - what a shame).

What is the most exciting thing about it for me is that it doesn't limit you to a system. MySpace, orkut, and probably Facebook probably can provide this kind of updates for you in their system; but they can't provide what happens outside their system.

On the other hand, what worries me is that amount of different places that you have to go to keep your list of friends up-to-date. You have to sometimes go through multiple-step registering processes to get each person into the system. And then there is the upkeep (which is probably much more complicated in the case of keeping track of friends' actions on the internet). But we will see. I signed up for Beta testing it and I'll let you know how this turns out.

The silly A380

So the Airbus 380 from Singapore Airlines finally took off. It's silly:

Video from National Geographic

Certainly a tech geek's paradise on this configuration. Unfortunately I won't be seeing any for a long time (and probably won't be willing to pay the price to travel in any for even longer)

Last one for the evening

Alright, I had to post this other ones:

New "Meme": Manly or Self-Sufficient?
Do Good Things

Those are related: lists of things you should do before you die. Lots of things there that I haven't yet done, of course. On the first lists, I can even claim I have done most of them. The final list is much more interesting though. Here is the list with my comments:

1. Found a utopian colony. - that you find every day
2. Integrate by parts. - I've done that way too many times
3. Decode the Voynich manuscript. - hehe
4. Defy gravity. - what is gravity, anyway? There is no spoon...
5. Recover lost treasure. - Treasure is such a vague word
6. Translate the pre-Socratics. - Another good thing to do on your spare time
7. Make love on the 50-yard line. - ok...?
8. Raise a pig and make sausage from it. - Can it be a dog?
9. Lead a witness. - I'll work on that
10. Outrun a bear. - I won't work on this one
11. Raise a point of order. - politics...
12. Memorize Paradise Lost. - memory?
13. Swoon. - That I don't remember...
14. Wake up in Vegas in a stranger’s house. - What happened there is a thing of the past
15. Collapse a wavefunction. - Also something that I've done way too many times
16. Run for public office. - Sorry, I can't
17. Resign in disgrace. - Hehe
18. Prove Fermat’s Last Theorem. - Can't do that, or else people will forget about poor Fermat
19. Hack into NORAD. - No comments about this one. Who knows who is reading this?
20. Problematize a binary opposition. - cool
21. Square the circle. - much more interesting
22. Kiss in anger. - huh?
23. Batten a hatch. - Sports?
24. Unscramble an egg. - Well, it's just a matter of what is an egg
25. Donate to charity. - cheap plug

Resign in disgrace... That's my next goal!

The importance of sleep

In my general "I don't want to go to sleep" evening, while going around reading articles, I came across this interesting report on Scientific American:

Can Lack of Sleep Cause Psychiatric Disorders?

I can't say I'm very surprised by the results shown here, but I just thought it was ironic to be posting this less than 6 hours before my alarm will go off and I'll have to wake up. So I had to do it.

Freebase

Tonight, instead of going to sleep after a quite intellectually busy day, I decided to use my Alpha account to Freebase and give it another try. If you are not aware of Freebase, here is my summary: it's a website that was built to allow people to create and maintain structural data about things freely. It's very web 2.0-y, with lots of annoying AJAX that half-work, but are quite powerful.

There are many ways to review this website. I'll try to touch a little on each of them:

1) Interface: as I mentioned, it's quite annoying. It's full of hover javascript actions, with double clicks, single clicks, objects that appear when they want to appear... In a way, they had very good ideas, but javascript is still an unpredictable beast. Sometimes it works great, sometimes it's so slow (especially when you are doing AJAX calls to determine what you should show when the user has his/her mouse on top of the element) that it makes it just hard to use. So, great ideas, not very great execution.

2) Features: it's actually quite interesting feature-wise. It contains three different "core" elements: types, elements and attributes. All have hierarchies. Elements can have as many types as they need. Also types makes it so that you can select which attribute to fill in for an item. Only after adding a type that contains the attribute, you can add the attribute to the item. What is its fallacy? Simple: it contains a data representation model. When you constrain yourself to something, like the explicit separation between elements and types, you are restricting what type data you can represent. Also, their representation user interface does not help you to create aggregator elements. So, if you want to say that a person did a job between two specific dates, you are out of luck.

3) Data: It's not that easy to tell how their data is. They did a general import from wikipedia, and most articles that I've seen come directly from there. User contributions are harder to find. So, everything that came from wikipedia isn't very well-structured and not necessarily authoritative. Also, because of limitations on how to represent things, you can find the same data repeated, or very similarly defined with different models. For instance, I was trying to look into Mstislav Rostropovich. He was set as a musician, but not a conductor or cellist. So, my first task was to add those types. After I've created Cellist, I've seen that other people have used conductor and cellist as professions and not "is-a". Which is valid, but just a different model. And those examples are everywhere.

My conclusion: it's an interesting experiment, but it lacks a lot of features to make it a viable solution for knowledge representation. There are other systems out there that I want to have a look:

Twine
Powerset

None I can really tell what they are about, but we'll see what comes out of it. I've sent my request to be added to their beta testers, so I'll just wait.

Discussing data representation

It's interesting how data representation discussions always teach me something. I've read uncountable papers about it, but it seems like it takes me actually talking about it, arguing with different-minded people, to understand some of the concepts behind what exists.

So, today it was a discussion that actually opened my eyes to the "beauty" of RDF. I'll have to admit that it's sometimes hard to work with all the verbosity of it. It's also strange to have to create intermediary "fake" elements, just so that you can tie things together in a more coherent way. And the more elements you add, the more expensive calculations become and so on.

Why is it good then? Because its very simple triple limitation provides you with one of what I'm starting to believe to be the most powerful thing in data representation: schema compatibility.

Schema changes all the time and it's always going to be painful to maintain it. However, if when your change can't really do something that will break the expected elements at a certain section of your graph, it makes everything much more powerful. Let me try to explain with an example:

You are modeling a catalog of items and somebody tells you that you have a concept called "list price". The first thing that comes to your mind as a modeler is that list price has one value for each currency of a given marketplace. So that's how you model it and go on with your life, making good use of your new attribute.

Then comes a request to aggregate the data from an already-existing, very-similarly-modeled catalog, but that had one important difference: it was better tailored to different marketplaces. When you start the import procedure you suddenly realize that your assumption that "list price" is a single value for a single-currency marketplace is not valid any more. In some places of the world, for imported products from neighboring countries, customers like to see also the list price on the original currency!

If your catalog is very database-driven, you are very likely looking at having to change your schema, maybe backfill all your items and have some sort of either downtime or time that your catalog is in transition, so not completely consistent. It's a lot of pain that just keeps growing as your catalog grows.

Now, if your underlying data representation was just this RDF triples graph, adding a new edge of the same type won't really cause any problems. You have only to fix the validation code and, maybe, add some filtering code to make sure that clients that consume your data and can only consume the list price in the marketplace's currency only see the data they were used to see and voila, you are done. No backfill, no database cleanup, no database schema changes (but you do change your RDF schema to increase the cardinality of the connection restriction).

Oh, well, unfortunately sometimes you just have to live with other options due to optimization, so that you can handle millions of updates a day with a reasonably small fleet of machines. It's what engineers were bred to do, I guess.

3 years working for Amazon

So today I'm celebrating the fact that I have been at Amazon.com for 3 years. I don't know if celebrating is the right term for it, but, in certain ways, it surely feels like a celebration. Not because I'm getting RSUs today and Amazon share price is the highest it has been since I have joined, but because it's been 3 years.

The question that came to my mind was: am I closer to my ideal that I was seeking when I joined? I feel like I don't quite know how to answer this question. In many ways, yes. I have learned a lot in the last 3 years, and I'm still learning. This is the inwards-looking view of it. The outwards looking one, the one that looks at the organization that I'm working for, the company, and the world that this company serves, do I think that I'm closer to what I was expecting to get?

Without entering information that I wouldn't feel very comfortable in writing, I think the answer is "maybe". There are some signs of improvement. However, I feel like there are many more signs of loss on my part, of decisions that what I had in mind will never get done. It could probably mean that I've become more experienced and can tell what is feasible and what isn't; but it could also mean that I'm losing the dare to dream. I'm becoming engrossed the the operations of life.

Anyway, 3 years... Quite a chunk of my life here. Almost 7 years in the U.S.A. An even bigger chunk of my life.

Excel 2007 Bug

When I read this last night I knew I had to post it:

Excel 2007's numeric display bug

It's one of the weirdest bugs I've ever seen. I've tested the bug myself and it's really there. An interesting challenge to figure out what is going on. Maybe I'll use it as an interview question some day! :-)

Commas and quotes

I've mentioned in the past the fact that I find silly that in American English you have to put the commas inside the quotes. Because of this, I had to post this story from Worst than Failure:

It's a Different Set of Rules

Depressing...

Audio: what is enough?

Yes, I know I haven't been blogging much lately. It's not because I haven't had ideas to blog about, just that I think I haven't had many interesting conclusions of my ideas. So, what do you do when you don't really think you know you have something interesting to blog? You post links! So here is my link for today (I was planning on sanding more links, but I'll keep it simple for now):

Is really expensive audio equipment worth the price? Very interesting article triggered by an amazing new speaker cable that was priced at US$7250.00!

This also reminds me of hearing that there are some interesting developments in the music industry lately, with some bands deciding to break away from normal music industry and provide their albums online for whatever price you want to pay. Interesting concept, but I'm not sure it's big enough yet to shake the industry in any way.

Where do I think the music industry is going? Nowhere... I continue thinking that we will have the classic competing forces: to one side the bands that are usually not very good being sponsored by a lot of money and selling a lot just because of exposure, and smaller bands that are bennefitting from the lower cost in producing albums and have a wide range of quality. Some very good things, but most of the time they are buried in the noise of bands that probably just had way too much free time in their hands.

Diversity is great, but it can be claimed that if you lower the bar you will just increase the amount of noise you get. Decrease the proportion of good music to bad music that is recorded.

Back from Yellowstone

So I'm back. Today was a day of fruitful discussions (or at least I like to fool myself thinking that they were fruitful) and catching up with what happened in the days I was out. Also, I've started to organize my pictures from the trip... About 900 pictures... It's going to be a long process to clean up everything and then upload it somewhere for people to access it.

But enough about today (or maybe yesterday). Some words about the trip itself: it was fantastic! Grand Teton and Yellowstone are amazing places. All the free-roaming animals, the strange rocks, breathtaking waterfalls, and scary hydrothermal features makes it a unique place. Something people have to visit to understand.

Weather was alright. It was the end of the season and the time that weather becomes a little bit less predictable. So we almost got snow every day, except for Friday and Sunday (which was our most active walking around day and the best weather overall). Between Monday and Tuesday it snowed about an inch. This made us a little scared as we had to drive back through passes to Idaho Falls to catch our flight.

Everything ended up working fine. There was no snow on the roads and we arrived at the airport 3 hours before our flight. Enough for us to... do nothing for a long time. I've read some of my book, some articles through my blackberry (trying hard not to read emails), and, soon enough, we were back home.

Now it's getting late and I should really go to bed. Just because I slept a lot during my vacations (there isn't much to do there when it's dark outside), I shouldn't just decide on compensating by not sleeping for the next few days...