Happy Holidays!

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Check out my holidays podcast!













メリークリスマス

See you here in 2006!

last day of school for 2005!

Well today will be my last day of school for this year. I have remarking for CSC309 and I will be marking final exams today. So, I guess like everyone else does, what are my reflections for this year. It's been a crazy roller coaster year for me in terms of PhD and research. Things didn't go so well for me in the beginning as I was getting very frustrated with my previous research. Then I switched supervisors in May and things started to pick up with my new supervisor and my new research on blogging and community. So, here are my list of accomplishments:

1. I submitted my Masters thesis which is my research paper here at U of T to pass one PhD milestone.

2. I organized and presented at the CASCON Business of Blogging workshop, and presented at the CASCON Hands-on Workshop on the Latest Technologies where I talked about RSS, feeds, and podcasting.

3. I submitted a paper and got accepted to a conference early next year (details to be posted later).

4. I presented my research at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing over the summer.

5. I organized and created the CASCON blog, IML blog (the previous IML blog at Modblog is now retired), and helped out with the IML Planet blog and Melody's blog (her old blog was on MSN Spaces before our group moved it over)

See more of my academic, research accomplishments, and publications for this year.

Maybe I should do something like what Google did here with the 2005 Google Zeitgeist, a visual snapshot of the year that is about to pass by.

So what will 2006 bring for me? My plan is to complete my research seminar presentation, depth oral, publish some more papers, and complete my PhD thesis proposal.

Pink Motorola RAZR available in Canada!

Through Rogers Wireless, the pink Motorola RAZR which is available in the States is now available in Canada. I wonder when the gold RAZR will be available (I highly doubt it and if it is, it will be REALLY expensive!)



Technorati tags: pink+RAZR

U of T home page has changed

I just went to the U of T home page, and the web site design has changed. Not sure if I like it compared to the old one, it's gonna to take time to adjust I guess.

Marking assignments done!

Finally I've finished marking assignments for A4 for the CSC309 course! And I started making the marking sheet and marking yesterday (well Monday). That's pretty good, before I used to spend so much time on marking, because I would keep on changing the marks and change the way I marked things, and I would have to then change all the previous students' and rerun their assignment again.

But this time, I sticked with a plan, and I kept everything recorded in Word and not on hard copy which I used to do before. Saved so much time, especially having to make changes. Next, I am going to proctor the exam tomorrow (today), and then have to mark the exams on Thursday!

Is the Internet broken?

Well according to MIT's David D. Clark, it is. In an article in Technology Review, Clark talks about how there is a need to redesign the Internet from scratch, especially since there are so many holes in the architecture and lack of security (with viruses, worms, spam, phishing, security patches, etc.). There is NSF funding for academics and researchers for this, to find new architectures and protocols for building Internet 2.0 I guess (just like we have Web 2.0).

Others argue that the Internet is not broken, that the reason why it is broken is an OS issue (think Microsoft Windows and its' gazillion updates from Windows Update). As well, the Internet hasn't implemented the latest protocols designed to improve security like IPv6 for example. We don't need to redesign the Internet from scratch, and would it be a good idea to. If we would redesign, how would existing protocols and applications work? And how would other people then upgrade to the new infrastructure? IPv6 didn't really take off, even it was designed to improve security and assign more IP addresses, with each device having an IP address. The problem with IPv6 is that it requires installing an IPv6 stack on all the routers and network software. Who really wants to do that? And of course there's backward compatibility problems.

So, what do people think? Does the Internet need a new makeover, a face-lift, an upgrade to progress into its future?

Marking assignments

Well today, I'm busy marking assignments for the course I am TAing, and will probably (hopefully) finish tomorrow. So research will have to be on standby until probably after the holidays. But after the submission of the final camera-ready paper, I think I need some time off. It seems after you finish writing a paper, I get tired and all my energy is drained. It's really a lot of work to write a paper. But up to the hours till the deadline of writing a paper, it's interesting how you get all this adrenaline pumping and you can like work insanely hard without any sleep. But you feel the effects right after.

So, how do others deal with post-paper submission? Do you do nothing for maybe a day, before returning back to your research?

Paper submitted!

I just submitted the final camera-ready version of the paper for the conference today. I think I'll take a break this weekend. I have a Chinese hot pot dinner with a couple of friends on Saturday and I am picking up my sister from Western on Sunday. I have to mark assignments for a course I am TAing, and then mark final exams on the 22nd. So, I don't officially start my Christmas holidays until the 23rd. I can't wait for the holidays to start!

Finally updated my web site!

I finally got around to updating my web site, which I was supposed to do a couple of months ago at the beginning of this term, but I never got around to doing so. Actually, more like being lazy I suppose. But I figured that I need to update the information on my web site with the latest research and other material. And also, I didn't like the template I used for my web site before (which was blueish), so I decided to change the template. My new revamped web site is here. I hope it's easier to read, it's certainly not as pretty as other web sites, I could certainly have made it better. But I am too busy now to worry about that, I have to submit my camera-ready paper.

Yes, my paper I submitted about 1 month ago got accepted today!

My paper got accepted!

The paper that I worked on about a month ago got accepted! I have to finish polishing it up after the reviewers' comments and submit it by Saturday, December 17. When I finish submitting the paper for final publication, then I'll post it up on my web site, and post it in our research group's blog, so you can all have a look at what IML is doing with blogs and community, and make comments on the blog!

Isn't research all about collaboration, feedback, comments, criticism, suggestions? Isn't that what a blog is designed to facilitate? Just to quote what Lilia Efimova said in her paper to the AOIR conference , research is blogging and blogging is research.

A RAZR for him and a RAZR for her

Continuing on the success of the Motorola RAZR, there is now a pink (or magenta) RAZR for women (or for men if they like). Found out about this from i4u news, the news for gadgets which I read (how do you think I keep up with all the newest gadgets and toys?). Now, I just found out there's a gold RAZR, called the V3i, but it's gonna be expensive. I guess this will be for the executives and millionaires out there. So there are now 4 different colours of RAZR all shown below.






Here's an ad from the Motorola site showing all the 3 colours of RAZR (not including gold, there's not much info on that because it's going to be sold separately and not by Motorola).

What's next for the RAZR, blue, green? (just like the Apple iPod mini?) Also, there's RAZRWire which is Bluetooth headset embedded in sunglasses.



You can also get prescription lenses for the RAZRWire! Looks like being a cyborg like Steve Mann in public is close to being really here! Of course, you're now seeing many people wearing Bluetooth headsets now these days everywhere, so it's becoming popular and fashionable. I see it all the time on the train when I go to school, when people are in the car, or walking. I wore my first Bluetooth headset about 2 years ago, and I used to make calls on the train with them. I was like the only person with that and people were all staring at me.

Now, I am staring at those people to see what kind of Bluetooth headsets they have. If anyone's curious, mine is an older generation Bluetooth headset, that uses the Bluetooth 1.0 specification (not 1.1) and it's from Omiz.

Yahoo buys del.icio.us

This is huge for the social bookmarking area and for Web 2.0 and tagging. Yahoo just bought del.icio.us. More information on my post at my research group's blog so I won't repeat it here.




Let's just say that I had a hunch that sooner or later this was going to happen.
Hmm, it would be great to find a summer research internship job at Yahoo Research!

Typing search words in Firefox URL bar

Hey, I just found something cool. I wanted to find the web site for the Samsung MM-A900 cell phone that I found from CNET (I just wrote a post earlier), and do a search on the Google search bar in Firefox. However, I accidentally put in the Firefox URL bar, and when I pressed enter it directed me to this page on the Samsung MM-A900 cell phone. I didn't know that you could do that with Firefox! Another great reason I use Firefox as my main browser and not Microsoft Internet Explorer, among also other things (like tabbing, being fast, extensible plugins, non-Microsoft, etc.).

Imitating the Motorola RAZR

The Motorola RAZR is a very popular phone due to its slim design and big screen. I know because I have it. Samsung has now come out with a RAZR wannabe called the MM-A900 (SPH-A900) and it's available from Sprint shown below.




Compare this with the RAZR V3:




I haven't seen any word about whether it's available in Canada. CNET has done a review here and it seems it doesn't really unseat the RAZR. It does improve on some aspects of the RAZR though, like a 1.3MP camera, swiveling lens and built-in flash.

It would be kind of nice if the next RAZR could do some short clips of video so if I see something I can quickly make a video, that would be something that I would use. I don't know why there is no cable to connect from the RAZR to the computer though, apparently if you want that it costs to get the cable. You're already paying for the RAZR, and most cell phones do include a data cable. I know you can transfer through Bluetooth but for most people, their computers don't have Bluetooth and having to buy a Bluetooth USB dongle or adapter will cost about maybe $50 Canadian. If you transfer a lot, then Bluetooth is really slow and a cable is much better.

However, I somehow still like the RAZR V3 better, maybe I am biased because I have one.

Gonna be a busy 2 weeks before Christmas holidays

I'm looking forward to the Christmas holidays. I've got lots of work to do before the holidays. I have to mark assignments and a final exam for a course I am TAing, work on my PhD research, start to prepare a document for my PhD depth oral, and start applying for summer research internships. Also, I'm going to a couple of Christmas get-togethers with family and friends, so it's gonna be busy for me.

So if you don't see regular daily blog posts from me, then you'll know why ;)

Gmail changes

I've noticed some changes to Gmail today. First, there's no showing that Gmail has added anti-virus scanning, but that's not new anymore. Second, there's an ad for Google Talk, but I am using Google Talk now. Finally, I've noticed that when you want to delete a mail item, instead of "Move to Trash", it says "Delete" from the drop down menu. I don't understand why before Gmail just had Delete, since all the other e-mail clients have that. A lot of people may not understand what "Move to Trash" means, and "Delete" is more easier and uniform around all e-mail clients.

Don't know why it took Google so long to realize that.

Sun University Developer talk today

Today, Sun came to talk to U of T CS and ECE students about Sun's latest stuff, evangelizing open source, Java and OpenSolaris, promoting the Sun developer network and student network, as well as giving free T-shirts and CDs. I was at the talk, and got a free T-shirt, it was orange coloured as you can see below.

Front of shirt:


Back of shirt:


I didn't go for the first part of the talk in the afternoon, which was about Sun's DTrace which is dynamic tracing in the OS. But that wasn't what interested me, what I was interested is Sun's take on Java and seeing what's new with Java, as I haven't kept up with it. So here's what I got from the talk.

Sun has a developer network just like Microsoft's MSDN and today Sun stressed about the student connection on the Developer Network. So, I signed up for the network, which offers free Java and Sun tools like Sun's NetBeans IDE. I missed the first presenter after the DTrace talk, so the presenter that came next was Inyoung Cho, who is a Technology Evangelist. Being a Technology Evangelist is cool, you get to try out and talk about new technologies, I actually wanted to have a job like that when I was working full time and before going back to grad school.

Inyoung Cho, Technology Evangelist
Inyoung is a graduate from the University of Toronto and now is a Technology Evangelist working for Sun. She first mentioned that from the beginning. She talked about the popularity of Java and how Java is portable (I know that already, so this part was boring for me, I wanted to know about what new things were happening with Java, which she came to later and I will mention that later). She mentioned about the different flavours of Java that run on different types of devices (Micro Edition, Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition). Then she talked about the history of Java with Oak and James Gosling. OK boring again, I've heard this many many times now. What I didn't know was that this year, Java celebrated its 10th birthday, it was in 1995 that Java was born. She showed a picture of the Java team with a birthday cake at JavaOne, Sun's Java developer conference. Next, she began to talk about the impact of Java, she mentioned Java contributes to a $100 billion economy and it is growing. The stats according to Ovum are the following:

2.8B Java devices worldwide, 1.07B Java powered phones, 700M Java powered PCs, 149 Carrier deployments, 1.25B Java Cards deployed, 4.5M Java developers

Java is everywhere in RFID tags, cell phones, refrigerator magnets, and will be in next generation devices like set-top boxes, toasters, refrigerators (hmm, does this sound familiar, when Sun talked about Jini doing that? And where is Jini now?). She also talked about how community is what makes Java so successful and where it's at now, and how the Java Community Process (JCP) is there
for creating and extending existing Java APIs. The reasons for Java being so successful according to her are compatibility, community, volume, and value. The next thing she did was to show how easy it is to create a Java application, she had a demo with NetBeans IDE 5.0 Beta to create a mobile application. NetBeans allows you to create a GUI application form and source code, compile and run in the emulator. You can specify the design by drawing which buttons, and forms goes back or forward. NetBeans also has a profiler which can monitor applications and monitor threads, and you can look at heap size in VM Telemetry Overview. I felt the NetBeans IDE was pretty neat especially the design panel, it seems very similar to developing for mobile devices using Microsoft .NET and

The next thing she talked about was very interesting to me was the Java roadmap for the next couple of years and where Java is going. Is Java dead, like some people say? Well, from today, Java is alive and well. Here is the Java Standard Edition (Java SE) roadmap.

Java 5.0 Tiger

- this is out and has seven New Major Language Features
- Make it more easier to use, eg. they've introduced a Foreach loop
- Powerful new libraries like printf and Scanner
- concurrent utilities (simplified multi-threaded programming
- improvements to Swing (better look and feel)

Java 6 Mustang (will be released 2006/Q3)

- Java 6.0 Mustang Themes:
- Compatibility, stability and quality
- Diagnosability, monitoring and management
- XML and web services * (this will be great since there needs to be tighter integration with XML and web services, it still really isn't that easy to do web services in Java)
- Ease of development
- Enterprise desktop
- Transparency

Java 7 Dolphin (to be released 2008/Q1)
- will include Mustang component JSRs such as annotation processors, JDBC 4.0 (don’t need to specify JDBC driver in Java, just specify in XML), easy to implement web services
- JSR-277 to take care of JAR problems like adding native code to the JAR
- add XML language features, make XML part of Java syntax (that would really simplify stuff a lot!). For example, the idea is that you could write your Java application and XML together like MyFriend.getFriend(). Right now you can't do that, you have to get a Writer component (like writing HTML in Java using servlets)

Then there were questions and I asked the question about compatibility of Java code from early JDK versions. I know (and I'm sure others also) find it extremely frustrating when I run some Java code and it works in older version of the SDK, but it doesn't run on newer versions because the Java API is deprecated. It makes it so difficult because I have to use a specific JDK to run a Java application which shouldn't be if Java's model is write once run anywhere. Especially for older Java applications that want to run on new Java SDKs. So, Inyoung explained that Mustang will have the feature where you can specify to ignore older JDKs and deprecated APIs .

Sun always likes to talk about future technologies that use Java and so here are some. First one is having Java in the car with iDrive, second is that there will be Java technology in the Blu-ray Disc (for the new standard of DVD). The third is smart dust called SunSpots where you have small sensors and they have a tiny Java VM inside (kind of like Tini or Motes I suppose).

The next talk was from Peter Karlsson, also a Technology Evangelist and he talked about OpenSolaris.

Peter Karlsson, Technology Evangelist, OpenSolaris

First of all, I knew that Sun had a version of Solaris for Intel which I had a copy and tried installing one time but then took it out. I knew that Sun was open sourcing their Solaris OS, but I didn't know that it was called OpenSolaris. So, OpenSolaris is the open source of the Solaris OS. It is free and can be quickly found through Solaris Express. With OpenSolaris, you have everything there compared with Linux where you just have kernel and you have to download packages to build. OpenSolaris has 10M lines of source code. When you go to the OpenSolaris web site, there is an OpenSolaris source browser which is very fast, you can search for definitions, history, and cross-references.

You can get the latest marketing numbers for OpenSolaris which I certainly did not know. In my opinion before I came to the Sun talk, I thought Solaris was dead, you just hear Windows, Linux, and MacOSX, but rarely Solaris. Boy, I was dead wrong. OpenSolaris uses a license called CDDL which is based on Mozilla MPL, you can link binary code with source files. Sun's philosophy with OpenSolaris is to release updates frequently to Solaris on a 6-8 month basis. For developer tools, Sun has the Sun Studio compilers, GNU compilers, cool source browser, and bugs can be tracked here. Also, Peter mentioned that Sun has the best compiler on the planet, which in many cases is faster than the GNU compiler, which I found that interesting. Sun is also trying to create a computer science curriculum for OpenSolaris, and looking into community projects with universities (eg. Sun with UCLA). An important thing to note is that OpenSolaris is not a distribution. Sun is going to build the next version of Solaris using OpenSolaris.

Solaris 10 includes DTrace (dynamic tracing), predictive self-healing, service management framework, secure execution (digital signatures on files before executing), and ZFS (which is Sun's new file system, also never heard about that). Peter made a joke about how he was able to run programs from 1995 on Solaris 10 without having to recompile, he said try doing that with Windows, which to that many laughed. Solaris 10 has process rights management where you can have 48 privileges associated with users, processes. Solaris ZFS is a way cool file system (according to Peter), it has 128-bits, and has very high reliability. Sun has a Solaris 10 University Challenge which he touted and basically it involves students to work with Solaris 10 and win cash prizes and Sun systems. Solaris is the distribution of OpenSolaris and it’s free. You can participate at OpenSolaris Del.icio.us tag.

Next talk was about Java GUI with Swing, but I didn't attend the full thing. This is all that I recorded.

Java GUI with Swing
Shannon Hickey
Technical Lead, JFC/Swing
He was a graduate student from CS at U of T. He gave introduction to Swing and showed Swing demo, then with button and behaviour. I wasn't really much into Swing, so I didn't attend the remaining part of his talk.

All in all, it was ok, hey I got a free T-shirt and free pizza!!!

Here are some links for the Sun Developer Network Academic Program:

Join the Sun Developer Network
Get your free developer tools
Get trained on Sun technologies and tools at no-cost
Subscribe to the Student Connection eNewsletter
Solaris 10 University Challenge
OpenSolaris community
NetBeans
java.net
Find out about all Sun-sponsored open source communities

Gmail errors today

Has anybody encountered Gmail errors today? I've been encountering mail problems and getting the following message:



And then after I click OK, then I get this screen:



A sorry for the inconvenience message? From Google? Can this be possible?
I thought Gmail was robust, is something wrong with Gmail today? I've forwarded my school e-mail to Gmail because it's fast and I like the threading of e-mails together and the categories for the e-mail. I might think again and switch back to leaving my school e-mail on my CS department's e-mail server.

I just read this message from the gmailforums. Apparently, it's happened before, someone suggested to log in using the secure version. That worked.

Take the search engine experiment!

Try this search engine experiment to reveal which search engine you like, Google, Yahoo or MSN. According to the results,
Google comes up on top with 41%, followed by 33% by Yahoo and 27% by MSN. Which search engine results do you prefer? Take the experiment, it only takes less than 5 seconds!

I tried it with the query "GadgetMan blog", and I apparently I chose Yahoo as the relevant search results. The others returned the CASCON 2005 blog and MSN Spaces blog.

Google's early days

Here's a blog about Google's early days and the ex-Googlers who made it happen. Interesting to read the inner workings of Google and what happened behind the scenes. Only through blogs can this happen.

Round 1 results for Canadian Blogging Awards

Just found out that the Round 1 winners are up on the Canadian Blogging Awards site. Unfortunately, this blog did not make it to Round 2, but Joey de Villa's blog (speaker at the Business of Blogging workshop at the CASCON conference) did make it to Round 2 in the Best Blog category. So vote for him!

Thanks to all who voted for the CASCON blog, my GadgetMan blog, and the How About That Melody blog.

Just finished submitting a journal paper!

I apologize if I haven't been blogging here lately. I just finished submitting a paper to a journal that was due today at midnight. By the time of the clock right now, I submitted it with 15 minutes left to spare!

Another paper journal submission done, now got to process more of the results from the CASCON blog conference and other blogs, and analyze the results. On top of that, I also have to mark and help out students for an assignment for a course I am TAing. And also prepare applications for summer research internships. Ah, the fun never stops in PhD!

Last day to vote for Round 1 of Canadian Blogging Awards

Today is the last day to vote in Round 1 of the Canadian Blogging Awards. So please vote for my blog as Best Personal Blog, and while you're there vote for How About That Melody as Best New Blog, CASCON blog for Best Group Blog and Best Business Blog, and Accordion Guy as Best Blog!

Behavioural Graph Colouring CS talk - Michael Kearns

Today, I attended a Computer Science talk by Michael Kearns about Behavioural Graph Colouring.

Abstract:
The pioneering work of Travers and Milgram in 1969 established the
now-familiar folklore of "six degrees" of separation in natural social
networks. More recently, researchers including Jon Kleinberg and Duncan
Watts have explored the algorithmic aspects of how messages are forwarded
in such networks. Perhaps the computer science view of this fascinating
line of thought can be best summarized as follows: Using relatively local
information, distributed human organizations can compute good
approximations to the all-pairs shortest paths problem. What other sorts
of distributed optimization problems can humans solve?

In this talk, I will first overview our more mathematical research at
the intersection of computer science, economics and social networks that
led us to be interested in the empirical question above. I will then
describe the preliminary findings of a behavioral study we held recently
at Penn. Human subjects attempted to perform distributed graph coloring
using a system that controlled network structure, information conditions,
and a variety of other variables of interest. The experiments shed early
light on whether such problems can be solved by humans, under what
conditions, and what algorithms they seem to adopt.

The behavioral experiments are joint work with Nick Montfort, Huanlei
Ni, and Siddharth Suri.

Bio:
Michael Kearns is a professor of Computer and Information
Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the National
Center Chair in Resource Management and Technology, and is co-director of
Penn's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. He has published
extensively in the theory of machine learning, probabilistic artificial
intelligence, and related disciplines. His most recent interests lie at
the intersections of computer science with economics, game theory, and
finance.

This was an interesting talk, he talked about social network theory and how humans can collaborate to solve complex computer science problems, as shown from his preliminary results. It looks like social networks are being applied everywhere now, so it's good that my research is into this area and I switched professors in my PhD to continue along this line of research.

Alias TV series ends in May 2006

Oh too bad, I just heard, my favorite TV series Alias is ending its fifth season at the end of May 2006. Apparently, Alias cost too much to make, have you seen Alias with all the props, the special effects, the gadgets and the high-tech stuff? So it was canned by ABC. I've been into Alias since I first started watching it like 5 years ago, but I haven't been watching it lately since season 4 last year, so I don't know what's been going on. Partly, I didn't know what time Alias was on for this season.

Modblog is still down

Did I mention how much I hate Modblog?. Well the site is still down where we host our research blog. Sacha, one of our research group members, just told me that Bloglines keeps a cache of the feeds you subscribe to. Well lone and behold, she's right! So, I guess I'll take the cache and then import the feed into our blog platform (we're going to be using WordPress), which we are using for all our other blogs (the Indie music blog, and the CASCON conference blog).

I really love WordPress and how you can customize by adding plugins and edit the blog pages. Kudos to the WordPress development team! Maybe I should move over my blog here on Blogger to WordPress. I might do that, when I have time and am not so busy. I am busy right now getting the analysis of data from the CASCON blog and the Indie music blog.

Vote for my blog as Best Personal Blog at Canadian Blogging Awards

Round 1 voting has begun for the Canadian Blogging Awards. Please vote my site as Best Personal blog. Round 1 voting ends November 30th. While you are there, other nominations from our research group include How About That Melody for Best New Blog, and the CASCON blog for Best Group Blog and Best Business Blog. Also vote for my friend Accordion Guy as the Best Blog.



Technorati tags: canadian blogging awards

How About That Melody Indie music blog has a new home

Our research group has moved the How About That Melody Indie music blog to our own hosted blog site.  We control the content and the blog, and can make whatever changes we want.  We're using WordPress which by the way, is a great blogging platform. It allows you to edit your php pages and the sky is the limit as to what you want to put on your blog.  Even Robert Scoble, chief blogger from Microsoft has switched his blog to WordPress from Movable Type.  Come and check us out at our new home!

Catholic Insider podcast

I've been listening to this Catholic Insider podcast on my iPod mini. It's a great podcast recorded by Father Roderick, and it provides great inspiration in the Catholic faith. This is a great example of reviving back Catholicism and encouraging youths to be active in their daily Catholic life. He talks also about the happenings around the world, the gadgets, Harry Potter, Star Wars chronicles. It's amazing, he even got his bishop interested in podcasting, and how it can be used as a new medium to spread and evangelize the word of God. Or in other words, provide a Godcast.

You can subscribe to the Catholic Insider podcast, the Praystation portable podcast, the Harry Potter podcast, and the Star Wars chronicles podcast.

Modblog sucks

Our research group's blog is on Modblog, but I think it's time that we switch over to WordPress and install it locally on our server. I've been delaying this, but now it's the second time that Modblog has been down. They have some technical issues, once they're up, I am moving our blog out of there!

Google to Go

I'll take a Google to Go please. Yes, Google Local is available for your mobile phone. I don't know if it will work with Rogers Wireless in Canada, but it does show my phone (Motorola RAZR V3), so maybe I'll try it out and see how it goes. Having Google Maps on your phone or PDA would really be good so you don't get lost, which I know I do get lost very often!

Grad student's productivity curve

Ha, this is funny!  The curve of a grad student's productivity.  How many students have this kind of productivity?  Where there are certain days when you get a lot of work done, and others when you get absolutely no work done?

Technorati tags: grad student productivity

Quotes about operating systems

Here are some neat quotes about operating systems. I particularly like the following:

"Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix." (Kieran O'Shaughnessy)

"Operating systems are like underwear — nobody really wants to look at them." (Bill Joy)
- Ha ha, that's funny

"Develop for it? I’ll piss on it. [the NeXT Computer]" (Bill Gates)
-This one, I didn't hear about, and this coming from Bill Gates?

"Linux is just a file system and a file manager." (Steve Ballmer)
- Well Steve, that's kind of wrong, because your Apple OSX is based on BSD version of Linux.

When you say: "I wrote a program that crashed Windows", people just stare at you blankly and say: "Hey, I got those with the system -- for free." (Linus Torvalds)

"Every operating system out there is about equal. We all suck." (Brian Valentine of Microsoft)
- Wow, this coming from Microsoft, interesting. So that means Microsoft Windows sucks! But didn't we know that already?

"It's not the technology, folks, it's the people. When we trace [the errors] back, it's always human error." (Bob Herbold of Microsoft)
- Isn't that what technical support always says to the end-user?

"Java is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS." (Alan Kay)
- Hmm, I found that one a little strange, I think Java is a good thing, and I use it for programming most of the time

"I think it would be pretty bizarre if OS/2 finds any popularity." (Bill Gates)
- I remember Microsoft supported OS/2, because they helped build it along with IBM
- but then when Microsoft came out with Windows, they totally abandoned OS/2 and OS/2 finally dug its own grave, even though it was a more superior OS. I remember having it installed on my computer, and it rarely crashed. But there was lack of support for programs, although you could run Windows applications on OS/2 through the Windows emulator

"Saying that XP is the most stable MS OS is like saying that asparagus is the most articulate vegetable." (Dave Barry)

"Of course, Linus didn't sit down in a vacuum and suddenly type in the Linux source code.... He had my book.... But the code was his. The proof of this is that he messed the design up." (Andrew Tanenbaum)
- Ooh, that's pretty harsh

"I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter." (Nicholas Petreley)
- here's a person who really hates Microsoft!


What are your favorite quotes?

Peter Norvig talk from Google today

Peter Norvig from Google came to talk today at the Distinguished Lecture in Computer Science at U of T today. His talk was about AI in the Middle: Mediating between Author and Reader.

Here was the abstract of his talk:

The system of publishing the written word has made more knowledge available to more people than any other technology. No other system comes within a factor of a million. Now that a good portion of this written material is available online, it can be processed by computer. But the written word is notoriously imprecise and ambiguous, so currently the best way to make use of it is to leverage the intelligence and
language understanding ability of author and reader, and relegate the computer to the more modest role of connecting the two. Even this modest role still leaves a number of challenges in computer science, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence, which will be discussed.

His bio is here with an excerpt below:

Peter Norvig has been at Google Inc since 2001 as the Director of Machine Learning, Search Quality, and Research. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field.

Previously he was the senior computer scientist at NASA and head of the 200-person Computational Sciences Division at Ames Research Center. Before that he was Chief Scientist at Junglee, Chief designer at Harlequin Inc, and Senior Scientist at Sun Microsystems Laboratories.

Dr. Norvig received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a Professor at the University of Southern California and a Research Faculty Member at Berkeley. He has over fifty publications in various areas of Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering, including the books Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common
Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX.

Here are the notes that I made from the talk:

Peter talked about the 3 different methods for combing knowledge from information. The first method is knowledge engineering which involves general level human intelligence therefore this requires logical axioms and encoding knowledge. However, the problem is too expensive and it takes time to process and analyze, we don’t really need all that knowledge. The second method is machine learning (of which U of T Computer Science is renowned in, as it has the largest group in AI). Machine learning involves examining trends, and with machine learning algorithms, you can do spelling corrections. So, Peter gave an example where his Google colleague's name using dictionary-based schemes becomes Tehran Salami. The audience laughed. However, if you use corpus based, then you get a better result. Even though the more data you get, then the algorithms work (shown by Google's graphs and prediction scheme), we need to worry more about the data rather than the algorithms. So this method is not really good for general AI.

Enter AI in the middle as a hybrid that connects the authors and readers together, between knowledge engineering and machine learning. There is a book by Andy Clark called Being There Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again – the brain is not the sole part, Clark says that the brain is the mediator. If we apply this to search, the idea is this. We predict something, present it to the user, and the user provides feedback. We let the human do the decision, and don’t try to approximate human intelligence. We would be happier by getting material from an authority rather than an aggregator.

How to make author and reader become more intelligent? We need to know about the What, Who, How, Where, When, and Wallet (which is very important to get money!). Google uses Statistical Machine Translation. For example, to translate Arabic into English, some words are not fluent, there is 1 disfluency for each sentence. For translating Chinese into English, there are 2 disfluencies for each sentence. So Google uses a probabilistic model based on word statistics, don’t use syntax (parser), or semantics (ontologies, Wordnet). More data is better, this doubles the parallel training corpus.

Another way for searching words is using Named Entity Extraction. For example, Sun Microsystems is in the group of software companies. They use word clustering and use a Bayes network to assign words into clusters to infer what the word is, and use that to return results of query.

There was a question period after the talk. I asked question about Google’s take on social searching and searching based on others that have searched for that term before like for example My Web 2.0 Beta from Yahoo and from del.icio.us and flickr and tagging. Peter replied that he doesn’t believe tagging works well but Google is working on personalization of searches and in the labs for sharing searches with others. Before they based their searching algorithms on stateless, but now beginning to add state. However, he believes that in certain situations, tagging does work like for example in pictures but it doesn't work well for web pages.

Another question that was asked was about structural searching. For example, finding apartments with a certain price and at a certain location. Google can't answer that query for you. Peter said that Google hasn't really looked too much into this. On the topic of searching on mobile devices, Peter mentioned the need for a different type of interface because of the constrained space and that this will become important in the future. This is probably the work of the summer intern as a wireless engineer at Google Labs.

The last question dealt with visualizing searches and showing clusters. Should we have clustering at all? Peter and Google say no, for the majority of queries, you don’t want clusters, but for the minority audience then it may be good to have clusters, but for most queries, it won’t help to show the clusters in the results. One of the problems with clustering is that what happens if the cluster is incorrect then have to correct the cluster where it would be easier to just redo the text then revisualize it. Another problem with clustering is what to name the cluster.

All in all, it was a good talk, hey it's from Google! It's the work at Google that makes Computer Science still the discipline that students want to get their degree in.

Splogs and Dr. Seuss

I just read this comment from the post in Slashdot about splogs clog blog services. Splogs are basically spam blogs, a program is written which creates a blog and proliferates them all over the place (but the content is garbage and has no meaning to the topic of the blog whatsoever), polluting the blogosphere. In fact, using this method inflates the PageRank on Google of that blog because it links to other valid web sites, but the spam blogs are in no way related to them. Then someone commented about splogs clog blog services should be called splogs clog blog logs. And then this guy started talking about how that is a tongue twister and started other tongue twisters as shown below:

Splogs clog blog logs.
Spam jams Stan's LAN.
Guy's WiFi goes awry.
CERN confirms worm, firms squirm.
Forget cassette and diskette, USB key snazzy.
Nimrods applaud iPods abroad, while tightwads called slipshod clawed screen fraud.
One Phish, Two Phish.
Red Phish, Blue Phish.

Ha, that's funny!

Regarding about splogs, whenever any new technology comes out, there's always going to be people trying to find ways to circumvent it for prestige, to show that the technology is flawed, for fun, etc. That's never going to change. We need to somehow find methods to detect them and have ways to combat them. Kind of creating a digital nervous system like in the body, where the body can fight the viruses. This is the hope of autonomic computing.

Get your own Google logo or personal search engine!

Ah, this is cool, I just read this post about how to make your own Google logo! Everybody loves Google. This web site will allow you to make your own name in Google logo format and have your own personal search engine. Here's mine:

Paper submitted!

I've been pretty busy the past couple of days preparing a paper for a conference based on my research and I've just finally submitted it tonight at 11:55 pm before the deadline of 12:00 am!

Talk about intense work activity. I actually started writing the actual paper 2 days before the deadline, and worked non-stop, at school, at home, on the train. I thought I couldn't get it done, but I was able to. I was so tired after, so I took the entire weekend to do no research, just relax, watched a movie, spend time with family, and went shopping.

I think now my rest time is over, so it's back to work on Monday, for more cutting edge research! Ah, the life of a PhD student.

RIM Blackberries now have Bluetooth and one has a camera!

Well, it looks like RIM is now widening their turf from a straight e-mail device and getting into the PDA/smart phone/all-in-one mobile device market. RIM is going to release some new Blackberries that will all have Bluetooth. One model, the 7130E, will have 802.11b, a QWERTY-landscape keyboard and camera. Wow! I remember I had a discussion with a friend of mine who was working at RIM about why RIM Blackberries didn't include Bluetooth, I thought it would be easy to put in, so you could use your Bluetooth headset with the Blackberry phone or transfer data to another Bluetooth device, like swapping contacts, or syncing with your desktop.

I find Bluetooth to be a great feature, of course, I was into Bluetooth in 2000 when I was working at Classwave Wireless in Toronto. I was an advocate for Bluetooth then, I envisioned having Bluetooth in every electronic device and that infrared would be killed because of Bluetooth. Well, my prediction was wrong in terms of infrared being non-existent, but you do see new devices have integrated Bluetooth and it does make sense. I can transfer my pictures from my Bluetooth Motorola RAZR cell phone to my laptop, sure it's slow, but it works and it's instantaneous. I did this while blogging at the CASCON conference.

So now this makes me think about how you have two camps, an integrated all-in-one device, or a device that does one thing. There's pros and cons to both. You can have one device that works well on one thing but then have to have different devices for different functions, eventually carrying them on a belt or pocket and becoming like BatMan. Well, that's what I have right now, that's why they call me GadgetMan.

Tony DeRose talk from Pixar

Today is the talk from Tony De Rose from Pixar at the Computer Science colloquium at the University of Toronto. He is talking about Math in the Movies, and started with a teaser trailer of Cars, which will come out on June 9, 2006. There's lots of people in the room as almost everyone has watched a movie made by Pixar like Monsters Inc, A Bug's Life, and Finding Nemo. It's interesting in that when Tony graduated from his PhD, he had a tough decision to decide to become a professor at University of Washington or at University of Toronto. So, he became a professor at University of Washington before going to work at Pixar.

Here is his abstract and bio:

abstract --
Film making is undergoing a digital revolution brought on by
advances in areas such as computer graphics and computational
physics. This talk will provide a behind the scenes look at how
fully digital films, such as Pixar's "Finding Nemo" and "The
Incredibles", are made, with particular emphasis on the role that
mathematics plays in the revolution.

bio --
Tony DeRose is currently a Senior Scientist and lead of the
Research Group at Pixar Animation Studios. He received a Ph.D. in
Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in
1985. From 1985 to 1995 Dr. DeRose was a Professor of Computer
Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. In 1998, he
was a major contributor to the Oscar winning short film "Geri's
game", and in 1999 he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics
Achievement Award.

In his talk, Tony talked about how the animation is done in the movies. In a progression reel of the movie, first there is a story reel of frames which are drawn out on paper. Then each frame on paper is then animated with layout, then simulation and adding actors and audio. There's also lighting that needs to be added to the frame, and there is a mathematical formula that calculates the amount of lighting L(x, y) which involves an integral of L(y,z) and shading R(x,y,z). The problem is solving for L(x,y) which is usually done with an approximation.

I've always been fascinated about the making of animation movies and the technical process involved. Tony mentioned about subdivision surfaces where you take the points of a surface, split and average in a subdivision matrix and then as you interate through the subdivision, you can have a smoother surface. He showed how subdivision surfaces was applied to Woody's hand and face from Toy Story 1.

Wow, a lot of the math relates back to signal analysis that I studied in a course about more than 7 years ago. Tony is talking about wavelet noise construction and Perlin noise. Fourier transform, sampling, deja vu for me. I remember I used to have to manually compute the Fourier transform!

2005 Canadian Blogging Awards

The 2005 Canadian Blogging Awards are coming up which I got from the GTA Bloggers. Nominate your favorite blogs in one of the following best categories:

Best Blog
Best Political-Left Blog: for blogs that are politically left.
Best Political-Right Blog: for blogs that are politically right.
Best New Blog: for blogs that started in 2005.
Best Group Blog
Best Humour Blog
Best Photo Blog
Best Culture Blog: for blogs about art, literature, movies, music, etc.
Best Personal Blog: For blogs about the lives of their authors.
Best Media Blog: for blogs by professionals in the media.
Best Business Blog
Best Religious Blog
Best Sports Blog
Best Blog Post: For an individual post by a blogger.
Best Blog Post Series: For a series of posts that relate to each other.

I nominated the CASCON blog for Best Group Blog and Best Business Blog.

Apparently, AccordionGuy is up for the Best Blog, you should check it out, it's really good!

I also nominated How About That Melody, our research Indie music blog as Best Culture Blog, and Best Blog of 2005.

Need help to write a conference paper?

I'm sure many people find it difficult and very time consuming to write a conference paper. Not anymore with SCIGen from the folks at MIT. Automatically, get a paper written within less than 30 seconds! It randomly generates a paper for you.

Apparently, one of the papers that the MIT students computer generated got accepted to a conference! Kind of makes you think about the peer-review process for reviewing papers and the quality.

Blog data for research

One of the issues for researchers in mining blogs is to find blog data to test their algorithms and research on. It's currently difficult to find blog data since it's not publicly available or you have to ask a certain researcher to see if you can have access to them. I just read a post today about making blog data available. I just wrote a comment back to Anjo's blog (Anjo also worked with Lilia Efimova, who's prominent in the academic blogging community) proposing that there should be some forum or group or web site where people could submit their blog data traces for other researchers to use.

By doing this, we can foster greater community and help those with mining the blog data and advance the research on blogs. We could perhaps build an open-source community for sharing blog data (maybe under a Creative Commons license?). There's already something like this with the wireless community. CRAWDAD is a group that maintains wireless traces for Wi-Fi from Dartmouth College. What do people think about this?

Technorati tags: blog data, blog research

RSS feeds for mobile devices

For the longest amount of time, I've been looking for a feedreader to install on my Palm Zire 71. I tried various feedreaders for Palm. I wanted to try out the FeedBurner feedreader for Palm but unfortunately it requires Websphere Micro Edition which only runs on Palm Tungsten C, Palm Treo 600, Palm Z22, Palm Tungsten T. So that really sucks. I tried Vagabond and AvantBlog. AvantBlog sounded pretty good, because it can sync Blogger blogs and I have this blog using Blogger. It's just an AvantGo channel that you add to AvantGo which you can download on Palm or any other mobile device that supports AvantGo. However, you have to remember to sync the channel. I tried doing this, but then it didn't sync properly, and I had to sync again from the Palm and HotSync back to my computer. It's not foolproof though, sometimes it does work and sometimes it doesn't. So, I got sick and tired and I don't use that anymore.

Then I was browsing my AvantGo channels on my Palm when I saw that AvantGo now supports RSS feeds with AvantGo RSS. I thought this is great, because I use AvantGo all the time to read my news from the web offline on my Palm. So I tried it out and synced one of the feeds I subscribe to. I think I didn't do it properly, because not all the posts showed and it was difficult to scroll. Also, AvantGo RSS also supports creating an AvantGo RSS channel for your blog. So, that's what I am going to do next and put that on this blog.

Now, I just found out through Google search on feed reader for Palm that there is a standalone Palm feed reader application called Quick News for PalmOS. So maybe I'll try that and see how that goes. Will keep you updated.

Technorati tags: palm feed reader

Subscribe to my podcasts!

I've made my podcasts available for subscribing now. Go here to subscribe to my podcasts!

Notes from Mik Lamming's talk

Here's the notes of the talk today with Mik Lamming that I wrote with my laptop.

Sensing Behaviour
Mik Lamming, HP Labs

Before Mik began to talk, he discussed about how before he got into research, he used to work in Photoshop. He met Roy Want (who now works at Intel Research) from Olivetti with the Active Badge. Active Badge is a device which looks like a badge and is equipped with a radio for sensing where you are in the office environment. It was one of the first ubicomp systems deployed. Mik then talked about his work on the Forget-me-not which he worked on at Xerox PARC.

Forget-me-not
Xerox, 1993

- Pervasive over space and time
- Proximity information better than location
- Showed BirdDoc to Xerox, person under surveillance
- Roy Want worked in Xerox to help Mik with Active Badge with a display -> PARCTab was invented
- Log people’s behaviour, who you were with, where you are, log people’s activities by wearing these small devices – they embedded these devices everywhere in the lab
- Built system called Forget-me-not as a memory prosthesis unit
- Want to remember things in the home not just in the lab
- Xerox said no possible use for this system
- Repurposed the system as document retrieval system, how to retrieve documents
- Lessons learned:
- people are working on systems with absolute position (have to make uplink to wireless network, that burns power, it’s more expensive to do that than peer-to-peer pinging, that was their theory)
- there was lack of sympathy to tracking people’s behaviour eg. Participant would come back and the device didn’t work because it was wet
- invasive and privacy – dumb and evil
- installing this infrastructure was extremely tedious
- lots of these applications need to work in your own house, single user value proposition, rather than lots of users

Alzheimer’s and Caregivers Work

This was Mik's work that he talked about while working at HP Labs.

- did caregiver interviews in collaboration with Prof. Linda Nichols, UT Memphis
- caregivers are typically the elderly, they have caregiver burnout
- expensive cost of caregiving
- analyzed logs of data
- Alzheimer’s patient behaviour can fluctuate from day to day
- Designed a system for sensing
- Zone detection eg. In bathroom, in bed,near stove, fire
- Proximity
- Constructed a design rationale for environment sensing for monitoring environment

Out of this came the Minder concept.

Minder Concept
- Personal technology for sensing personal and social context while providing control and privacy of information
- Embed them in everyday things that you carry, wear
- P2P system
- Always on and attentive, yet long-lived, a year without battery change, wear it day and night
- Backed by 3rd party brokered utility services
- Proximity matters without central system to be better than Forget-me-not
- Opportunistic interactions, see proximity and upload the log to a portal for timeline analysis
- Pattern recognition language to apply to the minder device
- Make a network that can’t be heard by others based on shared authentication (privacy model), next version will use UWB

At this point, Mik passed around the prototype being deployed on caregivers and Alzheimer’s patients, very small device with a chip and using IR called the SPEC.

Using proximity for monitoring detection of Alzheimer’s patient
- address problems like leaving the stove on
- attach these devices to stove knob, and find out that it has been moved
- how to build system that will keep going long enough, and easy to change battery so don’t lose tracking information

Sensing own behaviour on a typical day
- Mik showed graph of what he did, he deployed SPECs in different locations
- From here, can tell what Mik did everyday (probably more than he wanted to know and what the whole world to know)
- Wrote analysis software to take the interaction graph to translate into human interpretable terms
- Why keep diary of behaviour? eg. For drug trials
- Does this reveal too much private information, figure out too much about yourself and share with the world?
- By talking to other devices in the environment, keep log on your device

Recognizing and responding to situations in real time
- tested this with a kid
- event queries may be downloaded
- downloaded a pattern
- deployed the SPECs on backpack, scooter, garage, desk and bedroom of the kid's belongings
- could detect whether he forgot his scooter by having LED emit on the SPEC

What learnt from Minder s1
- can do lot of useful things with proximity sensing, and simple pattern recognition
- power, adding sensors saves power if gives hints when device can sleep
- by using knowledge of behaviour, then can turn off power when necessary
- form factor, can now do 24X7 tracking, need to be invisible and fashionable, not geeky
- try to embed in things that people use and wear, example embed in watch

Minder s1 / “Firefly 1”
- wristwatch form factor with RF, accelerometers/magnetometers for walking/orientation
- doing another iteration of this device with range finding to do time of flight to use chirp-mode radio and not UWB
- moving ahead with the home care
- lots of uses that people want for this, eg. Google way for providing ads based on human behaviour

Mik's sensing behaviour work with the SPEC reminds me of the research project I worked on opportunistic interactions using Palm handheld devices. In this case, we used Palm Tungsten T handhelds equipped with Bluetooth and wrote software to make pair-wise connections with other Palms and Bluetooth devices nearby. Of course, we never did achieve great battery life like the SPEC which is like in the order of couple of months. Our Palms only lasted 6 hours on a good day before having to be charged.

The wireless radios out there like Bluetooth, UWB, Wi-Fi were not really designed for opportunistic spontaneous networking. They are power-hungry and take a long time to establish connection. A custom radio needs to be designed for something like this that has almost zero-power.

Do not install Newsmonster!

I came across Newsmonster, web-based feed aggregator for Mozilla Firefox. It's cross-platform, and the GUI looked really nice in the browser and has support for offline browsing. So, I thought hey this is really good, cause right now I am using Feedreader, which is a Windows application. So I have to open Feedreader in order to read my feeds that I subscribe to. Most web-based feed readers that I've looked at like Google Reader, My Yahoo, Bloglines, do an ok job but it looks very crude in presentation at best. This looked like the web-based feed reader that I've been looking for. Alright, then, I said, I'll go and download it, and it's an extension for Mozilla Firefox.

After I finished downloading and installing it, I restarted Firefox, and I saw Newsmonster on the right side of Firefox in the browser. I tried to customize it and play around with it. This is where the nightmare began. I couldn't customize it, and I couldn't go to any web site, and the entire Firefox browser was frozen. But, I couldn't even exit the browser or close it! Then, I went into the Windows Task Manager to kill it. I then ran Firefox again, but the browser wouldn't come up. I thought that's strange, so I killed it again. And again. And again. I thought maybe my computer is acting up, so I'll defrag my hard drive. I did, but still that didn't work, then I decided to reboot my XP machine. Still to no avail. I decided to do a Google search on Newsmonster and Firefox hanging, and lone and behold, many people have complained about Newsmonster and Firefox freezing!

After about 30 minutes, I was able to uninstall the extension and restore back Firefox. Lesson learned, never install any software that has the word "monster" in it! I was about to work on writing some code for mining the data for my research, but it got put off because I decided to install Newsmonster. Bad move. I'm glad that others have posted the solution to uninstall!

So, let this be a warning to you all. Don't install Newsmonster!

Technorati tags: newsmonster

Mik Lamming talk at U of T tomorrow

Mik Lamming, from HP Labs at Palo Alto is giving a talk on Continuously Sensing Human Behaviour in BA 1180 tomorrow at 11 am at U of T. Specifically he's exploring the use of small wireless devices called SPECs that can be embedded on people to continuously sense human context. This is certainly something of interest to me, because one of my research interests is in context awareness. The details and abstract of the talk are described below:

Drug companies, marketeers, HMOs, advertisers, architects, and many others, have strongly held business reasons to learn more about the daily lives of their customers, and users. But as consumers, we yearn to understand more about ourselves: to discover what factors influence our wellness, spending patterns, or progress towards some goal. We all need help to recall details of past events, or to be reminded of things in the future. These are just a few of the things that could be achieved if we could continuously sense our own behavior, and especially if we believed that our data could be kept confidential until we had a compelling reason to share it.

I have been looking at ways to continuously sense my own context and behavior: where I am, who, or what I have near me, and what I am doing. By continuous I mean everywhere I go, all the time - 24x7. I have been tackling three core issues : how to get continuous coverage of my life; how to avoid being snooped upon by Big Brother; and how to make the infrastructure smoothly scale from a single user, to the whole world. I'll present a few things my team learned from our first system.

Recently I have been looking at how these ideas could address the problem of elder care giver burnout, a situation with which I have had personal experience. I'll describe our goal, and the new apparatus we have been building.


Mik Lamming is a Distinguished Scientist at HP Labs Palo Alto. He is exploring how tiny computers can continuously monitor long-term human behavior, but without compromising privacy. He believes this is a crucial key in addressing the everyday information processing needs of every man, woman and child on the planet. He enjoys doing user studies, building prototypes, and then figuring out their shortcomings.
For the past couple of years he has been exploring how swarms of tiny computers called SPECs might reduce the burnout rate for people caring for the elderly at home.
With William Newman is author of the textbook "Interactive System Design".
In '90s he helped found Xerox EuroPARC, and built the Ubiquitous Computing lab. establishing many of the fundamental patents in the field, His team prototyped Forget-me-not a portable prosthetic memory, and Satchel, a tiny ubiquitous document access device.

I will definitely be going to the talk tomorrow, so watch back for updated notes.

Sing while you poop

Ah yes, only this could come out from Japan. It's the toilet MP3 from Toto. You can listen to MP3 music while you go to the john. The MP3 is not integrated in the toilet but is mounted on the wall. It features an SD slot. A video shows how the toilet works (in Japanese).

There was a story a while ago about Microsoft in the UK making an iLoo, which was an Internet-enabled toilet with wireless keyboard. What's the next high tech gadget out there?

Is the Apple iPod video worth it?

I must admit the Apple iPod video player looks really nice, and it's much thinner than the regular iPod. CNet video shows this player and it almost has the form factor of the iPod nano. So what's next for the next generation iPod? And with so many different accessories that you can now add to the iPod, it's really spawned the iPod generation X. Can the iPod get any better? Would it be worth to put in Bluetooth or 802.11? Motorola has tried to blend iPod and a cell phone with the Rokr but it really hasn't done too well.

Will the iPod become a PDA, a reincarnated Newton? Remember, the Apple Newton, the first PDA before Palm came out. The iPod has some bit of PDA functionality, so it could become a PDA. But to stick with Apple's design and philosophy, it should be simple and should be designed well for one particular purpose. And for the iPod that is music or in the new iPod video. Once, you try to cater to other functionality, you will lose something. You can't have a all-in-one swiss army knife of gadgets.

Updated podcasts from CASCON

I've just updated the podcasts from CASCON for Tuesday and Wednesday. Come and listen to them. You can subscribe as a podcast.

Technorati tags: cascon

New gadget and it's free!

Yes, there's a new gadget out there and it's free! You don't have to buy a PDA or expensive organizer, you just have to get the PocketMod. It's a disposable paper-based personal organizer. The premise is that it's easier to carry a folded piece of paper and less cumbersome than carrying a PDA. You have to get used to the user interface on a PDA, but with paper, you just write. And how many of you HAVE NOT had crashes on your PDA where you wrote something and then you lost it for some reason?

Has anybody tried this? I am trying to get rid of paper as much as possible, but in some cases I still like paper, for example, for reading conference papers, it's still better than reading PDF on the computer.

I love Feedreader!

I never used Feedreader before for reading RSS and Atom feeds until when I had to give my talk on feedreading and RSS at the CASCON Hands-on Workshop on the Latest Technologies. I used to always use the feed reader from My Yahoo because I always use My Yahoo to read news. But the problem with web-based feed readers, even though they're ubiquitous in that I can get from any browser, is that when I click on the feed entry then I go to that on the web site. If I want to read another feed entry, I have to go back in the browser window to my list of feeds on My Yahoo. That kind of causes a bit of a nuisance.

However with Feedreader, even though I have to import my feeds, if I have lots of feeds, I just import the OPML file that I export from Bloglines. If you haven't used Bloglines, use it. It's great in that you can categorize and add all your feeds which I did with my Bloglines. Then all you have to do to use any feedreader is to import that OPML file to any feedreader. So, I did that with Feedreader on my laptop and on my computer at school. And with Feedreader, I see the posts just like e-mail messages, and I can scroll down the posts and the feeds. But here's the nice thing about Feedreader, it's an HTML-based reader so when I click on the post, it will load the actual HTML link in Feedreader on the bottom pane of the window. Sweet! And if I want to make a comment or post, I can do so right within Feedreader. So, this means I don't have to go to a web browser to make a post or comment. I can do everything within Feedreader. I really love that!

Just to let you know that Feedreader works only on Windows. But there are lots of feedreaders for other OSes. You can also use Sage as a feedreader for Firefox, although it doesn't show up as nice as Feedreader.

Post-CASCON

So the CASCON conference is over, and it was quite a week. I am so tired, I woke up quarter to 6 in the morning every day from Monday to Wednesday of last week just to get to the hotel at around 8 am. But it was great, I spoke about feedreading, RSS and podcasting on Monday and Tuesday at the Hands-on Workshop on the Latest Technologies, and I chaired the Business of Blogging workshop and spoke about my research at that workshop as well. I also had a poster in the Technology Showcase at CASCON. Oh yeah, and also I helped out with doing podcasts of the keynotes and workshops, as well as created a CASCON blog. So, basically, I went CASCON crazy and hopefully made my mark this year. The only thing I don't have to my credit is a CASCON paper, so that's what I will have to work on for next year!

I am now processing the audio that I recorded from the keynotes and workshops from last week which I recorded on the Apple iPod with iTalk. However, I just found out some of the recordings didn't seem to work well. The problem is that the iTalk wasn't plugged in properly into the top of the iPod and so without me knowing about it, the talks never got recorded. However, the best recording was on Wednesday at the Business of Blogging workshop where I was able to record the talks plus the discussion. This weekend I made the edits to the audio, there were some that I had to delete some stuff and amplify, because it was too soft to hear. Editing audio is time consuming. I now need to make an RSS feed of this, and then it will be posted on the CASCON blog.

The next step will be to analyze the data gathered from CASCON, the questionnaires and surveys, as part of my research data.

Oh yes, and by the way, I've finally decided to make a cosmetic change to my blog. The orange colour was getting to me, and it was looking very bad, so I decided to change templates. Hopefully, the presentation style is better now and more people will come read and post comments to my blog!

Technorati tags: cascon

CASCON Business of Blogging workshop was a success!

The Business of Blogging workshop is over! It went great, much better than I expected. Thanks to all who came and participated in the discussions, it was great. Now that CASCON is over, I have to now process and edit all the audio that I recorded on the iPod and make a podcast.

Day 3 of CASCON conference

Sorry I haven't been blogging lately, I've been so busy since Monday of this week at the CASCON conference and maintaining the CASCON blog. I presented at the hands-on workshop on latest technologies on Monday and Tuesday where I talked about RSS feeds and podcasting. Today just finished listening to a keynote from Rob Sutor of IBM on standards and open source and a panel discussion from the 4 Pioneers of Computing in Canada. I have a poster in CASCON and today I will be chairing and presenting at the Business of Blogging workshop where I will be talking about blogs and communities.

So very busy this week and also very tired. I hope my talk goes well today, yesterday's talk went so-so, the blog site choked a little bit so I had to think of things on the fly.

It's nice to have wireless internet access in the hotel! True pervasive and social computing yeah baby yeah!

I am at CASCON conference right now

Wireless internet is great. I am at CASCON right now, listening to the keynote from Rob Clyde from Symantec Corp. The introduction right now just talked about the Hands-on Workshop on Latest Technologies, which is where I am speaking at about feeds, RSS and podcasting.

I am also podcasting the keynote right now, hope it works!

CASCON 2005 conference

The Interactive Media Lab will be in full force at the CASCON 2005 conference this year. Sacha Chua and Alvin Chin will be speaking at the hands-on workshop on Monday and Tuesday. The Interactive Media Lab group will have a poster at CASCON in the Technology showcase on Tuesday and Wednesday from 11:45 am to 5:00 pm. More details below:

Poster at Technology Showcase:
Blogs and Communities - Using Blogs to Build Communities
The exhibit is about how one can build communities using blogs. Blogs are popular on the web, so the CASCON audience will be interested to know how blogging can be used to improve collaboration.

Please visit the CASCON blog for more information and to join in the blogging discussions at CASCON, even if you can't make it to the conference!

When Windows crashes in public

I was waiting at Union Station tonight for the GO Train to take me back home like I always do every night after I finish school. I was checking to see what track number the train was at, when I saw the digital screen show a black screen with the Windows recovery screen (you know Last Known Configuration menu, the screen you get if Windows can't boot up properly). I thought that was hilarious, so I took a picture of it with my Motorola Razr V3 cell phone (which by the way I love and which I've uploaded that picture to my computer using Bluetooth!) . Then, the screen would show the HP logo and I thought oh it's just rebooting and will return back to the schedule. Nope, it was cycling through the black recovery screen and the HP logo.

I've seen Windows crashes before, I saw one at one of the airplane check-in counters in Terminal 3 at Toronto Pearson airport where it showed General Protection Fault. But come on, these are public places, and it makes you wonder as to the security, reliability and stability of the computer systems that run these places.

Should public places be running Windows and if so, what measures are in place to make sure their systems are secure, reliable and stable, and most importantly dependable? Have any of you seen something like this happen in public places?

Here are the pictures:
Windows crash
HP logo on screen

Technorati tags: windows crash, union station, toronto

Yahoo introduces tools for podcasts

Yahoo is now getting into podcasting, that is, just searching, organizing and rating for now not creating. Yahoo is betting that users that are not familiar with podcasts (which still are not known to many web users) will become familiar through them, since many people use Yahoo. So far, finding podcasts is still not that really easy, unless you know of a podcast site or go to for example iTunes. By using a heavyweight search engine provider, then podcasts can be searched for much easier is what Yahoo is trying to do. I know personally when I started searching for podcasts, I did a google search for podcasts, but still it was difficult to find what I was kind of looking for. iTunes helped somewhat because it grouped into categories, and I knew if I wanted to look for Catholic podcasts, or technology podcasts, or Palm podcasts. But I still didn't find it that easy to do, it took some time, probably spent me about an hour trying to find podcasts to load up to my iPod mini.

You can see now that the major search companies are now branching off to various different aspects of search, since text-based search is pretty much covered. Google is into searching of blogs and video, and searching of mail in GMail. It won't be long till Google will be doing search of podcasts that's for sure, they probably have it in their Google Labs.

In fact, Google just recently released their Google Reader for reading feeds. So far, it looks pretty simple. What's neat about it, is that you can preview the paragraph of the blog entry, which in My Yahoo you can't really do and have to go to the blog entry on the web page itself.

Web 2.0 has arrived

Everybody's been hearing about Web 2.0, and how it will change the Internet. The next generation of the web involving a more social atmosphere to the web. This article from Technology Review talks about Web 2.0, and how some people feel that it has already arrived.

What is Web 2.0? According to the article, "Web 2.0 stands for the idea that the Internet is evolving from a collection of static pages into a vehicle for software services, especially those that foster self-publishing, participation, and collaboration". The technologies for Web 2.0 involve community photo sharing (like Flickr), tags, blogs, collective editing (like Wikipedia) and social bookmarking like del.icio.us.

In fact, you see many companies embracing Web 2.0 technologies. Witness Yahoo which bought Flickr and launched Yahoo 360 for blogs and community and Yahoo My Web 2.0. So what do you think, is Web 2.0 a social phenomenon for the web? Can semantic web play a role in this web transformation and bring a collaborative and humanistic touch to the web?

AOL acquires Weblogs Inc.

AOL agreed to buy Weblogs Inc., a provider of premium content blogs where Weblogs pay bloggers to write content. I read about Weblogs Inc. and their model of business for blogs from this Technology Review article.

Very interesting read on Weblogs Inc. from Technology Review, and is much related to my workshop on the Business of Blogging which is on Wed. Oct. 19 at the CASCON conference in Toronto. Visit the CASCON blog for more details!

IML research group blog up now

The IML research group blog is up and running now. It was down last week due to technical difficulties at Modblog. I don't understand how a website can be down for an entire 1 week. Modblog said they were doing their best to get back up and running, they had some hardware issues. Still, I think one week is quite a long time to get back up and running.

Apparently, not all the functionality is there, I want to backup the blog entries but I can't. They haven't enabled that feature.

Didn't know there's another CASCON 2005

Google points out that there exists another CASCON 2005 which is here. I did not know that! But that CASCON you have to pay $695 and have to go to Loew's Miami Beach, but the CASCON in Toronto is free. Though, mind you the weather in Florida is probably better than it is in Toronto as it's getting cooler now in Toronto. And it's also on the beach!

Anyways, if you haven't already, visit and blog on the CASCON 2005 blog!

IML Research Group Blog down

As you may have noticed, our research group blog is down for a week now since our blog is hosted on Modblog. I can't believe that it's taken this long to fix their problem. Well, I know I am going to move our research group blog to a different blogging provider once Modblog is up. Modblog sucks, who has their web host down for a week?

Podcasting on the train

I decided to test out the iPod and iTalk for podcasting on the train, so here's what I recorded. It's not too bad, I can see where I could use this to record my research thoughts or record any talks, lectures, meetings.

My first podcast

I just recorded my first podcast today, using the iPod and Griffin iTalk which is a voice recorder that sits on top of the iPod. I have a picture below. It's pretty simple to use and neat!

Here's the iPod and the iTalk together:


Here's the iTalk by itself:

Google tech talk tonight!

Google came tonight at U of T for a tech talk. The room was totally packed, Google had free long-sleeved T-shirts to giveaway. Unfortunately, they ran out, but I did get one. It's a white T-shirt with the Google logo, which I've shown as a picture below. But they ran out of men's XL size, so I had to get a woman's XL size. It doesn't seem to be as nice compared to the black Google shirt which I wore today (also shown below). I got the black T-shirt last year when Google was on campus. I think the black T-shirt is much better, don't you think?

Anyways, Google talked about the problems that they are solving with search and queries, their infrastructure, the positions that are open (mainly full-time and summer internships), the Google culture (do you know they have free gourmet food like breakfast, lunch, and dinner, doesn't this sound like the grad life, except you're being paid as a salary to do something!), and the technical details of how they made their Google applications like Google Maps for example.

Google had a prize draw at the end where they gave away a Google lava lamp (those are popular at Google), and 2 sets of really nice speakers. I submitted my CV as I am looking for a summer research internship for next year.

I wanted to do some work and surf the Internet while I was listening to the talk, but I couldn't detect any wireless in the room! But I guess that's good, because otherwise I would be distracted to doing something else. And I am good for doing that, especially multitasking.

It's funny, when I came into the room, a lot of people thought I worked for Google, hehe.

Here's the black Google T-shirt that I wore:


Here's the white Google T-shirt that I got:


Here's the beginning of the talk:


And here's the giveaway of prizes (it's a little blurry, since I used my Motorola Razr V3 cell phone which by the way is awesome, especially with the transfer of photos over Bluetooth!):

Ning - social software from Marc Andreesen

Marc Andreesen, the creator of Netscape, is at it again. He just created another company called Ning that creates social software to make it easier to access social sites like Flickr and thefacebook. You can see the article about Ning from SiliconBeat.

Interesting to see how this is going to play out, and how communities can be formed. Social software is getting really hot now, witness My Web 2.0 from Yahoo, LinkedIn and others.