Microsoft Research talk in Beijing, China

Today, I gave a research talk at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing on my research which is on Building Communities Through Blogging. The talk went well. Microsoft Research Asia is a very nice place, it covers several floors at the Beijing Sigma Center. The Beijing Sigma Center is a high-tech building with all high-tech companies. My hotel is near to Microsoft, it is the Tianhong Plaza hotel.

Here are some pictures outside of Microsoft (obviously I can't take pictures inside of Microsoft). At the Microsoft reception area, there is a guard there, so security is tight.





Here are the pictures of the Tianhong hotel:

Outside of the Tianhong hotel along Zichun Road


Entrance to Tianhong hotel


Full view of Tianhong hotel


Side view of Tianhong hotel


A little side view of Tianhong hotel overlooking Zichun Road


And the hotel has Internet access included, so I am using it now as I am writing this blog entry! I was also able to find wireless Internet with Wi-Fi in my hotel room. But obviously I am using the high-speed broadband Internet access. This is great!

Nice quote of the day!

Ah, this quote is perfectly applied to research.

If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
--Albert Einstein

I posted a comment on that here.

Officially on blogto.com!

Yes, I am an official Toronto blogger! I just got the e-mail that my blog just got added to BlogTO. So if you want to know what's happening in Toronto, go to BlogTO!

Happy blogging in Toronto!

Technorati tags: BlogToronto

GadgetMan's blog online again

The server where I host this blog was down on Thursday night, so if you've tried to get to my blog, you wouldn't have been able to. But now it's back up and running. We're so dependent on technology now, it's like when you have no Internet access or your blog server is down, you feel apart and out of place. I feel that a part of me was missing during that outage, that I couldn't update my blog which I normally try to do on a regular basis.

But anyways, it's back online again. You may ask why not host if on a third party server or on blogspot? I could but I like to maintain control over my blog. It's just a personal preference I guess.

Motorola unveils Linux cell phones

Motorola unveilled their new line of cell phones running Linux. This is great, since right now Nokia is the leader in the cell phone industry. I don't seem to like Nokia phones that much, I think the design and style of Sony Ericsson and Motorola are much better. I currently own a Sony Ericsson T68i cell phone (one of the early phones that had Bluetooth, the 2nd Ericsson phone, the 1st phone was the R520m which I actually used and played around with back when I was at Classwave).

But my T68i cell phone, as good as I like it, is dying on me, it's bigger than the other phones, and I'd like to get a flip-style phone. I'm heading over to China and HK in a few weeks, so thinking of buying a cell phone there. I like the Motorola Razr V3 and the A910.

These are my requirements for the next cell phone I want to get:

1. Bluetooth
2. GSM 900/1800/1900 and GPRS
3. MMS
4. Possibly Wi-Fi (like the A910)
5. Digital camera preferably at least 2 MP
6. Flip phone (judging how many times I've accidentally pressed the buttons on a non-flip phone and it started dialing my contacts and even connecting to the Internet without me knowing it!)
7. Decent battery life. At least I can have the phone on (without calling) in standby mode and don't have the charge the phone for maybe 2 days.

Any good phones in China and HK that I should be looking at, send them my way!

Technorati tags: cell phone, linux cell phone, asia cell phone

What's in a name?

For those curious to know what's in a name, check out this site. Thanks to Diana for posting this. Interesting note that Diana posted on my blog entry about comments in MSN Spaces which she came across from reading John's blog from which John mentioned I was his 20,000th visitor! Amazing, the power of blogs and linking!

Anyways, here's what the name site says about my name:

Alvin

Friend of all, noble friend : Teutonic

You are an inspiring leader whose originality, creativity and wisdom are applied to creating practical solutions to "unsolvable" problems. Humanitarian and idealistic your vision is to make the world a better place and you will work to this end. Hardworking and tenacious people admire you for your honesty and integrity. You are a loved and loyal friend and partner. Your have the potential to achieve enormous success in the world.

Here's what it says about my nickname UbiquitousDude:

Ubiquitousdude

With a strong intellect, organising ability and a thirst for knowledge you are a natural researcher or scientist. Anything which can stimulate your agile and analytical mind, including travel, will be of interest to you. With your efficient confident manner and willingness to accept responsibilities you are especially suited to directing group projects. You are admired for your honesty, integrity and fairness.

Wow, that's pretty good and accurate! What about my other nickname GadgetMan, can I score 3 for 3?

GadgetMan

You are responsible, determined and tenacious with sound judgement and the ability to inspire others making you ideal for positions of leadership. Having broad vision you are happy to accept the challenge of handling large projects which others may find too demanding. With your keen intuition and inventive mind you are always seeking answers. Fair and just you have a warm and compassionate nature which attracts many friends.

Amazing, all three names are right about me! How did it know me?

Technorati tags: name, what is in a name

Video for Skype!

I knew something like this was going to happen pretty soon. Skype does voice conferencing over the Internet, it's as if you were talking on the phone, the quality I find is very good. It's great for conversing long distance, without having to pay long distance charges! I use Skype all the time. Now, you can add video to Skype so that you can have a face-to-face type of conversation except remotely (kind of like audio + video chat in MSN Messenger).

I'm going to have to try this out. This is great, the Internet has really made long distance communication seem very close.

Technorati tags: video4skype

Technology news blog

Just found this technology news blog called commandN. They have a show about technology and do a podcast and video of it on their blog. Looks pretty interesting. Check it out!

Technorati tags: TechShow

OPML meeting last night

Just found out that there is a last minute OPML meeting in Toronto last night. For those who don't know what OPML is, OPML is a format for blog feeds, just like RSS and Atom. If you export your blog list as OPML format, then you can retain the structure and import it into a feed aggregator. It's written in XML.

AccordionGuy is Joey de Villa, who works at Blogware, that creates blogs down in Toronto! Here's the details of last night's meeting.

State of the Blogosphere in 2005 reported by Technorati

In research group's blog post, I posted about a report of the state of the blogosphere in 2005 by Technorati. I've put that post here for convenience in reading.

Here's the summary of Part 1 of the report from Technorati:

* Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005
* The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months
* A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily
* About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year
* About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly

According to the report, "There's a growing number of WordPress-based hosted services that are arising, including Laughing Squid, Dreamhost, and Blue Host, marking an interesting trend - that of ISPs and hosting providers using the GPL'ed software as a differentiating feature of their services." There also appears to be more people moblogging and photoblogging on their camera cell phones. Blogging is definitely now becoming a habit and people are blogging on a daily basis.

Here's the summary from Part 2 of the report on posting volume:

* Technorati is tracking about 900,000 blog posts created every day
* That's about 10.4 blog posts per second, on average
* Median time from posting to inclusion in the Technorati index is under 5 minutes
* Significant increases in posting volume are due to increased mainstream use of easy hosted tools as well as simple posting interfaces like post-from-IM and moblogging tools
* Weekends tend to be slower posting days by about 5-10% of the weekly averages
* During the day, posting tends to peak between the hours of 7AM and noon Pacific time (10AM - 3PM Eastern time)
* Worldwide news events cause ripples through the blogosphere - not only in search volume, but also in posting volume

Interesting statistics, but they're probably not that surprising.

Technorati tags:Blogosphere