Why use Gmail?

Check out this video made by Google as to why YOU should use Gmail. It's quite hilarious, though I'm not sure if I agree with all.



On Technorati: Gmail

The Oscars social network

You know social networking becomes mainstream when even Hollywood starts getting into the action. Here's a social network from the Oscars of the recipients of the awards and who and what they thanked.



Interesting stuff. But it does show the power of social networking analysis.

On Technorati: Oscars, social network

Ed Nightingale talk

Ed Nightingale from University of Michigan is at U of T to give a talk on "Improving the performance of highly reliable software systems". Abstract of his talk is below.

Commodity operating systems still retain the design principles developed when processor cycles were scarce and RAM was precious. These out-dated principles have led to performance/functionality trade-offs that are no longer needed or required; I have found that, far from impeding performance, features such as safety, consistency and energy-efficiency can often be added while improving performance over existing systems. I will describe my work developing Speculator, which provides facilities within the operating system kernel to track and propagate causal dependencies. Using Speculator, I will show that distributed and local file systems can provide strong consistency and safety guarantees without the poor performance these guarantees usually entail.

Ed Nightingale is Jason Flynn's PhD student, I remember reading a bunch of his papers during the pervasive computing research for the systems area.

He is talking about how to improve the performance of software systems and how reliability and correctness can still be ensured while improving the performance which is 8X slower than synchronous I/O. This is called external synchrony. It has to do with tracking causal dependencies in processes. He is also talking about when data is durable that you know it has been written properly to disk, as well as speculative execution. Speculative execution can dramatically improve the speed while maintaining consistency guarantees.

One of the research areas that I know Ed's work is in energy-aware adaptation for mobile computing systems. Since battery life is crucial in mobile computing devices, therefore one active area of research deals with how to maximize battery life on a computer. You already have several power saving modes on the computer, but Ed looks into whether there are other aggressive ways to even save more battery life on the computer, which when I read was very innovative. One of his papers is "Ghosts in the Machine", a similar resemblance to the Japanese animation movie "Ghosts in the Shell".

On Technorati: speculative execution, DCS talk

Ray Kurzweil has another book

Just found out that Ray Kurzweil, renowned technologist and scientist whose book The Age of Spiritual Machines I read, has written another book called The Singularity is Near. I found The Age of Spiritual Machines a fascinating read, especially how he predicts that humans and robotics will merge together and how computers will surpass human intelligence. This is the vision of AI scientists (AI stands for artificial intelligence). Remember the movies Bicentennial Man, Artificial Intelligence:AI, and John Mnemonic where humans get implanted with computers and circuits inside their bodies. I kind of see something like that in what Ray Kurzweil says.

However, this is going to cause a moral debate because if we start adding computers and circuits to improve ourselves and alter our makeup, then we begin to cross the fine line of whether we are tampering with creation of which God created us. It's been a long time since I've read a Kurzweil book, this book looks interesting. However, I have so many other magazines that I haven't read, and papers to read for my own PhD research and thesis. I don't know if I'll even have the time to buy or read this book.

On Technorati: Ray Kurzweil, AI

Current.TV

I'm checking out this new customized TV web site called Current.TV. They have people that make TV casts and programs, yet they also allow viewers to submit their own content. They call their approach VC squared or Viewer Created Content. They have special pods or channels of which you can watch viewer created content, and they even have special channels you can watch on regular TV programming as well. I would use something like this more than Joost, Joost right now doesn't allow for viewer created content, they have to license content. Joost just got a deal with Viacom, where Viacom will provide them with content.

I don't really use much of Joost because I find that Joost is very memory and bandwidth hungry, and slows down the rest of my apps. And right now, I don't find any compelling content to watch. But I can see how Current.TV would be something that I would watch. There's this special video clip of Gates vs. Jobs which I found really really funny and nice, check it out!

Photos: Celebrating the life of James Kim - CNET News.com

Hundreds attended a memorial for CNET editor James Kim, who died in the Oregon snow last year while seeking help for his stranded family. Here is a photo gallery of that memorial from CNET. In remembrance of James Kim, there is a James Kim Technology Technology Foundation to support technology education in public schools in San Francisco. RIP James, and thanks for all your news commentary on new technology and gadgets.



read more | digg story

Yahoo Pipes

I've never heard of Yahoo Pipes until I heard the TWIT podcast (if you don't know TWIT, it stands for This Week in Tech hosted by Leo Laporte). I love this podcast, they have a panel of people to talk about what has happened in the tech world for the past week, and just start ranting and having discussion. I was listening to this podcast while going to the gym, when I heard about this new thing called Yahoo Pipes. Apparently, John C. Dvorak, who is known at PC Magazine never really heard about this. Yahoo Pipes is basically making a mashup of various feeds put together where the output of one feed becomes the input of another feed. The basic idea is to customize the feeds of what you want to see, the user is in control. The term for Yahoo Pipes comes from the Unix pipe where you can make ad-hoc queries by taking output of one command to be the input into another.

Anil Dash has a great article on Yahoo Pipes which will do a much better of explaining than I can. Apparently, many people are saying Yahoo Pipes is really innovative and new, something that Yahoo hasn't really done, since all their other products are based on Google or are based on the companies that they have bought (namely Flickr, Upcoming.org, delicious). At first glance, I was like what's so new about Pipes? But then looking at the user interface and how you can edit certain pipes and create the workflow of what you want, and it has a GUI on the web site to handle that, I think it is the workflow that is the contribution that Yahoo is making to the Web 2.0 arena.

This composition of feeds to form pipes reminds me web services, where you have composition of existing services to create newer web services, and you have web services orchestration creating a workflow like WSFL and BPEL4WS.
I think this looks interesting, as this will encourage users to create their own mashups without having to write a single line of code.

On Technorati: Yahoo Pipes

Updated U of T Computer Science web site

I just got an e-mail from the chair of Computer Science at my university (University of Toronto), that the Computer Science web site is now updated. It certainly looks so much nicer than before, and just by browsing it, the information is much more richer and pleasing on the eyes.

This is what the Computer Science home page looked like before, courtesy of Google's cache. Compare that with now. Much better. Let's hope I can find the information that I'm looking for faster than before. It was well overdue that the Computer Science web site needed to be redesigned and overhauled. We have the KMDI and graphics and web people in our department, our web site should at least look somewhat decent! Certainly, we should be able to create a nice interface and data repository for content on our web site, with the expertise that we have. We should be putting on the newest technologies, like RSS feeds and links to featured research.

At least, this is a step in the right direction.

On Technorati: U of T CS, Computer Science

What's next in the world of the Web?

The Web will become more personable, more easily searchable, more customizable, and more sociable. We are ready heading towards that direction with Web 2.0. According to this article from ZDNet, Nova Spivack from Radar Networks draws the roadmap to the next version of the Web, Web 3.0 (dubbed Semantic Web) and Web4.0 or the WebOS which means the entire Web becomes an operating system and our entire computer ecosystem is just one big OS on the web. There's already evidence to prove that we are going in that direction, with Google apps on the web now like GMail, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Calendar. Here is the roadmap for the web according to Nova Spivack:



I certainly agree with this roadmap and I think the dates seem realistic. We'll also see mobile devices increasingly become part of the Web ecosystem, we're already seeing that with cell phones and handhelds that connect to the Web, and mobile web applications of popular web applications like Google Search for mobile devices, Windows Live for mobile, etc.

On Technorati: Web 3.0,Semantic Web, Web 4.0, WebOS

Who says tech geeks can't be romantic on Valentine's Day?

Check out this video, classic, tech geek!

Have a Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

On Technorati: Valentine's Day, tech geek

Turn Windows XP into Vista without installing Vista

This is cool, since my machine doesn't seem to be able to run Vista, there are some free applications that you can download to make Windows XP feel like Vista without having to actually install Windows Vista. I found this video from CNET that shows you how to do that. I want to try to do that, but when I have some spare cycles, I may try that.

Have any of you tried to turn Windows XP to look and feel like Vista? Is it worth the effort, so you can fool your friends and colleagues to say you have Vista?

On Technorati: Vista, Windows XP

Windows Mobile 6 released

Microsoft's Windows OS for mobile devices called Windows Mobile, has been upgraded to Windows Mobile 6. It was just announced at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona. Palm's Treo 750 will be upgraded with the new OS as is shown in these pictures below. The pictures come from the Engadget blog:







According to Treo Central,

The new OS also brings with it new naming conventions, gone are "PocketPC Edition" and "Smartphone Edition." Instead we have the more simplified:

* Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition - for non-touchscreen smartphones
* Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition - for touchscreen smartphones like the Treo
* Windows Mobile 6 Classic Edition - for non-smartphone, touchscreen Pocket PC devices.


Many people feel that this is an evolutionary upgrade rather a revolutionary upgrade, that it should be called Windows Mobile 5.5 because it fixes some stuff from Windows Mobile 5. But apparently it does add some new features listed below (also coming from TreoCentral):

* Built-in Windows Update(!) - Will the carriers stand for this? I know that Palm spends months testing the most minor of bugfixes so the carriers won't have a bird.
* Built-in memory card encryption and the ability to do remote-wipes.
* HTML-formatted email (I don't want this, but others do).
* A neater feature is "SmartFilter," which automatically filters your emails as you type just like most contacts applications filter your contacts. SmartFilter also works on your music collection.
* Better Live Mail (nee Hotmail) integration, including contact integration.
* 320x320 Screen Resolution support - Palm, I expect a new WM Treo yesterday with this screen resolution.
* Windows Live goes out of Beta and will be built-in
* Direct Push now standard (has been for awhile on WM5, but I know some of you are still stuck without it)
* 3rd party software should still work fine - just in case you were wondering.
* Microsoft Office Mobile updated - now full edits documents on all editions of WM6!
* Pocket Internet Explorer to be faster, they're saying 30% faster - let's hope! Also new, "Mobile AJAX standards"
* Better Vista integration
* Enhanced Calendar, including a "ribbon."
* Improved Security
* Built-in VOIP(!) - no, not really, but they added support for it "under the hood", according to cnet.
* A ton of smaller tweaks, changes, fixes, improvements, etc.

Vista integration and Microsoft Office integration, along with Windows Live Mail (now to be renamed Windows Live Hotmail to not lose the current Hotmail branding), and of course Windows Mobile media player, it's part of the Microsoft ecosystem of the Windows family. First, Microsoft conquering the desktop, now they want a chunk of the web. And why not, right now Google is beating the pants out of them!

On Technorati: Windows Mobile 6, Microsoft, Treo 750

Apple iPhone in Canada?

I bet everyone's been wondering if we're going to get the chance to see and buy an Apple iPhone in Canada. Well, it looks like probably Rogers Wireless will be the cellular carrier to carry it. No word on when though, but according to this post, maybe in 2008.

Why do Canadians always get the latest technology from the US and other parts of the world, the last? I guess companies don't see Canadians as the bleeding edge in technology, so the more profitable and tech saavy crowds are the Japanese, Europeans and then the Americans. And we Canadians come after that.

Of course, you don't have to wait for the iPhone to come in Canada. Just buy an iPhone online when they're ready, get it unlocked, and then get a Canadian mobile number here. If there's a Rogers Wireless employee reading this blog, let us know as soon as possible if you'll be providing Apple iPhones, I would just love to hold one and play with one (even if I'm not going to buy it, me being the GadgetMan as I am!)

On Technorati: Apple iPhone, iPhone

What Apple Mac ads should be like

I just found this hilarious parody of an Apple Mac ad from Microsoft MSN's Soapbox, a competitor to YouTube. Check it out, it's pretty nice and funny!


Video: What Apple's Mac TV Ads SHOULD sound like

On Technorati: Mac ad, Apple

Linux graffiti in the Toronto subway

I read this post from TorCamp and this is just hilarious. After Windows Vista launched last week, some Toronto student saw this on the Vista ad and took a camera shot:



The original blog post is here.

On Technorati: linux,windows vista

Toronto Transit Camp

When bloggers, geeks, technologists come together for a good cause to use their technical knowhow and social networking technologies to spread the word, important issues get noticed. Enter Toronto Transit Camp, which is an unconference similar to BarCamp organized by some of the TorCamp people. These people had their first meeting on how to improve Toronto public transit at the Gladstone Hotel yesterday. They're going to take all that was discussed from the meeting yesterday, along with comments on the website and Google group newsgroup, and provide a report of recommendations to give to the TTC. Apparently, TTC chair, Adam Giambrone (the youngest ever TTC chair, he's like only 29!) was there yesterday along with some other politicians.

It's great to hear that the tech community is really helping out on this, and shows how social networking technologies like wikis and blogs are really making the issues become noticed to everyone. In fact, news of the Toronto Transit Camp have made international waves too at BoingBoing, where famous Cory Doctorow is a part of (he's Canadian eh, and also a regular speaker on TWIT, This Week in Tech hosted by Leo Laporte).

It'll be interesting to see what happens from Toronto Transit Camp, and if we can get make Toronto a world class city with first class transportation (similar to other transit systems like Hong Kong and Japan). I would really like to see a single smart card for the TTC and for GO Transit, similar to the Octopus card that can be used for the tram, MTR subway, bus, ferry in Hong Kong.

On Technorati: TTC, Toronto Transit Camp, TorCamp