Met Shel Israel in Toronto last night!

Tonight, I finally met Shel Israel, the author of the book Naked Conversations. He’s a really nice guy, and he was invited as part of the AIMS conference in Toronto. When I first approached him, I was going to say something, but he beat me to it, and said “Are you Albert”. At first, I thought he meant Alvin, and I was like, man, how does he know me? Did he read my blog? I thought that’s impossible. He said “Were you at the conference in California?” To which I replied, “No, I just came back from a conference in San Sebastian, Spain”. He then replied to me (well not in these exact words, but I am paraphrasing), “Spain is nice, much warmer than here”. Then, that’s how we started talking to each other.

I brought my copy of the Naked Conversations book, and asked him to sign it for me, which he graciously did. It took him a long time to sign, because he was holding the book while talking to another person. But he did sign it.

I then told him I was a PhD student at University of Toronto and doing research on finding communities in blogs using social network analysis and clustering techniques and building a quantitative framework for evaluating blogs (like creating a eBay rating was one lady who was beside me who chimed in) and that hopefully this would be part of my PhD thesis. He then replied “That’s great, you can do that as part of a PhD?” But, he was certainly intrigued about my research in finding communities. He said that I was a smart fellow (wow, that coming from Shel Israel, I think I made an impact). I told him to check out my blog and we exchanged business cards. Then, I asked the lady whom I met to take a picture of me with Shel.



There were lots of people at the event that was held at Shoeless Joe's in Toronto. I took some pictures of the crowd as you can see below.





Here's a picture of the organizer of the event, who managed to get Shel to come to the blogging dinner as well as to the AIMS conference.

Pope + iPod = iPope

I just read this article about the Pope being an iPodder. Apparently, it was when Pope Benedict XVI went to visit the Vatican Radio's broadcasting headquarters, where he was presented with an iPod nano and with it preloaded songs of Classical Music and Vatican Radio podcasts. Now, the Pope can stay connected and be kept up to date with his iPod. In fact, he has stated he wants to use the latest technology to connect his message to Catholics. I think that's really great, Pope John Paul II also encouraged using technology to bring the message to the faithful. The first pope to embrace technology was Pope Pius XI when he started the Vatican Radio almost 75 years ago.

Hey perhaps, Pope Benedict XVI will start to have his homilies and daily messages be videocasted as well. Maybe he can start to write his own Vatican blog!

Web-based Communities conference done!

Well, almost. I´m right now in the Internet stations area because the wireless here sucks, I can sometimes connect and sometimes cannot to the free wi-fi access points. I can connect to the hotel Wi-Fi, but it´s operated by Swiss Eurospot and you have to pay 13.92 euros for 24 hours or like 6.00 euros for an hour. Not really worth it, I did spend for just one 24 hour time period but that´s it.

Anyways, I finished my presentation yesterday and it went very well! Lots of people came up to me to ask about my research work and they commended on a great presentation. I had a remark from someone saying that it´s good to see a Computer Science person speak well, so that was a great compliment for me, as I want to improve my speaking skills. Yesterday afternoon, there was a tour of Bilbao and Getxo, and we went to have a late dinner at the Cider House. I´ll post more details when I have a chance to process all the millions of photos I took as well as podcasts from the iPod. I made lots of friends and got business cards, so this now increases my social network which is really great!

I am going to be off to Barcelona this afternoon and then I´ll fly back to Paris and then back to Toronto, where I have to finish a journal paper a day after I get back. Don´t know when I´ll post the photos and podcasts and other stuff from the conference on the blog, but keep posted!

As they say in Spanish, Gracias San Sebastian and IADIS, I enjoyed this conference (especially the tour, and the food which I´ll post later!!!) :)

At the Web-Based Communities conference

I arrived in San Sebastian, Spain on Saturday, February 25 at night. The conference started yesterday, there were some interesting presentations and speakers. There was a speaker called Cliff Figgalo from SociAlchemy who worked with Howard Rheingold and Stuart Brandt and were the incarnators of the WELL, a BBS type of electronic system that was considered the first electronic virtual community. I recorded some of the presentations, and took down notes. It will take me some time to process them on this blog here, but I will definitely put them up!

Today, I'm giving my presentation on "Finding Evidence of Community Through Blogging Co-citations: A Social Network Analytic Approach". I'm going to podcast it and then put it online here, so others can have a listen as to what my research is about.

Meanwhile, here are some photos of the conference and the city of San Sebastian for your enjoyment!

1 more day till Paris and Spain!

I've got one more day left till I leave to go to Paris first and then Spain, where the conference that I am presenting my paper is in (which is in San Sebastian). It's the Web-Based Communities conference. I'm just finishing up the slides to my presentation!

Vive la Paris!

Oh, I can't wait to see Paris!

Busy before leaving for the conference!

Sorry to all my blog readers for not writing for a while. I've been extremely busy the past 2 weeks working on a project getting ethics approval, as well as writing a journal paper, and preparing for the conference presentation. Only 2 more days till I leave, I'm going to stop by Paris first before hitting Spain.

Presenting my paper at Web-Based Communities 2006 conference

I am presenting my paper called "Finding Evidence of Community from Blogging Co-citations: A Social Network Analytic Approach" at the Web-Based Communities 2006 conference. I just found out the conference schedule, I am presenting in the 11:30 am to 1:20 pm slot on Monday, February 27. I can't wait to go to Spain!!!!





Ha, can you tell I can't wait, I'm already posting pictures of San Sebastian!

2 more weeks till Spain conference!

Sorry for not posting many new blog posts on my blog, I've been extremely busy this week and also next finishing up a journal paper and working on a research project. I've been accepted to present my paper at the Web-Based Communities conference in San Sebastian, Spain. I will also take a trip to Paris before going to Spain. I've never been to either Paris or Spain, so I'm looking forward to this trip. And I think I need a break, I've just been working like a dog this past month! But I've been getting results, so it's all good. I'll post the link to the paper at a later date so you can see what my research is looking into.

Neat search engine

Here's a neat search engine called ProLifeSearch that is powered by Google. You search in Google and for each search, the search engine will donate money to pro-life organizations. Sounds interesting, I'm up for it. And by the way, I just did a search on "gadgetman", and I'm #2 in Google!

Shel Israel in Toronto!

One of the authors of the book, Naked Conversations, which is the book I am reading on business blogging, is coming to Toronto on the morning of March 7 as a panelist at the AIMS event titled Social Marketing: Tapping into the Power of Connected Customers. From this blog entry, a group of bloggers are organizing a dinner for Shel at the Peel Pub the night before.

I'm reading this book right now, you can see my blog entries for the various chapters I have read (when I received the book, Chapter 1 and 2, and Chapter 3.)

Last Year of the Dog - for Sony Aibo

The popular and cult-following of Sony's Aibo robot dogs will be no more. Sony has announced it will discontinue the Aibo according to this article from the New York Times. Oh that's too bad, I really liked the Aibo robot dogs, I've never actually played with one though, but they were cool. With Wi-Fi on the Aibo, you can have your own mobile access point whereever you go, just follow the Aibo! The reason for Aibo's demise, Sony says is because of its financial restructuring.

GadgetMan's blog featured in BlogTO

My blog is featured this week on the Blogerati files in Toronto's blog site, BlogTO!



Come and have a look!

Konica Minolta exits out of camera business

This was a shocker this morning as I read this. Konica Minolta is getting out of the camera business and is transferring their assets to Sony, as of March 31, 2006. So that means, all support for Konica Minolta will be through Sony, and Konica Minolta and Sony will joint develop technologies for digital cameras. I bought a Konica Minolta camera, the G500 which I find is a pretty good camera, except I had to service it twice. The repairs were pretty quick so I was quite satisfied, even when my warranty expired, they managed to service it for free which was really great!

According to this article, Zoomtron will take over the camera repairs for Konica Minolta and they have a branch in Mississauga, so it's nice to know that if my camera has any problems again, I can service it. Of course, I'll probably get an even better digital camera when that time comes! So, Konica Minolta is out of Canada, at least for their camera business.

My thoughts? Well, I really liked Konica Minolta, I had a film camera and a digital camera. They were a well respected camera company so I trusted them. Now, Sony is just getting bigger and bigger, they are becoming the Microsoft of photo and digital camera and imaging I think.

Read Chapter 3 of Naked Conversations book

This chapter is appropriately worded, blogging is indeed “word of mouth on steroids”. The authors provide 3 examples of companies that have used blogging to spread adoption of their product. In fact, it is word of mouth and conversations that through social networks of friends that have catapulted software products like ICQ, Firefox and Skype to ubiquitous use by both techies and non-techies alike. I didn’t know that ICQ started out from Israel and was started by two youngsters and their dad who funded them with 10,000 and in less than 60 years they achieved global acceptance around the world. It’s interesting that they contrast that with other brands that have come from Israel, namely the Bible, and Christianity. The stats are mind boggling, it took 2700 years for the Bible to gain recognition and acceptance, it took 2000 years for Christianity, yet it took less than 10 years. And what about blogging? Blogging has shattered ICQ’s record, that’s for sure.

At first, I was skeptical about blogging, I was like so what? I write something and post, I can do that with a web site and display it publicly. But what I didn’t realize was not the blog itself, but the impact that a blog can have and how its structure and use can hugely influence opinions and become viral in nature, as the authors have mentioned. If you have something interesting to say, people will naturally be curious about it, and read, and comment. That’s all part of conversation, and all part of human nature. And what makes blogging even more powerful is how much it can reach others. This can’t even compare with direct marketing, where for TV ads they say, it reaches a lot of people, but only like less than 2% will respond positively to the ads, say for buying products. And the TV ads cost so much to make and produce. What about blogging? How much does it cost to make a blog post? Nothing, zilch, nada, zero! So you do the math, what would you use to reach your customers if you had an interesting product or idea??? Blogs have also the meme concept, which is viral, you say something, someone reads and then links to you, and then others link to that person, and so forth, and next you know, in less than say 1 day, you could make or break a company.

So, why is it then that still not many traditional companies don’t use blogs? All new companies especially those that are startups, use all the newest and Internet technologies to spread their word. Just like Firefox which has a web site called SpreadFirefox.com. And if you want to get recognition and credibility, the chapter explained an example where a GM vice president read a person’s blog, and even linked it! That is huge, you start having impact on the big-wigs! Isn’t that what you want for your idea or product? Blogs allow for one to many conversations, and the thing is that it’s not forced down your throat. The tone of blogs is natural like you would talk to someone, there’s no hidden agenda, like there is when you do traditional marketing or campaigning like for the recent Canadian election. You talk straight out, and most of the time you would be honest in doing so, because your credibility is on the line.

In fact, I am writing this blog entry on the train coming back from school, after reading Chapter 3 of the book, because if I don’t, I’ll forget. I want to jot my thoughts down and if I do have something interesting to say, I hope that others in the blogosphere will read this, comment, and spur conversation.

Bill Buxton at Microsoft Research

Bill Buxton, who was a former CS professor at the University of Toronto, famous for his ubiquitous computing and user interface research and his work at Alias (an inspiration to all Canadian HCI researchers, with another mention being Ron Baecker), is now working at Microsoft Research according to this article from IT Business Canada. Thanks to KMDI for posting this in their newsletter which I just read tonight!

Interesting that Bill Buxton wrote to Rick Rashid of Microsoft Research that he wanted to work there, he didn't even apply, just asked Rick that he wanted to do something at Microsoft Research and said let's make it happen. And it did. So what's Bill working on at Microsoft? Apparently, not much yet, he wants to learn the culture at Microsoft. In fact, he feels that Microsoft can be a better company by leveraging on the existing assets and talent in the company, rather than getting new people. He points to Microsoft's competitor Apple, whom he admires, and how they turned their business around, by focussing on their existing talent and not really creating anything new, but rather, a new cultural shift and perspective. Which brought the iPod and iMac, and now Apple, is as popular and successful as ever (now Apple has the MacBook Pro and the Intel-based Macs).

Bill also talks about having a chief design officer, how design should be a separate discipline, and how design is so important in the product development cycle, but is often done poorly or ignored. Which leads to frustrating user interfaces, poor products, lots of customer complaints, upgrades of products, and projects that become way over budget and over time. Bill is also a very outdoors person and like to go ice-climbing. In fact, he gets many of his design inspirations from nature. So, maybe that's what perhaps Computer Science needs to be, not just straight programming and technical, but also add the creativity, artistic and design flavours. In fact, isn't this what ubiquitous computing should be, an aura of it works but it's pleasant and it's useful?

Also in the KMDI newsletter, there is a blurb about Blogs Canada (a web site directory of Canadian blogs), and free wireless access in Toronto and where from Wireless Toronto.

Started reading Naked Conversations book

I've started reading the Naked Conversations book which I posted about here. I read the foreword while I was riding the bicycle in the gym this morning, and I read the first 2 chapters coming back from the train. It's interesting that Robert Scoble (one of the authors of the book) got recruited by Microsoft to work on the Channel 9 web site and blog (since Microsoft looked very closely at Scoble's blog, and he used to work at NEC).

The Channel 9 site actually started from Lenn Pryor who joined Microsoft in 1998 as Microsoft's technology evangelist. In dealings with customers, he had this feeling that customers didn't like Microsoft and said bad things about them and were bad mouthing Microsoft. He wanted to know why that was the case, and apparently the customers found him to be a very nice guy, easy to talk to, not like what they thought Microsoft would be (I'm sure many of us still think of Microsoft as the bully in grade school). Microsoft wanted to change their image to have a better relationship with customers, and be more open. So apparently that was the job of Pryor. And how did Channel 9 come about, since Microsoft wanted to explain themselves and what they do with no holds barred and be public and open, they named their blog and site Channel 9 after a public voice channel on United Airlines, where passengers can hear the pilots talking. Pryor wanted to some kind of reality TV show of Microsoft, to make the public hear what Microsoft is talking, and to change the image of Microsoft as a bully or the devil. And that's when Pryor recruited Scoble.

Microsoft is an example of how blogging can work in businesses, to improve business culture and relations with customers. Why? According to Scoble and Israel in Chapter 1 and 2, it's because blogging brings the human side up front. It's not like e-mail or instant messaging, where these technologies allow you to communicate, but the conversations are private, rather than public. Blogging is public, and blogging is public conversation. And they bet that blogging will be the norm, and if you as a company, are not into blogging, you will miss out.

I believe that blogs provides the social aspect to pervasive computing, which we so much need. Mark Weiser's vision was for computers to become a part of our lives, well blogs can become part of our lives. In fact, blogging has become a part of my life. Right now, I am blogging about what I just read today from the book. And if others are reading my blog right now, they can link to it and write comments (are there any who have already have the book?). Also, the book came about from the authors' own blog on Naked Conversations. So come join on the conversation about this book!

Naked Conversations

I just received this book called Naked Conversations: How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers by Robert Scoble (chief blogging officer at Microsoft) and Shel Israel.



The blog for this book is here. This book is part of my blogging research, I organized the Business of Blogging workshop at CASCON. I can't wait to start reading this book.

Mickey Mouse and Pixar?

Apparently, Disney is in talks that may indicate they may want to buy Pixar Animation studios, according to this article from the Associated Press. Pixar is the hugely successful animation studio that made Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, and the new Cars due out this year. This would make Jobs become part of Disney, and could have quite an influence on Disney's animated pictures. Jobs is currently CEO of Pixar and the successful Apple that have catapulted themselves from almost bankruptcy and elimination, to the newly hip company successful with the iPod and now the recently announced Intel Apple computers.

I think this would be huge and would cause a shakeup of the animation industry, Disney animation movies compete with Pixar animation movies, so now they would be one. What would this do to other animation companies? How would they react?

Yahoo hacks

If you're a technology buff like me, you like to use shortcuts or hacks to make your life easier. Here are some Yahoo hacks (note some of this is not really hacks, as so much as it's all published from the Yahoo Search API). It comes from the book, Yahoo Hacks, by Paul Bausch, who was the co-creator of this blogging software called Blogger!

Acura RDX Prototype

I did an earlier posting about the Honda Fit. Everybody wants to get at the Toyota Matrix. Now, Acura has come out with the RDX Prototype.



It looks really nice, maybe I might consider looking at the RDX Prototype.

Technorati tags: RDX, Acura

Just submitted PhD advisory committee

I've completed another checkpoint in my PhD timeline. I submitted my PhD advisory committee form stating who is on my PhD committee. The next items in the agenda are the presentation of the research paper and the depth oral.

Apple's new announcements at MacWorld!

What did Steve Jobs roll up his sleeve at MacWorld yesterday? He unveilled the finally awaited Intel-based Mac computers (Intel-based iMac and Intel-based MacBook Pro), but there were no new iPods. Well, I mean they came out with the video iPod back in November. More information can be found from CNet.


CNet quoted the following:

Today, Apple added Intel processors to an existing Mac desktop and an entirely new laptop, updated Mac OS X and iLife, and introduced an FM tuner/remote control for the iPod. Not a bad day's work. Steve Jobs brought Intel CEO Paul Otellini onstage during his keynote to introduce the new Intel-based iMac, which will feature Intel's new Centrino Duo processor.

On the mobile side, the PowerBook is being retired in favor of the MacBook Pro, Apple's new high-end laptop that also features Centrino Duo.

Auto gadgets from Detroit Auto Show

As a gadget fanatic, I'm also interested in the newest concept or production cars that are presented at yearly North American Auto show in Detroit. I just found out from CNet about Honda's new car, the Fit as illustrated below.

Here's the front:


Here's the back:


And then something popped into my mind, doesn't this look similar to the Toyota Matrix?



I think this is Honda's answer to the Toyota Matrix which started the trendy sports type mini-van kind of car. It was started by Toyota, then Pontiac came out with a version like it called the Vibe (which in my opinion is a really bad design and doesn't come as close in style to the Matrix). But the Honda Fit looks pretty nice, interesting to see how it will compete with the Toyota Matrix.

Riding America on a Segway

Two guys have made a documentary of their travels riding across the United States on a Segway. Check out the trailer here. What's next, maybe a Segway racing contest? A Segway reality TV show, now that would be interesting, maybe the Amazing Race: Segway Edition?

Gates has a Palm!

Yes, from the interview from Engadget of Bill Gates at CES, Gates revealed that he's carrying the Treo 700w from Palm, the first Windows Mobile Palm smartphone. Other things in the interview, he revealed how he played games on the XBox 360, where others totally beat him out, he mentions about the new services that Microsoft has unveilled like PlaysForSure, a music service with MTV, his reaction to him and his wife Melinda being Time Magazine's people of the year along with Bono from U2.

Back to school today!

It's back to school today, back to research and back to real life! I'm applying now for research summer internships for this year from May to August 2006. If you know of any good possible research summer internship positions or are interested in my qualifications, please see my CV and research statement.

Also, I've updated my web site, so have a look!

The iPod: Dangerous to your health?

I've read an article and heard today on CBC News about how the iPod can be dangerous to your hearing. It has to deal with listening to music at a loud volume and that the headphones that are included with the iPod act as amplifiers that can amplify and absorb the noise, which can cause damage to your hearing. The remedy? Apparently, to listen to the music at a comfortable volume so that nobody else can listen to it, as well as perhaps switching to a different earphones.



I certainly like the iPod headphones because they're small and fit right in my ear, and it doesn't look so wierd. I've tried other headphones that are foldable and go over the ear (from Sony) and even though they are good, they just are too big and don't feel so comfortable than the earbuds. Of course, the disadvantages with the earbuds (which has happened to me numerous times), is that the soft covering of the earbuds can easily come off or rip.

So what do people think about this? I think it's just not the iPod, there's been many articles about how listening to loud music is dangerous to your hearing. It just so happens that this becomes big because it refers to the iPod which is the ubiquitous music device out there (I have the iPod mini).

Consumer Electronics Show 2006

Yes, it's the new year, and guess what, new gadgets! It's all happening at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas from January 5 to January 8.



Last night, Bill Gates gives the keynote and talks about Windows Vista, the next upgrade to Windows, touting better security, as well as the new Internet Explorer 7 which will allow for blocking of sites. Hmm, Mozilla Firefox already has these features for a while now, and now Microsoft starts getting on the bandwagon. Will there be a revival war between Microsoft and Mozilla Firefox (now that Netscape is gone and has been reincarnated by AOL).

There's lots of keynotes from big wigs like Howard Stringer from Sony, Paul Ottelini from Intel, Terry Semel from Yahoo, and Larry Page from Google. CES is always a crowd wow pleaser showing all the newest gadgets, I would most certainly like to be there, but it's expensive to book a hotel and register. So the next thing, is to witness it online with video, web updates, and podcasting.

For more information on CES and reviews from the show floor, check out CNET.

Happy New Year!

It's a new year and this is my first post for 2006. After a relaxing and joyful holidays, it's back to work. So I'd like to wish everyone a successful new year in your work and personal life.

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!