I just finished and submitted the last project of the course for the term! Yes, I'm finally done, and can relax for the Christmas holidays. I really need a break, I've been working really hard, it's been a crazy term with 2 courses, 2 projects, PhD depth oral, and TAing. But, I've made it through all the stress, all the pain, and have sweated it all out. Now, it's time to relax and enjoy the holidays!
On Technorati: Christmas holidays
Friday, December 22, 2006
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
One more project to go!
I've finished writing the final exam for the last course of my PhD, yay! I've also finished a project, and I still have to finish one more project, before the holidays start for me. Can't wait for the holidays to start!
I found this new social networking site, called Socialight where you can create sticky notes on a mash-up using Google Maps of places, and create channels and find people to create social networks. I just signed up, to explore what Socialight is all about, and since it's something related to my PhD research, I decided to try it out and create a sticky note of where I work.
On Technorati: social network, Google Maps, Socialight
I found this new social networking site, called Socialight where you can create sticky notes on a mash-up using Google Maps of places, and create channels and find people to create social networks. I just signed up, to explore what Socialight is all about, and since it's something related to my PhD research, I decided to try it out and create a sticky note of where I work.
On Technorati: social network, Google Maps, Socialight
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Satyanarayanan talk
I'm connected on wireless and ready to blog!
Towards Seamless Mobility on Pervasive Hardware
M. Satyanarayanan
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Satya is now talking. Ah yes, Satya is taking back us now 10-15 years ago, I see what he's going to say, it's the dream of mobile computing which we have accomplished. We have arrived at this stage because of the phenomenal hardware progress. The first portable hardware (albeit very large) was the Compaq Luggable. Also, we have had great progress with networking and communications, with Wi-Fi being ubiquitous. What else is going to happen in the world? Computers have gotten really cheap now, the hardware is almost free. How will almost-free hardware change our world? Just like how free software (open source) has significantly changed the software development and software landscape. Satya says that almost-free hardware will lead to seamless mobility. He's now comparing things that are portable and pervasive, the difference between "carry" and "find". Air is pervasive, light is pervasive, water is pervasive (or could be portable if you bring from home). There are many resources that have become part of our daily lives (ie. pervasive). Pre-2000, the phone was pervasive in that you could find public phones everywhere. Now (post-2000), the phone has become portable. Personal computing is now portable. What personal computing will be, it will become pervasive. So, the key observation is that "find" means the resource is available at all visited locations, and "carry" means there is reasonable doubt or risk at least at one location. Can we achieve the same transformation (that ubiquity can substitute for portability) with personal computing? This is a more harder problem, and has interesting research issues.
The observation is that laptops can be suspended and resumed, using the same laptop. For example, I bring my laptop on the GO train and I work on it, then I put it in suspend mode, and when I come back home, I can open the laptop and continue the work where I left off (like for example my depth oral document which I passed! :)). So, the question is that can we mimic this suspend/resume mode of laptops with personal computing, so that I can continue where I left off but using a different device and not the same laptop. This is similar to what my Masters thesis dealt with, which was addressing service invocation and roaming in pervasive-computing environments, being able to continue accessing a service without interruption when moving to a different network or different location. Personal productivity applications have ballooned because customization is what people do to make their computer their own, and make them most productive.
If we go back to the past with timesharing, what is missing in today's world, is that in the past with mainframes, you could use any "dumb" terminal. This is kind of similar to Sun's SunRay product, where all the resources are on the network and you just log in to any SunRay computer using a smart card and login and get access to your resources and data. So, the challenge is that we maintain the good aspects of the personal computing world, and combine that with being able to utilize resources from anywhere and seamless access data. Why does seamless mobility matter? When there is a glut of information, there is a scarcity of attention, this was made by Herb Simon, a former colleague of Satya's. Human attention is finite when talking about cognitive tasks. Seamless means having to be familiar, which has low distraction, which translates to higher productivity. Ah, yes, he finally mentioned Mark Weiser, I was waiting for that. Higher productivity happens when the seamless becomes ubiquitous in the sense that the cognitive aspect is very low. Any technology that is going to be ubiquitous, needs to be resilient and low maintenance.
So, how do we achieve this seamlessness so that it sinks below our cognition, and just comes naturally. One approach is to use a thin client, like SunRay and VNC. The thin client approach is good except it is not resilient to the network. Another approach is distributed file system. It can be very resilient with network failures, but they are imperfect with respect to ubiquity and seamlessness. Process migration can also be used but have low ubiquity. Language-based mobility is high in seamlessness but medium in the rest of the features. What are the features for an ideal solution? We need high seamlessness, solution generality, network resilience, ubiquity, volume of state xfer, and solution complexity.
This is where Satya proposes using internet suspend/resume. So, the vision is suspend anywhere, resume anywhere, and that "any computer is your computer", your entire personal state is centrally managed. Their strategy is to layer a virtual machine on a distributed file system. Virtual machine technology has largely matured over 5 years. The ISR client architecture looks like the following:
--------------------------
| Guest Aps |
| guest os |
| virtual machine |
| virtual machine monitor |
| isr client code |
| linux |
| x86 box |
|
ISR storage and control servers
The client architecture also uses portable storage like a USB key, so you store your state on your USB keychain. How they do it is to use lookaside caching. Using portable storage is more robust, according to him. They have started the ISR project since 2001 and has gone through 3 stages. They are not looking at the testing the deployment of ISR with users. A new version of the system is being created called OpenISR that is agnostic to the virtual machine, use a transient thin client mode (which is being developed together with Eyal de Lara and Andres Lagar-Cavilla at U of T), guest-aware migration, cross-parcel data sharing, and trust sniffers.
He's passed through the performance slides, because he's running out of time.
"The most successful technologies have low usage complexity, in spite of substantial internal complexity" - Alfred Spector, VP of Software Systems and Services, IBM Research, October 2003, ACM SOSP Invited Lecture
He says that ISR fits this description perfectly, and naive users "get it", the look and feel of the PC is preserved. The wallet is a good example in that, we need to think "wallet", and not "swiss army knife" which is what the mobile computing world is going to (eg. cell phone, camera, video into the same device).
An important question is that now we see web-based applications like GMail and Google Spreadsheets and Documents and AJAX application. Does this hurt ISR? Satya's response is that the web-based applications require instant connection to the network, whereas with ISR, you can continue working on your own device because there will be disconnected operations. Isn't that what pervasive and ubiquitous computing is all about, being able to work disconnected like I am right now (with no internet access) or when I'm connected (like I'm returning back to my office)?
On Technorati: Satya, ISR, Internet Suspend/Resume, pervasive computing
Towards Seamless Mobility on Pervasive Hardware
M. Satyanarayanan
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Satya is now talking. Ah yes, Satya is taking back us now 10-15 years ago, I see what he's going to say, it's the dream of mobile computing which we have accomplished. We have arrived at this stage because of the phenomenal hardware progress. The first portable hardware (albeit very large) was the Compaq Luggable. Also, we have had great progress with networking and communications, with Wi-Fi being ubiquitous. What else is going to happen in the world? Computers have gotten really cheap now, the hardware is almost free. How will almost-free hardware change our world? Just like how free software (open source) has significantly changed the software development and software landscape. Satya says that almost-free hardware will lead to seamless mobility. He's now comparing things that are portable and pervasive, the difference between "carry" and "find". Air is pervasive, light is pervasive, water is pervasive (or could be portable if you bring from home). There are many resources that have become part of our daily lives (ie. pervasive). Pre-2000, the phone was pervasive in that you could find public phones everywhere. Now (post-2000), the phone has become portable. Personal computing is now portable. What personal computing will be, it will become pervasive. So, the key observation is that "find" means the resource is available at all visited locations, and "carry" means there is reasonable doubt or risk at least at one location. Can we achieve the same transformation (that ubiquity can substitute for portability) with personal computing? This is a more harder problem, and has interesting research issues.
The observation is that laptops can be suspended and resumed, using the same laptop. For example, I bring my laptop on the GO train and I work on it, then I put it in suspend mode, and when I come back home, I can open the laptop and continue the work where I left off (like for example my depth oral document which I passed! :)). So, the question is that can we mimic this suspend/resume mode of laptops with personal computing, so that I can continue where I left off but using a different device and not the same laptop. This is similar to what my Masters thesis dealt with, which was addressing service invocation and roaming in pervasive-computing environments, being able to continue accessing a service without interruption when moving to a different network or different location. Personal productivity applications have ballooned because customization is what people do to make their computer their own, and make them most productive.
If we go back to the past with timesharing, what is missing in today's world, is that in the past with mainframes, you could use any "dumb" terminal. This is kind of similar to Sun's SunRay product, where all the resources are on the network and you just log in to any SunRay computer using a smart card and login and get access to your resources and data. So, the challenge is that we maintain the good aspects of the personal computing world, and combine that with being able to utilize resources from anywhere and seamless access data. Why does seamless mobility matter? When there is a glut of information, there is a scarcity of attention, this was made by Herb Simon, a former colleague of Satya's. Human attention is finite when talking about cognitive tasks. Seamless means having to be familiar, which has low distraction, which translates to higher productivity. Ah, yes, he finally mentioned Mark Weiser, I was waiting for that. Higher productivity happens when the seamless becomes ubiquitous in the sense that the cognitive aspect is very low. Any technology that is going to be ubiquitous, needs to be resilient and low maintenance.
So, how do we achieve this seamlessness so that it sinks below our cognition, and just comes naturally. One approach is to use a thin client, like SunRay and VNC. The thin client approach is good except it is not resilient to the network. Another approach is distributed file system. It can be very resilient with network failures, but they are imperfect with respect to ubiquity and seamlessness. Process migration can also be used but have low ubiquity. Language-based mobility is high in seamlessness but medium in the rest of the features. What are the features for an ideal solution? We need high seamlessness, solution generality, network resilience, ubiquity, volume of state xfer, and solution complexity.
This is where Satya proposes using internet suspend/resume. So, the vision is suspend anywhere, resume anywhere, and that "any computer is your computer", your entire personal state is centrally managed. Their strategy is to layer a virtual machine on a distributed file system. Virtual machine technology has largely matured over 5 years. The ISR client architecture looks like the following:
--------------------------
| Guest Aps |
| guest os |
| virtual machine |
| virtual machine monitor |
| isr client code |
| linux |
| x86 box |
|
ISR storage and control servers
The client architecture also uses portable storage like a USB key, so you store your state on your USB keychain. How they do it is to use lookaside caching. Using portable storage is more robust, according to him. They have started the ISR project since 2001 and has gone through 3 stages. They are not looking at the testing the deployment of ISR with users. A new version of the system is being created called OpenISR that is agnostic to the virtual machine, use a transient thin client mode (which is being developed together with Eyal de Lara and Andres Lagar-Cavilla at U of T), guest-aware migration, cross-parcel data sharing, and trust sniffers.
He's passed through the performance slides, because he's running out of time.
"The most successful technologies have low usage complexity, in spite of substantial internal complexity" - Alfred Spector, VP of Software Systems and Services, IBM Research, October 2003, ACM SOSP Invited Lecture
He says that ISR fits this description perfectly, and naive users "get it", the look and feel of the PC is preserved. The wallet is a good example in that, we need to think "wallet", and not "swiss army knife" which is what the mobile computing world is going to (eg. cell phone, camera, video into the same device).
An important question is that now we see web-based applications like GMail and Google Spreadsheets and Documents and AJAX application. Does this hurt ISR? Satya's response is that the web-based applications require instant connection to the network, whereas with ISR, you can continue working on your own device because there will be disconnected operations. Isn't that what pervasive and ubiquitous computing is all about, being able to work disconnected like I am right now (with no internet access) or when I'm connected (like I'm returning back to my office)?
On Technorati: Satya, ISR, Internet Suspend/Resume, pervasive computing
Satya comes to town
You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I'm telling you why. Satyanarayanan is coming to town. Yes, that's right, Mahadev Satyanarayanan, the most prominent researcher in pervasive computing, and I would say the #2 man behind Mark Weiser, is coming to U of T this morning at 11 am for a talk. I've read lots of articles from Satya, especially his seminal paper on the issues with pervasive computing, his work with Coda, and Odyssey. He's also the founding editor of IEEE Pervasive Computing. It's finally great to have him hear him, I've always wanted to hear him and admire his work, and dedication to the pervasive computing field.
Here's his bio:
Satya is an experimental computer scientist who has pioneered research
in mobile and pervasive computing. One outcome is the open-source Coda
File System, which supports distributed file access in low-bandwidth and
intermittent wireless networks through disconnected and
bandwidth-adaptive operation. The Coda concepts of hoarding,
reintegration and application-specific conflict resolution can be found
in the hotsync capability of PDAs today. Key ideas from Coda have been
incorporated by Microsoft into the IntelliMirror component of Windows
2000 and the Cached Exchange Mode of Outlook 2003. Another outcome of
Satya's work is Odyssey, a set of open-source operating system
extensions that enable mobile applications to adapt to variation in
critical resources such as network bandwidth and energy. Coda and
Odyssey are building blocks in Project Aura, a research initiative at
Carnegie Mellon to explore distraction-free ubiquitous computing. His
most recent work in this space is Internet Suspend/Resume, a hands-free
approach to mobile computing that exploits virtual machine technology to
liberate personal computing state from hardware. Satya is a co-inventor
of many supporting technologies relevant to mobile and pervasive
computing, such as data staging, lookaside caching, translucent caching
and application-aware adaptation. He is also a co-inventor of the
Diamond approach to interactive, non-indexed search of complex and
loosely-organized data such as digital photographs and medical images.
Early in his career, Satya was a principal architect and implementor of
the Andrew File System (AFS) which pioneered the use of scalable file
caching, ACL-based security, and volume-based system administration for
enterprise-scale information sharing. AFS was commercialized by IBM, is
in widespread use today as OpenAFS, and has heavily influenced the NFS
v4 network file system protocol standard that was published in April
2003.
Satya is the Carnegie Group Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie
Mellon University. From May 2001 to May 2004 he served as the founding
director of Intel Research Pittsburgh, one of four university-affiliated
research labs established worldwide by Intel to create disruptive
information technologies through its Open Collaborative Research model.
Satya received the PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon, after
Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology,
Madras. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, and was the founding
Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Pervasive Computing.
A very distinguished and prolific fellow.
Here's his talk abstract:
Speaker: Mahadev Satyanarayanan, CMU
Title: "Towards Seamless Mobility on Pervasive Hardware"
Abstract
Preserving one's uniquely customized computing environment as one
moves to different locations is an enduring challenge in mobile
computing. In this talk, we will examine why this capability is
valued so highly, and what makes it so difficult to achieve for
personal computing applications. We describe a new mechanism called
Internet Suspend/Resume (ISR) that overcomes many of the limitations
of previous approaches to realizing this capability. ISR enables a
hands-free approach to mobile computing that appears well suited to
future pervasive computing environments in which commodity hardware
may be widely deployed for transient use. We show that ISR can be
implemented by layering virtual machine technology on distributed file
system technology. We also report on measurements from a prototype
that confirm that ISR is already usable today for some common usage
scenarios.
As always, I'll be blogging the talk.
On Technorati: satya, pervasive computing
Here's his bio:
Satya is an experimental computer scientist who has pioneered research
in mobile and pervasive computing. One outcome is the open-source Coda
File System, which supports distributed file access in low-bandwidth and
intermittent wireless networks through disconnected and
bandwidth-adaptive operation. The Coda concepts of hoarding,
reintegration and application-specific conflict resolution can be found
in the hotsync capability of PDAs today. Key ideas from Coda have been
incorporated by Microsoft into the IntelliMirror component of Windows
2000 and the Cached Exchange Mode of Outlook 2003. Another outcome of
Satya's work is Odyssey, a set of open-source operating system
extensions that enable mobile applications to adapt to variation in
critical resources such as network bandwidth and energy. Coda and
Odyssey are building blocks in Project Aura, a research initiative at
Carnegie Mellon to explore distraction-free ubiquitous computing. His
most recent work in this space is Internet Suspend/Resume, a hands-free
approach to mobile computing that exploits virtual machine technology to
liberate personal computing state from hardware. Satya is a co-inventor
of many supporting technologies relevant to mobile and pervasive
computing, such as data staging, lookaside caching, translucent caching
and application-aware adaptation. He is also a co-inventor of the
Diamond approach to interactive, non-indexed search of complex and
loosely-organized data such as digital photographs and medical images.
Early in his career, Satya was a principal architect and implementor of
the Andrew File System (AFS) which pioneered the use of scalable file
caching, ACL-based security, and volume-based system administration for
enterprise-scale information sharing. AFS was commercialized by IBM, is
in widespread use today as OpenAFS, and has heavily influenced the NFS
v4 network file system protocol standard that was published in April
2003.
Satya is the Carnegie Group Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie
Mellon University. From May 2001 to May 2004 he served as the founding
director of Intel Research Pittsburgh, one of four university-affiliated
research labs established worldwide by Intel to create disruptive
information technologies through its Open Collaborative Research model.
Satya received the PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon, after
Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology,
Madras. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, and was the founding
Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Pervasive Computing.
A very distinguished and prolific fellow.
Here's his talk abstract:
Speaker: Mahadev Satyanarayanan, CMU
Title: "Towards Seamless Mobility on Pervasive Hardware"
Abstract
Preserving one's uniquely customized computing environment as one
moves to different locations is an enduring challenge in mobile
computing. In this talk, we will examine why this capability is
valued so highly, and what makes it so difficult to achieve for
personal computing applications. We describe a new mechanism called
Internet Suspend/Resume (ISR) that overcomes many of the limitations
of previous approaches to realizing this capability. ISR enables a
hands-free approach to mobile computing that appears well suited to
future pervasive computing environments in which commodity hardware
may be widely deployed for transient use. We show that ISR can be
implemented by layering virtual machine technology on distributed file
system technology. We also report on measurements from a prototype
that confirm that ISR is already usable today for some common usage
scenarios.
As always, I'll be blogging the talk.
On Technorati: satya, pervasive computing
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
PIN number reversal is a hoax
If you get an e-mail or see this on a blog, it's a rumour, it doesn't work and so treat it as a hoax.
PIN NUMBER REVERSAL (GOOD TO KNOW)
>
>If you should ever be forced by a robber to withdraw money from an ATM
>machine, you can notify the police by entering your Pin # in reverse.
>
>For example if your pin number is 1234 then you would put in 4321. The
>ATM recognizes that your pin number is backwards from the ATM card you
>placed in the machine.
You can view more information on this here.
On Technorati: PIN number reversal, ATM hoax
PIN NUMBER REVERSAL (GOOD TO KNOW)
>
>If you should ever be forced by a robber to withdraw money from an ATM
>machine, you can notify the police by entering your Pin # in reverse.
>
>For example if your pin number is 1234 then you would put in 4321. The
>ATM recognizes that your pin number is backwards from the ATM card you
>placed in the machine.
You can view more information on this here.
On Technorati: PIN number reversal, ATM hoax
Passed the depth oral!
Yes, I just finished my depth oral and I passed! That's a great sign of relief. And I had a great Christmas lunch at the Faculty Club with my IML friends. You can check out the photos from the IML blog. Great, depth oral done, now to finish up 2 projects, mark assignments, study for an exam, and mark exams, all before the Christmas holidays!
On Technorati: PhD depth oral, IML, Christmas lunch
On Technorati: PhD depth oral, IML, Christmas lunch
D-Day today
Today is what I like to call D-Day. No, it's not D-Day from World War II, but Depth oral day. I'm presenting my depth oral today as well as my research paper (which is my Masters thesis). Our lab will also have a nice Christmas buffet lunch, courtesy of a great supervisor. He's helped me so much in my research, proofreading my papers and documents, depth oral and presentations. The Christmas buffet lunch is amazing, I had it last year, and it was delicious! Of course, as a grad student, free (but delicious and high class food) is music to a grad student's ears!
On Technorati: PhD depth oral, Christmas lunch
On Technorati: PhD depth oral, Christmas lunch
Saturday, December 09, 2006
PhD depth oral on Tuesday
I'm presenting my PhD depth oral on Tuesday as well as presenting my research paper. What's a depth oral? Basically, I'm going to present about the background research and the problems with that research, that will lead me to develop a PhD thesis topic. So, I'm going to have a busy weekend finishing this up and practicing the presentation. Then, I have to mark assignments that week, mark a final exam, and write a exam. Oh yes, did I not mention, I will have to finish up 2 projects as well before December 20?
I can't wait for this term to be over, I'm definitely looking forward to the Christmas holidays with my family and friends.
On Technorati: PhD, depth oral
I can't wait for this term to be over, I'm definitely looking forward to the Christmas holidays with my family and friends.
On Technorati: PhD, depth oral
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Prayers with the James Kim family
The Kim family has been rescued, unfortunately James Kim has died. Can't believe this. Prayers go out to the Kim family. I'll certainly miss James Kim's videocasts of gadget news at CNET. May he live in peace with you God.
Here's a wonderful tribute video to James Kim from the people at CNET
On Technorati: James Kim
Here's a wonderful tribute video to James Kim from the people at CNET
On Technorati: James Kim
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Palm Train
I was waiting for the GO train at Union Station on platform 3B, when I saw this train car coming near me. It was an advertisement of Palm on the train car. So, naturally, I had to sit in it. I took a picture of it with my Palm (of course, the Palm and gadget geek that I am), while passengers were boarding the train.
Then, I took a picture of it again after I arrived back in Oakville. Yes, it's these things, that I have to take, it's in my gadget blood!
On Technorati: Palm train,Palm
Saturday, December 02, 2006
CNET editor James Kim and family missing
As an avid GadgetMan, I try to read the gadget news as much as I can, although I admit I haven't been doing so much lately since I have to finish a lot of school work before the Christmas holidays. However, I came across reading this in my e-mail which I felt that I should write about. I read a lot of CNET tech news, especially the stuff on gadgets like handhelds and personal entertainment devices. So, I will try to read the MP3 segment news by CNET editor James Kim. I was surprised to hear about this news, James Kim and his family are missing and search and rescue party has been initiated to find his family. There's been lots of comments about this, so please keep Kim and his family in your prayers, and hope that they will be found safe. I enjoy listening to James Kim's videocasts about the newest devices.
On Technorati: James Kim
On Technorati: James Kim
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
PhD depth oral
I've been busy like crazy finishing off this PhD depth oral which I will present before the end of this term. Plus, I have to finish up 2 projects, TA work, and writing an exam all before the Christmas holidays. I'm going to be extremely busy, so I'm looking forward to the Christmas holidays!
But I'm also finished writing the depth oral which I'll give to my PhD committee and give the depth oral in about 2 weeks. Then I'll complete two of my PhD milestones, which is presenting my research paper (My Masters thesis) and the depth oral (literature review). Next term, I will have to present my PhD thesis proposal and then hopefully I'll finish my PhD in a year. Then I'll be looking for either post-doc positions, research positions, or perhaps a professor positions. We'll see, as the saying goes, one step at a time.
On Technorati: depth oral
But I'm also finished writing the depth oral which I'll give to my PhD committee and give the depth oral in about 2 weeks. Then I'll complete two of my PhD milestones, which is presenting my research paper (My Masters thesis) and the depth oral (literature review). Next term, I will have to present my PhD thesis proposal and then hopefully I'll finish my PhD in a year. Then I'll be looking for either post-doc positions, research positions, or perhaps a professor positions. We'll see, as the saying goes, one step at a time.
On Technorati: depth oral
Friday, November 24, 2006
Lilia Efimova and Jonathan Grudin's blogging paper
Jonathan Grudin, who was here at U of T and from whom I met during the student and faculty meet and greet session (check my blog post here), along with Lilia Efimova (who's prominent in the blogosphere and also with her blogging research), have written a paper at HICSS (Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences). I should have a look at this paper, as it's very relevant to my research and I'm interested in how they were able to conduct the study and what methods they used and how they analyzed that data.
On Technorati: Microsoft blogging, HICSS, Jonathan Grudin, Lilia Efimova
On Technorati: Microsoft blogging, HICSS, Jonathan Grudin, Lilia Efimova
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Jonathan Grudin talk
Jonathan Grudin Talk
Emerging Technologies and Knowledge Management
The wireless does not appear to be working here in BA 1180, so I’m going to blog locally on Microsoft Word and then transfer to Blogger. There will be a meeting with grad students and faculty later this afternoon. I’ve just also noticed that this talk is being recorded by ePresence. Jonathan just mentioned that he’s glad to be back in Toronto. Anyways, I've just realized that this talk is very similar to the video talk that I attended and blogged while at PARC. He’s now talking about irresistible forces in technology, there is an imperceptible change of exponential growth of technology. From psychological studies and effects, even when aware of non-linear growth, we reason poorly about it. Even though we have more data, it doesn’t help. He’s now showing the visualizations of exponential growth, in particular Moore’s Law. The basic curve of Moore’s Law doesn’t change, but you have a long tail which becomes longer and longer in time as you increase in time. There have been professions that have been affected by this change in hardware, like hardware R&D, software R&D, user interface R&D.
OK, the wireless is back on, so I'm going to continue blogging in Blogger beta.
We now see effects in consumer behaviour and in organizational and institutional behaviour. There's a new generation of technologies and students are picking up these skills and behaviours (note: he mentioned that weblogs are a waste of time for students, hehe, well I'm blogging right now but I think it depends what the blogs are talking about, I think blogging can be constructive to find community, hence my research). Jonathan is doing research into these new collaborative technologies. Ah yes, the ever popular emerging technologies hype cycle from Gartner, this is what he is showing. Gartner is optimistic about these technologies like wikis and blogging. The research that he is doing in MS Research include a qualitative study of blogs at MS with Lilia Efimova (who's a PhD research doing similar work to finding communities in blogs like I am). They've found rapid evolution of product blogs, Microsoft employees are heavily into blogging. They found that blogs are good for communicating with businesses and customers if the employees had lots of experience in blogging.
The second part of his research is talking about Managing Knowledge: Challenges and Potential Solutions. Digital documents are difficult to find, adding metadata is work. One type of adding metadata is unstructured tagging like Flickr. Almost everyone in the room put up their hand to say they've visited the Flickr site, in contrast to not many people from our survey that we did in the Business of Blogging workshop from CASCON 2005. It's so easy to search for photos in Flickr based on tags, Jonathan mentioned how he had to write a trip report for table top displays, and so just did a search on that in Flickr and found all these photos from the recent CSCW conference in Banff that ended couple of weeks ago. Flickr has an innovative approach, bu the question is how far can bottom-up go? Flickr also has automatic clustering of photos and create structure based on number of visits, the most recent time. You can quickly navigate through the photos space of Flickr. There's also been a recent study of Flickr from Cameron Marlow and his colleagues from Yahoo Research from the Hypertext 2006 conference.
Jonathan is now talking about how blogs are affecting the workplace, we explored this in the Business of Blogging workshop at CASCON 2005. Employees can get up to date information from events, for monitoring comments on products, to put a human face on your enterprise and connect to customers (including Microsoft), and internally-facing to communicate about project visibility and knowledge management. Blogs can then be used to link to document repositories to provide context. In other words blogs can provide documentation to projects. How do blogs provide context? Blog entries briefly describe documents and it's easier to blog a comment than to email it. It doesn't add work.
One of the questions that Jonathan gets is the blog a limited structured format? He thinks that there will be a merger between blogs and document repositories because blogs can add that missing context to document repositories. This also includes wikis which is good for deadline-driven collaborations. Building expertise locators hasn't succeeded so people bypass the system. Why they don't work? It's because it's difficult because the processes are highly social and complex.
In conclusion, he encourages us to look ahead of the curve and how rapidly things can change. There's now a paradigm shift in HCI and its social computing and it's great to know that I'm in the right area for research!
On Technorati: jonathan grudin, knowledge management, emerging technologies, social computing
Emerging Technologies and Knowledge Management
The wireless does not appear to be working here in BA 1180, so I’m going to blog locally on Microsoft Word and then transfer to Blogger. There will be a meeting with grad students and faculty later this afternoon. I’ve just also noticed that this talk is being recorded by ePresence. Jonathan just mentioned that he’s glad to be back in Toronto. Anyways, I've just realized that this talk is very similar to the video talk that I attended and blogged while at PARC. He’s now talking about irresistible forces in technology, there is an imperceptible change of exponential growth of technology. From psychological studies and effects, even when aware of non-linear growth, we reason poorly about it. Even though we have more data, it doesn’t help. He’s now showing the visualizations of exponential growth, in particular Moore’s Law. The basic curve of Moore’s Law doesn’t change, but you have a long tail which becomes longer and longer in time as you increase in time. There have been professions that have been affected by this change in hardware, like hardware R&D, software R&D, user interface R&D.
OK, the wireless is back on, so I'm going to continue blogging in Blogger beta.
We now see effects in consumer behaviour and in organizational and institutional behaviour. There's a new generation of technologies and students are picking up these skills and behaviours (note: he mentioned that weblogs are a waste of time for students, hehe, well I'm blogging right now but I think it depends what the blogs are talking about, I think blogging can be constructive to find community, hence my research). Jonathan is doing research into these new collaborative technologies. Ah yes, the ever popular emerging technologies hype cycle from Gartner, this is what he is showing. Gartner is optimistic about these technologies like wikis and blogging. The research that he is doing in MS Research include a qualitative study of blogs at MS with Lilia Efimova (who's a PhD research doing similar work to finding communities in blogs like I am). They've found rapid evolution of product blogs, Microsoft employees are heavily into blogging. They found that blogs are good for communicating with businesses and customers if the employees had lots of experience in blogging.
The second part of his research is talking about Managing Knowledge: Challenges and Potential Solutions. Digital documents are difficult to find, adding metadata is work. One type of adding metadata is unstructured tagging like Flickr. Almost everyone in the room put up their hand to say they've visited the Flickr site, in contrast to not many people from our survey that we did in the Business of Blogging workshop from CASCON 2005. It's so easy to search for photos in Flickr based on tags, Jonathan mentioned how he had to write a trip report for table top displays, and so just did a search on that in Flickr and found all these photos from the recent CSCW conference in Banff that ended couple of weeks ago. Flickr has an innovative approach, bu the question is how far can bottom-up go? Flickr also has automatic clustering of photos and create structure based on number of visits, the most recent time. You can quickly navigate through the photos space of Flickr. There's also been a recent study of Flickr from Cameron Marlow and his colleagues from Yahoo Research from the Hypertext 2006 conference.
Jonathan is now talking about how blogs are affecting the workplace, we explored this in the Business of Blogging workshop at CASCON 2005. Employees can get up to date information from events, for monitoring comments on products, to put a human face on your enterprise and connect to customers (including Microsoft), and internally-facing to communicate about project visibility and knowledge management. Blogs can then be used to link to document repositories to provide context. In other words blogs can provide documentation to projects. How do blogs provide context? Blog entries briefly describe documents and it's easier to blog a comment than to email it. It doesn't add work.
One of the questions that Jonathan gets is the blog a limited structured format? He thinks that there will be a merger between blogs and document repositories because blogs can add that missing context to document repositories. This also includes wikis which is good for deadline-driven collaborations. Building expertise locators hasn't succeeded so people bypass the system. Why they don't work? It's because it's difficult because the processes are highly social and complex.
In conclusion, he encourages us to look ahead of the curve and how rapidly things can change. There's now a paradigm shift in HCI and its social computing and it's great to know that I'm in the right area for research!
On Technorati: jonathan grudin, knowledge management, emerging technologies, social computing
Saturday, November 18, 2006
It's gonna be a busy hectic couple of weeks
I'm in for a busy hectic couple of weeks (as if I'm never busy). But especially for these coming weeks, because I have to finish up assignments for 2 courses, projects in 2 courses, write an exam, mark assignments for a course I'm TAing, mark final exams in December, and also complete my PhD depth oral and research paper presentation which will be in middle of December as well.
Then I can concentrate on my thesis proposal in January, I will have finished all my courses by end of this year, and hopefully if all goes according to plan, I will finish my PhD by end of next year (hopefully!). So, if you don't hear my blog that often, you'll know why.
On Technorati: busy, PhD depth oral
Then I can concentrate on my thesis proposal in January, I will have finished all my courses by end of this year, and hopefully if all goes according to plan, I will finish my PhD by end of next year (hopefully!). So, if you don't hear my blog that often, you'll know why.
On Technorati: busy, PhD depth oral
Friday, November 17, 2006
When anti-spyware is actually spyware
My laptop got infected with spyware today, the exact same case as my sister's in the post I did here. Fortunately, it did not require me to reinstall Windows! Basically, what was happening was that I had two programs that were installed in the system tray. The first was a red circle with an exclamation which kept constantly giving me a message saying that Warning: you have spyware on your computer and to click this balloon to download all necessary software. However, this program is clever because to the average user, he/she would click and start downloading other anti-spyware programs and anti-virus programs like WinAntivirus Pro. The second item in my system tray was a "Critical system error" message prompting me to download their anti-spyware software to clean it. Actually, these programs are spyware but are cleverly disguised as anti-spyware. Don't download their anti-spyware! (this is examples of what is called rogue spyware, it seems legit but it isn't, so it may fool you). If you actually look at the message, there is a misspelling on balloon, it's spelled "baloon", so I could tell that I had spyware installed. But using your average anti-virus program (Symantec Antivirus in my case) and Windows Defender and Lavasoft Ad-aware could not remove it. Ad-aware did detect malware and removed some of it but not all.
As I start getting fed up and concerned about this, I did a Google search for "Critical system errors system tray windows", and up came a whole bunch of articles on how to remove it. Some were very complex, saying you have to install this and that, and I was like what? Others had to post something called a HijackThis log, and I wasn't in the position to do something like that. I finally found out how to get rid of both of my spyware programs and these are the steps that I did.
1. I came to this article which is a blog post from PC's Ancestor, which was the top search in Google. Thanks to this, I was able to download SmitfraudFix.zip and follow the instructions to remove infected items in the registry in Safe Mode. So, that got me to remove the "Critical system error" message in the system tray.
2. Then I rebooted back into Windows XP and Windows Defender came on and detected a program called Toolbar888 which is called Browser Modifier, this is what happened and modified the browser so that popups are displayed. So, Windows Defender removed that.
3. To make sure I had no other infections, I rebooted back into Safe Mode and ran Ad-aware. I found out that I still had some type of spyware called Virtumonde which is a program that causes popups to happen. Ad-aware couldn't kill it or quarantine it so it said that I need to go and download a Virtumonde removal tool.
4. I'm currently downloading the Virtumonde removal tool from Symantec.
Now, I don't have the "Critical system error" message or the "Security warning" messages in the system tray anymore.
I also just realized that there were two URLs that were installed in my Start menu about online and security troubleshooting but I've removed them (that's the easy part).
I've never seen software this sophisticated before, it just shows that you have to be careful when you're downloading and on the internet, and install a firewall, anti-spyware (a valid one!) and anti-virus programs. Hope these instructions will help others who have the same problem.
On Technorati: spyware, smitfraudfix, browser modifier
As I start getting fed up and concerned about this, I did a Google search for "Critical system errors system tray windows", and up came a whole bunch of articles on how to remove it. Some were very complex, saying you have to install this and that, and I was like what? Others had to post something called a HijackThis log, and I wasn't in the position to do something like that. I finally found out how to get rid of both of my spyware programs and these are the steps that I did.
1. I came to this article which is a blog post from PC's Ancestor, which was the top search in Google. Thanks to this, I was able to download SmitfraudFix.zip and follow the instructions to remove infected items in the registry in Safe Mode. So, that got me to remove the "Critical system error" message in the system tray.
2. Then I rebooted back into Windows XP and Windows Defender came on and detected a program called Toolbar888 which is called Browser Modifier, this is what happened and modified the browser so that popups are displayed. So, Windows Defender removed that.
3. To make sure I had no other infections, I rebooted back into Safe Mode and ran Ad-aware. I found out that I still had some type of spyware called Virtumonde which is a program that causes popups to happen. Ad-aware couldn't kill it or quarantine it so it said that I need to go and download a Virtumonde removal tool.
4. I'm currently downloading the Virtumonde removal tool from Symantec.
Now, I don't have the "Critical system error" message or the "Security warning" messages in the system tray anymore.
I also just realized that there were two URLs that were installed in my Start menu about online and security troubleshooting but I've removed them (that's the easy part).
I've never seen software this sophisticated before, it just shows that you have to be careful when you're downloading and on the internet, and install a firewall, anti-spyware (a valid one!) and anti-virus programs. Hope these instructions will help others who have the same problem.
On Technorati: spyware, smitfraudfix, browser modifier
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Microsoft Zune launch today in US
Microsoft today launched their Zune player, the competitor to Apple's iPod. I blogged about the Zune in an early blogging post. The Zune comes with the following features:
WMA, MP3, AAC, JPEG,WMV, MPEG-4, H.264 media playback
Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g) connectivity
30 GB Hard Drive
3 inch video LCD 320x240
White, Black, and Brown Colors
FM Radio
Dedicated song download site zune.net
Podcast playback
Updateable Firmware
Tested 13 hr battery life for audio, 4 hr video
3 day playback of Wi-Fi transfered songs from friends
XBOX streaming
XBOX (Microsoft) points compatability
Preloaded music videos
Over a dozen accessories at launch
5.6 ounces in weight, 4.4 x 2.4 x 0.58 inches size
Metric: 158 g, 112 x 61 x 14.7 mm size
Custom background images
WiFi transfer of photographs
Tag based storage system (Will not appear as drive)
PC Compatability (no Mac client at launch)
Zune tag enabled
Horizontal and vertical video orientation
It's $249.99US, but it's not coming to Canada until next year. Don't expect Microsoft to make a bite out of the Apple iPod. But with Microsoft's muscle into entertainment and the digitally connected home with XBox360, Windows Media Edition, TabletPC, UltraMobilePC, they may be able to carve out a market in this space. As with all Microsoft launches, there's huge media and launch party, some pictures from the event are shown below from the Zune web site.
It's pretty funny, on the Zune web site, there's a Google ad for a free iPod! I guess, there's no context-aware ads yet, context awareness would say, hmm iPod competes with Zune, if the iPod is free, doesn't this go against buying a Microsoft Zune?
This is interesting also, a survey shows that many iPod users will buy a Zune? What kind of a poll is this?
A new survey conducted by ABI Research has shown that many prospective MP3 player buyers—even owners of iPods—would be likely to choose Microsoft's Zune player. 1725 teenage and adult US residents were asked whether they planned to buy an MP3 player in the next 12 months. Of those responding that they were likely to do so, 58% of those identifying themselves as existing iPod owners and 59% of those who owned other brands said they would be "somewhat likely" or "extremely likely" to choose a Microsoft Zune player over an iPod or another brand of MP3 player.
"..iPod users don't display the same passionate loyalty to iPods that Macintosh users have historically shown for their Apple products."
source ABI
So, the ultimate question, will GadgetMan buy one? I still haven't replaced my Palm Zire 71 yet, in fact, I've found out I don't use much of my Palm that I used to 2 years ago, just use it mostly for making appointments, for synchronizing contacts, and reading the Bible. And also, the occasional camera shot if I feel like it. So, I don't see myself buying one anytime soon.
On Technorati: Zune
Monday, November 13, 2006
U of T CS is #1 at ACM programming competition!
On Saturday, the U of T CS teams competed in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition regionals, and we won!
Our two teams took first and seventh places, beating Waterloo and over 100 other teams from Ontario, and 3 US states.
The final scoreboard is here.
Toronto 1 will go to the finals in Tokyo in March.
Congrats to the team!
On Technorati: ACM Programming Competition, U of T
Our two teams took first and seventh places, beating Waterloo and over 100 other teams from Ontario, and 3 US states.
The final scoreboard is here.
Toronto 1 will go to the finals in Tokyo in March.
Congrats to the team!
On Technorati: ACM Programming Competition, U of T
From Web 2.0 to Web 3.0
I'm sure people have heard about this Web 2.0 phenomenon that's all over, about AJAX and mashups, blogging, podcasts, tagging, basically making the web usable for humans. Now, we're getting to the next upgrade to the web, or maybe a leap, called Web 3.0. It's the first time I've heard of this term, coming from this article from the New York Times.
Note: a Google search already shows that Web 3.0 has already been used a lot now, I just never knew about it!
Thanks to my supervisor for sending this to me. It's basically talking about when web sites begin to understand each other and when you make a request, then the results you get are relevant to what you're looking for. What do I mean? For example, right now, if you want to book a conference trip, you need to find a web site for the conference and do registration. Then, you need to book your flights so you go to a travel web site to find the lowest fares that suit your dates of travel. Then, you have to find the accommodations to stay at in the conference (if you don't want to stay at the conference hotel). On top of that, if you want to do some sightseeing, you have to go the city's web sites or Google or find other travellers who have gone to those places like TripAdvisor. Basically, this is all time consuming, I know for me it is! I spend so much time, trying to find the best bang for the buck and for the experience.
So, what if instead, I enter in the query that I want to book a conference and give the conference name and want the travel itinerary. I log in, it knows my profile and finds that my favorite airline is Air Canada, it also knows that I've stayed at many Best Western hotels so I have a discount for Best Western. Furthermore, it knows the dates that I'm travelling because it consults the conference web site and finds out the dates of the conference. It then also consults with my calendar to know what my schedule is, and then decides the best dates for me to travel with Air Canada, with the lowest cost (since I'm a grad student and I'm poor). Then, it knows how many days I'm staying at the city of the conference, and how much money I have from my bank account, so it recommends a schedule of places to go that will suit my budget and my time. That's what I want, and that's what the vision of what Web 3.0 will be like, it's the Semantic Web, touted for a long time by Tim Berners-Lee.
Basically, the web becomes an exchange of data and meaning associated behind that data, as well as translating the human queries into machine level web service transactions divided into mini transactions and rules that execute the query of "Booking a conference". What are the technologies that Web 3.0 will involve? Right now, the ground work is ontologies, or creating categorizations of data. We need to have classifications so that web sites are able to talk to each other. The Semantic Web effort at the W3C is dealing with RDF and OWL-S, and there's lots of research being done in academia and research labs on semantic web. For example, MIT has something called the Simile project, and you can easily Google to find more people working on Semantic Web.
There also will be a need of inference and AI type of work. I'm a big fan of this kind of stuff, I did a little bit of semantic web research as part of my Masters thesis when I was investigating disconnections and crashes in mobile pervasive environments, and how web services can be used to stitch this together as service-oriented computing where computing is not about dealing with data but it's about finding and interacting with services.
When will we see patches to Web 2.0 or incremental releases like Web 2.0a or Web 2.1 , will there even be a Web 4.0 or will the numbering change to like Web 2007 just like software releases? Maybe there maybe alphas and betas and RTWs (Release to Web, just like RTMs like Release To Manufacturing in Microsoft speak).
On Technorati: Web 3.0, Semantic Web
Note: a Google search already shows that Web 3.0 has already been used a lot now, I just never knew about it!
Thanks to my supervisor for sending this to me. It's basically talking about when web sites begin to understand each other and when you make a request, then the results you get are relevant to what you're looking for. What do I mean? For example, right now, if you want to book a conference trip, you need to find a web site for the conference and do registration. Then, you need to book your flights so you go to a travel web site to find the lowest fares that suit your dates of travel. Then, you have to find the accommodations to stay at in the conference (if you don't want to stay at the conference hotel). On top of that, if you want to do some sightseeing, you have to go the city's web sites or Google or find other travellers who have gone to those places like TripAdvisor. Basically, this is all time consuming, I know for me it is! I spend so much time, trying to find the best bang for the buck and for the experience.
So, what if instead, I enter in the query that I want to book a conference and give the conference name and want the travel itinerary. I log in, it knows my profile and finds that my favorite airline is Air Canada, it also knows that I've stayed at many Best Western hotels so I have a discount for Best Western. Furthermore, it knows the dates that I'm travelling because it consults the conference web site and finds out the dates of the conference. It then also consults with my calendar to know what my schedule is, and then decides the best dates for me to travel with Air Canada, with the lowest cost (since I'm a grad student and I'm poor). Then, it knows how many days I'm staying at the city of the conference, and how much money I have from my bank account, so it recommends a schedule of places to go that will suit my budget and my time. That's what I want, and that's what the vision of what Web 3.0 will be like, it's the Semantic Web, touted for a long time by Tim Berners-Lee.
Basically, the web becomes an exchange of data and meaning associated behind that data, as well as translating the human queries into machine level web service transactions divided into mini transactions and rules that execute the query of "Booking a conference". What are the technologies that Web 3.0 will involve? Right now, the ground work is ontologies, or creating categorizations of data. We need to have classifications so that web sites are able to talk to each other. The Semantic Web effort at the W3C is dealing with RDF and OWL-S, and there's lots of research being done in academia and research labs on semantic web. For example, MIT has something called the Simile project, and you can easily Google to find more people working on Semantic Web.
There also will be a need of inference and AI type of work. I'm a big fan of this kind of stuff, I did a little bit of semantic web research as part of my Masters thesis when I was investigating disconnections and crashes in mobile pervasive environments, and how web services can be used to stitch this together as service-oriented computing where computing is not about dealing with data but it's about finding and interacting with services.
When will we see patches to Web 2.0 or incremental releases like Web 2.0a or Web 2.1 , will there even be a Web 4.0 or will the numbering change to like Web 2007 just like software releases? Maybe there maybe alphas and betas and RTWs (Release to Web, just like RTMs like Release To Manufacturing in Microsoft speak).
On Technorati: Web 3.0, Semantic Web
Saturday, November 11, 2006
New feature on my blog: get notified by email!
I've just added a new feature on my blog which is e-mail notification. Instead of having to check or subscribe to my feed and having to read the feed, you can subscribe via e-mail. Whenever my blog gets updated, you'll be the first to know! Thanks to blogarithm for providing this feature. I'm using blogarithm right now for tracking when blogs that I read get updated. As you know, it's a chore having to read blogs when you're so busy. But having a notification via e-mail is great, I can see which blogs get updated and decide whether I want to read them or not.
You'll see this feature on the sidebar of my blog which looks like this:
Also, I've added another feature to see what my blog readers are also reading.
Try it out!
On Technorati: Blogarithm
You'll see this feature on the sidebar of my blog which looks like this:
Also, I've added another feature to see what my blog readers are also reading.
Try it out!
On Technorati: Blogarithm
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