thecapacity

In the beginning you were a Starfighter, recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada… well, actually the beginning was something much simpler, something more like Space Invaders.

Space Invaders was a classic, it spurred the video game industry, inspired a vast genre, can still be played online and occasionally even in a lecture hall.

Now, you can play in my office;

Well, it would be hubris to claim that my humble beginnings have reached the same success but I do believe it has matured in much the same vein. I seem to have moved beyond building a deadly office putting toy to a serious office defense system!

This might even classify as something much more sophisticated than some Russian spy gear! Now I’m truly ready to defend my office against any and all invaders, alien or otherwise!

In truth, I’m hoping I can stash this in a friends office maybe for a surprise ambush! However, in practice it might be hard to convince someone to put on a face shield before heading to work.

Building from my previous creation I connected my wiimote to a servo via some python and my ioBridge 204 module, only this time I replaced the coilgun with a remotely triggered airsoft gun! Now there are no more issues with reloading a weapons system half a world a way after each shot!

Here is the action sequence;

Would you like to know more?

I hope those who know me wouldn’t peg me as an alarmist. So take my title with a grain of salt but also, because of that same optimism, with a sense of sobriety.

I’ve followed “cloud computing” for a while (before it was called that), most often in the context of Amazon. From my position, it’s been really interesting to see the growth and dead-ends of this shift. And although in some ways it represents an outside disruptive force for my job, in others it’s a technology and mindset I’m trying to drive internally and externally.

My analogy for my job is that I help design, edit and publish “books” but never write one of my own, so some of my perspectives are gleaned second hand without the heat and intensity of battle. Yet, I’m also keen to learn from other’s failures (and successes) so I do my best to leverage the examples others provide.

SmugMug is a photo sharing site that’s been a big champion (and occasional critic) of Amazon’s services and despite seeing their use of them as a competitive advantage they’ve been very open about their practices. Recently they described how they’ve built a very successful workflow around these concepts and I think you should give it a read.

There’s a tangible shift in computing that I don’t think has been felt in more traditional environments. Certainly enterprise IT is used to hearing fads fall to the floor, anyone remember “The Mainframe is dead”? But it’s also very easy to point to successful companies like SmugMug and claim they’re not enterprise players.

However, consider Amazon (or Google) and remember they don’t just provide this stuff for fun. It’s what they themselves use internally for their “day jobs” and that it’s because of these same services and not in spite of them, that they’ve reached their current heights.

Time will only tell if they can hold these lofty positions, but my belief is that the future’s in the clouds.

No, this has nothing to do with strange anthropological experiences it’s even more fascinating…

I watched a great video from iTunes U (my new favorite pastime) and it made two (of many) interesting points;

1. Wal*Mart, which would be China’s 8th largest trading partner if it were a country and is the United State’s largest business, doesn’t make a single thing. Instead, their success is due to their logistical knowledge and expertise.
2. UPS doesn’t just “deliver things” they’re also “in-sourced” to perform operations for companies, for example Toshiba. When you mail a laptop out for service, it gets picked up by UPS, taken to one of their facilities, repaired by UPS and mailed back to, all without ever touching Toshiba’s hands.

In that many ways the world wide economy is turning into a “knowledge based economy”where the ability to conceive of an idea dictates success, not specifically the ability to build or deploy that idea, those proficiencies can be contracted.

There is certainly value for operational excellence a la Wal*Mart, Starbucks, UPS and today I think we get to add one more to that list, Amazon.

They’ve announced a “Fulfillment Web service (FWS)” which allows you to leverage Amazon’s existing distribution network to store and ship your products.

In addition to offering warehousing and shipping, in true Amazon tradition, they’ve coupled this capability with a programmatic webservices interface. I think this may be a pretty key differentiator. It’s not that Wal*Mart doesn’t have a business to business (B2B) interface, but EDI can be complex and costly to implement.

Wal*Mart attempts to server “the common man” but it seems clear that Amazon’s focused on “the common business”.

One last question and thought; Why has this taken so long? We can be pedantic about definitions or dissect the statement that innovation can truly not exist without invention. Semantics aside, I believe Amazon’s practice and “inventions” in the webservices technologies has afforded them the “innovation” required to bridge this gap.

PS, if you have the opportunity check out iTunes U, specifically the presentations by Thomas L. Friedman at MIT; “The World is Flat” and “The World is Flat 3.0″.

I was watching a presentation on my iPhone on implementation of MapReduce for multi-core and multi-processor systems…

You can find out more about it at the project’s website.

Before you go.. note the “~christos” part of the URL. In UNIX-speak it means “the home directory of the user christos”. That little “squiggle” is called a tilde and is a common syntax, especially for geeks.

However, the iPhone’s keypad lacks a ‘~’ character!

Rather then enter a relatively short URL, I had to use some searching on Google to get me there. Not exactly the user experience I think Apple would strive for.

Just a quick post before the holidays, I’ll be traveling quite a bit so we’ll see how everything holds up.

While planning out this trip, I was thinking about making a “My Maps” Google map. I tried this technique while I was in Philadelphia but unfortunately it wasn’t successful.

While the iPhone’s built in map application is awesome it doesn’t allow you to do the “My Maps” things like add your own markers. At the time I thought “no big deal” and fired up the embedded Safari. When the interface didn’t do what I wanted, I eventually made the map on a PC and then browsed to that map on my iPhone.

The ultimate problem is that the iPhone won’t let you scroll the google map. Because of the multi-touch interface of the iPhone, whenever you make a “mouse flick” it tries to scroll the page in the viewport window, not pass that motion down to Google Maps.

This actually happens in a few other web applications as well, but Google maps is the biggest place where I suffer. I came up with a simple fix last night which would add an approprite key combination to let you do this.

I recently stumbled across “Petitinvention” and have been jealous of Mac Funamizu’s ability to articulate ideas in such a visually simplistic and artful manner.

Subconsciously I must have been influenced by his resent “iPhone & iPod Touch’s instant access button (you can allocate functions)” concept and it peculated through my brain to last night.

My belief is that the default behavior of the iPhone should stay just as it is. However a useful addition would be that if you hold down the “home” button while making a mouse “flick” the iPhone should pass that motion down to the web application instead of interpreting it for itself.

Hopefully that made sense, otherwise Funamizu-san will have to give me a lot of graphics lessons.

Happy Holidays to you all!

I really appreciated the thoughts in The Next Social Network: WordPress – GigaOM. I’ve been on Facebook for a while now (and prior to that LinkedIn) and despite my initial misgivings, I’ve been surprised at how much value social networks have provided, for a relatively low amount of effort.

On the social side, Facebook has provided me with the ability to reconnect with old friends as well as making it extremely easy to keep up with all my friends. LinkedIn really hasn’t been a “game changer” for me but it’s a nice way of keeping an aggregated collection of business contacts.

However, given Facebook’s alarming disregard for our privacy most notability with their Beacon project, and their growing commercialization, I would feel more comfortable if I could manage my own social network presence.

Perhaps with the opening of the walled gardens social networking API’s, Gacebook, LinkedIn and OpenSocial all have announcements, we may gain this ability. It would be amazingly empowering to centrally manage my online presence(s), including the multiple views of “who I am” as well as being able to filter undesirable content, where I get to make that distinction.

This seems a great avenue for WordPress to pursue, given its opensource nature and might help continue it’s differentiation now that Movable Type has decided to opensource their product as well.

I wish I was a true “webhacker” and could just make this happen, sharing code is always more compelling then simply spreading an idea. However, I’ll be cheering on whomever does.

update:

Normally I’d make post anew rather then update an existing one, but I just saw Scoble’s Can we get a first step in social networking portability and wanted to comment on it here because it’s so pertinent to these thoughts.

As usual, and is typical, I think Scoble’s got the right idea just misplaced in an outdated modality. True social networking, as in the “seemless” desire of that purpose, is not about portability, import/export or “linking”. Those are all walled ways in which people still have to do the work, and implementors believe they should be in control.

So far google, or even yahoo, are the best representations of this ideal. They’re both in a position to find my interests, my pictures and my friends. Unfortunately, for now, name isn’t a sufficient differentiator for search engines.

I intended to try my hand at making some videos for this post, but it didn’t happen after a day and I’d rather post out the experience while it’s fresh, then wait. It’s likely a benefit for you as well because my poor video skills might distract from the content, however “seeing is believing” so you’ll have to do your best to visualize!

Sunday my wife and I went to B&N to start on our Christmas shopping. It’s a longer story to explain why we were shopping at a brick and mortar store but in the end, despite going to the counter with many purchases, we actually left everything there because we couldn’t receive the discount we expected.

That’s the context however, and not really the point of this post and it’s enough to realize that we were gleefully book shopping as the two of us love to do. During this I experienced a few ways in which my iPhone became a “game changer” for me.

I’m really not one to “brag” about my gadgets and I hate it when people show you every little feature of something they have, especially when it doesn’t seem that impressive. However, in about an hour here’s the evolution of my experience that night and the ways the iPhone “clicked” for me.

1. Take a photo of a book I’m interested in remembering – I’ve done this with my old phone and even had a set of scripts so I could text message ISBN numbers to add books to my “to read” list. However, with the iPhone’s big screen this becomes a more satisfying (and less squinting) experience.
2. Looked up the price for Wikinomics – My wife handed me this book and I was instantly sold, however I wasn’t sure if it was a reasonable price. So I opened up Safari and went to Amazon.com and checked their price. Amazon has an iPhone optimized page and it was a very “instantly satisfying” experience.
3. Facebook’d someone with a question – We’d been talking about buying a “family game” for holiday entertainment, but weren’t sure if the family in question owned the game. So I hopped on the Facebook’s iPhone page and left a message. I got a response in about 5 minutes so we knew we could get the game right then!
4. Called my wife when I got lost – Granted it’s not the most iPhone specific activity and I’m sure we’ve all done this before. However what “clicked” was when I realized I’d done everything with the same device! It wasn’t a matter of having to pull my cellphone out for this specific activity.
5. Had our shopping list emailed to me – My wife had a “note” on her iPhone with the books we were looking for, and we decided it would be better to split up, so she simply emailed me a copy of the list. Technology actually making it easy to share!
6. I decided to check the Colts score – We couldn’t watch the end of the game because of time constraints but at least I could find out who won. Again it’s not iPhone specific but this is when I started to realize I could “play” with the connectivity provided by my “phone”.
7. Checked Amazon for book reviews – I was caught up in the programming section and pulled up Amazon to check out the reviews for the “Python Essential Reference“. It made me feel “not alone” in trying to decide the value of something.

I’m sure many of the geeks among you have utilized similar functions to fulfill similar situations, for me this was just “my time” to “get it”.

I realized in the span of an hour how in many ways a still naive tool could make my life more “seemless“. It’s less about the specifics and more about the realization of what’s to come, and I want more!

I often think I have good ideas, but I tend to be a “thinker” and have problems “doing”. It’s not that I can’t “do” it’s usually the familiar feeling of saying “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” quickly followed by “yea, and it would also be nice if I had time for that” which I’m sure we can all sympathize with.

I recently read Accelerando by Charles Stross. It’s not my favorite book of his but I really like his work. In this story one of the main characters embodies sort of the ultimate in opensource philosophy. Rather then just the typical “writing code and giving it away for free” that we’re all familiar with, he shares his ideas for free and lives off the goodwill of those who implement them.

It would be an ideal job description for me, and although I never expect to get compensated for an idea I thought I would try to embody that idealism. I seem to recall a website somewhere in the ether with the same philosophy but can’t recall the URL.

Anyway, in that spirit, here goes;

I think someone should hack greasemonkey and google reader so that “sharing” or “starting” an entry automatically promotes it on digg and reddit. There shouldn’t be an additional step. Or maybe digg and reddit could simply implement feed slurping for your shared list.

I believe the future of the Internet as a whole will be an increasingly seemless interaction between multiple services. User’s don’t want to manage Gmail and Yahoo mail as separate entities (yes I have both). That’s a simple example but ask yourself the question why, given the proper security / policy / profile controls, it’s necessary for you to goto Facebook to receive your Facebook messages.

Why can’t your Facebook “status” be slurped from Twitter, or pushed there?

Seamless integration, it’s what many of the best “hacks” seem to be about.

Lets be witty I’ll call it “seemless” integration, where multiple services seem unified.

So it’s probably not catchy enough to be a clothing line but I really agree with the proposed concept of an “opensource community grid”, or “grid for us, by us”. Groups like Folding@Home, SETI or other distributed computing activities are a start. However, you either have to get community buy in for assistance in solving a very selective problem or find funds to pay one of the general distributed computing groups which lease out their capacity.

I’ve long wondered why there isn’t some type of package in Fedora (or any of the other distros) which someone could enable to participate. Much like the mysterious CryptNet group from Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age.

In reality I know there are some very complicated issues to work out. For starters, how do I know something I host isn’t ultimately using my cycles, memory, storage and bandwidth for nefarious ends. How can I ensure a hosted process isn’t going to crash or otherwise corrupt my system (accidentally or intentionally)… the pessimistic list could go on.

But I think in spirit if we want to continue the trend of using opensource to positively impact society at large, then some step will ultimately have to be taken in this direction. It’s simply too constraining to continue to operate as completely isolated entities.

Are there ways we can accelerate this? Can we take any lessons from “distributed corporate America” ( amazon, flickr, google, … ) ?