New digital copyright bill

News.com published an article about the new digital copyright bill, which is currently being prepared by Congress.  According to the information from News.com the new bill is nothing else but the DMCA on steroids. Instead of scaling down the controversial DMCA, as was requested many times by computer scientists, security experts and technology folks in general, the Congress wants to give more freedom to law enforcement structures in “fighting the IP crimes”. And, of course, this bill is already widely supported by RIAA and others.

I really do hope that this bill will not go through. Generally speaking, there is nothing to be afraid of: the digital future is coming anyway, whether the lawmakers want this or not. Looking at the trends and the general direction of the development of the “technology world”, one can easily see that the current copyright-based business models do not belong to that future.

What this bill might change, however, is the price we would have to pay for entering this brave new world. And it depends on the lawmakers whether the road to the Tomorrow will be an easy and fast one, or bloody and hard one. I hope (though, probably, without any reason) that the intelligent and educated people in Senate will overcome the narrow-minded conservatives, and that the money would be spent on development of the new business models rather than on enforcing a law which protects old ones.

Technorati tags: DMCA, Copyright, Politics

Office 2.0

It’s funny – quite recently I wrote about “Web Desktop” being a new concept, and today I’ve stumbled upon a whole blog dedicated to this very idea – but it’s called there “Office 2.0”. Well, I never was able to coin a catchy phrase or name – so, I have to admit, “Office 2.0” is much better as a buzzword than “Web Office”. Anyway, the blog is extremely interesting - doesn't matter whether you support the idea of moving totally to online space, oppose it or just interested in new and useful web applications.

Technorati tags: Office 2.0, Web 2.0

Web Clipboard

Here is a small, simple, but quite useful tool - web clipboard: http://cl1p.net The idea of the tool is also very simple: you pick any URL that starts with http://cl1p.net (for example: http://cl1p.net/myclips) , and it gives you a place to store some text or upload some file (up to 2 MB). Then from another computer you use the same URL to access your data. The data can be password-protected to prevent others from modifying and/or reading you record. And that’s it!

While definitely not fully functional clipboard (you cannot paste OLE objects there. Hmmm, and what about ALE? That might be interesting…), this tool might be very useful – especially if you work behind a firewall. Another interesting thing is that cl1p  provides a URL to directly download data (without getting through a web-page). This might help people write some utilities, which will use cl1p for data exchange – maybe even a full-scale web clipboard will become possible.

Nice and useful tool.
Technorati tags: cl1p, web 2.0, tools

"Web Desktop" and ALE

It seems like the whole Web 2.0 world goes faster and faster towards creation of a “Web Desktop”. All basic desktop applications are already there, for example:

• All internet applications (browsing is obviously there, email, rss-readers, instant messengers (Meebo))


• Word processing, spreadsheets – even PowerPoint presentations editing: ThinkFree Office Online,Writely and others.


• PIMs, organizers – HipCal


• Collaboration - BaseCamp,Zimbra

One thing missing from this “Web Desktop” equation is application integration. On Windows I can easily embed images into spreadsheets, spreadsheets and images into documents and so on. Web 2.0 applications were missing this functionality – but now Zimbra came with a solution for this problem, called ALE (Ajax Linking and Embedding).

I think this is a very important, even fundamental step in the development of Web 2.0 and “Web Desktop”, and I am sure that the new generation of web applications, utilizing ALE, will appear soon, and will begin competing with the traditional office desktop applications. (And I want to play with this cool new technology too!)

Great job, guys at Zimbra! Technorati tags: web 2.0, Ajax,Zimbra, ALE

SEOmoz's Web 2.0 awards

Two days ago SEOmoz.org announced their Web 2.0 awards. Speaking frankly, I have no idea how representative these awards are – or what exactly SEOmoz is? (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization – but what that has to do with Web 2.0 I am not sure). The list of applications, however, is long and quite interesting. While I definitely do not agree with some of the awards, I enjoyed reading the list, and discovered quite many new applications there (well, new for me at least).

Technorati tag: web 2.0

GDC 2006

Just returned from GDC 2006. That was my first GDC, and I was overwhelmed with almost every aspect of the conference. Crowds of interesting people, booths of multitude of companies, famous ones and unknown ones, having to chose from several equally interesting lectures and having only three days to enjoy this event…

Here are some of my impressions from GDC. This is not my notes – just some disjointed musings.

The biggest disappointment of GDC for me was Will Wright’s keynote speech. Everyone was waiting for the speech by the cult game designer on “What’s next in game design” (at least, that’s how it was declared in the conference schedule). He was assigned the largest auditorium – and the line of people wishing to attend his speech wrapped around the building. But, instead of sharing his ideas on game design, Will spent an hour talking about astrobiology and research he had done for his next game, “Spore”. I was angry because of the wasted hour and the lack of respect that Will demonstrated towards his audience.

“Spore” was, in some sense, one of the most talked about games in the conference. Several lectures were dedicated to different aspects of this game – which was strange for me, since the game was not released yet.

One of the hot topics of the conference was prototyping. There were several lectures directly dedicated to prototyping (I’ve listened to one – “Advanced Prototyping” – it was really good); and it also was discussed in many other lectures, from all possible angles – what to prototype, how, when and why?

A curious session named “Burn, baby, burn!” was led by Eric Zimmerman from GameLab and was nothing else but game developers ranting about different issues. Funny, but most rants were about ranting too much!

The indie games presented at the Independent Games Festival were really impressive. Several games that caught my eye:

• "Braid" - a game exploiting the idea of "rewinding time", but adding some very unusual twists.


• "Strange Attractors" - a game with one- button control. The game reminds a pinball table, where the player can control the gravitational forces between objects on the field.


• "Ocular Ink " -gesture- controlled game with interesting system of gestures.

Another hot topic at the conference was emotional game design. It seems like emotions in the games are the next “big thing. It’s too sad that, while pursuing emotional aspect, designers often forget that the game, first of all, should be fun. Some of “emotional” games, presented at GDC, were quite boring (for me, at least).

Conference ended on Friday with a perfect finishing touch: “Video Games Live” show, where a symphonic orchestra was playing music from different video games, both old and new, while some video clips from the games were projected on a huge screen on the stage. This was truly a memorable event!

I am very happy that I went to GDC this year – and ready to go there next year!

Technorati tags: GDC, GDC 2006, Game development,
Game design

Ma.gnolia - impressions

So, I spent significant time last week sorting my bookmarks in ma.gnolia. Here are my impressions so far.

What is good:

• Overall page design. Nice colors, clean, easy to read and navigate. The ads are pretty unobtrusive.


• Ability to have private bookmarks.


• Import feature.


• Nice auto-suggestions when adding tags.


• If I got it right, the site uses some king of fuzzy search when selecting tagged items, and this is good – it helps when I have accidentally created similar tags (reference and references, for example)


• Nice bookmarklet for FireFox – and Google toolbar add-on for IE!


• Community features seem to be good – though I don’t use them as much.

Now, what I think can be improved:

• Bookmark layout. Each bookmark occupies too much space – it would be great to have (at least, as an option) more condensed mode.


• Too many page loads. To edit details of a bookmark, I need to go to the “Edit bookmark” page, then, after saving, I’m getting “Bookmark details” page – and if I was working on some tag, I have to go to “Tags” page again, and select the necessary tag. In-place editor would help a lot.


• Tag list is not present on every page. As a result, an extra page load is needed when I want to open another tag.


• Limited search options. No support for NOT, OR operators. AND operator is supported (represented by comma), but not documented (information from http://weblog.zerokspot.com/posts/605/)

And some more notes:

• Currently Ma.gnolia has no API – but, according to the site, it is in works.


• The “Page thumbnail” feature is cool, and there is an example of creative usage of this feature (http://mongoo.se/articles/2006/03/07/ma-gnolia-bookmarks-picture-linkroll), but, unfortunately, quite many screenshots are incorrect or outdated. In the FAQ, Ma.gnolia team explains: “Ma.gnolia uses a third-party service to create the small images of saved copies of web pages. Sometimes the service gives us an out of date image of a web page, or an image from another part of the web site.”

Overall, I am happy with ma.gnolia – but, probably, will check out some other services, too.

Technorati tags: ma.gnolia, Social Bookmarking, Bookmarking

Ma.gnolia team is great!

Wow, I’m really impressed by Ma.gnolia! When I posted my previous post, I didn’t expect that people from Ma.gnolia will react to it (hey, I didn’t even think they will read it!). So, imagine how I was surprised when a couple of hours after posting I found a reply to my post in my mailbox. The reply was from Ma.gnolia, and they offered me help with my import problem.

So, I wrote a message to them, and for two days the guys worked with me trying to troubleshoot my import process. At last they found the reason for the import failure (it turned out that Linkman produced incorrect bookmark file), and suggested another way to import my bookmarks.

And so, now I am a happy Ma.gnolia user! I am busy sorting and organizing my bookmarks now – not an easy thing to do, though the import process converted my folders into tags, so I’m not starting it from scratch.

I’ve never seen such a level of attention to users! Thank you, Ma.gnolia team!

Technorati tags: Ma.gnolia, Social Bookmarking, bookmarking

In search of bookmarking tool

Well, well, well… I am definitely not an early adopter – on the contrary, usually I wait for quite some time before trying some new technology. It happened already with RSS and with blogging – now I am ready to try social bookmarking!

To be more precise, I am not that excited with the social bookmarking – I just need some online application to store and organize my bookmarks. And the only reason I want it online is because I want my bookmarks collection to be accessible from both my home and my office computer.

So, what exactly am I looking for? I want the tool to:

• Let me easily add bookmarks from any browser


• Let me organize, annotate and search my bookmarks


• Provide some reasonable level of privacy


• Provide a way to export bookmarks – if I will decide later to change the tool


• Allow importing my existing bookmarks – I have more than 500 of them!

For beginning, I decided to try two services: del.icio.us and ma.gnolia. I’ve created accounts in both. In del.icio.us, I found out that their import tool is currently disabled – so I didn’t go any further. Ma.gnolia allowed me to upload my bookmarks file, but then it told me that my bookmarks would be added soon. Six hours later my bookmarks are still not added – which I don’t understand at all. I understand that there might be some kind of queue, and that parsing a file takes some time – but not six hours!

So, I will wait a little longer – but, probably, I will try something else. After all, social bookmarking is so hot now – there should be some working tool out there!

Technorati tags: bookmarking, Del.icio.us, ma.gnolia

Why people like creating tools?

Call me a slow thinker, but it didn’t occur to me until today how beneficial for a career might be working on company’s internal management/organizing tools. (Not that I am doing such a work – I was just pondering about the fact that the management added yet another request/ticketing application to the existing zoo).

The work on such applications (ticketing, document management, request tracking etc) has some great advantages over any other development work:

• The work is highly visible, especially to the management.


• The work is not mission-critical: a bug in the ticketing application will cause just some trouble. The same bug in a user-visible application might become a disaster.


• Management usually just loves this kind of tools (probably because the tools provide them with feeling of control and organizing power).  Managers pretty soon become dependent on the tools, and the person who creates and maintains them swiftly becomes a VIP.


• There is always a space for improvement – so you can work on the same application for as long as you like.


• Deadlines and schedules are usually quite flexible.


• You can use any cool technologies you like – as long as the application works, no one really cares how it was implemented.

This revelation helped me to get answer to a question which was intriguing me for some time: How come that the number of such systems in my company keeps growing despite all attempts to reduce it? And it also sheds some light on another question, which might seem totally unrelated, but, as I see now, touches the same principle: why people around the globe spend so much effort on creating and improving GTD and other so-called “productivity tools and systems”? The same reason: working on the systems and tools which purpose is to help us doing some work is infinitely more pleasant than actually doing the work…

Technorati tags: Rants, Productivity

JavaBlackBelt

Following a post on TheServerSide.com, I found a very interesting site: JavaBlackBelt.com. The site is a community for Java & open source skills assessment. I joined it, took couple of tests, and it’s cool!

The site uses a very interesting (and, I would say, unusual) system to promote participation and, at the same time, prevent cheating. All tests are free – in terms of “real world” money. But most of the tests cost some “contribution points”. Members of the site get contribution points for submitting new questions and commenting on the existing ones. The price for the tests is realistic, but it will definitely require quite some involvement in order to achieve high degrees of certification.

Of course, it will require some time for JavaBlackBelt to become as recognized as BrainBench. Most of the tests are still in beta stage, and even stable tests have some errors. But, since the site is community-driven, it will get power very soon. Definitely a “must-visit” for any Java programmer.

Technorati tags: Java, Programming, Certification

Pocket PC - impressions after the first week

So, I spent the first week (or a little more) with my new Pocket PC, and here are my impressions.

Good:

• The screen: it is nothing short of gorgeous. Reading from this screen is a pure pleasure; games look just great.


• File system: it’s good to have at last a normal file system, to be able to easily put any files on my handheld (Palm didn’t want to work with unknown file types – at least, without some special utilities. I’ve heard that it’s no longer an issue with more recent Palms – but I had to live with this).
  

Bad:

• No vibration. I don't understand this - it always seemed to me that vibration alert is one of the most useful features for a PDA. I just loved being able to switch my Palm T2 to vibration mode, and safely get my alerts while being at some long meeting. Why didn't Dell include this feature? Anyway, I miss it. And with the standard reminder sounds being soft and short, this becomes a real problem for me.


• Synchronization. I think my situation should be pretty common: I use Outlook as an organizer at home and in the office. I want to be able to synchronize my PDA to both of them - but I want to be able to prevent some of my items from being copied to the office Outlook. With Palm that was easy. With my PPC, I didn't find a good solution yet.


• Stability. I don't remember having so many glitches with my Palm. Nothing serious - I mean, nothing which can't be fixed with a soft reset - but annoying. Though I am currently in search for PPC equivalents of my favorite Palm programs, so I'm installing and removing a lot of software, and not all of the programs work well with WM5 - that might be the reason. But still, overall feeling is shaky.
  


• ActiveSync. I don't know what made Microsoft switch to using TCP for syncing PDA with desktop. Probably, they had their own reasons. But as a result ActiveSync causes problems with firewalls - I was unable to make Sygate firewall work with ActiveSync.


• Responsiveness. I know, this is a common problem of people converting from Palm to PPC - but I have to say it: Palm was much more responsive! Sometimes the slight pause between click on a control and the reaction just drives me crazy.

Don't get me wrong - I am not going to discard my new PDA just because of those issues. I probably will find solution for some of them, and will get used to others. But, still, the impression after one week is less than excellent.

Technorati tag: Pocket PC

Good bye, Palm! Hello, Pocket PC!

Ok, so, at last, it happened! After using Palms for 8 years (or even more – I’ve bought the very first model, the one without the backlight) I betrayed them and switched to the Pocket PC. The reasons for this heinous act were multiple, but they all boiled down to one: for last couple of years I was looking for a new Palm, and was completely disappointed with the new Palm devices.

I remember several years ago I was making fun of my PPC-enthusiastic friends. I laughed when they were carefully putting their bulky devices into special cases, while I easily and elegantly slipped my sleek Palm into my shirt pocket. I laughed sarcastically at the stories about registry problems. I criticized ugly and cumbersome Windows CE interface, showing my friends the simple beauty of Palm.

But time flies – and soon I’ve noticed that PPCs are becoming thinner and smaller; that the screen of the newest devices supports VGA resolution; that the UI becomes more and more elegant. Then my friend bought a Pocket PC which had both WiFi and Bluetooth (my palm had only Bluetooth), slots for both SD and CompactFlash cards (mine had only SD slot – and at the same time the dimensions of his new machine were just a little bit larger than the size of my beloved Palm.

And Palm Inc…. Well, I don’t know what they were thinking about. Probably, they were too preoccupied with Treo – which is really a nice device, but I don’t like combining phones and PDAs together. Anyway, for quite some time their newest and most powerful devices didn’t support WiFi (all but a few models), didn’t provide dual flash card slots… And slowly, I stopped believing in Palm.

Well, now I’ve got Dell Axim x51v. I know, that quite recently Palm has released Palm TX – the model which has both WiFi and Bluetooth. It still has only 320 x 480 display, supports only SD cards – but I hope that people at Palm recognized their faults and soon will release new models which will be on par with Pocket PCs. Then maybe I will come back… And meanwhile I will have to learn how to use my new gadget.

Technorati tags: Pocket PC, Axim, PDAs

Design flaws + unneeded creativity = trouble

Two examples, found in the same day:

In the database, a record for some object has a field for its name. At some moment, some developer wanted to add comments for these objects (“generated automatically…” or something like this). Unfortunately, there were no field for notes and comments. A burst of creative thinking  – and the comments are now appended to the end of the name. Which means that, since the users usually do not want to see the comments, the results returned by a SQL query should now be post-processed. Which is not always easy – sometimes there is no good place to insert this post-processing.

Another one: the same database, but different table. The table holds data for some objects, which are divided into several categories (actually, a hierarchy of categories). The categorization feature was added later than the table was designed, so the table doesn’t have any field to mark the place of each object in the hierarchy of categories. The developer didn’t think about the necessity of such a field. The users needed it, but, instead of asking the developer to add it, they decided to be creative and invented their own naming convention, so that the name of each object now has some keywords embedded. Everyone was happy – until I had to design a report, where the data from this table would be sorted according to the categories…

Creativity is a great thing. But sometimes I just want people to stop being creative, and simply ask for help instead.
Technorati tag: rant

Testing Lexxe

Emily Chang in her eHub blog posted a link to the new search engine called Lexxe. The unusual thing about this engine is that it claims to be able to answer questions written in a natural language. To be more precise, it searches the web and extracts the answers from the pages it found.

I gave it a shot, and it kinda works – sometimes. More often, however, it produces answers that are far from being precise.

Q: Who was Lenin?
A: leader of the bolsheviks a violent
(I don’t know why it picked such a strange fragment, but this is true).

Q: What was the real name of Mark Twain?
A: Samuel Clemens
(Bingo!)

But the same question about O’Henry caused a problem – the answer was marked as “not reliable”, and contained some words related to the “Seinfeld” show.

Q: Who discovered America?
A: China
(What?!)

Q: When was America discovered?
A:1492
(Ok…)

Q: What is the size of proton?
A: 1 Million
(1 Million of what? Hmmm… Let me try again…)

Q: What is the size of a proton?
A: 10-18 Meters One
(Too scientific for me…)

Q:What is the weight of the Earth?
A: 150 Million Km
(…no comments…)

Q: Who invented radio?
A: Horzepa Stan Surfin’…
(Huh?!)

Q:What do butterflies eat?
A: Nectar
(Correct.)

Q:What do elephants eat?
A: Pounds of Food
(Great answer!)

My last question was: What is Lexxe? And the system proudly answered: 3rd generation search engine.

The answers are not the only output of the system: it also produces clusterized search results, links to the definitions of the key words in the question etc. And these features look good. The engine is still in the alpha stage, so we can hope for improvement.

I like the idea of the search based on natural language requests. I definitely will keep an eye on Lexxe, and will add it to my bookmarks. But for the time being to get answers I’d rather use Google+Wikipedia.
Technorati tags: web2.0, search, Lexxe, Natural language

How to find a human

One of my friends recently sent me a link to “The IVR Cheat Sheet", which is a list of companies together with instructions on how to bypass their phone-answering computers and get directly to human. The list definitely goes straight to my bookmarks collection – I prefer talking to human being whenever it is possible (though, I have to admit it, couple of times I’ve encountered really helpful answering systems). At the same time, the mere existence of this list points out a couple of interesting things:

1. A very simple idea: not everything that can be automated should be automated. Deciding what can be done by a computer and what should be left to human is an important part of the design process.
2. The question itself: “How to get past a computer to a human being” is a disturbing one. Sounds like something from a sci-fi book – maybe we live in one already?

Technorati tag: Lifehacks

Happy New Year!

As always – in the very last minute.

I wish all my readers a Happy New Year! May all your dreams come true! In the coming year I will try to blog more often and more interesting – at least that’s one of my resolutions. So, Happy New Year – and hope to see you all in 2006!

Digg - first impressions

Today I’ve tried using Digg – and I am not very impressed. I mean, the site as an application is great, and the content is present in abundance, but I still cannot understand the right way of using it.

The main problem that I have is filtering out the right news. There are just too many news out there. As far as I understand the system, I can read either front page, or top news, or news by category. The categories are very coarse-grained for me: for example, I do not want to read all programming news, since I do not program in C# or Python. I would greatly appreciate the capability to sort the news by some other criteria (tags, for example – this seems like an ideal place to use them!). I can’t even sort the news inside one category by their ranking.

The top news section is a mixture of all categories – and I am not interested in half of them. The same goes for the front page.

So, I will probably make another attempt – but for now, I think that Digg severely lacks the filtering capabilities, and for me this is crucial.

Technorati tags: Digg,Web 2.0

Best of Web 2.0: two lists

Two lists of the best Web 2.0 applications of 2005. The lists give pretty good idea of what Web 2.0 is and what are the most prominent directions of its development.

The first list was compiled by Mark Millerton and can be found here: http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Top-10-Innovative-Web-2-0-Applications-of-2005/10891

The second list comes courtesy of Dion Hinchcliffe and is located here: http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2005.htm This list breaks Web 2.0 applications in categories, and, besides naming the best, provides also several runners-up for each category. The discussion that follows this article is also quite interesting as one can find there even more interesting applications and sites.

A curious thing: it seems to me that only Digg has made it into both lists. I’ve checked Digg out as soon as it was mentioned by eHub – but I definitely cannot consume more news now, so I still didn’t try and use it. But now I think about giving it a shot – since both lists recommend it.

Technorati tag: Web 2.0

Wikipedia trouble

On Monday O’Reilly Radar reported about a website which orchestrates a preparation to a class action lawsuit against Wikipedia (http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org/). The basic idea is the accusation of Wikipedia that the information posted there is inaccurate and leads to defamation of some people.

The story behind this case is a long one. The summary of events (from the Wikipedia’s point of view) can be found here. It seems – at least after reading the Wikipedia’s version – that the whole “class action suit” is just an attempt of retaliation, made by some people, whose dubious business practices were accidentally uncovered by Wikipedia members. The case itself – if it will ever reach the court – might become a precedent, particularly important as we enter the world of Web 2.0 and user-generated contents.

But there is another aspect of this case, which interests me, probably, even more – and it is a question of Wikipedia’s accuracy in general. The next post on O’Reilly Radar is also dedicated to this question, since it talks about an experiment carried out by the “Nature” journal. They run 42 science articles in Britannica and in Wikipedia by a team of experts. It turned out that Britannica has on average about 3 inaccuracies per article, and Wikipedia – about 4.

Though it may seem as an impressive achievement for a team of voluntary unpaid editors, I am still not convinced in the quality of Wikipedia. The problem which concerns me lies in the area of “common misconceptions”.  Since the editing process is open to everybody, I am afraid that the real facts that contradict with some popular belief will be edited out in favor of incorrect, but widespread opinions.

Which, in turn, brings in a discussion of the changes to the process of acquiring knowledge that are brought by the Internet. Not so long ago, the answer to the question “Where do I get knowledge about X?” was “Go read a book” or “Go ask an expert”. No the answer is “Ask Google”, or “Check the Wikipedia”. The knowledge of the experts is slowly being replaced by the knowledge of the crowd. The consequences of this process for our life and our society may be quite deep, and, I am afraid, quite negative.

Technorati tag: Wikipedia