Loosely Coupled

Chrome OS I'm excited about Google's announcement to release what sounds like an ultra lightweight OS to basically surf the Internet. I'm hoping this device will allow me (and others) to breathe new life into old, underpowered laptops, allowing them to essentially work as netbooks. This could also open up new and inexpensive opportunities for schools to recycle or prolong the life of expensive computing equipment and expand horizons of their students. I've been watching the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) movement for some time and I see this as another avenue toward their goal. I don't share the optimism that this OS will somehow replace Windows. Sometimes you need extra horsepower and functionality. I edit a lot of photos and create some simple video, but the web tools I've tried to do either task can't hold a candle to the four-year-old version of Photoshop Elements I own. I'm not sure CPU intensive apps like this will port very well to the web....

It's been a while since I had a post to talk about some of the new(er) technology I'm just hearing about. Here are three things that got me excited recently. First person user interfaces I came across this article on First person UIs . Basically it works like this: you have a location aware device like a smart phone with GPS and a camera. You're walking around and you see a historical building, business, or other point of interest (POI). You point the device's camera at the object and WHAMO - you instantly get a bunch on info about the object. This can include the name of the POI, how far it is away, a phone number to call, a history, and a bunch of other interesting tidbits. It will be like having a virtual tour guide in your pocket. This is very cool! This concept is also called "augmented reality". Google App Engine, Big Table, and more on the Cloud I recently watched this talk on Google App Engine . I've been watching Amazon's EC2 for s...

Good things always have that "secret sauce" - the element that sets it apart from the pack and makes it better than anything else. The "secret sauce" takes something ordinary and makes it extraordinary. It's a Mac vs. a laptop. Disney World vs. a theme park. A Big Mac vs. a hamburger. When I hear company execs talk about what sets their companies apart, it seems there's no real "secret" to the sauce after all. It boils down to hard work and a commitment to your customers. A commitment to a better user experience. A commitment to treating every guest interaction "special". A commitment to a good hamburger every time. There's not a magic switch you can flip... it's a commitment to excellence through hard work. Looking for a shortcut to this kind of success is a waste of time. All too often I've seen software development teams look for magic switches rather than commit to the hard work of fixing the underlying problem. ...

I'm fascinated by all the context sensitive/targeted media that is making it's way into the mainstream. The other day I was reading an email from my wife having to do with bringing some milk home and something about a recent trip we had taken. The Google ads on this page were some that you'd expect - one on how to save gas, another for a baking product. The one that really surprised me was an ad for silica gel?!? Silica gel is a moisture absorber and usually found in the little packets that say "Do Not Eat" included when you buy a new pair of sneakers and many other products. This was intriguing to me because there was no mention of anything related to this in the body of the message. However, my wife works for a company that produces these products and sent the email from her work address. Not only was AdSense was smart enough to pick up on the from address and trace it back to an actual company, it knew what the company produces, and suggested an approp...

Yesterday two people at the place I'm working gave notice that they'll be leaving the company. There has been a lot of turnover in the six months I've been here. Based on what I've seen, I'm not really surprised. Still, there always seems to be some head scratching by management and some longer tenured employees on why these people are leaving. Here's some of what I've seen. I've already mentioned the poor tooling and processes in place here - starting with Lotus Notes - so I won't rehash that here other than to mention the tooling shortfall has been brought to management's attention many times with no real action. Some people I sit near are in a constant state of emergency. Their production systems break daily (even nights and weekends) because the company's trading partners send messages that don't conform to their messaging API. Instead of rejecting these transactions, management's approach is to ignore the problem, askin...

NOTE: I realize this post might be a little "out there" for a Tech Blog, but I've been fascinated with Disney since visiting there last Spring. How they provide such a quality experience to so many people is an inspiration. Please indulge me... On October 1st, Disney's Epcot celebrated it's 25th anniversary. From the beginning, Epcot's goal was to provide people a place to explore the future and the world around them. While learning a little history about Epcot and the various pavilions, I've noticed a few themes common with those I've been exploring. Mickey Mashup?? In it's original form, the Journey Into Imagination featured Dreamfinder, an interesting character whose goal is collecting the stuff dreams are made of.... sounds, colors, ideas... anything that sparks the imagination. And I store these sparks... and recombine them into new ideas and inspirations. 1 When I heard Dreamfinder describe his ambition, I immediately thought of...

I've spent a lot of time away from the office lately and haven't had much of a chance to post. Here's a quick update on what I've been thinking about. First off, the Ruby XMPP-bot I had started is complete. This was insanely easy to implement in Ruby. The only snag I ran into was in creating a new chat room with the bot. The 0.3.1 release of XMPP4R seems to hang when creating a new room. After some research , it was apparent that others experienced this problem and had already submitted a patch. Cool. My next job is to connect the bot to an application my company developed. Communication to this module has been done previously using CORBA. Unfortunately (or not), I have not been able to find an acceptable Ruby CORBA module ( Rinn looks like it's dead and R2CORBA does not appear mature enough). Recently many of our legacy CORBA API's have been replaced with Web Service API's and I'm going to take this approach with this module. While researchi...

I've been hearing a lot of buzz about QEDWiki, which is being developed at IBM. QEDWiki is a basically a wiki that can host simple web components. At first glance, QEDWiki looks like a typical portal, displaying aggregated information from around the web in widgets. Think dashboards like PageFlakes or My Yahoo . I soon learned that QEDWiki is something completely different. My perception changed when I saw these widgets linked together, creating what IBM calls "situational applications". A "situational application" is a simple applications created on the fly using information provided through a web service. These applications can be created by business users, for business users - without the support of a development team - very much like the advanced Excel applications created and shared today by business teams. I see something like QEDWiki taking the place of these apps with Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) playing the role of the Excel "s...

I was glad to hear mention of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) in a podcast I listened to early this week. OLPC (a.k.a. the $100 laptop) is an organization whose goal is to provide inexpensive laptops to children for education. Integrated collaboration is one of the key features offered in these laptops. The belief that information and ideas are meant to be freely and openly shared is a core principal of open source software... and it's revolutionized the software industry. Allowing children to learn the value of this openness firsthand, will hopefully lead to a more open and collaborative environment in other fields (government for one) when these children enter the workforce as adults. To help foster these ideals away from school, children will need access to the Internet at home. Fast and cheap, widespread Internet penetration needs to improve. In the neighborhood I live there is one broadband provider and it's rather expensive - making it out of reach for many lower inco...

I love TV. Granted there's a lot of garbage content, but there's also a lot of great content. Since the VCR, it's been possible (although clumsy) to time-shift your TV programs - watching the programs you want, when you want. Things like TiVo and DVR provide a cleaner interface to this functionality while adding useful new features like "pause live TV". The problem with these technologies is that you need to know the programs you want to watch in advance . If you've just discovered a new series and want to watch previously aired shows, you''ll need to wait for the TV network to rebroadcast (or for the episode to be released on DVD or iTunes). Enter Move and Joost . These new products offer the promise of time-shifted, on-demand TV, offered over the Internet. Both these products allow the owners of the content (networks) to control distribution, so there's no YouTube-like copyright worries. Joost works more like a file sharing system (think...

Last night, Nova featured the life and contributions of Alberto Santos-Dumont , an early inventor of airplanes and dirigibles. In addition to Santos and the Wrights, the early 1900s brought forth other great inventions from Edison and Tesla, and marked the rise of the automobile... things that are cornerstones of our lives today. I've always looked back at this time period in wonder and amazement. In a short period of time, the world was turned upside down. The way people travel, communicate, and got their news was forever changed. I'm happy to be, 100 years later, living in a period similar of similar innovation. The proliferation of Internet has revolutionized the way people meet, shop, and communicate. Innovations like social media and RSS allow individuals to take a more active role in media they consume (not only what, but when). And it seems we're finally making strides identifying clean, renewable energy sources. It's my hope that the contributions we'...

I've previously written about Rich Internet Applications and how they bring desktop-like functionality to web applications. The knock on this technology has always been "how do I work if I don't have an Internet connection?" Last week, Google announced Google Gears , a framework designed to address this problem. Google Gears provides 3 modules developers can used to make their web applications available offline. LocalServer allows web applications the ability to store, then serve, web content locally when a user does not have an Internet connection. These resources can be updated when the user is reconnected to the Net. Database provides persistent storage to the application when working offline. WorkerPool allows long running operations to be "chunked", and run in the background without blocking the browser. It's likely Google developed this technology to widen the appeal and availability of it's Google Docs & Spreadsheats offeri...

I'm pretty excited about the latest consumer tech products I've seen from Apple and Microsoft. Although they seem to target slightly different segments, both have new offerings which push user interface and interaction to a new level. iPhone Early this year, I watched the Macworld video where Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. I was blown away. It was easy to see the new possibilities offered by this device. I mean, the phone I have now offers many advanced features that are clumsy and frustrating to use (web access, email, text messaging, etc) . The iPhone makes these tasks intuitive (and it looks fun). As the average user gets a hold of this, I'm guessing we'll see a spike in web traffic as mobile computing goes mainstream (sort of like what the iPod did for digital music). It will forever change the way people interact with the Internet and our products. Microsoft Surface Computing Yesterday I watched a video demoing Microsoft Surface Computing. I don...

It's Friday and I don't feel like writing anything I have to think about too much. I thought I'd start a list of some of the online resources I regularly use for news and inspiration. I hope to add to this list as I go. Props to these great innovators! Kayak Kayak is a travel search engine. Kayak makes excellent use of AJAX, adding results as they are discovered, and allowing users to tweak results (times, airlines, stops, etc) without a page refresh. I love how natural this application is to use. I also appreciate how willing they are to share the technology they're using and other cool stuff . CSS Zen Garden This site really cemented, for me, just how powerful and flexible CSS can be. I can spend hours browsing designs and learning new techniques. I do not have an extensive background in design and this site has really helped me refine my user interfaces. Amazon I'm always impressed with the great innovations Amazon has developed for users b...

I’m really intrigued about the possibilities provided to small or new business by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Basically, the EC2 allows developers to create a pool of virtual machine images, that can be scaled up or down in minutes. The EC2 integrates with other Amazon web service offerings, like S3. The package seems like the ultimate service oriented architecture. I’ve always been impressed by Amazon’s web site and infrastructure. When you think about all the information (products, reviews, users, wish lists, recommendations, orders, etc.) on this web site, it’s amazing it works and scales as well as it does. I look at the EC2 as Amazon allowing the rest of use to leverage the expertise they’ve gained developing and designing large, scalable systems. Thanks! For companies, this technology allows a very cost effective way to test new business ideas with the safety of scalability should the idea take off. I’m having a hard time finding a down side to using th...