Strength is Life. Period

A lesser known religion called.....

2009-10-11T10:04:00.000+05:30

You inherit diseases not religion, you pass on debts not religion, you share vices not religion, you hide crimes not religion. Religion is so pure and incorruptible that it cannot be inherited, passed on, shared or hidden.

Well, umm, I can't narrate my stuff like its Godfather, 300 or Dark Knight material but hey sometimes its interesting (at-least to me). So whats the ado about religion crap; I got a bike. Heck, whats the big deal, every other kid around the corner has a bike. Dude, I am talking about blood red, fuel guzzler, mighty bull with meaty thumps which has a silencer longer than WWII torpedo and thump louder than a lion's roar, oh please not the 300 crap again, OK. But that fact is I never felt excited about anything else quite lately, so this 350cc cast iron engine Bullet Electra 5s is a soul saver for me. It took almost eight years and over hundred thousand bucks for me to buy my first bike.
And I never had chance to ride a bullet before I bought my own. And when I was bringing it home I was bit nervous whether I will be able handle this over 350Kg juggernaut well or will only end up embarrassing my self. For some reasons the latter never happened and I have already finished my 300Km today. Owning a bike is never a big deal for anyone but owning something that you cherish and excited about is a different story. And if you don't know where the spark plug and fuse goes you will be more excited when suddenly the bike refuses to start and leaves you in sweat. Its a nightmare have to drag this fat ass to mechanic or home. I have heard those dreaded stories when a man takes his wife for ice-cream post dinner on machismo and on their way the bike suddenly acts as if in curfew and won't move an inch and the couple has to drag the machismo home, needless to mention that guy gets a divorce without a hearing. But there are prices are to be paid (not as hefty like I just mentioned) when you go against convention and stand for your choice. Its true for almost everything in life. Imagine when you don't have to pay any price to realize your dream, it won't have any value or worth for that matter. Don't think it as price you are paying, think of it as gravity you are adding to your dream by paying the price which is justified for it. Most of time we end up in making compromises and we hardly notice that a compromise has been made and this is like a infectious disease. Compromising people tend to have compromising choices, compromising friends and compromising life. When do we realize that all we need to do is just casually walk out of our comfort zone and accept our fair share of pain. Ironic but true, most of the good things in life are covered deep under the pain, to get it out first you have to touch , accept and embrace the pain. Rest of the things follows. I believe our choices are heavily biased by pain and pleasure. If something involves less pain, it is considered an easy choice irrespective of the fact whether its right or wrong. This logic narrows down the people into two categories, one who take less painful path irrespective of right or wrong and the (rare) other ones who takes the correct path irrespective of pain or pleasure involved.

Well thats pretty much of philosophical crap for today, I guess people who don't have anything great to say start puking philosophy. To wind it up I must say that "We are the choices we make". Our personality, character and everything else for that matter is defined by the choices we make. When Harvey Dent said "Either you die as a hero or live long enough to see your self as a Villain" he was damn right. If you are reading this blog and happen to be alive, chances are that you are more of villain than a hero. Why? For obvious reason that to live long you will need to make choices which are less painful implying wrong choices implying you being a villain. So be it the choice of a bike, job, hobby or religion. But first you have to make choice, a choice unbiased, unprejudiced by pain or pleasure.....uff this Dark Knight is not getting off my head. At-least I chose my religion after twenty years of thinking and whining...

For a lesser know religion called..... Bullet.

The Web Knows

2009-09-29T20:28:00.000+05:30

We all get this weird feeling sometimes that the Web knows a lot about us but there's no way to know otherwise because the Web doesn't tells how much it knows. For me, it knows what magazines I read, what friends I share my photos with, what places I fly, what food and clothes I buy, where do I work, what movies I watch, what songs I like, what blogs I write...the list goes on and suddenly I shout.."Jesus, the Web knows more about me than my mother." But then I calm down knowing that its not going to tell anybody, at-least in near future. However Sir Tim Berners-Lee thinks otherwise, he believes that the web will reveal everything once we start to ask in a structured manner. 20 years ago as a frustrated Software Engineer Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Now he is frustrated again with how the web has evolved so far. As the head of W3C, he is now evangelizing the idea of linked data and semantic web. So what we would have will be a "Web of data" rather than "Web of documents". And I couldn't agree more with Tim, the current web however useful is still a mesh of incoherent, in-congruent and highly unstructured data which is bound to be replaced by Linked Data. If you are fumbling with idea of how linked data is going to reframe the next web, Sir Tim's talk (on TED.com) on Linked Data is a must watch for everyone who wants to know where the Web is headed. He is pivotal in creating W3C design specs for Linked Data, some of the key points of which are:

Use URIs to identify things that you expose to the Web as resources.
Use HTTP URIs so that people can locate and look up (dereference) these things.
Provide useful information about the resource when its URI is dereferenced.
Include links to other, related URIs in the exposed data as a means of improving information discovery on the Web.

Technically nothing new is going on here but logically the world is changing. However the transformation is easier said than done. There are uncountable websites with unstructured data which no doubt amass valuable information that can't be ignored. Currently there are two possible ways of integrating this data with semantic web, one is that websites themselves expose their data with webservices and other is to scrape those websites to collect and organize the data. The first option being more plausible is also more easier to implement. Later in this article we will see how web scraping really works and what problems confront it. The below image depicts how many websites have opened their webservice and are currently participating in Semantic Web as datasets and these datasets are increasing exponentially.

So the "Web of data", as some call it Web 3.0, will eventually encourage web sites to expose themselves as Web Services. And we are now witnessing such services already surfacing on the horizon with giants like Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Thomson Reuters joining the bandwagon. Lets us take a brief look at some of these exciting webservices.

My personal favorite is OpenCalais which is probably the best current example of Linked Data which is a type of structured data recommended by Sir Lee. OpenCalais API was launched on Feb '08 by the international business and financial news giant Thomson Reuters. The reason why I favor OpenCalais is the ease with which Linked Data can be generated. The users passed unstructured HTML in API and it turns into semantically marked up data. The linking is more profound in categories such as 'people,' 'places,' 'companies' and few more. This way, third party applications and sites can build interesting new things from that data - one of the defining principles of Linked Data.

Thomson Reuters is not alone, Wolfram Research launched a "computational knowledge engine" called Wolfram|Alpha in May '09 which is not Google killer as some predicted. With a search engine-like interface Wolfram|Alpha serves natural language query like Google but it also does some interesting computation on the retrieved data. Wolfram|Alpha is more inclined towards consuming structured data rather than generating it. Wolfram|Alpha is one of the few existing products that marks the beginning of era when machines will consume human generated content.

Not quiet coincidently, also in May '09, Google added a new feature in its core search called 'Rich snippets' which is a form of structured data. This features shows little more useful information about the pages in result by using structured data format such as microformats and RDFa. Although this markup is not widespread yet but given the wide reach of Google this is surely a good news for the development of Semantic Web.

Above three examples are certain indication that structured data is rapidly becoming a feature of today's and future's Web. Players like Thomson Reuters and Google are encouraging generation of structured data and products (like Wolfram|Alpha) will make use of structured data in ways we perhaps can't imagine right now. Linked data can also helpful in making businesses grow by expanding their userbase or making their data more accessible. This is evident from Amazon's visionary WebOS strategy. Amazon has released number of developer friendly API to expose their infrastructure. One of the interesting web services opened up by Amazon was the E-Commerce service which allows access to Amazon's product catalog. Third party developers can use this feature rich API to manipulate users, wish lists and shopping carts. Making this API completely free makes perfect business sense for Amazon as the application developed on top of this API will drive user traffic back to Amazon as the webservice returns items with Amazon URL.

Despite the evident benefits of webservices some site will choose not expose their data through webservices, this will force third party developers to deploy scrapers in order to collect the data from such websites. Web Scraping is more or less reverse engineering of HTML pages and has its disadvantages as with any other reverse engineering technique. It is essentially parsing out chunks of information from a page. The problem with scraping web pages coded in HTML is that actual data is mingled with layout and rendering information and is not readily available to a computer. For Scrapers programs to get the data back from a given HTML page, first they have to learn the details of the particular markup and figure out where the actual data is. By applying such a scraper, it is possible to discover what URLs are tagged with any given tag but the result may not be accurate as achieved through webservices..

When compared to scrapers, webservices offers numerous advantages. To name a few, websites will have the control over the data and can track usage of data alongwith granular details like how the data is used and by whom. Following Amazon's track other sites can do this in a way to encourage third party developers to build applications which will eventually drive the traffic back to their sites.

In the past websites were very conservative about the data they own as they believed closed data gives them a competitive advantage. However people have started to realize that opening up their data can open new business possibilities. Amazon being pioneer in this change has already proved that charging a very small amount for their data can indeed increase the revenue as more traffic is directed to its sites through non-Amazon applications.

In the future websites will have to act as a database for other applications, how they do it still unclear. More or less websites will transform into webservices. However webservices APIs may not be available for all and this will fuel the expansion of scraper program penetration. Some sites will fail to notice this change and will pay the price for it. Only those who understand and appreciate the importance of Semantic Web will survive to see the dawn of "Web 3.0".

Customer Felicity Through Usability Experience

2009-09-20T20:18:00.003+05:30

By gone are the days when you just meet customer requirements and call it a job well done.
The last time I checked we are not breathing in Stone Age. This is age when it is quite expected to deliver beyond expected. Customer expectations have soared through the roof. Only a spark of brilliance is not enough, those who bring everything each day week-in week-out will rise to the top. There is a Chinese proverb for it "What you got here is not going to take you there." These turbulent times have changed the way customers buy software or services and competition is fierce than ever. Software vendors are hunting for new ways to allure customers; be it dazzling application functionality or world class support. Apart from this there is one more factor which is playing decisive role in success of a software product; Usability of the software. Software's usability—the ease with which end users can be trained on and operate the product— is becoming a fundamental purchasing criterion and a direct way of cutting operational costs.

Moreover it is ludicrous to consider application functionality and usability as trade-offs anymore,

Good Functionality + Bad Usability != Bad functionality + Good usability

Good functionality always take precedence but usability is making its way into the board room discussions. We simply can't afford to pay for products that cost us a lot of overhead anymore," said Keith Butler, a technical fellow at Boeing's Phantom Works research and development arm. When thousands of end users are involved, design flaws can cost millions of dollars in lost time and productivity, he said. So even if you pack ocean boiling features in your application but it takes 12 engineers 3 months to log into your application, you are going right out of the window. Yes, there are exceptions, for instance take Facebook, results of a heuristic evaluation show that Facebook performs poorly with regards to traditional usability guidelines. So in theory, Facebook should not be the success it currently is due to its failure when tested using a traditional usability evaluation method but its immensely popular and gazillions user flock around it. But every software doesn't get evolved up to Facebook level. Usability is something that no longer can be compromised in favour of diverting focus to functionality. Thanks to NIST there is a standard for generating usability test reports called CIF Usability Test Reports.

The development of a standard for comparing product usability was spearheaded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Called the Common Industry Format (CIF) for Usability Test Reports, the standard outlines a format for reporting test conditions and results and gives user companies enough information about a test to replicate it. This format has evolved as an ANSI standard already
Boeing played a lead role in the development of CIF after its experience and internal studies showed that usability played a significant role in total cost of ownership. In one pilot of the CIF standard on a widely deployed productivity application, the Chicago-based company said improved product usability had a cost benefit of about $45 million. Butler said it's much better to have vendors refine an interface design "than to have thousands of end users doing it involuntarily on top of their jobs and then just feeling frustrated."

With CIF it possible for vendors and users to discuss usability as a science rather than marketing hype. Several benefits of introducing summative usability testing into the development process:

* It provides a concrete benchmark for user performance and satisfaction, thus reducing the risk that the new system is more difficult to use (and therefore less successful) than the existing system.
* It highlights usability problems with the existing system that need to be addressed in the design of the new system.
* It provides specific goals for usability and gives developers the opportunity to became familiar with typical user task scenarios.
* It provides the framework for the more detailed usability work required by ISO 13407.

Microsoft Corp., also a major CIF development participant, has incorporated the usability testing it conducted on its Windows XP, Windows ME and Windows 2000 operating systems into the CIF format, said Kent Sullivan, Microsoft's usability lead for the Windows client. CIF has been adopted by major giants like IBM, Kodak, Cisco to name a few.

Even if the numbers of end users are very less usability tests still make a lot of business sense. As those few users will have direct say in whether their company should go for the next version or consider some other vendor. Usability is all about how you offer functionality to be harnessed without much effort, training and certainly frustration. It takes much longer time for user to explore all the functionality of the application but usability starts making a dent from Day One. Spending more thought, effort and time will put you in an elite group of vendors who claim to deliver Customer Felicity.

Further Readings:
CIF: http://www.usabilitynet.org/prue/cif.htm
http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/iusr/documents/cifv1.1b.htm
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=633292.633470

User Experience: http://mashable.com/2009/01/09/user-experience-design/

Courtesy: www.dilbert.com

Small Tech Talk

2009-07-15T19:55:00.017+05:30

Why do we need Wolfram Alpha?

The fact that Stephen Wolfram is a genius is beyond any trace of doubt; the fact that it takes a work of a genius to put up something like Google is undeniable. Are these two geniuses really on a collision course? We are witnessing WA as threat to Google but why Google only, WA imposes direct competition to Wikipedia also and so many other great things we regularly use. Within seconds when Wolfram Alpha went live amidst a storm on May 16 it started receiving 10 unique hits per second. Its not a coincidence when Stephen Wolfram was giving presentation on WA's beta, Google released their service on the very same hour which has a stark resemblance with WA interface and is based on Google's 2007 acquisition of Trendalyzer . Rumors has it that WA's curated data is 300 times the size of what Google's crawlers guzzle. So will we, the users at the totem pole of food chain, be forced to make a choice. Maybe I am exaggerating it too far maybe not. WA's present data in graphical format, charts, maps etc. It does have the potential to creative new advertising space, if that's the case Google will ferociously defend its territory and when a company with $131.8bn of war-chest is involved, the war will get dirty. Wolfram said in an interview "We are not a search engine. No searching is involved here. The types of things that people are currently searching for have some overlap [with Google], but it isn’t huge. What’s exciting is that we have a whole new class of things that people can put into a input field and have it tell them what it knows.” WA doesn't claim to be a search engine,it calls itself a Fact Engine or computational Knowledge Engine. Microsoft Bing went live on 3rd June and they claim it to be a Decision Engine. So we have here a search engine, a fact engine and a decision engine. Are you sure which engine is right for your digestive system? One more thing to note about WA is that requires some learning, Google rides on top of the fact user knows how to read and ~~write~~ type and users can put keywords in the engine without any training. WA requires more than that, user are expected to have some familiarity with any query language to exploit WA capabilities to its fullest. People who have used Mathematica back at the school know what I mean.

What is this Bing thing ?

So another search engine called Bing showed up on web on 3rd June. Well, OK, they could have a better name for it but its Microsoft so we have tolerate the names. What if Microsoft had created ipod, well then it would have been named as Microsoft Ipod XP Professional Edition (SP2). Alright enough bad jokes, maybe Bing is just a recursive acronym like GNU: GNU's Not Unix or P.I.N.E: Pine is not Elm and Bing: Bing Is Not Google. It is rather trivial to figure out what Bing does. Its a decision engine by software behemoth which claims to help people in making buying decision. But why, aren't ebay or amazon doing its job well enough? Do we really need another product review, fare comparison, or travel planner site claiming it to be a search engine. Microsoft is using Powerset technology and it shows up in the result and some people say Bing's understanding of intent is fairly better than Google. I observed its only true when you search for US specific stuff. Maybe MS still needs to collect substantial data for the international audience. Comparing Bing and Google result on http://www.blackdog.ie/google-bing/ was really a funny experience. When I searched for the word sex, Bing didn't accepted it as a keyword, now this similarity between Wolfram Alpha and Bing puts a thought in my mind that both these engines can used in schools for kids with the offending content of the Internet being filtered out. But that can be bypassed if you change your country settings in Bing. Bing is surely getting positive reviews across the globe and its quite expected for a product with $100 million marketing muscle.

Is semantic web really an unfair advantage ?

In this edition lets talk about only Calais and how automated generation of rich semantic metadata will give your website an unfair advantage.We, the users, are accustomed to consume human generated content like blogs,scraps or tweets, engines like wolfram spew machine generated content.Now this kind content is equally consumable by humans and machine. This explores a new dimension of Internet of which machines can be dominant player in consuming or creating content. With Calais exposing its webservice to public it’s pretty simple for a user to generate rich metadata for her content: You hand the Web Service unstructured text (like news articles, blog postings, your term paper, etc.) and it returns semantic metadata in RDF format. The metadata is generated using natural language processing and machine learning techniques, the Calais Web Service examines your text and locates the entities (people, places, products, etc.), facts (John Doe works for Acme Corporation) and events (Jane Doe was appointed as a Board member of Acme Corporation). Well we should be talking about it 10 years earlier but thanks to Jeff Bezos many of the great ideas got subverted by the fireworks of dotcom boom. But recently there have been lots of activity in semantic web. Calais being one of the serious effort.

Google Wave. How would you feel if the email was invented, say, today?

"I saw that baboon while driving at 70 mph." Does your laptop knows who was driving at 70 mph, you or the baboon (No offenses meant). Well that's one feature in Wave, it has server side semantic engine that can provide contextual suggestions if your spelling is right but grammar isn't. Wave is aimed at designing a co mmunication system that takes advantage of computers' current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms. So you don't have to use different apps to mail, chat or share photos. Wave seamlessly integrates all this and more in single communication model in one smooth continuum called Wave. So on a single wave you can work on many things all when you are having chat with your friends. It not live yet but the API is released for the developers at the Google I/O by Vic.Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale. Once you are stick to wave you will be addicted to it and will find other collaboration suites rather trivial.

Jaunty Jackalope is here and to stay.

So the long term support version of Ubuntu 9.04 code named Jaunty Jackalope was finally released on 23 April 2009 and heck I upgraded my intrepid right away on the same day and the improvements are rather glaring. C ombine jaunty with compiz fusion and you got the fanciest desktop you could ever imagine. For the interested ones Ultimate Edition 2 is now available.
A new “Netbook Remix” package optimized for the latest tiny laptops. So the cumulative effort in the direction of netbook seems to gain real momentum as google unveils it plans to launch a chrome based on OS later next year. Ubuntu now offers support for the Ext4 filesystem thanks to the new Linux kernel (version 2.6.28)and includes a new wireless package that should help those using newer wi-fi cards. But that nasty bug is still there that causes the wi-fi led to flash moronically. Maybe Karmic Kaola scheduled to be released on this november will fix it.Jaunty promises to push the OS toward hybrid “weblications" where desktop based apps interact more and more with web for their core functionalities to deliver eclectic user experience.
In a post to the Ubuntu mailing list Shuttleworth writes, “The bar is set very high, and we have been given the opportunity to leap over it… we want to make sure that the very best thinking across the whole open source ecosystem is reflected in Ubuntu, because many people will judge free software as a whole by what we do.”. So true.

Project Natal: Reclaim the control.
This is by far one of the most dazzling product I have ever seen coming out from MS stable, well I got bit dazzled with Silverlight also but never mind. When I first saw the launch on youtube (gaah, couldn't configure moonlight for my jaunty yet ) I was amazed at such a marvelous piece of technology, innovation and implementation, the last time I saw anything like that was BigDog from Boston Dynamics. Well people like Steven Spielberg don't show up to inaugurate AS/400 version of retirement planning game for kids. Project Natal is aimed for controller free entertainment on Xbox where user can do away with the controller and become the controller themselves. You see a ball kick it, have skateboard scan it and starting loafering around. It has highly advanced AI, you are playing and someone walks into the room and the game automatically goes multiplayer. Project Natal has far reaching potential unimagined by the design team itself. Enhance the vector dynamic precision and it can be used for space, military or medical use. I am running short of words for Project Natal now, go get a load of the launch video and you will know why.

FutureCast: Well, umm, maybe Google will buy twitter. Please don't beat me in the hallway if this goes wrong. ( By wrong I don't mean that Twitter will end up in buying Google instead.)

Further Links

Wolfram Alpha :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TIOH80Qg7Q
Semantic Web : http://ow.ly/h0Gt
http://ow.ly/h0Gl
http://www.opencalais.com/about
Project Natal : http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/projectnatal/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oACt9R9z37U
Bing : http://www.bing.com/
http://ow.ly/h6TK
Wave : http://ow.ly/h6TQ