Technology

The Buzz is growing among us nerds. It is typical among my friends to be testing everything new I guess. This is probably an effect of our general curiosity for anything we feel is interesting. Right now Google is back in the buzzing circle, after what many consider to be an overhyping of Google Wave. Their new product Google Buzz is kind of a competition for Facebook and Twitter combined with location information. They are integrating Google Mail, Google Reader and Google Maps into the mix as well. According to their presentation video they even want to integrate Google Latitude and Google Wave into the mix later on.

My experiences so far are mixed.

• The integration with Google Mail works kind of well, but it can get a bit noisy when you start discussing buzzes


• I like the way they hide things that seems to be uninteresting. Their idea of showing what is important and hiding what is not is promising.


• The search features combined with large numbers of messages is probably a key feature.


• The integration with flickr and twitter is a starting point so far. I want to see those I follow in twitter within Buzz as well, and not only my tweets, but I understand the reasoning behind the current functionality.


• The photo posting is not available on the iphone, but the feature in Google Buzz using a browser on my PC works great.


• Link posting with the rich interface is not available on the iphone, but again, using a PC works great.

Over the years I have been a heavy user of small electronic devices. I started with Sony Walkman in different versions. Later I switched to computer devices. That is mostly “small” gadgets often called organizers or smart-phones. It started with me testing some development utilities for Palm Pilot Professional and Palm OS devices back in 97. I had recently started working and could not afford a Palm Pilot myself, but I started testing them and helped configure my colleagues’ devices. I guess you could call it a bit masochistic, a budding gadget-holic without gadgets, just begging to play with the gadgets of my friends and colleagues.

So I got myself a Palm V and later a Palm IIIc back in the late 90’s early 2k’s. Later I switched to a Palm Vx and then Sony Clié. I still think of that little Clié as one of the best devices ever made and used it for several years, it had Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth and everything worked pretty OK. I used to run TomTom Navigator for Palm on it using Bluetooth to a TomTom GPS receiver. It was my little brain, pet and best friend.

In addition to this little infatuation with organizers I also was heavily into mobile phones. Mostly I used different Nokia models. Those models worth mentioning are the Nokia 5110, and later 7110, before I switched to the 6310i. I particularly liked the 6310i. It worked excellently. To get most out of my Palm devices I used to connect them to the internet through my mobile phones, using cables, or later Bluetooth, and thus syncing email and calendar through the network. Okay… there were a few things you had to do on your computer in order for that to work, and there was that little issue with firewalls. But who cares, I got it to work with only a few configurations, and tricks, and hacks applications, and other sneaky smart ideas.

I admit that in parallel with this I also invested in different mp3 players. First I had an Expanium MP3 CD player from Phillips, I am pretty sure I got that sometime in 97. I was a user of Archos MP3 players – the AV340. The player was a bit bulky, but with an enormous amount of features. Hey, how many other MP3-players do you know that you can connect to your TV-decoder and record TV-shows? I am not going to tell you the number of cables I normally am carrying around. Let’s just say that if you need a charger I probably have one nearby, or maybe two. Who am I kidding, how many do you need?

In 2006 I attempted to reduce the number of devices I always carried around and decided to gather them all into one device. I decided to buy a Smartphone. I invested in a Nokia N80, but what happened was that I still used both the Sony Clié and the N80. By connecting the Sony to my Nokia via Bluetooth I had myself a nifty little setup with online email and web-surfing. The calendar and overall GUI was so much better on the Palm OS than on the Nokia. The media player part of the mobile phone was even worse though so I continued to use other MP3-players. The Archos became too bulky in the long run so I switched totally strategy regarding MP3-players and switched to a Creative Zen Nano. Not a MP3-player with a large capacity, but it included 1 GB storage and FM-radio, all delivered in a very little package. It wasn’t until Apple released iPod touch I finally jumped on the iPod bandwagon.

For years I had been walking around with 3 devices. I had hoped to get rid of my Sony Clié when I switched to Nokia N80, but that didn’t work. So I made another attempt in 2008. I switched to Windows mobile and got myself a HTC Cruise and later HTC Diamond. Finally I was one device down. The calendar in the windows mobile was not perfect, but it worked. It could synchronize itself automatically with Exchange, and email, calendar and contacts were synchronized at all times. But what do you know, as long as I had access to Wi-Fi, so was my iPod touch. It had all the features of a smartphone except the possibility to call or use mobile networks. The lock-in with iTunes is a pain in the *** sometimes, but it works. Here I had a device that were simple to use and worked pretty much as easy as my Palm devices did. The biggest issue with Windows Mobile is not its features, Microsoft have an endless list of features. No the biggest issue with Windows Mobile is its slow speed and how annoying it can be to use. It sometimes feels like you have a brick that you want to perform a little bricking operation on. I am sorry to say that the Flow GUI from HTC does not make it that much better. It might flow better when you throw it, but it does not flow particularly while using the phone.

Here is an example: My employer recommends us to switch on the password protection included in the mobile phone. This is a feature that locks the phone after some inactivity. Now, let’s say you want to use a HTC Diamond to call a Taxi. In Oslo you are now supposed to press a lot of numbers on your phone in order for you to feel that you are not waiting as long as you really are. These numbers should be pretty easy to click on a phone, right? Not when you are talking HTC Diamond. You see while you wait to be connected to the automatic voice the password protection has suddenly activated. So when you have to select number 1-9 in the Taxi menu you first have to punch the password. Why it doesn’t understand that you are using the phone I have no idea. Now when you pull out the stylus and have punched your pin, Windows Mobile has decided that since you used your stylus during a phone-call you want to use the notepad feature of the phone. So you have to close that. Oh right. Now you have to activate the keyboard. Yeeees right again. That is that small little button on the bottom of the screen. Now you can click the number, but guess what, the automatic voice has kept on talking while you panicky have tried to navigate to the correct feature on your mobile and you are in a new menu and since you have not been listening to the voice in the phone lately you have no idea where in the menu you are, what choices you have or how to get back to the first menu. My phone has been very close to flowing very far in situations like that.

Enter the iPhone 3GS. The summer 2009 Apple releases the new iPhone 3GS, and I decided that maybe I could finally live with only one device.

One device to rule them all,
One device to find them,
One device to bring them all and in the brightness bind them.
(Freely adapted from the Lord of the Rings, by Tolkien)

So far it looks good, now if I only could get some of the old calendar features from my Palm devices: A 5 or 7 day week view, week number display and the possibility to set privacy status on calendar entries…

I've gotten a new iPhone 3GS (32 GB) and of course I need to test all the features. There are a few small configuration tidbits still left for me I see. And if I continue to use it as I have so far, I have a serious battery problem. (Yes I disabled 3G networking as quick as I could, in order to save some part of my battery usage)

I am testing a lot of applications at the time being and I admit that there are some applications that are excellent, some fair and some I still am testing.

I have been using GPS on my mobile phones and Palm organizers for years. So that part of having an iPhone is not really new. I have noticed that the integration of location into several other features is a nice added value though. In addition to this I have been a satisfied owner of an iPod touch for years now, so some of the applications are fairly well known to me.

Social media is maybe one of the stronges feature sets available from the iTunes app store. So far the Facebook app is proving to be excellent, and I also like Twitterific and Nambu. I am still evaluating Shozu though.

The biggest plus in my eyes though is the massive increase in response time compared to Windows Mobile 6 and 6.1 HTC phones. Even my Nokia N80 was faster than those. Palm organizers have always been responsive and simple to use, I would have liked to test the Palm Pre, but somewhere even my gadget budget have to stop.

More news soon to follow.

Opera has released their new "revolutionary" Opera Unite. It is an interesting way of handling the sharing of services and information and probably also a quite natural extension of the browser as an platform. Now we just have to sit back and wait for some more exciting services in addition to those available in the beta release.

Here are some of the services I would like to see (Some of them might be available or not possible, I have not read the documentation fully yet):

• WebDav - I would like to be able to upload and download files easily within my normal desktop tools.


• HTTPS connections - I would like to be able to do this securely


• A versioning system - A simple subversion implementation maybe?


• Easy Backup - A way to create a backup of some of your files on a friends computer.


• Easy Wiki/Blog/Portal - A simplified tool for creating a site in Opera Unite. Hopefully with RSS support (both out and in)


• RSS Reader

What do you think, are there other tools you would like to see? Please leave your wishes in the comments.

Do you want to know more about how it works?

Check out these articles:
digi.no - Slik fungerer Opera Unite (in Norwegian)
digi.no - Opera flytter webserveren til nettleseren(in Norwegian)
Opera.com - An introduction to Opera Unite

Some are not that excited:
DagensIT - Operas viktigste nyskapning(in Norwegian)

It’s kind of interesting to see the turn among most companies out there concerning the use of different software tools for different tasks. For years we have had a mentality that either you create your own monster of a solution or you customize one product from some big vendor. But since the appearance of internet and the web our world has gotten a lot more fragmented.

(All links in this post opens in new windows)

Lately the consumer market has created a feel for sites and products on the net that is not only OK to use, but “necessary” to use. I am of course talking about web based applications and social software. In other words, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, instant messaging products and other similar tools. Several companies have their own Wikis, blogs, forums and instant messaging products. Micro-blogging tools like Twitter and Yammer is also being used more and more these days.

For years we have had Open Source Software (OSS), and except for Linux and Apache not all of them have been accepted by big business. And the only reason that Linux and Apache got accepted was due to their track record and the support from some pretty large vendors, among else IBM.

Lately I have got the feeling that a lot of corporations have accepted the risk of using products with a smaller support organisation than what these corporations are used to. The acceptance of small vendors and OSS products into the suite of software used by corporations have given me as a professional both benefits and challenges.

The biggest challenge is the same as it has been for years now, integration. We need information and functionality integrated on several layers and in infinite ways. So what the big vendors do and have done for years is to create tools for us to help integrate our fragmenting world.

The increasingly complex world of tools and services always make me think of the second law of thermodynamics. Luckily we do not have a closed system; we have the opportunity to impose change and to establish ways to solve our complexity.

So, the next time you use a wiki for documenting your experiences, the next time you rate some other users post on the web, the next time you chat with a colleague or the next time you write a blog post, consider this - how do you use such information from other products and sites within your company. Are you able to use the information? Should you be able to use it? Do you want to be able to use it? And finally, if the answer is yes on any of those questions, how do you integrate your tools?

I have deliberately not mentioned search, archiving and all the other corporate necessities like reviewability, reusability, accountability and so on. Neither do I want to mention the words service oriented architecture (SOA), web services or integration platform. What I want is a world where this information is seamlessly available to me, stored indefinitely and persistently at no cost. As a professional I do not trust this, so I need to gather knowledge I have produced in such a way that it is still available to me even though the service I originally used to create this information no longer exists.

How do you do that?

On Saturday 14 March 2009 David Norheim can celebrate another birthday. Today the WWW can celebrate it's twentieth birthday. One of the creative girls (Terese Liadal) at work created this cake and we felt we just had to share it with all the rest of you out there in cyberspace as well.

David Norheim is one of the leading Semantic Web gurus in Norway and was extremely happy when he got this cake. The cake illustrates one version of the Semantic Web Layer Cake, an illustration that describes the different layers in the architecture stack. There are several versions of this layer cake available online.

You can find a close up of the cake here

I’ve got a lot of nerdy friends. One of them is on chatting terms with Sir Tim. Who is Tim you might ask? Well if you have to ask, then you probably aren’t that interested in technology. We are talking TBL here… Tim Berners-Lee. The man behind the World Wide Web.

Now, that is an idea that most have heard of. If not, how are you reading this? The World Wide Web is an invention that has permeated our entire society. We are producing, consuming and sharing content on an enormous scale. All due to his proposal from March 1989, according to several sources (2 pages on wikipedia: Tim Berners-Lee and WWW). The name could have been Information Mesh, The Information Mine (TIM – a reference to his Name?), Mine of Information (MOI – moi is me in French!), but they settled on World Wide Web. A name that most people only pronounce as the web, WWW or W3.

So let us skip back to my friend again. He just happened to chat with Tim this weekend, and suddenly he remembered to ask. ”Hey, if we would like to celebrate the WWW, what date should we do that on?”

His reply?

”March 13!” (The exact language was a bit more engineer like)

So this Friday the Web as we know it will be 20 years old.

Let’s all write together now… CONGRATULATIONS,

and thank you Sir Tim.


My employer Computas also wanted to talk about this event so they created this little newsitem (in Norwegian) World Wide Web fyller 20 år fredag den 13.!

Update:
A lot of other sites also mentions this little item:
Dagbladet.no - Gratulerer med dagen, WWW! (in Norwegian)
Computerworld.no - Gratulerer, world wide web!(in Norwegian)
digi.no - Weben fyller 20 år i dag

Windows Live Messenger 9 is out of Beta. It has been so for a while, but I admit that I’ve missed that little news item. During the Christmas season I guess a few other of us have missed this bit of information as well. So please check out download.live.com

I work at a Company called Computas. We have been developing a new search interface for a multimedia kiosk called "Mediasone" (=Media zone) this autumn. The development is not finished, but the hardware of the kiosks was publicly displayed on Friday.

It looks like this might be a great hit if my feelings have any votes on this. These kiosks are going to be used as user interfaces for a multimedia search feature that the Deichmanske Library is releasing soon. You will be able to search all kind of multi-media content available in the Library, including sources like NRK, movie companies and a lot of music. Everything trough a touch sensitive screen and on software running on Mac OSX.

The kiosks have been designed by students at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

More news to come at a later date.

As a follow up to my earlier fantasy of new possibilities regarding a documented generation I would like to blow out some steam regarding social software as well.

One of the problems we see today is that there are only a few people producing the information that is consumed by all the rest. Those reading are participating with tagging, bookmarking and rating of the content, but even this should be easier. The production of the content could also be easier.

So let us play with the idea of a documented world. On our way forward we have a few stops on the way. Some of them we are experiencing right now, among else by using Facebook, Linked-In, Plaxo or other social networking applications. By blogging and micro-blogging what we do and what interests us we are giving the world knowledge and information that can be used by other applications as what we often call value-added content.

Consider this, you are watching a video or listening to a podcast on the net regarding some information. The video or audio is tagged in such a way that as you play the content, different meta-information rolls by in tandem with the content, and the media player might then display related information based on automated searches as you watch. We are talking hypermedia that intelligently can give you information that you need or want. You will be able to decide where the information is gathered from.

In the next generation of social software I expect us to be able to increase the value for each other in even better and easier ways than today. And as always, the enabler of these features will always be technology.

So in the future, expect great things. Probably not some of the small ideas I present to you here. What we will see will probably be better.

And you will be a part of it. By easily producing content, and adding meta-information and grading what you see. The world will give you more of what you want and of what interests you.

Whether it is semantic technology or intelligent search engines, I bid welcome to interesting and feature rich social networks, in a documented world where you can have an even more enhanced life experience.

Soon, in a life near you!

In the future: You will be able to rewind your whole life. Everything you have ever done, ever said, ever seen and ever heard will be reviewable, analysable, searchable and last, but not least, available.


We are getting closer to something a lot of people are calling the documented generation. Even today most of what we do is documented in some way or other. I myself have used my archive of digital images gathered over several years to remember when and where I visited some place. I’ve tagged all my images to simplify finding and searching, but I welcome the day this is an automatic process.

Most of your financial transactions are documented and traceable today when you use a debit or credit card for paying. Often you even use a membership card to get other benefits as well.

Most of your movements are traceable today, whether you use a car with an Autopass chip to pass trough highway toll boots, or you pass traffic cameras that watch the traffic. If you fill gas at a gas station you pay using a credit or debit card. When you go by train you use an electronic train ticket containing an RFID chip. When you go by plane you pay by card and you have to show a picture ID before boarding the plane.

Actually you are filmed by surveillance cameras almost everywhere, and most of what you do at work is logged on your computer.

All of your life is already stored on a plethora of computers all over the world and the internet.

These are known issues and something we have seen emerging over several years. Science Fiction authors have suggested this for years and the last decade these issues have been and are discussed in mainstream literature and media as well. And this is only the beginning.

What this will have to say for us personally, for our security against ID-theft and against the misuse of personal information is probably something a lot of people already have felt.
As long as our information is as available as it is, id-theft and misuse of information will become more and more common. The only way to prevent this is to change the routines and the systems available for those that need to verify our identity. They need a more secure way to verify that we are who we say we are, and they need to increase their efforts for protecting our data.

The way technology improves and evolves makes the possibilities for tracking and storing all kinds of information better each day. A new generation of people where everything they do is documented, from the day they are born until the day they die, is not that far away. The documented generation!

I would venture the guess that very soon we will see solutions in the consumer market that enables us to document events while they happen in new and exciting ways. Things like video-goggles that store everything you see, hear and say while attending a meeting or conference. The information might be stored on small, flexible, secure and large storage devices or directly on network storages units. This information may even be integrated with GPS-data and other environment information like weather or temperature, or with auto tagging features that adds other automatic metadata to the different parts of the recording. Face-, object and speech recognition will be automated and stored together with video and sound. And maybe not that much further in the future, this might be available in a 3D video with better than HD-quality.

The benefits that come with this kind of easily available information will of course be both a curse and a boon for us users. I often wonder where I met some people for the first time or what some customer said about some technical problem. Together with the stored information and multimedia we will probably be able to cross-reference our ”life-stream” with all other kind of information. With automated image and speech recognition everything we do, experience and say will be searchable and analysable.

What do you think? How soon will this be available? In 15 years? In 10 or 20 years? Will it be possible to rewind you whole life?

And as a small idea: When will we see the possibility for creating alternate experiences that makes it look like you have led a more exciting life than you really have? Will we see jamming equipment for jamming people from recording you on their life-streams? If you have an idea, please add a comment below.

PS: Yes I am aware of this little thing from the US, but I am saying that people are willingly going to do this just because they can.

Yesterday Google launched their new Google Chrome web browser. The follow-up in miscellaneous media has been enormous. I've tested it myself and I do find it a very interesting application. There are a few features I miss, but I guess Opera has made me a demanding web user. All in all I expect Google to release a solid and innovating new browser when the final version is finished. As usual regarding Google, a few questions concerning the content and other privacy issues do surface. The new secure surfing feature is great, but a few people have issues with the licensing terms:

"By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services."

That is a direct quote from this article at Slashdot. I am not sure this is an issue to fear. It seems that they need that in order to display content on your screen, but we will see I guess.

Finally, if you have not seen the comic from Google explaining the new browser, please read it.

While I was on vacation The New York Times had an article about the latest research on the Antikythera Mechanism. If you want to read more there is also a web site for the research-project itself.

If you have no idea of what I'm talking about, and want to know what the Antikythera Mechanism is, then Wikipedia as usual has a good explanation.

The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient mechanical calculator (also described as the first known "mechanical computer") designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, in 1900. Subsequent investigation, particularly in 2006, dated it to about 150–100 BC, and hypothesised that it was on board a ship that sank en route from the Greek island of Rhodes to Rome. Technological artifacts of similar complexity did not reappear until a thousand years later.

So, it might be considered a historical anachronism. Something so advanced that many people do not believe it could have be created 2100+ years ago.

The latest research connects it to Corinth and possibly Syracuse (the hometown of Archimedes) and also informs us that the mechanism could among else calculate solar eclipses and the four year cycles of the Olympiad.

I wonder what more knowledge they can wrestle from this very interesting artifact.

The New York Times has this very good article on early ideas of the world wide web. "The Web Time Forgot" describes the how a Belgian called Paul Otlet tried to index all known knowledge, and realised that this was too hard to do by paper alone. So in 1934 he dreamt up this concept of doing this with "electric telescopes". That is an electric device that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. According to NYT he described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even collaborate or congregate in online social networks.

This proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog index-card and telegraph machines, but it included an idea of a hyperlinked structure of information.

“This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.

I personally liked this little nugget.

...Otlet’s version of hypertext held a few important advantages over today’s Web. For one thing, he saw a smarter kind of hyperlink. Whereas links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between documents, Otlet envisioned links that carried meaning by, for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or disagreed with each other.

The article goes one to discuss Semantic Web in a not so nice way. I admit that I don't agree with the author on that account, but all in all an interesting read.

Please read the original article in The New York Times.

There is a new application in beta from Microsoft these days for all of us with Windows Mobile devices. The overview says it all:

Windows® SideShow™ for Windows Mobile® is an application for Windows Mobile 5 and Windows Mobile 6 Pocket PCs and Smartphones that allows you to use your Windows Mobile device as a Bluetooth SideShow-compatible device. This enables you to use your phone as an extra window into your PC. You can both access your computer’s information from your Pocket PC or Smartphone, and control the computer through a gadget interface. While the phone is out of range, or when your computer is off, you can continue to view content sent to the phone previously. This makes it easy to send information to the phone that you'll need later on.

So check out the Windows SideShow for Windows Mobile Developer Preview