More Web 2.0

Some time ago I wrote about Tim O'Reillys article on Web 2.0. Now Paul Graham has also written a piece on what he thinks about Web 2.0. First it seems that he is really negative towards the whole concept. But in the end I think he manages to sum it up very well:

Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used.[...] It just means doing things right, and it's a bad sign when you have a special word for that.

While Paul Graham is rather negative to the term "Web 2.0" he is very much in favour of all the things is stands for. He sums it up as "Ajax, democracy, and not dissing users." And that doesn't sound so bad to me either.

Linux as a Windows screensaver.

Oh, the beauty of it. A guy at IBM has Linux running as a screensaver on Windows. The fact that it is so meaningless makes it even cooler! Via slashdot.

More Mythbusters

Finally! The answers from Adam and Jamie, the Mystbusters, has arrived. A month ago the slashdot crowd could submit questions and the best ones would be forwarded to the dynamic duo to answer. Lots of fun things to read about. For example, I'd love to see an episode where they try to send something to the Moon, and so it seems, would Adam and Jamie. It was also interesting to read about how long it takes them to shoot the episodes and various myths.

Also, I just cannot resist to quote a sig from one of the comments. It's just brilliant.

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

Proof

Yesterday I went to see to movie Proof, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins. It's about a great mathematician who just passed away and the heritage he leaves behind. During his last years he was very ill, or rather insane and he was taken care of by one of his daughters. She is also a very gifted mathematician but had to give up her studies to take care of her father. Now that he is dead she has to face her own life and problems as her order sister tries to help her in her own way and one of her father's students wants to go through his books in the hope of finding some valuable math in between all the crazy scribblings.

It is a very good film and I can highly recommend it. The cast is spectacular and my guess is that Gwyneth Paltrow his getting herself and Oscar for this performance.

After the movie we had a little discussion about mathematics in movies and tv shows. One of the things that this movie does right is that it doesn't try to explain any of the math the characters are working with. All attempts that I've seen to do that have failed miserably. Present day math is just so far away from peoples' comprehension that trying to explain it is doomed to fail. Another movie which deals a lot with math successfully is Good Will Hunting which also never tries to explain it. The math is just there as a backdrop to the story about the characters. The tv show Numb3rs also does this pretty well. All these examples of math used right have their story mostly circling around the characters. It's more drama than math sci-fi.

One temptation is to trivialize the math in a movie just to make it understandable and part of the plot. But while that will appeal to math interested highschool student it looks a bit childish to anyone who's done math at the university level. One example is the movie Pi which I saw recently. I'm not saying that this movie is a total disaster, I thought it was quite OK. But the math part wasn't really that believable.

One of the reasons I went to see Proof was to see how they portrait mathematicians in Hollywood. I was a little afraid that it would be mostly the crazy genious stereotype that was shown. Indeed, both Gwyneth Paltrow's and Anthony Hopkins' characters have a bit of that in them. But the late mathematicians student, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is far from crazy. He is a very sympathic everyday guy with some small geek tendencies. And the movie makes a bit of fun of the geekiness of math students, but it does so in a very friedly way.

How Google treat their workers

Having a company full of nerd can be a difficult thing to manage. Google is one of those companies that do it really well. They have accepted that they have nerds (or "knowledge workers", which is the politically correct term) and that these people have special needs. In the article "Google: Ten Golden Rules" they explain how they take care of their employees. Man, it would be nice to work at Google.

Tabs in Browsers and Operating Systems

I've been thinking more about using the web browser as an operating system (and a window manager, which is really what this post is about). There's been a lot of focus on tabbed browsing in the last couple of years. Mostly because Firefox and Opera has it while Internet Explorer lacks it. Today it occurred to me that Windows have had tabs for quite some time. At the bottom of the screen there is the bar with the start button and that contains a tab for each application. If we wish to start using the browser as a operating system it is only natural to add tabs.

One thing that I've constantly found frustrating with the tabs in Windows is that I cannot reorder them. They show up in the order the applications were started and stay that way (except for when Windows occasionally freaks out). I find this very annoying. The mind is good at remembering spatial relationships and therefore I try to keep a certain order between the tabs of the applications I use most often. For example I always have Firefox first. But if I need to restart it for some reason it ends up as the rightmost application and the only way to fix that is to close all other applications. Silly. In Firefox I prefer to have the Gmail tab first followed by the Google Reader tab. In version 1.5 it is easy to reorder the tabs if they should end up out of sync which I was very pleased to see.

But the oddest thing I noticed when I realized that Windows also have tabs is that Windows and the browsers don't agree on the placement of tabs. Windows have the tabs at the bottom of the screan while all browsers I know of have the tabs above the web page under the menu and status bar. Isn't that funny? I would think that there would be a most natural placement but so far I have heard noone complaining about either placement. But since Windows allows you to change the placement of the tabs I've now put it at the top of the screen just to see what it feels like. And if it works out I will keep it that way to that I always have my tabs at the top. But now in the beginning it is a very weird experience. I am totally unused to it and it feels very unnatural which surprises me. I suggest you try it too. It remains to be seen if I can manage to keep it this way or if I will have to change back eventually.

Mythbusters

A couple of weeks ago my fiance and I discovered a show on Discovery Channel called Mythbusters. It's about taking myths of any kind and see if they really hold water. The way they test the myths is to actually recreate the conditions of the myth and see what happens. This makes for a whole lot of fun like blowing the most unlikely things up or using crash test dummies until they fall apart. This show has now become one of my absolute favorites.

One nice thing with the show is that they sometimes rerun some experiments in later shows if the viewers think that they have done something wrong. This is what I just did. I saw an episode a few days ago about a myth that got busted. But I think that they missed a couple of details so I sent them a mail on how they should test the myth properly. I'll be sure to post about it here if they rerun the test as I suggested.

Some more Mythbusters links:

• Fan club
  
• Jamie Hyneman's Visual Effects company
  

Aeon Flux

Today Aeon Flux opens in the US. I thought I'd comment a bit about my that film before I've seen it. First of all I have very little idea about weather the movie is going to be good or bad. From the little I know and the trailers it could be an OK action movie. But that's not really what I wanted to comment on. I'd rather go on about the relationship with the original animated Aeon Flux.

Aeon Flux was an animated TV series in the beginning of the 90's. It was shown on MTV. It was about a female agent (Aeon Flux is her name) running around on her missions usually killing of a lot of clone soldiers. The series is very characteristic (for me at least) in its rawness and violence. Aeon is very athletic and performs incredible stunts as she tries to accomplish her missions. Furthermore she has very little clothes on, but nothing essential is revealed. There is nothing sexually about her bareness (at least, I don't get turned on by her dress).

Now, I have some very serious doubts that they will be able to capture the feeling of the original series in a film with real actors. The film will most likely be just another action movie with some ideas and plot inspired form the animated version. I have no doubt that Aeon Flux will be able to perform spectacular stunts with today's special effects but that will not help much to create the real Aeon Flux feeling. It's also something about how the characters are drawn in the animated version which adds to its roughness which I think is simply impossible to recreate and at the same time let the movie take place in the real world. And I should also make sure to whine about the choice of Charlize Theron as Aeon Flux. She's pretty and a good actress and I'm sure she will attract a lot of people to go see the film. But she is very far from the animated Aeon Flux. The animated woman is not pretty but looks a bit anorectic and very fit at the same time. She also has a lot of rawness to her which Charlize Theron doesn't even come close to.

So all in all I think the movie will not honor the animated series. But whether it will be a good movie or not I have no idea.

The Browser as Operating System

I've just upgraded to Firefox 1.5 and that made me think a little about how I use my browser. Some peope have argued that one can see the browser as an operating system in itself with urls providing the file system. Recently more and more web based applications have popped up which makes it possible to start using the browser more and more as an operating system. I've been trying to move as many applications as I can to be used inside the browser lately to try out this idea. I use the browser to read mail (via gmail), read news (via google reader), write blogs (via blogger), search my hard drives (via Google Desktop) and handle my torrent downloads (via azureus' HTML WebUI plugin). And I must say that I'm pretty happy with doing things inside the browser. It gives a common framework to all the applications. I like the way tabs work and now I can even reorder them in the new Firefox 1.5.

But moving more and more applications to the browser will place higher demands on the usability of the browsers and how one can interact with them. But to me it seems that the browsers are continuously improving in this respect and adding capabilities such as SVG. It will be interesting to see how the new browser Flock is going to affect the rest of the browsers as it does a very good job of integrating and supporting web based applications.

It's funny how web based applications have created a kind of standard for how to design programs. Most web based applications come with their layout written in CSS, the client side data in HTML or XML, client side logic written in Javascript and they communicate to a server via XMLRPC. It is interesting to see how that this creates a very nice separation between the looks of the application and its data. This is something that one could wish more of from ordinary applications even though the Model-View-Control paradigm tries to realize this. It seems though that ordinary applications are learning from this. Microsoft has announced a new language for specifying interfaces which seems to me to be related to CSS.

I should also mention that I'm still using Firefox. I tried to switch to Opera a couple of weeks ago. But many of the things I use my browser for doesn't work properly in Opera and that is a showstopper for me. I use Opera for one thing though, Amazons Mechanical Turk. But we will see if Opera will improve further with their upcoming version 9. Perhaps I'll switch then.

History's worst bugs

Wired has an article on history's worst bugs. It gives a chronological list of the 10 worst bugs in the history of bugs. I found it an interesting read. Furthermore they also give the etymology behind the word "bug" which was fascinating.

A random silly fact about the article is that the authors name is very similar to Simon Garfunkel. I misread it several times.

But what I'd like to expand a bit upon is what they write in the first paragraph of the article. There they report on the fact that Toyota had to recall a number of their Prius cars due to a bug in the software of the car. I find it interesting that Toyotas name shows up here because few company's are so tightly associated with high quality and robust things. Here in Sweden someone even tried to put a Toyota logo on his car when he had it inspected in the hope that it would pass more easily. (He didn't come up with this himself though, Toyota is running a commercial which shows people doing just that.) "The Toyota Way" is a corporate model for (among other things) increasing the quality and reliability of the products. Examples of how they work is that finding a problem is considered a success. They keep asking "why" when a problem shows up to really find the root of the problem. This had the effect that a small pool of oil on the factory floor changed the bonus program for people in the buying department. This way of long term thinking reminds me of the thinking I blogged about a while ago in Getting Software Right. What I would like to see is a Toyota Way for the software industry. Now that Toyota need software in their cars maybe they can improve the field of software engineering. I should point out that I don't think it is possible to use the Toyota model right off the shelf since it is aim at producing physical stuff, not computer program. These two things are inherently different.

Winners of the 18th IOCCC

I can't help my fascination for the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. The kind of code that the contestants produce is just mindblowing. The winners of the 18th version of the competition was just announced. The code of the winning entries has not been published yet but ruling from the titles of the entries they're better than ever. The following picture was generated from one of the winners.

Finally, I can't mention the IOCCC without boasting about the fact that I have my office across the corridor from a three time former winner of IOCCC.

24 signs of stress

Here's a beautiful demonstration of various signs of stress.

Found on Jonathan Hardwick's homepage.

Standard Annotation Language for Haskell

A thought struck me today: Maybe Haskell needs some standard way to annotate the source code? There's already a semi standard for documentation and that is Haddock. But what I mean is something juicier than that.

It seems several projects are working on attaching some kind annotations to Haskell. It mostly has to do with properties of Haskell functions, for example if a function is idempotent or if it commutes with some other function. The two larger projects that I'm aware of that does these kinds of things are Programatica and Cover. And there is also DrIFT which it a kind of code generation tool for Haskell to simply certain repetitive tasks. All these projects use different means to attach information to Haskell programs.

But doesn't Haskell already have a way to annotate the source code? There is the compiler pragma specified in the language standard. Well, pragmas are only standardized up to the point that they are delimited by certain characters. Apart from that, all bets are off. We need some more structure, a unified syntax along the lines with Java's annotations. While I haven't used the annotation mechanism in Java it looks really well designed and useful. Something along those lines is what I'm after for Haskell.

So, what would this look like. Currently I have no idea. All I know is that having a common way of expressing things saves time and work. Syntax is not shallow, it is really important. The problem is that those people who need it the most (the Programatica and Cover people) are the people who are the least likely to spend any time with this. I know most of these people and the look down upon thing like this, defining a common syntax with no meaning. But XML is also a syntax without meaning and although that sounds like something really ridiculous XML has actually saved a lot of work and has let programmers and designers spend their brainpower on the more semantic parts of their problems.

Well, I should really talk to someone about this. Make the wheels start turning. We'll see how it goes. Unfortunately I'm a bit pessimistic.

Googlism

There's been lots of talking about Google the past days (well the past years in fact...) I thought I'd write down some of the news here.

First of all the result Googles Summer of Code was published. I'm really impressed by the number of successful projects that has been sponsored by Google. It's a great thing for the open source community and I hope we will see more of this. And I expect we will since it must generate a lot of good-will for Google.

Secondly, Google is pouring some more money. This time it is to the Oregon State University and Portland State University for helping them maintaining various open source websites and projects. There's an official press release.

Perhaps the most exciting news is that of base.google.com (it's currently down but has been known to be up at occations). It's a database where you can add all kinds of things. The really interesting thing happens when it is connected to Googles other services like Google Local, Froogle and the upcoming Google Wallet. Then you can share and trade information and goods, you can start local or global clubs and organizations. The possibilities are almost endless. The only potential problem that I see is how to structure the site so that it doesn't become "too abstract". That is, it becomes so general that it is almost useless. But I think Google will solve this, they know how to do things right. There's an article at ars technica about this.

Finally a note from Googles official blog about some stuff that was published on Google Video. Personally I haven't used Google Video so I cannot really say anything about it. Other search engines just search the web for video files and let you search them. But Google requires video makers to upload them onto Googles site. The archive will ofcourse be a lot smaller but perhaps it will be more useful. Time will tell.

Well, Google is hot. And they just continue to lanch new stuff all the time. Some people might fear that Google might become too big. But I don't think that is a problem. If there is one company that I will happily see taking over the world it is Google. With their philosophy that one can earn money without being evil, and which they've also proven to be correct, I trust the company fully.

Quote time again

Long time since I posted a quote here. This time it is from an invited lecture given at the conference FLoC in 1996. The reason I found this quote is because I read it in an article. Just a warning before you read it; You need to be a computer scientist to understand it.

Translating a conjecture into clause normal form before handing it over to the theorem prover is like shooting oneself in the foot before starting on a long hike.
-- Gerard Huet

Dark matter and Cosmology

For quite some time I've been rather provoking about our current knowledge of the universe by saying: "The only thing we know for sure about the current model is that it is false." The problem that has been plaguing scientists for some time is that the observed weight of the galaxies isn't enough to hold them together with gravitation. At least that's what the theory says. And since we all know that the theory is right (I'm being ironic here) people have suggested "dark matter", mass that we haven't been able to observe, to be floating around and making up for the lack of mass. This whole thing has always sounded a bit ridiculous to me. It's a sure sign that a theory is in trouble when you have to patch it like this. So I've just been waiting for the downfall of the theory.

Now it might turn out that fixing the theory is surprisingly easy. Researchers have now redone the calculations using a better approximation. They've used general relativity theory instead of Newton's old workhorse of a theory. It turns out that this closes the mass gap and removes the need for dark matter. The article hasn't been reviewed yet but if it holds out then it is a very good thing for the present cosmological model.

Web 2.0

I've just read one of the most interesting articles I've ever read about the internet. Tim O'Reilly is writing about what is called Web 2.0. To be honest I hadn't heard about this term until recently. It's a name which tries to capture the new ways of the internet, the new services, the new business models and how it all works. O'Reilly tries to nail down the core of Web 2.0 and has some very insightful comments on the way. It's a long article but it is well worth the read. Go on, read it!

What Is Web 2.0

Levine the Genius Tailor

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE DESIGN

It is impossible to begin a discussion of psychological principles of programming language design without recalling the story of ``Levine the Genius Tailor.'' It seems that a man had gone to Levine to have a suit made cheaply, but when the suit was finished and he went to try it on, it didn't fit him at all. ``Look,'' he said, ``the jacket is much too big in back.''
``No problem,'' replied Levine, showing him how to hunch over his back to take up the slack in the jacket.
``But then what about the right arm? It's three inches too long.''
``No problem,'' Levine repeated, demonstrating how, by leaning to one side and stretching out his right arm, the sleeve could be made to fit.
``And what about these pants? The left leg is too short.''
``No problem,'' said Levine for the third time, and proceeded to teach him how to pull up his leg at the hip so that, though he limped badly, the suit appeared to fit.
Having no more complaints, the man set off hobbling down the street, feeling slightly duped by Levine. Before he went two blocks, he was stopped by a stranger who said, ``I beg your pardon, but is that a new suit you're wearing?''
The man was a little pleased that someone had noticed his suit, so he took no offense. ``Yes it is,'' he replied. ``Why do you ask?''
``Well, I'm in the market for a new suit myself. Who's your tailor?''
``It's Levine---right down the street.''
``Well, thanks very much,'' said the stranger, hurrying off. ``I do believe I'll go to Levine for my suit. Why, he must be a genious to fit a cripple like you!''
Would it be inappropriate to concot a version of this story called ``Levine the Genius Language Designer''? The first problem in discussing language design is that we do not know the answer to that question. We do not know whether the language designers are geniuses, or we ordinary programmers are cripples. Generally speaking, we only know how bad our present programming language is when we finally overcome the psychological barriers and learn a new one. Our standards, in other words, are shifting ones---a fact that has to be taken into full consideration in programming
language design.

Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg (pages 210-211 in the silver anniversary edition). Via LtU.

Good Worms

A constant problem with today's internet is (beside the problem of spam) the many viruses and worms that take control of peoples computers. And this is not a new problem. No, it has been around since the 80's at least. So why do we still have this problem? Well, it hasn't become a real problem until the internet took off in the late 90's. As time passed on more and more security holes where found in computer which were exploited by worms and viruses. But these holes were patched and today's operating systems are much more difficult to exploit for a worm.

So why are worms still a problem? Because most users use old unpatched software. Even modern worms use old exploits to propagate through the internet.

This is a very frustrating situation. I wish that we could somehow force the people who uses insecure systems to upgrade. But there might be a way. Using the same holes as the malicious worms use we could create 'Good Worms' which patched systems instead. There is a very interesting article about this in eWeek. Ofcourse there are many potential problems and complaints about this techniques but I think it can be made to work and I think it needs to be done considering the present situation. Make sure to read the article and also read the articles it refers to which argues very well for Good Worms.

Less depressed or more happy?

Psychology and psychoanalysis has to date mostly been about negative emotions such as depression, anger, frustration and so forth. When you go see a shrink he will probably discuss all the bad things in your life and your negative thoughts. Unless your lucky. Because, as of late, this field has realized that focusing on the bad just doesn't do it. It's not enough to just make people less depressed, they need to be more happy!

I just read the most exciting article on the about happiness and the newly started research in that area. This whole line of thinking makes very much sense to me, to try to do something good instead of avoiding to do something bad. But I should admit that most of the time I'm no better than anyone else in this respect. I'm actively working on getting better in this respect right now, though.