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Showing posts from 2009

Why I think the Google Phone is poised to shake up mobile

The whispers of a Google branded wireless device have been out for years, before Android was announced many bloggers and tech. journalists prognosticated on Gooogle's entry in the space with a branded handset. However, when Google did enter the space it did it vicariously through the development of the open source Linux based and now rapidly maturing "Android" operating system. To some the rise of Android started slow but I was confident before even the first phone using the OS arrived that it was poised to open the wireless handheld space wide open. I posted my reasons for this in a post in late 2008 . Today the phone is seeing rapid adoption by handheld makers, Motorola has redesigned its entire line of phones around Android. HTC has a couple of compelling options using its take of Android using the "Sense UI" and talk of dozens of other Android based phones to debut next year hint at 2010 being the year that the Android Tsunami storm surge hits the shores of

AgilEntity framework: Open Code Challenge #1

In an effort to showcase the self management capabilities of the AgilEntity framework these open code challenges will periodically be run to highlight how AgilEntity enables a new secure, collaborative development paradigm. Here’s how they work, below 5 user accounts have been created with workflow participation and view permissions established to several jsp templates of the AgilEntity platform, these templates contain the actual code that runs on the associated pages that the user accounts will be able to execute by navigating to them on the UI once logged in. The view permissions on each template enables the logged in user to make changes to the code and then submit those changes for update on the actual run time template file. The Action Oriented Workflow system takes care of the rest, enabling the changes to be routed to an agent (me) for evaluation of the solution provided in the code. Here’s how the contest will work. 1) First, use one of

A NYC moment: Random act of Kindness

NYC is a place of wonders that continues to surprise me with how easily the trendy, elite and technologically advanced could buttress the mundane, downtrodden and unfortunate. Often as I walk the streets scanning faces set in stone, flowing in the endless waves of people that mark the city scape with their darting , halting and ever meandering life lines, I think of the stories that all these people have, the places they have been and the places they are going. Last night, after a great time spent with old and new friends at a Village bar near 14th st. as if often the case for me after imbibing a good amount of alcohol and having danced the night away, I had the munchies. Unfortunately, the night of revelry ensured that I had no cash to buy the pizza so the hunt for an ATM was on the way, in the city that usually means a walk of no more than a block and sure enough a block later I found a Chase ATM. I entered and began my transaction , as I finished I noticed motion in the peripheral

1905: Annus Mirabilus - Photo electric effect

1905 was a great year for physics, in this year a 24 year old patent examiner in Bern Switzerland published 4 fundamental papers in physics in 4 disparate areas of the field. The topics included special relativity, the relationship between energy and matter, brownian motion and the subject of this post, the photo electric effect. The photo electric effect paper by Einstein was probably the most practical paper next to the brownian motion paper in that it provided an answer to a long standing problem in electromagnetic theory at the time that had stood as an embarrassment to particle physics. This embarrasment was a legacy of the work of James Clerk Maxwell and his fundamental equations of electromagnetism, by using a continuous wave analog to describe the energy of propagating fields Maxwell was able to do the astonishing, he explained the riddle that was the relationship between electricity and magnetism in clear mathematical terms and he was able to show how light must be itself an

Ever lives... the continuum

I recently answered the question of my life purpose in an FB comment response, excerpted in its entirety below. The "purpose" of life is what you make it of course, a relative thing, I don't use "purpose" in some grand metaphysical sense disconnected from people that is often solely the stance of those with a religious bent...no, I feel personally fulfilled that I am the guide of my life, what ever I chose to do it is me that is the conductor of the great symphony that attends the short time I have on this rock. (longer if we succeed in eradicating the disease of aging in the next 20 years as we are on schedule to do!) I am contended to know that our consciousness is a blip on the continuum that through our work over centuries passed on from one to the next we are able to extend temporally, opening a wider stage over which to do our life dance. Ultimately, we are in the infinite expanse of existence an infinitesimal blip of many such blips that came infinitely

Email will never go obsolete.

As definitive as a post title as one can get, what follows is an analysis of why I am convinced that email , the electronic message delivery system that has been in use on the internet for over 30 years is here to stay...even in the face of more real time oriented communication technologies. How it works: In order to fully understand why email is here to stay we need to take a look at the history and the internals of the communication medium. The purpose of email as stated in the RFC (request for comment) document that specifies the technology and the protocols. RFC 821 written in 1982 states: The objective of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is to transfer mail reliably and efficiently. SMTP is independent of the particular transmission subsystem and requires only a reliable ordered data stream channel. Several things are important about this statement, first note "simple" is in the name, when designed it was more important that messages were delivered (at some tim

Taking global warming heat to use it..

A recent article in the Times online describes the idea put forward by by Art Rosenfeld, a member of the California Energy Commission that simply painting roof and road way surfaces could reduce carbon emissions this got me to thinking of another possibility that I've entertained in the past. Instead of reflecting the light into space we could try to harness it. Existing research on building more efficient solar cells is moving forward all over the world and if we can create significantly efficient panel designs we could succeed in solving the heat absorption problem and acquire energy (to avoid needing to burn fossil fuels) all in one solution. It is true that trapping the energy for use could definitely kill two birds with one stone but it would be orders of magnitude more expensive than just painting or coloring surfaces. The advantage would be the power generation of the panels which depending on efficiency could pay themselves off in a short time. Let us say solar cell

Failing to understand how science works.

I often get involved in discussion with people that center around various interpretations of scientific studies or papers in the soft sciences (climate science, biology...etc) that veer from objective analysis of the study or paper data being presented to assertions (on the part of those I am conversing with) that the underlying edifice of science is some how engaged in some conspiracy. I've often found it quite perplexing how people can draw that conclusion given the rigorous nature of scientific investigations and the pains to which scientists go to before drawing conclusions on acquired data. Sure , examples of failure to do this exist (Fleishman and Pons any one?) but they are exceedingly rare and if they do get to a peer review stage , are rightly cremated for the mistakes made. Yesterday, I engaged such a discussion with regard to one of the media darling "controversy" subjects , Anthropogenic Global Warming. Earlier this week, yet another massive study on climate d

Numeroom.com compared to Google Wave , how are they different?

In a post from several months back I mentioned the Google "Wave" server technology that had been announced by many of the IT media shops. Google provided many tech. videos on the service on youtube and after watching a few of them I got the gist of the service as being basically an open source collaboration server for a more real time collaboration experience between users on the server. Shortly afterward I was asked by Juliette Powell what the main differences were between the numeroom.com service and google wave were. I explained some of the architectural differences based on what I knew of them at the time in this post which had some great input in the comments for that post but on the business end, numeroom.com collaboration provides a solution for small businesses that makes it more efficient than going with any server based system for several important reasons as indicated in the list below: No need to host the collaboration server and services yourself. This is a hu

Ardipithecus ramidus: what can we really say definitively about it??

The breaking news today was the announcement by researchers that they have found a new species of hominin that predates "Lucy" the previous oldest known fossil find of the hominin line (which includes human beings). The lead researchers are interpreting the morphology of this new find to indicate that it had "advanced" bipedal capabilities that do not lend credence to the idea that the hominin line and the chimp line share a common ancestor. However, this line of reasoning is not necessarily proven by the "ardi" finds made. I export a section of an answer to this that I posted on a friends Facebook wall to explain : "The chimp line could have diverged earlier (as molecular data suggests it did) and Ardi is simply an intermediate species along the line from last recent common ancestor with chimps and modern day hominin (of which the only extant species is us)lineage. Strictly speaking chimps are an "offshoot" (or reciprocally ... the hominin