Firefox Closed-Tab Undo

Ever closed a Firefox tab and wished you hadn't? lifehacker has a great tip for undoing that close. Ctrl-Shift-T (Windows) or Cmd-Shift-T (Mac) will do the trick! How's that for a cool feature?

Ghost in the Machine

Wired Magazine is running the tale of Chris McKinstry and Pushpinder Singh, two AI researchers, both Canadian, from completely different backgrounds, who eventually took their lives in very similar ways. McKinstry had a history of suicidal attempts, and struggled for legitimacy in the academic world. Singh had a privileged upbringing that culminated in a doctorate from MIT and landing a job working alongside his mentor, Marvin Minsky. Both shared similar theories of AI, and both pursued similar research. Both committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. There probably isn't much more to their stories, but both read like a work of fiction, begging for something deeper to be there. And maybe there is.

Project Kittyhawk

IBM Research published a paper last month, on the possibility of leveraging their Blue Gene/P platform, to create a global-scale computer, codenamed Project Kittyhawk. From the abstract:

This paper describes Project Kittyhawk, an undertaking at IBM Research to explore the construction of a next-generation platform capable of hosting many simultaneous web-scale workloads. We hypothesize that for a large class of web-scale workloads the Blue Gene/P platform is an order of magnitude more efficient to purchase and operate than the commodity clusters in use today. Driven by scientific computing demands the Blue Gene designers pursued an aggressive system-on-a-chip methodology that led to a scalable platform composed of air-cooled racks. Each rack contains more than a thousand independent computers with highspeed interconnects inside and between racks.

We postulate that the same demands of efficiency and density apply to web-scale platforms. This project aims to develop the system software to enable Blue Gene/P as a generic platform capable of being used by heterogeneous workloads. We describe our firmware and operating system work to provide Blue Gene/P with generic system software, one of the results of which is the ability to run thousands of heterogeneous Linux instances connected by TCP/IP networks over the high-speed internal interconnects.

This platform, which IBM proposes to run generic software, such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/Python and Ruby on Rails, in a massive cluster, would in effect, be capable of running the entire internet, as an application. Imagine that -- the entire internet on one box. Cool!

Computing on Clouds

Well, apparently Google invented cloud computing. Or that's what you'll get out of this BusinessWeek article, that profiles the 27-year-old Christophe Bisciglia, chief-cloud-guy, at Google. Have a read, as it gives a good sense of where Google is heading, and why they will take over the world if they're successful. Worse case scenario: Terminator or the Matrix. It will make us wish for the days when Microsoft dominated the computing market. Watch out future, here we come!

80 Million Tiny Images

It's a visual dictionary of all the nouns in the English language, arranged by semantic meaning, and linked to 79,302,017 images culled from image search engines. Randomly click on the tiny images to see a popup of the hidden word and thumbnails representing the word. Totally cool ... in a "I not sure why they did this" kinda way. See the related research paper on the work for the techno-babble.

Giant White Glove

What happens when you take Michael Jackson, well, his white glove, and throw in some Java coding? You get a giant white glove. Don't ask why. But if you do, see the White Glove Tracking open source project.

Shiver me timbers!

Don't you just love it when a plan comes together? Or when it falls apart really bad, and publicly for a scorned organization? In their battle against media pirates, movie studios and record companies have placed great store in MediaDefender -- a company that has been employing some nasty tactics to fight bittorrent traffic on the internet. MediaDefender however, just got a nasty surprise. It was outted on the internet by the very same protocol it sold itself as trouncing. It appears that a whole lot of internal MediaDefender emails have been made available via bittorrent. The leaked emails apparently came from an employee that forwarded most of his emails to his gmail account, which got hacked by a group called MediaDefender-Defender. The emails reveal some disturbing practices by MediaDefender -- including entrapment activities that posted torrent files to lure surfers. Bittorrent users are now having a good laugh.

Gay Computer

There's something deeply disturbing about this picture. There's always something disturbing with homophobes in general, especially those religiously motivated. This protester however, tops the list -- and I'm assuming here that this one ain't a fake, as it seems to be in the middle of an orgy of homophobic display. This protester is specifically targeting Alan Turing, a British mathematician and cryptographer, largely regarded as the father of modern computing and the code breaker that cracked the German Enigma machine in the second world war. Turing was gay in a time when homosexuals were not tolerated, and the law and medical science tried to cure the homosexual affliction. Turing was stripped of his security clearance, which in effect led to the termination of his work for the government cryptographic department. Alan Turing committed suicide at the age of 41, in 1954.

Vinyl Code

Back in the day, when fighting music piracy wasn't the primary goal of record companies -- record companies actually liked their customers. Liked them so much, that in some vinyls released in the 1970s and 80s, they included bonus material. The bonus material that came shipped on the rare vinyls were computer code embedded in audio, to run on the Sinclair Spectrum home computer (my first computer was the Timex Sinclair). Some of the code that was secreted on vinyls, included simple computer games. As Kempa.com points out, some of the games and emulators to allow you to play them on your computer, are available. If you missed the gems the first time around, you can still give them a spin.

Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has penned an interesting paper that goes against our natural tendency to preserve our past. In Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing [PDF], Mayer-Schönberger argues that in the digital age, a comprehensive trail of our actions, words and beliefs is being preserved for posterity, and aided with distributive and recovery capabilities of the internet, could inadvertently pose a danger to society. In effect, our technology-aided ability to recall everything is creating panopticon world that threatens to stifle the public discourse that fuels the engines of our democracies. Technology evolved fulfilling our retention desires, with default to retain, rather than delete. Mayer-Schönberger wishes to reset the default; to enable our technology to forget.

Already, there has been growing concerns with the retention and use of private, historical information. Just about all of our public, and increasingly private transactions are being captured, stored and combined with other data to create information that in return is used to paint a target on us. There is no anonymity in surfing the internet, purchasing with credit cards or using public spaces. In a world afraid of terrorists lurking around every corner, surveillance capabilities of public and private institutions will continue to increase. Advertising dollars continue to shift from old media to the new as a result of the latter promise to target individuals more accurately based on their demographic profile and personal desires. Google apparently has all user queries saved since the beginning of Google Inc. We are all potential terrorists and consumers in this increasingly monitored world that relies on our past behaviours.

In response to privacy concerns, there has been efforts to protect personal information via legislation and constitutional reinterpretation (Canada and US, anyway) … both of which Mayer-Schönberger addresses and discounts for being ineffective. Mayer-Schönberger also tackles the do-nothing approach, and one suggested by Lawrence Lessig, which would employ rules within technology to influence and constrain our behaviour. The do-nothing approach is dismissed as being irresponsible, but Lessig's suggestion is fine-tuned to tackle the resetting of the default state of remembering. Mayer-Schönberger suggests that our technology should have a built in default to forget, and this requirement should be mandated by legislation. Webcams and surveillance cameras would have short defaults to forget what they've stored. Internet Cookies would expire in days or weeks, not decades. Search engines would have to delete what you've searched for over time, including losing caches to sites no longer in existence. Digital photographs would need to be deleted based on your personal preferences. It all sounds good, but stepping back to look at what problem Mayer-Schönberger is trying to solve, leaves me unconvinced.

Mayer-Schönberger wanting to reset the default to enable forgetting is in response to the potential misuse of information detailing past behaviour. With our every action being recorded, we may temper future dialogue for fear of being taken out of context and misrepresented. Behind the potential misuse of private information however is narrow perspective of the past. The past has already happened, and doesn't necessarily dictate future behaviour. It does, however, hold invaluable information and insights that can be leveraged for future value -- privately and publicly -- that we have yet to fully grasp. True, private information should only be used via expressed consent, but it should be remembered for what it is: the past, and not necessarily a harbinger of the future. Mayer-Schönberger uses the example of Amazon's suggestion feature, where Amazon suggests what you may want to read based on past purchase decisions. So, if you purchased a children's book in the past as a gift, suddenly, Amazon thinks you also like to read kids literature. This is exactly why the past should be forgotten, but it also why, while the past may be interesting from a historical perspective, it isn't necessarily predictive of the future, nor should it be given such relevancy.

Of course, therein lies the catch. We give the past much relevancy in the present. We dissect every sentence ever said by public figures in the hopes of catching them in inconsistencies. We enjoy finding the duplicity of others. We don't allow for change, yet expect others to give us a fair shake, independent of our past blunders. It's not the past we need to be afraid of, it's us -- and there is no technology or legislation that is about to solve that little problem. Mayer-Schönberger's suggestion however -- not a bad attempt at of a band-aid for human nature.

IT and Innovation

The February 1^st issue of CIO Magazine carries an article on innovation and benefits IT can bring to the process as an enabler. CIO suggests that as product lifecycles continue to shrink, the pressure to bring the innovation cycle down to shorter timeframes will be even greater. Internal R&D departments can no longer afford to do it all on their own –- and innovation as a result, is becoming a distributed process, requiring the collaboration of customers, suppliers, independents and even competitors.

How can IT help? CIO provides these elements that specifically requires IT as an enabler:

Collaboration. Communications is critical among both internal employees and external contractors. Agree on a medium, whether its e-mail, IM or fancy collaboration software, and get everyone using it.

Data access.Easy access to research information is the basis for doing collaborative innovation work with outsiders. Make project data available in a format that is standard, simple and easily viewable –- think PDF and HTML.

Process standardization and automation.Standard templates and automated workflows that don't depend on specialization systems are important to getting multiple outside contributors involved in the process. Such tools also allow you to chunk up workflows so that one group can pick up where another left off. The caveat: Dont let standardization stomp on creativity –- its a delicate balance.

Cross-functional integration. Researchers and engineers dont own innovation anymore. Find ways to connect other functions to the innovation process –- especially those that deal with customers, like sales, marketing and customer service and give them a voice.

CIO also profiled P&Gs use of IT as an enabler to their R&D process, and cites the requirements that IT needed to meet in order to get into the game: flexibility, scalability, cross-functional integration and collaboration.

What a concept! Collaboration, flexibility, information access, and, the delicate balance of process standardization and integration –- think of your IT organization, and ask how well they do any of those. More likely than not, your IT organization is stuck in time about decade ago, and see those suggestions as dangerous –- if not downright crazy.

Beyond Virtual Reality

The April 2^nd issue of BusinessWeek carries a cover story on the coming virtualization of the world that's an eyeopener on future of human-computer interface. Lets face it, the keyboard is not natural -- neither is the mouse, the remote control or 2D simulations of 3D worlds. What is natural for humans have long been a challenge for computers to accept as input, interpret and execute. A glimpse of the future however is here, and its showing up in the unlikely place of business.

Sure the entertainment industry has been at the forefront of exploiting new technologies such as motion capture, rendering and virtualization of the real world -- but how about sensor technology that detects movements and expressions, allowing the natural interaction with presentations? Or technology that tracks the motion, allowing advertisers to interact with their audience? Others are also bringing 3D modeling to life, allowing prototypes to be interacted with -- designed, tested and virtually constructed and used before ever becoming real.

Systems that track motion and emotions are also being developed, with a varied landscape of applications waiting in the wings. Imagine if Google ads could from eye movements and facial expressions being captured by webcams, whether ads being served up are registering –- or even effective. Imagine if security systems could tell from movements and facial expressions, whether an individual is up to no-good. Or think of the possibilities, if the health industry could interpret a gait and associate it with medical conditions. The education industry could reach a higher dimension if movements and expressions could be captured and rendered virtually to bring geographically displaced individuals together.

BusinessWeek closed off the article with some words from clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle of MIT: Motion tracking is about the mirroring of body motion, and of course the subtle things like hand gestures, or the way someone characteristically cocks his head before speaking. With the widespread use of these systems in business and entertainment, these motions will give us a much greater sense of connection with our online selves. The virtual will seem much closer to the real. The possibilities are nothing short of the Matrix.

ReactOS

Windoze ... freeware! Check out this free open source effort that aims to build, from the ground up, an implementation of a compatible Windows NT operating system. That means when completed, the ReactOS will be able to install and run native Windows drivers and applications. Regardless of whether this actually ever makes it out to general release, you have to give these folks kudos for having fortitude, with just a little bit of crazy.