Data.driven()

A while a go (September 2007), I asked some sales guy from Microsoft what the penetration rate of Siverlight was compared to Flash. I asked him in front of a large audience (a) because I was really interested, and (b) because I felt like being a bit of a smart-ass as I guessed it would be really really low. The sales guy seemed quite unimpressed by my question and refused to give me a straight answer, but he had promised to give away a Microsoft prize for each question (I got a crappy ugly Silverlight hoodie, which I promptly returned to one of their marketing chicks).

Anyway, I just read an article that stated MS has released Silverlight 2 beta and that people are installing Silverlight,

And over the last several months Microsoft has seen an increase in the number of Silverlight downloads, Guthrie said, and users have been downloading Silverlight to the tune of 1.5 million downloads a day… In comparison, however, in a recent interview with Adobe Systems’ chief technology officer, Kevin Lynch, Lynch said Adobe’s Flash is downloaded up to 12 million times a day

I’m still unsure as to what percentage of browsers now run Silverlight, but does not yet seem to be making as much of an impact as good ol’ Flash.

According to the IE Blog:

Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).

That’s great news. However, the fact that they are keeping the meta switch is a bit disappointing. They should really dump that altogether.

The best thing I read today:

• HTML5 published by w3c!

The most stupidest thing I’ve read in years (and made it known!):

• Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8

I share Anne van Kesteren’s view on the matter, and everyone else who is against this. This is a really really stupid idea on Microsoft’s part.

I’ve been doing my fair share of traveling lately. I went to the W3C TPAC in Boston, which was great, and I just got back from vacation in Tropical North Queensland (Port Douglas) a few days ago. I went whitewater rafting, and snorkeling in the (sadly dying)  Great Barrier Reef, got to swim with a turtle, and some sharks.

While I was in Boston for the TPAC, I bought myself an IPod touch and a Nokia N95. The first thing I did when I got my iPod was to jail break it. I have to say, the iPod touch is simply awesome… however, I wont go into a rant because I don’t want to expose myself too much as an Apple fanboy:) The first thing that struck me as I was navigating the list of apps to install on the jail broken iPhone was the availability of the Apache Web Server and PHP. When I saw that, I instantly thought “OMG! this changes everything: I am a server!”. Sure enough, I installed them and they worked. I got my friends from Australia to log onto my IPod - very cool! It was only a few weeks later that I heard that Nokia was also going to release a phone with Apache, PHP, and MySQL (APM) which I’m keen to try out on my N95. I think this is a significant development while we wait for the standardization and eventual implementation of HTML5 (which will provide similar functionality).

Putting aside all security and privacy concerns for a minute, I think the idea of everyone now being a web server is a very exciting and disruptive innovation. Imagine a widgets ecosystem that intertwines phones and desktops and integrate ideas from social networking and the unique aspects of the mobile in a single container (widgets).

I don’t know what Nokia is going to do with their APM phones (and I am sure that Apple Iphone/IPod and Google Android will both feature web servers really soon), but here is a simple future scenario: I buy a new phone with the APM capability. When I connect the phone to the internet, people can access the phone via its IP address (which kinda sucks, but fixable… more on this later). Pre-installed with the phone is a widget engine, which allows the user to either manually install widgets or use pre-installed widgets. The widget engine provides an admin interface, accessible only via, say, “http://widgetengine/” or something, which allows me to add/customize/remove widgets. Widgets in this contexts are little PHP apps, packaged to conform with the widgets 1.0 spec. Lets says the default widget that ships with the phone is a Nokia-build one that shows some info about the phone, and generates a photo gallery of the pictures stored on the device.  Although impressive, is not really of much use to me because everyone I care about is on Facebook ( or some OpenSocial network).

Given that the phone has a widget engine that runs on top of the server, a developer could create a Facebook widget that gathers all the phone numbers and details from my facebook friends list and packages them into a widgets. When the widget is installed, all those phone numbers and details get stored into the MySQL database. I can then ask the widget to either SMS or simply message, via Facebook, all the preferred contacts to let them know that my phone server is up. Better still, the widget, via PHP, can monitor the phone to see when it is assigned an IP address, and automatically connect to Facebook to let my contacts know that I am online. From there, my contacts can check out, for example, photos that I have just taken on my phone or other things the widget may allow viewers to do.

The things that I would want to share as a user (my profile: things that define me publicly as an individual and associate me as part of a group) and some simple app ideas:

• My location (exact (gps) or derived (eg. brisbane) or abstract (eg. the office))
  • Apps: Where am I now? Where I’ve been (recently, travelling, etc)? What exercise path did I take (and times, calories burnt)?
• My pictures (sortable, in sets, searchable)
  • Apps: my picture gallery; my picture gallery and with pictures taken from similar location (eg. mix locally stored pictures with flickr)
• My music (what I’ve got on my device, what I am listening to right now)
  • App: my music and music people around me are listening to?
• My details (maybe my social wants and needs. link to my blog online)
  • App: a dating widget? Syndication of my blog combined with my locally stored pictures?

The effect of these apps is very interesting because it means that I can bypass services such as flickr, or I can integrate both flickr and my phone. I can also merge the means of communication with my contacts, via SMS or the web.

These applications require additional infrastructure to connect me to other users:

• Global peer-to-peer infrastructure: when my phone connects to the internet, I want my contacts to know about it!
• Local peer-to-peer infrastructure: when my phone connects to the internet in this place, let those near me know: eg, for playing location-based games, or other multiplayer games; or, for example, for letting people know at this place that I’ve arrived.

This also requires a place where phone widgets are distributed by developers and scrutinized by the community for security and quality.

The future looks pretty nice if AMP enabled phones and services take off…. and if the security and privacy issues are handled with care.

This New York Times article seems to suggest that Google has the potential to threaten Microsoft’s software reign by undermining it in the “cloud computing” space (web apps). Although the numbers don’t add up (yet), Google has the potential to steal a significant part of Microsoft’s market share in the Office space in the future by creating great web-based software. This will eventually weaken Microsoft’s because of its inability to adapt/compete due to its archaic software development/release cycle. If Microsoft implements HTML5 in all its awesomeness, will it leave itself more vulnerable to companies developing software for the web? Or, as the dominant browser vendor, will Microsoft be able to adapt many of it’s products to run on HTML5 before the rest of the industry can respond… I guess it depends, to some degree, on how much market share other browser vendors can steal from Internet Explorer. Hixie is right, this may just be “a good position for the industry to be in.”

The hard drive in my laptop decided it had had enough today and decided to crash (with only two days before I depart to Boston for a W3C meeting!). Luckly I was able to recover all my PhD stuff and work I had been doing today on Widgets. I’m currently in the process of reformatting my drive with Windows XP. I was able to recover almost everything using BartPE, which creates a cd-bootable stripped down version of Windows. BartPE is very useful as it allows you to map network drives. To get my data, I just copied all the stuff that I could onto one of our development servers. It took me about 2 hours, as BartPE kept crashing trying to copy files.

Tomorrow I’ll have to waste time reinstalling all my apps and testing the system to see if it is stable enough to take to the US… otherwise, it’s “off to the shop” to for a new hard-drive :( If all else fails, my girlfriend has offered to lend me her new MacBook which I will happily take over my PC any day :)

Update: went to get a new 160GB hard drive, but once I started reinstalling Windows the installer kept crashing with IRQL_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL (new  BSoD error, which I had not seen before). Did a google search and all evidence pointed to either that the RAM or CPU was overheating. One of the IT guys here at QUT ran a memory tester and we discovered that it was infact one of the RAM chips that was fried. Sucks, as I only bought the new RAM  about  one week ago . Anyway, all seems semi-stable now… currently reinstalling Windows XP. I made a 40Gig partition to install Windows Vista  so I can agian play with SideBar Gadgets. I previously unistalled Vista because I found it so shockingly bad to use and unstable.

Yesterday I started writing a paper for WWW2008 about widgets (and given the highly competitive nature of the WWW conferences, I doubt it will be accepted). Anyway, the conference mandates that citations conform to ACM’s referencing style (eg. smith [1] says, “bla bla”), which is not currently supported by Microsoft Word. My immediate thought was, “Right! Word’s style files are just (OO)XML so it should just be a simple matter of changing some angled brackets to create the ACM style!”. My plan was to base the ACM style on the already supported ISO 690 style, which is similar except it uses parenthesis “(1)” instead of brackets “[1]“. So I went into MS Word’s program file directory, and located the bibliographical styles. To my shock, the reference style file was an impenetrable XSLT file (7093 lines long and completely uncommented!). I spent about 20 minutes trying to work out what the hell the file was doing… but eventually I gave up :(. I compared ISO 690 XSLT style file to the ACM Bibtex sytle file. The bibtex style file is only around 1700 lines long, and nicely commented I might add.

Yay! the W3C has canned the work on the Declarative Format for Applications and User Interfaces (DFAUI), putting an end to something that had no way of ever finishing. Of course, you probably have never heard of the DFAUI because the WAF WG never published any documents about it. The idea was to standardized an XML language similar to XAML or Openlaszlo…. but instead, what the WAF-WG got was an input from Nexaweb called XAL. Anyway, the people that were supposed to be editing the document never got very far, and as far as I am concerned, the work they produced was of fairly low quality (that’s not to say my work doesn’t suck!).

These are my random thought on how I think the DFAUI should have been standardized…and why it failed….

(more…)

If you are thinking of installing Vista, don’t! It is easily the biggest waste of time and money ever. Their campaign should really focus on the “Wow! now that’s total crap” factor. Easily the most counter productivepiece of software I have ever used. After using it for 6 months I swear I was about to throw my laptop against the wall. I don’t usually experience frustration with software, but Windows Vista just goes too far. It’s slow, even with all the glitz turned off, and nothing works properly: could not print as the spooler service would constantly crash on start-up, explorer.exe constantly crashed, slow, slow, system freezes, more slowness, would not come back from sleep mode, argh I get angry just thinking about it!!!

I instead reverted back to WindowsXP (which we have now dubbed “the workhorse”). Out of frustration I also installed Ubuntu, hoping to free myself from Microsoft… alas, Linux still has a few years to go. The world is rosey again