Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Wednesday 30 July 2008, 5:53 PM
Yuil cooler than Cuil
This is too funny for words. It's a cruel Cuil parody - but unlike most parodies, it doesn't twist or satirise its original. Instead, it does what feels like a very similar job - but it was written in a few hours by one man called Sam Pullara in Python using Yahoo's BOSS open search services platform.
To make matters worse, in a side-by-side comparison it felt rather faster and produced some rather more apposite pages. It certainly got the pictures better.
Let's hope he doesn't pull the same stunt with ZDNet.
(TOTH to DJ)
[UPDATE - looks like Yuil has been turned off. Shame. Let's hope this isn't another pungent comment on the chances of Cuil's survival]
[UPDATE x 2 - It's back in mufti as 4hoursearch. Break a leg.]
Wednesday 30 July 2008, 9:25 AM
Microsoft's Midori - a green spirit?
If you are or know a student in the UK, you'll know about Midori. It's a painfully sweet clear green concoction with the great taste of melons, somewhere on the other side of the galaxy from a decent Islay malt.
Midori is also the code name for a non-Windows operating system under development at Microsoft. As yet, few details exist outside the company - but there's a very interesting overview of what's known over at SD Times, which claims to have seen some internal design documents relating to the OS.
There's a lot to get past the tonsils, although many of the ideas will be familiar to anyone who's thought about the current challenges in system design: concurrency, parallelism, service oriented architecture, heterogeneous platform support, managed code, replication, and resource management. In all of these areas, Windows is very weak -- and all of these areas are becoming increasingly important.
There's not space in this blog to cover the implications of all of the above, let alone explore the real problems of migrating an industry even assuming Midori comes out more Laphroaig than lager top.
A couple of details may give the flavour, though. One of the underlying technologies being discussed is the Bartok compiler and runtime system. Currently a product of the Search group, Bartok examines the code it generates for known classes of error - which seems a most intriguing use of ideas that have grown out of search and anti-malware research. This may be the start of practical self-analytic systems that have their own sense of correctness and the ability to check against that at all stages during their lifetime, and that has implications way beyond catching potential stack overflows.
The other tiny detail that stood out was resource management. This is a low-level part of Midori that understands details of the capabilities of the platforms it's running over, and makes intelligent decisions about scheduling and resource allocation based on such ideas as processor, memory and power available. At one level, this brings to mind the concept of launching a particular application or service from a mobile device, with the operating system finding the right place on the network to run the meatier parts while leaving the mobile coping with those bits its good at.
But at a deeper level - and I've no idea whether this is part of the game plan - it leads to the idea that active management of energy consumption can be wired into the system to very fine detail, with much more finesse than the current "Is anything happening? Right, let's go to sleep" processor-level control. Most IT burns most of its power doing nothing much; anything that truly addresses this has world-changing implications.
But all this is in the future. I hope Microsoft indulges in its better nature and opens up the design of Midori for community discussion and work. Trying to distill an entirely new computational infrastructure for the world is hard enough: trying to do it in the dark is just plain crazy. It's bound to come out the wrong colour.
Monday 28 July 2008, 4:11 PM
Things I didn't know about Gmail, volume one...
One of our high-powered product development people here called me over to his desk this morning. "I think there's a security problem with GMail," he said. "I keep getting emails for someone else with my name. They're something to do with Woolworths in Asia..."
Indeed, he showed me a few of the emails he'd been getting on his Gmail account, concerned with packaging issues and logistic strategies. His Gmail account was, say, Bernie.Badger@gmail.com; the emails were addressed to Berniebadger@gmail.com. Certainly looked like a problem.
A bit of digging, and it turned out that this is deliberate Gmail policy. It ignores dots in email names - once you've registered rupert.goodwins@gmail, then it doesn't matter how many (if any) dots there are in incoming email - r.u.p.er.t.g.o.o.d.w.i.n.s and rupertgoodwins will all resolve to the same inbox. The other Bernie Badger would have to be Bernie.Badger2 or some such variant: his colleagues, suppliers and so on had probably mistyped or guessed wrongly.
That's not a problem if you've got an unusual name, and if you've got a very common one you'll be used to having to use some wild variant. It's those in the middle who'll have problems.
I had something similar happen at the weekend myself. Apple has loaned me an iPhone 3G for a couple of weeks (so far, the email client has stopped displaying the body of messages and the GPS has been remarkably slow to get going. Addicted to the App Store, though). As is usual on short-term evaluation loans, it's come with a SIM. While the phone was clearly new, the SIM has been drawn from a pool - and someone has the number from a previous existence. I've had a few phone calls already for Steve and/or Peter.
But t's a good thing I wasn't out with the missus showing it off when the following text came in:
"Looks like it's nearly showtime! Waters have broken! x"
I replied wishing them luck while suggesting that they might try to check the number and try again...
Wednesday 23 July 2008, 7:33 AM
Microsoft's pre-modern message puts a new face on Vista
Over at ZDNet.com, Ed Bott reports a first sighting of Microsoft's eagerly awaited $300 million ad campaign. Already the cause of much speculation, the consensus is that this will be an enormous attack on what the company considers our mistaken perceptions. The overall message will be that Microsoft is a smart, coherent company with smart, coherent things to sell you a message that Redmond sees already hitting home when sent by Apple and Google.
Microsoft is quite right to be envious of those clothes, and spot on when it sees its own image falling some way short. And a smart, coherent advertising campaign is an excellent way to get people to reconsider mistaken or outdated ideas: the history of marketing is full of examples where a basically sound but rather jaded entity is repositioned at the forefront of cool and new. Volkswagen, Guinness, the Labour Party: browse Soho's adland bookshops and you'll find cubic metres of glossy, expensive paper explaining how to pull that trick off.
You need engaging, intriguing adverts, which anyone with $300 million to spend can make happen. They set the tone, that you're dealing with an intelligent, interesting company that's worth listening to. They then have to deliver on that promise by linking the products with those ideas and this is where the challenge really begins.
Microsoft's first blast is not shy of tackling that task head-on. It's there to reposition Vista. The underlying message is forthright and sane: yes, we know we said it was great when we started and yes, we know you've had problems with that. But it's grown up and so have we so now's the time to lose those old ideas and see what it's really like.
That's clever in many different ways; the implication is that both the product and the company have addressed their shortcomings Vista, by getting its performance and incompatibilities fixed; Microsoft, by being cool and honest enough to admit its previous over-selling and so our ideas about them deserve to change too.
It's a shame, then, that the very first message in this opening shot is just plain wrong. The image is perfectly judged; a classic illustration of a Napoleonic-era ship in full sail across a lively sea with wind and sun behind it. But it all goes wonky in the text:"At one point, everyone thought the world was flat. Get the facts about Windows Vista."
Ah, if only. The trouble is, the flat earth belief myth is mostly that myth. Plenty of Iron Age primitive cultures bought into that idea, but from Aristotle onwards simple observation won the day. Ships disappear beneath the horizon. Constellations change their height above the horizon as you travel north or south. People see further from mountains.
The idea of the medieval flat-earther is entirely a 19th century concoction, a combination of anti-clerical propaganda and popular fiction. Microsoft's advert set sail for the new world, bravely ignoring everyone else's ignorance perpetuates that myth. It's setting the scene for the entire campaign one designed to make Microsoft seem up-to-the-minute, trustworthy and effective by peddling an outdated chunk of propagandistic fiction.
That wouldn't matter if people still believed it, but it's a fiction past its tell-by date, one that's been substantially debunked by any number of popular science writers. Gershwin got away with it in 1937 when he wrote "They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, when he said the world was round". Today's smart cookie will be more familiar with Carl Sagan's remix: "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Oops.
Tuesday 22 July 2008, 8:52 AM
iPhone 3G reception problems: your information, please
Lots of chatter on the net about iPhone 3G problems - dodgy apps, apparent firmware problems with responsiveness and GPS, and of course that rather lacklustre battery life. My experience is limited - Apple promises to make good on that, thanks Ved - but not inconsistent with such reports.
The one that's most interesting, because it can be measured, is lack of welly with 3G reception. It's famously difficult to characterise this because of issues like local blackspots, shielding from buildings, and network congestion - but according to this Apple support thread there is the chance of getting something approximating to actual data.
If you enter *3001#12345#*, you'll go into Field Test Mode, where one of the indicators is the signal strength in dBm, or decibel milliwatts. Anything below around -100 dBm is not good -- radio engineers, preferring consistency to clarity, work in negative numbers where 'higher' is in fact lower, so -80 dBm is a better signal strength than -105 dBm. (For reference, -90 dBm is one picowatt, giving you some idea how little power we're dealing with here).
if you're getting -100 dBm in an area where you'd normally expect decent O2 3G coverage, you have interesting information. It's even more interesting if you're on another UK network, but those results may take longer to appear.
Do let me know what you find. It's unlikely that the calibration on the iPhone is good enough for truly consistent results across units, but they should be close enough to get an idea.
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