everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: web & tech

  • On the Cusp

    On the Cusp

    One silver lining in getting laid off is that you have time to meet people and learn about things that you may have not had the time or attention to pick up on while in the trenches of a full time job. During the first week of my new no-fixed-schedule life I learned about:

    A company called Helios that uses AI to analyze the voice of the CEO on investor calls to measure the confidence of leadership. The company is offering a product described in their white paper as,

    the first widely available data product that systematically assesses the tone of the voice of an executive during earnings conference calls to produce novel and meaningful sources of quantitative information

    The Tone of Voice Provides a Novel Source of Alpha

    Freaky.

    The search engine as we once knew it has become a thing of the past. Google, originally hailed for its simplicity and clean results has lost its shine. The ten blue links are crowded out by paid placement and other forms of sponsorship. The gradual infection of the open web with cheap clickbait has now ruined even the coveted “organic links” so that if you look for something like “Best Hotels in Osaka” even the non-ad results are SEO optimized sites filled with affiliate links and ads. It’s rotten all the down. For more on this, read Doctorow’s excellent enshitification

    There’s something called a “small modular reactor” (SMR) which is basically a mini nuclear reactor. There are multiple use cases for such a small form factor including replacing old coal power plants but it is also timely for the power-hungry data-centers which have been accused of running dirty.

    WebAssembly (WASM) has evolved to the point where it will not only replace the older browser-based code with something faster. It will also allowing for sandboxed applications to run, on-demand, within your browser heralding the age of truly write-once, run-anywhere applications. If my understanding is correct, this is one of the biggest enhancements to web development since AJAX programming back in 2005.

    So much to learn, so much to do!

  • Oblong and the g-speak UI

    Remember the computer UI in Minority Report? Yeah, they can do that now.

  • Cloud Computing through the Ages

    The Network is the Computer – Sun Microsystems – 1990s

    The Network is the Computer

    Nothing but Web – Google – 2011

    Two perspectives on an old idea, twenty years apart. For a humorous perspective on Silicon Valley spin, check out Larry Ellison’s schtick at the Churchill Club, “The Cloud is Water Vapor.”

  • Three Days of Terror at Pinboard

    Pinboard has a three-day trial period, and I was now having nightmare visions of spending the next ten days sitting in front of the abysmally slow PayPal site, clicking the ‘refund’ button and sniffling into a hankie.

    – Anatomy of a Crushing

    In the middle of the great del.icio.us exodus of 2010, the small bookmarking site Pinboard faced a crushing influx of new users. Co-founder Maciej Ceglowski writes in detail about how he and Peter Gadjokov kept the site running and lessons learned along the way.

    "Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions at Yahoo had decided to give us a little help."

    Yes. I’m a pinboarder too.

  • Leapfrog making a toy Blackberry

    Text & Learn

    I am not sure what to make of this. I’m all for making toys realistic and all but working at Nokia, we’re all about trying to make mobile mobile devices more playful and fun. So it’s weird to see a Leapfrog making a toy phone more, um, business-like.

  • 5 Uses for Low Cost GPS Tracking

    With low cost GPS tracking devices, it is now make it economically feasible to electronically “tag” people and things that you love. A couple of examples:

    1. Lobster Pots
    2. Celebrities such as Simon Cowell
    3. The baby Jesus statue in the nativity
    4. Your pet dog
    5. Lingerie???

    But no one has come up with the most obvious application suggested to me by Yahoo Researcher Marc Davis. It’s got to be out there. Has anyone added the ability to turn on your phone’s GPS from a desktop browser so you can find your phone when you’ve lost it?

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  • Realtime Map Tracking

    Maybe it’s the air traffic controller in me but there’s something oddly compelling about watching little dots move across the screen when you know they represent objects in the physical world.

    TechCrunch posts about Bill from BitGravity is streaming his driving trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles over a live video stream showing the traffic out his front dashboard and a Google Maps tile showing his position as he drives down Interstate 5. He’s just south of Tracy as I write this so tune in now if you want to see it live.

    And tomorrow morning, before I head over to pick up my wife and kids as they return from Japan, I will fire up Google Earth and use Aeroseek to follow Northwest Flight 28 as it soars over the Pacific and make sure they’re coming in on time.

  • For the Prankster’s Toolkit

    How would you like to edit any web page as if it were a wiki?

    Here’s a little Javascript trick that has helped me mock up prototypes as well as spice up the odd presentation with improbable news headlines for dramatic effect.

    Copy and paste the following line into the address bar of your browser,

    javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

    hit <enter> and edit away. Yet another reason not to believe everything you read online.

    <thanks to Lady Banana for the tip>

  • Robots!



    At the Robogames in San Francisco I got to see Zou Ren Tii’s Body Double robot. Can you tell which one is the robot?

    More photos from the day here.