Mary Panttaja

My good friends Sandeep and Sunita Giri (and young ones Ashwin and Priya) just returned from a trip to their families in Nepal. It seems it was a wonderful trip, and we are sorry to have missed it.

Sandeep reports that his good friend Mahabir Pun (they both attended university in Nebraska) has received a major award for this work bringing education, computers, and internet connectivity to remote villages outside of Beni and Pokhara. Mahabir has managed to inspire a whole region and has installed a complete wireless network where every part and computer has to be carried into the mountains. (Nangi Village in Myagdi, Nepal is a day’s walk from Beni Bazaar.) Here is a link to some great trekking photos of Sandeep’s travels to Nangi Village.

If you want information on how you can contribute to Mahabir’s work, check out his website on Nepal Wireless.

Also, Sandeep’s parents are now running a bed and breakfast just north of Kathmandu. I have stayed there and can attest to how wonderful they are and what a thrill it is to stay in a Nepalese home that also has all the comforts we are shamelessly used to. If you want to go and have any questions, feel free to contact me. I love to encourage people to head to Nepal, especially since things are much calmer there these days.

So, today’s post on Catching the Updraft has been a nightmare. It has so few words—but 9 images. So many things didn’t work right:

1. First, 4 of the images were missing—and I had to recapture them from a document (their source seems to be missing, but they aren’t really right and need to be redone anyway. But not today.) This took most of yesterday’s writing time.
2. Last night our sites were down. Our hosting provider is not very dependable and may have to be replaced. When I have time to write and post I am dependent on the site being up at that moment—a serious flaw in the blogging process exacerbated by the fact that I use images. 90% of my time on this post has been uploading the images.
3. Wordpress, my blogging platform, doesn’t really allow you to put open space in the post. I need it to format around the images. Therefore the ugly periods that I had to use to create some space.
4. The upload failed 70% of the time this morning, so it took an hour to get them up.
5. My “cloud” images were made for a white background and therefore look terrible on my gray background, but fixing them today can’t fit into the schedule.

So my apologies. I obviously need to upgrade some technology. I was commiserating with a colleague yesterday about the horrible state of blog and wiki editing. A truly grim situation.

All good. Done now. Fewer images coming up.

A very interesting post this morning by Peter Brantly of O’Reilly Radar on the multiplicity of projects aimed at gathering more sensed information on the state of the planet. This is focused on new science to enable us to learn what is really going on and make better choices.

Everywhere I look in the natural sciences, there is a sudden, significant maturing of large-scale distributed science projects that involve active real-time sensing of one of more aspects of the physical planet and its environs. These projects include Neon, the first widely distributed ecologically-based sensing project; the Keck Hydrowatch project based in the American West, and a burgeoning number of geological and space sensing systems. Together, these efforts are often coalesced together under the sobriquet Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), in the ultimate hope that their data and insights may inform each other.

This made me think about our daily practice of developing more awareness for ourselves; to evolve our ability to actually know what is true and make better choices. It’s critical for ourselves and our planet that we not live inside of some story we tell ourselves, but actually see truly what’s happening. You can’t manage something that you do not see and understand. And you can’t move (yourself or your business) unless you have your feet on the ground with a true sense of where you are. That’s where traction comes from—feet (or wheels) on the real ground.

Okay, it seems cheesy to talk more about the iPhone, but it is taking up a lot of mips at my house, including Jim’s post on his iPhone. So here goes.

What amazes me about the phone:

1. It’s damn beautiful. Really. The unit is beautiful, the images are beautiful, the interface is beautiful. The box it came in is beautiful, as is the bag the box came in. Wow. Every bit of it is a pleasure to look at and hold.
2. The color and resolution enable the images to just glow; and I love the way the images flip when you twist the unit 90 degrees.
3. It’s fabulous to actually just pull up a web pages and browse them. Extra fun that our website, which is so sparely designed, looks elegant on the iPhone. And you can actually read our blogs easily.
4. But what I really love, which is only mentioned in all the writeups, is access to the maps of the entire world with corresponding satellite images. I can see houses in villages in Spain—on my phone. So clearly. The waves coming in from Alaska off the coast of California are as clear as the eddies and drops in the Urumbamba River that surrounds the walls of Machu Picchu—also visible on the phone. Of course, this is just what Google maps does, but to have it always with me is like having a atlas to dream over whenever I want. Very cool.

I’m sure that there will be things wrong with the phone in the long run, but the initial experience really is quite joyous. Now we’ll have to deal with data synchronization (which applications can be made to work, etc) and more nitty-gritty details of contacts and calendars (though musics, photos, email, bookmarks all work easily).

So, is it worth it? Not clear. But if you really enjoy seeing beautiful technology that can change how we think about things—maybe so.

(No, this is not about the current season giving way to summer.)

On the train Monday, the people next to us were having a business meeting/consultation of some sort. I couldn’t help but notice a beautiful application that was being shared. (One of the party had developed it.) It was a particularly appealing form of graphic analysis that I have been intrigued with understanding. The visualization is a network graph with dynamic movement. I have come across them in several contexts.

Erik Loyer has used them creatively in some of his digital artwork at his site, The Lair of the Marrow Monkey. Some of his work has been commissioned by MIT Press. A presentation on the book Writing Machines by Anne Burdick is here: Hollowbound Book. (Try moving your mouse over images to elicit interesting behaviors.)

There is a thesaurus available in a network representation: the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus. The intriguing thing about these network diagrams is that they have been animated—they react and self adjust, so they feel a little alive.

I have been searching for software for them and have been stifled by not knowing what to call them. Finally I found a developer, Mark Shepard of Adobe, who has created a Flex component. He calls them spring graphs. Of course, they have the advantage of being built in Flash/Flex which makes them even more intriguing.

They have something to do with the analytic work that has been tickling my brain. Something to do with structuring information, the origins of which have come from my writing requirements that I previously discussed. Jim and I have started exploring how we apply other constructs and constraint based concepts to the basic network structures. Not sure why, but we find it interesting.

The images from the train were also beautiful. Colorful networked gems moving and unfolding on a black night sky. Very intriguing and compelling. Who knows where it leads.

PS. Another source of information is the site TouchGraph.Co; they have Java-based Google and Amazon browsers.

To continue Jim’s thread:

Here is an illumination of the language in my novel Illumine, the largest dataset I own. I am pondering how this relates to the original concept of “illuminations” in text.

(You need to open the blog in Safari or Internet Explorer and then click through to the graphic.)

A tag cloud:

PS. I obviously have to research why the word “back” is so important.

One of the blogs I read is Ryan Stewart’s Digital Backcountry where he covers rich internet applications. (He recently went to work for Adobe and covers Flex/Apollo extensively.)

There is a useful post on some new features coming out in Flex 3 that concern “deep linking” in Flash/Flex/Apollo applications. This has been an issue for web developers who come from the world where linking out of the application is possible and/or the user employing the “back” button is an inherent part of the application behavioral syntax. Flash/Flex applications, as “contained” application environments don’t inherently have a back button or a back button syntax and, up till now, the user couldn’t link out of the application.

Ryan writes correctly:

This also meant the back button wouldn’t work, so Flex/Flash felt very different from the browser experience and it was something that’s been criticized in parts of the community. There are some significant theoretical arguments about what the back button should actually do in the context of an application, and that has also been part of the problem.

In some ways I see this as an artifact resulting from trying to use one functional model to replace all other models whether or not it fit. The basic web technology (with its links and page sequencing (including back and forward)) was designed to present stand-alone objects (pages with text or whatever) in a sequential (or multi-linked-sequential) flow, originally without context or much control. Building functioning applications in this environment has always seemed like a bit of a kludgy hack to those of us who have designed contained and controlled application architectures. Of course, “web application” technology has evolved its capabilities to maintain application context and control behavior, but it has always suffered from a lack of true context control oftentimes because of behaviors like the back button.

So it is a “new” solution to a “new” problem: before the advent of the internet, application architecture enabled us exert control over content, context, and user behavior. Of course, they weren’t universally available over a ubiquitous universal network, so these days are better days in many ways. Adobe has published some really good talks and white papers on how application architecture took a large set of backwards steps, which are now getting addressed with several new offerings from many vendors.

Stewart reports that behavior that doesn’t reflect “browser” behavior is seen to be a deficient architecture. The reality is that every application needs to be able to control context and behavior as necessary within the requirements of the application, the user, and the proper control of the dataspace and context. Something as innocuous as the “back” button can’t be a sacred cow—elegance, usability, correctness, and common sense need to lead the day in building future applications.

The new application platforms that will allow applications to work on the internet and on the desktop (so far we’ve looked a bit at Adobe Apollo and Google Gears, though there are others) are exciting, but we have to get passed a need to hold them to a standard that only came to exist in the last decade and is a short term artifact of the current evolution of development capabilities.

And then there is the data management issue that Jim has discussed here, and which we will be exploring further. The models for managing the distributed dataspace of distributed applications (online and offline) are complicated and challenging.

We attended the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs Launch: Silicon Valley yesterday. It was very interesting and helpful. They showcased the top 30 startups from 170 applicants. Besides the wide variety of business concepts and models of the most attractive of the presentations—which is an interesting thing in itself—it was quite interesting to note how wide the disparity was between these, the top 15% hand-selected out of the larger pool.

And they differed in quality along quite a set of variables:

• Strength and quality of the underlying technology innovation
• Power and diversity of the underlying financial model
• Innovative leverage of existing markets
• Presentation skills and ability to communicate

It surprised me that there wasn’t more depth in the group at this level, though this is just one place that such companies can showcase their work. It was a great event though and I really got a sense of the kind of topics that are getting attention.

And for me, after being holed up in my country hermitage writing for years, a little practice in working a room again. Never my best suit, but not impossible to revive I see.

We did run into two of our former associates who are now entrepreneurs in their own right. Very cool to see them and reconnect.

Jim is posting on this event as well at jim.panttaja.com.

So here we are. The second “developer day” in two weeks. Today we’re learning everything there is to know about the new Google developer tools and APIs. We did this two weeks ago at Salesforce.

It’s all fascinating and the technologies look like fun—though complex. One key element that I didn’t really appreciate until spending some time here is that these “development platforms” are significantly different from what we used to consider a development platform. Adobe Flex 2.0, for example, is a general development platform with which you can build any application for any purpose. This is traditionally what we thought of as a development platform.

These platforms (Google and Salesforce) are decidedly different. When you build with these platforms you are not only getting a platform with sophisticated tools. They are aimed at very particular types of applications designed around the core capabilities of the base platform—-search, maps, contact data.

The other element that is even more radical is that you are buying into an already existing audience. An application built on the Salesforce platform is intended only for Salesforce customers. Every user has to pay a monthly fee to Salesforce, a per person tax, if you will. Very few applications would be able to support that tax, but if they are already a Salesforce customer, the platform support is virtually free, Salesforce markets your application to them, it is trivial for them to subscribe, and you only need to charge a reasonable delta subscription. In fact, Salesforce will collect it for you.

What does Salesforce get? More sticky applications to attract and serve their customers without having to build or maintain them. So if you have some particularly valuable IP that serves this community you can dive in with a minimum of infrastructure and overhead. (One partner brought in $2-3 million in the first year with 6 company members—they have very widely useful IP—most Salesforce customers decide to buy it.)

Google has a whole suite of developer platforms that do maps, gadgets, mashups, etc. These are also targeted to Google users—a larger audience than almost anyone else has. Google provides the platform, the tools, the audience, the “marketing” (they list your app in the list of available components). The sofware is relatively easy to build—still takes wizards, but they can do things in record time.

Google, of course, gets more pages served. They hope that the gadget maker’s revenue model is to serve Google ads which bring Google revenue which they share with the maker. This seems to be the primary revenue model for these applications—ad serving, and perhaps some extended services or products served from the gadget maker’s base website.

And Jim points out that Google views the consumer as their primary customer. So you need to be interested in fulfilling a need in the consumer marketplace. That’s the target market. (It is interesting to me that it’s never been a market I really considered.) This has help me get a handle on what the “new 2.0″ world (”wisdom of the crowds”) is really about—meeting the needs and interests of the general public (consumer as a label is harsh, many of the services/features used are not just about consuming.)

All educational. Not sure where it leads yet.

An interesting post this morning from Tim O’Reilly about an NSF grant for research on translating American sign language (ASL) to speech. This will accellerate (cute!) the development of the use of accelerometer sensors as part of the input device into the computer. ( Accelerometers capture the speed and direction of movement.) I asume the ASL speaker would wear devices on his hands/fingers.) This is what the Nintendo Wii has done with its new hand-held controller that captures directional movement. Last week we learned to play tennis on the Wii at my son’s house. Jim and I got a kick out of using full arm swings, though Jon just uses his wrist.

I get a kick out of a reference in Tim’s article that is becoming mainstream (at least mainstream in the geek communities): The Minority Report UI, from the movie Minority Report. This refers to the elegant computer interface used in the movie, with a clear class wall as in the screen and dramatic arm gestures to control the high-bandwidth visual data being displayed. So this sci-fi movie reference is becoming a defining factor in how we talk about the future of our technology. Of course, this is a ongoing relationship between future-looking fiction (they do their research) and our culture (we get to see the future before we build it.)

Speaking of alternate UI technologies, we spent some of the weekend playing with the speech controls on our Macs, to only middling success. (It works better if you wear a microphone.) I am hoping to start using a recording/transcription device while I ride my bike—just to capture ideas and sentences that occur to me. (More on that in another post.) So finding multiple ways to move work into the computer is just in the air these days.