Archive for April, 2007

Tech changes, but the song remains the same

April 29th, 2007

OK, I got round to trying Joost.

My desktop has Linux, so i couldn’t install it there – Joost is only available for Windows and Mac OS X. Though since it words for Mac, it might be rapidly tweakable for Linux portability. Had to install it on my Win laptop, crappy sound card included.

I was quite impressed by the interface – cool program, easy to use, just like having digital tv in fact. Except you catch the programs when you want, and you can pause and fast-forward at will. My ideal TV.

Unfortunately, the content they offered was crap. The colleague who invited me said the same – after the first amazement at the coolness of it all, you spend about 10 minutes zapping through the programs, and then you switch it off, bored already. Similarity to normal TV there. The definition of the image was not great, a bit like middle-to-low-def divx, but still watchable.

Joost has a ‘standby’ option, which means that it’s switched off, but you’ve still got a small icon on your status bar. Since i’m a nosy and suspicious person, i switched on a network analyzer to see if there was still P2P traffic going on.
I first looked at what was passing through when Joost was on, then when it was on standby, and then when it was off. Well, you can guess the result. Standby doesn’t mean off – be well aware that you’re contributing to the greater good of P2P TV-dom. At least, off (exit) means off, no sneaky uploading+downloading happening in the background (the number of packets slowly winds down over a few minutes).

Then i got subscribed as a beta tester of Neokast. The formula is different: the software is not a stand-alone application, but a plug-in for your browser. Nice, i hear you think – so this is platform-independent. Correction. A plug-in for Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher. So i had to use my Win laptop again, and remember to use IE, which i’ve not done since about 2003.

Simply put, there was little content. Just 15 films or so – very clearly a beta, in the non-gmail sense of the word. To the Neokast team’s credit, any content there was, was slightly more interesting than the drivel offered on Joost, but i didn’t detect a lot of activity at all (the live streaming page was inexistent).

The quality was OK – a bit fuzzy, but without blocky transitions. Looked like a different compression algorithm then for Joost – smoother and fuzzier, if that makes sense. Full-screen option was available.

I did the same trick with the network analyzer. First i left the browser window open with the film stopped, and then i closed the browser. Didn’t see much difference, so i concluded they were pretty clean. Also, looking at the IP addresses, the Neokast didn’t seem to be P2P in the conventional sense of the word – exchanges with one IP address only.

In sum, i can’t say which one is better – i just can say that it won’t matter to me if all they offer is crappy wine-tasting programs or travel news.
The first one who plays ‘Down by law’ 24/7 gets my vote.

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Posted in geek, so sue me, P2P TV, Tech

I’ll take gems in my coffee

April 28th, 2007

I can kind of understand the disgruntlement of experienced developers when first playing around Ruby on Rails.

What comes up after the first amazement:

too easy, where’s the catch ?
playing with C pointer tables and weird C++ constructions makes me feel quite the hacker, everyone could do Rails
why’s everyone using J2EE ?

Of course, it’s not that simple – it still takes at least a good design to make a good program, even in RoR. And hype nonwithstanding, RoR is no miracle receipe, it’s just a good framework for creating web apps (not big batch processings, not device drivers, nor videogames).

It’s not even suitable to build high-volume web apps, since the performance bits still need working on – not to mention that Ruby is an interpreted language. J2EE also has the advantage of maturity, most things you might need have been worked into libraries and tools (for instance certificates and smart card handling are still in the works for Ruby on Rails).

Meanwhile it’s good fun. I hope that RoR will grow. And also that it will remember the lessons learned from J2EE, and avoid equating feature-rich with complex.

I’ve read posts by people praising Python on Django. But unless there are suddenly 5 more hours in a day or my brain evolves into a supercomputer, i think i’ll stick to Rails for now.

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Posted in developer, RoR, Tech

My kingdom for a horse

April 25th, 2007

Thinking about the air quality again – i’m wondering what our world would look like without cars.
Cars are ingrained in the Belgian way of life. Most of us go to work with our cars, we get our bulk shopping once a week in a supermarket, we visit friends all over Belgium and abroad.

Imagine we had to go without. Personal cars, i mean – if we want to keep on living, in our densely populated country, we’ll still need the delivery trucks. So no personal cars, just public transport, delivery traffic, and of course emergency vehicles.

First off, all the ugly malls at the edge of town would die a mercifully fast death. Back to the small neighbourhood grocery shop, 5 minutes away.

Everyone would buy bikes, because without the threat of cars, bikes are actually a great way to go from A to B.

If we worked far away, we would all cram in trains, trams and buses. Hopefully they would come at a greater frequency, and at least they would not be stuck in traffic jams.

Since that still wouldn’t be anyone’s idea of a good time, company activity would be reorganized in a distributed fashion, with local centra communicating by VOIP and videoconferencing. Or just by plain teleworking, though i’m not a believer in 100% teleworking.
Big companies could organize something like a school bus, dropping off all people in the same neighbourhood.

We would need to reconfigure our friendships: going to visit friends out in the far reaches of Limburg would become an ordeal – we would do that twice a year. We’d need to find company and soul mates in the more immediate neighbourhood (in the old-fashioned way). Actually, we might stand a better chance of keeping close ties with a friend in London than with a friend in Abbaye-La-Vieille.

Every village would need a plumber, an electrician, a physician, a dentist, a school, and i’m probably forgetting a few. That might be a problem.

The city would be very, very quiet.

(btw: i don’t know if anyone noticed, but bioethanol or biomass are used in combustion engines. Hence, they don’t solve anything about global warming, the exhaust still qualifies as only slightly less bad. They only have an effect on our dependence on oil – we’ll need something else eventually. I hate it when media try to confuse issues).

(and i still don’t know what i’m gonna do/say/contribute at barcamp. eek.)

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Posted in air, life, random musings

Joost madness

April 24th, 2007

The net is overflowing with people begging for a Joost invite – just saw a post by a guy that was offering 50$ for one, someone pretended it was her birthday today, and another was ready to sell his stepmother.

Apparently, Joost (from the same company as Skype) is not the first nor the only initiative of this kind. But it’s certainly the one with the best viral marketing.

P2P TV is a fantastic idea. It’s perfect – everyone watches TV (more or less), so everyone can share. Plus if you get content that’s attractive worldwide, you might get good QoS 24/7 (since enough peers will be sharing).

Of course, a good question will be whether the ISP’s can keep up the traffic if everyone starts watching. Cringely tells us they can’t. So they might really start to lean on net neutrality, to give lower priority to your tv packets (if they can be recognized, which they probably can).
Though reading an interview with guys at Joost, they don’t seem to be worried about that, because with their revenues, they can buy the bandwidth they need (and probably screw the competition).

Also, Joost offers TV by big players. I do hope that something like P2P tv will extend the broadcast capability to more low-budget channels.
I wouldn’t give 50$ for a Joost invite, but I might pay to see some grassroots off-beat and wacky programming.

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Posted in life, Tech, web2.0

The gas mask of Damocles

April 23rd, 2007

I had a shock the other day: we were driving past Delta (Brussels), and they had an air quality indicator. The writing on the board was red – air quality poor. Suddenly, my lungs felt tighter.

I happen to have a fantastic view of West-Brussels from my living room. Lately, when we have a string of sunny days, i can see a yellow layer of smog on top of the building, clearly defined against the blue sky.

Also, more and more children have respiratory problems in our country.

You’ve probably heard about Bruxell’Air (Leefmilieu Brussel). In short, if you hand in your registration plate, you get a year of free public transport, and some other goodies.

Nice. But it doesn’t take into account one simple fact: 40% of the cars in this country are company cars. Which means that 40% of the people having a car don’t have any incentive to stop driving. And sometimes they can’t afford to, they have to reach work, after all.

So i’ll give my vote to the politician or party who:

throws big wads of government money at improving the public transports
gives incentives to companies to have car sharing initiatives
gives incentives to companies properly organizing teleworking
takes away the fiscal advantage companies have giving employees cars (i know that takes b*lls, politically)
generally funds think tanks, forums, contests to come up with constructive ideas at decreasing traffic

I’m hardly an ecowarrior, but i do like to breathe.
So maybe it’s time to have a good long think, while our brains are still properly oxygenated.

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Posted in Brussels, life, on the soapbox

Riddle

April 21st, 2007

What is this ?
Pick one:

fireworks
an underwater microorganism
random digital art by an AI
my cat playing with photoshop

The answer is here.

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Posted in random musings, Tech

Descent into the IT gender abyss

April 21st, 2007

When i was doing my engineering studies, 12% of us were women – and this was considered real progress.
After that, i went into IT. The proportion of females took a dive. Not that i minded. On my largest project we were 3 out of 30 consultants. On smaller projects, i was often the only one.

Now i’m reading a Computerworld article which announces that the few women in my sector are going to run off, because combining family and work is no longer possible.

Why does this worry me ? Because sparsity will encourage stereotypes. Bad, bad stereotypes.

The real reason for the decrease is: partners of a couple with children cannot both pursue a demanding career without their children paying the price. And so the partner who often yields, is yes, the mother.

Will people remember this, or will they think women are somehow less suited to analytical work, are afraid of computers, or cannot cope with stress ? I’d like men to get used to have equally smart women peers.

Because even though we live in a country where opportunities are more equal, there are times it’s a struggle. We do get slightly tired of pretending we don’t mind the sexist jokes. Or to have to raise our voice and be brilliant to get proper attention for our ideas.

That’s probably why there are such associations like IEEE women in engineering, or vrouw en ingenieur, or Debian women. We like to know we’re not alone.

Geek women of the world, please keep coding.
IT companies, to get the full percentile of gifted people, get daycare.

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Posted in geek, so sue me, on the soapbox

Fortune 500 chain reaction

April 19th, 2007

I read this fascinating article of the NY Times about the nature of celebrity, or in marketing terms, success.
In short, it says that according to a study, celebrity is a very social phenomenon. Our choices are partly based upon what other people like, however independent we think we are.

The conclusions of the article are:

to get famous, you need to first attain a certain critical mass of celebrity. Once enough people know you, you’re on the roll, nothing can stop you
fame is not an indicator of quality. As long as you don’t stink too much, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re Joe Bloggs or JS Bach (the hitlists are a daily reminder). The only important factor is to get that nuclear reaction going.

In my opinion, what goes for popstar celebrity, also goes for brand recognition, or new ideas.

This is both encouraging and disheartening. It’s pretty random, all things told (though i’m pretty sure obscene amounts of money and a great network can throw that random distribution out of whack).
You just have to pray for that magical number of people mentioning you or buying your stuff, before they do it for your competitor.

Talking about the emergence of new ideas – it seems the idea of webtops (see previous posts) is on its way up – i just read a blogpost devoted to the subject. Except he doesn’t call it webtops, but BBDE (browser-based desktop environment).

Well, i’ve said my piece about webtops, and since i’m not particularly in favour i won’t help it getting over the celebrity threshold. Let’s see if that particular idea/product reaches enough minds to end up becoming our daily reality. The coin is spinning, the die is rolling.

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Posted in life, webtop

Surprise attack of the summer

April 14th, 2007

What do you call it when it’s 25° in april, in Brussels ? We should invent something like the Indian Summer – last few years, winter’s barely finished that we fast-forward through spring in 2 days.

Suddenly everyone walks around in t-shirt. The Rue Neuve shopping street is packed with people wondering where they put last year’s sandals, and why they don’t have anything to wear anymore. Girls look as if they just popped out of a chrysalis, all light and colourful, and sweaty men peek at them through dark sunglasses.

Public transports are uniquely flavoured with the combined reek of hundreds of different armpits. Elderly people collapse with heart-attacks. Everyone’s sitting outside with drinks, wondering why we’re in Barcelona all of the sudden.

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Posted in life, random musings

Twitter on Rails

April 12th, 2007

Interesting interview with one of Twitter’s developers (see previous post about microblogging).
I’ve been wondering how Ruby on Rails scales, i guess this answers that.

So there’s still work to do on that front – maybe an interesting project to contribute to. I’m in love with developing on RoR, so furthering that cause would be a good challenge.

Meanwhile, it’s good to know the limitations of a technology. There’s no cure to all ills. Except chocolate, in moderate quantities.

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Posted in microblogging, RoR, web2.0

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