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Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Lightning strikes twice for the Google Maps Team

29 May

Okay, so eight to ten years ago, when IM was just starting up and ICQ was the next big thing, I started following the work of an open source project called Jabber whose goal was create an open source instant messaging system. Being open source guys, they didn’t like the idea of being tied to a single company’s system.  They much prefered a federated system, like email, where anyone can run a server, and there is an established protocol for servers talking to each other.  So, that’s how they set their system up.  XML was also a ‘next big idea’ at the time, so they decided to make a DTD for messaging, another for presence and contacts, and have the server, at its core, just by an XML router which routed the appropriate message documents to the appropriate contacts.  Being forward looking guys, they knew this would make the system extensible, and, even at the time, had big ideas about adding DTDs that would support things like real-time white boarding and other collaboration tools.   The Jabber guys established their niche, but the general public had already chosen one the handful of proprietary messaging platforms was happy enough that they saw no reason to leave.

What, you are probably asking, does all of this have to do with the Google Maps Team and lightning?  Well, as good internet citizens, the Jabber guys documented they protocol and went through the hassle of getting it established as an ITEF standard known as an RFC.  This standard was called extensible messaging and presence protocol, or XMPP.  Many organizations have used this standard as the basis of their own messaging platforms.  Among these was Google, who used it as the basis of Gtalk.  Which, finally, bring me back to the Google Maps Team.  After their technology was bought by Google and turned into Google Maps, they decided to work on something new:  a real-time messaging and collaboration platform.  After eighteen months work, the results, called Google Wave, were previewed at this week’s Google IO conference, and the results are astounding.  I won’t attempt to explain it you just need to watch it:

Much as I suspected while watching the video, when I read their published protocol specification at waveprotocol.org, I learned that the whole thing is built on a extensions to XMPP.  At the guts of the Wave are XML DTDs for wave detlas being streamed around, serialized, and sycnronized.   This is going to be huge, and the Maps Team deserves the praise.  But, it all started with the vision of the Jabber folks.

 
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Posted in Computers, Technology

 

Robots != Machine Intelligence

21 Mar

I watched the series finale of Battlestar Galactica last night. For the first hour and a half, it was wholely befitting of a show which has attracted the cult follow that BG has. The last half an hour was a bit of a disappointment for me, particularly the ending. The close featured a montage of the crude humanoid style robots that the current state of technology can muster, and a goofy warning that it will all happen again.
It has always amused me that people associate robotics with machine intelligence. Having worked in robotics, I can assure you robotics is much more about PID loops, sensors, and servo motors than it is about an artificial self awareness or machines having a soul. Anyone with even a passing interest in AI knows that it’s going to be an awful long time before we have to worry about an army of sentient machines taking over the word. Really, there is no need to fear your Roomba.

 
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Posted in Technology

 

One Month with Boxee

05 Dec

My last posting float the idea of Apple expanding its App Store to the Apple TV.  In it, it held up Boxee as the type of compelling application that would result.  Well, I have a cofession to make.  At the time, I hadn’t used it.  My exposure to it was solely from videos posted by the Boxee people on their site.  I had applied for an alpha invite, I just handn’t been granted one.

Shortly after that post, I received my invite, and, within an hour, had used the wonderful atvusb creator to create a patchstick and install XBMC and Boxee on my Apple TV.  The patchstick leaves the Apple’s software complete functional, it simply adds an menu for Boxee, XBMC, and updating the two, to the main frontrow menu of the Apple TV.  So, you can still purchase / rent Apple content, if that is your thing, and still have the whole iTunes syncing functionality going on, you just have this orthoginal Boxee funtionality as well.

So, has Boxee lived up to my expectations?  Absolutely.  Its interface is slick.  The social media recommendations are nice.  The local media management could use some work in terms of organizing your media.  There are better methods that hierachial directory organization for this sort of thing.  Quite frankly, since I’d already had to convert every thing to iTunes compatibile formats for the Apple TV, I still use Apple’s interface for that sort of thing.  The codec support is fantastic.  However, its the internet media interfaces, particularly last.fm integration on the audio side and Hulu, CBS, and WB on the video side.  I used it for a solid two weeks before Apple’s automatic 2.3 software update wiped it out.  Fortunately, the atvusb creator was updated after a week, so I just got up and running again.  I find myself using the Apple TV on a daily basis now, and that certainly wasn’t the case before.

There’s definitely room for improvement.  The aforementioned interface for orgainizing media, the lack of direct access to your iTunes content, and little tweaks here and there.  The Flickr module should grab high resolution versions if available, give you access to your group pools, and let you browse the forums.  Boxee will play VOBs from ripped DVDs, but there is not way to navigate the menus.  You find little things like these all over the place, but there are several updates to the software a week, and it is evolving rapidly while remaining remarkable crash free (they do happen on occaision).

I am, however, finding that the Apple TV is becoming a limiting factor in the equation.  The CPU, GPU, memory constraints, and @#$#! six function remote of Apple’s $229 hobby product keep an upper limit on what you can do with non-Apple media, and even that is limited (2.5 Mbit HD, indeed).  With the recent announcement of Netflix support the Mac and Boxee’s integration to it in their latest release, I would seriously consider a Mac Mini if I didn’t already own an Apple TV.

Overall, I’m very impressed…to the point that I may even consider upgrading my hardware just for Boxee.

 
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Posted in Technology

 

Hey Apple, how about expanding the App Store to the Apple TV?

08 Nov

You must have noticed that, much like your other closed platform, the iPhone, communities have sprouted up around your hobby project to add functionality that it lacks and people want.  Also like early iPhone developers, they’re doing it without your help.  At times, even in spite of your efforts to thwart them.

You may have also noticed once you made those iPhone developers legit and fostered them, your new platform took off like a rocket.  I wonder what would happen to your hobby project if you got behind the pent up demand to develop on that platform?

p.s.  You better hurry.  AwkwardTV, XBMC, and Boxee are pretty compelling without you.

 
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Posted in A/V, Computers

 

A new kind of browsing could be headed your way

12 Sep

I had the TWiTLive stream of Bear Hug Camp playing in the background for a great deal of the afternoon.  At first I thought it was going to be a train wreck.  Steve Gilmore as the moderator in the beginning was a poor choice.  I know he was an organizer of the get together, but his opinions are far to strong on the matter to be impartial or even patient with those who might have other opinions.  I think the limited time with the Twitter guys could have been more productively spent than everyone listening to him berate them for taking his track away and hearing how he must get back otherwise the dastardly Republicans will keep the White House.  Does he really think the Twitterverse is that big or important?

Much to my surprise, the conference quickly redeemed itself.  The “Big Thinkers” eventually shut up and let the tech guy start to work out the details.  In addition to the Twitter guys, who couldn’t return after lunch, there were representatives from Google, Seesmic, Microsoft, Facebook, Identispy, and others.  Evan Prodromou, of Identica and Laconica, presented his Open Micro Blogging specification and he and the other began to hash out the details of how these social communities can share their event streams and how aggregators can add value and federation for everyone.

I still think there is an awful lot of reinventing the wheel here.  As one of the participant pointed out on more than one occasion, many things that Evan is trying to formalize, like federation, are already solve with XMPP and the XEPs.  As I’ve stated before, I think it would make much more sense to build the whole infrastructure on XMPP.  The web is really just a presentation interface, and this is really micro messaging, not microblogging.  Imagine, XMPP routers routing messages of various XML schemas to you based on your criteria, your client renders them for you based on XSL transformations that you specify, and if your client can render that schema then it knows how and to whom you can respond if you wish to participate in the conversation. It’s got a long way to go, but there some really potential here to change both the web and messaging.

 
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Posted in Technology

 

What’s important about Chrome

06 Sep

I just finished reading Google’s comic book about there new browser effort, Chrome.  Much has been written this week in the Tech press:  Why do we need another browser?  Just another attempt to gather more data about me.  What, windows only?! Etc.  Well, this is the first chance I’ve had to check for myself, and I must say I’m impressed.

First off, everything is open source.  Re-using existing open source components when available and writing new ones when necessary to achive their goals.  Very smart.  Additionallly, the new components that prove to be superior can be adopted or adapted by other Firefox and other browser that choose to participate in the open source world.  Much like their use of Gears to prototype things they are proposing to the W3 standards bodies, this is about building the infrastructure for a richer web.  So, all the breathless paranoia about privacy is just that.  There won’t be in privacy busting components in there because it’s open source and would be exposed immediately.

Second, they’ve reallly thought about what’s wrong with the browser security model, and they are not only fixing it, but showing everyone else how to do it.  The comination of the sandboxing and the process model are very important.  As the web moves more and more toward becoming it’s own applications platform, all browsers will need to adopt this or die.

Finally, we have V8, the javascript VM.  Here, I’m excited about the performance possibilities, but also a little concerned.  There is a lot of divergent work going on in this space.  Mozilla is building their own VM.  Microsoft is almost basing IE 8 on their DCLR.  The Webkit guys also have work in this direction.  Google’s, Mozilla’s, and Webkit’s are open source and will likely be used in other projects.  But, as a developer, what I really want to see is a standardization of the VM interface.  If my applet can be compiled, compressed byte codes, then I not only save time at runtime, but I can also write applications in other languages and use a compiler targeted at the VM.  As web application increase in complexity, maintaining them will be a nightmare if we can’t use more appropriate languages.

 
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Posted in FOSS, Software Development, Technology

 
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