Today I needed access to some old files. I had an old tar file from around 1998 that held several gigabytes of files. It came from large Unix servers, and for many years I had no easy access to it’s contents – Windows would cringe at trying to access the large number of files (43502 files, some very big and some with very long file names). Solaris, of course, could easily handle all of it (10 years earlier).
But now my main work horse is the new i7-based MacBook Pros – so again (10 years later) I am now working with 64-bit Unix on a proper file system with multiple processors. So today I pointed my laptop at this old set of files. Mac OS X had no problems at all, and Spotlight reindexed everything in a matter of minutes.
One of the fun things I found was a PowerPoint that I made in 1997. It’s from a presentation I was invited to hold at Svenska Dagbladet in February of that year. SvD was at the time one of Sweden’s two large national newspapers. There was a debate within SvD about how significant the Internet would be for print media. I was somewhat established in the space at the time, having written a number of articles in 1995 and 1996 and held a few invited talks on the overarching topic of the significance of the Internet. I had personal web pages from April 1993, and had one of the first (if not the first) columns in mainstream print media that was connected to a web page where readers could post comments (first such column was in October 1995).
Tomorrow I will be attending IJ-7 at Stanford, so I was curious as to how well my old observations on the impact on Media would pan out.
It’s seriously slanting towards dated news, but we rolled out the press release today that I have joined Finnish startup Conformiq as VP of Marketing. The official link to the announcement is here.
Conformiq has productized technology in the Model Based Testing (MBT) space, and calls their (our) approach “Conformiq Automated Test Design”. It’s basically generating functional and system unit tests from a formal model of the system under test. Very cool stuff. At the core, there are some very neat algorithms for “inverting” a system model to figure out what the best tests are. Then it’s a small matter of convincing large engineering organizations to adjust their software development process to leverage a new approach…
Well, it’s official now: Wind River acquires Virtutech, the company I founded in 1998 together with a brilliant team of four co-researchers from SICS – Bengt Werner, Andreas Moestedt, Magnus Christensson, and Fredrik Larsson.
Simics will live on, but that wraps up Virtutech, and thus the end of an almost 19 year long project. So, for the history books, some retrospective …
A few years ago I was curious about why there are 5280 feet in a mile. The explanations I found weren’t very convincing. At the time I made some fixes to some elements of the puzzle in Wikipedia, but today noted that even now, if you perform a Google search for “why are there 5280 feet in a mile”, you still get the conventional, largely inconclusive, explanations.
Now, I haven’t found any really good sources. And Wikipedia, of course, is not a soap box nor a place for original research. But my blog is my personal soapbox. So I can write whatever I want here.
So here’s the thing: below is my theory of how the mile ended up with 5280 feet. If you have a better one, please point me to it. Read the rest of this entry »
Some 4000 Google I/O attendees gave a standing ovation at the end of this morning’s keynote pre-launch of “Google Wave”. Google I/O attracts a reasonably savvy crowd, and this was not a Reality Distortion effect. What Google announced this morning is significant. It is the first candidate killer application for the Fourth Wave of Computing.
Google Wave is a smooth hybrid of email, instant messaging, photo sharing, discussion forums, wiki, and document management. It is best described in the words of the brother of its lead developer, who also delivered the bulk of the keynote:
In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content – it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.
The features are impressive, and the demonstration was awe-inspiring. We were treated to a symphony of technologies. What Google is cooking up is a blend of technologies and trends, and is not entirely simple to dissect.
My club cancelled indoor soccer pickup at the last minute – so much for a much-needed blow-off-steam opportunity and some beers with a soccer buddy afterwards.
So, fresh from listening to keynotes at Web 2.0 in SF, I found myself settling for a nice beer and catching up on the latest 1 trillion initiative with a NYT at a bar, ordering some too-many-carbs food.
A gentleman had settled down on my left. He made some comments about the food I had ordered and that there was too much food. Well, of course there was. This is America. There’s always too much food. He asked if maybe he could have some – or at least that’s what I thought he asked. I smiled and said “no I don’t think so”, and went back to my NYT.
Shortly after there was some debacle. The man was trying to communicate with the bartender, who in turn was quietly laying down the law.
“What’s the problem,” I asked. “I think he’s on drugs or something,” the bartender answered. I looked at the man again and thought some suitable variation of “there but for the grace of God …” and told the bartender, “don’t worry, I’ll pick up his tab.”
The bartender took a second look at me and asked if I was sure, and I said Yeah, I got you covered.
Google may have lost the debate on whether they are violating their “do no evil” motto, but they’re still a friend of the small guy in other areas.
Today they announced their Measurement Lab, an effort to make more data available for research on Internet performance issues.
Hidden in this set of announcements is Glasnost, an effort to estimate how much your ISP is interfering with your Bittorrent traffic. Of course, the US has no laws on the books to prevent your ISP from pretty much doing what they want with your traffic. The article on their initial results notably shows that the US is the least free country in the world in this regard – at least as far as data is available.
They had published much of these results in October at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2008, but the Google announcement gives their result much higher visibility.
Which, no doubt, is very much Google’s intent.
[UPDATE] The Reuters story made no mention of the fact that the researchers had disproved the notion that the Cable companies needed to do this. Imagine that.
On the day celebrating the birth of the modern personal computer (summarized by main stream media as the invention of the computer mouse), i blogged from the seat next to Doug. I’m still digesting my thoughts from those two great days. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll be attending the Program for the Future events on Monday and Tuesday, and blogging a bit about the events, as well as being on one of the panels. The conference is prompted by the anniversary of Doug Engelbart’s “mother of all demos” which took place on December 9th, 1968.
The event itself is mostly remembered as being a huge leap forward in not just what the concept of a computer is, but a manifest demonstration of how one might go about building it. Doug demonstrated early incarnations of the first computer mouse, tele- and video-conferencing, e-mail, hypertext, and shared-screen collaboration, as well as more geeky firsts such as object addressing and dynamic file linking. And that’s just the highlights. (The phrase “mother of all demos” was first used by Steven Levy in 1994 when documenting the history of the Macintosh.)
What is generally forgotten is the context for the work. As expressed in the original flier for the event: “The system is being used as an experimental laboratory for investigating principles by which interactive computer aids can augment intellectual capability.”
Collective Intelligence (“CI”), or Collective IQ, is when the behavior of a group of individuals exceeds the cognitive abilities of any single individual – at least that’s one way to try to define it. Exactly what CI means remains a key topic of CI. Today the discussion is part of the “wisdom of the crowds” thoughtbase as well as (more vaguely) the rise of global social media.
Lord knows I have opinions about the topic. But let’s first see how the talks and discussions unfold. There is a very impressive line-up of smart and thoughtful people in the program, spanning locations at Stanford, SRI, and the SJ Tech Museum. Speakers include Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Steve Wozniak, Thomas Malone, Peter Friess, Paul Resnick, Andy van Dam, and Robert Taylor.
Posted by Peter S Magnusson 
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