Month: March 2004

Butterfly effect

I had the pleasure of participating in the Bell Sympatico/MSN Market Trial for the past four months. In a partnership with MS, Bell plans to integrate the MSN portal and MSN 8 software into Sympatico.ca and broadband services.

I got the impression that the MSN software is going to be an value-added service you have to pay extra for, like the current firewall and anti-virus add-on packages. I also got a free mousepad out of it. 🙂

MSN 8 is basically an Internet Explorer tarted up to look like AOL, although the Encarta.JPG result is much more pleasing to the eye. Menus have a translucent glass effect on them. The program actually greets you by your first name everytime you log in. The masterwork, however, is the MSN Dashboard, a vertical sidebar that displays the time, a photo slide show, Inbox, favourite links, stocks, etc. It’s a smart idea that will also appear in Longhorn, and the inspiration for the freeware program Codename: Dashboard.

One feature I do not like – the clumsy integration of MSN Messenger. It installs itself without permission. It sets itself to load on Windows startup, without permission. When I disable that option, it starts up with MSN 8 without my permission. It cannot be terminated while MSN 8 is in memory. While MSN 8 is on, it becomes redundant with contacts appearing in its own native window plus the MSN Dashboard.

Furthermore, when I exit MSN 8, it does not close down. I try not use MSN Messenger (admittedly, its audio and webcam features are nice) as I find its “in your face” nature not very pleasant.

Using the future to preserve the past

In partnership with IBM, The Supreme Council of Antiquities and Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage have unveiled their online multimedia masterpiece, Eternal Egypt. tbm.jpg The site is also available in wireless phone and PDA formats, features text-to-speech commentaries, and 3D views of famous monuments and sites, such as Giza and Luxor.

For budding Egyptologists, I also recommend the Theban Mapping Project, a Flash site developed by the American University in Cairo to map out the Valley of the Kings.

Eternal Egypt runs on DB2 over Linux. The TBM runs on Access over Windows 2000. However, both sites hope to preserve the past through technology.

The Google philosophy

The Google philosophy has 5 principles:

  • Work on things that matter,
  • Affect everyone in the world,
  • Solve problems with algorithms if possible (aka automate when possible to increase knowledge reuse),
  • Hire bright people and give them lots of freedom,
  • and don’t be afraid to try new things.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates echoes the fourth point. I recall his three ingredients for success were: smart people, small teams, and excellent tools.

Here’s another intriguing practice: Google requires that its engineers spend 20% of their time working on personal technology projects that have nothing to do with their primary objectives. Perhaps this is a way to prevent a narrow vision, a single-minded strive on sustaining their existing processes and technology, lest they fall prey to some disruptive technology barrelling in from left field.

Christensen said as much in an interview at the MIMC last month; only 80-85% of all R&D investments should be on sustaining innovation.

You can ping me for a date, any ol’ time

CSI is usually a show that takes delight in being as accurate as possible in its portrayal of forensic science, but the CSI:Miami episode I saw last night, “Big Brother”, had some awful flubs. Aside from the requisite cheesy Bejeweled-like graphical interface of “Grave Robber”, a fictitious file recovery program, and a bizarre looking command line ping program (that helpfully tells its user that an IP is spoofed with a blinking red “Forged” indicator), they also showed two malformed IP addresses.

The IP addresses went something like this: 301.101.28.1108. All valid network addresses must have their first octet between 0 and 223; “301” is way out of this range. As for “1108” at the end there, let’s just say only a number between 1 and 254 is valid.

But then they may have done this on purpose. In the same way that all fictitious phone numbers on TV have NPAs of 555, the producers felt they need fictitious IP addresses too.

Insert foot in mouth, echo internationally

Windows Calculator shouldn’t take seven seconds to load. Certainly not on a ThinkPad T30 with a Pentium 4 2GHz!

I’ve TweakUI‘ed and Cachman‘ed, Ad-aware‘d and X-Setupped, plus fiddled with virtual memory. I cleaned out the system tray, Registry and Startup for pesky TSRs. No dice. What could it possibly be??

I loaded up Disk Defragmenter and hit Analyze. File Fragmentation: 47%!

How could this be? This is a brand new laptop. And then it hit me. The laptop wasn’t installed from the ground up, but given the standard disk image by corporate IT. This is the same image the smarties in IT are giving to every laptop user in the company. Great.

(There’s an extra story of waste here: all ThinkPads come with Windows XP Home plus license preinstalled. When we get them, we format them and replace them with an image containing Windows 2000 Pro, also licensed. No wonder Microsoft is so rich.)

Sound bite

It was a rainy Spring afternoon when I got on the streetcar downtown. Rainy and dull. Wet and dark make gloomy companions. I think that if the TTC ever buy new Red Rockets, they should get ones with glass ceilings. Wouldn’t that be a treat?

I was interrupted from my reverie on sunroofs by a female voice.

“I’m the original office b!tch.”

She was a young woman, talking to her male friend. “This guy went up to me and said, ‘We’re going to have a working lunch, can you go out and get us food for eight?’ I’ve worked five years in this industry so that I can order people fvcking lunches?”

“I didn’t realize it until now,” she added. “But it was such a cushy job.”

At that point, my mind wandered away on the subject of lunch, and I thought of a toasted cheese and herb bagel with roasted red pepper and sundried tomato creamed cheese. Mmmm.

Moral of this story: Be a moving target.