Category Archives: Technology

Top 100 Alternative Search Engines

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Charles S. Knight has a compiled his list of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. The article makes for an interesting read as he describes his method of analysis by comparing them to Google under a set of categories he defines.

What made me grin the most was the reference at the end of the article to Asimov’s The Last Question, an excellent short story that wonderfully suggests an answer to the question “is Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, a fait accompli“. In fact for making that observation/link alone Charles gets a thumbs up from me.

Google Booksearch … now visualise places mentioned in books on maps!

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I think this is really cool:

So why not visualize places mentioned in books on a map? Now you can. Our team has begun to animate the static information found in books by organizing a sample of locations from them on an interactive Google Map, with snippets of text from the book, and links to the actual pages where the locations are mentioned. When our automatic techniques determine that there are a good number of quality locations from a book to show you, you’ll find a map on the “About this book” page.

To see this in action just search for any book on http://books.google.com for example this Book on New York, when you click on the About this book page you get the places referenced in the book displayed on a map, along with the page references from the book.

Maybe i’m just a big geek … but I think its really cool!

Welcome to Google Planet? is Google building a virtual world?

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Came across this article in New Scientist. Rumours are circulating that Google is developing an online Virtual world, much like Second Life. I suspected this might be the case when they acquired SketchUp last year which allows users to contribute 3D buildings for others to see which can be overlayed on Google Earth.

Read the New Scientist article for more information … but I’ll definitly be keeping an eye on this. Google has made a habit out of taking on very established markets and re-defining them. I do hope though that Google, if they go down this road, improve on the metaphor, I really hope they dont end up cheesing people off like SL has 🙂

Google enabled targetting of soldiers in Iraq

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I got quite annoyed when I read this sensationalist rant against Google by written by Paul McNamara. McNamara bases much of his rant on quotes from this article over at the Telegraph. Basically he would have us believe that insurgents in Iraq are using two year old satellite photos on Google Earth to pinpoint their attacks against British bases in Basra.

Now I’m no military commander, but if your enemy can rely on two year old photos to plan attacks against you then shouldn’t alarm bells be ringing in your head about your own complacency? Am I the only one that thinks that it shouldn’t really be possible for insurgents to pinpoint attacks based on two year old pictures?

By their own admission the Military Intelligence (Oxymoron anyone?) state that:

We have never had proof that they have deliberately targeted any area of the camp using these images but presumably they are of great use to them.

I’m guessing a pair of binoculars and a current roadmap might actually be more useful to them. Unless the images were very recent they aren’t going to show the correct positions of tents, or ordinance or even buildings. I admit they might be useful in the wider context of planning to provide information about surrounding terrain but its not as though that information isn’t already available elsewhere.

McNamara’s opening salvo is hardly objective:

Sooner or later Google is going to have to start doing a better job of coming to grips with the collateral damage created by the ever-expanding array of wiz-bang applications that have made it a worldwide phenomenon.

There are always social implications for any new technology most people love Google Earth in fact there’s an entire sub-culture thats developed around people trying to identify buildings, boats, interesting bits of terrain etc. and posting what they have discovered up just visit here to see what I mean. Stating that by not censoring their service Google is somehow colluding with terrorists to kill soldiers is to my mind offensive, I’d agree with him if the images were real time or current but they aren’t. All this is, is scaremongering of the worst kind and I dont like it … in fact I find it quite distasteful.

C’mon the last time I tried to use Google Earth to look at my home there was a huge camper van parked outside it owned by one of the neighbours … but she sold it three years ago!

Anyway found this article over at The Register whilst its a tad irreverent it makes a great read, one of the individuals quoted (Brigadier Daya Ratnayake – Sri Lanka) makes an excellent point:

“In this era of technology, you have to live with the fact that almost everything is on the internet – from bomb-making instructions to assembling aircraft. So it’s something the military has to learn to live with and adapt.”

However what worries me the most is that doing a quick google for the search “google earth insurgents terrorists” leads me to a list of articles that regurgitate the kinds flawed views echoed by McNamara and fail to point out how woefully out of date the images are. Take this quote from Fox News’s coverage of the story:

The officer said he believes insurgents use Google Earth to identify the most vulnerable areas of bases, such as tents. The tool can get as detailed as showing specific vehicles in a desired region and has no limits to who can sign up and use it

What happened to journalistic integrity? or actually using common sense? I guess scaring the shit out of people sells newspapers a damn sight quicker than telling them the truth.

For those in any doubt here’s John Pike’s view on the issue over at GlobalSecurity.org:

“If I was going to be going through all the trouble to conduct a well-planned assault on a nuclear power plant, I’m not going to trust some Web site to do my intelligence collection, If evildoers were wanting to get imagery of say, a nuclear power plant, there’s simply so many different ways that they can do it, the fact that it’s available on an Internet Web site really doesn’t alter their attack planning requirements.”

You can also read this article written by Barry Levine which offers a more balanced view, in fact Paul I recommend that you do read it you might actually learn something useful to report back to your readers.

btw: heres Bruce Schneier’s take on it.

… "learning a new programming language is just about learning a new syntax"

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It always grates on my nerves when I hear someone say that …because there’s a part of me that simply can’t bring myself to believe that it’s a true assertion. Rob and I discussed the point after he interviewed a candidate last week who had made this assertion, and asked me for my opinion. Ok the strength of my response does worry me a little, I’m not sure whether I’ve built a fence around this issue – that’s why I’m writing this to see if I’ve overlooked something. It’s certainly isn’t the first time I have heard this view expressed, in fact I’ve heard it a lot, and there’s a part of me that’s beginning to wonder whether there’s any validity to this assertion … so I’m hoping someone can tell me why it’s true. Me, I’m going to stick to my guns for now and try to explain why I think it’s wrong.

Here goes…

I think each language has its own philosophy, it’s reason for being different to every other language. Some languages were designed with a particular types of applications in mind for, example Fortran, which as a language was widely adopted by scientists for writing numerically intensive programs. Some languages are developed to be general purpose or universal enough to serve all purposes ( like Java for example ), whilst many languages try to be this, I don’t believe any really have.

The truth (ok as I see it ) is that there are many many programming languages out there and many more being developed. Some fall into disuse, others evolve or are extended to meet the ever changing needs of the communities that use them. Perhaps the need for this diversity arises from the diversity of contexts in which languages are used.

So I think you have to understand the contexts, and try to understand the reason why a particular programming language might be better suited for solving a problem than another, in order to do this I believe It’s important that you try to understand the philosophy behind that language. For me why is more important than how.

Yes, of course, you have to learn the syntax and the semantics of the language. But just understanding the syntax isn’t enough, you have to understand its nuisances, it’s idioms. Think of it as trying to teach a computer to speak a language. You can teach it correct grammar, but that doesn’t means the sentences it comes up with will make any sense … even though they’re grammatically correct.

As programmers we can be like that too, that’s why when we have a good understanding of a language and we move to using a different language we often fall into the trap of applying the idioms of the one to the other … or simply assume that we should be able to. A classic example of this is when a Java developer writes an object in C# and automatically starts writing public getter and setter accessor methods for each property he/she wishes to make accessible, when anyone who understands C# knows that whilst this works, C# has a completely different philosophy of how you expose Properties. It’s a crude example but I think it illustrates the point I’m trying to make, or at least I hope it does. In any case I believe the following is certainly true:

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

— Alan Perlis

Alan Perlis was the first ever recipient of the Turing Award in 1966, I often remember this quote because I recall how some of the students on my AI degree course used to complain that we had to learn way more languages than the students doing the normal Software Engineering degree. One of our Professors Aaron Sloman, used this quote to try to explain why it was important to be exposed to a wider range of languages better suited to the problems we were attempting to solve, and that this should change the way we think about programming. Anyway Perlis has written many often-quoted epigrams you can find some more here.

Second Life Client code to be open sourced

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I know I’ve bitched about Second Life and why I think it sucks however I was interested to learn that they had finally decided to Open Source the code for their client software. Whilst this means that that interested developers can develop their own client software based on this, Linden Labs will still control all the proprietary backend server code that actually controls the virtual world’s.

U.S. Government to encrypt all data on laptops

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Was catching up on Bruce Schneier’s blog when I came across this posting. Immediately made me think of a conversation me and several members of our skywalk team were having on Friday over lunch at one of the local pubs. We were talking about the inadequacies of various types of security measures being considered by the UK Government, in particular the laughable ID Card Scheme. Rob made some interesting points about the government push of ID Cards in the UK and the relationship or lobbying for them by PKI vendors, im hoping he’ll blog about soon….anyway…

I remember rather anecdotaly mentioning during the conversation that whilst at aQtive Justin, Alan and myself briefly worked with a company called topsoft, who almost a decade ago had developed a full disk encryption system, which they were selling to other companies and the UK DoD. FDE systems have often been considered overkill, but encrypting every bit of information on a machine does mean that you dont need to rely on the user consciously choosing what to encrypt and what not to.

It is interesting that the US Government has decided to open up this selection of a product in the form of a competition … I find myself agreeing with Schneier’s assessment that:

It’s certainly a high-stakes competition among the vendors, but one that is likely to improve the security of all products. I’ve long said that one of the best things the government can do to improve computer security is to use its vast purchasing power to pressure vendors to improve their security.

But I’ve always been really wary of the whole idea of Key Escrow, the system just seems far too easy to abuse, and some of the worse violations of privacy, encroachment of civil liberties and indeed human rights have been perpetrated by so called patriots under the banner of “national security“.

Google removes its Tips feature

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Google has removed its tips feature. In the past when you searched for “photo sharing” for example it would have presented you with the tip “Want to share pictures? Try Google’s Picasa Web Albums”.

This feature got some bad press recently, most notably Blake Ross blog entry entitled: Tip:Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose, in which Blake argued that this feature which points users to Google only services that arent necessarily the best of breed. It bumps to the top of the page an advert for a Google product that would not have appeared as a top entry in a search result.

Google haven’t offered a reason for removing this controversial feature, im hoping that they chose to do so because of the negative feedback they have received from advertisers as well as bloggers like Blake, and for me thats a good sign … that they’re still an organisation that is willing to listen to others.

UseIt.com – Usability in Movies — Top 10 Bloopers

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Had sweet little christmas lunch in the hospital visiting M with our little gang. Its been a nice day so far, hope your all having a great christmas?

Anyway, didnt get round to posting this up last night so here goes …

Jakob Nielsen posted up his list of top 10 usability bloopers in movies. Its actually a fascinating read, and does make me smile. However science fiction has provided the inspiration for many technological advancements, take a look at this demo of a Minority Report like gesture based interface being developed over at Microsoft Research.