Month: May 2005

Notes for 5-31-2005

So much to say, so little time to write it. Here’s a quick “get caught up” post for today:

  • Happy Birthday Felicia! Hope you enjoyed your day 🙂
  • We had the Imagine Cup Conference Call this afternoon, and it went quite well. We’re hoping to have more in the future, so if you’re interested, let me know! I’ll follow this up with a post later.
  • Watched Dickson finish Fable this afternoon, appeared far too easy. I am close to finishing too. Enflame is by far the best Will weapon in the game!
  • I have decided that reheated Pizza 73 is better than reheated Panago, simply because the crusts don’t get all hard.
  • The door for the room inside our office finally got installed today, the signage was put up last week. That means, party soon!

Dickson, Andrew and I are off to Calgary for the day tomorrow, on official Paramagnus business! Of course we’re never too far from an Internet-connected computer, so maybe we’ll post something from the road. The quest to build the robot continues!

Roadcasting

Post ImageMy “wireless everywhere” mantra is becoming more and more of a reality every day. The latest wireless technology (and also the latest “add -casting” buzzword for 2005) is Roadcasting, a project developed by current and former master’s students at the Human Computer Interaction Institute.

Roadcasting uses a variant of the popular Wi-Fi technology to create ad hoc networks between vehicles. Each vehicle then acts as a “node”, extending the network’s reach a mile at a time. Essentially you get to have your own little radio station, and instead of tuning to a frequency to listen to music, the system will find music that you’ll like from other people’s collections.

The system — still largely theoretical — will also feature a collaborative-filtering mechanism that compares music in a recipients’ collection to that of the broadcaster. The filter will pump out a mix of songs matching the listener’s tastes.

“What’s really cool about this is that while you’re busy (driving), Roadcasting will just pick songs that you enjoy,” said Mathilde Pignol, one of the Roadcasting developers, “and then it will let you influence the songs with your music taste without you having to do anything.”

Makes one wonder what the RIAA would have to say about this. Considering that in Canada (and perhaps elsewhere) doctors offices and similar entities must pay a yearly fee to play music for their clients, I can’t see how the RIAA would let something like Roadcasting slide. I suppose stranger things have happened though!

I rather like the idea of Roadcasting. Their process page has a really good description of some of the positives and negatives of both radio, and of being a DJ. Apparently the system is in the prototype stage, though its unlikely to take off without major automobile manufacturer support.

And I thought podcasting was cutting edge!

Read: Wired News

David Dodge on U.S. Economics

Post ImageI have read many times about the huge current account deficit in the United States, but usually from American media like The Economist, or maybe something from Europe. Never from Canada! It seems the Canadian government generally likes to keep quiet about our neighbour’s spending habits, maybe for fear of more beef or softwood lumber-like troubles. Needless to say, I was quite surprised to read today that Bank of Canada governor David Dodge had something to say on the matter:

In the text of a speech to be given at a Montreal conference, the central bank chief warned of “large, global economic imbalances that have become the subject of increasing concern” to policy-makers.

“I am referring, of course, to the persistent and growing current account deficit in the United States that is mirrored by large current account surpluses elsewhere, especially in Asia.”

Basically what has happened is that the United States has decreased their saving while most of the rest of the world has increased saving. Thus, the U.S. has become reliant on foreign borrowing, creating the large deficits that Dodge and other economists talk about (the United States actually has three deficits, international trade, current account, and federal budget). At the same time, China and other Asian nations have used their large and growing export income to soak up the American debt.

I think it’s really interesting to watch, even if the situation unfolds slowly. For some reason, it seems significant to me that Canada finally had something to say on the matter too, though I can’t put my finger on exactly why.

“At some point, they will have to be resolved. Why? For one thing, a country’s external indebtedness cannot keep growing indefinitely as a share of its GDP. Eventually, investors will begin to balk at increasing their exposure to that country, even if it is a reserve-currency country, such as the United States.

“For another thing, the buildup of foreign exchange reserves by Asian countries will, eventually, feed into domestic monetary expansion and lead to higher inflation. These imbalances will ultimately be resolved, either in an orderly, or in an abrupt, disorderly way.”

Perhaps Dodge is worried that things are heading down the path to a disorderly resolution, which would probably be bad for Canada.

Read: CBC News

Testing BitTorrent's Search

Post ImageLast week I wrote about BitTorrent the company and the search engine they were planning to launch. Well that search engine is now live, so I figured I’d take it for a spin. The site apparently only indexes torrents that it’s robots can find on their own, so I am not sure how well they would do at penetrating the sites that require registration.

The first search I attempted was for something legal, Firefox. The entire site, front page and results page, look a lot like Google, but I suppose that’s typical of most any search engine these days. Anyway, there were 22 results for Firefox, and not one of them was the latest version. In fact, the latest version I could find was 1.0.2, which is two versions behind.

The second search I tried was Coldplay. Of the 20 results it returned, 9 appeared directly related to Coldplay’s music, with torrents for the new single, their previous album, and some rare songs among others. Search number three was for Britney Spears, and it returned 42 results. Keeping with the music, I searched for 50 Cent, and it found 33 results.

I figured software would be a good thing to search for too, so I tried Microsoft. Lots of torrents for Microsoft stuff, with 83 results. How about Linux? There we go, 333 results. Unfortunately, not many of them look like distros.

Based on that brief exercise, I was left unimpressed. I think for now I’ll stick to the torrent sites that haven’t been shut down as they do a better job of indexing and displaying torrents. The BitTorrent search doesn’t show how many seeds and peers a particular torrent has, nor how many times it’s been downloaded. These pieces of information are useful in weeding through the crap that is out there. Perhaps over time the site’s robots will find more torrents too, so the index will become more useful. Room for improvement I guess! Another thing that would be nice to see is stuff like Firefox manually indexed. The search engine would be so much more useful if legitimate software like Firefox was properly listed, and up-to-date.

One definite positive to the search engine is that it should draw new users to the protocol, because it definitely does lower the barrier to entry. What will most people do when they hear about BitTorrent? Either try to visit http://www.bittorrent.com or they’ll type it into Google, so either way they end up at the new search engine.

Anyone else try it? What did you think?

Read: BitTorrent Search

Imagine Cup Conference Call

Post ImageJust a reminder, if you’d like to provide some feedback on the Imagine Cup, we’re having a conference call tomorrow afternoon with the team. The conference call will take place on the phone and over Microsoft LiveMeeting, so if you’d like to take part, either email me or add me to MSN Messenger (mastermaq@hotmail.com) so I can send you the details.

We’re starting at 4 PM EST, and we’re scheduled to go for an hour. What kinds of things did you like about the Imagine Cup this year or last? What would you want to improve? Do you have ideas on how to make the competition even more attractive to students? The team in charge of planning for Imagine Cup 2006 is going to be listening in on the call, so this is your chance to provide very direct feedback!

If you can’t make it or would rather not take part, but still have feedback, leave a comment here and I’ll be sure to share it with the team. Thanks!

Target: Your iPod

Post ImageIf you’re an iPod owner, no doubt you’ve at least once donned your white earphones with a certain pride. White means you’re part of the club, you get it, you’re cool. And it also means you’re a prime target for thieves. It seems that the supposed iPod robberies in New York have jumped the Atlantic (or returned?):

iPod owners are increasingly being targeted by muggers who can spot the digital music players by their distinctive white leads, the country’s most senior police chief has said. The desirability of the players is partly to blame for a steep increase in robberies on the streets of London, according to Sir Ian Blair, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

When stories like this come out, it’s only right to question them. Are thieves really robbing people for their iPods? The numbers in London seem to suggest that’s the case, as “street thefts of iPods have risen from 10 in November 2004 to 52 so far this month. All crime in which an iPod was stolen has more than doubled to around 400 so far this month.”

Just one more reason to buy a music player that isn’t overpriced, and won’t lock you into one store! Or if you like paying a premium, being restricted to purchasing music from one place only, and walking around with a big “ATTACK ME” sign on your person, go ahead and buy that iPod.

[Disclaimer: I own a first generation iPod, but my Creative Zen Touch has since replaced it!]

Read: The Independent

Philadelphia Wireless

Post ImagePhiladelphia is being called the “poster child of the municipal wireless movement” with their citywide Wi-Fi network scheduled to be operational by next summer. If we want to get anywhere close to my “wireless anywhere” mantra, experiments like Philadelphia’s are an absolute must. I am looking forward to hearing how well things work in the city:

“Setting up a citywide network is definitely not as easy as putting up access points all over the place,” said Doug Schremp, chief technology officer of BTS Partners, a consulting firm that designs and deploys networks. “There are some technical issues that need to be addressed, and cities really need to look at the operational and business issues that come with building and owning their own network.”

More importantly, there are fears of wireless interference which would result in very unreliable connections. Apparently in testing, Philadelphia did not find any problems related to interference. Boston on the other hand, has seen major problems (look at the number of universities and colleges in the area to see why). I think there probably needs to be more testing done.

Hopefully we’ll see more of these citywide roll-outs when WiMax becomes popular, as it should help to decrease the cost of not only setting up the network, but also maintaining it. And as more networks go up, the problems associated will become more clear, and can then be solved. In any case, the Philadelphia network is very promising!

Read: CNET News.com

Calgary Tech

Post ImageAs you’re probably aware, I live in Edmonton, so I know all about the infamous and never-ending Battle of Alberta. And yes it totally sucked watching the Flames make it to the finals. While the battle between Edmonton and Calgary is usually thought of in terms of sports, I think it applies to other industries as well, like technology.

Why does Calgary seem so much more favorable to tech firms than Edmonton? Is it really that much closer to the States? Not really, so there must be another reason. While searching for electronics and robotics stuff today, Andrew and I discovered that there are far more related stores in Calgary than here in Edmonton. Heck even the Western Canadian Robot Games were held in Calgary at SAIT this year.

There is other stuff too! Like the programming competition that Dickson and I won back in January – that took place in Calgary, not Edmonton. A search on Google for Calgary gives 23,900,000 results while a similar search for Edmonton returns only 16,300,000 results. Google’s satellite maps show street level detail for Calgary, but not for Edmonton. Techvibes has 3 pages of technology companies for Edmonton, but 6 for Calgary!

I don’t know why, but we’re currently losing the technology battle of Alberta!

Website Design Seminar

Post ImageWant to learn website design? A few of you Edmonton-based folks have asked me about making web pages. Instead of trying to teach each of you individually, why not run a crash course in website design, at least to get you started? That’s what I am thinking anyway! A small seminar would be kinda fun I think 🙂

Admission would, of course, be a can of Coke. It could be as long or as short as you’d like. What I would do is give a brief history of websites, an introduction to the terminology, and show some of the programs that you might want to use. Then of course, we could get into the good stuff like HTML, CSS, and javascript! Of course, I’d be open to showing whatever you ask about – except Flash, because a) I suck and Flash and b) I think it goes against what the web is supposed to be.

Thoughts, comments? Would you come?

China Goes Shopping

Post ImageQuick – where is the world’s largest shopping mall? Nope, it is not Mall of America. Nor is it our very own West Edmonton Mall. The largest mall in the world is Beijing’s massive Golden Resources Mall, which measures a mind-boggling six million square feet. It opened last October, and is still growing:

How big is six million square feet? That mall, which is expected to cost $1.3 billion when completed, spans the length of six football fields and easily exceeds the floor space of the Pentagon, which at 3.7 million square feet is the world’s largest office building. It is a single, colossal five-story building – with rows and rows of shops stacked on top of more rows and rows of shops – so large that it is hard to navigate among the 1,000 stores and the thousands of shoppers.

As impressive as the mall is, there are larger malls on the way for China. The South China Mall is expected to be three times the size of Mall of America when completed.

Already, four shopping malls in China are larger than the Mall of America. Two are bigger than the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, which just surrendered its status as the world’s largest shopping mall to an enormous complex in Beijing. And by 2010, China is expected to be home to at least 7 of the world’s 10 largest shopping malls.

Not to be outdone, the Ghermezian’s are planning to expand Mall of America, and have two ten-million-square-foot malls in the works in China, called Mall of China and Triple Five Wenzhou Mall. I wonder if there are plans to expand WEM too?

While it might seem like a needless game of “I’m bigger than you!”, taking note of these malls in China is important. For one thing, it certainly casts doubt on the western-held view that the Chinese don’t have much disposable income. Perhaps not as a whole, but there are obviously enough wealthy Chinese to support such massive shopping malls. And the outlook must be positive enough to be planning the construction of even more malls in the country.

It’s also interesting to see that China is sort of following in America’s footsteps. Owning an automobile has become possible and extremely desirable in China, and now shopping in gigantic malls has hopped the Pacific too. Makes one wonder what else the Chinese do like the Americans.

Read: New York Times