Unto the pure, all things are pure

This is my Outlook Out-of-Office message and it is permanently turned on: Hi, I am not traveling, nor out of town, nor on vacation, nor without Internet access, nor in a place with limited Internet access.  In fact, most likely your mail popped right up in front of me and caught my immediate attention. Having said all of the above, it doesn't mean that I will be reading your mail, will be able to understand it, or will be working on it. Have a great day! --Sent not from an iDevice

I am surprised that schools are still conducting examinations the old usual way. As explained here , life is not about memory capacity anymore. It is about sieving memory. Finding the needle in the haystack is not a good enough analogy, as the smart guy will just deploy a metal detector. I suppose a tougher challenge is not merely opened books, but how to allow the use of the world-wide web in examinations without the ability to contact another live human being. Even intelligent databases or systems that allow asking interactive questions should be permitted. Perhaps here is an opportunity for Google - how to duplicate a section of the www such that everything in the world's knowledge repository can still be fully accessed but short of human assistance and contact. Besides schools, the military and prison authorities would be interested. We all know that we are quite helpless during the few moments we are without Internet access. But we don't want to be too depende...

What was supposed to be a straighforward task took me more than an hour. I out-file my commands to a text file: "ftpUserName`r`nSecretPassword`r`nDIR`r`nQUIT" | out-file ftpCommands.txt And then: ftp -i -s:ftpCommands.txt But it did not work.  It says: 331 Password required for f. and after a while: User cannot log in. Login failed. It turns out that the default encoding for Out-File is Unicode.  That added two bytes to the beginning of the file ftpCommands.txt.  Somehow, the -s option of ftp does not open the file in the Windows way but treated the file literally byte for byte. By explictly adding -Encoding ASCII to the Out-File command solved the problem.

I had never believed that maps could calculate for me a practical drive-able route from point A to point B in the real world.  Earlier this year, just for the fun of it, I asked Google Maps the route from where I was in town to home.  I was surprised!  It knew where the U-turns were, where I could turn left, and where the ramp into and out of the highway was.  It gave the exact route that I was using for years. The details of the  information required for such as feat is complex.  I have been left behind on the progress and standards made in the cartographic world. In the last forty-eight hours, everyone has heard how Apple has bungled up on their maps.  I would like to relate an experience with Google maps here to demonstrate some of what it takes to build usable maps. In April, I had to make a trip to a remote outback of south Malaysia.  This was from Google Maps the day before I traveled in April. Google Maps BEFORE I drove For part ...

Steve Jobs said users don't know what they want or need and went on to build a couple of wildly successful items. Microsoft went the opposite way. According to Mr Sinofsky here , Microsoft collected telemetry on, I suppose, ordinary dumb users, and designed Metro/Windows 8 based on that data. It's hilarious how such a big company can be so dumb.

With hindsight, we can tell what cause certain things to succeed wildly.  My takes are as follows. BlackBerry: It was the full qwerty keyboard.  Anyone who has tried to use a 0-9#* keyboard to enter an Url, even with T9, will realize that it is a real pain.  All BlackBerrys had a full qwerty keyboard, and to me that was the critical success factor.  It is not enterprise acceptance because of fantastic security.  In fact, any CIO who recommends the BlackBerry service should be sacked.  Permitting all mails to go to route to one Canadian operator is plain wrong. iPhone: The pinch zooming and touch panning.  The iPhone screen is small, very small, only 480x320 addressable dots.  No web pages can fit into that amount of real estate.  Hence, the ability of a very quick way to allow the whole page to be read is critical.  All small screens without a similarly efficient way to pan has failed without exception. SMS: The limit of less tha...

What do you notice about mobile devices, especially the cell phone? It is the extremely small screen. An entry-level tiny 14-inch notebook can typically hold at least twelve (12) cell phone screens! Hence, what you can see on a cellphone is less than one order of magnitude of what you can see on the cheapest notebook. If you are using your cell phone to send and read SMS’es, it’s no big deal. The moment you use it to do something like reading a “usual” web page, there is a big problem. You are able to see only a small fraction of what you can usually see on your notebook. Until the iPhone came along, this stumbling factor prevented phones from being used to browse the web. It was just impractical as you would be spending 99% of your effort scrolling the page one direction or another. Apple is rightfully credited for introducing touch zoom and pan. Touch zoom and pan was innovative and is the best solution so far to read a document that is bigger than your display area. To...

The technology to connect two (mobile) parties by voice or message has been solved a long time ago. Whether it's GSM, PCM, VOIP or whatever, it's all passe. Messaging is even simpler. What makes a solution useful is, not news, the network effect.  Remember the old story about that super fax machine that can transmit a full color page in 0.01s and you are the only one with the glorious privilege of owning one?  It's totally useless until you can find another person with the same machine.  And its value increases proportionally, if not astronomically, with the number of people owning the same fax machine. Part of the network effect is also the directory system.  Besides having to be technically compatible, you need to know the address of the other party you want to talk to, when you need to.  It is a joke if you have to frequently use another communication network in order to find out the number/address of the person to whom you want to communicate. T...