TECH-fidel

If you have been following the news you have seen wildly varying estimates of death and destruction in Myanmar. The numbers have been growing exponentially. This won't stop. When such devastation happens, deaths continue on for sometime following the event and will kill more- a magnitude more, perhaps- than were killed initially. Tens of thousands are already dead, with tens of thousands missing and most likely dead. 1 million homeless- many of these are dead men walking. How long do you live with no shelter, little food, bad water, and the deadliest water-borne diseases brought on by dead bodies? This ain't survivor. These people are at risk and tens of thousands more are likely to die, especially when you see a headline like this: U.S. still waiting for Myanmar aid flight approval

We can't send aid and people will die every day. The military government does not care. Why? Probably some dissidents are dying, certainly poor peasants. These are pople worth nothing to the junta and losing them might even make their job easier. Aid will flow in, eventually, and lots of it will not go where it is supposed to. The junta will rejoice, make some extra cash selling aid products on the black market, and the next cyclone will be no different.

How does the junta survive since 1962? Selling natural resources to China, getting military aid from China allowing their army to grow, and selling heroin. They also get weapons from North Korea and India. China's actions are disgusting and their support of the 'governments' of Myanmar and Sudan (aloing with the suppression of Tibet) are criminal. Imagine how things would be different without Chinese intervention. But the peasants know nothing of this. I wonder, is it easier to die hoping for help but knowing none will come, or hoping for help knowing it might come?

More information on just how sad Myanmar is: http://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33479.pdf

By the way, the official name of the junta is the "State Peace and Development Council." This situation is just another example of evil being called good and good being called evil.

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 05:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think the programmers have gotten lazy. Fast CPU's, virtually unlimited RAM and bandwidth, and reliable connections have made them complacent. The "least common denominator" bar is actually set pretty high these days. Just try surfing the web with a modem.

Here's a challenge for you: apply context to your applications. What's that, you say? I'll tell you.

Let's start with something hot: Location. It is a lot more complicated than you might think. The parameters of interest that I see are:

Latitude and longitude
Speed
Heading
Route
Zip code
Metro Area
Country

Here are some examples to help you see why these are useful. First of all, not everyone using your service is sitting at a desk. Think wimax. Think more users in more places means more money.

Lat and long are the low hanging fruit, but the user really does not want to see them, they just want them used behind the scenes. You can plug them into google maps through the javascript API and make mapping apps know where you are when they first start up. That's handy.

Speed- hmm. I could use this to infer if you are in a car or on a train or walking or sitting still. These differences could be important to your service. For example, if you are driving, maybe you want to find gas or a place with a drive-through.

Heading. Which way are you going? Are you driving home or going to the office? Perhaps you have a to-do (or ta-da!) list that changes based on where you are driving to. I doubt you are going to go by groceries on the way to the office.

Route. What I mean by this is where have you been lately? Are you out of town- let's get you some traveler's info. Are you driving in circles- maybe you are lost. What road are you following and what is on that road that could be of interest.

Zip code is the old standby and I hope to never enter it again. Due to current limitations of how location is usually determined, zip code is the dominant player and is used in nearly ever location-related service on the web, so no example is needed.

Metro Area is a good one. Craigslist makes you pick this. Other metro area services are TV and radio stations/programming, weather, airport info, etc.

Country is used by many international sites and also has other uses (then getting the language right). It can matter because some activities may be legal in one country (or state, for that matter) and not in another. Your service may simply not be allowed to work in some places. I recall Pandora could not be used in Britain, though this was unenforceable. Now we will see.

So there you have it. Context matters. If you want your apps used from other than behind a desk you should start using it. Otherwise, your apps may just not fit with what the user is doing and also will fail to get as much use as possible.

I will be covering several more areas of context and how to use it over the coming weeks.

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

'Widget' is a funny word. Historically, this is what it meant (according to www.dictionary.com)

Then in the 80's  is about when you had widget kits for software development. they were screen elements, but still like definition 1 above- part of the instrument panel. Today, we still have widgets in that sense, but now a new concept: the little software utility application.

I love them and the tools (Adobe AIR and Flex) for building them. This is like java in 1996. but enough history. On with the real topic.

I believe widgets are going to move off your computer screen and back into being a small mechanical (or rather electro-mechanical) device. Some already have. I count bluetooth earpieces in this category of widget. Those little widgets in Nike shoes. Dive computers. I think we will have many more, without gong to sci-fi, and they will be cheap and connected to the internet (IP V6 no doubt) or at least your wireless internet relay widget (from XOHM) that all your devices share.

Email direct from your brain. A weather widget on your wrist watch. William Gibson's microsoft. A flickr slide show on your sunglasses. Flexible, electronic ink screen on your forearm (or sub-cutaneous- even better!). A zippo-lighter sized movie projector.

Who needs a desktop. I want widgets the way the used to be.

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No, not a French actor. A cool new web tool that will help you weed out the excess noise of the Internet and media in general and point you to the promised land. That is, guide you to what is best and might possible fit into your busy schedule. Land we actually make, now, but we're not making anymore time in the day on this planet.

www.brijit.com

And if you are semi-literate, you can even get beer money for reading a few articles and posting the precis (sorry for the French) and your worthiness score.

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)