Bruno Unna

01/12/06

Today's podcast (Vinod Khosla)

Filed under: Society, Technology — Bruno @ 04:39:44 pm

Web 2.0 is coming of age and facilitating collaboration, participation and communication between users. It has opened up opportunities in media distribution and what Vinod Khosla calls media mangling. Personalisation has also started to fulfil its potential on the web and new startups are using this opportunity to launch businesses by pursuing VC funding. However, startups need to use the capital raised judiciously to avoid making the same mistakes associated with the growth of Web 1.0.

Vinod Khosla points out that mobile phones are becoming ubiquitous globally. Mobile phones are being used to help people learn English in India, China and France. Taking the topic of education further, Khosla proposes that all textbooks should be open source and easily editable - like Wikipedia - so that children can look at different versions of the same topic depending on their level of comprehension. He believes that this will help imbue the virtue of critical thinking in children. Khosla thinks that the open source idea can be extended to many things outside its traditional scope, such as seeds. Seeds can be specifically engineered to suit a region's particular environment and population requirements. This is not feasible today, however, because of patent protection.

When asked during the short Q&A session at the end of the show whether Google's relevancy of search results can be improved, Khosla responds by saying that this can be achieved through the collaborative filtering of search results. In response to other questions he explains why he suspects that the successful companies of Web 2.0 will be those that can increase the size of their audiences rather than those which try to control content.

Vinod Khosla was a co-founder of Daisy Systems and founding Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. Vinod serves on the boards of Agami, eASIC, Indian School of Business, Infinera, Kovio, Metricstream, Spatial Photonics, Xsigo and Zettacore.

Vinod holds a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, a Master's in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

01/05/06

Today's podcast: Computational Origami

Filed under: Mathematics, Technology, Art, Entertainment, Popular culture, Applied sciences, Information science — Bruno @ 10:49:51 pm

Robert Lang

Origami Artist and Theorist

The last decade of the twentieth century saw a revolution in the development and application of mathematical techniques to origami. Robert J. Lang describes how geometric concepts have led to the computer solution of a broad class of origami folding challenges and, as a consequence, enabled origami designs of astonishing complexity and realism to be developed.

As often happens in mathematics, a theory originally developed for its own aesthetic value has led to some surprising practical applications. In addition, it has shed light on long-standing mathematical questions and solved practical engineering problems. Lang gives examples of how origami has enabled safer airbags, Brobdingnagian space telescopes, and more.

Eureka! Unit testing using STI in Rails

Filed under: Computing — Bruno @ 08:09:05 pm

Agile Web Development with Rails, version 2005-9-13, page 152. Used without permission. :)

The CartTest class highlights another case where the setup() method is useful. Both of the test methods need a Cart object. Cart is a model, but it's not actually stored in the database since it's not a subclass of ActiveRecord::Base. That means we can't use fixtures to load Cart objects because fixtures load objects into the database. Instead, we can initialize a @cart instance variable in the setup() method for all the test methods to use.

def setup
  @cart = Cart.new
end

So I have modified the automatically-generated unit tests for the inheriting models, removed the fixture invocation and replaced it with setup() methods.

01/02/06

A9 maps

Filed under: Geography, Entertainment, Tourism, Communication, Internet — Bruno @ 05:09:18 pm

Impressive what intelligent people can do with money and motivation.

12/22/05

Today's podcasts

Filed under: Psychology, Technology, Education, Anthropology, Biology, Business, Communication — Bruno @ 12:51:29 pm

Tom Kelley

Managing Director, IDEO

Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Tom Kelley, author of "The Ten Faces of Innovation -- IDEO's Strategies for Beating the Devil's Advocate. Tom is the managing direcor of IDEO, that innovative design firm known worldwide for its originality.

Norman Packard

Pop!Tech 2005: It's Alive!

Syhnthetic Biology

What makes something alive and where is the boundary between a machine and a life form? Can a system such as the internet be considered alive, since it is self-maintaining, self-reproducing and evolving? Can a cell that was created from whole cloth in the lab still be considered life?

These questions are aroused in this talk by Norman Packard of ProtoLife, who is creating "synthetic biology" - artificial living cells made of non-living material. ProtoLife is exploring the possibilities to create "designer" life, for example, cells that are programmed to create hydrogen. The goal is make tiny living machines that can be used for medical and other applications.

This talk was from the It's Alive! session at Pop!Tech. The other speaker in this session was Theo Jansen. The question and answer period can be heard at the end of Theo Jansen's talk.

12/19/05

Today's podcast: XML Content Syndication

Filed under: Education, Communication, Internet — Bruno @ 12:40:10 pm

Beyond the Blogs

Our panel of experts debates the next generation of applications and the unintended consequences that occur when you separate content from design using RSS or Atom: spam-proof mailing lists, personal-content gateways (your TiVo?), meta-feeds and the data mining services Technorati and Feedster.

  • Joi Ito, Neoteny, Six Apart, Technorati
  • Robert Scoble, Microsoft
  • Bill Kearney, Syndic8
  • Andrew Grumet, RSSTV
  • Greg Reinacker, NewsGator
  • Chris Pirillo, Lockergnome.com

12/16/05

Today's podcast: Supernova 2005 (John Clippinger)

Filed under: Philosophy, Psychology, Technology, Education, Anthropology, Applied sciences, Biology, Information science, Communication — Bruno @ 06:33:58 pm

On the last day of Supernova 2005, John Clippinger, Senior Fellow of The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, spoke about his work at Socialphysics.org. According to the website, "The goal of SocialPhysics is to help create a new commons, the 'social web.' The social web is a layer built on top of the Internet to provide a trusted way to link people, organizations, and concepts."

John approaches Social Physics from a multidisciplinary perspective drawing from theories of economics, philosophy, neurology and behavioral science. John discusses the role of trust in developing a social network. He suggests that centralized, authoritarian systems in networks are antithetical to non-hierarchical empathetic interaction on the Internet. Today, he says, individuals do not have the power to control their digital identity and what is needed are new roles to protect and empower those individuals on the edge, rather than at the center of networks. He suggests that by using systems of tagging (as a form of reputation) and empathy, people in networks are better able to meet those goals.

John says that markets are social networks; using tools like his open source software framework, Higgins, he and others are experimenting and creating new avenues for meta identity on the Internet.

I'm sure Sebastian and Juan will find (or have found) this podcast very thought provoking.

12/15/05

Tim Berners-Lee is now a blogger

Filed under: Communication, History, Internet — Bruno @ 11:49:50 pm

And he chose as his blogging tool Drupal. Interesting.

12/14/05

Switch to KDE

Filed under: Computing, Religion, Entertainment, Information science — Bruno @ 02:37:26 pm

Perhaps I would have used a slightly softer set of terms, but I think Linus is basically right when expressing his position on the matter:

I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.

This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.

Please, just tell people to use KDE.

12/07/05

The word of the year

Filed under: Languages, Information science, Communication, Internet — Bruno @ 10:26:30 am

Guess what is the Word of the Year, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary?

Podcast!

Among the words that did not make it were two other terms popular in tech circles.

One was lifehack, which refers to a more efficient way of completing a everyday task.

The other was rootkit, defined as software installed on a computer by someone other than the owner, intended to conceal other programs or processes, files or system data.

powered by  b2evolution Credits: blog skins | blog software | web hosting | monetize
This skin features a CSS file originally designed for WordPress (See design credits in style.css).