This blog has moved

I've switched to wordpress, so I am no longer updating this blog. My new blog is here.

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Virtualization for BPOs?

LiveOps is a very interesting start-up which is essentially virtualizing call centers. This is the description of LiveOps from Techcrunch:

Palo Alto based LiveOps offers web based management of more than 10,000 home based telephone workers. Here’s what makes them interesting: their service operates as a performance based auction, routing incoming calls to the best performing worker available. Top workers participate in IM communities to discuss methods of increasing productivity and solving problems. I like seeing the web make work more interesting and perhaps services like this will help decrease the drudgery of call-center work. At the very least, it will likely make the business more efficient.

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Bruce Eckel: Why Java lost, AJAX won and Flash will ultimately take over the web

Bruce Eckel has an in-depth article on the language/platform of choice for RIAs (rich internet applications). Although Java (with applets) was arguably the first-mover in this space, it lost out because of a bunch of issues (difficult to install, parts not well thought out, etc) which he has dissected. He contrasts this with JavaScript and AJAX which is clearly the winner right now. However, he goes on to say that AJAX is essentially a hack that has reached its limits and is unlikely to go much further. It will run out of steam and the technology likely to take over is Flash (with Flex as the tool for creating rich Flash apps). Very interesting reading even if you don't agree with him.

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Cat smileys

Check out these new smileys.

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Yahoo! Pipes: drag-n-drop mashups for the web

From the O'Reilly Radar: Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator" that allows you to "create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant." While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.

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Israeli spa offers "snake massages"

No comment!!

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Why Windows is less secure than Linux

Here is a graphical representation of the various system calls that occur when the Apache webserver is running on Linux: Now, let us look at a similar picture for IIS running on a Windows server: The blogger who created these thinks this is clearly shows why a Microsoft webserver is inherently less secure. Also check out the related slashdot discussion

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Recording your kid's promises with a digital camera: Parent Hacks | Parenting tips

If your kids tend to forget their promises, this might help: My husband came up with the idea of using the video function on our digital camera to record her promising not to get upset when we say "no" to candy later because we're letting her have a piece early. It worked! We've started doing it other times, too. She loves the digital camera, and it reminds her about the whole "delayed gratification" thing.

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Educate your kids with Google Video

Kim's husband introduced their toddler to the wonders of Google Video:

My husband was searching Google Video for different animal videos (child-friendly ones - hence no SHARK ATTACKS SURFER ones). Our son was in a trance, and he learned the difference between a shark, a whale and a dolphin, he got to see deer, penguins, brown bears, etc. -- it was like watching National Geographic personalized and up close.

Our son's absolute favorite was Matrix Cow - very funny rendition of a cow in a Matrix-style fight - he laughs so hard from the moment the cow snorts and jumps on his back two legs. I have to agree it was pretty funny the first time or two - but he got a bit too attached to this one… "AGAIN, do cow AGAIN".

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The 7 deadly sins - and the 21 secondary sins

If you plot the 7 deadly sins as 7 nodes in a graph, and then convert it to a fully connected graph, each edge in the graph will represent a secondary deadly sin consisting of a pair of the original deadly sins. Then you get this fascinating diagram from:

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Using web-2.0 to look for missing scientist (Jim Gray)

Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful. Now, Amazon has created a novel effort to help find him. They have put up satellite images of that area from the appropriate time frame on the into the Amazon S3 storage service. Then, they created tasks on the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service to search for the missing boat in those pictures.

Examples of the object to look for in various orientations. The size of the boat in the sample images is the size of the object you are looking for, even though the images you are scanning are much larger.

See related post on Werner Vogel's blog. (Werner is the CTO of Amazon.)

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YouTube - Jeff Han on TED Talks

Very cool demo of something called "multi-touch" sensing. This could be the future of interaction with the computer (instead of the standard mouse). Click to play the video. Very cool.

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Don't miss the gorilla

See this interesting article on how "focussed" humans become when they have a specific task at hand. Excerpt: Picture yourself watching a one-minute video of two teams of three players each. One team wears white shirts and the other black shirts, and the members move around one another in a small room tossing two basketballs. Your task is to count the number of passes made by the white team - not easy given the weaving movement of the players. Unexpectedly, after 35 seconds a gorilla enteres the room, walks directly through the farrago of bodies, thumps his chest and, nine seconds later, exits. Would you see the gorilla? Fifty percent of all observers do not see the gorilla.

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Buying and Selling Software Bugs

The New York Times has an interesting article on how a market exists for software bugs. If you find a new bug in any software (typically a security related issue) you can sell it on the market - either to "legal" buyers like security companies, who do it to plug the holes, or to hackers and other internet criminals who can use the knowledge for identity-theft schemes or spam attacks. Excerpt: The Japanese security firm Trend Micro said in December that it had found a Vista flaw for sale on a Romanian Web forum for $50,000. Security experts say that the price is plausible, and that they regularly see hackers on public bulletin boards or private online chat rooms trying to sell the holes they have discovered, and the coding to exploit them. And also:

“To find a vulnerability, you have to do a lot of hard work,” said Evgeny Legerov, founder of a small security firm, Gleg Ltd., in Moscow. “If you follow what they call responsible disclosure, in most cases all you receive is an ordinary thank you or sometimes nothing at all.”

Gleg sells vulnerability research to a dozen corporate customers around the world, with fees starting at $10,000 for periodic updates. Mr. Legerov says he regularly turns down the criminals who send e-mail messages offering big money for bugs they can use to spread malicious programs like spyware.

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Mis-wanting: People don't really know what they'll want in the future

See this interesting article on how we really know much less about our (future) desires than we think.

Excerpt: My favourite is a simple experiment in which two groups of participants get free sandwiches if they participate in the experiment - a doozie for any undergraduate.

One group has to choose which sandwiches they want for an entire week in advance. The other group gets to choose which they want each day. A fascinating thing happens. People who choose their favourite sandwich each day at lunchtime also often choose the same sandwich. This group turns out to be reasonably happy with its choice.

Amazingly, though, people choosing in advance assume that what they'll want for lunch next week is a variety. And so they choose a turkey sandwich Monday, tuna on Tuesday, egg on Wednesday and so on. It turn out that when next week rolls around they generally don't like the variety they thought they would. In fact they are significantly less happy with their choices than the group who chose their sandwiches on the day. Also: For example, how good would you feel if you won the lottery? Most people predict their lives will be completely changed and they'll be much happier. What does the research find? Yes, people are measurably happier after they've just won, but six months down the line they're back to their individual 'baseline' level of happiness.

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Ian McDonald's book "River of Gods (August 15, 2047 - Happy Birthday India)"

Ian McDonald's sci-fi book "River of Gods" which is set in India on its 100th birthday sounds very interesting.

From Boing Boing:

River is the story of India's 100th birthday, when the great nation has fractured into warring subnations on caste, religious and cultural lines. Like McDonald's other great novels, the story is beyond epic, with an enormous cast of richly realised characters and a vivid, luminous vision of techno-Hinduism that beggars the imagination.

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Google's biased suggestion

Unfortunate Google search result -- if you search for "African
ingenuity" on Google, it will ask "Did you mean: American Ingenuity".

>From Boing Boing (http://boingboing.net).

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A Brief Introduction To RISC — Rural Infrastructure & Services Commons

The Indian Economy Blog has an interesting article on an initiative which is trying to prove that development does not necessarily mean urbanization. It first lays out the arguments as to why urbanization is "usual" path to development, and then goes on to suggest an alternative.

Excerpt: It is therefore argued that ‘village-centric’ development is not feasible because of resource limitations and because people naturally tend to migrate out of villages to cities. Furthermore, it not desirable since a vibrant economy depends on the aggregation of the population into units much larger than a small village. In short, investing scarce resources into villages is short-sighted and uneconomical.

Based on the above considerations, a model for rural development has been conceived called RISC – Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons. The RISC idea is to bring to the rural population the full set of services that are normally available only in urban locations. It works within the constraints of limited resources by focusing attention to and concentrating investments at specific locations to obtain economies of scale, scope, and agglomeration.

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