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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