WolframAlpha Vs Google

There is sudden buzz about WolframAlpha being a "Google killer" and I was quite surprised how that can happen when Google has been around for so long and it has vast amount of data already indexed.

Then, it turns out that WolframAlpha is a computational engine which targets at delivering the numbers in a meaningful format. 

I searched for "distance from New York to New Jersey" on WolframAlpha and it gave me the exact distance in miles (52.61 miles) and it also gave me results in meters, kilometers, nautical miles (??) and centimeters (??????). On top of it, it gave me direct travel time taken by flight, sound, light in a fibre and light in vacuum. Now most of the data that it returned are something that I do not care about. When I search the same on Google, I get links to distance calculators. 

After going through the examples, I could gather that, WolframAlpha in its current form is a great resource for research analysts who play with data. It is not that Google cannot provide this data, but WolframAlpha makes this data understandable and much more accessible 

Search for "India literacy" on Google and you will get 61% as the first result (without even digging the link) and this was present before WolframAlpha could do it with it computation engine based on Mathematica.

Is WolframAlpha a semantic search? I don't agree entirely. The structured queries as per their examples are fine, but here is why I am saying it is not entirely semantic.

I did see some weird responses as well. I searched for "voting age US" and it did not give me any result, whereas "voting US" gave me the result as "18 years of age; universal".

I searched for "US viting" and WolframAlpha interpreted it as "US Vitina" and showed me the distance from the US to Vitina in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Google prompted me and asked "Did you mean: US voting".

WolframAlpha has taken online computing to a different level, but not yet usable by common internet user who is used to Google. They are working on a lot of stuff right now and may soon come up with something far more robust, but will it challenge Google at any point? No I don't think so, just because the purpose of WolframAlpha is completely different from what Google is designed for. 

Again, Google Squared is in the news now and is being termed as "WolframAlpha killer'.

Note to Wolfram: ... I am not looking for distance from New York to New Jersey IN CENTIMETERS OR NAUTICAL MILES, and I am definitely not interested in how soon light will reach NJ from NY in vacuum. 

Advent Of Real-Time Search - Checking Scoopler

Real-time web is the next big thing and there are quite a few real-time search services that are creating buzz around. Tweetmeme, OneRiot, Twitscoop, Scoopler etc. Most of these like Tweetmeme and Twitscoop focus around Twitter updates, but OneRiot and Scoopler takes it further to include other services like Digg. Scoopler, which I would really call a "social media search engine" covers Flickr, Youtube, Delicious and other services.

Scoopler keeps it simple and structures the information very effectively. It shows tweets in real-time along with the popular videos, links and images from Youtube, Flickr, Digg etc. Along with it, it also stores your last three searches thereby making it easier to switch between your results.

While your at discovering information through the search, Scoopler makes it easy by showing the entire headline and instead of going to the URL, you can get a "peek" of the content in the target URL and "share" through a host of other services.



More than real-time web I am inclined towards onDemand web as written in the post by @rickmans. With that in mind, Scoopler comes up with too many tweets if you search for a hot topic (Eg: Adam Lambert while American Idol is being aired) and keeps pushing information onto your screen. There is no easy way, time or provision to make sense of the flowing information especially when it is a hot keyword. A "pause" button is critical for Scoopler (or for any real-time service), like in a Tweetmeme or a oneRiot.

Its not eye catchy from a look and feel perspective and I think a lot can be done to improve it.

But, I like Scoopler more than the others right now available.

... and before I finish, Scoopler uses a less known Cloudant, a distributed database service firm (a new type of database) funded by Y Combinator.

Watch What You Post In Your Social Networks

Pouring out your frustrations online? Posting pictures of the wild party that you had? Hold on ... 

A recent survey done by CareerBuilder.com reveals that one in five employers use social networking sites to research job candidates. Some of the critical findings after surveying around 3,100 employers were:

 41% - candidate posted information about them drinking or using drugs

 40% - candidate posted provocative or inappropriate photographs or information

 29% - candidate had poor communication skills

 28% - candidate bad-mouthed their previous company or fellow employee

 27% - candidate lied about qualifications

 22% - candidate used discriminatory remarks related to race, gender, religion, etc.

 22% - candidate's screen name was unprofessional

 21% - candidate was linked to criminal behavior

 19% - candidate shared confidential information from previous employers

 They have also provided suggestions on how to have a clean digital social life:

1. Clean up digital dirt. Make sure to remove pictures, content and links that can send the wrong message to a potential employer before you start your job search.

2. Update your profile regularly. Make sure to include specific accomplishments, inside and outside of work.

3. Monitor comments. Since you can't control what other people say on your site, you may want to use the "block comments" feature.

4. Join groups selectively. While joining a group with a fun or silly name may seem harmless, "Party Monsters R Us" may not give the best impression to a hiring manager. Also be selective about who you accept as "friends."

5. Go private. Consider setting your profile to "private," so only designated friends can view it.

 So, that gives you a good reason to go cleanup stuff ... and may be think thrice before you post those random outbursts of frustration at work. 

 Be responsible! Have fun ...

iCloud - OS/Desktop In The Cloud?

According to the post on Geek.com, first desktop in the cloud has been launched. iCloud allows users to have free online storage (upto 3GB free), applications, virtual desktop and backup.


It provides you with 30 free applications and at this moment, supports only IE and Firefox.

Does this service make sense?

iCloud gives you a whole host of options including a command line console. It also manages internet outage, which they explain in their Q & A section:

... if no Internet connection is available when attempting to save or perform changes to a document, icloud will simply store all changes in a transaction buffer that will be sent and synchronized to the data center once an Internet connection has been re-established.

In my first trial, after playing around for 5-10 mins, my IE crashed (which I can probably attribute to Microsoft), but my in subsequent trials, iCloud/IE refused show me a desktop. Firefox was no exception. It got stuck after using for 5 mins. I had to kill Firefox process to get my other applications work. Having encountered this scenario, I want to point out few things:

- iCloud has to evaluate providing an alternate provision to access the data in case the browser or iCloud desktop does not show up. Uptime of the service is very critical.

- Customization options to make the desktop lighter to a level which a user wants to use will become essential from a user experience perspective.

- After 8 years of development, even if it is an Alpha release, I would expect the application to be relatively fast, but it failed my expectation.

I think is a revolution in the making and I hope their beta release focuses more on performance and reliability more than functionalities. Also, there is massive amount of data going to be stored in the cloud once the user community starts using this application more. It's probably time that they also start thinking about monetization model.

And Here Comes The Flying Car

No more road trips?

Seen flying cars in movies? Here comes one for real.

"Terrafugia Transition" is first flying car and it passed the first flight test on March 5th, 2009.

It can fly up to 450 miles at 115 miles per hour.

"... two-seat, four-wheeled, carbon-fiber-composite aircraft, which can fly up to 450 miles at 115 miles per hour and is distinguished by folding wings that ratchet out of the way when it’s on the ground. That makes the craft just 80 inches wide, narrow enough to tool down the highway—where it can go up to 65 mph and get 30 miles to the gallon."

The video of the first test:



I want 500 meters stretch infront of my apartment so that I can take off this "car". I am going to write a letter to GHMC for leveling the road.

Bespin: Coding In The Cloud

Introducing Bespin from Dion Almaer on Vimeo.

This is a radical change in development. This probably can be called as Coding-as-a-service. The best part for me is that your development environment is accessible anywhere, anytime.

Read more about Bespin and how you can contribute ...

Macbook Wheel - Notebook With No Keyboard

Innovation getting better ...

- No keyboard
- Hummingbird battery that powers the laptop for full 19 mins before it needs to be re-charged

What's puzzling is how to type using the wheel to scroll to each alphabet. Looks cumbersome ....

Will wait for the next generation ...

SaaS?

Should you use SaaS (Software As A Service)?

Yes you can, if:
1. You do not have capital to invest in infrastructure
2. You do not care about data back up

I think SaaS is a great concept and most of it comes for free. But relying on something like salesforce.com or any other similar platform for storing your information, without enough back up plan, sounds risky to me.

What if the service goes down?
How do you take care of backing up of data?

Data backup is mandatory from conpliance perspective. So if you are using AWS or Google Apps, how do you accomplish this?

Comments & ideas weclome ...

ILOG taking Rules further

ILOG has come up with rules for COBOL. I came to know about this a while back, but ran into this post by Daniet Selman (ILOG JRules Rule Studio Lead).

The effort for rules extraction from Legacy systems have been in place for quite sometime now. Rules For COBOL approaches in a different way.

The advantage with this approach is that enterprises can divide-and-conquer their legacy modernization, incrementally externalizing their business rules from COBOL applications and moving them into the BRMS. They can continue to execute the rules as COBOL minimizing the disruption to their system infrastructure.

Interesting. Now gotta learn mainframe to check this out.

Making Java Easier

Shlomo Schwarcz's write up name Making Java Easier on TheServerSide is pretty interesting one.

Some highlights are:

The Java language itself is not the problem, nor the JSP syntax or the JRE API packages. It’s what’s around the language that makes it so difficult to step into.

He suggest simple deployment model, dynamic reloading of classes, a simple web server GUI console and a Visual IDE GUI designer.

Sure, it's a great system for professionals managing large projects but what if I just want a 20 page interactive web site? Why can't I simply write a Servlet or JSP or even a single Java class, copy it to the server and execute it?

The fact is that if you are not a Java guru, then it will be almost impossible to perform the simple task of visually designing a form in NetBeans and then deploying it to a Tomcat or Jetty server.

One interesting comment by Ron Grimes which I pretty much agree to:

For me, the biggest drawback to being a newbie to Java is feeling like you're not a "real" Java developer unless you speak fluently about EJB and all the garbage that came before you decided to jump into the stream. A lot of developers feel like, in order to learn Java, you not only have to learn what is current (frameworks like Spring), but you also have to learn how to maintain all the legacy frameworks that came before it. And, maybe you don't have to learn all that, but you feel lost on Java forums because of all the antiquated features of Java that fewer and fewer people are using, but everyone still talks about.

I agree to a huge extent.

1. It is a nighmare to port a EAR on to different App Servers like WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss etc especially when I am using data sources and JNDI lookups. I need to write all sorts of App Server specific descriptors.
2. The smallest of fixes in the servlet class forces me to redeploying the WAR again.
3. So many frameworks coming out(it is chaos) from all places and there is no standardization.
4. Cannot bank on one framework for long as it may be replaced by another one in less than an year


I hear Groovy/Grails a lot here ...

Free Software?

Quick questions on crisis management

What do you do when you have to deal with a mismanaged project? Here are the constraints:

1. You cannot rewrite the application because client is still strict with timelines
2. Unit testing was not done properly and a bunch of requirements were never coded
3. While fixing defects, more and more defects are getting introduced
4. Resources are not competent enough to handle all the technical difficulties and few of the good ones become heroes are are over worked
5. After being mismanaged, the senior management suggest to go on a 24x7 repair plan and completely over seeing their responsibility in having the project in this situation in the first place. This has resulted in people getting overworked, and resulting in stress

Technocrati

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Innovation - Football way

A recent post I ran in to by Tim Leberecht was really insightful. Most of it can really be applied to IT services.

The post has a quote by Ronaldinho, the soccer player:

"The important thing is to keep on innovating and finding a way to surprise. You always look to surprise, with dribbling, a new move, a new pass. (...) As long as I believe I have the creativity for that, that's what I'll try and do. I'm never going to lose my characteristics because that's what I know how to do. I want to mix everything that is innovative with the same things as always. Perhaps the fans expect me to do all the tricks, the opponents as well. If you don't innovate, they all take the ball away from you. I believe it's important to innovate in order to avoid repetition."

It concludes by saying:

Soccer can be researched, carefully planned, and strategically devised -- however, the most beautiful thing about this "beautiful game" is the fact that there is no lag between idea and implementation. Creativity can be immediately applied and has to be found on the pitch again and again. Every match is a blank slate. There is no history, only anticipation. Nothing is ever the same. This is what business leaders can learn from soccer: Innovation is, literally, a "play," and the best players will win.

So true. Like I said in my previous post, innovate and promote innovation.