As I transition from my old life to my new life – that sounds so dramatic, doesn’t it? – I’m letting certain domains lapse and taking projects from an “archived on their own domain” state to a “archived on this site” state. I think the Internet is one of the greatest made-made creations there is, and I hate to see any of the information shared on it – no matter how trivial – be obliterated.

I’m especially thankful to the creators of HTTrack Website Copier for making a tool that allows people like me to take our work and archive a whole domain’s worth to a single folder. Comments get lost in the case of a WordPress blog, which is a shame, but it’s a small price to pay for the ability to archive an entire site.

I won’t pretend that archiving the site below is anything other than an ego trip of wanting to remember the work I did in years past, but as someone who has a passion for keeping digital memories of all sorts, this is something I’d been planning for a while.

The Two Inch View was a Web site I created under contract for Microsoft. This was back in the heady days of Pocket PCs, Smartphones (note the capital “S” on that), and Portable Media Centers (a.k.a PMCs). A contact of mine at Microsoft wanted an “instant content portal”, so I created one. It was all real content, written by me, but it was created to support specific marketing pushes – each month I’d suggest topics for them, and we’d decide what would get written about. It was a fun little sandbox to play in, different from Pocket PC Thoughts and my other sites.

The amazing WordPress theme was designed by my friend, Fabrizio Fiandanese, and I recall getting several messages a month asking where I got the WordPress theme from, whether or not it was for sale, etc. It was a beautiful Web site for its time (and still is).

In my current role for HTC and dealing with vendors, I kind of chuckle at some of the ways I thought back when I did this project…if only I knew then what I know now! Enough talk, into the archives it goes…

Truer words have never been spoken: you don’t start with a cool technology and try to market it to customers…you start with the need of a customer, find the cool technology to address that need, then market the solution. It will sell itself. I’ve lost count of the number of products I’ve seen/reviewed where the technology is all the product has going for it; the customer experience is a disaster. I wish more companies understood this…

I got my hands on my first Android phone a couple of weeks ago – an HTC Incredible S – and it was of the Euro/Asia 3G frequency variety. That means I wouldn’t be able to use it on the Rogers network here in Canada. I really wanted to test this phone out though, so I figured a relatively easy option would be to get a SIM card from Wind – they happen to operate on the 1700/2100 frequencies – and simply forward my old cell number to this new number. Seemed simple enough, right?

When I got home though and put the SIM into the new phone, I was impressed at how everything was automagically configured. Within the first day though, I noticed something really weird: my device said I was roaming. On Android – or on this Android phone at least – every time it happened I’d get a pop-up window I’d have to dismiss three times. I decided to call Wind today to ask them if this was normal, and they directed me to their coverage map…and I was surprised by what I saw.

That little green arrow? That’s me. Yes, the community I live in is on the western edge of the city, but it’s still part of Calgary and the Wind Mobile coverage ends about 2 KM from my house. Because I’m on the edge of the coverage, it sometimes works, but not reliably so. When I bought the Wind SIM I knew I was buying into an urban wireless network, but I thought for sure they’d at least cover the entire city. Nope.

The good news is that I’m in the planned expansion area – the yellow is where they expect to expand to by the end of the summer.

I didn’t get the full context right from the start – basically, it looks like the singers ask the name of the woman they’re chatting with, then sing their catchy song using that name. You can tell their aren’t native English speakers because they pronounce it “Deeeana” in the song, but I doubt the woman on the other end cared – she was clearly thrilled with a bunch of strangers singing her a song.

Image from Wired.com

Today I watched something that completely and totally captured my attention: IBM’s supercomputer, dubbed Watson, took on two Jeopardy champions (Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter). Watson is packing some serious hardware:

“The 360 Power7 chips that make up Watson’s brain represent IBM’s best and brightest processor technology. Each Power7 is capable of over 500 GB/second of aggregate bandwidth, making it particularly adept at manipulating data at high speeds. FLOPS-wise, a 3.55 GHz Power7 delivers 218 Linpack gigaflops. For comparison, the POWER2 SC processor, which was the chip that powered cyber-chessmaster Deep Blue, managed a paltry 0.48 gigaflops, with the whole machine delivering a mere 11.4 Linpack gigaflops.” – via HPCwire

So how did it go? In short, Watson got off to a commanding lead and was crushing it early on…until the humans adapted. You see, Watson is extremely accurate when it comes to coming up with the right question to fit the answer to the clue. There were a couple of flubs, but for the most part I’d say Watson was as good or better than the human champions. Where Watson truly shone though was reaction time. You could just tell watching the humans madly pressing the buzzer that Watson had them beat when it came to triggering the buzzer when it knew the answer. I noticed something though about halfway through: I think that the humans started buzzing in without knowing the answer.

This is pure speculation, but to me it looked like the two human champs switched to triggering the buzzer before the clue was even partly finished – I think they both realized that if they waited until they heard the full clue, Watson would continue to beat them. By the end of the game Rutter was at $5000, Watson was at $5000, and Jennings was at $2000. This is a far cry from the first 5 minutes where Watson was snagging all the questions.

I don’t know the mechanics of Jeopardy very well, but it looks like the contestant can buzz in at any time after the clue has started to be read aloud. It’s a risk buzzing in on something that you might not know the answer to, but it’s a call that a human can make on the fly – and one that a machine would be hard-pressed to make.

One of the things they didn’t explain fully was how Watson go the clue: they said it was “delivered as a text file”, but what does that mean exactly? Is there someone pressing a SUBMIT key on a keyboard as Alex Trebek finishes the clue? No, there would be too much latency with that approach. Does Watson get permission to read a text file as Trebek finished the question? That seems equally problematic – it would have to be machine driven somehow. Voice recognition would seem to be the only fair way to tackle this problem, but if Watson mis-recognized a word, it would throw the whole game off. This is something I hope they explain more about later on.

This was some fascinating TV! I’m looking forward to watching the next two episodes.

UPDATE: This article says that Watson is “fed the answer in text form at the same time the answer panel appears to the two human players.” That explains Watson’s edge in buzzing in – it can parse the text file faster than a human being can read the clue. The only way for the humans to win then is to buzz in before they read the clue. Gutsy!

It’s somewhat laughable that in 2010, Outlook still lacks the basic software intelligence to help make the lives of its users easier. If there are known elements (day of the week, day of the month, a time, and a time zone) it shouldn’t be difficult to create a function in the software that would automatically parse and order that data into an appointment – all that would be missing is a description and location (though the latter could be part of the data points). Despite everyone embracing the cloud, I still stand by Outlook as my pain productivity weapon for email, calender, tasks, contacts, etc. It works extremely well for me – far better than any cloud-based solution I’ve tried.

I should add that I’ve seen some Outlook add-ins that do some things like this – specifically with contacts – but I don’t like loading up Outlook with add-ins. The core functionality of Outlook needs to improve.

Figure 1: What is this, 1994 all over again?

Whenever bandwidth is discussed, there’s always lots of finger pointing because there are so many variables, and players involved, that it’s rarely a simple issue. My particular bandwidth bugaboo this morning? I was ticked off that Dropbox [referral] was only uploading at 10 KB/s. I left a 900 MB transfer running all night and it wasn’t finished in the morning, and that’s when I discovered the awful speed. My first instinct was to point a finger at Dropbox, thinking there was some sort of bandwidth throttling going on. I did a speed test with a tool my ISP provides (speedtest.shaw.ca) and was shocked to see 1.7 Mbps downloads and 107 kbps uploads (Figure 1). It’s normally 20x that on downloads and 10x that on uploads, so I knew something was wrong beyond just Dropbox. (more…)

I can’t understand a word of this video, but the visuals are hilarious! It’s fascinating watch some users turn on Apple – they’re a company that has specialized in giving users a specific, highly controlled experience that for the most part works really well. But it seems Apple has finally crossed the line with the iPhone 4 “Antennagate” in terms of being too pushy with their users (“You’re holding it wrong”), and some people are lashing back. It’s very interesting to watch this play out.

I type fast, but sometimes my accuracy is awful – and this is a good illustration as to why it’s important to actually stop and read what the spell check is suggesting before you accept it and share that message.