Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

My copy of Edward Tufte's The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint arrived in the mail today. Overall, a nice collection of arguments against the typical slide based presentation, all originating from the low resolution of a projected slide. Here is a slightly more verbose review than in this post. I'm now tempted to order his other books on presenting information.

I just posted low resolution PDF versions of my recent presentations on XML-RPC and ZODB. The setup is hopefully Google friendly now, though the site's internal search engine still can't index anything other than ASCII text.

I'm not entirely happy with how the slides are organised online, but it works for now, so I'll leave it as is. In future I want the slide's outline tagged to the slide itself, so it isn't just an image.

Saturday's LJ Meet Pictures are up. I'm not very happy with this lot. Most were out of focus, the lighting is poor and I forgot to set the date after changing batteries, so they are all stamped Jan 1, 2002.

Slide Presentation #3 turned out much better. I wasn't reading out of slides.

Still needs work though. Next time: one point per slide, maximum two minutes to a slide. Fewer bullet points, more infographics. Text just doesn't get the point across like a illustration does.

Slides are available at my site. Contact me if you want a version you can use for a slideshow.

For anyone considering switching to Mac OS X: here is my guide to the best apps on the platform.

Brian at Unsanity.org is the latest in a series of people who've been complaining that the Internet email system needs an overhaul to be spam resistant.

But, I have to ask, isn't that happening already? How many of you are heavily dependent on email anymore? I do all my collaboration over RSS feeds and instant messenger. Email is now just a tool for receiving payment receipts, contacting people that I normally have little to no contact with, and for some mailing lists that refuse to upgrade to the new collaboration systems — and I should also note — are increasingly becoming irrelevant to me.

Spam happens when your email address gets posted somewhere that a spammer can pick it up from. Most of the time that will be the public archives of some mailing list.

As long as I control distribution of my email address, I don't have to worry about spam.

How does fuso13 manage to keep getting into such situations? Why can't I have a life that fun?

I notice that my recent writing is weaker than it was when I wrote regularly. And yet, some of my best writing was just a few months ago, when in love and separated by continents. I miss that clarity of thought.

The only way back there is by reading and writing more, and indeed, both are high priority now.

But now I must sleep, and then I must debug my code.

Three years ago, when looking for a digital replacement to a paper diary, I discovered LiveJournal and promptly signed up. This was meant to be a private diary but LiveJournal had no support for private posts at that time and so everything I posted was public, protected only by obscurity.

During the next few weeks several of my colleagues at work got LiveJournal accounts, and then their friends too, and soon people I didn't know where reading what I wrote. It didn't bother me much because I had spent most of the previous year as a journalist. I was used to writing for the public and receiving feedback. The difference here was that an online journal gave me a freedom of expression that very few people get in print. I wrote about my life, my work, of what I thought of things. I didn't care much for who was reading my journal or what they thought of it.

That carefree existence didn't last long. LiveJournal's popularity exploded and it got to the point where I discovered my father had an LJ account too! That was the period of my first publicity crisis.

What was I writing about? Who was reading what I wrote? Should I be making so much of my life public? Should I be allowing complete strangers to read all this?

The crisis wasn't as much for the security of my identity as for making my emotional status public knowledge. I didn't believe privacy and the Internet were compatible (and still do). David Brin's excellent essay on the future of privacy is worth a plug here. What bothered me was what bothers everyone: making my fears public knowledge.

My journal didn't emerge unscathed from the crisis. brad had implemented security levels and custom security by then and I started actively using that feature. Public posts got filtered for emotional content. But the journal didn't die. Three years later, it's still alive and frequently updated.

And in these three years, I've seen several others go through the same crisis. Some were so badly affected, they deleted their journals. Others survived but made their identity obscure. Yet others make a mix of public and friends-only posts. This crisis is such a common occurrence now that even the mainstream media has started to take notice. The New York Times posted an article yesterday (get your free registration here). Also interesting is this follow-up from one of the people the NYT article mentions.

I have a sore throat. Expecting to be mute by the morning. This week hasn't been very good in the health department. But at least I got some decent code written. Need to slap a Web UI on it now and get it live before Monday is here.

New: Google News India.

Now I wish they had an RSS feed too.

From Riva Logic's front page:

Riva Logic is an IT consulting and development company that provides services to a broad range of clients. Riva Logic was founded to help clients solve I.T. problems and to realise their business goals through strategic I.T.solutions that really work. RivaLogic delivers dynamic, engaging, and easy-to-use sollutions that are aligned to your strategies.

Contrast this with the front page of Antarctica Systems:

Enterprises have made huge investments in information, yet users still struggle to find what they need.

Antarctica’s visualization software improves the return on the investment you’ve already made, by doing away with conventional result lists and the need for complex querying. Whether it’s a document repository or a data warehouse, our map interface gives your information a facelift and your users a clear path to what they're looking for.

Which one tells you what the company actually does?

In my mailbox today:

From: postmaster@vsnl.net
Subject: Re: Account#: 143694251 - Purchase More pre-paid Hour before they ran out

They tell me I only have "1.362370" hours left in my account. Two days ago, I bought 500 hours. Customer service is getting a piece of my mind once the "24-hour service" that only runs 9 to 5 on weekdays opens again on Monday.

From the page:

A socio-cognitive grid is a complex system offering an environment that people can use for the successful and efficient execution of their everyday activities. Much like an electrical grid that provides the power for electrical devices to operate, a socio-cognitive grid provides cognitive and social resources that people can access on electronic devices in support of common activities such as shopping and socialising.

To summarise: "people use technology to talk to each other." They're holding a workshop to marvel at this?

In Revenge of the Nerds, Paul Graham argues that languages are evolving towards Lisp:

If you look at these languages in order, Java, Perl, Python, you notice an interesting pattern. At least, you notice this pattern if you are a Lisp hacker. Each one is progressively more like Lisp. Python copies even features that many Lisp hackers consider to be mistakes. You could translate simple Lisp programs into Python line for line. It's 2002, and programming languages have almost caught up with 1958.

But Paul Prescod disagrees:

Python is not growing towards Lisp. Python's most directly Lisp-inspired features were added very early in Python's lifetime. Guido was a new language designer then and had not mastered the habit of saying "NO". When people told him that he could borrow these cool features from another language he did so without entirely thinking through the consequences. For the first several years the features were an extremely bad fit. Other improvements to Python made them a slightly better fit more recently, but at the same time, other new features in Python have made them less important and less useful.

And more Python links: Paul Perscod again on why he promotes Python and dislikes Perl, Google's Peter Norvig on Python for Lisp Programmers, and his collection of infrequently answered Python questions. Kevin Altis says Python is an agile programming language, and Uche Ogbuji explains.

Peter Norvig also has a presentation on design patterns in dynamic programming.

LinkedIn's about page tells a story rather than the standard marketing puffery, and I think, explains the site's purpose better than most other About pages I've seen before. I haven't gone deeper into the site yet, but Cory Doctorow has. Seems pretty interesting.

Paul Graham's brilliant piece Hackers and Painters finally explains who a hacker really, really is. I'm tempted to quote bits here that I particularly identify with, but there is so much worth quoting that using only a few pieces would do severe injustice to the rest, and using all of it would make this post run into several pages. You're better off reading it all yourself.

Tim Bray promises commentary soon.

Bruce Eckel: Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing:

After I had worked with Python (free at www.Python.org) for awhile -- a language which can build large, complex systems -- I began noticing that despite an apparent carelessness about type checking, Python programs seemed to work quite well without much effort, and without the kinds of problems you would expect from a language that doesn't have the strong, static type checking that we've all come to "know" is the only correct way of solving the programming problem.

This became a puzzle to me: if strong static type checking is so important, why are people able to build big, complex Python programs (with much shorter time and effort than the strong static counterparts) without the disaster that I was so sure would ensue?

Very nicely explained piece on why strong-typing is no guarantee of well written code.

From today's Times of India, Bangalore edition, page 12:

HotSpot for wireless Net access
Internet roaming, popularly known as WiFi, is fast becoming a rage, not only with business community but at commercial places as well.

WiFi (wireless fidelity) or HotSpot is already being extensively used across the US with Manhattan alone accounting for over 3,500 HotSpots.

WiFi started off with the Starbucks coffee chain which used this as its unique selling point (USP). Now, almost all the leading hotels (such as Marriot Group of Hotels) and airports are replete with HotSpots.

The trend is catching up in India as well, starting from the hospitality segment to healthcare and premier college campuses.

WiFi works on radio technology offering the most-preferred Internet roaming facility to executives. HotSpot indicates a public access point where anyone with a valid tool can access the Net wirelessly. It is significantly fast compared with the narrow dial-up lines or conventional leased lines.

WiFi provides the user freedom by allowing him to connect to the Internet from wherever he is.

...

The amazing people at Times of India had the gall to publish this drivel under the heading "Cutting Edge". This piece was written by Mini K. Joseph. Anyone have an email address?

After hearing all the fuss about the new iTunes Music Store, I upgraded to iTunes 4 and last night, bought Beck's Sea Change from the store for $9.99. The download took most of the night on my dial-up connection and the files came down in MPEG-4 AAC format with ".m4p" extensions. The meta-data on each file includes my name and email address as the purchaser. A quick Google search reveals that at least two AAC plugins for XMMS exist (1, 2), but I haven't checked if they actually work yet.

iTunes had no hassles burning me an audio CD of the downloaded music, so I did that and tested the CD in three CD players around the house: in the same drive that burnt the CD, in a half-decade old Sony system, and in a cheap MP3/VCD/CD desktop player that my brother uses in his room. It played in all three but was extremely noisy on the Sony. I assume the Sony system wasn't designed for CD-Rs. The other two played it just fine.

The $9.99 rate (Rs. 473) for a full album is rather steep considering that the same CD at Planet M or MusicWorld will be about Rs. 350 and will come on better media, in a better audio format, with a protective case, cover art and possibly lyrics too.

However, I still think that the iTunes Music Store will now be my primary source for new music considering all the things it has going for it: I don't have to go to a store and find that the album I wanted isn't available, I can look up the Net for reviews before I commit myself to a purchase, I can buy individual tracks instead of the whole album (99¢ per track), and top it all, the sheer convenience of not having to get away from my desk to buy a new album.

Tim Bray has an excellent write-up on how the iTunes Music Store fits in with the WWW.