The tablet as the new main computer? Quite Possibly.

April 19th, 2012

My tablet seems to be so fast at everything that I am starting to wonder if indeed this might be the next portable computer for the nimble professional. What makes this plausible are a number of (obvious) factors:

  • the new iPad has a near perfect screen, and it’s ridiculously fast at everything I’m doing with it so far.
  • ingenious cover solutions exist that give you a Bluetooth keyboard coupled to a stand, so you get the laptop experience, though this may mean you need a trackpad or mouse to go with it
  • storing your data in the cloud is clearly now a no-brainer
  • remote desktop makes it possible to access a powerful desktop from any location, and these are increasingly available on the web browser as well
  • as a software developer your code is probably on Github and you could use a cloud IDE, and surely you have an automated build system
  • online drawing tools are plenty and some are really good, so you can create your architecture diagrams or other documents without requiring a software running locally and have a comfortable experience
  • rather than printing, you can email, share via to an online share point, place documents on an online collaboration tool
  • to top it off, if you lose your tablet you can remotely wipe it out, or use the find my device feature to help the police trace it

So, what’s left that would tie someone to a desktop, or a laptop? Clearly not very much. Surely, such a transition will come at the price of some inconvenience. Not everything will be perfectly smooth at the start but people will accommodate, akin to the situation where “fail whale” (regularly crashing web sites) came to be tolerated for the convenience of being online.

Google’s vision of Chromebook still intrigues me though, unless it would cost less than $100 why wouldn’t you get a tablet instead? If the new iPad is anything to go by, even Apple may wake up to a time when the traditional MacBook buyers are migrating to the iPad. Unless you are running several Operating Systems on your laptop you may not need to carry it around if you’ve got an iPad. The implication is that the next PC laptops and MacBooks would have to match 2011 servers, those may become more of a niche for the really power hungry IT professionals or media producing consultants.

I read all the buzz about the new iPad screen and I thought, blah blah, sure. But what I’ve experienced is that the whole experience is astonishingly smooth, and that really gets you thinking.

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All Apps are bad: ‘scarenomic’ may be just as harmful as privacy scourging

April 9th, 2012

Can the media tackle any important issue without resorting to hyperboles?

The WSJ piece on Selling You on Facebook, makes an interesting read on privacy issues for the non-initiated, clearly their main target audience. I was going to agree with it wholesale until I realised that the article sweeps too large and makes every app look bad – I mean mobile apps, not Facebook apps which clearly are something else in my opinion.

Yes, it’s true that the general public doesn’t realise the privacy implications of social media. Yes, it’s true that some apps and some companies are abusing the trust implicitly placed in them and taking more than they should. But I disagree with the way the WSJ article seems to be pointing to every app out there, the notion of app itself. That’s not a realistic ways of painting the true picture of what is going on. If that were to be allowed, then you could say the same thing of every human creation that may possibly be put to bad uses. The list would be long, folks wouldn’t feel safe anywhere or at any moment.

I agree that people need to be educated on the privacy issues surrounding social media in general. I disagree with trying to scare people into, perhaps, reading your article. If you try to scare people about every possible thing that could go wrong, then you blur your message and may defeat its purpose. What really helps is giving people self-help clues on what may be happening, and the implications of the specific actions they may be taking online. This should be measured, paced and kept up-to-date. But not a broad sweep because then people are no better off than when they weren’t told anything at all.

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Google Go is good to go now. Where are all the libraries to go with it?

April 1st, 2012

I read an article on ReadWriteWeb, commenting on Google’s announcement that their Go language reached 1.0. I took a quick look, as I did when it was first publicly announced. As then and now, it looks interesting but I personally can’t see it fit in any of the initiatives I am involved in at the moment.

One thing that is constant, and actually infuriating with these new programming language announcements is the way they are presented. Many would showcase a Hello World, Fibonacci, writing a Blog Web site, or writing a To Do List application. I don’t know about you but I’ve rarely come across a real-world problem involving any of these examples. I think it as a form of escapism.

Another problem with any new programming language is that people have to go through a stage of “brainwashing” before they become really productive. That may be luxury for a lot of people at the moment. And lastly, even if a language is great you would be swimming upstream unless you could count on a large amount of libraries to tap into. In that department, the recent wave of JVM based languages are doing well. Even Microsoft, who normally have a massive install base, understood this and is working very hard to bridge its languages with the open source communities out there. I am not yet seeing how Go will help developers get the most out of existing libraries. This also makes me think that it is not targeted at the larger developer community.

It seems that Google Go would suit scaling issues that are mainly due to application execution (CPU) bottlenecks, so not disk or network performance bottlenecks which are actually more common. Targeting those who’d have to otherwise program in C means that Google expects a niche market for this language. Companies like Facebook and Twitter may have good use cases, but those don’t look to be the best of friends with Google nowadays. Would traditional enterprise development groups rush to adopt Google Go? I doubt it.

I am curious how the reactions would be like over next few months.

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Getting serious about programming, I mean Clojure

February 29th, 2012

I’ve never been far away from programming over the years. Last three years definitely saw a significant change in my habits, instead of simply analysing the architecture of some newfangled technology I found myself spending more time and enjoying writing code. It used to be that, after a couple of lines I’d be already bored to tears and often moved on swiftly to something else. I didn’t care because it didn’t matter that I’d be an expert in a particular technology, I seldom claim to be an expert in one technology. When a user issue arose, I am usually able to do my bit or could count on someone who’s the programmer on the job.

When I decided to reorient my career, I went back to some earlier loves, being creative, try and crack difficult technology problems, build and ship solutions myself. One by one I opened up my archives looking for something useful, my exploratory paths took me to my university thesis dissertation: implementing TCP/IP stack on an X.25 network. I was shocked to see that my memory of that stuff is still fresh like it was yesterday, what a shame I didn’t carry on working on that stuff. Then, I realised that actually what I’m doing is only a continuation of those earlier efforts. So I thought, let’s find out what the cool kids are toying with and why they think it cool.

Rediscovering functional programming sort of reignited some long lost buzz. Over last years I learned (or re-learned) to program in OCaml, F#, Lua, Haskell, Erlang, Python, Scala and Clojure. Ruby and Rails framework have been with me since 2006 but they never really became a passion. Of all those languages, Clojure is the one that seriously grabbed my attention and retained it for a long stretch of time. I’m discovering the reason that happened every day.

Suddenly I started writing code by thinking naturally about how I would go about solving a problem, with little or no infrastructure stuff getting in the way. What’s more, some times I’d think of a problem and a solution direction, then imagined that someone must have already solved that, set out to find out and I’d usually come across a code that’d be just like I imagined it. I thought mathematics was the most beautiful thing I learned during my study years, I didn’t get a career in Finance but I didn’t realise that that subject would come back rushing in my life. With functional programming it is sort of happening, though I’ve not had to resort to anything complicated yet.

If you read this blog then you probably know that I think that “laziness” is a good attribute for a programmer. Few things thrill me more than finding out that there’s code I don’t need to write. Scala is good, but it’s got too much Java in it and it’s not beautiful to read. Clojure however is just a superb language, and I like the way I don’t squirm at someone else’s code. ClojureScript is the icing on the cake, it makes end to end internet solution crafting a joy.

I am not suggesting that other programming languages aren’t good or anything, I am only saying that Clojure has become my favourite programming language.

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Will Windows 8 eventually drop the acid colours from Metro?

February 22nd, 2012

It is interesting to watch what i would call Microsoft’s renaissance – in the French language interpretation of it. It is not yet clear if the markets (consumers!) are wholeheartedly responding. But the telling signs are multiple in my opinion, the first sign for me is a combination of the following:

  • when I saw the first preview of Windows Phone 7
  • the developer tools group’s genuine embrace of open source
  • the work they are doing with the programming languages, think F#, what their language designers say these days
  • the very impressive Azure product line
  • and the first develop preview of Windows 8

I like the general user experience of Metro Style UI. The one thing I haven’t warmed up to yet is the acid colours, those colours are “too loud” to my taste. That would be my single criticism for now. I hope there would be a way to tone that down when it eventually ships.

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Effective Scala: open source book from Twitter

February 20th, 2012

Another useful open source resource from Twitter, Effective Scala is well worth the read for anyone interested in or using Scala.

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Sense of security and privacy: Who’s Zoomin who?

February 15th, 2012

I find it ironic that while one company gets shouted at for leaking its mobile users address book, lots of others might be routinely doing it without anybody saying a word. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out what is going on.

Developers are tinkerers by nature, they seldom stick to written procedures – otherwise they may not be very good. From the moment a platform software development kit is made available, people will poke around to see what they can do with it. As you poke around, you are bound to find undocumented features, wholes and what-not, and depending on your inclination you may make some unconventional moves. If word gets out and people like your moves then you are a genius, if people don’t like what you did then you get named names. That’s how it goes.

I can hardly believe that only one company, Path in this case, were downloading user’s address book. I’m sure others are, were, or will be doing so too. What happens is that something pops up, a big howl ensues. Then a few words of apology are issued, the noise dies down, people go back to their businesses, some quietly continuing whatever-may-be-questionable.

This is a bit like what goes on with IT security. When a paper is published on some software vulnerability, some debates follow and drum rolls for vendor patches coming to the rescue. Once such holes are deemed patched by the software vendor, the focus shifts away from the issue and not much is said about it. But even then, a lot of people can’t actually be bothered with software updates so they remain exposed.

The reality we live in is that we often have a false sense of security and privacy. It’s not like the bad guys would be waiting to hear about some security vulnerability before attempting to discover and exploit them, it’s likely that by the time a vulnerability is public it’s already old news for serious hackers. Likewise, the talk is on unauthorised address book download today, tomorrow another company may be found using your mobile location or device’s camera for some unpublished uses.

The tittle of this post is borrowed from an Aretha Franklin’s hit song from the 80′s.

UPDATE:

Seeing the headlines and some of the blogs out there, there is apparent outrage about Apple (only them?) having allowed this to happen. I am very curious if anyone checked that this problem doesn’t exist on Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, or other connected systems. I guess it’s much easier to cry ‘Haro sur le baudet’.

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Posted in Internet, Social Media | 2 Comments »

Twitter Bootstrap UI framework is proving to be a hit, well done to them

February 13th, 2012

When it was initially made public, I thought Twitter Bootstrap could prove quite useful and I blogged in that direction. Many months later, I can now see that a lot of people adopted it. They’re recently released a version 2.0, which may well be a response to Zurb foundation. A glance at Github suggests that Twitter Bootstrap is one of the most popular project there.

I don’t have any affiliation with either organisations, but I do like to see something so useful in widespread use. This can only help users and developers, companies that build on such toolkits may be able to optimise their web application interface design costs too.

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An iOS UI overhaul beckons

February 13th, 2012

I was looking at the sharing-bookmarking menu of Safari on my iPhone, clearly Facebook is going to be in here at some stage, perhaps one other. But the problem is that there is no room left. So, either Apple won’t expand the feature, which I doubt, or they’d have to redesign it, which I’m inclined to think. My guess would then be, away with the drop down menu concept, a new slider (up/down, left/right) would be much nicer and scale better. Would that be too radical?

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The power of tribes (The Economist)

February 3rd, 2012

In this artcile, The Economist argues that

Businesspeople need to reckon with the Anglosphere, the Sinosphere and the Indosphere.

The article goes a little further and says that

Reading a contract is useful, but you also need to be able to read people

The arguments here echo a bit some of the thoughts expressed in an earlier post of mine, in turn inspired by a discussion on comfort zones (read that post for more on that topic). I guess that’s how it goes. I found it insightful, read the full article on The Economist here: The power of tribes.

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Posted in Innovation, Leadership | 1 Comment »

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