cloud passing by
Credit: Diego Sevilla Ruiz

“Cloud Computing will revolutionize IT!”

Really? What’s Cloud Computing?

“Instead of people installing software on their local computers, future applications will run on host computers!”

So Cloud Computing is just a funny name for a client/server Mainframe Architecture?

“But it’s not running on a Mainframe! It’s running in the Cloud!”

So it’s an application running on the World Wide Web… like Yahoo Mail and Google Docs?

“Not at all! In Cloud Computing, you own your application and the data running on it!”

So it’s an application I upload to my web host, like WordPress.org or EyeOS…

“No. No. No. Because with Cloud Computing you only pay for the processing power you use!”

Etc, etc, etc.

This sums up my last two years’ worth of trying to figure out what the heck this “Cloud Computing” thing is. I’ve downloaded and then uploaded cloud desktop applications that work in ways so esoteric as to make them useless. I joined Amazon’s AWS only to find it offers little more than my current Web Hosting provider. I’ve read lots of articles brimming with buzzwords like “single-tenancy”, “service-oriented architecture”, and “integration connector,” none of these articles apply a consistent definition of “the Cloud.”

Entropy is a fairly easy concept to define, the measure of disorder in a closed system, and a rather difficult concept to grasp, but one that furnishes us with wonderful insights into the way the world around us operates. The amount of entropy in the Universe is ever-increasing, the energy concentrated in our sun is constantly radiating away in light and heat, dissipating into an unusable state, absolute undifferentiation.

Sunflower
Credit: riandreu

Living things form “pockets of resistance” to the force of entropy. They do this through syntropy, or negentropy, which is the entropy we export to reduce our internal entropy; in other words, it’s the waste energy we generate to keep our soma in an organized working state. We collect the sun’s waste energy and use it to organize ourselves through syntropy.

How Much Information Entropy?
Credit: Moi

In Information Systems, entropy, known as Shannon entropy for Claude Shannon, is the measure of uncertainty in a random variable. A coin toss has one bit of entropy for the 50/50 chance of it turning up heads or tails, 0 or 1. A six-sided dice carries three bits of entropy for the possible outcomes it may produce with each roll (1 (000), 2 (001), 3 (010), 4 (011), 5 (100), 6 (101)). The weather has an amount of entropy difficult to quantify, but it varies from location to location. The weather in New York has more entropy than the weather in Southern California because Southern California has a more consistent climate. Similarly, in our first example, if we were dealing with a rigged coin, one that turned up heads more often than tails, then there would be less than one bit of entropy in each coin toss because we would expect heads more frequently than tails.

Web developers put content online to be consumed, but we have little control over the mediums consuming it. Web pages are rendered on mobile phones, printers, televisions, and their semantic content consumed by a variety of bots, each with their own requirements and best-practices for layout. Here I’ll outline three commons solutions to providing a print version of web page content.

Defining Printer-Friendly Design

First we need to define the differences between design for the screen and design for print. Computer monitors and mobile phones are very different media from paper, even when displaying static content. Screens are backlit, while paper is reflective. Web development for the screen must take into account screen resolutions, while presentation on paper must consider page dimensions and toner consumption.

Jennifer Kyrnin has a definitive list of print-friendly attributes, changes that should be made to web content before outputting it to the printed document. Here are the three I find most important, but the list can get much longer depending on your needs:

1. Eliminate dark backgrounds and darken font colors presented over them.
2. Do something with links, either display full URLs, emphasize the text, or remove them altogether.
3. Remove headers, footers, side menus, and advertising.

Server-Side Solutions

One strategy for handling both print and screen layouts of a web page is to have two methods for building the page on the server. For example, w3schools’ “PRINT” button at the bottom of each page opens a new window/tab accessing the same page, but with an “output=print” variable added to the end of the URL, which the VBScript accesses via a GET method. When the VBScript detects the “print” flag, it builds the page without all the extraneous content.

Isaac Asimov Entry on Freebase

With Google’s aquisition of Metaweb the searchopolis takes a stake in the seemingly-forever-emerging Semantic Web, a concept with endlessly verbose standards and few demonstrable applications for all it promises. I yawned when I read of Google’s move, remembering a few years ago when I explored Freebase, Metaweb’s semantic database. I even tried downloading and playing with their semantically-rich database version of Wikipedia… and was really unimpressed. It was 3GB of schemas, xml, and ontology, seeming to add up to little of practical value.

Was I ever wrong. I returned to the database this last weekend and found a community of several hundred users maintaining a browsable schema, with some of these volunteer ontologists having contributed millions of facts to the database the same way people devote thousands of hours to maintaining Wikipedia. On its surface, the database just seems like a bunch of web pages, you click through the associations as you would on Wikipedia, with articles and entries leading into each other in standard hypertext fashion.

Where the value of semantic associations comes into play is when you experiment with the Freebase Query Editor, where you can search for data in explicit detail, tailoring it to your specific needs. For example, with the following query I can get a list of computer scientists born before 1950:

[{
  "b:type":        "/computer/computer_scientist",
  "date_of_birth": null,
  "date_of_birth< =": "1950",
  "education": [{
    "institution": null,
    "id":          null
  }],
  "name":          null,
  "id":            null,
  "type":          "/people/person"
}]

Pager, Tamagotchi and Psion Organiser

Pager, Tamagotchi and Psion Organiser
Credit: steve greer

Every time a new device comes around, the self-proclaimed techsperts start declaring the death of older devices. It’s boring to keep hearing critics say things like the Smartphone is the “death of laptops,” the Kindle is the “death of books,” and the iPad is the “death of PCs” and the “death of e-Readers.”

Eken M001 Android Tablet
Credit: mrbill

I can see the iPad being nice for lying on the couch, flipping through websites and comic books, or playing relaxing video games that aren’t too intense. As appealing a toy as it is, I don’t find it very hard to resist buying the Android tablet equivalent. I get whatever it could provide me between my existing devices, my laptop, e-reader, and Smartphone. Like a lot of other technologies on display at Best Buy, the tablet pc doesn’t fit any particular need in my life.

In the tradition of Matt Groening’s Life in Hell…

Abstraction Guy

“We really need a Factory Pattern for that Factory Pattern.”
Pros: Produces really really really loosely-coupled systems.
Cons: Output will never escape the layers of code.

Buzzword Bumbler

“This enterprise needs to move to a service-oriented paradigm in the cloudplex to encapsulate polydactylism!”
Pros: Impresses the heck out of people who don’t know better.
Cons: Someone will eventually call bullshit.
Note: For fun try putting two in the same room to watch them throw nonsense at one another.

Bleeding Edge

“Why don’t we just replace the company phonelist spreadsheet with a FOAF browser plugged into an object database?”
Pros: Thinks outside the box.
Cons: Must regularly be beaten back into the box.

RHoK Project Submission Form

Before various media dimbulbs perverted it to be synonymous with “criminal act,” the word “hack” was a geek term that meant “an appropriate application of ingenuity.” A “hacker” was someone particularly adept at pushing the limits of a system, finding the flaws in it to make it stronger, and discovering new ways to use existing systems for both fun and productivity.

This last weekend Vicky and I took part in the Random Hacks of Kindess 1.0 event in Washington D.C., where code-monkeys and other IT professionals teamed up with assorted Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to craft solutions to pressing needs. The event was sponsored by Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo, with other events being simultaneously held around the world in Jakarta, Nairobi, Sydney and elsewhere. Developers around the world were able to coordinate via online collaboration and streaming video on open-source solutions to pressing humanitarian needs.

I almost missed it this year with so much else going on, but I wanted to take a moment to bring your attention this Ada Lovelace Day to Dr. Anita Borg, founder of the Institute for Women and Technology in 1997, renamed the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology in 2003 after her death. The institute seeks to “increase the impact of women on all aspects of technology, and increase the positive impact of technology on the world’s women” through a strategy it calls “The Virtuous Cycle” where women learn leadership skills through embracing engineering and technical professions, which they use to influence the design and implementation of technological solutions to world problems, which demonstrates the capabilities of technically-empowered women, which influences societal perceptions, which results in more women taking technological paths to leadership.

Anita Borg
January 17, 1949 – April 6, 2003
Credit: Heinz Awards

Anita Borg received her doctorate in computer science from New York University in 1981, and in 1987 she started the Systers e-mail list, which has grown into the “world’s largest email community of technical women in computing.” She also started the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing technical conference for women. In 1999, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Presidential Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology. Today Google offers the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship each year to women seeking higher education in Computer Science in Borg’s honor.

In addition to all these amazing achievements, she also wins my geek-vote for the coolest name in Computer Science “Dr. Borg.”

JavaScript Frameworks

I recently checked out Google’s AJAX Libraries, which, aside from being inaccurately titled, provides a means for web developers to access functionality in a wide variety of popular JavaScript frameworks and toolkits without having to host the libraries themselves. Simply include the base Google library, and then use it to load whatever framework you want to access in you code. It’s not for me, as I’m a total control-freak when it comes to production implementations of my code, and I don’t like having my web pages hang up trying to access URIs on outside domains, which definitely happens to the code I run locally using this tool; however, it does provide a convenient playground for testing out different JavaScript frameworks and toolkits.

You can do anything with JavaScript, but you have to program around its shortcomings. How JavaScript functions depends on the ECMAScript engine running it, with Firefox running TraceMonkey, Chrome running V8, and Internet Explorer running Trident, it makes it difficult to write code that runs the same in all browsers. Then there’s JavaScripts’ object-orientation strategy, which uses prototype chains for inheritance, confusing most OO programmers. Finally, there’s some major oversights in JavaScript functionality, like the fact that it lacks a trim() function.

There are two types of JS Frameworks, those that extend JS functionality for the advanced programmer and those that simplify coding for the novice. If you’re an advanced programmer, it’s nice to have true object-orientation in your JavaScript. If you’re a novice, it’s nice to be able to whip out some fancy special effects with just a few lines of code. What follows is my understanding and impressions of these frameworks as I used Google’s Libraries to play with them.

In his book Chess Metaphors, about chess, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, Diego Rasskin-Gutman devotes a short section to the popular myths, literature, and films dealing with characters creating artificial humans from motivations like desire, necessity, curiosity, and power. More fascinating than the motivations for producing AIs, is the evolving origins of where the artificial life comes from in fiction:

8 AD

Pygmalion et Galatée
Credit: Alex Bakharev

One of the myths retold in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is of King Pygmalion who, when he grows disenchanted with real women, sculpts a statue of a woman with whom he falls in love. The Goddess Venus brought the statue to life in response to Pygmalion’s prayers, and the King married her. There were other examples of artificial life in Greek mythology, but this is the most compelling throughout the following millennia, inspiring numerous works of art, including George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion, which was later remade as the 1956 musical My Fair Lady

1800s

Rabi Loew and Golem
Credit: Mikolas Ales

As the legend goes, the 16th century rabbi of Prague Judah Loew ben Bezalel created a Golem out of clay or soil, bringing it to life with the word “emet” on its forehead. When the Golem had terrorized those prosecuting the Jews sufficiently to have them relent, the rabbi killed his creation by erasing the letter “e” from its forehead, leaving “met,” Hebrew for “death.” Although there is divine intervention involved in the creation of this artificial being, everything is under the rabbi’s control.

1818

Frontispiece to the revised edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Credit: Theodore Von Holst

A story of artificial life without anything divine in its origin’s is Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, where Dr. Frankenstein fashions “the monster” using ambiguous means; however, Dr. Frankenstein’s background in chemistry and other sciences certainly contributed to his success in creating life. The monster is an outcast, abandoned by the fearful doctor and alienated from other people due to his frightful appearance. So a second trend appears in the myths of artificial life, that the more involved a human is in the creation of life, the more inhuman that life becomes.

1921 and 1927

R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)
Credit: BBC

This trending of artificial life into malevolence continues with Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), where artificial humans, mass produced at a factory, revolt and drive the human race to extinction. The Machine from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis also serves as a cautionary tale, engineered by Doctor Rotwang, the robot impersonates the leader of the workers and uses their trust to inspire a revolt. In the first example, the artificials use their overwhelming numbers to overthrow humanity, in the second, a single artificial uses its resemblance to humanity to manipulate it. The robots grow increasingly insidious as they grow powerful.

2001

Artificial Intelligence: AI

Although not in Rasskin-Gutman’s examples, the robots in the film Artificial Intelligence: A.I both blend in with humanity and are mass-produced; however, Spielberg and Kubrick’s future AIs are highly benevolent beings, curious and generous. They lament the extinction of the human race that we brought upon ourselves, and try to understand us by resurrecting humans out of space-time. Although this new myth has yet to withstand a few decades of time to see if its message will stick in cultural memory, it does signal a new direction for human perceptions of artificial life, from divine gifts, to manufactured monsters, and now manufactured gods. “The secret of life is sought in a gradient of divine intervention to human intervention, which is also a temporal gradient,” Rasskin-Gutman notes, “representing the triumph of science over religion.”