Cubegeek

Flash & Cold Fusion

My two cents.

Flash on Apple? No. What difference does it make? It's the difference between legacy applications and new stuff, which is to say if the trend continues that Android will suck up all of the Flash world and Apple rejects it, Apple will be in the better long term position.

I seem to recall that Flash was the stuff of Web 1.0, back when it used to belong to a company called Macromedia and the greatest authoring tool in the world was Dreamweaver and HomeSite. Are you kidding me? And back when Adobe purchased Macromedia, what I recall was that the whole edifice was crumbling under its own weight. Adobe was the ship almost too late to save a drowning witch. Considering the number of other video standards that are out there, the big deal with Flash just doesn't seem to be a big deal to me. The best developers will easily adapt to new tools.

Just because you can name a product Cold Fusion doesn't mean you can defy the laws of thermodynamics.

A High School Math Memory

In Father Cooper's basement I learned many embarrassing things. One of them was that I didn't know what factorial meant. But there was an HP calculator in that basement that I could program. The factorial function meant 1x2x3x4 all the way to n. On the HP calculator, the biggest number it could handle was 99.999999 E99. And the closest way to get to that number was to program in 69 factorial. If you did so, the display would whir and after about 20 seconds it would flash the answer.

At the time, the idea that you could get a machine to count to such a ridiculously large number (which is bigger than the number of atoms in the known universe) in under a minute was crazy cool and mind-bending. There was no such need for those kinds of numbers, but here was a machine that could count that high.

My iPhone can count higher. It can do 103 factorial in a split second giving me 9.9029 E163.

GestureWorks Open Source Vocab

Notes on Enumeration

I am thinking of components of a new kind of database tool. It is part and parcel of how I envision a multitouch interface becoming a new paradigm for computing. The initial question is "How do I deal with millions of things?".  Then considering a 'glasstop' multitouch GUI what kind of primative and second-order operations might gestures generate.

One class of these deal with enumeration, and I'm thinking of this in the context of data mining. The first thing I want to do is generate some human-comprehensible names for result sets, one dimension at a time. My paradigm is naming conventions. So, imagine that we have a large set of data and upon this data we run a random transform - what do we name the set? 

If we go back to the deck of cards data and the 'hoop' operation that I mentioned in 'glasstop', we recall that I may have 1 million 'records' and that when I set them through this transform I get, say, 15 new sets of records. I have distributed them and now the 15 new smaller decks will divide the larger set. The distribution should be named and tracked, so now we need 15 names for the smaller decks. Each of these 15 will can be reduced to a histogram of the gating/distributing function.

The Enumerator is a labeling / indexing function that assigns familiar human comprehensible attributes to result sets. The cardinality of the distribution is matched, along with user preferences to a predefined or dynamically generated set.

Consider a deck of cards that goes through a hoop called 'birthday month'. The deck of cards represents a demographic database with 1 million persons. Of those million, 89% have a birthday attribute. The function will then distribute them to 13 piles with the 13th being "N/A". But we could assign an enumeration target not to 'birthday month' per se, but to a color, or a color and shape combination or to an animal. 'January' could be mapped to 'Blue' or any such set with a cardinality of 13. This gives the human operator a way of cognizing and associating intermediary datasets at an abstract level. Alternatively the transforms can be transparent with those functions and their result sets directly named without abstraction. The abstract enumerations can be turned on and off at any time.

Clearly, size, shape and color are the most primary and recognizable abstract enumerations.

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iPad Corporate App & HW Redefinage

The way I see it, the iPad is a consumption tool and the PC is a production tool. I already can see in certain corporate cultures where an iPad would be acceptable to take to a meeting, where a laptop would not be. The iPad gives phones an opportunity to dumb down, which is exactly the kind of move I went through about 14 months ago when I was Treo + iTouch. So the way I see it, a phone becomes more important as a networking brick. I'd pay Verizon or AT&T a premium for a mesh phone with great coverage tethered to my laptop and iPad, but nothing about multitasking Droidage appeals to me.

With the iPad as a nice consumption device and new, new media platform, I see corporate communications reaching a new level. Sitting in a room consuming a powerpoint with a human presenter is so 1990s. There is no reason a good sized company could not generate next gen presentations (a la TED video + embedded Business Intellegence) and distribute them. HTML5 + XBRL is what I think.

I cannot imagine that Cisco would not jump up and down on Jobs' head to get a front-facing camera on the nextgen iPad. There's a killer app just waiting to be born.

What I don't understand is why there isn't a global standard for secure RSS. It seems to me a no-brainer that such a protocol would destroy Microsoft's lock on the Sharepoint market (poor blighters). Maybe it's already done in Webdav or something Mac-y that I do not yet know (me being new to OS X), but that's the step that publish and subscribe has to take at enterprise scale, now that CMS is commodity.

Those are three pieces that would aid in the disintermediation all the confusing middle-tier of enterprise software - which we know are all glued to transaction DB technology of yesteryear. Why smart players haven't jumped into that market is not a technical question.

The iPad is a new kind of peripheral, just like a game console. As soon as some smart people see the enterprise space as a scaled-down MMORPG with a much smaller sandbox of transaction types, the sooner we leverage these cool technologies.

The Journalism Problem

Last night I listened to the NPR reporter interview the director from the service organization that just got dropped after a foster child was murdered here in LA. They guy took his time and explained patiently how his organization, which had been consistently rated in the top 10% of such providers to the government offices whose business is foster children and adoption got puked on for no good reasons.

It struck me that this was a no-win situation, especially as he mentioned that there is an ongoing investigation. An ongoing investigation means that somebody knows, its just that a bigger somebody with authority doesn't know yet and so officially nothing can be said. But that's somebody still knows. The problem is getting to that somebody is what makes for sensationalism. It is journalism and communications in a nutshell.

The NPR journalist took calls after the director of the service organization finished his statements. A woman from Orange County wanted to know the demographics of foster children and how it was that a family that keeps pit bulls can be approved as foster parents and potential adoptive parents. She wants blood. The LATimes journalist breaking the story is up next. I got out of my car and turned of the radio in disgust.

What's going on here is that the radio station and the newspaper, as part of their business model, need to highlight what's potentially wrong, which is by definition sensational. There's nothing wrong with that, it's important. What's wrong is that the newspaper cannot own that audience because the real audience for this story is longitudinal. The kind of outrage and blood the caller expressed is like an online flamewar with a newb. She obviously knows nothing about the subcontracting details and the authority delegated between the full-time bureacrats in the child welfare department, the care-giving subcontractors and the board of supervisors. None of us do. All we know is a two year old kid was murdered and the system didn't protect her.

The director mentioned the scorecarding system that the County uses to rate its subcontractors as well as the three government officials who would have to be involved in the approval of transfer from foster parentage to adoptive parentage. What we don't know is how well the system works so much of the time that we pay no attention to it. And if we are genuinely interested, where would we look? Most importantly how could we use a different form of communication to translate the energy of outrage which is currently owned by the radio station and the print media journalists into the energy of responsibility owned by the director's care-giving organization?

You see? The length of the attention span of the media in its current instantiation does a disservice to every organization that gets scandalized because the energy of the anti-scandal owned by the media outweighs the energy of reform.

Part of this imbalance is inevitable and cannot be fixed. Consumers cannot be producers. Anybody can enjoy listening to music, but only a few can play it, and only fewer still can compose it. We have a faux system of journalism that promises to enable democracy in conflict with this fundamental human fact. Everybody can be outraged at the death of a two year old, but only a very few of us can prevent it. The Director did not, and maybe he could not. However consumers can become prosumers if they are informed in the right ways. And so voters can become reformers if they are given the proper background. But this is not a job for journalism as it is currently constructed - it is more a job for the communications directors of such agency's as the one now under fire.

If this story generated 50,000 hits at the LATimes, how long with those same eyeballs stay glued? How long can the investigating journalist on the story write about it and follow up? How can those eyeballs be moved to a longer attention span with a prosumer / reformer / watchdog capacity that is credible even in the eyes of the Board of Supervisors, the child welfare agency and the subcontractors kiretsu? This is the problem to be solved in all of journalism and in all of communications. Journalism has to itself move from pique to education or the burden needs to be gracefully transitioned to the communications abilities of the first parties. When the care-giver's agency can take those 50,000 hits and disseminate on a long term basis, then we have a win.

Until then it will be outrage as usual and frustration with the system. This is what the current media generates.

--

Here's the technical view:

• Curt Monash on Ike Pigott
  
• Information Ecosystem Framework
• Retention of Everything

Last night I listened to the NPR reporter interview the director from the service organization that just got dropped after a foster child was murdered here in LA. They guy took his time and explained patiently how his organization, which had been consistently rated in the top 10% of such providers to the government offices whose business is foster children and adoption got puked on for no good reasons.

It struck me that this was a no-win situation, especially as he mentioned that there is an ongoing investigation. An ongoing investigation means that somebody knows, its just that a bigger somebody with authority doesn't know yet and so officially nothing can be said. But that's somebody still knows. The problem is getting to that somebody is what makes for sensationalism. It is journalism and communications in a nutshell.

The NPR journalist took calls after the director of the service organization finished his statements. A woman from Orange County wanted to know the demographics of foster children and how it was that a family that keeps pit bulls can be approved as foster parents and potential adoptive parents. She wants blood. The LATimes journalist breaking the story is up next. I got out of my car and turned of the radio in disgust.

What's going on here is that the radio station and the newspaper, as part of their business model, need to highlight what's potentially wrong, which is by definition sensational. There's nothing wrong with that, it's important. What's wrong is that the newspaper cannot own that audience because the real audience for this story is longitudinal. The kind of outrage and blood the caller expressed is like an online flamewar with a newb. She obviously knows nothing about the subcontracting details and the authority delegated between the full-time bureacrats in the child welfare department, the care-giving subcontractors and the board of supervisors. None of us do. All we know is a two year old kid was murdered and the system didn't protect her.

The director mentioned the scorecarding system that the County uses to rate its subcontractors as well as the three government officials who would have to be involved in the approval of transfer from foster parentage to adoptive parentage. What we don't know is how well the system works so much of the time that we pay no attention to it. And if we are genuinely interested, where would we look? Most importantly how could we use a different form of communication to translate the energy of outrage which is currently owned by the radio station and the print media journalists into the energy of responsibility owned by the director's care-giving organization?

You see? The length of the attention span of the media in its current instantiation does a disservice to every organization that gets scandalized because the energy of the anti-scandal owned by the media outweighs the energy of reform.

Part of this imbalance is inevitable and cannot be fixed. Consumers cannot be producers. Anybody can enjoy listening to music, but only a few can play it, and only fewer still can compose it. We have a faux system of journalism that promises to enable democracy in conflict with this fundamental human fact. Everybody can be outraged at the death of a two year old, but only a very few of us can prevent it. The Director did not, and maybe he could not. However consumers can become prosumers if they are informed in the right ways. And so voters can become reformers if they are given the proper background. But this is not a job for journalism as it is currently constructed - it is more a job for the communications directors of such agency's as the one now under fire.

If this story generated 50,000 hits at the LATimes, how long with those same eyeballs stay glued? How long can the investigating journalist on the story write about it and follow up? How can those eyeballs be moved to a longer attention span with a prosumer / reformer / watchdog capacity that is credible even in the eyes of the Board of Supervisors, the child welfare agency and the subcontractors kiretsu? This is the problem to be solved in all of journalism and in all of communications. Journalism has to itself move from pique to education or the burden needs to be gracefully transitioned to the communications abilities of the first parties. When the care-giver's agency can take those 50,000 hits and disseminate on a long term basis, then we have a win.

Until then it will be outrage as usual and frustration with the system. This is what the current media generates.

--

Here's the technical view:

• Curt Monash on Ike Pigott
  
• Information Ecosystem Framework
• Retention of Everything