I'm thrilled largely because of the symbolism of Obama's election, although that's not enough in itself - I would not have been thrilled about Sarah Palin breaking a historical barrier if she and McCain had won. His charisma, on top of his evident ability and sense, make it easy to believe, to feel a faith and hope in this person, that I had not thought was possible in this day and age. Maybe people felt this way before Watergate and the death of the Kennedies, but these days we know politicians are not worth investing any kind of faith into.
I have to say, my expectations of Obama are relatively low. Despite his rhetoric, and despite the claims and hopes of many of his supporters and detractors, he is a mainstream politician. A huge component of his brilliance at speaking is that he doesn't actually say much, he avoids specifics, and particularly, he avoids saying anything that would spook the horses. He makes statements about change, but doesn't specifically talk about doing anything radical. This has allowed many people with different views to overlay their own hopes (and fears) about what he would do onto Obama, and prevented the mainstream from taking claims that he is a Muslim terrorist communist seriously enough to vote against him.
But while I don't believe Obama is going to bring sweeping peace and prosperity to the nation and the world, I do believe he will bring intelligent, sensible, and principled decision-making to the problems that we face. He will be mightily constrained. There is a limit to what a President or an entire government can do to fix an economy going into what is likely to be a heavy recession - the forces of economic cycle don't dance on command.
On the other hand, government can make the damage much worse. The major impediment to good government in the Obama administration will be the Democratic congress, emboldened by the election victory, encouraged by protectionist instincts of the population. Obama does not have much of a record of going against the Democratic estabilishment. But he has shown some glimmers of backbone in this regard - he threw his hat into the ring for the nomination "out of turn", and he made the critical decision not to bow to party establishment pressure to take Hillary onto his ticket, a move that probably would have cost him this election.
The second major impediment to good government, especially a couple years into the Obama administration, will be the Democratic urge to over-compensate on security issues. Historically this led JFK and LBJ to take us into Vietnam, to prove they weren't "soft on communism". More recently this has led the Democrats in Congress to support human rights violations, and Hillary Clinton to campaign as a right-winger. Right wingers will be gearing up even before Inauguration Day to accuse Obama and the Democratic Congress of being soft on terrorism, Russia, Iran, China, etc.
I am hopeful that Obama has the steel and the sense to govern as well as possible in these times. And above all, I'm proud of my fellow citizens for proving wrong those people who have been telling me for the past two years that Americans are too deeply racist to ever see this day.
Congratulations, President-elect Obama.
]]>I humored him, agreeing that it's possible there are monkeys running loose in the park, and kept my reservations to myself. The concept has a certain appeal.
The question was settled last week when I was pushing him throught the park in a stroller. He pointed and shouted "monkey!" yet again, and I saw he was pointing at a squirrel.
I haven't been able to disabuse him of his belief that squirrels are a type of monkey. I'm not completely sure I want to.
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I've uploaded a few recent pictures of Erel, mostly with him swimming. If you want a page to go to see all of Erel's pictures on Flickr, they are here.
Yeni Ereli fotograflar! Hepsi Erel fotagraflar burada.
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I've uploaded a few recent pictures of Erel, mostly with him swimming. If you want a page to go to see all of Erel's pictures on Flickr, they are here.
Yeni Ereli fotograflar! Hepsi Erel fotagraflar burada.
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Charlie has posted pictures of his gigs in England and Switzerland. We didn't get to see him play this time around, hopefully we will next time!
]]> Charlie has posted pictures of his gigs in England and Switzerland. We didn't get to see him play this time around, hopefully we will next time!
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kief.com has always been a weird mix, there is a small but loyal audience of friends and family who check it for information about what we're up to, and then there are those people who find one of my sporadic technical posts via search engines or blog aggregators.
The frequency of my posting on any subject is hardly enough to need two blogs, but I feel more comfortable having the separate places to post. I often feel self-conscious about boring people who subscribed to my feed because they saw a technical post if I post things about my family, and most of my family would be equally bored by my ramblings on Java, Unix, and similar gearhead topics.
So if you're interested in techie stuff, you'll probably want to unsubscribe this feed. This site is probably going to become a monument to my obsession with my newborn son, which I would find painfully boring if I were in your shoes. But please consider subscribing to the feed for Azedi Tech. That site probably won't be much heavier in traffic than this one was, but that's probably a blessing.
Thanks for your patience!
]]>We put the call on with the PC speakers a desktop microphone, and usually a camera, and we sit around the living room. So the call isn't a person to person call, but group to group. The fact that it's free adds to the relaxed, leisurely experience of the call.
Technically it's a bit fiddly. Setting up Skype is a snap, but the production aspects of the call, especially with video, take a bit of effort to get nice. It's too easy to have echoing, since most people don't know how to position the speakers and microphone to avoid it. Lighting and positioning can be a problem for the video. The quality of the voice and video connections are also an issue, it's quite choppy.
But these don't really slow people down. The thing that strikes me is the non-techie people in my circle love it, and are enthusiastic about taking it up as a regular habit. As open-room audio/video sessions like this become more widespread, people will become more sophisticated about
I think as this type of thing becomes more popular, whether via skype or other services, people will get more sophisticated about production values. If end-to-end network capacity continues to grow, the audio and video quality will improve with it.
I wonder how long it will be before we're routinely plugging these calls into our wide-screen, HD televisions, gathering people together from multiple locations to share family events.
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As of yesterday! Congratulations Brandon and Carla, welcome to the family Tyler!
]]> As of yesterday! Congratulations Brandon and Carla, welcome to the family Tyler!
]]>The Yahoo! Design Pattern Library is a collection of design patterns for web interfaces. Design patterns are a concept from "enterprise" programming, where best practice approaches to typical problems are described in a way that can be used by programmers using different languages. These patterns from Yahoo describe typical web UI patterns, such as paging multiple lines of search results.
There's nothing ground-breaking in the patterns, but it's useful to have these spelled out. It serves as a checklist, or a specification, if you find yourself having to implement one of these things. Even better, if you're asking someone else to implement some bit of web UI, giving them one of these patterns - modifying it if necessary -is a good way to make sure you're both clear on what you want it to do.
]]>Google really laid on a slick hosting job. They had nice printed signage, including a label on the elevator button for the floor to go to, coat check, free t-shirts and pens*, plenty of free booze and food handed out by catering staff wandering the floor. The presentation equipment was also tops, dual projectors and the presenters' slide shows were technically seamless.
* Figuring out how to open the free pen may be an example of the infamous Google recruiting tests, it took about 3 or 4 different approaches before I figured it out. Maybe not something to brag about.
Oh yeah, the presentations themselves were pretty interesting as well. The theme for the evening was payment systems, in other words, ways for content providers to make enough money to make it worth doing. This probably is the biggest thing holding back the content industry, shady ring-tone clubs aside.
Shannon Maher from Google gave the first talk, and although it was the one least targeted to the theme, I think that most of the attendees, sated with Google-booze and delicious toothpick-meat, didn't mind. Google is building a new London-based mobile engineering team to complement their team in California. It sounds like their main reasons for doing this are to tap into the European mobile scene, given that as Mr. Maher said, the UK now has 100% penetration versus 70% in the US; and for partnerships with external organizations, including carriers (mobile network operators, as I usually call them), OEM's, and "industry", whatever that means.
Maher was fairly cagey on the specifics of Google's product plans, at one point begging that he hopes not to see his offhand musings blasted onto front pages the next day as announcements of new Google services. He said the first step is to bring existing properties onto mobile, then step 2 would be to innovate, and design for the mobile experience.
One thing he mentioned that I think resonated well with attendees is that Google considers small content providers as being of key importance, and wants to help them out. In an industry which cripples itself with walled garden strategies, breaking down the walls is the only way to get the kind of success people keep claiming is inevitable. Google is an ideal company to help with this.
An interesting point that Mr. Maher made was the fact that search is very different on the mobile. The mobile web is not nearly as well-linked as the regular web, so Google is struggling with finding all of the content that's out there so people can search it.
Other attendees raised questions about how people are actually going to "discover" mobile services. Very few people whip out their phone and go to Google to find things the way we do on the regular web. The operator portals can be a major source of traffic, but the most popular is the old fashioned texting a keyword to a shortcode approach. I believe that mixing non-mobile and mobile is the key, both for this discovery/marketing process and for most applications. There was some discussion on the floor about mobilized adwords and adsense, but I think there's a lot of mileage to be gotten out of using normal Google Adwords to drive people to mobile applications.
Margaret Gold presented Luup, which is Yet Another Payment Scheme (my term, not hers), basically a mobile-oriented Paypal. She used a new-fangled presentation style, rapid-fire slides with just a word or two or a picture, which was pretty cool. But when someone asked why Luup will succeed where others have failed, especially given that Paypal can easily move into mobile, her answer was pretty weak, basically saying there's room for more than one. The Network Effect suggests that there probably isn't room for more than one, and Paypal already has a massive head start. I don't think being the first into mobile will matter.
One thing a lot of mobile dotcom wannabees don't appreciate is that mobile is not an entirely new playground, it's just an extension of the web. There's a parallel here with the original dotcom bubble, where entrepreneurs thought the web was an entirely new economy, separate from the old one. It turned out to be just another facet of the old economy.
Jeremy Flyn from Vodafone talked about xPay, which sounds like a set of standards which is trying to pick up the pieces left from the crash of SimPay. One of the reasons SimPay failed was that it used a single model across Europe, but different European countries have very different economics for mobile content, including how much they pay out. Flyn repeatedly emphasized that the UK has the highest payout to content providers for premium SMS messages. So xPay is a UK-specific standard, which the operators and SMS aggregators will hopefully all sign onto.
Richard Watney from Reporo gave a fairly brief demo, using a phone, of their service, which basically seems to be a custom J2ME shopping applicaiton. Users browse shops that have signed up with Reporo, and Reporo stores credit card details and uses them to charge purchases.
So the talks were fairly interesting, although in a lot of ways there didn't seem to be anything very new. I think this demonstrates that online mobile services, although it's becoming very hot at the moment, is still struggling to find it's place in peoples' everyday life. I'd say we're basically at a similar stage to the 1996 Web, where very few people were actually making money outside of porn and ripoffs, and it's still difficult to make an unshakable argument that it will become a real, profitable, mature market. Personally, that's what makes it fun to me, just like then, it's uncharted territory.
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