RickyRobinson.id.au

Ben strikes back in the UbiComp saga by asking

Do I want to live in the distopian future of, to take a bad example, Minority Report, where I am addressed by name by advertisements for bland Japanese luxury cars (Ok, that’s probably not the actual example from Minority Report)? Does my backpack need to acquire new functions automagically? Does every can of baked beans need to contain a record of it’s entire production process?

The answer is probably no to all of the above. But none of the above is a requirement for UbiComp. UbiComp might make these sorts of things possible, but they are certainly not a necessary indicator that UbiComp has arrived.

The example Ben uses from Adam Greenfield about self-moulding beds (my bed moulds to me just nicely already) simply shows that no matter how contrived a UbiComp scenario one can think up, it’s just as easy to develop a scenario equally or more contrived in which the technology fails.

The point of the self-moulding bed example, I suppose, is that things break. Of course they do. When there’s a blackout, my computer crashes. The blue screen of death is still a regular occurrance if you use a certain operating system. Things always break for one reason or another. Yet, I’m not about to argue that traditional computing technology has not arrived.

The story about Prada from Fred’s House, which Ben linked in his previous post, is another example of something not working as it should. However, there are many examples where this technology is working. Wal-Mart and many of its suppliers are about to start using RFID tags to monitor and track goods as they move from place to place. The FDA has, as recently as last Monday, released policy guidelines that encourage the use of RFID tags on prescription drugs. At least one pharmaceutical company, Purdu Pharma, has already begun tagging some of its drugs.

I don’t think anyone has ever stated that UbiComp would be perfect and flawless and that nothing would go wrong. UbiComp is not Utopia. It’s just another computing paradigm.

There are certain enabling technologies that will allow the goals of UbiComp to be fulfilled. Ben mentions a couple of them: speech recognition and agents. Ben says that these are a Long Way Off. The kind of speech recognition engine that doesn’t need to be trained on a particular voice, that has an unlimited vocabulary, and can infer intended meaning from context might be a long way off, but this kind of speech recognition is not required to bring about UbiComp. For example, I can already ask my little mobile phone to call home by talking to it. I regularly use this feature, because it’s by far the quickest way to dial. It’s nothing fancy; my mobile phone lacks the processing power to do anything like proper speech recognition, but it’s an example of something simple enabling technology that works. As for the agents. Well, A.I. might be a very long way off; but again, A.I. is not a necessity to bring about useful agent technology. The cool thing is that lots of neat things can be accomplished without true A.I. Check out this project, for example. Sure it’s an honours project, but it works on real phones. It does call redirection based on where you are, what devices you currently have access to and what you’re doing. It automatically switches profile depending on context. It does adaptive ringing, which means that if somebody really, really needs to talk to you because they’re calling every 30 seconds the ring tone will get louder each time the person calls.

Lots of interesting things can already be done. If they haven’t been deployed in the real world yet, they certainly will be within the next 10 years (although I’m betting the stuff I’ve just talked about or some variant of it will be deployed by some telco or another well before 2015).

So no, not even 90 years, Ben. Think about where computers were 90 years ago and where they are today. 90 years ago we had nothing more than Babbage’s "sketch" of the Analytical Engine. Now I can send e-mail over the Internet using my mobile phone.

I don’t think so. New Now Know How points me to an article in Fred’s House, which claims that UbiComp could well be a 100 year problem. I’m of the opinion that UbiComp will progress leaps and bounds in the next 10 years. It won’t be perfect, but then, nothing ever is. Sure it’s much harder to deploy technology to the real world compared to the lab, but slowly it’s already happening. Perhaps Japan is the leader in real world deployments of this technology. They are showing that the stuff can work. The gripes raised by Gene Becker (the proprietor of Fred’s House), largely revolve around fiddly handheld computers. In ten years’ time, handhelds may be a thing of the past. UbiComp is not about handheld computers anyway; it’s about hiding computers from sight altogether. I accept that this grand goal may not be achieved within 10 years, but it’ll happen within 100. There are many, many problems to overcome before the true dream of ubiquitous computing arrives. But in a limited sense, it’s already here.

Living in a developed nation, it’s easy to take things for granted sometimes. When one turns the tap on, clean water flows out of it. Hot? Plug your fan or airconditioner into the wall and switch it on. If you’re stuck without a ride, dial somebody (your mum, perhaps ;-) ) on your mobile phone and if you ask really nicely, they might come and get you.

While we enjoy these modern conveniences and basic amenities, 2 billion people around the world still don’t have access to a toilet! To address this problem, hygiene experts, town planners and environment specialists are currently attending the fourth World Toilet Summit in Beijing. They are formulating a plan to deploy loos to every corner of the earth, and to improve the hygiene standards of existing toilets. An admirable cause if ever there was one!

Tomorrow (Friday) is World Toilet Day.

(Via ABC News Online.)

Anyone who cites IETF RFCs in their work on a regular basis should find this BibTeX database very useful. It contains the details of just about every RFC ever written in BibTeX format. Looking through my own BibTeX database, I note that there is absolutely no consistency in the way I’ve been entering information about RFCs. That shouldn’t be a problem any more!

The Australian is running an interesting story about infiltrating groups of cockroaches with robot cockroaches in order to influence the group’s behaviour – presumeably making it easier for them to be cornered and disposed of. Eventually they expect to be able to prevent sheep from jumping off cliffs by using a robot sheep to influence the flock. Sort of anti-lemminglike, really.

Jean-Louis Deneubourg, the leader of the project in the news story, has long been at the forefront of studying the group behaviour of animals (especially insects). Coincidentally, my thesis references one of his papers on ant behaviour.

According to Enetica, one can use one’s nickname as a domain name in the .id.au 2LD. Here is part of an e-mail that I sent to Enetica enquiring about random.id.au:

You have allowed a company (Random Technologies) to register in the .id.au 2LD (random.id.au). This is in direct breach of Schedule D of auDA’s Domain Name Eligibility and Allocation Rules for the Open 2LDs (2002-07). What action, if any, will you be taking in this matter?

And here is their reply:

Thanks, for your email,

the registrant of random.id.au is Edson Galindo, the contact details he has provided are not relevant to his eligibility to hold that domain.
Edson has warranted that the domain is somehow related to himself, ie his nickname, and as such he is eligible to hold that domain.

Of course, I have no claim to that domain name either. I was just curious to see what their response would be. Enetica interpretation of auDA’s rules is very strange, to say the least!

I jumped on the Firefox bandwagon a few months ago. I’ve been very happy with it. It’s extension mechanism is fantastic, and couldn’t be easier to use. One slightly annoying thing is that search engine plugins can only be installed system-wide, which seems a bit silly. But this has already been listed as a bug by others and is currently being fixed. If you want to make the switch from another browser, especially the evil one, please click the Firefox image in the left margin.

I’ve also switched to Thunderbird from Evolution at home and at work. I found Evolution to be exceedingly slow when my Inbox got large. Thunderbird has not displayed the same problem so far, dealing with exactly the same number of messages. Unfortunately, Thunderbird will not import mail from Evolution, so it has to be done manually. Since Evolution and Thunderbird use the standard mbox format, it’s just a question of copying your inbox and subdirectories to the relevant place in your Thunderbird profile folder. That part takes all of ten seconds. The tedious part is having to set up all your mail filters again. Thunderbird has a great spam detection feature which has been working really well for me so far. Another problem is importing your address book. Thunderbird will only import LDIF, CSV and a few others. Evolution will only export vCard. Therefore, you have to find a way to convert from vCard to LDIF or one of the other text formats. Since my address book wasn’t too large, I found it easy just to recreate my address book by hand. The "Add to Address Book…" item in the context menu that pops up whenever you right-click an e-mail address in Thunderbird expedited this process somewhat.

It turns out that the reviews for the paper that we (Ryan, Jaga, Audun and myself) submitted to the Australian Computer Science Conference were lost, and that our paper was supposed to be accepted. This is quite unbelievable, but our paper got accepted, so I can’t complain too much. The organisers had to contact the reviewers of our paper to double-check that our paper was supposed to be accepted. It must have been some major glitch. Firstly, we received an e-mail saying our paper had been rejected. Secondly, the follow-up e-mail, which was supposed to contain our reviews, did not contain anything of the sort. Anyway, at this stage Ryan will be presenting our paper in Newcastle in a few months’ time.

I’ve written an exceedingly simple and braindead shell script pinger for use with Technorati. It uses the POST (lwp-request) utility that comes with libwww-perl library to deliver the ping message. Usage is as follows:

technorati <blogname> <blogurl>

The shell script is invoked whenever I add a new entry to my weblog. It’s been working for me, but I give no guarantees. Use at your own risk and do with it what you will.

So I’ve finally acquired my very own domain (rickyrobinson.id.au). I intend to care for it, and treat it with kindness and respect, and I promise it will never be neglected. It will be diligently tended to, and whenever it cries for help, I will come running. I want only the best for my domain so that it may bloom and grow… like Edelweiss.