TechComet

Tumblr - A Faster and More Organised Method of Sharing Content

2011-07-04T18:40:00.008+08:00

TL;DR Version: Follow my new Tumblr blog at www.abhiroopbasu.com.

Almost exactly a year ago today, I set-up my Posterous blog. At the time I felt as though my needs were not being served by Twitter or Facebook. The former limited my poetic voice and the latter was not an ideal medium for sharing interesting content with anecdotes. In any event I felt that I wanted a central source for all my content. Anyway, over time I just stopped using the service because it was too much of a hassle to maintain yet another social media platform.

Recently, I have started sharing a lot of content and most of the time I am unsure whether it is on Facebook, Twitter, or somewhere else. Additionally, if I share something on Facebook or Twitter it becomes harder to find later on. Hence, once again I wanted to have a centralised location for all my “shared” content.

To this end I started a new Tumblr blog at www.abhiroopbasu.com. TechComet still remains the primary blog for all my long-form articles and opinions, however, I have actively started using Tumblr for sharing links, videos, quotes, images, and all sorts of other quick bites.

I have been sharing content on Tumblr for the past few months and one of my most recent posts was a live blog of the 2011 Wimbledon Men's Final, which Djokovic won confidentially.

Life of an Undocumented Immigrant in the US of A

2011-06-23T10:09:00.002+08:00

Jose Antonio Vargas is a former reporter for The Washington Post who shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings.

In his recent article in the New York Times he "comes out" as an illegal immigrant who has gone through life in the United States with a series of fake documents since he was 12.

One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby D.M.V. office to get my driver’s permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I figured it was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U.S. residency, she flipped it around, examining it. “This is fake,” she whispered. “Don’t come back here again.

Not allowing his immigration status to hinder his progress and living in constant fear his "secret" would be discovered, he managed to secure a place at San Francisco State University with a full scholarship; obtain a drivers licence; land a job with the Washington Post; write about Hillary Clinton’s position on driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants; and even snag a Pulitzer.

I decided then that I could never give anyone reason to doubt I was an American. I convinced myself that if I worked enough, if I achieved enough, I would be rewarded with citizenship. I felt I could earn it.

The more I achieved, the more scared and depressed I became. I was proud of my work, but there was always a cloud hanging over it, over me. My old eight-year deadline — the expiration of my Oregon driver’s license — was approaching.

The issue of immigration is a hot topic in virtually every developed country (including Singapore) and cases like Vargas's identify the need for greater clarity and reform.

But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.

Have a look at his new project "Define American", which seeks to change the conversation on immigration reform.

I define “American” as someone who works really hard, someone who is proud to be in this country and wants to contribute to it. I’m independent. I pay taxes. I’m self-sufficient. I’m an American, I just don’t have the right papers. I take full responsibility for my actions, and I’m sorry for the laws that I have broken.

I WON the Noise to Signal Caption Contest

2011-06-09T10:00:00.001+08:00

Exactly a month ago I entered the Noise to Signal caption contest with the caption:

When Biz Stone called to say he would have me picked up, I assumed he meant a limo.

Noise to Signal Cartoon

I entered the contest through the dedicated Facebook app on the N2S Facebook page and earlier this morning I was notified by @RobCottingham himself that I had won the competition!

As someone mentioned perhaps I should have put @biz instead of "Biz Stone".

Thanks to @RobCottingham and Noise to Singal.

How Not To Pitch For VC Funding

2011-05-18T10:45:00.000+08:00

Every entrepreneur needs to obtain funding for their project. However, a buzzword-laden product pitch is usually not the ideal way to make a good impression.

Source: Mashable

Facebook Profiles - An Alternative To The Wayback Machine

2011-05-17T15:20:00.001+08:00

I was alerted today to an interesting archival project taking place on Facebook.

The Singapore General Election 2011 came to an end in the early hours of Sunday, May 8 2011 when the results for the last constituency was revealed. From nomination day, which was held on April 27, till the votes were cast there was an abundance of political commentary flooding my Facebook news feed. Everyone and their non-voting friend had become an armchair political pundit during this brief period.

To capture this moment in time the architects of the Facebook Archiving GE2011 project aim to collect (not analyse) all your Facebook comments, wall posts, notes and other data created during this period. Their means of doing so are explained in a detailed note and the method is striking for its simplicity. All you have to do is save your Facebook profile as a webpage and mail it to their dedicated email address.

This project raises a number of interesting questions which arise out of using Facebook as a means of data archival. Firstly, the issue of data portability permeates the project as there is no clear method of collecting the information. Secondly, the use of Facebook as a tool for political commentary is an interesting notion in itself. Finally, the relevance of archival itself is questionable.

Data Portability

Of course one cannot discuss Facebook without touching on its perceived lassez-faire attitude towards privacy and protection of its users data. Interestingly, in this case it is not the protection that is the problem, but rather the access. Indeed up until a few months ago it was impossible to download any of your data from Facebook. Hence, the simplistic method used by this project to download the data of your profile from a specific period in time, appears to be the only means of actually gathering that data. This is a flaw in Facebook's design that open-source advocates have long rallied against. Although the privacy war-cry is sexier, data portability is an important consideration when your life is laid out on servers half-way around the world.

To combat the closed nature of Facebook, an open-source project called Diaspora sprang up with much fanfare, including eliciting patronage from Zuckerburg himself. However, this project has yet to officially launch and it is unlikely users will jump ship unless there is compelling reason to do so.

In essence we are stuck with Facebook and its unwillingness to allow its own users to manipulate their own data.

Platform for Commentary

First, there were "letters to the editor, then there were blog posts and now we are left with Facebook notes, comments and wall posts. The democratisation of content creation has allowed armchair pundits to spring out of the most unlikeliest of places. So, during the GE I had all sorts of interesting comments appear on my news feed adding a new perspective to the largely one-dimensional commentary provided by the mainstream media.

Facebook has made commentary easy because all it takes is a few words and hitting enter (there isn't even a send button any longer). Your friends are then able to communicate with you and a political discussion ensues out of thin air. This ease of interaction was impossible before Facebook and it is important that it survives.

Archival

The Internet Archive, more popularly knows as the Wayback Machine, has been keeping an archive of all websites since 1996. However, Facebook is a closed system and the Wayback Machine has no way of archiving the data within users' Facebook profiles. Hence, a large segment of the web has, in essence, not been archived for the passed few years. This is troubling as there is no record of the web that lies within Facebook. As the Archiving GE2011 project has shown, there is a lot of interesting and relevant content that should be saved for posterity, and currently there is no method of doing so.

In contrast, the data on Twitter is largely open and available to all and the US Library of Congress has taken advantage of this by archiving every public tweet since Twitters inception in March 2006. This is a massive project, but it is doable with resources of a governmental organisation. Similarly, the complete archival of Facebook must be left up to a third-party with significant resources. We cannot trust Facebook to do this and ad-hoc methods, while laudable, will not capture the full depth of content sitting in Facebook's services. However, for the time being it seems unlikely that Facebook will be amenable to sharing its valuable data.

Unplugged

2011-05-15T18:14:00.000+08:00

In a connected world what happens when you have to unplug?

Many GTD experts have pontificated on the benefits of switching off. Is that really what it should take for us to find ourselves or at least feel as though we were connected to the rest of the world? By disconnecting ourselves?

Your life is your own. Rise up and live it.
-- Terry Goodkind (Faith of the Fallen)

Soundstage Replicates the Sounds of Warfare

2011-05-14T05:52:00.004+08:00

Is it ever possible to simulate what a battlefield feels like? Steven Grant of the Missouri University of Science and Technology has attempted to do so by building a soundstage that accurately recreates the sounds of warfare.

The sounds heard on the field of battle are often a determinative element of the amount of fear and panic coursing through a soldiers body. Recreating this in a practice scenario helps soldiers acclimatise their bodies to situations where the noise around them is greater than that of a rock concert.

However, it seems unlikely that the researches can factor in the destabilising force felt by soldiers when hit by ordinance. It often isn’t just the sound but the feeling of having the wind sucked out of you that creates the fear and panic that soldiers are trained to avoid.

Another important element in creating a realistic environment is that soldiers are constantly on the move, so unlike watching a film at a theatre or playing a game the position of the body relative to the sounds is never static. Hence, the researchers must create a system that compensates for this by automatically repositioning the sound based on the location of the soldiers.

Have a look at Wired's interview of Grant who explains how his innovative system works and what its effects are.

Source: Wired

There is a World Outside the United States of America

2011-05-14T05:52:00.003+08:00

A couple of days ago I was chatting with my Android Police colleagues on HipChat when one of the contributors gasped that the "music.google.com" page was LIVE!

To the uninitiate Google has recently announced that they will be creating an online music market/storage platform for users to buy music and store their already purchased music. Details on the exact workings of this new service are light, however early previews appear to be positive.

Read the multitude of (p)reviews of the service if you are interested. Frankly, I am not. I lost interest a couple of minutes after trying use the service. Since I wasn't located in the grand ol' US of A, I was blocked from even registering.

I know there are services, such as Spotify, which are not available in the States, and it isn't as though the rest of the world is bereft of innovation (see for example Creative Technology which was started in Singapore), but when one of the world's largest technology companies, creating a potentially game changing product decides to leave most of the world in the dark, one is left questioning their motivation.

It is a little unclear to me why Google has denied access to this service for non-US users. I can understand that for services such as Spotify and Pandora universal use is limited by record label contracts and other agreements. However, according to Google themselves, the current iteration of Google Music is a shadow of what it was originally intended: combining music storage, streaming, discovery and purchase. Instead a breakdown in negotiations led Google to launch what is essentially a cleaner version of MP3Locker combined with a Grooveshark-like interface. However, unlike those services users must manually upload each and every one of their songs (up to a max of 20,000) to their Google Music account. This is a tedious process which could take days for music aficionados with large collections. Essentially, Google Music is like any other storage service (a-la Dropbox, Skydrive, etc.) with a web and mobile streaming interface. Hence, I am unable to fathom why they would limit this service to the USA.

The alternate theory is that Google wants a smaller user-base to manage initially before a global release. But, everyone knows that the majority of computer users are in the US, or at least the majority that would be the likely users of this service. It is doubtful whether opening up this service globally would create such high demand that Google would be unable to manage the load.

Suffice to say I am displeased that I am not allowed to use this service. Doubly so since the service will only be free for a limited period.

Watches Are No Longer Obsolete

2011-05-14T05:48:00.001+08:00

With smartphones becoming ubiquitous fewer people choose to wear watches. The sole purpose of a watch is to tell the time, and if there is an equally capable device of doing so already on your person the usefulness of wearing a redundant gadget diminishes. In fact for most people today wearing a watch is merely a fashion statement.

Not so, says Fossil the creators of the Metawatch. No longer will the watch be a footnote in the annals of tech history.

New text messages, emails, appointments, tweets, Facebook updates, etc. all require you to pull your smart phone out of your pocket. However, the Metawatch will solve this and the watch crisis by sending your smartphone notifications straight to your wrist via Bluetooth.

The limits of the Metawatch has not yet been fully explored with Fossil pushing developers to create new and innovative apps for its new platform. The dev kit is open source so the possibilities of hooking the watch up wirelessly to your Android tablet or phone is virtually limitless. Imagine having a secondary screen to look at while you type something on your phone or reading off contact information from your wrist while you carry on a conversation.

The watch comes in two configurations:

a classic analogue/digital combination with two OLED screens for displaying info, and
a fully digitally one with an always-on screen

Both watches come with Bluetooth, an accelerometer, ambient light sensor, and a rechargeable battery. You can pre-order either today for $200 and it will ship on June 30.

Source: Gizmodo, Metawatch

Parag Khanna Redraws the World [TED Talk]

2011-05-11T19:10:00.001+08:00

TED Talks are an inspiring way to pass the lunching hour, and this time it was no different. I treated myself to an interesting talk by author and geopolitical expert Parag Khanna.

Maps have always been a lite hobby of mine. I have spent hours looking at the names of hard-to-pronounce places and comparing the distances between my favourite destinations. However, Khanna does something interesting and rather different in this talk. He looks at how historical factors have affected the borders of today and whether they can be shifted if not constrained by politics.

There is an especially interesting point in this talk where he stretches the border of Northern China to encompass all of Mongolia and parts of Siberian Russia, to compensate for the mass migration that is taken place in that region. The porous nature of some borders have made political markings obsolete. Similarly, the growth of supra-national entities (such as the EU) ensures that borders have become far more elastic than they were just a few decades ago.

Khanna concludes by saying that the development of infrastructure will ultimately be the defining factor in how countries will shape their borders. For example a pipeline through Azerbaijan would increase the status of this otherwise political lightweight.