TreeWorks Blog

I admit I have always liked combinations. Commutations, arrangements and pure mathematical stuff. If you feel like reading there is more on my personal blog: A puerile-aesthetics theory of the permutational diversity for me (in Romanian).

I spent 40 minutes yesterday reading ads invented with TheAdGenerator. I came across this thing on TechCrunch. A kid’s degree’s project. One takes semantic structures used in ads of our days, places the values of the moment, decorates it with pics taken from Flickr – chosen based on the similar tags and one has the ad. Now honestly speaking, they are not all good, but at least 100 per minute may be generated (that depends also on the connection). Can a copyrighter brag with such a prolificity?

What does that have to do with what we are doing? Well, first of all there is a nice example of algorithmic of what may seem indefinable – human creativity at work. Of course, human creativity means much more in this area – coherent strategy, positioning etc, but we can imagine that after these have been defined, a computer can elaborate 1000 propositions using the brand values selected, from which the discussion can start.

Second of all, it is a clear example of commodity brought by the technology – which before seemed a very rare thing can now be transformed into a routine action. And then you have to come up with a new secret sauce and other twenty condiments. Luckily Gödel proved that there are non-algorithmic zones of mathematics. When it will all be algorithmised, we should start inventing new theorems. BTW, a pretty cool stuff about the “mathematical ideas mining” is in Greg Egan’s Diaspora. Genial author! A must read for info geeks.

PS. There is also a blog of the generators. And there is not much time left before a generator of generators appears. Wait, can it be invented a generator of foods, for instance? Select different ingredients and random condiments, after a table of similarities, of taste-associations etc and then generate a finite number of steps (thermical treatments, blending, chopping, boiling, grilling, freezing) and there you have the finite product. With three “solution horizons”: edible dish, tasty dish and divine dish.

I took a look at the previous post and I realized that it can also be read in the hype/firemen-ish code. Behold Grid Computing!

Look at this paragraph from (the famous, but too little read) What is Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly:

Operations must become a core competency. Google’s or Yahoo!’s expertise in product development must be matched by an expertise in daily operations. So fundamental is the shift from software as artifact to software as service that the software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily basis. Google must continuously crawl the web and update its indices, continuously filter out link spam and other attempts to influence its results, continuously and dynamically respond to hundreds of millions of asynchronous user queries, simultaneously matching them with context-appropriate advertisements. It’s no accident that Google’s system administration, networking, and load balancing techniques are perhaps even more closely guarded secrets than their search algorithms. Google’s success at automating these processes is a key part of their cost advantage over competitors.

It’s also no accident that scripting languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, and now Ruby, play such a large role at web 2.0 companies. Perl was famously described by Hassan Schroeder, Sun’s first webmaster, as “the duct tape of the internet.” Dynamic languages (often called scripting languages and looked down on by the software engineers of the era of software artifacts) are the tool of choice for system and network administrators, as well as application developers building dynamic systems that require constant change.

If we admit that the phase of software as an artifact has passed away and its place has been taken by the software as a service, is obviously that on the hardware side more-more flexibility is needed. Practically, this grid computing thing does exactly this: includes the hardware into the application.

We are now working at a project for upgrading some systems in the grid computing paradigm. This paradigm goes really well with the web 2.0 philosophy. For instance, Google got to top at the same time as the wave of computing as commodity. That was the moment when the cost of the usual hardware got to be so low that, by placing them together,it got to replace the supercomputers. And maybe the most important technological advantage of Google is the big capacity of storing/processing plus high availability: that being the Google OS. The ensemble of computers from data centers plus the software that coordinates the leviathan.

On the other side this advantage is kind of passing. We now have grid computing. For which the type of hard you are placing is no longer important. The most known grid service is from Amazon (Elastic), but there are others too. The idea is that every smart little firm or a group of smart kids can now do cool stuff and scale the resources in the mean time with the success. As you probably know the big problem is that of scaling at big numbers of requests/users/processed data. Of course, the problems of grinding big numbers do not completely disappear.

But I should not drag it out: the idea is that in times in which the power of computing will be delivered just like electric power, the innovative idea and its execution are going to count more. You do not have to think at the costs of a hydro power station until you get with the workshop at the dimensions of a big factory and you want to reduce the operation costs.

Ionut spun his charmed twig and with two whiffles transformed the TreeWorks headquarters into a Fairyland. Bridi blew magical dust over us and transported everyone in the land where only friendly dragons exist. There where little frogs allow only attentive children to listen to their songs, where the dragon lights the stars and the bandmaster organizes concerts in the glade.

Almost synchronizing with Santa, the riped minds from Tree returned back to the childhood years, trying to remember the first school years and the confused letters, the meaningless numbers and the long studious afternoons. And because majority’s vote was against the wooden / plastic counting frame, we replaced it with garden full of magical beans. We have also decided that the ABC is a too cold, impersonal character, so we introduced the Inventor obsessed with noting everything he sees.

For Anna we have prepared a princess who is waiting to try on her complete and coquette wardrobe and an entire collection of colorful butterflies. For Daniel we have a quiver full of arrows waiting to be pointed to playful balloons.

But what we wanted to announce is the discovery of the fact that our minds stayed close to the first school years. For me, for instance, school was associated with the bang of chestnuts on the asphalt and technology with the great HC 91. But no matter the common generation gaps, we realized that the most important attributes of childhood are those that also existed 10 or 20 years ago. Curiosity and innocence.

We may grow wise. But we stay young at the same time. And that is what we wish for you too.

PS: We mention that we are responsible for having drew some other young minds into this: Ana, Olga, Simona, Alin and Alin. To whom we thank for having played a role in the Fairyland.

Yesterday I was talking with Emil about changing our 4 gb ipods with the new 8 gb ones. (The ones with a hard disk have a too big size.) Ioana and Ionut were mocking us (they are the light shuffle users and that explains it all): Why would we need an 8 gb one for current stuff? My explanation: because I always want to listen to the album I have just deleted yesterday. Emil’s explanation: an audio-book has 600 megas; putting 3-4 audio books on an i pod barely leaves you any place for the music. I hove everyone agrees with me when I say that 4 gb is not enough.

My futuristic solution is this: heaping up on a central server with high speed access through wifi,wimax, widracs Everyone should have its own secured backed-up virtual space with different access levels. Even more, the state should offer every person at birth an incipient space, with the possibility of buying extra space if needed. This could gather public things (ID card, birth certificate, CV, diplomas, tax and interest returns), personal stuff that can be accessed by everyone (for instance photos, blogs etc.), personal stuff with access for different security levels (pictures from private events, contract drafts, personal conversations etc.) and very personal stuff with access only for the owner. With this – association of the file with the owner and not with the device – all DRM (Digital Rights Management) problems could be solved. The access system, however, would put most problems – in order to be both usable and safe. Some embedded stuff could exist, so that the social structure be respected: parents can verify the space of children until a certain age, married couples could share a certain space of intellectual property – in co-ownership and so on.

Of course, there would be some things to discuss about the legality of order organisms‘ access. Plus those of scripted protocols – RSA? Biometric security (retinal, vocal, digital marks) for a certain privacy level. There a lot of things to consider.

My point is: the future is for small hardware clients who can access heaped information centralized by wireless, plus a comunitary definition for the concept of information. In this kind of future there are two big winners: technological aggregates (like Google), quality content producers (from persons to production companies). Who is going to have problems? The distributors who base on their dominant position: I mean, what point is there in having a public television in a world where everybody composes its own informational menu. If one wants to support culture, education and so on, better give subventions for the content producers. But this is another talk and I must start my work day.

The title of the article is not mine, nor the idea. An idea that, between you and me, is absolutely brilliant. The initiator of the subject is Ray Ozzie and the original post is available on the current Microsoft Chief Software Architecture’s blog, I mean here.

What is all about… Well, in general it is about “give power to the people”.

Starting from the idea that the future of the Internet consists in the interconnection of the services, of the processes and, in general, of the information between websites and that currently this process is available only to the field specialists (developers, programmers and so on, who succeed this by designing those applications), Ray Ozzie suggests a way through which regular users can easily exchange the information on their own websites, by importing/copying the desired information directly from other websites.

The solution that was found is inspired by the technology that stays at the foundation of the interconnection of desktop applications: the “clipboard”. Ray Ozzie suggests “Live Clipboard“ - a technology based on JavaScript, Ajax and XML structures, which allows the implementing sites to facilitate copying certain informational structures between them. Why informational structures? Because, if it is intended only the copying of a simple text, this is possible by using the well-known low-end (of the desktop) clipboard variant: text selection, then copy (ctrl+c) and then paste (ctrl+v) to the desired destination of the original text. But considering that there are already predefined data structures such as events, contacts, profiles etc. it would be interesting for the user to copy the entire informational structure, not only excerpts that need to be manually integrated at the target location. And how could he obtain that? Well, nice and easy, with the same clipboard model (Select/Cut/Copy/Paste), just that the initial selection isn’t performed by manually selecting text anymore, but through the icon specially created for LiveClipboard (specially meaning for the conception/design, to show to the user that the application is LiveClipboard Enabled and not because it would have had specially attributes toward a normal gif ) where user clicks and selects the intended action (copy, cut or paste).

Behind interface, the programming part makes everything and when clicking the mentioned icon the proper structure it is visually marked, and after that, at the selection of a (let’s say) copying action, the xml structure that defines the informational object in question it is serialized by JavaScript and then it is kept in the personal computer clipboard. At the “paste” action on the icon of a container where we want to save the informational object from the clipboard, the de-serialization and the importing or the saving (if this is the intention) in the database using Ajax, it is made also from JavaScript. I know! at the first sight it doesn’t seems something extraordinary but that’s because you don’t have the entire picture :). But you can have it by following the 100% functional example that it can be found here.

And the most astonishing thing is the fact that the above-mentioned application also works between two different browsers (meaning that I can copy the structure of a contact in Internet Explorer and paste it in Firefox). And this practically means a small opened door through which, in the near future, I will be able to copy the same structure from a desktop application (such as Microsoft Outlook) and paste it in a website (and vice-versa).

Of course, so far, LiveClipboard is still at the concept stage and many things (including the standards of the informational structure types) need to be developed and especially to be accepted so that this new technology could be used on a large scale. But the perspective is extremely encouraging and you can be sure that in the future we’ll hear again about LiveClipboard.

“Give power to the people!”

In connection with the yesterday link to the Apple UI posted by Ionut, here is the Yahoo user interface blog. The user interface bookshop code and documentation published by Yahoo can be accessed here. Great hints for those interested in usability.

Petronela Jipa, chief editor at “Tranzit”, came across our achievements in April this year (praise Google!!! ; ) ) and thought about writing an article on what we have done in the e-logistics area.

It’s a really cool article of 2 pages, issued by “Tranzit-Logistica” magazine right in this June, that explains - in a very smart way - how do these complex applications work.

Great done, Petronela! Thanks a lot for your work!

The whole article can be downloaded here.

An interesting article about Gates’ work style on CNN Money.

Leaving aside part of the hype and the way in which he uses the occasion to promote Microsoft products (explaining how these work) and the company in general, three things seem to be very interesting to me. 

1. He uses 3 monitors for productivity 
2. If necessary, he works in weekends (but especially on the matter of strategy then on current things) 
3. He has a pretty prosaic program (meaning not only speeches but also high-end meetings)