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Taking liberties since 1978

2.2.07

BlipTV Molly Interview

It's interesting to hear Molly's views on how it can be technologists versus the business with regards to standards. I think this has been true of everywhere I have worked, and it's understandable.
I think the points about businesses understanding the ROI from standards is also valid, they are waking up to this, however the biggest set back seems to be legacy issues and timescales. Often there are old systems that are difficult to replace, but also a great many of the contemporary tools that offer faster creation do so at a cost to the code quality. Can we please get some good standards compliant .Net components?

Also the mention of uneducated educators. This is so true for a great many areas of IT still it is shocking, even university level courses are behind the times, especially where IT is not the primary focus. I remember how quickly as a class at uni we knew more than the lecturer about Photoshop. The problem is made worse when the teacher is too proud or arrogant to acknowledge their lack of ignorance. Which gets me onto a whole seperate rant about the quality of teaching staff and the under appreciated nature of the job. It should be a desired occupation (like being a doctor) where the rewards are high, but you are held to account harshly for not being up to the task.

I haven't really seen the use of divs as table cell replacements, but it has been along time since I made the transistion from table based layout to CSS driven layout. I can easily believe it though, they are such different ways of working and require you to think so differently about you build a website. I've been made aware of this transistion again recently when learning Flex and WPF, where although some principles carry across, there are different rules and what you thought was the best way of doing it isn't necessarily the case.

Polar Rose - face recognition for web images

Polar Rose

This is pretty cool, if it works well. the potential to be able to recognise a face across multiple photos has previously been one of the tasks that still require a human. however this software potentially changes that. This is great news in terms of image searching.

It also reminds me about some interesting articles I've read recently around people who are unable to recognise faces, and how the internet had brought them together and offered a previously unavailable opportunity to study the condition.

Facial recognition is such a significant part of being human and the interactions that we have with each other, any step towards a technology that can make it an integral part of surfing the web is pretty cool in my book.

1.2.07

Gmail java app for my mobile

Thanks to the crazy people at work who won't let me check my gmail on my work PC, I have been without gmail for several months now and it's been difficult. I have tried using my mobile's browser, but it has been sluggish and expensive.

Now thanks to gmail's new java app for my phone it's just expensive. It's a really nice little app and it really streamlines the whole process and makes reading my email alot easier and clearer.

It's interesting to see the pervasive nature of Google onto the mobile phone. I 've been shopping for a new phone recently and it's interesting to see Goggle's influence on T-Mobile with their web'n'walk package. It's intersting to see the impact of VoIP is going to have on the mobile industry.