SAST Wingees

Meme – 8 least known facts about me

Updated June 27, 2007:  Some folks have responded, please see below.

Raj has tagged me and I am supposed to write 8 least known facts about me: 1. Thanks to my father’s war zone posting in Sikkim during my early childhood, I started schooling only from the 2nd grade.  That has made me perennially nursery-rhymes challenged. 2. I wasn’t into paintings that much. That changed after I encountered Monet, Van Gogh and Vasily Kandinsky. Priya Raju, my art lover wife had a key role to play of course. 3. I used to ride my father’s 30 year old Raleigh bicycle to school. My classmates used to call it the “rolls royce”. 4. A combination of my shyness and poor english speaking skills made me live in complete dread of public speaking.  Now I don’t miss any opportunity to make a speech, thanks to Donoghue Dunedin Toastmasters Club. 5. I’m passionate about anthropology and have an insatiable curiosity to learn about other cultures. These days our vacations are centered around this topic, thanks to Priya Raju’s shared interest and encouragement. 6. I directed 2 Tamil plays in high school. Interestingly, Ganesh who is one of the fellow bloggers on this site was the hero in both of them. 7. I can read/write/speak Sanskrit (speaking not that much) and Tamil – 2 of the 6 classical languages (Hebrew, Greek, Chinese and Latin are the other 4). 8. I have climbed both the no.1 and no.2 peaks in South India – Anaimudi and Mukurthi (Doddabetta is technically taller than Mukurthi but it has a motorable road right near to the top of it) I hereby tag 1. Ganesh and 2. Sibu who both blog on this same site. [Sibu responded saying he was on vacation and he will respond shortly]. 3. Kaps of Sambhar Mafia famous for his desipundit posts. 4. Ranjit Nair who is a KM aficionado from Satyam. [Ranjit has responded. Thanks Ranjit.] 5. Ram, a colleague at Cognizant who runs the Arre O Sambar blog.  [Ram has responded. Thanks Ram]

IBM’s Koala – Screencasting on Steroids

You must have all seen screencasts – a stream of screenshots with annotations of a session with a software application. This is the technique we use to explain how to use a software system. The person learning the new system must painstakingly go through the screencast, do the same actions on the system and learn to use the system step by step.

I have wondered for a long time, why we couldn’t create the equivalent of training wheels (which kids use to learn cycling) for learning applications. I had envisaged a scripting solution where you simply record your session and when you replay, the system walks you through step by step, pausing for you to do the task with prompts on what to do. Imagine how much easier it will be to train people on new systems. This could forever change the way we train people on new systems. Well, i never did anything about the idea like the other gazillion ideas i keep generating.

Today I was reading the June 2007 issue of IEEE Computer and I came across this article “Social Scripting for the web“:

As our business and personal lives move online, we must learn to carry out increasingly complicated tasks on the Web—for example, checking a bank account balance, setting up automatic bill payments, sharing photos with family, searching for real-estate listings, and ordering new business cards. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an expert watching over your shoulder and showing you how to do such things properly?

The Koala project at IBM’s Almaden Research Center ( www.research.ibm.com/koala) is aiming to create the next best thing: a wiki-type repository of instructions for Web applications that can help users automate common tasks.

In addition to being human-readable, Koala scripts are machine-understandable—the system can interpret each instruction and perform it automatically. At each step, Koala shows you what button to push and then does it for you. It can also fill in fields with your name, address, and other personal information.

I am so excited by this and can’t wait for the software to be released to the market. This may be hard to visualize for you. If that is the case, check out this Koala screencast on IBM’s site.

Ganesh, maybe you have access to this software inside the firewall? If you do, maybe you can update us [without violating confidentiality, of course].

Animating the global web

David Troy has built 2 very interesting much-talked-about websites twittervision and flickrvision. Latest updates on the popular micro blogging site Twitter are plotted on a auto-refreshing Google Map on twittervision. Flickrvision does the same thing for photos uploaded on the popular photo sharing site Flickr.  If you need to while away time, these 2 sites are great. Just watching the updates pour in from around the world is quite fascinating – an internet equivalent of looking out of your window and observing the passers-by. Check it out.

Clayton Christensen says Apple iPhone will fail!

It is 10 years since the Innovator’s Dilemma was published. Businessweek interviewed Clayton Christensen to commemorate the event.  Christensen predicts during the interview that Apple iPhone will fail.

What do you all think will the iPhone succeed?

Multimodal Biometrics and Voicepay

Biometric authentication is fascinating for the simple reason that you can do away with passwords and all the resultant hassles. Technology Review profiled an interesting company called Voicepay which promises to revolutionize payments by using your own voice to authenticate you. 2-factor authentication or using 2 methods of authenticating someone is considered to be relatively fool proof compared to single factor authentication (usually a userid/password).  Taking off from that idea, IEEE argues that we can combine multiple biometric methods to authenticate someone in a nearly foolproof manner. They’re calling it multi-modal biometrics.