Tweets of the month

is giving candy to trick-or-treaters! 10:50 PM Oct 31st, 2008

Miguel is having his research Big Picture day... Lots of RSS to catch-up with the help of Google Reader. 10:41 PM Oct 24th, 2008

Changing from Yahoo! Mail to GMail - same username, but ending with gmail instead of yahoo.co.uk 2:09 AM Oct 20th, 2008

Back to work at MIT after a long weekend. 7:03 PM Oct 14th, 2008

Windows Azure

Microsoft is announcing a new cloud operating system, called Windows Azure.

See a technical introduction by Manuvir Das, Director of the Windows Azure team.

Using RealPlayer to download Flash Videos

RealPlayer has a new killer feature: Flash video download. It works on websites like YouTube.


Notice the "Download This Video" call-out on the upper corner of the video. Very convenient!

Trace

Trace


A new game for iPhone that echoes the great classic platform games of the 1980s, like my all-time favorite Manic Miner. This time however, some of the platforms are drawn by the player... A very original approach, and a demonstration of how a new user interface can change the user experience.

P.S. - If mentioning Manic Miner makes you nostalgic about the ZX Spectrum, check out Your Sinclair magazine top 100.

GIMP Script-Fu

I've just finished a couple of GIMP Script-Fu scripts. Both to automate the generation of smaller images.


I love the name Script-Fu, and indeed learning it takes some time, as any "martial" art... It is a Scheme dialect. Not the best language for scripting in my opinion, but after some trial and error the results were OK.

The documentation is also very scarce. The most useful resources I used were:
- GIMP Documentation chapter about Scripting;
- GIMP's procedure browser window;
- Example scripts included with GIMP installation.
Using just these it's almost impossible for a novice programmer to get over the learning curve before quitting. I know I almost did! I had to will myself to finish the scripts while looking to keep my programming skills sharp.

I also used DrScheme to try some Scheme expressions and for a more complete language reference.

The Screwtape Letters

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis



Audiobook




Comic book

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.

This is truly a great book! I highly recommended its reading (or listening - the audiobook version is particularly captivating). Even the comic book is worth it, as it includes the full text of the infamous letters of the senior devil Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood filled with advice from below about the "patient" and filled of warnings about the "Enemy".

Nim's island

Nim's island


Nim Rusoe: "Nobody invades my island and gets away with it."

Delicious Library 2

In case you're wondering how I produced such a nice bookshelf picture, take a look at Delicious Library 2. It's a very visual library management application, with barcode scanning for quick data entry. It's integrated with Amazon.com's databases to fetch product data. It's very good!

Just two nuisances: doesn't recognize many Portuguese products, and is only for the Mac (I use in Joana's computer).

My current RFID bookshelf

Studying EE / A estudar EE

I'm studying Electrical Engineering, in the footsteps of great men, of one man in particular, very dear to me.

Left 18 months ago, but is Always with me.

/ This post is bilingual: English (U.S.) and Portuguese (Portugal) /

Estou a estudar Engenharia Electrotécnica, seguindo as pisadas de grandes homens, de um homem em particular, que me é muito querido.

18 meses de saudade, mas Sempre presente.

MIT ESD.209 Special Topics in Supply Chain Management on iTunes

One of the most interesting offerings on iTunes are the lectures from some of the best universities in the world.

I'm currently listening to MIT ESD.209 Special Topics in Supply Chain Management.


Using iTunes, you can conveniently download the lectures, put them on your iPod, and listen to them while you're walking from home to work, and back.

The history of RFID

Jeremy Landt, in IEEE Potentials, Oct-Nov 2005
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1549751
(requires IEEE library access)

Eye-fi

While looking at the Amazon tikitag starter kit, I noticed Eye-fi, a SD card what is readable using Wi-Fi.



Now you don't even have to take the card out of the camera to take out the pictures...

Check out Eye-fi's website.

Get started on your own Internet of Things with tikitag

Tikitag is a do-it-yourself approach to building a personal network of objects. Objects are tagged with a smart stickers (RFID tags) and can be read with a reader that connects to a web site where object information is stored.

Amazon is selling a tikitag starter kit for around USD 50.

It's worth a look. I'll be watching Tikitag.

P.S. - Thanks to Joana for telling me about tikitag :-)

One Laptop Per Child

Nicholas Negroponte
MIT poverty week

Programming is the closest a child can be thinking about thinking i.e. learning about learning

More about this talk on Joana's blog.

Leaving Yahoo for GMail

After 6 years as a Yahoo! Mail Premium customer, I decided to abandon Yahoo and switch to GMail. The new address is just the same as the old one, the only difference is the domain name, @gmail.com instead of @yahoo.co.uk .



My discontentment was growing for these past few years, especially because the new Yahoo Mail has been unfinished for years with an awful settings page, but the final reason was the failure of Yahoo Mail support to help solve a problem I experienced and reported and waited for a fix for almost a month. This problem prevented me from sending email from a new email address I set up with my wife.

Googling the Internet and beyond

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, EECS Department, Northwestern University
MIT CSAIL seminar

This was a breadth talk, covering several topics:
- TCP congestion control - removing exponential back-off - paper on ACM CCR 2008;
- DoS against streaming CDN (e.g. Akamai) - how to attack a CDN network, how to leverage a CDN network knowledge of network topology to make better routing decisions - paper on IEEE ICDCS 2008, and Usenix/ACM IMC 2008;
- Googling the Internet - an interesting approach to profiling internet usage by querying google about IP addresses - paper "unconstrained endpoint profiling" on ACM SIGCOMM 2008
- IDNet mesh - identity validation credentials - work in progress

Very lively talk, with some interesting research.

Beyond Google - seeking the un-indexed content

Khai N. Truong, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
MIT CSAIL HCI (Human Computer Interaction) Seminar

The talk was about ubiquitous computing and human-computer interaction.

First, the talk was about a diary study that lasted 4 weeks, aiming to capture information needs of people when they are not at the computer - What Why Where What When?
858 needs were reported; 22.5% needs were not satisfied in time; 32.2% needs were never satisfied. More information on the CSCW 2008 paper by Dearman, Kellar & Truong

Next the talk was about the analysis of why people answer in the site Yahoo Answers.
Their main motivation is to help others and not to learn. A similar approach can be used for mobile applications, to try and capture information in context.

--

On a side-note, the presentation used a very neat visual technique: small replicas of previous sides on the lower right corner of a new slide, to help the audience recall a previous slide.

The new life of Madredeus? / A nova vida dos Madredeus?

There's a story about Madredeus on the Expresso newspaper website.
Madredeus music without Teresa Salgueiro? Let's wait and hear...

P.S. - Thanks to Ana for sending me this story


/ This post is bilingual: English (U.S.) and Portuguese (Portugal) /


Saíu uma notícia sobre os Madredeus no sítio do Jornal Expresso.
Madredeus sem Teresa Salgueiro? Vamos esperar e ouvir...

P.S. - Obrigado à Ana por me ter enviado esta notícia

SOP - Service on Process

Ramos A., "eXtended Information System Architecture for SmartTags", Instituto Superior Técnico, MSc thesis contains an interesting figure about how services can relate to an Enterprise Architecture (AE).



It's called Service On Process (SOP) and the full reference for the work is:

Almeida, J.M.; Santos, P.; Carvalho, B.; Marques, E.; Segura, J.; Vieira, A.; Sousa, P.; "BPB-SOA e SOP: uma Framework e Metodologia para SOA orientado ao negócio", Link Consulting, 2008.

John Chambers at MIT

It's not about YOU as Time Magazine stated, but about US, the on-line collaboration communities.

I was at John Chamber's talk at MIT. He is CEO of CISCO Systems.

He did a very good presentation overall. I was particularly impressed with the way he connected with the audience, climbing up and down the stairs, and looking straight into the people's eyes. He was using a lapel wireless microphone. He also used Powerpoint as a complete accessory. Great!

Some of his insights were:

On business...

Understand a crisis 101:
1 - Is it market-driven or self inflicted?
2 - Determine its length and depth
3 - Prepare for the upturn

Time frames:
Vision - 5 years
Strategy - 2 to 4 years
Execution - 12 to 18 months

Organizations are switching from "Command & control" to "collaboration". This change is process-driven and requires a common vocabulary inside a company.


On technology...


We're going from "software as a service" to "everything as a service".

The importance of telepresence, not just teleconference.

With collaboration and tele-presence, CISCO now can keep track of 26 priorities a year, instead of 2 or 3 as before.

In-network processing to perform bandwidth adjustment to destination's screen size.

They have an internal Facebook-like application that enables them to choose the right people for the right job, in a cross-department view. They have a reward engine in place that is based on these kinds of contributions.


--

Joana was also at the event and posted about it on her blog.

Quick guide to research / Guia rápido de iniciação à investigação

So you did some interesting scientific work, and the question looms in your mind: is it worth being published? The answer is a definite yes!
Writing is the way to express your ideas in a way useful to other people. Your own personal learning is greatly impaired if you don't distill your work by putting it in writing.

I've just published a short guide to research. It aims to help novice researchers learn some of the "trade secrets". It covers: writing, citing, publication types, structuring, reading and tools.

If you're interested, follow the link:
Quick guide to research.

/ This post is bilingual: English (U.S.) and Portuguese (Portugal) /

Fizeste um trabalho científico interessante e a questão impõe-se: será que vale a pena publicar? A resposta clara é sim!
Escrever é um modo de expressar as tuas ideias de uma forma útil para outras pessoas. A tua própria aprendizagem não fica completa se não distilares o teu trabalho de forma escrita.

Acabei de publicar um guia rápido de iniciação à investigação. Pretende ajudar os novos investigadores - alunos de mestrado - a aprender de forma expedita os truques da escrita científica. O guia aborda: escrever, citar, tipos de publicação, estruturação, leitura e ferramentas.

Se estás interessado, segue a ligação para o documento:
Guia rápido de iniciação à investigação.

A note on state-of-art surveys

A state-of-the-art survey at the beginning of a research work is an advisor's admission of ignorance on the subject.

I think the research work should start with something more objective and let the survey happen later, naturally driven by the actual research needs.

This World of Ours (Oretachi No Sekai)

This World of Ours (Oretachi No Sekai)

After Requiem for a dream, another movie with a complete lack of hope.

NOT recommended.

MIT symphony orchestra - Celebrate!

MITSO



Dvorak: Carnival Overture
Prokofiev: Piano concerto #3 (soloist Matthew Serna)
Child: Punkie Night
Turina: Sinfonia Sevillana

Einstein quote

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

Albert Einstein

mailto:wwood@hell.com

My dear Wormwood,

I found a new tool to distract humans from what they're supposed to do: the Internet.

Blogs, e-mails, web-pages, videos, iTunes, etc.: they all can be used by the Enemy to let them learn new stuff, however it can also be used in our favor. With great benefits...

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape
(stape@admin.hell.com)

Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms (2nd edition)

Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms (2nd edition)



An updated version of my favorite book on distributed computing.

Excellent references list and suggested readings. It's a very good book to get a broad sense of distributed systems.

The new materials are mainly about peer-to-peer, with extensive discussion about distributed hash tables although scattered across the book.
There is also coverage for Web Services but it's not very extensive with some major omissions, namely WS-Security and WS-ReliableMessaging.

The new Architectures chapter is not very clear and it somewhat confusing because of the paradigm approach in the later chapters of object-based, file-based, web-based and coordination-based distributed systems.

Finally, I loved the new cover. It's much more sober and inspiring than the first edition's.

In defense of Windows

I used to think Macs were great, but some bad experiences have left me seeing the down side of single-vendor lock-up. I also think that currently Apple is scrambling to keep up with multiple fronts - Mac, iPhone, MacOS - and it's superior quality premise is getting weaker.

For me the ideal solution would be Linux. I like SUSE. But currently I'm pretty comfortable with Windows XP (no, I don't like Vista that much, but eventually will end up using it).

I found the following article with a good case of
Why PCs are better than Macs.

Workshop Masters S.I.

A great initiative from the Information Systems group of DEI, IST to kick-start their students MSc works.

http://sites.google.com/site/mestradosi/

Highly recommended for all Computer Science students!

Experimental Models for Validating Technology

Marvin Zelkowitz and Dolores Wallace, in IEEE Computer, May 1998
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=00675630
(requires IEEE library access)

A very important and timely account of the need for proper experiments in software engineering.

The authors present various data collection methods grouped into three broad categories:
• observational,
• historical, and
• controlled.



Definitely worth a read, particularly for all Computer Science MSc and PhD students.

P.S. - Credit to my colleague Bruno Martins, for referring this article to me.

More assertive talks

How to make my talks more effective? I got some top-notch advice from people I'm working with right now.

Don't just present facts. Show that you applied your wisdom in preparing the talk. Second, begin with a short introduction, then introduce your hypothesis/conclusion to capture the audience's attention! If you leave it to the end, people are just spectators during most of the talk. Next, go through the hypothesis/conclusion items, one by one, justifying them (the whys). At the end, summarize what the talk was about.

- The presentation style should pull audience from their collars; punch-line first; i.e. tell the story from end, twist, and then to beginning;
- Never repeat outside information;
- Challenge status quo;
- Make "Wall Street Journal" headlines;
- Try to always have demos or connections to physical world - it draws people's attention, particularly if they don't care that much about the subject of the talk.

The difference between the top and the rest of the world is the arrogance of people. They may be wrong 50% of the times, but they're right the other 50%. Self-confidence is a requirement to move forward. That's how change can happen!

This is particularly true when trying to promote synergy between higher education and industry:

Requiem for a dream

Requiem for a dream



Marion Silver: "Anybody wanna waste some time?"

My first wikipedia edit

You've probably used Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." But have you ever edited it?

I had never edited it, until yesterday.

I was looking into the Object Naming Service (ONS) standard and I realized that a new version had came out - 1.0.1 - and that only the previous version was listed as reference on the wikipedia entry. So, I logged on using my wikipedia account and I added it! It was that easy! And now, lots of people will see the new reference. It's really amazing! And also you get a very clear notion of the precautions you have to take when using information listed on wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a very valuable resource in my research, not only as a secondary reference - good to get an overview about the subject but not definite, of course - but mostly as a keyword tuning tool.

How does the keyword tuning work? Instead of using your own keywords for your publications and research, you first check how it's called on Wikipedia. There are a lot of aliases for the same thing. At the end of the day, it's better for everyone to use the same keyword

This is a nice example of the so called "wisdom of the crowds". The crowd part is right, but the wisdom... let's just say that the truth is not always democratic. But more about that on another day.