Discomgoogolation can partially be defined as being stressed or anxious at an inability to access the Internet. According to a survey back in 2008, 44% of Britons already suffer from this... This is just an indication that we are becoming more dependant on having information at hand 24/7. Be it via a laptop or a cellphone.
Cellphone technology has improved in leaps and bounds over the past few years. I still remember getting my Nokia 7210, which was one of the early phones with a decent colour screen. Soon afterwards, cameras were integrated into the handsets and now GPS's are quite common. Fast forward a few years, and my Samsung Omnia has a 5 Mpx camera, GPS, good web browser with HSDPA, touch screen and 16Gb memory, To put this in perspective, its processor is about twice as fast than my first Intel Pentium based machine and has about 14x as much storage space, whilst remaining big enough to fit into my pocket.
Ok... So we all know that technology is improving and soon enough todays best cellphones will be obsolete, but what does this mean? Coming back to the point on Discomgoogolation, I believe that “cellphones” will soon become the primary source of connectivity to the Internet. And not only that; they will soon replace the traditional laptop for mobile work. This is not to say that the laptop will disappear, but its role in mobile connectivity will change.
Some of the barriers of widespread adoption within the business world with regards to cellphone applications, is the limitation of screen size, processor speeds and cumbersome data input. However, few people could have predicted the merging of cellphones, GPS's, and Cameras over the past 7 years, and I therefore have no doubt that within the next few years, there will be widespread adoption of solutions that solve these issues. Another recent trend starting to emerge, is “Cloud Computing”. There has been much hype around it with various definitions thrown around, but fundamentally, there is a shift of processing happening on the client side, to the server side. This also has a positive impact on the addoption of cellphones as a primary business tool..
Reading an ancient book by Bill Gates (written back in the dark days of 1999), he repeatedly stated that keeping up and ahead of change has become essential in the modern world. Within business, there are a few truths that will always remain and this is one of them: We constantly have to think of ways of repositioning ourselves in order to remain ahead of the curve. People and businesses who position themselves now, with a vision of the future will be ready to ride the inevitable next wave of technological advancement. It's almost here.
I'm fairly new to Linux in spite of having a Linux based machine in my room for the past 2 years. I installed Mandrake 10, duel booting with Windows XP a while ago but never really ended up using it much. After trying to install the latest graphic drivers, I ended up messing up the X interface and all I got was a black screen. It took another 3 hours to figure out how to undo the mistake.
I eventually came to the conclusion that Linux was free, and great for certain things, but best left to the uber-geeks who had the time on their hands. I didn't feel like spending weeks to get a usable system and learn how to use it.
This all changed when I was given a copy of Ubuntu 8.10. I installed it on a virtual machine and tried it out because I'd heard quite a bit about it. There wasn't anything to it - It just ran. Everything just worked “out of the box”. But then again, it was running in virtual machine which had the network settings, drivers etc. already. Using it for a few days, I felt braver, and decided to format my old laptop, which was running Windows XP to see what it would be like running on the native hardware.
Once installed, it run mostly without problems. I could immediately connect to my home network by plugging in an Ethernet cable. The next step was to get the wireless network working. This took a little time reading various articles, but I think that I eventually just installed the drivers via the “Hardware Drivers” GUI that had already picked up the new hardware. So in hind-sight, it was really easy. Once the wiresles drivers were installed, I followed the same approach and installed the graphics drivers and that was all - Everything else was flawless.
Ok, now I had a system that worked, but I didn't like the interface very much. It didn't look very “polished”, as opposed to the Vista interface on my other laptop. So, I set out trying to get the interface looking as good. I happily discovered websites like gmomelook.org that provided themes and add-ons for the gnome interface that ubuntu uses. It was a simple case in most instances of downloading the files and dragging them onto the “Appearance” application. This then installed the theme and allowed changing the default icons, colours and windows look. This improved matters and made for quite a nice looking interface. Looking at a number of YouTube videos, trying to work out how other people had set up their machines, I came across “CompizFusion” which enabled a 3D desktop by means of 4 sides of a cube appearing as seperate desktops. This allowed one to work on one desktop, but with a click of a button, rotate it in 3D to a new face on the cube to present a clean desktop. This prevents the desktops from becoming cluttered with multiple open windows and has had an enormous impact on the way I work. There are many other plugins and settings for CompizFusion that improves the Gnome UI even more.
The next step was to install an application dock in the style of Mac OSX allowing quick launching of applications. After a quick search I found that Cairo Dock was one of the more popular ones. The installation was simple and worked fine. True to form, I themed it with a downloadable skin from within the application – very easy.
While setting up my machine, I made a few mistakes and learnt a lot, but in the end have a system that not only looks good, but is very usable. And best of all... Every piece of software running on my machine is FREE! Most of the day-to-day applications come pre-installed so for a basic user, there's no need to install much. For those users that have to use a particular Windows-only program, there is Wine. Wine allows running of Windows program within Linux. It's not perfect though, but should work in most instances. I've tested it with “Medal Of Honour Alied Assalt” 3D game and it worked perfectly (with a little tweeking).
So, my final conclusion... I'm keeping Ubuntu! At last the world has a practical
alternative to Microsoft's “Windows” (Assuming that you aren't paying for a Mac). As for an everyday user that isn't a total tech-geek, it's definitely worth trying out before forking out for the latest version of Windows. Afterall, it's totally risk free since it doesn't cost anything.
I've just got back from the Champagne Sports Resort in the Drakensberg which was the location for the South African regional finals for the 2009 Imagine Cup. The global competition is sponsored by Microsoft who very kindly put us up for the 1st - 3rd December at the wonderful Champagne Sports Resort. Many universities from around the country were represented by one or more teams with the final winning team being flown to Egypt in June 2009. With such high stakes, the competition was tough, with every team having an interesting project on display. The entries ranged from Masters theses to 3rd year IS projects. The event seemed to be well run and organized, but I hoped that there would be more public to view the awesome projects. I suppose being in the central Drakensberg, it wasn't unexpected.
Unfortunately, we didn't win, so for us, after a long road the competition is over. But, we did make some contacts in the radio industry and got good feedback regarding our project. After a huge amount of work and finally getting everything running relatively smoothly, it's a bit of an anticlimax just leaving it. I'm hoping to take the project further next year and see how that develops.
So, here goes - the breaking news... The winning project was a Masters project (A collaboration from UCT and Stellenbosch I think) which converted sign language performed by a person standing in front of a camera to text and finally to synthesised speech. Unfortunately I don't remember the guys names, so I can't give credit to them, but I'm sure I'll run into their names pretty soon as blogs/ news sites are updated. They claim that the difficult/ innovative part of the system is that it uses only one camera. This comes into play in that with one camera, depth has to be determined without the use of "bifocal vision". I think that the final aim of this research is to port the technology to cellphones which would allow a dumb person to use their cellphone and "speak" to a hearing person unable to understand sign language via sign language.
From what I've heard, research into this field has been going on for the past few years at UCT and therefore I think that the project has a good chance of doing well overseas. Good luck to the unnamed students - I'll be following your progress. (And updated this blog if I find your names.)
Yay! I’m finally a “serious blogger” according to Paul. (Boost Your Blog Traffic). I've added Feedburner, joined Technorati, del.icio.us etc and submitted my blogs to a couple of other networks. I've been reading for the past day or so on how to increase traffic to blogs and needless to say there are tons of different opinions. But while sifting through all the information out there, I eventually came upon a few people saying roughly the same thing. I'm not going to get into what's been said already except for emphasizing that people ultimately view a site for value. Whether that's entertainment, information, news etc, it doesn't matter - If the blog isn't valuable, it isn't going to be read.
But something that isn't often mentioned is that before somebody even reads a single word on the page, they've already formed a first impression. I.E. the visual impression of a blog is really important. There are billions of web pages out there and if you're so lucky as to have someone land on your page, you've got a really small amount of time to capture their attention. There should be no excuse to using the standard layout when you create your blog account. There are way too many sites that look exactly the same as the next. Finding the correct balance between that garish neon flashing banner advert and plain text can be difficult for non graphic designers but there are so many preexisting templates around that it is not difficult find and apply a nice looking one. And if you're into graphic design, they all enable customization. So, come on - go change that default layout!
Things have been really hectic over the past few weeks but at least I've got time to breathe again. We presented our beta version of the Radio Station System project on Friday which went fairly well. Apart from one problem with reporting all went smoothly and everybody seemed impressed. It never ends though - so now I'm trying to implement dynamically changeable look and feels for the portal component of the system.
That brings me to my biggest problem with C# - Exception handling. Coming from a Java background, I've got so used to the compiler reminding me when I've forgotten to handle an exception somewhere. Now, don't get me wrong - I don't rely solely on the compiler to tell me when I've made a mistake, but it helps in some cases. Being fairly new to C#, there is no way that I know all the exceptions and where they could arise. So, inevitably I miss quite a few and the application (usually at the most inopportune time) bombs out as you're trying to show off some functionality that's taken months to build. Instead of getting some oohs, and aahs, you've got a red face and try to mumble something about the Memory....
From what I've seen, the developers at Microsoft seemed to try to make things as easy as possible with the good tools provided, frameworks, API's etc, whereas Java seems a little "lower-level". I'm sure that the guys had some reason not to build C# with forced exception handling but I can't seem to find it. It just seems contradictory to the assistance everywhere else?
