This is a wonderful video and well worth sharing, I loved the concept and the way it was presented with the robotic prototype. For technology dreamers and innovators such as Fabien Hemmert (a PhD student at the Design Research Lab, in cooperation with Deutsche Telekom Laboratories) it all starts there. He shares a fascinating talk on TED about the future of Mobile phones and technology behaving more human-like and although the video is brief and this might be quite far into the future the results are mind boggling.

Fabien talks about making digital content graspable, and how to get the digital to the physical. I’ll let him explain as he does a far better job, but I really wanted to share this quote as it made alot of sense to me as we progress into the future of mobile touch and technology.

Humans should get more technical in the future, rather technology get a bit more human.

I find myself pondering about global economics, technology, innovation and where we might end up in the next 50 years. In this fast paced globe change is perpetual and I find it fascinating, and eve though I’m no economist but perhaps these books will help stimulate my mind to a better understanding of things to come in the near future?

You can find these all on Amazon, download them to your PC or read them on your Kindle device:

You Are Not A Gadget, by Jaron Lanier

Crisis Economics, by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm

The Great Stagnation, by Tyler Cowen

The browser i most depend upon is Google Chrome not Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera. Chrome has a lightweight footprint and out-performs all the others by miles.  It pleases me to watch their market-share grow over the months and for November it surges %0.75 (from %8.75 to %9.50 from the months of October to November) whilst other browsers didn’t see the same rise in numbers.

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Sure Chrome doesn’t have all the plugins that Firefox has (but they do have a growing market of some really cool existing extensions) nor have they thought through their bookmarks feature completely. Pound for pound this is still the best browser in the world. It’s all about speed and performance at the end of the day…

Anyone who has known me for long enough knows how much of an absolute failure I am when it comes to trying to learn a programming language and sticking to it. It’s not through lack of wanting to do it, I just easily get distracted by other “awesome” programming languages and try and learn those; a cycle forms.

Anyway, I am trying to stick with some languages now through hell or high water. I have decided to learn Perl and C and stick to them rigorously until I have finished my two books on them; which, incidentally, are very good and highly recommendable (O’Reilly’s Learning Perl and Keringhan and Ritchie’s The C Programming Language).

Anyway, when considering what languages to study, my mind always goes towards other things. The biggest “other thing” was the Python programming language. I have always dabbled with Python and actually deployed it for some maintenance tasks on a few servers. It’s highly readable, maintainable and has a few nice features built into it. It is also the language supported by Ubuntu’s Quickly.

This week we decide not to enjoy the sunshine, but to sit indoors and talk games, movies and tech. On the topic list we have: Red Dead Redemption; Google IO; MUBI coming to PS3; A NES, SNES and Megadrive console; speculation on Apple’s WWDC 2010; a whole heap of infomation on upcoming video games and much more.

Duration: 72 minutes

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Image courtesy of AP.

On the Economy

The Dow was shaken up this week with a 1000 drop in points.  Was it Greece, No, a trading mistake, No…

The Greek debt crisis. The fall of the euro. The collapse of the European order. Debt contagion hits the market. Never mind that, important as the Greek crisis is, nothing whatsoever changed in the Greek debt situation at 2:15 p.m. It was the explanation closest at hand, and it’s the job of the press to explain what was quickly turning into the fastest crash in U.S. market history.

Let’s blame it on technology, no? Or was it the trader who entered a “b” for billion instead of an “m” for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble a component in the Dow.

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Google Chrome is a superior browser to any i’ve used in the past 10 years or so, simply based on its performance. Firefox is great, but i’m not interested in all the add-ons and such that slow a browser down.

What I’m interested in is performance.  As i scower through the web with my many tabs open i want to be able to interact with them quickly as i cycle and rearrange tab by tab.

No other browser has yet given me the ability to browse the web the way Google Chrome has.   Firefox doesn’t even come close when it comes down to the tiniest little details. Lets talk about those details, see if you agree with me?

Google's Chrome browser has been heavy hit by people claiming it has serious privacy issues.

After an interesting discussion with people who are, “relevant to my interests”, the topic of Google Chrome soon came up. Most predictably what was mentioned was the privacy issues raised with it. As a believer in the open-source vetting process, I heavily disagree that Google could be doing anything subversive to our personal data.

To settle this argument in a non-subjective way I decided the best course of action would be an experiment. Essentially, what I wanted to test was the difference in packets between Google Chrome on first boot-up and search term “test123″ and a comparable browser with similar conditions. This way, we test Chrome against a vetted control browser. A few conditions before we get started:

• Experimental Browser: Google Chrome Beta for Linux (Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 x64) with experience reporting disabled.
• Control browser: Midori 0.2.3 (Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 x64), a WebKit browser licensed under a similar permissive license as Chrome.
• Analysis Method: A tcpdump, sudo tcpdump -w testbrowser.pcap -s 1550 dst www.google.com, command and Wireshark analysis.
  • This tcpdump commands monitors all traffic going to the Google domain (216.239.32.0 – 216.239.63.255)
  • Wireshark was to make the dump look pretty.
• Procedure: Start the dump, load up the browser and enter a search term to Google for “test123″. Stop the packet dump after this and monitor the results.

What I found:

The results actually surprised me in a very positive way. Not only did the two browsers communicate on exactly the same ports but Chrome also used around 60 less packets in the final dump. A cruel twist of irony that a third-party browser communicates with Google over 100% more than Chrome does. Anyway, without further hesitation, here is the dump from the different conditions.