Peerside blogs

Bookcrossing in Redwood City

ppower — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:58:06 +0100

One of my weaknesses is that I hate to dump books, sell them - fine, share them - ok but I just can't bring myself to dump a story. I'm also the type of person who can sink into a book when travelling and as a result I often find myself away from home with one or two finished books and trying to decide what to do with them. I used to leave the books in the hotel room hoping that the cleaners may find them useful but that was until recently when I saw a pile of books dumped in a skip outside a hotel in Dublin - horror !!!

So recently when I spotted mollydot releasing books via bookcrossing.com I decided that in the future I too would give my books freedom and release them into the wild. This morning I released my first book which can be viewed here , set free in the Sofitel lobby in Redwood City. Here's hoping someone else gets to enjoy it .. and if they dump it then let it be on their conscious, not mine !

Bookcrossing, for those of you unfamiliar with the activity, is a way to tag and share books through an online community Bookcrossing.com. As the web site describes itself:

Bookcrossing is away to share your books, clear your shelves, and conserve precious resources at the same time. Through our own unique method of recycling reads, BookCrossers give life to books. BookCrossing books are not stagnant dust collectors, but living entities travelling the world as true BookCrossing emmisaries. Our books find new readers and introduce them to the wonders of BookCrossing.

I'll blog some more on bookcrossing at some stage in the future, I find the idea intriguing and it intersects with an idea that has been nurturing in my subconscious for a number of years now about how we can efficiently combine book recycling with libraries, charities and social communities. More on that later. In the meantime - get out there and set those books free !

Where will Lifestreaming End ?

ppower — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 04:43:36 +0100

Blogging, tweeting, your linkedin feed, facebook, flickr gallery, GPS location, who you're talking to on the phone, what you're wearing, how you're feeling ... where will it all stop, or will it ?

I'm currently reading Accelerando (Singularity) by Charles Stross which starts with a character who makes his living from spreading ideas, hooking people up with new technologies, memes and innovations - interesting stuff but loses the plot about half way through. What I found intriguing was how, in the near fictional future, not only does everyone lifestream everything we see, hear and experience but they combine this data with personal agents for research, background checks, correlations etc. Imagine having your social agent whisper peoples names, when you met them last and the name of their significant other as you meet new people - not because you have told it that information but because it has mined your lifestreamed recordings and inferred the information. Another cool geolocation scenario is suggested where one of the characters ventures into a dangerous part of the city and is reminded by one of her personal agents that this will impact on her insurance premium - if the agent stuff doesn't freak you out then the use of geo data for risk based insurance billing should.

Have fun on twitter ....

Data Quality and Trains ?

ppower — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:41:59 +0100

After my last post Apple, iPods and Data Quality I've had a few queries from friends about what exactly I do in Informatica :-) Nothing new there but what did surprise me is that this time most of those people were aware of data quality because their CIO, Compliance department or customer services guys were making noise about it and to because they saw it as something they had to think about it in their day to day lives. A few years ago when we were still Similarity Systems and I told people I worked in data quality I may as well have said that I polished widgets ... no one had heard of data quality or worse just assumed it was data cleansing.

I believe that will change for individuals as well as companies as the world we live in becomes more and more driven by data. The case for companies is quite clear - data quality issues lose money - period. For individuals I believe the same case is there but we rarely measure our activities based on cost so it's not as apparent. Think about the personal cost to you for example if your credit check report ( especially stateside ) is incorrect, if your address is incorrect and your tax refund goes astray or your timetables are wrong ...

And on that last one I leave you with the most recent Informatica marketing video - ok so the acting is terrible but the punch line is worth waiting for.

del.icio.us Tags: Informatica, Data Quality, Train, Marketing, Fun, Accuracy

Apple, iPods, UPS and Data Quality

ppower — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:56:26 +0100

I rarely mention my day job in my blog because mostly I blog about alternative topics to give my brain a break - isn't there a saying "a change is as good as a rest" ? However today is different, I quite innocently stumbled across a classic data quality issue in real life - and all because I bought an iPod and wanted it delivered to my brother in Waterford.

The Apple Store is great, allows you to select what you want, select the color and even engrave a message on the back. No complaints there. So finally, time to enter the destination address, no surprises there and I provided a perfectly correct Name, Townland, Parish Name, County address and off it goes. Apple prompt send me my confirmation and the next day I get my order reference and UPS tracking code.

Microblogging - One Ring to Bind them All ?

ppower — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:47:15 +0100

Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, Friendfeed and the recently added Identi.ca - choices, choices and more choices. Surely if microblogging is going to stick around it'll have to standardise on a messaging format (XMPP anyone ?) and the tools just become end points just as Outlook, Eudora, GMail, Hotmail etc. became endpoints for email ?

In the meantime I'm trying out Posty to mix 'n match them all.

Mobile Concepts from Mozilla Labs

ppower — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 19:43:05 +0100

As much as Apple deserve credit for their recent, market changing, innovation around the iPhone they are by no means the only smart people out there. Take a look at the concepts bubbling out from the Aurora project created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept series.

I really like the idea of my UI adapting to my location and deciding what applications I most likely want to use and what data I'm most likely to find interesting. Similarly I like the tactile like gestures shown in one of the earlier videos - there's something about how sliding the menu out slowly makes sense yet a quick, dismissive, flick can exit back to the desktop (or should that be phone top ?).

I think the next few years are going to get very, very interesting as pervasive connectivity and location awareness change the way mainstream society thinks about how they interact with their surroundings. When your location becomes a program parameter does that mean you can customize applications for particular locations ?

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path

Aurora (Part 2) from Adaptive Path

Aurora (Part 3) from Adaptive Path

Aurora (Part 4) from Adaptive Path

del.icio.us Tags: mobile, location, mozilla, aurora, adaptive path, user experience, UX, concepts

Swimming with Dolphins - Doggy Style

ppower — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:44:23 +0100

My brother, a surf nut, pointed me towards this surreal but great photo of a Labrador swimming alongside a dolphin off the coast of Tory Island, Donegal recently. Nice photo Mr Morrison

del.icio.us Tags: dolphin, photography, dog,

WiFi on Irish Trains

ppower — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:02:44 +0100

According to ENN Iarnrod Eireann are considering the provision of WiFi on Irish trains through an arrangement with Airappz who would provide and I assume operate the technology for free. It appears Airappz plan to fund the service by selling advertising on the hotspot landing page which I assume can be valued based on the number of users that use the service .. and therein lies the catch.

Try getting space to open a laptop on the 5pm train to Drogheda you'll most likely get abuse for using up valuable breathing space. That said, anything that drives more connectivity in Ireland has got my backing, anything that drags Iarnrod Eireann out of the dark ages is priceless !

The History of Pastis - Part 2

ppower — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:30:33 +0100

Recently I've been combining one of my passions, cooking, and my wifes passions, France, by reading Culinaria France and amongst the many obscure and nostalgic details it presents about regional french food it also contains a piece on Pastis ( see my earlier post on pastis to see why that should interest me )

A familiar sight in the bistros of Marseille in the 1920s was a young salesman seeking customers for his wine. The label, painted by himself, showed vines, olive tress and the bright sun of Provence, his homeland. Paul Ricard dreamed of commercial success and the freedom it would bring him to do what he really wanted. His ambition was in fact to study painting, but his father would not allow it, so he started work in his father's business, selling wine. He dealt with deliveries, learned bookkeeping and racked his brains to find a way forward. Vin Ordinaire was not the answer.Neither his wine or his own brand brought him that sort of success, but he did notice on his frequent visits that people most liked to drink: pastis.

read more

Keeping it Simple - Boyer-Moore Fast String Searching

ppower — Sun, 11 May 2008 20:13:58 +0100

As anyone who reads here regularly probably already knows I've a firm believe that simple solutions glued together with a healthy dose of pragmatism will more often than not deliver applications that are more scalable, flexible and resilient to change.

Recently I spent time researching address linkage and data mining problems and my poor aging brain cells can only handle so much math and dry academic papers. While academia do get a hard time for being too "ivory towered" in their thinking it surely doesn't say much for an area of research of the researcher doesn't feel that wider public would benefit from easier access to the results. Ideally academic papers should come packaged with an associated tutorial or "this paper for dummies" which starts from the assumption that the reader does not have 10yrs research background in "discipline X" (and no, the "abstract" does not count)

You can imagine my relief when I discovered a worked and very clear example of the Boyer-Moore fast string algorithm presented by no more than Mr Boyer himself on his web page: Boyer-Moore Fast String Searching Example . It's simple, to the point and it doesn't try and make something that is actually quite simple ( albeit ingeniously clever ) any harder than it needs to be which I think is often unfortunately the case when people showcase their work.