One of My Dream Web Toys – Now Live

Posted on July 31, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Oh, am I happy.  Here’s where I’ll be, every day, for at least some little period of time: xRank on Politicians.

Every pollster and political consultant will like this – and okay, just plain political junkies anywhere, in this heightened political campaign year.  Politicians themselves will also want to check out their up/down arrow (Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine was hot “with a bullet” for a while because of the Obama VP rumors, but he’s falling now; John Edwards love-child stories are hot-hot-hot! right now).  Check it out yourself. 

xRank has been live for a while with celebrities’ names – but who cared about that?  Politicians – ah, good stuff.  Maybe we’ll give geeks their Andy Warhol moment and add technologists soon 🙂

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Invisibility, Mind-Control, Great Coffee, and a New OS

Posted on July 30, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Lots of interest and blogoshere commentary beginning about “The Mojave Experiment.”

The reaction is reminiscent of one of those Obama or McCain provocative ads posted online, generating far more attention and buzz than the attention they get on the natural by being broadcast.

Sure, it’s a sales pitch, and pretty narrowly geeky at that (thanks GoogleFight!).

But at least it’s an innovative one – as the Wall Street Journal puts it today, “Give Microsoft people credit: They did it with humor, and they weren’t afraid to air the negative stuff.”

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Microsoft Sphere, Apple Tablet

Posted on July 29, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: Today is the first public showing of “Sphere,” Microsoft’s newest multi-touch innovation: “After months of rumors, Microsoft researchers are taking the wraps off a prototype that uses an internal projection and vision system to bring a spherical computer display to life. People can touch the surface with multiple fingers and hands to manipulate photos, play games, spin a virtual globe, or watch 360-degree videos.”

Analysis:  The video tells the story, particularly when you keep in mind that Sphere (and its earlier cousin Surface) represent a new multi-touch, multi-interface platform for human use of computing power.  A year ago Surface was still just emerging from the research lab, and now a year later it’s been introduced into AT&T retail stores and is on its way to many other commercial and public environments.  Sphere will be used in similarly unpredictable ways, adopted by third-party developers as an innovative canvas on which they can project cool new uses.

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How to Keep Up with the Semantic Space

Posted on July 25, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: Reshma Sohoni, chief executive of Seedcamp (the VC accelerator focusing on European tech startups) said in an interview this week that “In the past few months, we’ve seen a lot more developments around the semantic web,” and talked about the coming value of semantic web services.  

Analysis:  There’s never-ending buzz about the semantic space. Just this week John Conroy writing at the Content Matters blog had a long and interesting piece examining “three ingredients needed to enable and popularize the semantic Web,” with the aim of answering “if we really are on the cusp of a content revolution.”

Also, I admit it, I can’t stop playing with the semantic-space startups, whether it’s Sensebot or the newly launched Evri, or Powerset (just acquired by Microsoft, as I wrote about previously).

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IPsec, IPv6, and Security at Your House

Posted on July 22, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Just had a great meeting in Redmond introducing some government friends to Steve Riley, one of Microsoft’s “technical evangelists” on security – network, app, data security and most of all, IP security.  He’s great at the big-picture integrated view of security, including physical security right up through the IP stack – here’s a video of a recent talk he gave at Microsoft’s TechNet called “The Fortified Data Center in Your Future.”

Check out his blog and you’ll see the kind of topics he works on; just one example of obvious value is a recent post full of real-world down-to-earth security advice for securing your environment at home (home networking, email use, internet browsing, etc for family and friends).

Oh, he’s also been on Twitter for almost a month now, where he mixes interesting finds on security news with offbeat political commentary 🙂  Yet another example of some of the bright people I meet back at the mothership in Redmond….

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Higher Math on the Sands of Santa Barbara

Posted on July 21, 2008 by lewisshepherd
UCSB

UCSB, looking NW

Spent Sunday afternoon with world-renowned mathematician Michael Freedman (short bio here) walking the beach and bluffs above, just northwest of UC Santa Barbara, talking about a number of absurd and not-so-absurd possibilities in the future applications of quantum computing.  Here’s an example of the kind of stuff I was trying, very hard and maybe somewhat successfully, to grasp while walking in the California sun and trying to ignore the nude sunbathers and hang-gliders.  If that’s unhelpful (as most of it is for me), here’s a straightforward description of some of his main work and its possible applications. 

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Theory of the Fireball, Supercomputing, and other Los Alamos Tidbits

Posted on July 20, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Back in the early ’90s when I was first dating Kathryn, now the lovely bride, we went on some awesome roadtrips, including many cross-country – great way to get to know someone.  At the time my brother was an Air Force pilot, flying the F-117 stealth fighter, so we once paid him a visit at Holloman AFB on a 10-day drive through the Southwest.  I’ll have to find and upload to Flickr the pictures he took of each of us sitting in its classified cockpit – surely a massive security violation which I lay entirely at his feet (lucky for him he’s retired from the Air Force now and flying for Delta). 

Sadly, the F-117 Night Hawk has also now been officially retired, replaced by the F-22 Raptor.

As much as that was a thrill, though, the highlight of that particular roadtrip was driving up to the Los Alamos plateau and spending some time touring around the Lab, the Museum, and the interesting little town that’s grown up around all that PhD talent in the middle of the high desert.

That lab’s on my mind because I’ve been thinking about supercomputing and the revolution it could undergo thanks to quantum computing. I’m in Santa Barbara visiting the “Station Q” research program in quantum computing, and will write more about quantum computing soon, since I’m actually beginning to understand it.

But as an interesting artifact in my preparatory reading, Microsoft’s John Manferdelli sent me a link to a Federation of Atomic Scientists archive of declassified Los Alamos National Lab technical reports and publications, from “the good old days” at Los Alamos.

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Test for Prediction Markets: They Say Obama, but Polls Say It’s Tied

Posted on July 12, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: According to the latest Rasmussen poll released Saturday July 12, and promptly headlined by the Drudge Report, “The race for the White House is tied. The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows Barack Obama and John McCain each attract 43% of the vote.” Newsweek is reporting a similar result in its own poll, with Obama moving down and McCain up (“Obama, McCain in Statistical Dead Heat“), and other polls increasingly show a similarly close race.

Analysis: I’ve been tracking the growing divide between two quite different methods purporting to offer statistical predictive analysis for the November presidential election. Polls are saying one thing, but Prediction Markets are saying another. 

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The “Rush to the Cloud” – Not So Fast…

Posted on July 11, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Had a great time on Wednesday on a panel at the “Defense 2.0” conference, at the Arlington Ritz-Carlton.  I believe I learned as much from my fellow panelists from Cisco, IBM and so forth – about the importance of information security and assurance – as any conference in recent memory.  The story in Government Computer News (“Defense 2.0 a Work in Progress“) captures the views of most of the speakers. 

I had a gentle and gentlemanly disagreement with the keynote speaker, Mike Nelson.  Mike has a distinguished career, working with Internet-inventor Al Gore while he was VP, and later Director of Internet Technology and Strategy at IBM.  I offered that he was perhaps slightly overly enamored of the “rush to the Cloud” school of thinking.  I’ve written about that school of thought before, and the balance of where computing power is likely to reside in future, given Moore’s Law for the foreseeable future.  The GCN quotes capture my thinking in short form: there’ll be the cloud, along with increasingly powerful computing in local form factors (some desktops, more laptops, handhelds, mobiles, and embedded-computing forms of all sorts).

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A-SpaceX, Google, and Virtual Tuesday

Posted on July 9, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Yesterday I had a “virtual world vibe” going.  At 5:30 a.m. when my dog Jack woke me up offering to take me for a walk, the first thing I noticed on my mobile was a series of tweets from Chris Rasmussen, NGA’s social software guru, posted the night before.  Twitter is interesting for a lot of reasons, but one is the ability to snatch asynchronous stream-of-consciousness statements, from strangers and friends alike, as they pass by in the microblogosphere conversation.

Chris went on a tear about Second Life, with several hilarious observations and comments within the space of an hour, so here are several from his public Twitter feed:

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