simra.net Doing stuff since 1973

Bear with me while I mess with pipes and test some more...

fyi, if you're subscribed to my RSS feed, check that it's http://feeds.feedburner.com/Simranet and not /blog/rss.xml. Otherwise you'll miss out on half the action. :-)

Good news #1: My cousin-in-law has offered me free hosting. Sweet! The server can be on the slow side, but beggars can't be choosers, no? I'll tweak drupal's throttle module to try to make things a little snappier.
Good news #2: I'm sitting at YVR after receiving my TN visa in record time. Many thanks to Microsoft's immigration lawyers for assembling all the documentation I needed to complete the process. Now I have an hour to kill while I wait to board.

Introducing MRDS 2008 CTP:
http://blogs.msdn.com/msroboticsstudio/archive/2008/04/09/microsoft-robo...
which is already garnering press:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1325

Most of the changes look to be in the simulator but I'm looking forward to trying out the new LINQ methods...

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080313/full/news.2008.670.html

Last month I posted this article on Milgram's six degrees of separation theory. Today, Ravi Bhat sent me this Nature article, and offered the following comment:

As far as I know, previous studies of social network connectedness all
involved either small-scale networks or involved decision-making on
the part of the participants (ie where they had to guess who the next
link in the connection would be to find a person).

This Microsoft study, which as Ravi notes is probably the largest ever, claims to confirm the 6 degrees theory, refining the number to an average 6.6 hops between any two instant messaging users. It seems that Milgram at least got the right ball-park in his now famous 1967 study, but I'm going to argue that the actual world-wide average is probably even closer to 7, or even higher- the Microsoft study considers only instant messengers-- people who tend to be young, and whose on-line lives tend to be socially promiscuous. If we throw in the rest of the world- and in particular people with limited access to technology (and who, I might add, probably constitute the majority), then surely the number must be larger. Larger, at least, until we get them all IM accounts.

http://community.research.microsoft.com/blogs/techfestlive/default.aspx
http://www.dudek.org/blog//103?

Techfest is Microsoft's annual internal technology fair, where MSR shows what it's good for. Today was the 'public' day, in which the press and other invited researchers get a peek. Greg Dudek is there, and there is a liveblog of the whole event (maintained by MSR).

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/31/myspace_fb_comscore_drop/
http://creativecapital.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/its-official-us-social-n...
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2008/02/el-reg-facebook-is-over.html

... and while we're on the topic of Microsoft. Anyone with half a brain could see this coming- all you had to do was look at Myspace's dwindling visitorship and linger times.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/02/1359218&from=rss
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/02/technology/02soft.html?_r=1&hp&oref=sl...

I was thinking exactly this yesterday, but the NYT scooped me: the Microsoft bid is an admission of failure on a grand scale. It's clear that the live.com rebranding and the adCenter platform have not been the successes they hoped for and if they're to compete with Google for online revenue, they need Overture,
Yahoo's main (only?) revenue generator. Put more simply, Microsoft needs to buy advertisers *and* eyeballs. What will happen to side projects like delicious and flickr, and how would they integrate with live.com? If they're smart, they won't make too many adjustments, notwithstanding the fact that yahoo has been struggling too.

[ The usual disclaimers apply: I'm a former adCenter employee. ]

Below the fold, Fake Steve Jobs' homage to the bid [possibly NSFW?]

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.excel/browse_thread/thre...

Oops. Excel has a problem with the number 65,535 (off the top of my head, this looks like the maximum short integer but I might be wrong). Seems to be one of those classic cases of a programmer flagging a number as 'special', thinking that result will never appear in the real world. Programming rule #1: if you think it will never happen you can bet it will happen.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20070803/tc_pcworld/135526

Spammers are getting better at defeating captcha systems (referred to as HIPs in this article). I think that's pretty cool (scary?) in and of itself- it takes a certain amount of expertise and resources to build a good captcha-defeating system, indicating that spammers have serious resources. In any case, expect to see lots of kittens in the next gen. And dogs and bicycles and other easy-for-people-but-hard-for-computers-to-identify objects. People used to argue that pornographers and game developers were the leaders in pushing the envelope in terms of computing technology, but now it seems spammers have an incentive to solve the mother of computer vision problems- generic object recognition.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=245971&cid=19764377

Behold, my witty and insightful comments about the recent Microsoft announcement that they will open a development lab in Vancouver.

A short article on Illah Nourbakhsh's work on "TeRK", the Telepresence Robot Kit.

Greg Dudek has a pointed opinion piece on Microsoft Robotics Studio and the reaction to it from the academic side. It sounds like the space of robot control software is starting to heat up a little. There is a long history of anti-microsoft sentiment in academics, and I prefer to reserve judgement for now- MSRS has some powerful features that no other existing controller can match.

This week I left Microsoft adLabs to start a new job at Braintech here in Vancouver. It was a difficult choice to make- I've really enjoyed my time at Microsoft, but family circumstances dictated that a return to Vancouver was in order. I'm excited to start the Braintech gig, where I'll be working on some mobile robot applications. I'm not so excited about the commute from UBC to the North Shore, but I'll take it as a new adventure and bring lots of reading material for the bus trip.