When I’m in need of someone to talk to, I now turn to Elbot, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) routine with the cute but annoying robot that did so well on the Turing Test in a recent Turing Test Showdown.

For the uninitiated, the Turing Test was created in 1950 by British Mathematician Alan Turing who said that if a machine was indistinguishable from a human it (the machine) was thinking. Passing the Turing test is probably going to be a requirement for all those new robots on their way after the current economic depression.

I’m not sure if I’d pass the Turing Test. But that’s another matter.

I only have three problems with Elbot,

1. When I tell him (it?) my problems, he always seems to want to turn the conversation back on himself (seems human)

2. He’s not that funny.

3. I wish his name was Tallulah. Elbot sounds so, so, robotic.

Good Evening,

1. If you are currently using Internet Explore 7.0, please don’t. A critical vulnerability exists that could infect your computer, launch malicious code remotely from your machine, steal your passwords and bring all sorts of other nasties upon you. At this time we aren’t sure if anti-virus software will catch the vulnerability. I suggest you run ”Mozilla Firefox” or some other browser until there is a rock-solid patch for Internet Explorer 7.0 – expected some time in January 2009. For TRU users, Firefox should already be installed on your desktop computer. The IT Service Desk will provide you any help you need. Update – Microsoft has now released a patch for this. Run Windows Updates – Security.
   
2. You may have noticed that the Toronto Stock Exchange has been down all day due to a “computer problem.” You may also recall that the London Stock Exchange was down all day in September.  Two things come to mind here, a) It would totally suck to be the IT Manager at those outfits and b) in our rush to cloudify everything, we may want to take extra care of those systems that can kill our fragile economies;
3. Green idea of the day – run the data centre hotter. While we currently keep the A/C on full tilt in our data centre, telecom companies are starting to run theirs at 35 degrees C. Given the bone chilling weather of late, I wouldn’t mind being in a nice warm server farm about now. Sorry, no fancy drinks allowed;
4. In other, non-IT related news, Canada was voted the friendliest place on Earth in an HSBC expat survey. The link is to a rather odd article (i.e. not as “in-depth” as advertised)  but nevertheless isn’t it great to be finally recognized as being so friendly, eh?
5. Sadly, your correspondent has been laid low with a bad flu. If he was smart he would have seen this sickness coming on Google’s Flu Trend Tracker and stayed inside, avoiding all contact.

Per Item 5 in my last post. That web visitor data from Alexa looked fishy. For a start, where was China? So I took a look at one year’s worth of log files in Google Analytics for www.tru.ca and got these countries ranked by visitor traffic:

1. Canada
2. United States
3. India
4. United Kingdom
5. China
6. Australia
7. Philippines
8. Germany
9. Japan
10. Saudi Arabia

Sorry for the grievious error. This cold is getting to me.

According to Alexa, the TRU website (www.tru.ca) is:

1. The  102,598 busiest website worldwide;
2. Is ranked 3,495 busiest website in Canada;
3. Is the 6th busiest university website in BC (see list below);
4. Is ranked 46th for all education websites in Canada (including sub-sites);
5. 57% of the website traffic comes from Canada but the top 10 countries for visitors in order are: Canada, India, USA, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Belgium, Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore;
6. Traffic to tru.ca increased by 17% over the last three months;
7. the website is rated as fast, and;
8. 356 sites link to TRU.

Top 10 BC Higher Education Website Rankings – according to Alexa

1    University of BC
2    Simon Fraser University
3    University of Victoria
4    BC Insititute of Technology
5    Vancouver Island University
6    Thompson Rivers University
7    Langara College
8    Douglas College
9    Kwantlen Polytechnic
10  Okanagan College

Notes about Alexa: There is some controversy over the stats in the Alexa database as they are collected from users with the Alexa toolbar or other plugins installed which biases the rankings. Alexa is owned by Amazon.

It’s really tough to lose a friend, especially your best friend. That’s right, I’m talking about the theft of your laptop. Wouldn’t it be great to recover your precious and catch the crooks? The smart chaps at the University of Washington and the University of California San Diego have come up with an open source tracking system for stolen laptops – Adeona – the Roman goddess of safe returns, or something. Proper details and all the instructions to set up the service are in the link.

Simply put, the system works by sending a small message, and for the mac, a photo, every so often to a server. During the installation process you build a credential recovery file that you need to keep safe by emailing to yourself. You then use this file to connect to Adeona and determine where your laptop has gone.

To Catch a Thief

Once the criminals connect to the internet with your purloined laptop, Adeona grabs the internal and external IP address of the machine, the wireless access point name and the nearest router. A number of online repositories are available to tell you where the heck these access points and routers may be. It also takes a picture of the bad guy (see above.) It does this update every 30 minutes or so you have updated information if the crook is on the move.

You can provide this information to your local law enforcement officer and Internet Service Provider. DON’T TAKE THE LAW INTO YOUR OWN HANDS, he shouted. If you install this software on a University computer that gets stolen, IT Services will liase with the RCMP directly to recover your machine.

And the newspaper reporter, musician, record store employee, and television producer, etc…

According to the Web 2.0 iconoclast Andrew Keen in his book the Cult of the Amateur the flood of user-driven content on wikis, blogs and social networking sites is “destroying our economy, culture and our values.” Oh oh, that can’t be good.

Keen has lots of illuminating examples in his book, which is a polemic against the “upload society” we have created that is eroding the livelihood of professional writers, musicians and producers, etc. While some of the book seemed a tad alarmist for me, I really liked the passion of the work.

I found the concept of how no one makes any money in the Web 2.0 world (except Google) very interesting. Take blogging, pour example. According to the book, Guy Kawasaki, whose blog is on the top 50 for the whole Internet, earned a paltry $3,350 for 2006, not exactly a wage matching his fame.

Keen also discusses the misfortunes of the rock-acoustic band “The Scene Aesthetic”, who, despite massive MySpace and Youtube popularity, couldn’t translate that success to real world things like cash. Page 111 talks about their national tour where they could barely cover costs:

“On good days, if the band manages  to sell enough T-Shirts and tickets, they can even buy dinner. On bad nights, Bowley and de Torres ended up sleeping on basement floors of fans homes.”

Not quite the image of rock-stardom for a band that had nine million plays on MySpace…

Call me old fashioned and a crazy, cock-eyed optimist but I’ll continue to buy music, books and magazines – thanks very much. I’ve found that in this Web 2.0 world I’m starved for good information from experts and works from talented artists. In fact, I’m spending more money in the iTunes store than I ever would have spent at the local music shoppe. While there are some blogs that I really, really enjoy I also need actual news from actual journalists from the CBC, The New York Times or the Economist, etc.

I found the most frightening bits in the book dealt with  how your information is mined by search engine companies. According to Larry Page, Google co-founder, the future is the “ultimate search engine that understands everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly.” To do that Google becomes pretty well omnipotent and the concept of personal privacy a thing of the past.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook:

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”

Yikes. And Google will remember it all.

Have a nice day.

Gentle Reader;

Today I was going  to write a clever entry about iPods. Everyone has one and some people I know change them once a year, like shoes. That’s all part of the Apple marketing campaign, captured exquisitely in this classic by the MadTV people.

But does the music coming out of all those iPods sound any good? I’m not convinced. Are we just trading off sound quality for storage quantity and dare I say, fashion?  Are we getting further and further away from how the music originally sounded? Will anything ever sound good again??? Inquiring minds want to know.

Answering these questions requires research and that’s when things got far too complicated for me. I needed to learn a lot more about Nyquist sampling algorithms, lossy compression techniques, codecs and rate-distortion theory. This science would inform the ideal bit rates for sound reproduction and playback. And I still wouldn’t have addressed the psycho-acoustical properties that need to be considered when you try and trick the human ear. And what about the quality of the headphones you use? (I bought myself some of those fancy noise canceling ones for Christmas – I’ll report back in the new year if that helped.)

So at this time it seems I can’t really comment on iPod sound quality. But I do have a theory. My theory is that your mood is directly related to your perception of sound quality. For example, music always seems to sound better at my brother’s house. Maybe it’s his dedicated listening room with the comfy chairs and a stereo that costs about as much as my car. Maybe it’s that rich, warm sound coming out of those speakers or maybe just the down-home hospitality and snacks.

I haven’t a clue. Happy Friday.

Fond Memory - Dog

Imaginary hands up who has a laptop or home computer? – lots of hands

Hands up who store precious and other memories in the form of digital photos, rare Brinsley Schwartz songs, etc on said device? – many hands

Hands up who back up those computers? – less hands

Hands up if a fire, flood or theft in your dorm or residence caused your computer to go AWOL – would your precious data be safe? even less hands; Ashen and crestfallen faces.

You see, we’ve basically digitized our memories over the last 10 years and with Web 2.0 stuff it’s gotten even more frenetic. Even my dear olde Dad has scanned and processed a lifetime of slides and family photos into his iMac. This data needs protecting.

But on this cold December day we need to come face-to-face with the home truth that we are all backup slackers. Dad and I use a solution called “Time Machine”, that comes with the Mac and provides automated “near-line” storage and recovery. This software, connected to a USB hard drive, acts as a good “belt” in the backup wardrobe but doesn’t protect you from the nightmare scenario of total loss. To do that you need to go to the “cloud.”

So today I decided to change my ways and test out some remote backup software. Being of Australian heritage I liked the sound of the Mozy solution.  It also seemed simple to use and is backed by that little company called EMC. I also liked the cute message about reticulating splines that comes up when it is configuring itself. If it reticulates its splines, it must be good…

Note that these solutions aren’t free (mozy is $5 per month per machine if you have more than 2GB to store – well duh) and may cause your ISP consternation when it takes that first big backup gulp of your hard drive. Remember also that this data is stored somewhere out on the cloud, probably in the USA, where Uncle Sam can view those pictures of Boots and Fluffy should those cute kittens pose a threat to national security. They are also slowwwwww to backup.

Whichever fashion accessory you choose to protect your data – belt, suspenders or both – do something people!