Thoughts on The Future
back to all thoughts
posted in The Future, Whatever by kumar on Monday Dec 17th, 2012 at 8:06p.m.
The Mayans were so advanced in their astronomical math that they calculated really long periods of time.
For example, they calculated the birth of the universe. In their Long Count
calendar they had a unit called a Baktun
which is about 394 years and starts at the birth of the universe as they knew it. The classic Mayan period lasted between the 8th and 9th Baktun.
On Dec 21, 2012, the 13th Baktun ends and rolls over to the 14th Baktun.
It's a New Baktun! We cannot pass up this chance to celebrate!
It's also the Solstice which matches up with their calendar.
However, the plot thickens. Apparently there is something special to the Mayans about the end of the 13th Baktun.
The way their calendar works is like an odometer. At the birth of the universe (according to Mayans),
the calendar looked like 13.0.0.0.0. Since the numbers naturally roll over, on Dec 22, 2012, the Mayan date will be
EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE BIRTH OF THE UNIVERSE. It will be, once again,
13.0.0.0.0. Of course, modern day calculations of the
actual Big Bang are agreed to be about 13 billion years ago, not 5,125 years ago like the Mayans thought, heh.
But their astronomy was very advanced for their time; the way they calculated big numbers is impressive compared even to today's calculation techniques.
Sometimes I think that when we finally scorch the earth and millions of years
have passed, enough for it to heal, some other
civilization will rise up way smarter than us and laugh about how we couldn't
even calculate the size of the universe correctly (or whatever).
In case you haven't seen it, NASA leaked their "day after the end of the world"
video. This briefly explains some of the Mayan calendar logic.
posted in Music, The Future by kumar on Monday Jun 18th, 2012 at 3:18p.m.
David Lowery wrote a piece on how downloading music is hurting musicians (which is a response to Emily White's piece on admitting to not buying music). Here is my response.
Music is a really interesting "product," especially when distributed digitally for $0.001 cents per download (production costs: bandwidth, storage, etc). The real production costs are for the time put in by the artist, studio fees, and creativity. Besides the creativity part, that formula sounds a little bit like the FDA drug market, right? It costs about $0.001 cents to manufacture a pill so the hefty price tag goes to recoup the money spent on drug research. Or does it? Yeah, selling drugs is a messed up industry...
posted in The Future by kumar on Friday Jan 27th, 2012 at 10:07a.m.
At ORD Camp last weekend Ben Huh led a discussion about how we -- a group of geeks and artists -- can save the Internet. We won the fight against SOPA and PIPA for now but those laws will just sneak in through some other bill. Will wikipedia be there to black out again in protest? The fight is nowhere near from over and we have to get organized...
posted in Django, JavaScript, Mozilla, Python, The Future by kumar on Monday Sep 19th, 2011 at 2:50p.m.
Most people at Mozilla are remote so each quarter we sync up face to face as a group for an all-hands meeting. There are over 600 employees! We of course sync up in smaller groups more frequently but this is a chance to see what's going on across the entire Mozilla horizon.
So what's happening at Mozilla? We're on the cusp of a huge shift towards an open web platform. That is, something more than a web browser -- something you can run "native" apps on. There's a lot of work left to do, of course. Here is a random dump of interesting projects in the works...
posted in Mozilla, The Future by kumar on Sunday Jul 3rd, 2011 at 11:49a.m.
The release of Google Plus presents a unique opportunity to open up the social web. Why? Because it's a compelling product -- it's intuitive and fun with innovative features like circles, hangouts, sparks, etc. In many ways it's a clone of Facebook but that's just a reinforcement of what Facebook (and before that, Friendster) got right. If Plus continues to succeed then the optimist in me envisions this as a golden opportunity! ...
posted in Music, The Future by kumar on Wednesday Mar 30th, 2011 at 11:10a.m.
A few services have been popping up lately that let you stream music from any
computer or device (the so called "cloud"). Amazon just released theirs,
uncreatively named Cloud Player.
I'm pretty excited about this one because it's the first I've seen to actually
offer sane, reasonable pricing ...
posted in JavaScript, Mozilla, The Future by kumar on Thursday Mar 3rd, 2011 at 2:04p.m.
The Internet was invented so that data could be decentralized and liberated.
Well, so much for that idea.
With the rise of services such as Facebook and Twitter we are back to the
original mainframe problem: everything is stored and controlled by a central
authority. Ironically, today's "to the cloud" meme is making us depend
on central authorities even more.
So what about data privacy? In this centralized
model we go about our online lives constantly posting data to all these different
servers that we trust...
posted in JavaScript, Mozilla, The Future by kumar on Thursday Mar 3rd, 2011 at 1:08p.m.
Firefox 4 is near the end of its beta cycle but what is so special about this
release? Why not see for yourself on the new demo site, the Web of Wonder
(requires Firefox 4 beta but some demos do work in Chrome and Safari).
I'll be honest, as a web developer, the new power of HTML5, CSS3, SVG, WebGL, etc
totally blows my mind...
posted in CHIRP Radio, Google App Engine, High Performance, Python, The Future by kumar on Wednesday Jan 5th, 2011 at 10:56a.m.
As web developers we are faced with this problem: how do we scale up our code to handle high traffic? A lot of time and engineering goes into this problem -- time to simulate the traffic we expect and add servers to our cluster, cache heavy database access, etc, in anticipation of the load. Time is precious. This time could be spent optimizing the usefulness of our web product and creating interesting content. No one really congratulates you when a website works, they expect it to work.
When Google App Engine was released their pitch was...
posted in Django, JavaScript, Mozilla, Python, The Future by kumar on Tuesday Nov 30th, 2010 at 9:59p.m.
Whenever I'd hear about someone from the Python community getting hired by Mozilla I'd get really excited because I knew they'd continue to share and collaborate in the open source world that I was a part of. So here I am about a month into joining Mozilla myself to work with the WebDev team. Everything Mozilla does is right out in the open: ideas are posted on blogs, code is committed to public repositories--free to use, free to fork, etc. They take a firm stance that everything you do on the web should be free and open even to the point where the new Firefox 4 audio API (which is amazing) doesn't even support the patented, closed MP3 format despite its ubiquity.
This transparent approach to technology is really powerful...
posted in Chicago, CHIRP Radio, Java, The Future, Whatever by kumar on Sunday Oct 17th, 2010 at 1:12p.m.
CHIRP Radio in Chicago is looking for someone to help us build a custom Android application so that our listeners can have a better experience on their Android phone. There are already a few Android apps for radio but they are clunky. Also, we have some plans to better engage listeners on phone apps with currently playing tracks, click-to-request-a-song, and other ideas like that.
We already have a pretty slick iPhone application created by volunteer John Carlin and after only a few months it already has 1,000+ downloads...
posted in Google App Engine, Python, The Future by kumar on Tuesday Jul 27th, 2010 at 1:05p.m.
Most deployment systems depend on PyPI, the Python Package Index, for fetching and installing dependencies. Although performance and reliability has greatly improved, there are still days when you may find PyPI down and thus are unable to deploy through the normal fashion.
Finally, there is now a concerted effort to create official mirrors of PyPI that everyone can use (see PEP 381). The mirrors are pretty simple--they're not full blown package indexes--and you can already start using them for experimentation. Also, thanks to Richard Jones, Martin Löwis, Guido, and others at EuroPython, my half-baked idea of using Google App Engine as a PyPI mirror has been resurrected! I don't know if it's fully implemented yet but you can try it out at pypi.appspot.com. App Engine seems like a logical place for a mirror due to its scalability. However, I am skeptical of how well it will perform. App Engine still has a long way to go with regards to stability.
To get involved with the mirroring project you can follow the discussions on the Python Catalog SIG mailing list. The next step will be modifying clients to discover and fallback on available mirrors.
posted in Django, Python, The Future by kumar on Thursday Jul 16th, 2009 at 3:57p.m.
Zed Shaw recently wrote a clear and concise defense for why he used the GPL on Lamson. I've seen a few mentions on twitter that alarmed me because people seemed to think now is the time to release all software as GPL. Here's what you need to ask yourself before you license your code as GPL. First, do you have a business plan that involves selling your software? Most people do not, most business plans have to do with actually using custom software. If that's you then your software and your business become better as more developers work on your software. I.E. when your software is applied to more real world situations, more bugs are fixed and more patches for features are received. GPL does not help you gain users because it shuts out most commercial enterprises ...
posted in Python, The Future by kumar on Monday Mar 30th, 2009 at 2:51p.m.
At PyCon 2009 the fact that Python needs to solve the "packaging problem" came up a few times. This is not a new discussion. However, the problem is still not completely solved so here I'll point out the details of the problem, the unsolved parts, the solved parts, and how the solved parts could be solved better ...
posted in JavaScript, Python, The Future by kumar on Thursday Feb 12th, 2009 at 2:48p.m.
I came across this article today on Coding Horror about how Google has a monopoly on search engines and how something must be done about it. I'm not one who falls into the "Google Is Evil" camp; I actually think they are a benevolent force in the world :) However, as with any monopoly, the lack of competition stifles progress. And when I think about the state of today's technology, I can't help but wonder why Google has not fixed the most fatal flaw in their Googlebot :
It does not behave like a web browser.
Search engines are made for people and the majority of people browse the Internet with a web browser. The first comment on the article is a cry for help: "What can we do?" I have an answer to that question. And you can take my answer and turn it into a business plan and climb the golden staircase to success. Any smart investor would be begging you to take their money. Google generated $5.37 billion dollars in Q2 of 2008 and their flagship product doesn't even work! In fact, I'm going to give this to you all for free; all I ask is that you visit me one day and say thanks. Are you ready?
posted in Python, The Future by kumar on Friday Dec 5th, 2008 at 4:41p.m.
posted in Chicago, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Testing, The Future by kumar on Wednesday Dec 3rd, 2008 at 10:58a.m.
posted in GTAC, GTAC 2008, Java, Python, Ruby, Testing, The Future by kumar on Monday Oct 27th, 2008 at 9:36a.m.
posted in GTAC, GTAC 2008, JavaScript, Python, Testing, The Future by kumar on Saturday Oct 25th, 2008 at 9:06p.m.
posted in GTAC, GTAC 2008, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Testing, The Future by kumar on Friday Oct 24th, 2008 at 3:58a.m.
posted in The Future, Whatever by kumar on Monday Oct 13th, 2008 at 11:04a.m.
posted in The Future, Whatever by kumar on Saturday Sep 20th, 2008 at 12:56p.m.
posted in JavaScript, Python, The Future by kumar on Wednesday Aug 27th, 2008 at 10:26a.m.
posted in Erlang, Python, The Future by kumar on Monday Apr 28th, 2008 at 5:56p.m.
posted in Google App Engine, Projects, Python, The Future by kumar on Tuesday Apr 15th, 2008 at 9:55a.m.
posted in JavaScript, Python, Ruby, The Future, Whatever by kumar on Friday Dec 21st, 2007 at 3:36p.m.
posted in JavaScript, Presentations, Python, The Future by kumar on Sunday Nov 18th, 2007 at 11:58a.m.
posted in GTAC, Java, Python, Ruby, Testing, The Future by kumar on Saturday Aug 25th, 2007 at 5:34p.m.
posted in The Future by kumar on Wednesday Apr 4th, 2007 at 10:15p.m.
posted in Python, The Future by kumar on Wednesday Feb 14th, 2007 at 10:32a.m.
