• The inability to run an operating system of choice on a mobile device
•  The restrictions on what language we can use to build mobile apps
•  The restrictions on how to distribute your apps

Is it capacity constraints of devices? I don’t think so. We ran much more powerful kernels in smaller amounts of memory.

Is it the lack of a reference design (for hardware)?

Is it because mobile operating systems need to work under different assumptions?

Is it because there is no Apache like organization for mobile operating systems?

Is it because mobile is heavily linked to the cloud?

Why can’t I write my app in PERL or Python or  C or any other language? On Android, it is Java (yeah I know about SL4A) and on IOS it is Objective C, both pretty yukky languages for rapid prototyping and innovation. And the alternative is html5 and Javascript? Wow!

Why do we, as an industry keep walking into these dead ends? I am surely missing something here.

The key ingredient for great innovation is not great ideas but great innovators.  And what makes a great innovator is a rare combination of passion, skills, tenacity and fortitude needed to slog through the process of prototyping, testing, refining and rejecting ideas until they hit on a combination that works.

It starts with a this compelling, provocative statements:

 

And I am not going to pollute it with my comments now. Read the doc and let us have a conversation. Here is the link .

Why do some children find Math hard to learn? I suspect that this is often caused by starting with the practice and drill of a bunch of skills called Arithmetic—and instead of promoting inventiveness, we focus on preventing mistakes. I suspect that this negative emphasis leads many children not only to dislike Arithmetic, but also later to become averse to everything else that smells of technology. It might even lead to a long-term distaste for the use of symbolic representations. – Marvin Minsky

“Math know-how is cumulative, which means it works much like a stack of building blocks. You have to gain understanding in one area before you can effectively go on to “build upon” another area.” – from Why Math is Hard

Some comments from the students from the class and my own questions.

• One student thought that Math was considered hard because lot of others thought it was hard. He attributes to the Social Influence.
• Lack of a cognitive map of the subject. What is it? Why are we learning it? What is it used for?
• Math is the opposite of commonsense which other subjects have to some extent.Is it too abstract? One student mentioned that he thought of Math mostly in terms of procedures.

There may be many other reasons. It will be great to see why.

Meta:

I loved Math. Not sure why. I was lazy as a student and this was  one subject in which your return on investment in time was very high. May be because,  I had great Math teachers and I learned and liked the subject.  Now after almost 40 years, I want to go back and understand better, dig deeper and get that “Cognitive Map” , Marvin Minsky talks about.

If you are interested in digging a bit deeper, these links and books may help

What makes Mathematics hard to learn?  A very good article by Marvin Minsky

Why Math is Hard from About.com

Letters to a Young Mathematician (about college level Math) by Ian Stuart

What Is Mathematics? (Just started reading it)

What is a hacker? Far from the stylized depictions of nefarious teenagers or Gibsonian cyber-punks portrayed in pop culture, we believe a hacker is someone who likes to solve problems and experiment with new technologies. If you’ve ever sat down with the latest O’Reilly book on a new computer language and knuckled out code until you were well past “Hello, World,” then you’re a hacker. Or, if you’ve dismantled a new gadget until you understood the entire machinery’s architecture, then we probably mean you, too. These pursuits are often undertaken for no other reason than to have gone through the process and gained some knowledge about the how and the why of an unknown technology.

Along with an innate curiosity for how things work and a desire to build, a computer hacker (as opposed to a car hacker, life hacker, food hacker, etc.) has experience with software design and development. This is someone who has written programs before, likely in many different languages. To a hacker, UNIX is not a four-letter word, and command-line navigation and bash operations may come as naturally as working with windowing operating systems. Using regular expressions and tools such as sed, awk and grep are a hacker’s first line of defense when dealing with text. In the chapters of this book, we will assume a relatively high level of this sort of knowledge.

Today, I find a reference to The Hacker Way,  in this article on Facebook IPO and got this text from the IPO document and felt that it is worth preserving and sharing.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

Do you know of similar quotes? Send me comments. Meanwhile, whenever I come across a quote on Hackers and their ways, I will try to update this post.

“We are facing a huge deficit in people to not only handle big data, but more importantly to have the knowledge and skills to generate value from data — dealing with the non-stop tsunami. How do you aggregate and filter data, how do you present the data, how do you analyze them to gain insights, how do you use the insights to aid decision-making, and then how do you integrate this from an industry point of view into your business process? The whole thing is hugely important for the future.”

Good questions. But education alone may not be answer. How about moving some of the data(base) experts and content analysis experts into this field?

The problem in solely focusing on teaching this stuff is that students do not have enough context about industry needs. While educational institutions teach theory, there is very little industry alignment or effort to understand industry needs. This problem cannot be solved in isolation. It has to be part of a bigger picture and spending a year or so in doing a variety of projects helping the industry.

Great thoughts by Scott Chacon on Handy Tools for Optimizing Your Team.

I don’t think it applies just to developers. This may be the assumptions with which we want to welcome any new member into a team, community or organization. We can assume that they have these qualities unless proven wrong.

Meta:

I have a confession to make. This is not how I always looked at people. It took me a long time to figure out even some of the basic ideas of how to work with people.

knowledge of emerging trends in scholarly communications and library and information technologies.

Qualifications:
MLS degree (or recognized equivalent) from an ALA-accredited program;
demonstrated large-scale project management expertise;
demonstrated experience with XML, applying metadata standards and schema, and controlled vocabularies;
demonstrated expertise with one or more metadata manipulation and scripting languages (e.g. XSLT, Perl, Python);
demonstrated applied web application development experience, including familiarity with development frameworks (e.g. Ruby on Rails, Django), and application programming language(s) such as Java, PHP, or others;
familiarity with semantic and linked data standards such as RDF and OWL;

Text/Data manipulation, scripting and meta data – are these  the new skills needed in science, engineering and knowledge work?

Here are some thoughts.

1. You need an entrepreneurial spirit. These are people who are willing to risk their careers on building some thing to solve a pressing problem. They should be willing to give up short term gains to pursue their dreams.
2. You need a culture that reacts to failure well. This will take time to build.
3. It will help to have a few successful entrepreneurs who did well. That is happening very slowly. It will also help to have people who have done well in their careers and are willing to try something new.
4. It needs a community. Communities are starting in Chennai – TiE Chennai Startup SIG, Nasscom Emerge, Chennai Open Coffee Club, Chennai Geeks and several other tech groups.
5. It requires great educational institutions. I don’t think we have enough.
6. Our Universities have to turn into research engines. There are a handful of institutions that do this a bit. Not enough, though.
7. We need to have proximity to great people who have built products. That is beginning to happen.
8. We need a spirit of collaboration. That is beginning to happen too.
9. We need capital infrastructure. This includes angel investors, venture capitalists, financial institutions and other supporting services. What we have now is nowhere near what we need.
10. We have the first generation of incubators.  They provide space and infrastructure but not what entrepreneurs really need – guidance in building a business from customer validation to business development. There are a few experiments happening and hopefully their success will inspire others.
11. A knowledge of the market would help. It is beginning to happen thanks to the Web.
12. We need lots and lots of conversations on both successes and failures. This is beginning to happen.
13. We need the spirit of bootstrapping. Out of necessity (due to the lack of funding sources), this is probably going to be the default model of building a business.
14. We have good experience in building service companies. How can we leverage this to move into products?
15. We have to find something unique and stuff that matters. This is much harder to come up with but not impossible.

There are encouraging signs. More and more product companies are showing up at the annual Nasscom product conclave every year. Incubators have a chance to play the role of catalysts. I think there is an opportunity here to find some unique problems and solve them.

What are your thoughts?

A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.

I have difficulty in accepting this view. Not sure why, for I cannot argue against this possibility. Infiintely Stupidity? is a video worth watching. This half an hour journey is guaranteed to stimulate you and make you think.

• Darwin’s Natural Selection
• Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
• The discovery that the conscious, deliberative mind is not the author of important decisions
• Emergence
• Pavlovian conditioning
• Two brain systems
• Chance shaping Personality
• People become what they do
• Group polarization

Link to the article

Meta: After some Googling, I found 2012 : “What is your favorite deep, Elegant or Beautiful Explanation” 

These 189 responses are going to take a while to digest

The strange history of “Think Python”
(Allen B. Downey)
In January 1999 I was preparing to teach an introductory programming class in Java. I had
taught it three times and I was getting frustrated. The failure rate in the class was too high
and, even for students who succeeded, the overall level of achievement was too low.
One of the problems I saw was the books. They were too big, with too much unnecessary
detail about Java, and not enough high-level guidance about how to program. And they all
suffered from the trap door effect: they would start out easy, proceed gradually, and then
somewhere around Chapter 5 the bottom would fall out. The students would get too much
new material, too fast, and I would spend the rest of the semester picking up the pieces.
Two weeks before the first day of classes, I decided to write my own book. My goals were:
• Keep it short. It is better for students to read 10 pages than not read 50 pages.
• Be careful with vocabulary. I tried to minimize the jargon and define each term at
first use.
• Build gradually. To avoid trap doors, I took the most difficult topics and split them
into a series of small steps.
• Focus on programming, not the programming language. I included the minimum
useful subset of Java and left out the rest.
I needed a title, so on a whim I chose How to Think Like a Computer Scientist

Focus on programming, not the programming language. That is it. That may be the magic formula. But I would add a couple more. Start with some really interesting, engaging problems. It is more difficult than it looks. I like how Moran starts out teaching Java in his Stanford Course.  ”Interesting and Engaging” can be different for different people.

For me, it is a tug of war between insulting the intelligence of my students (by being too basic and boring the good ones) and being too obscure to start with.

1. A shared (social?) bookmark – something I want to remember with some context
2. A fleeting thought – something I want to capture but mull over later
3. An opinion – an opinion fragment, really. It may be mine or something that I resonate with
4. A question – I may not even state it as a question but sometimes it is really a question
5. A quote – I don’t always put it in quotes but the link provides a context
6. An idea – Something I want to throw out there and see what people think
7. A signal – Mostly to myself but it is kind of public
8. A note – Lots of times it is just a note (with no opinion or endorsement attached)
9. Reflection – You know what I mean
10. Just a way of thinking aloud – Think along with me, it says (sometimes).

What is it to you?

We started with – What, Why and How of Innovation and discussed Ideas and Innovation. We covered a variety of topics on why students should do startups, how to do innovation in colleges, how students can make money and a few other orthogonal topics.

• What is innovation? – Implementation of an idea and creating value
• How do you start innovation – Not taking things for granted, starting with some ideas and building upon them
• Ideas – There are no good or bad ideas. All ideas are good starting points.
• Why Innovate – The urge to improve, to meet market challenges, for self-development
• Where do ideas come from – Fulfilling needs, meeting challenges, solving problems, incrementally improvements
• Why do a (student)  startup? – to understand entrepreneurship by practicing it, for independence, for fun

We finally ended up with the topic on how students can make money. Here are some ideas from students themselves:

1.  Teaching other (younger, high school students)
2. Doing projects for seniors (this was something I did not expect at all)
3. Creating niche online magazines (example given was a car magazine)
4. Selling customized T-shirts
5. Managing Events
6. On line data entry
7. Writing documentation
8. Note taking (for students by students)
9. Blogging
10. Helping companies work on promotional activities (marketing help)
11. Amazon Mechanical Turk (my addition)

-

1. obspy.core 0.6.0o  - a Python framework for seismological observatories.
2. opencl-for-python 0.4.0  Open CL Python bindings
3. Clyther 0.3-beta  OpenCL Python integration
4. selenium 2.16.0  Python bindings for Selenium
5. bliss 0.1.17  A native Python implementation of the OGF SAGA standard (GFD.90).
6. fandjango 4.0.1 Fandjango makes it stupidly easy to create Facebook applications with Django.
7. pyramid_skins 1.0 Templating framework for Pyramid.
8. stoqdrivers 0.9.14 Python fiscal printer (ECF) drivers
9. FilterPype 0.3.1 FilterPype is a process-flow pipes-and-filters Python framework.
10. Flask-DebugToolbar 0.6 A port of the Django debug toolbar to Flask
11. Astropysics 0.1.dev-r1142 Astrophysics libraries for Python
12. PyTeVCat 1.1.2 Python wrapper for TeVCat
13. OpenSRS 0.1.1 Higher level Python interface to the OpenSRS XML API
14. django-coverage 1.2.2 Django Test Coverage App.
15. django-user-metrics 0.1 capture metrics for each user
16. joblib 0.6.0a Lightweight pipelining: using Python functions as pipeline jobs.
17. django-maintenancemode 0.9.3.1 Django-maintenancemode allows you to temporary shutdown your site for maintenance work
18. django-configglue 0.6.1 Django commands for managing configglue generated settings
19. pyperry 1.2.8 Python library for querying and mapping data through generic interfaces (this is a port of the Ruby “perry” library)
20. python-sld 1.0.6 A simple python library that enables dynamic SLD creation and manipulation.
21. django-sld 1.0.4 A simple django library that generates SLD documents from geographic models.
22. django-threaded-messages 0.1.26 User-to-user threaded messaging system (similar to facebook) for Django
23. django-wysiwyg-forms 0.1.0 A What You See Is What You Get form editor for Django.
24. sleekxmpp 1.0 SleekXMPP is an elegant Python library for XMPP (aka Jabber, Google Talk, etc).
25. django-debug-toolbar 0.9.1 A configurable set of panels that display various debug information about the current request/response.
26. django-envelope 0.4.1 A contact form app for Django
27. crawler 0.1.2 python crawler.Do you want to receive these alerts in your email? Let us know by sending a message.
    

1. Silk ported from Kindle Fire to rooted Android devices, other web browsers now jealous
2. Spotify CEO shows off iPhone voice integration hack, love for Siri, Coldplay
3. Iwan Thomas on Motorola ACTV, motivation, music and more
4. Android Market hits 400,000 apps
5. Best Android sports apps
6. SugarSync updates Android and iOS apps, brings auto sync technology to videos
7. APP OF THE DAY: Touchnote Postcards for iPad review
8. Apple iPhone 4S Lands in China, 21 Other Countries Next Week
9. Android Ice Cream Sandwich Now on 0.6 Percent of Devices
10. iOS 5 Bug Could Leave Your Photos On iPhone Open For Everyone To See
11. Use Your Android Device As An Extended Display For PC With ScreenSlider 13 Download Now
12. How To Root ASUS Transformer Prime On Android 3.2.1 Honeycomb Using NachoRoot [Tutorial]
13. Apple Set To Launch iPhone 4S In China And 21 Additional Countries On January 13
14. Android Market Breaks The 400,000 App Barrier, Still Lagging Behind The iOS App Store In Absolute Numbers
15. Tweet Time Is A Simple And Efficient Twitter Application For iPhone Running iOS 5 13 Download Now
16. Google introduces mandatory Holo theme for Android 4.0
17. Android now has 400,000 apps, still a ways to go to catch iOS
18. AT&T to launch LTE Pantech Element 1Cwaterproof 1D tablet next week for $299
19. Samsung intros two new value members to the Galaxy family
20. Velocity Micro Cruz tablets will let you bring Android 4.0 home on a budget

Do you want to receive these alerts in your email? Please leave a comment here or send us an email at infostreams at imorph.com

Guess what? I found two packages for creating piples and filters today through my Infostream alerts  -  FilterPype  and Joblib.

Pypes and Filters is a framework for working with data. The purpose of Pypes and Filters is to make it easy to manipulate streams of data by “filtering” the data through Filters that in turn form a Pipeline, or Pype.

Here are some features from the Introduction page.

FilterPype is being used for multi-level data analysis, but could be applied to many other areas where it is difficult to split up a system into small independent parts.

Some of its features:

• Advanced algorithms broken down into simple data filter coroutines
• Pipelines constructed from filters in the new FilterPype mini-language
• Domain experts assemble pipelines with no Python knowledge required
• Sub-pipelines and filters linked by automatic pipeline construction
• All standard operations available: branching, joining and looping
• Recursive coroutine pipes allowing calculation of e.g. factorials
• Using it is like writing a synchronous multi-threaded program

Joblib is a set of tools to provide lightweight pipelining in Python. In particular, joblib offers:

• transparent disk-caching of the output values and lazy re-evaluation (memoize pattern)
• easy simple parallel computing
• logging and tracing of the execution

Planning to give both a try. Have you used any of these?

Strategic technology consulting will be an innovative service offering that gains traction in 2012. As more and more organizations start grappling with cloud computing models, technology scatter, virtualization, managing remote workers and branch offices, etc., the necessity for a company to come in and assess the current network environment and make recommendations for technological improvements that can provide significant business advantages will become apparent. – Heinan Landa, Optimal 

My addition:

It is not just physical networks but both internal and external social networks layered on top of that. Making sense of technology scatter can certainly help many organizations.

1. To check email when I am not at my desk
2. To check time and date (I don’t wear a watch)
3. To turn off sound while going into meetings and taking naps
4. To take pictures and share it with family/friends instantly
5. To tweet and read tweets when I am on the road
6. To make quick notes or jot ideas (using Ever Note)
7. To check the calendar
8. To play a few games
9. Occasionally to get a sense of direction (with a compass app)
10.  Occasionally to find directions (using Google maps)
11. Once in a while make meek attempts to manage my time using Pomodoro task application
12. Even less frequently to fill my Got To Do list which I never look at  till it is too late
13. Very rarely as a flashlight (using the flashlight app)
14. To entertain little kids with applications like Paint Joy. They always want games that I don’t have.

There are lots of other peripheral uses but they don’t count as much. As it is in books and bookmarks and other web related activities, my ambitions for doing things far outweigh my actual use. So there are a bunch of apps that I downloaded but never used.

What about you?

So I decided to get a bit smarter and simply Google “things to do in Chennai” (not sure why I did not think of it earlier).

Here is a partial list

Things to Do in Chennai (Madras) – Chennai (Madras) Attractions – TripAdvisor – 34 things

Things to do in Chennai (Madras) – Lonely Planet  - 89 things

30 Things To do in Chennai... well, 30 things

A comprehensive (unnumbered) list from Wiki Travel – too lazy to count

100 things to do in Chennai (but only 8 entries so far) on Facebook

I was happy to see that Google brought my own well intention-ed but purely executed Facebook page (the last entry in the list) on the first page of the results.

I know there are several overlaps and some day I may merge all these and clean it up. Till then…

An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one. The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.

What happens when you can change books? I can definitely see advantages. For example, books on programming  can incrementally change. They can cover new  language features, tools, and add examples to explain new features.

So if you can change books to keep pace with the changes in underlying subjects:

• Do they need version numbers for books?
• Will there be MVP versions of the book that are free and a finished version that can be paid for?
• Will there be a notification service to let you know of changes?