Happy Holidays!

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Check out my holidays podcast!













メリークリスマス

See you here in 2006!

last day of school for 2005!

Well today will be my last day of school for this year. I have remarking for CSC309 and I will be marking final exams today. So, I guess like everyone else does, what are my reflections for this year. It's been a crazy roller coaster year for me in terms of PhD and research. Things didn't go so well for me in the beginning as I was getting very frustrated with my previous research. Then I switched supervisors in May and things started to pick up with my new supervisor and my new research on blogging and community. So, here are my list of accomplishments:

1. I submitted my Masters thesis which is my research paper here at U of T to pass one PhD milestone.

2. I organized and presented at the CASCON Business of Blogging workshop, and presented at the CASCON Hands-on Workshop on the Latest Technologies where I talked about RSS, feeds, and podcasting.

3. I submitted a paper and got accepted to a conference early next year (details to be posted later).

4. I presented my research at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing over the summer.

5. I organized and created the CASCON blog, IML blog (the previous IML blog at Modblog is now retired), and helped out with the IML Planet blog and Melody's blog (her old blog was on MSN Spaces before our group moved it over)

See more of my academic, research accomplishments, and publications for this year.

Maybe I should do something like what Google did here with the 2005 Google Zeitgeist, a visual snapshot of the year that is about to pass by.

So what will 2006 bring for me? My plan is to complete my research seminar presentation, depth oral, publish some more papers, and complete my PhD thesis proposal.

Pink Motorola RAZR available in Canada!

Through Rogers Wireless, the pink Motorola RAZR which is available in the States is now available in Canada. I wonder when the gold RAZR will be available (I highly doubt it and if it is, it will be REALLY expensive!)



Technorati tags: pink+RAZR

U of T home page has changed

I just went to the U of T home page, and the web site design has changed. Not sure if I like it compared to the old one, it's gonna to take time to adjust I guess.

Marking assignments done!

Finally I've finished marking assignments for A4 for the CSC309 course! And I started making the marking sheet and marking yesterday (well Monday). That's pretty good, before I used to spend so much time on marking, because I would keep on changing the marks and change the way I marked things, and I would have to then change all the previous students' and rerun their assignment again.

But this time, I sticked with a plan, and I kept everything recorded in Word and not on hard copy which I used to do before. Saved so much time, especially having to make changes. Next, I am going to proctor the exam tomorrow (today), and then have to mark the exams on Thursday!

Is the Internet broken?

Well according to MIT's David D. Clark, it is. In an article in Technology Review, Clark talks about how there is a need to redesign the Internet from scratch, especially since there are so many holes in the architecture and lack of security (with viruses, worms, spam, phishing, security patches, etc.). There is NSF funding for academics and researchers for this, to find new architectures and protocols for building Internet 2.0 I guess (just like we have Web 2.0).

Others argue that the Internet is not broken, that the reason why it is broken is an OS issue (think Microsoft Windows and its' gazillion updates from Windows Update). As well, the Internet hasn't implemented the latest protocols designed to improve security like IPv6 for example. We don't need to redesign the Internet from scratch, and would it be a good idea to. If we would redesign, how would existing protocols and applications work? And how would other people then upgrade to the new infrastructure? IPv6 didn't really take off, even it was designed to improve security and assign more IP addresses, with each device having an IP address. The problem with IPv6 is that it requires installing an IPv6 stack on all the routers and network software. Who really wants to do that? And of course there's backward compatibility problems.

So, what do people think? Does the Internet need a new makeover, a face-lift, an upgrade to progress into its future?

Marking assignments

Well today, I'm busy marking assignments for the course I am TAing, and will probably (hopefully) finish tomorrow. So research will have to be on standby until probably after the holidays. But after the submission of the final camera-ready paper, I think I need some time off. It seems after you finish writing a paper, I get tired and all my energy is drained. It's really a lot of work to write a paper. But up to the hours till the deadline of writing a paper, it's interesting how you get all this adrenaline pumping and you can like work insanely hard without any sleep. But you feel the effects right after.

So, how do others deal with post-paper submission? Do you do nothing for maybe a day, before returning back to your research?

Paper submitted!

I just submitted the final camera-ready version of the paper for the conference today. I think I'll take a break this weekend. I have a Chinese hot pot dinner with a couple of friends on Saturday and I am picking up my sister from Western on Sunday. I have to mark assignments for a course I am TAing, and then mark final exams on the 22nd. So, I don't officially start my Christmas holidays until the 23rd. I can't wait for the holidays to start!

Finally updated my web site!

I finally got around to updating my web site, which I was supposed to do a couple of months ago at the beginning of this term, but I never got around to doing so. Actually, more like being lazy I suppose. But I figured that I need to update the information on my web site with the latest research and other material. And also, I didn't like the template I used for my web site before (which was blueish), so I decided to change the template. My new revamped web site is here. I hope it's easier to read, it's certainly not as pretty as other web sites, I could certainly have made it better. But I am too busy now to worry about that, I have to submit my camera-ready paper.

Yes, my paper I submitted about 1 month ago got accepted today!

My paper got accepted!

The paper that I worked on about a month ago got accepted! I have to finish polishing it up after the reviewers' comments and submit it by Saturday, December 17. When I finish submitting the paper for final publication, then I'll post it up on my web site, and post it in our research group's blog, so you can all have a look at what IML is doing with blogs and community, and make comments on the blog!

Isn't research all about collaboration, feedback, comments, criticism, suggestions? Isn't that what a blog is designed to facilitate? Just to quote what Lilia Efimova said in her paper to the AOIR conference , research is blogging and blogging is research.

A RAZR for him and a RAZR for her

Continuing on the success of the Motorola RAZR, there is now a pink (or magenta) RAZR for women (or for men if they like). Found out about this from i4u news, the news for gadgets which I read (how do you think I keep up with all the newest gadgets and toys?). Now, I just found out there's a gold RAZR, called the V3i, but it's gonna be expensive. I guess this will be for the executives and millionaires out there. So there are now 4 different colours of RAZR all shown below.






Here's an ad from the Motorola site showing all the 3 colours of RAZR (not including gold, there's not much info on that because it's going to be sold separately and not by Motorola).

What's next for the RAZR, blue, green? (just like the Apple iPod mini?) Also, there's RAZRWire which is Bluetooth headset embedded in sunglasses.



You can also get prescription lenses for the RAZRWire! Looks like being a cyborg like Steve Mann in public is close to being really here! Of course, you're now seeing many people wearing Bluetooth headsets now these days everywhere, so it's becoming popular and fashionable. I see it all the time on the train when I go to school, when people are in the car, or walking. I wore my first Bluetooth headset about 2 years ago, and I used to make calls on the train with them. I was like the only person with that and people were all staring at me.

Now, I am staring at those people to see what kind of Bluetooth headsets they have. If anyone's curious, mine is an older generation Bluetooth headset, that uses the Bluetooth 1.0 specification (not 1.1) and it's from Omiz.

Yahoo buys del.icio.us

This is huge for the social bookmarking area and for Web 2.0 and tagging. Yahoo just bought del.icio.us. More information on my post at my research group's blog so I won't repeat it here.




Let's just say that I had a hunch that sooner or later this was going to happen.
Hmm, it would be great to find a summer research internship job at Yahoo Research!

Typing search words in Firefox URL bar

Hey, I just found something cool. I wanted to find the web site for the Samsung MM-A900 cell phone that I found from CNET (I just wrote a post earlier), and do a search on the Google search bar in Firefox. However, I accidentally put in the Firefox URL bar, and when I pressed enter it directed me to this page on the Samsung MM-A900 cell phone. I didn't know that you could do that with Firefox! Another great reason I use Firefox as my main browser and not Microsoft Internet Explorer, among also other things (like tabbing, being fast, extensible plugins, non-Microsoft, etc.).

Imitating the Motorola RAZR

The Motorola RAZR is a very popular phone due to its slim design and big screen. I know because I have it. Samsung has now come out with a RAZR wannabe called the MM-A900 (SPH-A900) and it's available from Sprint shown below.




Compare this with the RAZR V3:




I haven't seen any word about whether it's available in Canada. CNET has done a review here and it seems it doesn't really unseat the RAZR. It does improve on some aspects of the RAZR though, like a 1.3MP camera, swiveling lens and built-in flash.

It would be kind of nice if the next RAZR could do some short clips of video so if I see something I can quickly make a video, that would be something that I would use. I don't know why there is no cable to connect from the RAZR to the computer though, apparently if you want that it costs to get the cable. You're already paying for the RAZR, and most cell phones do include a data cable. I know you can transfer through Bluetooth but for most people, their computers don't have Bluetooth and having to buy a Bluetooth USB dongle or adapter will cost about maybe $50 Canadian. If you transfer a lot, then Bluetooth is really slow and a cable is much better.

However, I somehow still like the RAZR V3 better, maybe I am biased because I have one.

Gonna be a busy 2 weeks before Christmas holidays

I'm looking forward to the Christmas holidays. I've got lots of work to do before the holidays. I have to mark assignments and a final exam for a course I am TAing, work on my PhD research, start to prepare a document for my PhD depth oral, and start applying for summer research internships. Also, I'm going to a couple of Christmas get-togethers with family and friends, so it's gonna be busy for me.

So if you don't see regular daily blog posts from me, then you'll know why ;)

Gmail changes

I've noticed some changes to Gmail today. First, there's no showing that Gmail has added anti-virus scanning, but that's not new anymore. Second, there's an ad for Google Talk, but I am using Google Talk now. Finally, I've noticed that when you want to delete a mail item, instead of "Move to Trash", it says "Delete" from the drop down menu. I don't understand why before Gmail just had Delete, since all the other e-mail clients have that. A lot of people may not understand what "Move to Trash" means, and "Delete" is more easier and uniform around all e-mail clients.

Don't know why it took Google so long to realize that.

Sun University Developer talk today

Today, Sun came to talk to U of T CS and ECE students about Sun's latest stuff, evangelizing open source, Java and OpenSolaris, promoting the Sun developer network and student network, as well as giving free T-shirts and CDs. I was at the talk, and got a free T-shirt, it was orange coloured as you can see below.

Front of shirt:


Back of shirt:


I didn't go for the first part of the talk in the afternoon, which was about Sun's DTrace which is dynamic tracing in the OS. But that wasn't what interested me, what I was interested is Sun's take on Java and seeing what's new with Java, as I haven't kept up with it. So here's what I got from the talk.

Sun has a developer network just like Microsoft's MSDN and today Sun stressed about the student connection on the Developer Network. So, I signed up for the network, which offers free Java and Sun tools like Sun's NetBeans IDE. I missed the first presenter after the DTrace talk, so the presenter that came next was Inyoung Cho, who is a Technology Evangelist. Being a Technology Evangelist is cool, you get to try out and talk about new technologies, I actually wanted to have a job like that when I was working full time and before going back to grad school.

Inyoung Cho, Technology Evangelist
Inyoung is a graduate from the University of Toronto and now is a Technology Evangelist working for Sun. She first mentioned that from the beginning. She talked about the popularity of Java and how Java is portable (I know that already, so this part was boring for me, I wanted to know about what new things were happening with Java, which she came to later and I will mention that later). She mentioned about the different flavours of Java that run on different types of devices (Micro Edition, Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition). Then she talked about the history of Java with Oak and James Gosling. OK boring again, I've heard this many many times now. What I didn't know was that this year, Java celebrated its 10th birthday, it was in 1995 that Java was born. She showed a picture of the Java team with a birthday cake at JavaOne, Sun's Java developer conference. Next, she began to talk about the impact of Java, she mentioned Java contributes to a $100 billion economy and it is growing. The stats according to Ovum are the following:

2.8B Java devices worldwide, 1.07B Java powered phones, 700M Java powered PCs, 149 Carrier deployments, 1.25B Java Cards deployed, 4.5M Java developers

Java is everywhere in RFID tags, cell phones, refrigerator magnets, and will be in next generation devices like set-top boxes, toasters, refrigerators (hmm, does this sound familiar, when Sun talked about Jini doing that? And where is Jini now?). She also talked about how community is what makes Java so successful and where it's at now, and how the Java Community Process (JCP) is there
for creating and extending existing Java APIs. The reasons for Java being so successful according to her are compatibility, community, volume, and value. The next thing she did was to show how easy it is to create a Java application, she had a demo with NetBeans IDE 5.0 Beta to create a mobile application. NetBeans allows you to create a GUI application form and source code, compile and run in the emulator. You can specify the design by drawing which buttons, and forms goes back or forward. NetBeans also has a profiler which can monitor applications and monitor threads, and you can look at heap size in VM Telemetry Overview. I felt the NetBeans IDE was pretty neat especially the design panel, it seems very similar to developing for mobile devices using Microsoft .NET and

The next thing she talked about was very interesting to me was the Java roadmap for the next couple of years and where Java is going. Is Java dead, like some people say? Well, from today, Java is alive and well. Here is the Java Standard Edition (Java SE) roadmap.

Java 5.0 Tiger

- this is out and has seven New Major Language Features
- Make it more easier to use, eg. they've introduced a Foreach loop
- Powerful new libraries like printf and Scanner
- concurrent utilities (simplified multi-threaded programming
- improvements to Swing (better look and feel)

Java 6 Mustang (will be released 2006/Q3)

- Java 6.0 Mustang Themes:
- Compatibility, stability and quality
- Diagnosability, monitoring and management
- XML and web services * (this will be great since there needs to be tighter integration with XML and web services, it still really isn't that easy to do web services in Java)
- Ease of development
- Enterprise desktop
- Transparency

Java 7 Dolphin (to be released 2008/Q1)
- will include Mustang component JSRs such as annotation processors, JDBC 4.0 (don’t need to specify JDBC driver in Java, just specify in XML), easy to implement web services
- JSR-277 to take care of JAR problems like adding native code to the JAR
- add XML language features, make XML part of Java syntax (that would really simplify stuff a lot!). For example, the idea is that you could write your Java application and XML together like MyFriend.getFriend(). Right now you can't do that, you have to get a Writer component (like writing HTML in Java using servlets)

Then there were questions and I asked the question about compatibility of Java code from early JDK versions. I know (and I'm sure others also) find it extremely frustrating when I run some Java code and it works in older version of the SDK, but it doesn't run on newer versions because the Java API is deprecated. It makes it so difficult because I have to use a specific JDK to run a Java application which shouldn't be if Java's model is write once run anywhere. Especially for older Java applications that want to run on new Java SDKs. So, Inyoung explained that Mustang will have the feature where you can specify to ignore older JDKs and deprecated APIs .

Sun always likes to talk about future technologies that use Java and so here are some. First one is having Java in the car with iDrive, second is that there will be Java technology in the Blu-ray Disc (for the new standard of DVD). The third is smart dust called SunSpots where you have small sensors and they have a tiny Java VM inside (kind of like Tini or Motes I suppose).

The next talk was from Peter Karlsson, also a Technology Evangelist and he talked about OpenSolaris.

Peter Karlsson, Technology Evangelist, OpenSolaris

First of all, I knew that Sun had a version of Solaris for Intel which I had a copy and tried installing one time but then took it out. I knew that Sun was open sourcing their Solaris OS, but I didn't know that it was called OpenSolaris. So, OpenSolaris is the open source of the Solaris OS. It is free and can be quickly found through Solaris Express. With OpenSolaris, you have everything there compared with Linux where you just have kernel and you have to download packages to build. OpenSolaris has 10M lines of source code. When you go to the OpenSolaris web site, there is an OpenSolaris source browser which is very fast, you can search for definitions, history, and cross-references.

You can get the latest marketing numbers for OpenSolaris which I certainly did not know. In my opinion before I came to the Sun talk, I thought Solaris was dead, you just hear Windows, Linux, and MacOSX, but rarely Solaris. Boy, I was dead wrong. OpenSolaris uses a license called CDDL which is based on Mozilla MPL, you can link binary code with source files. Sun's philosophy with OpenSolaris is to release updates frequently to Solaris on a 6-8 month basis. For developer tools, Sun has the Sun Studio compilers, GNU compilers, cool source browser, and bugs can be tracked here. Also, Peter mentioned that Sun has the best compiler on the planet, which in many cases is faster than the GNU compiler, which I found that interesting. Sun is also trying to create a computer science curriculum for OpenSolaris, and looking into community projects with universities (eg. Sun with UCLA). An important thing to note is that OpenSolaris is not a distribution. Sun is going to build the next version of Solaris using OpenSolaris.

Solaris 10 includes DTrace (dynamic tracing), predictive self-healing, service management framework, secure execution (digital signatures on files before executing), and ZFS (which is Sun's new file system, also never heard about that). Peter made a joke about how he was able to run programs from 1995 on Solaris 10 without having to recompile, he said try doing that with Windows, which to that many laughed. Solaris 10 has process rights management where you can have 48 privileges associated with users, processes. Solaris ZFS is a way cool file system (according to Peter), it has 128-bits, and has very high reliability. Sun has a Solaris 10 University Challenge which he touted and basically it involves students to work with Solaris 10 and win cash prizes and Sun systems. Solaris is the distribution of OpenSolaris and it’s free. You can participate at OpenSolaris Del.icio.us tag.

Next talk was about Java GUI with Swing, but I didn't attend the full thing. This is all that I recorded.

Java GUI with Swing
Shannon Hickey
Technical Lead, JFC/Swing
He was a graduate student from CS at U of T. He gave introduction to Swing and showed Swing demo, then with button and behaviour. I wasn't really much into Swing, so I didn't attend the remaining part of his talk.

All in all, it was ok, hey I got a free T-shirt and free pizza!!!

Here are some links for the Sun Developer Network Academic Program:

Join the Sun Developer Network
Get your free developer tools
Get trained on Sun technologies and tools at no-cost
Subscribe to the Student Connection eNewsletter
Solaris 10 University Challenge
OpenSolaris community
NetBeans
java.net
Find out about all Sun-sponsored open source communities

Gmail errors today

Has anybody encountered Gmail errors today? I've been encountering mail problems and getting the following message:



And then after I click OK, then I get this screen:



A sorry for the inconvenience message? From Google? Can this be possible?
I thought Gmail was robust, is something wrong with Gmail today? I've forwarded my school e-mail to Gmail because it's fast and I like the threading of e-mails together and the categories for the e-mail. I might think again and switch back to leaving my school e-mail on my CS department's e-mail server.

I just read this message from the gmailforums. Apparently, it's happened before, someone suggested to log in using the secure version. That worked.

Take the search engine experiment!

Try this search engine experiment to reveal which search engine you like, Google, Yahoo or MSN. According to the results,
Google comes up on top with 41%, followed by 33% by Yahoo and 27% by MSN. Which search engine results do you prefer? Take the experiment, it only takes less than 5 seconds!

I tried it with the query "GadgetMan blog", and I apparently I chose Yahoo as the relevant search results. The others returned the CASCON 2005 blog and MSN Spaces blog.

Google's early days

Here's a blog about Google's early days and the ex-Googlers who made it happen. Interesting to read the inner workings of Google and what happened behind the scenes. Only through blogs can this happen.

Round 1 results for Canadian Blogging Awards

Just found out that the Round 1 winners are up on the Canadian Blogging Awards site. Unfortunately, this blog did not make it to Round 2, but Joey de Villa's blog (speaker at the Business of Blogging workshop at the CASCON conference) did make it to Round 2 in the Best Blog category. So vote for him!

Thanks to all who voted for the CASCON blog, my GadgetMan blog, and the How About That Melody blog.

Just finished submitting a journal paper!

I apologize if I haven't been blogging here lately. I just finished submitting a paper to a journal that was due today at midnight. By the time of the clock right now, I submitted it with 15 minutes left to spare!

Another paper journal submission done, now got to process more of the results from the CASCON blog conference and other blogs, and analyze the results. On top of that, I also have to mark and help out students for an assignment for a course I am TAing. And also prepare applications for summer research internships. Ah, the fun never stops in PhD!