News

Google Opening the Social Graph

1 November 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 2 Comments

Google will today (Thursday) launch the OpenSocial API which is an application programming interface (i.e. a list of functions) that a number of social networking websites and plugin writers will comply to.

Techcrunch was the first to reveal the details but, basically, OpenSocial will cover (I quote the Techcrunch article):

Profile Information (user data)
Friends Information (social graph, who is linked to who)
Activities (events, notifications, birthdays, news)

Google partners are LinkedIn, Hi5, Ning, Orkut, Salesforce, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and even Oracle as well as plugin developers Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.

Notably missing are Facebook and MySpace (which will therefore not be compliant with the OpenSocial API – for the time being, at least.)

My interpretation

Following Microsoft’s flirt with Facebook, Google is trying to be more present in the social networking “business” (which is massively massive!)

Google could have tried to impose their own social networking system, Orkut, but decided to do something more subtle: impose their own OpenSocial API.

The consequence will be a number of different social networking ecosystems (e.g. Friendster and LinkedIn with their extremely different fauna) working seamlessly together fighting against Facebook and MySpace.

Seems to me that Google is really trying hard to control The Long Tail of the social networking phenomenon i.e. neither the kids nor the geeks.

My feeling

I personally use a number of social networking systems and I would be happy to make them interoperate. Google has proposed an API. For once, it does not seem that they want outright control of the data being exchanged. But what will be Google’s next step?

6 November 2007 – MySpace joins OpenSocial

Now everything will be interoperable. Except Facebook.

My next LCD TV, possibly?

28 October 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 23 Comments

My current Samsung TV is working fine.

But one of these days, I think I’ll replace it with the gorgeous Sony Bravia KDL-32S3000 LCD TV pictured above.

It’s beautiful, it’s feature complete (HDMI, 720p and Widescreen) and is currently being sold at around $900 in the US.

The only slight issue is the lack of high definition content in Mauritius. As indicated in the TV’s manual (which I’ve, of course, downloaded and read cover to cover), the TV accepts the following HD signals:

Over-the-air broadcasting via HD-quality antenna. MBC broadcasting HD signals?!? Forget it.
HD cable subscription. Not available here.
HD satellite subscription. I am not too sure that this is a priority either from Parabole OcÃ©an Indien or Canal Satellite. I have a Parabole Maurice subscription and I don’t have access to films in English. I am forced to watch (mostly) everything in French which is crap as I tend to watch a lot of American and English movies. So if they don’t feel that having two audio streams is important I doubt they’ll bother with an HD video stream which is bound to use a much higher amount of bandwidth. My guess is that we won’t have HD satellite programs here for at least 2-3 years.
Blu-ray Disc player or other external equipment. I don’t think I’ll buy a Blu-ray or a HD-DVD player soon (but who knows?). I don’t also intend to buy a PS3 or an XBOX 360. So there is only the Apple TV left. I am thinking of getting one to host all my media files (audio, photos, videos of the family and some movies) but I’ll have to convert all my video files to H264 first… which I’ll have to do as I fear that the (cheap) DVD-R I used to store my home videos won’t last for ever.

Seem a little bit limited for the time being, isn’t it?

How I became a programmer

10 October 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 18 Comments

It all started around 1986 (when I was 13) when my dad bought me a Sanyo MBC-16 PC. It had an Intel 8088 processor running at 8MHz (compared to the 2000MHz Intel Core Duo I am using now), 640kb of RAM (I now have 2,000,000kb) and ran MS-DOS 3.22.

One nice “feature” of that PC was that it came with two floppies only (it didn’t have a hard disk). The first floppy contained the operating system and the second one was GW-BASIC.

GW-BASIC (do you know what GW means?) was without doubt the reason I became a Computer Scientist (so, thanks Bill!). Remember, I bought that PC when I was 13 and the only way for me to play was to write my own games. So this is what I did. I wrote numerous Space Invaders clones and I wrote my own version of Tron with a very slow collision detection algorithm…

I had one friend at Royal College Curepipe who was also a computer maniac. I think his name was Harry and he died when we were still in college… Anyway, one day he gave me one floppy containing one executable: turbo.com

I went home and ran it. It was Turbo Pascal 1.0 and I couldn’t program anything as I didn’t know the Pascal language. I did what all good geek would do: I looked inside the executable and I found a data segment containing all the Pascal keywords (program, var, type, writeln, etc.).

I guess I tried all kinds of combinations for days until I became a fairly good Pascal programmer. I then wrote my own Mastermind game. I also fondly remember typing a maze-generating and -solving program I got from SVM magazine. Those were the great pre-Internet and pre-Google days where you really had to be motivated to learn something new…

This PC had two graphical modes: one was 320×200 with 4 colors out of 16 and the other one was 640×200 monochrome. This was the CGA standard.

As the color palette was so limited (4 out of 16 colors compared to the 16,777,216 we have today), games tended to look the same :-)

I fondly remember King’s Quest I by Sierra and Karateka by Jordan Mechner: