I AM The Universe: Random Thoughts

I’m a big fan of facebook. It has proven to be the most usable social network I have seen. Forget MySpace, with all the usability issues in the world as a result of custom layouts. And don’t get me started on orkut, with its perversive take on user privacy and the sheer number of messages you get in Portuguese.

The only thing I dislike about the social network is the developer platform. I mean it’s good that people have a wide array of apps to choose from, but as I said to a friend when the developer platform launched, that the presence of these apps on a web based platform will definitely cause a compatibility nightmare. And it has. We have taken incompatibility to a whole new level within what can essentially be called a web2.0 app.

Anyway, today a friend sent me an invite to the Compare People app. I don’t usually accept a lot of app invites, but come on, who doesn’t enjoy comparing people! So well, I answered a few embarrassing questions (30, actually), and the results showed that I was crazier than any of my friends. No, it actually said that. But then I saw something that I found deeply troubling:

How could this have been? I was devastated! Again, as if Allah almighty had heard the cries from the bottom of my heart, my eyes jumped to this:

Ah! I knew the results had to be inaccurate! I mean, I can second guess my tech-savvyness. But I have absolute no doubts when it comes to my likelihood of skipping class!

In college, every semester I would create a worksheet with all my subjects in it, and I would fill out the total credits I was supposed to take for each course. Then I would add a tally to the sheet each time I skipped class so that it would let me know if I was nearing the dreaded 75% minimum attendance requirement. See, this is the type of calculated crimes I commit I never fell below that point while still maintaining as little exposure to teachers as possible

I came. I saw. I drooled. The Gitex 2007 was awesome! Maybe I’ve been using that word too often, let me try again – the Gitex 2007 was the most bestest, coolest, most fun place ever! It was geek heaven, I tell you! It wasn’t so much about the floor space, which was just as much as in the Karachi Expo, but the variety. Everyone was there.

Additionally, there was no Gitex discount on products. There were, however, a myriad of gifts. I got myself a MacBook Now I got the MacBook on list price, but with it, I got a headset, a mouse, an iPod Shuffle, a DVD player, a 120GB network drive, and a skin for my MacBook! Isn’t that cool! Also, I got a one-year accidental warranty in addition to the one-year Apple warranty.

The fun part was seeing stands with CDs, selling super cheap, for abour Dhs.25. I burst into laughter just at the sight of the board, as I recalled the CD shops in Karachi, selling DVDs for Rs.50. There’s not much to say about the expo, really, you really had to be there to experience the thrill. Oooh, and here’s the pics of my new MacBook.

Check out all the photos from the Gitex here.

I read this (original post by T2F here)on a friends blog, and I find it equally disturbing as it is unlawful. Eh, since when did laws become unlawful? Anyway, it’s Pakistan, and I think that after this bill is passed, we will be right on track with superpowers like China. We will be one step closer to every Pakistani governments dream of control and censorship of the media. Here, the medium being targeted is the Internet and cellular networks.

The bill does not warrant internet censorship directly, but it will bring us one step closer to a form of censorship directly endorsed by the government. We have previously seen censorship in the form of banning the blogspot.com domain.

But the current issue that we have with this bill is the amount of legal access that it provides the government to email messages, mobile texts and other data of the citizens. I assume that these steps were taken to make citizens more secure on the internet, with cyber-crime seeping into our culture slowly, and our generally unaware public becoming an easy target.

But perhaps our policy makers fail to realize how to make people more comfortable with technology. I, for one, am not comfortable with anyone reading my emails – be it a malicious hacker or the government. What we need is an e-crimes bill that does not violate privacy. Especially so when this can have me convicted for sweetly addressing someone with a friendly, four letter word.

It is now tough for me to decide which is worse – internet censorship, or providing someone access to my emails and texts. Oh well, in a few years we won’t have to deal with this dilemma in Pakistan, since both these policies will probably be in effect.

EDIT: Some small tips for keeping your email messages secure.

1. Avoid using email services hosted in Pakistan, or any other country that has such laws concerning privacy (Duh!)
2. If you use webmail services like Windows Live Mail (formerly Hotmail), or Gmail, use a secure server if possible. For gmail, you can do this but using:
   https://www.gmail.cominstead of just http://www.gmail.com. Yahoo uses secure services in the background (no visible https address), but the security of Windows Live Mail remains lacking beyond the login point
3. As Zohair pointed out in the comments section, you can use GPG keys to secure your emails. For a GPG tutorial, go here. I will hopefully do a step-by-step, easy to understand GPG guide on this blog in the near future.
4. Always address the other person with respect, and treat him nicely, in case all your above efforts fail.

Allow me to go a little off topic with this hilarious parody on that Anti-Piracy Ad that we’ve been seeing so much of:

SWWEEEEETTT!!

With the iPod Touch, you get the same multi-touch goodness of the iPhone, plus Wi-Fi capability that you can use to browse the internet via the built-in Safari browser, buy or browse songs on the iTunes Music Store, and see a list of the last 10 played songs at any Wi-Fi enabled Starbucks!

The only thing that troubles me about the iPod Touch right now is that it’s only $100 less than the iPhone for the same 8GB storage capacity (Apple dropped the 4GB iPhone and reduced the price on the 8GB model by $200. But I’m not complaining people

Watch Apples Guided Tour.

Product compatibility has always been a pain when it comes to computers. Ever since the beginning of computers, putting together the right hardware and software was a unique task. In the beginning the choice was simple – Atari Assembly or Altair BASIC? Then things got a little bit complicated, with software and hardware compatibility going beyond the processor architecture, and we had to choose between software written for DOS, Mac OS, BeOS, NextStep, OS/2 and many, many others. But after a while things cooled down, and you could use software on different platforms to access the same file types. For example, you could use Calc on the Macintosh, and Microsoft Excel on Windows to use .xls spreadsheets. Microsofts document format (.doc) could be accessed from several applications available on several different platforms.

This was because these standards had been formed de facto as the industry matured. VHS became dominant because more studios used it, and a perpetual cycle of supply and demand turned it into the de facto standard for video. Things went pretty much the same way for digital file formats like .JPEG, .DOC, .WAV etc, and now our life is much simpler because of these standards.

But now another war is coming. The Web 2.0 war. Let me tell you what I mean.

I use Facebook. I also used to use Orkut, and had a MySpace account. I used to use flickr, and photobucket. I have a blog powered by WordPress, and I have a twitter micro-blogging profile, plus the Absar is tagline from Facebook. After all this, I end up using none of these effectively.

The thing is, that the Web 2.0 has yet to come to maturity, and hence we have too many options for emerging web technologies. We have too many platforms offering options for doing the same thing. I’m sure that Facebook users are haunted by three different wall type. I myself remain torn between uploading my pictures to Photobucket, flickr, Picassa Photos, or the Facebook Photos app.

We have many Web 2.0 apps today that are incompatible with each other, hence causing a divide between different online social communities. Each of these communities offers solutions to bring your photos, videos, messaging, social bookmarking, blogging and so much more in one place, which is ironic, since there are many of these “one place”s. The most ironic thing about standards is different standards for singular login systems like OpenID, Microsoft Windows CardSpace (1, 2), and SAML. Now all we need is a common login system for all these standards (is the sarcasm not palpable enough here?).

What I would like to see happening is the rise of a monopoly. That’s right. No matter what mainstream media would have you believe, people are not capable of making good decisions. Especially not computer engineers. And to save myself from any flaming, I don’t mind if this monopoly is an open-source platform. So, unless there comes a monopoly that establishes a common, standardized web API, we will have to remain torn between our options.