At one point, I thought the internet would fork thusly:
1) privileged access for a privileged few (more bandwith, higher QoS, better search/filter algs, glossier content, bought privacy)
2) the great unwashed (less b’width, shitty QoS (relatively speaking), invasive ads, next to no privacy)
Well, give it time, I suppose. It might still happen. In the meantime though, this is what is actually going on: Continue reading
In my previous post on analytics and retrofitting measurability, I talked about the first two phases of getting to grips with metrics and analytics in an existing system. I divvied it up so because otherwise it would have been too long to read. Continue reading
Measurability operates over an incredible range. It’s the ‘gravity’ of the metrics universe. Why do I say so? Because it is a quality attribute that manifests itself at business-level decision-making, without being constrained to that realm in the least.
Measurability permeates everything; it goes past the business level, down through engineering and development activities, and even further still, to actual infrastructure.
And what exactly is measurability, you might ask? It is the ability to quantify the behaviour of a system along with its most important outputs or results. This ‘quantitative’ aspect suggests the use of statistics and tabular data, the gathering of which exposes a well-known-yet-oft-poorly-solved problem: with a probability that is almost certainly ONE, your system has NOT been designed to fess up the numbers you need. Continue reading
I was reading this blog post on the expanding notion of what computing is, over at Broader perspective. I like the inclusion of ideas from the biological realm, because it’s one of those areas which proves once and for all that the universe is one giant computation, with smaller computations piggybacking off of bigger (or perhaps I should say deeper) ones.
We are too used to the idea of computation as something that a machine has to be built specifically for, and dedicated to doing. The fact of even walking over to such a machine and switching it on is itself an intricately complex computation… one that we’re not really responsible for (thank God).
Adjusting to the idea that, some computations have been going on long before we ever got here and will probably be churning out results for some unknowable process long after we’ve vanished, is one that will help every technology discipline on earth. We only need to seed our environment with processing capacity: give the things around us energy, memory and time (or some simulacrum thereof), and we might eventually be able to look back at the risibly-named ‘information age’ and see the nonsensical tautology at its core: all ages have been about, and been created from, and are destined for, the processing of information.
I look forward to the day when we don’t have to fire up a laptop or netbook and write software components.
I’d like to be able to instantiate a ‘solution space’ wherever I happen to be standing, whether it’s in the kitchen or an office or a green field, and call the elements forth.
I’d like to lie back on a lazy sunny day on an intelligent lawn, shielding my squinting eyes from the sun, and be able to say, “you, blade of grass. Can you ask all your friends to re-allocate .0001 percent of their photosynthesing apparatus and help me solve this equation? I own shares in the sprinkler botnet since I live in the nearby building and I’ll get you more nutrients this afternoon. Promise. Here. I’ll have my endocrines send you the algorithms in a drop of sweat. Is there a co-opted ladybug nearby that could walk across my finger and pick it up? Lemme know… I’m waiting..”
Clicktale, crazyegg, userfly. Suppose I asked you to Google those and then come back.
If I had those sorts of things installed on my pages, I could tell who among you did indeed go and look, and whom amongst you bothered to come back at all, and how long you lingered thereafter.
And if I had forms on any of these pages I could peep over your shoulder and watch you filling in each field, with what amounts to a keystroke logger that I wouldn’t even have had to write from scratch. Continue reading
The study of the morphology of language has at its heart an acceptance of imperfection and change. It seems intuitive that our grammars and vocabularies have allowed several random phonemes to accrete around central lexemes, subtly changing the meanings associated with those latter, and all the while carrying that meaning across an awesome stretch of time (and space). Continue reading
SEED magazine had a tiny article about how web datamining is an inefficient way to conduct scientific inquiry with large datasets, the reason being that any such dataset cannot really have been created with the goal of answering the scientific questions that a research team happen to have decided to ask. I’d like to expand upon this idea: Continue reading