Technologies and religion might not appear to get along well, each promoting values that are opposite of each other: material vs spiritual, individual vs collective, reason vs faith. Given the importance of both in our lives, what if we can bring them in harmony? What if beneath this seemingly odd relationship, are unexplored potentials for making technologies that fit better, harmoniously and ubiquitously in our life? This is what Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist from Intel, explored in her paper “No More SMS from Jesus: Ubicomp, Religion and Techno-spiritual Practices” (The PDF document can be found via this post).
In her research, Genevieve noted unexpected richness and complexity interplay between technologies, spiritual and religious activities. Although this interplay is still elusive in HCI community, it is important to embrace this challenge to talk about religion despite its “highly personal and emotional and increasingly politicized” nature - notably because “technologies rapidly scaled only at the point that they were invested with spiritual significance”. Since religious systems have impacts in which “new technologies are created, consumed, and indeed rejected”, it is important to “move beyond efficiency as a useful metric for measuring technology success” and to “re-image the very contexts in which those technologies are conceived, created and consumed, making room not just for fun and enjoyment but also another fundamental set of cultural and human needs” - leading to new ideas of privacy, identity, and security; and set of values such as simplicity, grace, humility, modesty, and purity into technologies.
An interesting possibility is calm computing described by Weiser and Brown, “if computers are everywhere they better stay out of the way, and that means designing them so that the people being shared by the computers remain serene and in control. Calmness is a new challenge that UC [Ubiquitous Computing] brings to computing … Calmness is a fundamental challenge for all technology design of the next fifty years”
One example of Google application that failed to excite me was Google Reader. I do not find it user friendly and easy to use for both reading and managing my RSS subscriptions. However, today was a totally different kind of experience - almost a year after since it was launched - the team introduced a totally new look and feel of Google Reader. It is superb!
These are three top features, enough to make me become a convert:
Unlimited post! I think this is the ultimate features that I really (really) love from Google Reader. With this feature, I no longer have to worry about missing interesting posts because I do not have the time to turn on my news aggregator. (I was hoping such feature from FeedDemon and Newsgator, unfortunately, its synchronization feature wasn’t working that well, and often crashed my computer). In fact, I can easily read, and bookmark interesting posts without having to bookmark it in my del.icio.us account (Keep it clean and simple!)
Easy to subscribe and to manage - Google Reader comes with handy bookmarklet so that I can add new subscriptions with two clicks (one to bring me to Google Reader page, and another one to confirm). And it is equally easy to manage, with its tagging and filtering features.
List and Expanded view, plus ‘unlimited’ scroll - Love it! It makes it really simple and fast to browse through blogs! It saves me from clicking previous or next entries again.
Minus point? I do not see the search box; so, it could be a problem to find certain topics within my subscriptions (it seems this is a pretty tough thing to do for the team as well). Nevertheless, Google gain manage raising the bar higher for the rest of online news aggregators.
It has been a (long) while since I post here - and so many things has happened since then. I have joined a new company, working in the eLearning industry as a senior consultant focusing on the visual aspects of our eLearning solutions. Although this industry might not appear as vibrant as it used to be in the past - I feel that the fundamental concepts and ideas behind it are still relevant and applicable in many other industries - after all learning is a life long process. The abilities to make this process more effective, efficient, and satisfying are still required and in-demand.
Apart from this new job, I managed to clear all my microsoft exam certifications - and few days ago, I received my welcome kit as MCSA (Microsoft Certified System Administrator). With this credential I could theoretically manage and administrate organization information infrastructure using Microsoft based technologies. Although at this present time, the certification has limited benefits, it helps me to get more familiar with security, technical and infrastructure issues in organizations. At minimum, I hope to leverage this certification to open up opportunities to interact with bigger group of people (who usually working behind the scenes)
Finally, I think it is a good time to put this blog a little bit more alive again, and get ready for a new life changing experience!
Make your reservation now; Many have already reserved
If you want to play, click here; It’s loads of fun!
Xbox and other prizes! X-actly my kind of contest!
Too bad I didn’t make it into the list ^-^” Nevertheless, I’m glad to receive a number of encouraging comments and to have participated in the conversation - Thank you for those who have voted and supported me!
This video shows what makes life as designer different from artist - designer receives plenty of feedbacks and suggestion that ought to be incorporated!
Google surprised me with their launch of Google Pages today. Google Pages is an online website development tools that allows you to create and edit web pages and host them in Google. The service reminds me of Geocities’ Page Builder service back in the 90s - only this time, some AJAX techniques are included for a WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get - experience. It has basic editing tools that allow you to perform basic text editing (font size, colors, bold, italic, bullets, heading etc), add and upload images, choose layout and style predefined templates. It also allows you to upload up to 100MB files. It is neat, but nothing revolutionary.
“[Google Pages] is not going to be a threat to the younger crowd who are all creating pages on MySpace, nor to the audience of millions of bloggers who already have their online presence, nor to the players in the CMS space who offer a whole lot more in functionality and power. I am not sure who this is targeted at as the small business owners and non technical folk sure aren’t looking at Google for a website solution and considering there is no domain mapping at the moment being a business and handing out a googlepages.com domain is just, well, embarrassing.” - in short, it is a miss
Ken Schafer from One Degree noted undesirable consequences from using Google Pages publishing feature:
“[With] one click of the publish button Google will make their e-mail addresses available to every stalker, sexual predator, phisher, and spammer out there”
In general, the excitement seems a bit low - much like other Google products that have been hyped or rumoured before the actual launch (say Google Base, Google Video, Google Talk, etc). Nevertheless, I think Google Pages is pretty strategic. It is an important component that allows Google to compete with Microsoft’s Office Live services (Minus a domain management service) in capturing the Small Business Market. Imagine free web hosting service - tied to Google Account for accountability - with Google Base for product catalogues, Google Mail +Talk for sales or product supports, AdSense for marketing, and Google Analytics for evaluating marketing strategy. Why would Google do that? If I put Google payment infrastructure (which is currently used in Google Video) into the picture, Google would be able to tap into a new source of revenues from these so-called long-tailed businesses. Less grander scenario, I hope to see Google Pages and Blogger merge their features - allow bloggers to easily build and customize their blogs
Today, I’m officially participated in “Remix MIX06“ Contest, which is held in conjunction with Microsoft’s MIX06 Conference. The contest requires the participants to redesign the conference homepage simply by modifying its stylesheet (the HTML code remains the same). The design that I submitted is called “Bill (Gates) and Tim (O’Reilly)” - named after the keynote speakers. The design shows Bill and Tim sitting in a panelist table, ready to engage in conversation, which is what this conference is all about: the conversation between developers, designers, and business people.
The entries will be judged based on overall design, creativity and popularity and the top three designs will win free admission to MIX, airfare, and lodging as well as a custom designed Xbox 360! It is worth to give a shot, isn’t it? So, if you like my design, kindly visit my gallery page @ http://blog.mix06.com/contest/gallery/picture329.aspx and rate it by clicking on those stars icon. You’d make a journey to Vegas possible
I have switched my hosting provider from Focushub to Dreamhost. They are currently promoting 20GB of disk space and 1TB of bandwidth monthly for about USD 8 if you sign up for two years. Now before you do that, I recommend to do Google Search for Dreamhost promo code. Some of the code will give you further discount up to USD 97. Apparently, Dreamhost does encourage viral marketing through their referral program. The referrer could get 10% of everything their referrals spend on hosting, or get a $97 one-time payment. To attract people, the referrer could create a promo code that will give a one-time discount.
Commission and rewards aside, migrating to a new hosting provider is quite an experience. I need to get used to new web management console, from de-facto standard CPanel to a custom-built Dreamhost panel. Dreamhost offers a basic management console that allows you to manage billings, domains, users, mails, goodies (installer), status and supports. It’s pretty easy to use and more accessible via the Web than CPanel because Dreamhost uses standard Web port. Apart from basic web hosting features like PHP, FTP and Mail, Dreamhost also supports Ruby on Rail and provides Subversion (for versioning). Unfortunately, Dreamhost one-click install feature is not as impressive as CPanel’s Fantastico, because it has less variety of application available. It does offer solid application such as Wordpress (Dreamhost is recommended by Wordpress) and MediaWiki (which is used to run Wikipedia).
Because of the way Dreamhost handles database, I faced initial problem of setting them up. I need to create a globally unique name across Dreamhost servers unlike database management in CPanel (I wasted some of the good name because I made some errors). Anyway, I managed to install Wordpress quite easily. The next thing that I have to do is to update dns of my domain to the Dreamhost nameserver. It takes about one day before the domain to begin to work. Finally, I have to migrate my old blog content to the new one
Since there isn’t migration feature in Wordpress, I have to create and use backup from my old MySQL database and then import it in the new database. I then have to run update database script to upgrade the old database structure to the new one (I happened to find that feature by coincident - it is not that obvious). Well after a few trial and error, I’m now a proud user of Wordpress 2.0.1!
Well, if you’re considering to use Dreamhost you can use my Dreamhost promo code: “IWANT100PERCENT” for full $97 discount or you might want to consider ”IMNICETOALBERT” that will give me 10 bucks comission. If you do not need the discount, you can have me as referral (use alberthardy as your referral) then I’ll get a 10% commission each month
Two of the most important and obvious features of the new IE browser are tabs and RSS support. The tab browsing in IE works much like Opera than Firefox. There is a dedicated button to launch a new tab window, and each tab has a button to close it. IE7 is capable to handle a lot of browser tabs. It has “Quick tab” feature that will display thumbnails of all open tabs in a single window, much like slide sorter feature in PowerPoint. Additionally, IE will hide earlier tabs rather than squeezing them all in a single display window, making it looks (and works) better than Firefox and Opera tab browsing.
The RSS support makes it easy for downloading, storing, and accessing RSS feeds - as well as (searching?), sorting and filtering content. It works pretty well - I’m currently trying to figure out if I could use it to replace my existing news aggregator (I like that it could archive all items - but let’s see if it could perform well with large amount of content).
However, the IE 7 is not without any problems or difficulties. I’m having difficulty to adjust the fact that the navigation button is now at the top, file menu toolbar in the middle (you can tweak it tho), and homepage button is placed along the tabs. It initially crashed after I tried to reorganize my favorites (which somehow was no longer properly categorized after I installed IE7). As a result, I have to manually sort my favorites via my Windows Explorer. I didn’t realize tab group features until I read its complete features list . And I almost thought that I could not import my feed because I hide my File menu toolbar (otherwise, there isn’t much left to see with so many toolbars included). And I need to adjust my new google toolbar every now and then because it disappeared when I launched a new tab (a display bug?).
Overall, I’m pleased with IE7, although I’m currently blogging this post using Performancing (which runs under Firefox).
