Kitten Lulu

Yesterday was more about quantity than quality:

• Apple to co-host panel on future of video surveillance. Apple presence is interesting. There is a growing interest in affluent, digitally enabled homes to integrate alarm systems and CCTVs with entertainment systems, creating a unified media framework and home storage & computing cloud. The ergonomics and design of Apple products have a big appeal on this better-off market segment.
• Merlin Mann’s on What Makes a Good Blog?
• Eighbar comments on Electric Sheep Company’s Webflock. Google’s Lively, after an interesting start, isn’t showing much progress. ESC is much more focused and has proven experience in virtual worlds. I think we’ll see Webflock used in some large corporation’s website relatively soon.
• Fulley, a site for hypermilers.
• TechCrunch on how Yahoo Japan is worth nearly as much as Yahoo. They did it going hyper-local and choosing the right partner, Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s founder and Japan’s richest man.
• Several highlights from a blog that I read in bursts. Marginal Revolution on:
  • Obama vs. McCain, “This election, in other words, is becoming a contest to decide which type of elite voters hate — or fear, or mistrust — more: A social elite or an economic elite?”
  • Which body parts are sung the most? Broken down by genre. It’s no wonder what Hip Hop prefers, is it?
  • FriendFeed’s fake following. Social software deception?
  • Markets in panhandling. Be sure to read the comments.
  • On pensions systems: “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that there is only a 7% probability that someone born in 2000 will receive their Social Security benefits as promised today. The better news is that with a probability of 58% the cut in benefits will be 20% or less.”
  • Untangling the economy may take a while.
• The scientifically correct procedure to boil an egg.
• Christian Scholz (aka Tao Takashi) on repoze.bfg, a Zope3-flavoured RoR-like framework ; thanks, I didn’t know about it.
• (in Italian) Stefano Quintarelli comments on what’s going on with our flagship airline. Alitalia is a sample of what’s wrong with Italian politics and business culture. The company should have failed long, long ago. As a publicly founded, It’s been used as a vote tank by all parties all the time. It grew and grew, bloated, inefficient, ultimately causing its own doom. In spring, Berlusconi opposed to an offer from AirFrance affirming there was a group of Italian businessmen that would save the company and keep it in Italian hands. Now, these oligarchs shown up but they demand guaranteed returns. They basically demand an (unofficial) suspension of antitrust laws. No wonder that Ryanair is mad at the government. The Italian people should be mad too, they are the one that will ultimately be paying for it. Unless The End of Aviation happens earlier and we’ll switch to virtual worlds and telepresence as means of long-range collaboration

I am going to run a little experiment. I want to see if I can make this blog a little more interesting and attract more readers. I will post links to the most interesting articles and blog posts that I read and starred in Google Reader each day.

Here’s the list for August 26th, 2008:

• Ars Technica: “Of gyroscopes and gaming: the tech behind the Wii MotionPlus“. Gyroscopes measure rotations. They used to be very expensive. Thanks to advances in technology, they reached the price point where they can be employed in mass consumer electronics.
  It’s quite an important news for us, virtual and augmented reality folk. I expect breakthroughs in AR applications in the next couple of years, if gyroscopes find their way into mobile devices.
• HAVA announces official N800/N810 client. I started consulting for an OEM start-up that does HD video and audio entertainment systems for luxury markets. Their products are quite more advanced (and expensive) than HAVA’s players, but I find the announcement indicative of a general trend. Mobile devices are rapidly becoming the preferred entry point toward the growing digital brains of our houses.
  It’s interesting (and expected) that they choose to use Nokia’s N800/N810: it’s both powerful and hacker-friendly device, a perfect tool for prototyping. It’s the forerunner of the emerging MID market that Intel seems so kin to invest upon.
• Nvidia released CUDA 2.0. It’s a toolset that allows mere mortals (read normal C programmers) to use GPUs as general purpose computing units. They expanded their support to Windows Vista, which was missing from the previous major release. It makes CUDA viable for wider adoption.
  We’ll see a brand new class of math-heavy applications, enabled by the instant jump from tens to hundreds of GFLOPs on the computers we already possess.
• Upcoming events on virtual worlds in Europe.
• Vint Falken plays with augmented reality using Irrlicht and ARToolKit.

Long story made short: I am considering a career change. I want to enter investment banking, as an intranet developer. It would put me in touch with quants. Bright people who write algorithmic models for real-time trading in options, derivatives and other kinds of exotic markets.

They make a lot of money and, more important, work on interesting things with interesting tools!

I want to live with this kind of people. Someone who don’t look at me like I am some alien from Mars if I tell them that I spend my weekend relaxing with a book on neurochemistry or studying papers on zinc oxide nanotubes (for a wind electrical generator design that I want to patent). That’s my concept of relaxing: turning my brain on. Most people seems to prefer to turn them off with Big Brother or something like that.

The problem: Quants generally have a highly numerate PhD. I don’t. Life derailed my early academic efforts.

Math and computer science have always been my thing. At seventeen, I wrote a neural networks based speech recognition system. It won a national science award.

I started with and completed 2/3rds of a 5 years course in Electronic Engineering, including all of the heavy math, physics and AI stuff… but hardware was not my thing and my family was short on money, so I left the university for a more interesting career in software.

I joined a media company writing software for their CDROMs, let’s call that company “D”.

After a year, the dot-com book came. I got an offer as an “IT manager” for a ferry company. I wasn’t really a manager, no one were reporting to me, but more like a consultant: I advised the CEO about IT decisions and took care of the local networks at their sale and port offices in Italy. When I left, they were pushing around 4500 passengers per day.

I went back to work with “D”: network management was boring. They had changed their focus on websites and intranets. As a tiny company, we worked hard to carve out a niche in this market. We did good. After 7 years, with no external funding beyond what we made, we can count 2 medium enterprises and 21 banks among our clients, plus more than 50 small media agencies.

In the meantime, I even took some time off to work as a freelance consultant and a sabbatical year working for a startup as a CTO: I spent time in India to setup their outsourcing branch, hiring programmers, training them on the technology we used and on agile software development, setting up business processes and teams. The startup didn’t took off because the product was too complex and the market wasn’t ready yet.

Failure is very important, I learned a lot on management and product design at that startup. I went back to work with “D” and, at the same time, got a BSc in IT and automation engineering.

Why do I want to leave “D” now? Because it’s a dead end in my career and I am getting bored again, doing the same (unchallenging) stuff over and over.

My dream work would be at the convergence of IT, cognitive science, bio tech and/or nano tech. There will be opportunities but they are not yet mature. I am just planning ahead, a decade or so ahead.

So a job in an investment bank is a good alternative. I will be able to get in touch with people with right background, learning about larger organizations and management, working with math and computer science and making decent money at the same time.

The problem (again): I don’t have a PhD.

On the other hand, I am 30 years old and have 10 years professional experience in software development (as a lone developer and as a lead for teams with up to 14 members) with a particular emphasis on agile techniques (extreme programming and FDD). I can code in (in order of experience) Python, PHP, C, Delphi, Javascript, Objective C (both iPhone and Mac development), C++, Java, Perl, Scheme, Prolog, Matlab, Ocaml, Erlang, Haskell, Oz 3 / Mozart, Mercury. I have about 9 years of experience with CMSes (mostly, a home-brew Zope-based one and Plone) and web development, but also experience with media-heavy (as in HD video) embedded Linux development.

So… if anyone want to help me plan a path to a new career, I’d love to hear your advices in comments.

Oops, I almost forgot about IQ tests. I just took one for the first time (this one from Mensa DK) and got 130.

I just saw this video about a flying spy drone, aptly called Voyer, and I can’t but think that it just look like a giant dildo:

I wonder if they made it like that so it hides in sex shops… U.S. is going to invade Amsterdam

I decided to sell my Second Life’s island. Its name is Marche. It’s a class 5, standard region (65535 sqm, 15000 prims).

I am using Ebay. Here’s the auction.

You know you are googling on the wrong path when you reach…. “the Worlds 1st Organic permanent gel hair colour specifically for pubic hair“.

And no. I wasn’t googling for porn.

PS: the link is safe for work.

Did you know that someone is working on Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) for Second Life? SSAO is what makes Crytek’s Crysis look so good.

Screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) is an approximation of ambient occlusion, the idea that parts of an object which are crowded by other objects are occluded from the sky, and therefore are lit less from diffuse sky lighting. Thus, these areas should be darker than those which are more open to the sky. Traditional implementation involves raytracing and is too slow for real-time graphics. Instead, SSAO uses only surfaces which are present in screen space, and approximately calculates the concavity of a point compared to the other surfaces which have been drawn.
This application proposes that SSAO should be implemented for Second Life.

(from an application to Google’s Summer of Code)

UPDATE: this blog post has tons of resources on hardware accelerated ambient occlusion, including SSAO variants.

UPDATE 2: Not Possible in RL blogged about it some days ago. Linking to an exchange between Dave Parks and Argent Stonecutter, Dave even links to some test screenshots from an internal research prototype.

Some of the oldbies like me will remember that we actually had shadows in Second Life circa 1.16, but they were extremely slow.

I’d like some feedback on this tongue-in-cheek concept for a 2050’s personal computing device. I’d appreciate also proofreading from an English mother tongue speaker.

The Pill®

Available in Blue and Red versions.  (*)

- Share yourself in GlobalConsciousness®
- Enrich your perception with RealVirtuality® patent-pending augmented reality system
- Forget depression and increase productivity with MoodControl®
- Unexpected death? Backup your consciousness and continue your journey in AfterLife® (**)
- Do you think you’re under external mindcontrol? Regain your freedom with MindShield® (***)
- Do you think you’re not under external mindcontrol? It’s too late. Sorry.

Footnotes:

(*) the red version is not on sale in all countries due to legal restrictions. Security clearance from your government may be required.
(**) Due to legal restrictions, blue pill users may experience limited memory loss when joining AfterLife®. Copyrighted music, films, books, works of art distributed by registered multinationals will only be available after the copyright protection ends - that is one thuosand years from artist’s death (see the Global Copyright Extension Act of 2039, also known as “Disney’s Joy” act).
(***) MindShield® use may be limited in blue pills sold in some countries, including China, Russia, Iran, USA and Europe. Do not expect MindShield to work in repessive regimes and in market democracies that ratified the Unrestricted Freedom In Advertising treatise (aka “Thought Control”) or which extend DMCA-like provisions to “advanced communication tecniques”.

… of my mobile development strategy.

I have been accepted in the iPhone Developer Program. It means that I will be able to write apps for the iPhone and publish them through Apple’s iTunes.

At the end of last year, I joined the Maemo Device Program to develop software for their Nokia Internet Tablets (NITs). Back then I promised to work on a lightweight mobile chat client for Second Life. I haven’t forgot. Real Life just got in the way so far. I will start working on the project this summer.

I could even end up creating an iPhone version of the lightweight client I have in mind.

Check out the nice flash little games at www.deadtoast.com, they’re addictive!

A walk in the park is sooooo cute.