Engineers Test Highly Accurate Face Recognition

Yang's facial-recognition algorithm can correctly determine the true identity of an individual even the image is corrupted or occluded.
Courtesy Allen Yang

You can take off that ninja mask now. A new facial-recognition algorithm created by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is able to recognize faces with 90-95 percent accuracy, even if the eyes, nose and mouth are obscured.

"Most algorithms use what's known as meaningful facial features to recognize people -- things like the eyes, nose and mouth," says Allen Yang, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley's College of Engineering who developed the new algorithm. "But that's incredibly limiting because you're only looking at pixels from a designated portion of the face and those pixels end up being much smaller than the whole image. Our algorithm shows that you only need to randomly select pixels from anywhere on the face. If you select enough of them, you can produce extremely high accuracy."

Yang's new algorithm, which was created with the help of a team of researchers at UIUC, could mark a quantum leap in face-recognition technology. Current feature-based systems have accuracy that tops out at 65 percent when some form of occlusion is introduced. They also require relatively high-resolution images, and can easily be fooled by changing small details such as adding a mustache, donning a hood or changing one's expression.

The secret sauce in Yang's new method is a mathematical technique for solving linear equations with sparse entries called, appropriately enough, sparse representation (.pdf). While all other facial-recognition algorithms tend to compare a given feature set against all others in a database (generating percentages of likeliness along the way), Yang's algorithm ignores all but the most compelling match from one subject -- basically, its most confident choice.

"It sounds like a simple idea, but by enforcing that one extra constraint you can suddenly see a huge boost in the performance," Yang says.

As Shankar Sastry, the dean of UC Berkeley's College of Engineering, notes, Yang's new facial-detection method also renders years of research in the field obsolete.

"The academic community is really upset," he says. "It sounds terrible. You don't care what features you choose? It flies in the face of many years of research."

Nevertheless, the new technique could pave the way for completely new models for online advertising, new ways of annotating video and still images, and new techniques for monitoring and identifying people in public places.

Yang says he's already been approached by one startup (which he wouldn't name) interested in adopting this technique for what he calls "preannotation." For instance, this technology could automatically add family members' names to each image in a massive photo library, Yang says, saving you the trouble of flipping through thousands of photos to find that one of Uncle Bill.

It's also easy to imagine search engines like Google being interested in automatically recognizing the faces of the humans portrayed in publicly available photos, adding the image data to the textual information surrounding those photos to produce yet another dimension for targeting advertisements. Looking at a party photo of Johnny Depp on a fan site? Google could display advertisements for Sweeney Todd.

This new technique is also bound to raise a series of red flags for privacy advocates, since what Yang has developed is a highly accurate way of recognizing people even with occlusion or distortion.

With more and more cities, retailers and employers deploying security cameras in public places, it's only a matter of time before face-recognition technology like Yang's gets added to these cameras. Then the question will be not just who is watching you -- but whether they know exactly who you are.

Yahoo Vs. Google Moves Up A Notch With 'Attack Ads'

Yahoo is taking off the gloves in its fight with Google for Web users.

The Web portal has launched its first-ever attack ad campaign, claiming that its revamped search service works faster and gets users better results than Google GOOG, the Web's most-used search service.

In one radio ad that began airing nationally this month, an announcer proclaims that "search engines like Google get you lost in all of the links, but not Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) search." The ad also calls attention to Yahoo search's drop-down menu that offers alternative words and phrases users can click as they type in words during a search.

"You won't find that on your Google page," the announcer intones.

Yahoo YHOO has positioned the ad as a humorous reminder that Google isn't the only search service, says Raj Gossain, vice president of marketing for Yahoo search.

"We're not trying to be nasty to them; I have a tremendous amount of respect for what they have done," Gossain said. "But our challenge as the No. 2 player in the market is to remind users that there is an opportunity to make a choice."

March figures aren't available, so it's uncertain if the ads are working. In February, Google's share of Internet searches in the U.S. rose to 59.2% from 58.5% in January, according to comScore Networks. Yahoo's share slipped to 21.6% from 22.2%.

Many people don't even know that Yahoo offers Web search, Gossain says.

"It's just a habit that people have of always going to the site of our friends up in Mountain View," he said, referring to Google's Silicon Valley home base.

Shahid Khan, a partner at IBB Consulting Group, says that Yahoo needs to act, but that using attack ads is surprisingly bad form on Yahoo's part.

"It just shows how desperate Yahoo has become that they would stoop to this level," Khan said.

But Barry Parr, an analyst at Jupiter Research, calls the ads a worthwhile gamble.

"They have a tough problem and not a lot to lose" by trying the ads, he said.

Yahoo remains the most-visited Web property, but it hasn't gained ground in search against Google. Worse, earnings and sales gains have stalled in the last year-plus, and it's the subject of an unsolicited takeover attempt by another fierce Google rival, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) MSFT.

Yahoo revamped its search service in October.

The new service gives users more than just links to Web sites. For example, a search for "10,000 B.C. movie" gives users a little box with viewer ratings, a link to a description of the film and a list of showtimes at local theaters.

Yahoo is trying to give its users short cuts to the information they want, Gossain says.

"We try to package a lot of great information, basically giving users answers they are looking for right at the top of the page," he said.

Some of Yahoo's new features aren't unique. Search company Ask, Ask a unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) (OTCBB:IACPP) IACI, offers a similar drop-down menu for Web search users. Google is testing such a feature.

"Yahoo is doing some interesting stuff, but it's pretty consistent with what everybody is doing with search," said Greg Sterling, head of Sterling Market Intelligence.

Google has never paid for ads to push its search service.

"We welcome competition that helps deliver useful information to users and expands user choice," Google said via e-mail when asked about Yahoo's new ad campaign. "Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space -- it makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that."





Newstex ID: IBD-0001-23988742

Originally published in the March 25, 2008 version of Investor's Business Daily.

Copyright (c) 2008, Investor's Business Daily, Inc. All rights reserved. This article is protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of Investor's Business Daily, Inc. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content

Before the test drive, cruise the Web

A few weeks ago, I received a dreaded phone call at 8:30 a.m. telling me he wasn't going to make it. The "he" in this case was my car, and the bearer of bad news was my mechanic. My 1994 Saab bit the dust when its timing belt broke, and after discussions about the cost of the repair versus the value of the car, I accepted the fact that I'd need to start looking at buying another vehicle.

I headed online to start researching (I was looking for a used car) but was overwhelmed by an avalanche of information. Everyone seemed to have something to say about cars, whether in blogs, community forums, editorial reviews, Kelley Blue Book values, Carfax reports or local dealer sites. As I discussed my findings with friends and family, more people than not were surprised to hear about the variety of research and price comparisons available online.

This week's column is an overview of sites that may help you or someone you know browse for a new or used car on the Web. I used sites ranging from trusted resources like ConsumerReports.org to search engine tools like Yahoo Autos. This column can't possibly mention every car-searching resource on the Web; rather, it's just a taste of what's available.

Edmunds.com and ConsumerReports.org both feature informative data on a number of new and used vehicles. Edmunds is a free site specifically geared toward cars, including an online magazine for enthusiasts called Inside Line and a Web forum for discussions about automobiles called CarSpace. I used various tools on Edmunds.com, including one that estimates the true cost to own a specific car over time. I especially enjoyed reading an article titled "Confessions of a Car Salesman," which proved uncanny in predicting a range of tricks and techniques the salespeople used when I first visited a car dealership.

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Edmunds offers a four-step pricing system, which includes getting quotes from dealers, and a payment calculator, which estimates monthly payments. Edmunds teams up with AutoTrader.com to help perform searches for certified pre-owned or used cars online.

Consumer Reports covers products as well as cars but keeps much of its most useful data behind a Web site subscription, which costs $26 annually or $5.95 monthly (magazine subscribers can pay a discounted price of $19 a year). You need this subscription to access CR's respected ratings and certain sections of its Web forums. These ratings were helpful to me, as they assessed numerous aspects of specific car models, including trouble spots by year, performance, safety and fuel economy.

CR offers valuable lists such as "All Recommended Cars," "Best and Worst Used Cars" and "Reliable Used Cars by Price." A car-buying calculator is an asset to this site that helps you decide whether it would be smarter to buy or lease a vehicle.

Google, Yahoo and AOL all present special search-results pages when you search for a specific car for sale, using drop-down menus and various ways to sort results. Google Base for automobiles, found by selecting "Vehicles" from www.google.com/base, is a list of data submitted to Google. Drop-down menus help broaden or narrow results by sorting the data according to certain attributes, such as make or price. Vehicle-search results can be viewed in one of three formats: List View, Table View or Map View -- an illustration of each car's location in relationship to a Zip Code. I found Table View most useful because it organized data in smart, spreadsheet-like displays so I could quickly skim through columns listing price, color, amenities and mileage.

But not all car searches within Google Base returned the same drop-down-menu options for sorting. In a few instances, I couldn't sort my search results by model year. Google Base does show the date on which each car was listed.

Yahoo Autos teamed up with Cars.com to offer richer content, including a Car Finder feature that helps people narrow down what type of new car they might like according to price, driving style and fuel (type and economy). Yahoo even tries to answer car questions with its Yahoo Answers Q&A tool, which lets people submit questions. I found user reviews on this site, as well as expert reviews provided by NewCarTestDrive.com, an auto-review site.

The used car section in Yahoo Autos reminded me of Google with its drop-down menus and results that displayed in list or map views. List view shows plenty of information in one glance, including an image of the car for sale and the number of additional available photos. From this list, users can link directly to view or order Carfax reports or email the dealer, saving time wasted on excess mouse clicks and browsing.

AOL Autos does a nice job of integrating Web 2.0 features such as pop-up menus that appear within a page rather than in an entirely new Web page. Vehicle search results are found by entering a few criteria for a new or used car, and used-car results can be further narrowed by adding or subtracting desired specifics listed on the far left of the screen. Some specs include model type, engine, year or extras like heated seats or a sunroof.

This site can condense numerous used car listings into one graph that illustrates car prices in relationship to mileage or year. Selecting any point on the graph reveals a short description of a vehicle's location, price and mileage. For new cars, AOL Autos offers lengthy expert reviews from NewCarTestDrive.com, as well as user reviews.

Both Yahoo Autos and AOL Autos walk users through steps to get price quotes from dealers for new cars.

Carfax.com provides car-history reports using vehicle-identification numbers, or VINs. For a $30 fee, used-car buyers can use Carfax.com for 30 days. This report shows a vehicle's history such as if it was a rental or not, how many different owners it had, how long each owner possessed the vehicle and where it came from. Tips pop up within these reports, including one that warned me about "curbstoning," a term that describes an individual without a dealer's license looking to sell a number of cars by posing as a private seller.

As can be expected, many newspaper Web sites offer automobile sections that display digitized classified ads, so be sure to check your local paper's Web site.

At the end of the day, test-driving a car will be a true test as to whether or not you like it -- no matter how much research you've done online. But knowing your stuff before you visit a dealership can save money and time.

Hands On: Microsoft Office Live Workspace

Microsoft is synonymous with the ubiquitous Windows operating system. But its Microsoft Office productivity suite pulls in more revenue than any version of Windows. Competition from Web-hosted productivity applications like Google Docs and Zoho Office has changed the rules of the application-suite game, however, threatening Microsoft's desktop application revenues and forcing it to address the growing popularity of Web-hosted applications with new features and products.

The obvious move would be to offer free, ad-supported, feature-limited online versions of Office's flagship applications designed to compete head-on with Google's and Zoho's word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs. Microsoft's free Office Live Workspace, however, takes a different tack by providing private and public shared online file areas, or workspaces, that are tightly linked to Office's desktop applications via a downloadable plug-in.

Though it lacks advanced workflow, communications, and project management features, Office Live Workspace has more in common with collaborative Web services like Basecamp and Central Desktop than it does with Google's or Zoho's online suites. Currently ad-free, Microsoft says the site may eventually include advertising.

Office Live Workspace anticipates the kinds of jobs you're likely to collaborate on, providing prefab workspace templates geared to specific business, school, and home tasks such as organizing a group meeting, launching a product, writing a term paper, throwing a party, or managing a little-league team. Individual templates contain document templates designed for the task, such as a project proposal outline in Word or a presentation in PowerPoint.

Office Live Workspace supports Excel files, too, though none of the templates available when we reviewed the site were Excel files. On the other hand, the service doesn't support Microsoft's Access database format, which is too bad--Access users looking to delegate data entry and to simplify reporting tasks might benefit greatly from an online database-sharing arrangement.

You can view documents in the three supported Office file types online, but to edit the files, you must download and open them in your local copy of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, or in a compatible suite such as OpenOffice.org, and then reupload them when you're done editing.

Emulating a handy feature pioneered by Zoho Office, the service also lets you open, edit, and save files directly from your Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 applications to your online folders, using a downloadable toolbar plug-in. Besides working in the supported Office file types, you can create, view, and edit several other types of files--Events, Contacts, Task Lists, and Notes--via the Web interface, and sync these with the corresponding information types stored in your local copy of Microsoft Outlook. The site lets you create one other file type--a spreadsheet-like list--and export it to Excel format if you wish. You can upload other file types, too. The site simply displays an error message if you try to view or edit unsupported file formats.

If you work with only a few collaborators, Office Live Workspace provides just the right combination of file-sharing controls and ease of use. As the workspace administrator, you create a new shared workspace and then invite other users by e-mail to join it, either as viewers (who can see but not modify files) or as editors (who can see, create, and modify files). You can share workspaces with invited users, make them public, or keep them private. Files are easy to move from one workspace to another. Though you can't share individual workspace files, you can share individual files that are stored in the default 'Documents' folder.

Office Live Workspace displays a log of file creation, editing, and deletion activity, and the administrator can retrieve an earlier version of a file if an editing snafu occurs. If you add the SharedView utility, a small download that's still in beta, you can share your screen and its applications with other workspace users--a feature that several other collaboration services offer as well. Only one user at a time can control and edit a document via SharedView, however. If you need tighter controls over file access, or other workflow tools like e-mail reminders of project milestones and due dates, choose a more powerful collaboration service.

You'll also want to look elsewhere if your projects involve lots of large files. While other online storage services--including Google, Zoho, and Microsoft's own Windows Live Spaces--offer gigabytes of free storage, Office Live Workspace gives you just 500MB, with individual file size limited to 25MB. But if you and a few of your coworkers or family members want to collaborate in a lightweight fashion using Microsoft Office apps, Microsoft's unique response to Web-hosted applications could be a free and easy no-brainer.

Open source: It's time to get down to business

March 24, 2008 (Computerworld) Don MacAskill calls himself a "huge fan" of open-source software in general, and the MySQL database in particular. MySQL is one of the core technologies used at SmugMug Inc., an online photo-sharing service, where MacAskill is CEO.

But now MacAskill finds himself hoping that MySQL can be rescued and righted by Sun Microsystems Inc. -- a traditional IT vendor, albeit one that has fully embraced the open-source process in recent years.

Sun's acquisition of MySQL AB last month is the biggest in a series of steps that vendors have taken to try to improve the open-source experience for corporate users. That's becoming a pressing need as more companies adopt open-source software -- and as vendors push hard to increase the adoption rate even further.

But there's still a long way to go to soothe user concerns over issues such as the timely delivery of new features and bug fixes, the need for more predictable product road maps, and the lack of IT workers with open-source skills and experience.

At SmugMug, for example, MacAskill is still waiting for fixes to a scalability problem that led him to write in a January blog post that he was "seriously considering" not renewing the company's MySQL Enterprise support contract when it expires later this year.

As SmugMug adds more processor cores to its MySQL servers, performance isn't increasing like it should, MacAskill said. The problem stems from concurrency problems between MySQL and InnoDB, the most widely used storage engine for the database.

MacAskill said he and other users tried for years to get MySQL to address the glitches, "and all we got back was radio silence." Eventually, users such as Google Inc. developed their own patches in an effort to fix the performance problem, but MySQL has been slow to incorporate the patches into the database.

Zack Urlocker, MySQL's executive vice president of products, said in a response to MacAskill's January blog post that MySQL had added some fixes to new database releases and was reviewing Google's patches. MySQL was also looking forward to tapping into Sun's "great expertise in scaling performance," Urlocker wrote.

MacAskill said he hopes that Sun, which he viewed as an IT dinosaur a few years ago, can solve the scalability problem. And despite the nature of open source, he would prefer that the fix come as part of the vendor's support of the database. "We have our own product to build here," he noted.

The uncertainties of the open-source development model continue to drive some corporate users away. For example, Dale Frantz, CIO at Auto Warehousing Co., considered desktop Linux before deciding last year to replace the new-car processing company's PCs with Macintosh systems.

The problem, Frantz said at Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference this month, was that when he talked to people in the open-source community, they mostly "wanted to know what we could do for them." In the end, he added, "we had to do what was best for Auto Warehousing Co."

Another big issue is the split development model that many open-source vendors have adopted for the enterprise and community versions of their products.

Jeremy Cole, a former MySQL user at Yahoo Inc. who is now a consultant at Proven Scaling LLC, said that MySQL has been updating its enterprise database release more often than the community version. As a result, he said, "while enterprise users are getting fixes faster, they're essentially running untested code."

n addition, Cole said, users such as Google and Yahoo have long had to either live with a variety of shortcomings in MySQL's software or do the development work themselves.

Cole wrote in a blog post in January that he thinks Sun "has a very good chance of leading MySQL better than MySQL" did. As of last week, though, he had yet to hear of any planned changes to MySQL's development model or release schedule.

Bill Parducci, chief technology officer at Think Passenger Inc., which builds online communities for companies and their customers, noted that Linux vendor Red Hat Inc. doubled the length of its new-release cycles several years ago because of pressure from users who were having trouble keeping up with its updates.

In addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Think Passenger uses open-source technologies such as the CentOS version of Linux, the Jetty Web server and Iona Technologies PLC's Fuse Message Broker.

Parducci is satisfied with most of his open-source vendors but sees room for improvement, particularly among the smaller ones. They need to cultivate their communities and ensure that they have timely feedback loops so that business users can get the technical help they require, he said.

More comprehensive and reliable product road maps would help as well, according to Gautam Guliani, executive director of software architecture at Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions.

The division of Kaplan Inc. uses a small assortment of open-source software, including Red Hat Linux and Red Hat's JBoss middleware. Getting timely support from the open-source vendors hasn't been a problem for Guliani. But in some cases, he said, "the development road map isn't thought out as much as we'd like."

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO and president, said after the announcement of the MySQL acquisition in January that the open-source vendor's inability "to give peace of mind to a global company that wants to put MySQL into mission-critical deployment" had been a big impediment to its growth. To try to rectify that, Sun plans to offer new MySQL support services worldwide.

Red Hat is also pushing to make it easier for corporate users to deploy its JBoss middleware. Last month, the company said it was setting up new performance-tuning, application certification and technology migration centers for prospective JBoss users. And on March 13, Red Hat said it had bought open-source systems integrator Amentra Inc. specifically to work with JBoss users.

Also, Novell Inc. and SAP AG last week said they're working to optimize Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system for users of SAP's ERP applications.

Baldor Electric Co. in Fort Smith, Ark., has been running its SAP applications on an IBM mainframe with SUSE Linux for the past three years. Mark Shackelford, Baldor's vice president of information services, was skeptical at first about moving the SAP applications to Linux. "But it's more stable than any proprietary Unix that we had," he said.

SmugMug's MacAskill is counting on Sun to bring some stability and better scalability to MySQL, even though he hasn't seen any changes yet. "I think it's a new phase of MySQL's life," he said. "It's fascinating watching this, really."

Craig Stedman contributed to this story.

Web 3.0 And The Features That Wow Many Users

For those who are in the dark, the web has numbered versions. Not too many people know this truth but, a few years back, a guy named Dale Dougherty envisioned Web 2.0. This is despite the fact that the whole world was in chaos because of the crash of the dot-com. People were losing hope that the Internet would ever rise again but Dougherty never gave up. The Web 2.0 Conference in 2005 gave way to the birth of the World Wide Web.

Web 2.0 has come to depict practically each site, technology, or service which are promoting collaboration and sharing even down to the Internet’s roots. Blogging, tags, wikis, RSS feeds, Flickr, del.icio.us, MySpace, and YouTube were the first fruits. The world has been a witness to the evolution of the Web from its 1.0 phase to Web 2.0. Looking at the great developments on the web’s history, people are wondering what is in store for those who would be able to witness the coming of Web 3.0.

Net technologies are constantly evolving: in the minds of geniuses in universities, in prime corporations, and many other great minds out there. Most of the online population coin the term Semantic web to Web 3.0. This is somehow in connection to Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web.

Basically, Web 3.0 is a location where web pages are read by machines just like humans read them. This is also a place where search engines abound. Looking at it on a layman’s perspective, it simply means a single database for the whole world (well, this is not quite simple when you begin to fathom the work it’s going to take to make this happen).

Some are skeptical about the birth of this modern Internet idea of Berners-Lee in 2001. He began with an idea where the Semantic Web can have agents that would take care of people’s schedules (even down to the setting of appointments). Semantic web agents can be programmed to do just about anything else (processing of research papers or even booking vacations). All it takes for these agents to become a reality, according to its author, is for the web to be re-annotated.

Nowadays, Web 3.0 is more than just a dream. Official standards which describe the metadata that would make information machine readable are now practically everywhere—they are already in place in RDF (Recourse Description Framework), OWL (Web Ontology Language), there is even a development platform in HP called Jena and structures are to be found in the Spatial database tool of Oracle.

The technology of Web 3.0 is evident in Google Gears which allows users to create web applications even when offline. The Adobe Flash player lets application developers have some access to the microphone and webcam. Pretty soon, it would be possible to drag then drop files from the desktop all the way to a web browser.

More awesome features await those who would want to experience Web 3.0: spectacular graphics, hi-def video and audio, seamless animations, and 3D. The present day’s generations of web front-end engineers are very lucky to have Web 3.0. Fragmentation which could result when technologies skyrocket could be moderated with the use of JavaScript toolkits.

These could very well be the vision that Berners-Lee saw. It’s more than just storing and sharing information now—the Internet could do far more complex actions that would make Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 seem ‘Neanderthal’ in comparison.

Bridging Desktop And Web Applications - A Look At Mozilla Prism

New platforms like Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism are evolving that combine the benefits of Internet flow with the flexibility and power of desktop applications. They are part browser, part desktop app and are extremely efficient for certain types of applications.

Flash, Silverlight and Ajax get most web applications over the hump in terms of usability and are the technologies behind the fast transition of desktop applications to the web. But it’s not clear that they’ll ever kill off all desktop applications entirely. The bridge between them may very well be Air and/or Prism.

I asked him to write a guest post discussing Prism and how it fits into the ecosystem v. Air as well as a number of emerging technologies for using web applications offline (Firefox 3, Google Gears).

Thanks to innovations like Ajax and Flash video, web apps are quickly gaining ground on their desktop counterparts. With a few notable exceptions like Firefox and Skype, the big software hits of recent years have been websites such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. And yet web-based software cannot yet equal the high-quality user experience of the best native apps. This is the reason why Apple was forced to reverse its original decision to make Safari the official SDK for the iPhone. It also explains why online productivity suites like Google Docs are still struggling to compete with stalwarts like Microsoft Office. Web apps simply don’t provide the responsiveness, performance, whizzy graphics and access to local data that users crave, and they only work when you’re connected to the internet.

Single-site browsers (SSBs) aim to bring the best of the desktop to web applications. Rather than running programs in normal web browsers like Firefox or Safari, wedged in a tab between New York Times articles and TechCrunch posts, each app is given its own dedicated browser, which is customized to include many of the desktop features that users know and love. Some of the advantages are obvious. Apps like Gmail and Facebook get an icon in the dock (on Mac) or the taskbar (on Windows) for easy access, and in the case of Gmail the icon can be “badged” with the number of new emails, a popular feature of traditional mail clients. Superfluous elements like the back/forward buttons, generic browser menus and the URL bar can be hidden away, reducing user interface clutter. Other benefits are more subtle. Since each app is running in its own operating system process, for example, a crash in one program won’t bring down your whole browser.

Mozilla Prism is one of the oldest examples of a site-specific browser. It grew out of the WebRunner prototype created by Mozilla developer Benjamin Smedberg, which he showed off at the XTech conference in 2006 to demonstrate the capabilities of the Mozilla platform. Another Mozillian, Mark Finkle, recognized its potential and continued to extend and improve the prototype. It was rebranded as Prism and launched as an official Mozilla Labs project in October 2007. Rather than creating a new platform for standalone web applications, Prism aims to leverage existing web apps while integrating them more smoothly into the overall desktop experience.

With the release of Prism 0.9 two weeks ago, the project now comes with a Firefox extension that makes creating a single-site browser for a website a one-click process that can be performed directly inside Firefox 3. Surf to Gmail, for instance, choose “Convert to Application” in the Firefox menu, and a shortcut with the Gmail icon appears on your desktop. Clicking the icon launches Gmail in its own window. Extensive customization options are available to add things like dock badges, system tray icons and popup notifications. Web developers can add special hooks to their code so that these bells and whistles are automatically included whenever someone spins the app off onto their desktop. Prism is still very much a work-in-progress, but it has already met with some early success; recent Yahoo acquisition Zimbra, for example, is using it to deliver a desktop version of their popular web-based mail client.

Adobe announced the first alpha version of Apollo in March 2007. A beta version was released in June, rebranded as Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). AIR is similar to Prism in many ways, although it is based on the open source WebKit rendering engine (also used by Apple’s Safari browser on the Mac and iPhone). The other big difference when compared to Prism is that AIR, in addition to web standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, supports Flash and another proprietary Adobe language called Flex. A glance at their application showcase reveals a heavy emphasis on using Flash and Flex to give applications a slick native look and feel. Early adopters include big names like eBay and AOL.

Another noteworthy site-specific browser is Fluid. It has an impressive list of features considering that it is the work of a single developer, Todd Ditchendorf. The main restriction is that it works only on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature is “built-in support for Greasemonkey-compatible userscripting.” For those not familiar with Greasemonkey, this means that a web app can be modified with a simple JavaScript file that runs on the client whenever the app is loaded. There is already a huge number of scripts available to do things like send SMSes from Gmail, download videos from YouTube and strip ads from websites. This type of userscripting is particularly useful in the case of a site-specific browser since changes to the application user interface may make it work more effectively on the desktop. For example, certain features might be moved from hyperlinks inside the application to the window’s menu bar. In the long term, web developers will hopefully make modified SSB-friendly versions of their apps available, but in the meantime userscripting can be used to pimp them out directly on the client.

A final contender is Google Gears, which was originally positioned as a way to take web apps offline so that they can be used without a live internet connection. Currently the only Google application to support Gears is Google Reader; users who install the plugin can sync their news feeds to their local disk and read them offline. It has recently become clear that Google has much bigger plans for Gears; a “Desktop Shortcut API,” for instance, lets Gears users add an icon to their desktop to launch an app directly. Gears developer Dion Almaer provides a laundry list of future APIs, including everything from notifications and cryptography to image manipulation.

As such, Gears represents a strong move on the part of Google into the browsing space, almost certainly to include site-specific browsing. Despite persistent rumors, it is now apparent that Google does not intend to create its own “GBrowser”. Instead, it is using Gears as a vehicle to add new features to existing web browsers (it currently works in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari), for use both by Google and by third-party apps. Google obviously realizes that its applications won’t be able to compete with the likes of Microsoft Office without significantly beefing up the capabilities of the web browser. At the same time, it would be too stiff a challenge to achieve broad market penetration with a completely new browser brand. Gears is its elegant solution to this problem.

Offline functionality is key piece of the site-specific browser puzzle. Internet connectivity may one day be ubiquitous, but in the meantime web apps need to function offline if they are to compete with their desktop brethren. HTML 5 includes a specification for offline web apps that is already supported by Safari 3.1 and Firefox 3. Gears is in many ways a direct competitor, although one of the HTML 5 editors, Ian Hickson, works for Google, and it is quite plausible that Gears will be adapted to support the specification in the future. Offline functionality is not inherently linked to site-specific browsers, but together the two form a powerful combination.

It’s pretty early to call a winner in the site-specific browser space, especially since heavyweights like Apple and Microsoft are probably poised to enter the game as well. But Prism has one big advantage: a killer app in the form of Firefox. By integrating Prism into a future version of Firefox, Mozilla could quickly get its technology into the hands of its 150 million users. AIR, on the other hand, has the advantage of using Flash and Flex to add sizzle to web app user interfaces, at the price of requiring potentially significant adaption on the part of the web app developer. However the space shakes out, the era of running applications in a tab in a traditional web browser may soon be coming to an end.

BlogEngine.NET Feature List

 

1. Features

Here’s a short list of all the features of BlogEngine.NET  

Plug ’n play

BlogEngine.NET is very easy to setup and customize. To make it work, just upload the files to an ASP.NET 2.0 webserver and you’re ready to start writing. No database configuration, just plug ‘n play.

Full featured

BlogEngine.NET comes with all the features you would expect from a modern blog engine as well as new unique features such as AJAX comments and screenshot trackbacks.

Web 2.0

BlogEngine.NET features social bookmarks, OpenSearch support, XFN tags, AJAX, Microsummaries, Gravatars, coComments, tag cloud, Google sitemap and other so called Web 2.0 features.

Referrer stats

The referrer statistics enables you to see which websites link to you, so you can follow up with comments or just to have fun. This feature is a real time killer that you cannot live without.   

Cool widgets

There is a variety of cool widgets that such as an AJAX post calendar or a blogroll that automatically retrieves the latest posts from each blog and displays the title beneath the blog. Most of the controls are configurable from the admin section.

Advanced comment system

Comments are a very important part of a blog, so BlogEngine.NET features a very advanced commenting system in AJAX that supports country flags, live preview, Gravatars, coComments – all of which can easily be modified in the admin section.

Full syndication suite

BlogEngine.NET supports syndication feeds in any possible location. You can find feeds on comments, categories, authors and a main feed. Both RSS 2.0 and ATOM 1.0 are fully supported.

Trackbacks and pingbacks

All outgoing links from the posts is tracked- and pinged back, so your blog will get listed in the comments on the linked website if it supports it. When a new post is created, BlogEngine.NET automatically pings Technorati, Feedburner, Ping-o-Matic etc.

Search

The search capability of BlogEngine.NET is one of the most advanced and it even allows the visitors to search in the comments. Everything about the search can be configured in the admin section.

Standalone pages

Besides regular blog posts, BlogEngine.NET supports the creation of static pages that exist outside the blog chronology. Pages are useful for all kinds of information about you or your blog.

Multi-author support

BlogEngine.NET fully supports multiple authors to write posts on the same blog. Visitors are then able to subscribe to the individual author’s RSS feed or view only the posts from their favourite author.

Cool themes

BlogEngine.NET comes with some very cool themes for you to choose from. If you want to modify or create a new theme you can do so easily with just a basic understanding of HTML and CSS.

XHTML compliance

All the controls in BlogEngine.NET are 100% XHTML 1.0 compliant. All posts you write automatically become compliant thanks to the tinyMCE text editor.

Extendable

BlogEngine.NET is built from the ground up using nothing but C# and ASP.NET 2.0 all with simplicity in mind. It means that you can write new controls and themes by using the skills you already have as a .NET developer.

For a full list of features see the feature table.

 

2 - User’s Guide

The everyday things you’d like to know about BlogEngine.NET

• Creating posts
  
• Editing or Removing posts
  
• Comment Management
  
• Setting up Categories
  
• Changing Themes
  
  
• Syndication Setup
  
• Using Metaweblog APIs
  
• Using SQL Server for data instead of XML (which is the default setup)
  
• Using ASP.NET 2.0 SQL Membership and Role Providers

3. Videos

Because some things are easier to show than tell. We add new videos frequently so remember to come back for more.

Getting Started

• Complete Installation (6:19)
  
• SQL Provider Setup (3:26)
  
• SQL Membership/Roles Provider Setup(8:53)

4. Extensions

Here’s a list of extensions that you can download and implement into your own BlogEngine.NET installation.  Thanks goes to Paul Tumelty for collecting this list and sharing with it us.

Embedded Media Extensions

• Slideshow Photo Gallery - Silverlight based Photo Gallery
  
• Lightbox Extension - Integrates the Lightbox Javascript Library into BlogEngine.NET
  
• Thumbnailer Extension - Automatically generates thumbnails of images embedded in posts/pages
  
• Flash MP3 Player - Allows you to embed a small flash movie to play mp3s on your blog
  
• Odiogo - Add voice to your site
  
  
• YouTube Plugin - Add YouTube videos into posts
  
• FLV Flash Player - Embed FLV files into posts
  
• Random Image Control - Displays a random image from a given directory
  
• Gallery User Control - Automatically generate thumbnails of images in a folder and build a table to show them
  
• Photo Gallery Project - Project to bring a full PhotoGallery subsystem into BlogEngine.NET (in progress)
  
• Silverlight Slideshow - Silverlight based slideshow control
  
  
• Silverlight Player Extension - Embed Silverlight movies into posts
  
• Alternative Lightbox Extension - Another Lightbox extensions for BlogEngine.NET

Navigational Extensions

• Historical Breadcrumbs - Shows the last few pages visited
  
• Hierarchical Breadcrumb Extension - Shows the user where they are on your blog
  
  
• Menu User Control - Allows you to configure hierarchical menus that can link to pages/posts
  
• Random Post Link Generator - Generates a link to a random post from your blog

Sydication/Social Bookmarking Extensions

• Social Bookmarking Extension - Enables you to add links to all of the major social bookmarking sites
  
• FeedFlare Plugin - Something to do with FeedFlare (in Italian!)
  
  
• DotNet Kicks Button - Submit a blog entry to DotNetKicks
  
• SIOC Implementation for BlogEngine.Net - SIOC for BlogEngine.NET. SIOC (Semantically-Interconnected Online Communities) is an extension of RDF which goes beyond RSS in that it describes not only the content of a website, but the connections between site content, users on the site, and other websites.
  
• DotNetKicks Button Extension for BlogEngine.Net - Generates a “Kick It” button to submit the post to DotNetKicks
  
• Updated DotNetKicks Button - Enhanced DotNetKicks Extension

Statistical Extensions

• Counter Extension - Counts file downloads
  
• Top Commenters Extension - Shows who the top commenters are on your blog
  
• Google Tracker Extension - Insert the Google Tracker information for Analytics
  
• Click Tracker - Track clicks to external websites from your blog
  
• Simple Counter Extension (Al Nyveldt) - Count hits for downloads
  
  
• File Download Tracker (Chris Blakenship) - Another File Download Tracker
  
• Page Load Time Control - Shows how long it took to render the page

Anti-Spam Extensions

• Akismet Anti Spam - Get rid of Comment Spam
  
• SpamFighter - Block spam in comments

Theme Widgets

• Quote of the Day Widget - Widget enabling storage and display of Quotes of the Day
  
• Stock Quotes Widget - Widget which enables Stock Quotes to be displayed on your blog

Hyperlink Extensions

• Toolbox Extension - Allows you to build lists of resources which can easily be referenced via blog posts, or displayed in a list (This page is built using this!)
  
  
• Wikipedia Plugin - Allows creation of links to terms in Wikipedia (site in Italian)
  
• QuickLinks - Automatically create hyperlinks from keywords
  
• QuickerLinks - Enhanced version of QuickLinks
  
• Snap Links Extension - Provide thumbnail previews of Links
  
• ShortLink Extension - Create shortcuts from small text snippets

Administration Extensions 

• Comment Relish - Send users that comment a welcome message after their first comment
  
• My Profile Extension - Allows an admin to modify details for themselves
  
• Encrypt Web.Config Extension for BlogEngine.Net - Encrypts Web.Config
  
• Artmel XML Membership with BlogEngine 1.3 - Use the Artem XML Membership provider after upgrading to BlogEngine.Net v1.3

Input Extensions

• Comment Toolbar Extension - Enables additional options for people commenting on posts
  
• BBCode Toolbar Extension - Enables additional BBCode options for commenters
  
• BBCode Extension - Wiki Syntax for comments
  
• TextFormatter - Wiki syntax in posts
  
• Syntax Highlighting - Make code samples look nice with the Syntax Highlighter
  
  
• Smilies Extension - Replace similies text with smilies

Miscellaneous Extensions

• WoW Tooltip Extension - Replaces tags with details of WoW characters
  
• Xbox Gamercard Extension - Allows you to embed your xbox or xbox live gamercard into a blog post/page
  
• Windows Live Writer: Copy code to clipboard - A nice way to display code and make it easily available

Features

Posted in ASP.NET.

Now use Google Analytics to Track Google Docs

Since the release of Google Docs, it constantly has seen new developments, with the most recent addition till now being the Offline accessibility option. But now as if it all wasn't just enough, you can now track your published documents with Analytics. This change was first seen and reported by Blogoscoped.

In order to track your published content, you would need to enter your Google Analytics account's tracking codes. This feature at present it seems is being rolled out and debugged while it is in its testing stage. Once you have published a document, you will be shown a small message: "Tracking visitor traffic with Google Analytics."

Below is the screenshot for viewing the source code of a published document: the highlighted Google Analytics tracking code “UA-18065-1” is used by Google, whereas the other tracking code would be related to your account.

This certainly is something that most of us had been looking forward to. But it would know that right now, this new option is frequently being updated and so at times you would not be able to use all the features of the new application. Still, at least now we do have something to look forward to, what do you say?

OpenAjax Alliance Announces New Initiatives Around Secure Mashups and Mobile Device APIs

The OpenAjax Alliance today revealed new standards and open source initiatives for secure mashups, Ajax on mobile devices, and a unified browser wish-list from Ajax toolkit suppliers. Ajax is the technology behind most Web 2.0 applications, including the increasingly popular "mashup," a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience, and Web "gadgets," which can be placed into Web pages and social network sites.

The OpenAjax Alliance is an organization of vendors, open source projects and companies using Ajax that are dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based Web technologies. Today from AJAXWorld in New York City, the alliance is announcing a set of coordinated initiatives that will unleash the power of mashups, but within the context of a secure mashup framework that prevents malicious attacks, such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF). The two centerpieces of the secure mashups initiatives are OpenAjax Hub 1.1 and OpenAjax Metadata.

OpenAjax Hub 1.1 extends the publish/subscribe features found in the recently approved OpenAjax Hub 1.0 to allow incorporation of untrusted mashup components, known as widgets, from third parties. Using a technology called "SMash" that was contributed by IBM (NYSE: IBM) to OpenAjax Alliance, untrusted widgets are isolated into IFrames and can only communicate with the rest of the mashup through a secure, mediated message bus. The alliance is producing both a formal specification for industry standard OpenAjax Hub 1.1 APIs, along with a commercial-ready open source JavaScript reference implementation.

Today, there are dozens of proprietary widget formats, making widespread use difficult. OpenAjax Metadata defines industry-standard XML metadata for widgets and Ajax libraries so users can mash information from more sources. The Alliance also has a companion open source project that is developing a set of transcoders from popular widget formats, such as Google Gadgets, into OpenAjax Metadata, so that these proprietary widget formats can achieve OpenAjax Metadata compatibility immediately. Additionally, the alliance is developing a sample open source mashup application that uses OpenAjax Hub 1.1 in its runtime engine and assembles widgets that are compatible with OpenAjax Metadata. This mashup application integrates the open source widget transcoders, thereby allowing integration of existing proprietary widget formats, such as Google Gadgets.

"Today's announcements from the Alliance illustrate how it is helping extend the reach of Ajax from the consumer space into the enterprise by introducing the ability to security mashups as well as use any existing Widget or Gadgets in an Ajax Application," said David Boloker, OpenAjax Alliance Steering Committee Chairman. "With OpenAjax Hub 1.1, a Web page can allow or disallow untrusted JavaScript code to communicate with other widgets, Gadgets or existing JavaScript code, thereby isolating the untrusted JavaScript code."

The Ajax industry today has dozens of useful Ajax libraries and several popular developer tools, but integration of Ajax libraries into Ajax tools has been a largely library-by-library manual process for the tool vendors. In addition to its mashup features, OpenAjax Metadata also defines a comprehensive industry XML standard for describing Ajax library APIs and UI controls, with the objective to allow arbitrary Ajax tools to integrate with arbitrary Ajax libraries. Among the participants on the IDE committee are representatives from Adobe, Aptana, Dojo, Eclipse, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, TIBCO and Zend.

"The strategy is not to replace the well defined custom formats for metadata that each development environment already uses. Nor is it to ask the Ajax library creators to change the way in which their code is currently annotated and documented. Instead we're working with development tool providers, which represent a strong majority of the market and the Ajax community, to create a shared intermediary format -- a format to and from which each custom format can be transformed," said Kevin Hakman of Aptana who chairs the IDE working group. "In addition, to make it dead easy to use, we are also engaging the community to create open source transformation utilities for the more common and broadly used JavaScript API annotation schemes such as the popular JavaScript auto-documentation utility JSDoc."

The alliance announces a new Mobile Ajax initiative to broaden the use of Ajax on mobile phones. On mobile devices, the industry is using the Ajax platform (Web Runtime) not just for Web browsing, but also for downloaded widgets and for the user interface for device-resident applications. Many of these new classes of Ajax-powered mobile applications require integration with the phone's operating system, such as retrieval of the user's current location, which might help improve search applications, or access to the phone dialer, in order to allow one-touch dialing of a phone number that might appear in a Web page or a widget. To address this emerging industry requirement, the alliance's Mobile Task Force has launched a fast-track activity to establish use cases, requirements, and characterize the requirements of the security effort, with likely follow-on efforts to pursue industry standards and/or open source.

"In order to deliver tomorrow's innovative mobile applications, the industry needs to standardize its approach to allowing the Web Runtime to use mobile device services, such as current location, messaging services, address book, and connection status," said Brad Sipes, CTO and Engineering Vice-President of Ikivo, which co-chairs the Mobile Task Force at OpenAjax Alliance. "By unifying the industry around a common approach, and defining the security requirements, OpenAjax Alliance's efforts will help propel the next-generation of mobile applications."

"Vodafone is actively participating in this effort to help drive the industry towards a consensus position on the use of AJAX technologies for delivering new Web-based services and applications through the mobile phone," said David Pollington, Senior Manager, Vodafone Group R&D, Terminal Research. "Vodafone Group R&D has already been looking into such concepts and has put their JavaScript extensions work (MobileScript) in the public domain via the OpenAjax Alliance and Vodafone's own Betavine developer site to help progress discussions within the industry."

The alliance recently launched its Runtime Advocacy Task Force, which is collecting a unified wish list of key foundation features that are needed in future browsers in order to unleash the next-generation of innovations from Ajax toolkits. Many of the features in the list are specific performance-related requests to specific browsers, which if fixed will enable Ajax toolkits to deliver cross-browser user experience innovations in future releases. The alliance has worked with Ajax industry leaders to produce a wiki that holds its initial list of feature requests. At its face-to-face meeting on Friday, March 21, the Alliance will conduct a town-hall meeting on the feature request list, and will soon launch online voting by the community to comment on and rank the feature requests.

"Ajax has emerged as a core platform upon which services are delivered upon. However, the various Ajax runtime issues have been and continue to be challenges. What can we do to make it better? OpenAjax Alliance is a great vehicle for us to get together and help make progress on these issues," said Coach Wei, CTO of Nexaweb and Chair of OpenAjax Runtime Task Force. "At the OpenAjax Runtime Advocacy Task Force, we are drawing the attention to Ajax runtime issues, gathering community opinions, facilitating dialogs, and hopefully help deliver better Ajax runtime environments upon which service providers can deliver even better web experience going forward."

About OpenAjax Alliance

The OpenAjax Alliance is an organization of leading vendors, open source projects, and companies using Ajax that are dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based Web technologies. The prime objective of the group is to accelerate customer success with Ajax by promoting a customer's ability to mix and match solutions from Ajax technology providers and to help drive the future of the Ajax ecosystem. To learn more about OpenAjax Alliance, please visit: www.openajax.org

New Dimensions in Spatial ETL: Safe Software's FME User Conference 2008

While the theme of Safe Software's FME User Conference,
held March 6-7 in Vancouver, was New
Dimensions in Spatial ETL (extract, transform, load), I'd say it
was a GIS conference that was not so much about GIS. The challenges are
geographic, to be sure, but the conference was really about integration
- integration of data, platforms, services, levels of government, etc.
While GIS and related technologies were in the picture, the focus was
the "glue" that enables integration. Below are the key announcements
and takeaways from the two-day event.



FME 2008

As is always true in an update of Feature Manipulation Engine (FME),
Safe Software's workhorse for translating data between formats and
restructuring them to meet specific needs, there's a long list of
enhancements. Among them is a new interface tool that allows drag and
drop of transformers. That tool alone, said co-founders Don Murray and
Dale Lutz, will save users "1000s of clicks." The pair tag teamed each
day's product-focused plenary sessions with an amusing banter that
reminded me of twin brothers trying to entertain the family during the
holidays. (They are a riot.)



Some of the new or enhanced formats supported: PDF (3D only), AutoCAD
Map 3D (with object data), CityGML, Golden Software's Surfer, GeoJSON,
IFC (for BIM), LandXML (from a 1998 request!), SQL Server Spatial 2008
(not yet available) and read/write support for GeoConcept. If you are
keeping score, the number of formats FME supports has grown from nine
in 1997 to 220 in 2008. One subtlety of FME that should be emphasized
and may not be widely understood: FME can be consumed as a Feature Data
Object (FDO), the open source "connection" interface pioneered by
Autodesk. Said another way, if your software supports FDO, you can,
with an FME license, gain access to those 220 formats. Which software
supports FDO? I asked around and confirmed just three products: AutoCAD
Map 3D, MapGuide (Enterprise/Open Source) and 1Spatial's Radius Studio.
I hope to see more in the future; FDO is still a relatively new option
for developers.




New transformers (software calls that transform data) tie back to key
customer demands such as 3D (an extruder), geometry management
(triangulation of complex polygons), simplifying data for systems that
don't understand complex types (a donut bridge builder and constructive
solid geometry "flattener"), attribute maintenance (the ability to
retain attributes of simple geometry when they are combined into more
complex features), and Web portal support (tile creation for Microsoft
Virtual Earth and Google Earth). The flashiest demos of the new
transformers and Web services support tapped into existing Web
services. One demo grabbed local data and put them into KML for
visualization in Google Earth. Clicking on a location on the map
provided a link that called a Web Service to populate a pie chart of
the fraction of conference goers from that location. A second demo
called a pay service from White Star (the oil/gas data providers) that
provides locations of wells, and popped them up on a Web-based map.



FME Desktop should be available for download this week and available in
packaged form a few weeks later.



FME Server

If you take the power of FME Desktop and put it on a server you get href="http://www.safe.com/products/server/overview.php">FME Server.
That simple statement doesn't reveal the power of this new product. In
simple terms, you can put a workspace (a saved workflow of transformers
and conversions) up on server for use. How do you do that? You develop
the workspace in FME's desktop graphic development tool, Workbench, and
publish it to the Web with the push of a button. ("That's easy!" was
the running in-joke during that presentation.)



How do you use the saved workspace once it's up there? You can call the
workspace to run (1) via a URL with appropriate parameters, (2) via its
own API (soon to be SOAP enabled), or (3) from another application such
as another ETL solution. The resulting data, the output of the
workspace, can be (1) streamed via a MIME type (a PDF for example), (2)
zipped and delivered, (3) saved out to a file to be used later, or (4)
in a future release, served via OGC's Web Map Service or Web Feature
Service specification servlets.




FME Server is aimed at dynamic data, data that changes and needs to be
served, reformatted or re-checked regularly. FME Server provides the
infrastructure to ensure that those who need the data receive them in
exactly the format needed, without necessarily needing to have, or know
how to run, FME.



Safe offers three key use cases for FME Server:

1. Distributing dynamic data - allowing users to get
   at data formatted as they need, whenever they need, without a copy of
   FME or knowledge of how to use it


2. Off-loading computationally complex and
   time-consuming tasks - multiple servers can help break up and speed up
   big jobs


3. Integration with workflow and other systems - for
   example, Informatica or IBM WebSphere or ArcGIS server

 One of the most powerful demonstrations of how
FME Server might be used had a user key in a city of interest, use that
to find traffic data from the Web (perhaps in GeoRSS), symbolize the
data, and output them in KML to be visualized in Google Earth. The demo
made me think of a "geosavvy version of Yahoo! Pipes (I href="http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=2438">wrote
about it last year), Yahoo's tool for non-programmers to link
together Web services for their specific needs.


URL to Pipes Article



That, to me, is the power here. While there have been discussions of
standards enabling all sorts of mashups of geodata, non-programmers
have had limited access to any definitive tool for their creation. Now,
with FME Server to do the hard work of understanding the different
formats, querying, symbolizing and combining data in the appropriate
output form, that all changes. One big plus: all of the various formats
are treated the same.



FME Server should be shipping in late March or early April. Beta 3
should be out this week. FME Server does not include a copy of Desktop,
though most users will want to use it as the preferred "authoring
tool." Further, FME Server users will need to have a Web server and
database up and running to use FME Server. Finally, SpatialDirect,
Safe's "clip, zip and ship" solution for data distribution in many
formats, has been retired as a standalone product. It's now an optional
add-on to FME Server. Existing SpatialDirect users will be upgraded to
that version of Server without extra fees. Several SpatialDirect users
noted their excitement about this change. They will finally be able to
use Workbench as an authoring tool, something not previously possible.

 

Questions, Questions

To my surprise, at this conference about FME, the majority of the
questions to presenters were not about FME! The Log-In-Project, a joint
effort of several ESRI European offices and con terra, presented by
Christian Heisig of con terra, aims to provide a secure Web service
interface to geospatial data, including monitoring of services' uptime,
and uploading and downloading of data of different types. The questions
were mostly about the security and monitoring parts.



Wesley Hardin and Jamie Katz from Burns and McDonnell described an
in-house developed Geospatial Dashboard for a central Connecticut
transmission line project. It uses FME to standardize data and make
them available to all stakeholders and contractors via Google Earth Pro
(soon Google Earth Enterprise). It costs about $150,000 and took three
people three months to develop. The questions were about data quality
and linking to other key systems (Primavera Expedition among others)
and how to keep the datasets small (some tricks - remove symbology
information from the streamed data and lop off a few unneeded decimal
points).




Frank Orr from CH2M Hill described a Homeland Security-funded data
integration project for the Colorado North Central Homeland Security
Region. The project goes live in May and requires 10 counties to be
able to upload and download eight layers of data for hazard planning
needs. That meant "matching" data models from each county on the way in
to the server and mapping the "other" counties' data to that same model
on the way down. The questions were about metadata, security and data
management issues such as edge matching.



What does this tell me? The technology most of these users interact
with day in and day out is sort of invisible to them. They worry more
about what's around it. I think that's how software is supposed to
work.



FME as the Backend to the App

If there's a complaint about the new visualization-focused Web tools
(Google Earth, OpenLayers, MapServer and others) or even some of the
lightweight desktop GIS visualization packages (QGIS comes to mind),
it's that they need more data crunching and analytical power. Some put
ArcGIS Server or GRASS in the back end to provide that functionality.
Many at the FME User Conference put FME back there. The City of Calgary
did. Staffers from that city told me why: "It's easy and fast." They
had taken one of the three advanced FME training courses the day
before. Jason Birch of Nanaimo, British Colombia explained that when he
joined the city's GIS group, it didn't have ArcGIS. So he had to use
the tool at hand, FME, to do some light analytics and data prep. He and
his colleague Matthew Dunstan ran down a long list of projects where
FME is their "leatherman tool" for GIS. Now with FME Server, I expect
we'll see even more FME use in this vein. I'll offer that from what I
saw in user presentations, FME is used maybe 20 percent of the time as
a data format converter and 80 percent of the time as an analytical
toolbox/data restructuring tool.  



FME in All Sorts of Shops

As the "Switzerland" of the GIS world, FME pops up in all kinds of
implementations. CH2M Hill, one of three Google Earth partners, uses it
to enable clients to see their own data on Virtual Earth, Google Earth
and Google Fusion. Specifically, users want to overlay their own large
raster imagery and ArcSDE and Oracle Spatial data on these platforms
and FME paves the way. Jubal Harpster of CH2M Hill brought a few
servers and clients to show how it's done. The City of Surrey, British
Columbia uses ArcIMS and GeoCortex IMF to power its Web mapping. FME
provided tools to set up a "pay for data" portal. While that's a
technical challenge, it seems determining the pricing was at least as
difficult!



Live Demos


After seeing some "video recorded" demos recently, I was very happy to
see lots of Safe's demos run live and, frankly, not work! Sometimes it
was Vista weirdness, sometimes it was human error, sometimes it was
running with the code that was compiled the night before... No one in
the audience seemed to care. In fact, one attendee from Michael Baker
noted these "failures" as one of the best parts of the event. Another
attendee commented to me on the same topic, "They are in this with us;
that gives me great confidence things will get fixed!"



Whatever happened to...

Recall all those diagrams from recent years with a centralized database
in the center and many different thin and thick clients around the
outside? I used to draw them myself to highlight how Oracle Spatial
might be in the center, with AutoCAD, ArcGIS and other clients around
the periphery, for example. I didn't see those diagrams at FME UC. What
I did see were diagrams with a centralized data store (or stores) in
the center, then a layer of FME, and then those same clients. Why? The
pure database vision does not take into account the different data
structures or the different data needs of, say, a planner, an engineer
or the assessor. Those end users want - no, insist - on seeing data in
the way they understand them, on the client with which they are
familiar. While it's possible to do that with many databases and
clients, it's quite a lot of work. FME provides a single environment
that can keep everyone happy. I expect to see FME popping up in the
stack, perhaps on a server, more and more often, even as (perhaps
because?) new spatial databases appear, such as Microsoft SQL Server
2008.

 

The
sessions took place in a round room at Simon Fraser University. Photo
courtesy of Safe Software.

href="http://www.directionsmag.com/images/newsletter/2008/02_week3/crimemap1_lg.jpg">alt="" src="http://www.directionsmag.com/images/newsletter/2008/03_week2/fme_1.jpg" border="0" height="233" width="350">

The Joy of a 130-Person Conference

When we met in a round room at Simon Fraser University on the opening
morning of the event, I knew it was going to be a good few days. You
could see everyone in the room. When Murray or Lutz alluded to, or
asked a question of, a colleague, they were in the room. If you are
investigating, or even vaguely interested in, a technology that has a
conference with fewer than 500 attendees, spend the money to attend.
You'll learn more than at any larger event and not have to work half as
hard to do so.



Users Attend User Conference

It was great that so many users attended the event. They presented all
of the papers in all the sessions, while Safe staff acted as "doctors
in a Doctors Office and instructors in typically filled-to-overflowing,
hands-on workshops. Some conferences seem overloaded with
vendor/partner/reseller presentations. That was not a problem here. Who
was missing? Some of Safe's software partners. I was pleased to speak
with, and be amused and enlightened by, staff from Microsoft and
MapInfo. I know that ESRI staffers were on hand, too, as was a local
rep standing in for 1Spatial. I was disappointed not to see
representatives from other players.

The
"Idol" session. Photo courtesy of Safe Software.

href="http://www.directionsmag.com/images/newsletter/2008/02_week3/crimemap1_lg.jpg">alt="" src="http://www.directionsmag.com/images/newsletter/2008/03_week2/fme_2.jpg" border="0" height="179" width="350">

Fun and Games

After the buzz last year about "FME Idol, and not having seen the TV
show on which it was based, I was certainly excited to see it live.
Alas, watching a handful of top coders try to decipher a challenge live
(when you don't know the challenge) is not exciting. I did appreciate
that Safe staffers had put together some fun "audition videos" to fill
the time and that some demos missed in a morning session could be
revisited. The coolest part from my perspective, Safe staffers were
competing alongside the players and several conquered the challenge!
Alas, none of the potential Idols fully completed it within the
allotted time. Don't get me wrong, I'm in awe of users with the guts to
get up there and show off their skills. The closest to completion took
home a topographically correct "bowl" featuring the local geography,
while the runners-up pocketed iPhone Touches. After a festive evening
meal overlooking the water, attendees were treated to an improv show.
The actors had clearly been briefed on what Safe does. (Imagine trying
to explain that to actors!) To my surprise, they did a great job
injecting "extract, transform and load" and other subtleties into their
stories. I'd not laughed so hard about geospatial technology in a long
time!

 

All materials from the general sessions, hands-on workshops and
breakout sessions are now available at:
www.safe.com/fmeuc/presentations. Video footage of the general
sessions, keynote presentation by Peter Batty, as well as a few of the
breakout sessions will be posted on this site within the next two
weeks.



[Disclosure: Safe Software covered my transportation and lodging for
the conference. I received, as did other attendees, a Safe Software
jacket and "tuque (winter hat).]

Google's Online Maps Gets New Jersey Commuters On Time

In an example of the growing use of Google's mapping capability, New Jersey Transit's public transportation system will partner with the search engine company to provide trip planning for commuters utilizing the utility's extensive system, the largest statewide public transportation system in the U.S.

The partnership integrates Google Maps on NJ TRANSIT's Web site. NJ TRANSIT provides scheduling data for its 164 rail and 60 light rail stations along with information pages for each station. Customers can then find local businesses at locations convenient to their travel routes on the system.

Google Transit delivers visual depiction of commuters' routes on geographical maps while also displaying departure and arrival time for individual travelers.

"For visitors to the region or the occasional rider who is less familiar with New Jersey's public transportation options it gives them a starting point for learning about NJ TRANSIT and is a key too for attracting new riders to our system," said NJ TRANSIT broad member Kenneth Pringle, in a statement on Monday. The system is also planned for eventual use across multiple transit providers as they come online in the future.

Much of the origins of Google Transit can be traced to the company's transportation routing operation that picks up and delivers Google employees headed to work at the company's Mountain View, California, headquarters. Two Google employees developed basic pieces of an advanced Transportation Routing system in 2004 and filed a patent for it. The patent, US20060149461, was published in July 2006. Additional features can be added in future iterations of the system, features like GPS linking between commuters and bus drivers and others.

Google said more than 30 transportation agencies in the U.S. and internationally offer trip planning using its system. Travelers can log onto the system to obtain specific departure and arrival times along with estimated trip duration. Utilizing Google Maps, the system provides driving directions as well as the location of local businesses and specific landmarks.

The NJ TRANSIT application is an example of how Google cobbles together various technology pieces including its search and mapping technology and creates a sweeping application useful to a wide audience.

Using Full KDE: Almost There

Using full KDE, meaning the KDE environment and all KDE applications, I have learned about the various applications and their usage. After using it for a week, what have I found?

KDE by far offers the best integrated experience. Just about all applications integrate into each other, which in many ways is good, although, there are problems.

The overall functionality (not functions) of many of the programs are not complete. For example, the default web browser Konqueror, has many features, and works great as a file manager. However, as a web browser, the quality is somewhat lacking. May web pages, depending on how the site you are visiting is built, it may have too many “web 2.0″ features to load correctly in Konqueror. Sometimes, you enter a link, or are loading two pages at once, and either one or both pages will fail to load. Given, the plug-in downloader works perfectly, although in the end, Konqueror is difficult to use as a web browser, with pages that will not load every time. I have written in my previous post about this page incompatibilities in Google Docs, although other Google services have basic functionality through Konqueror.

Kontact is a good program with many different features. Once again, features get in the way of functionality. One specific example is the KMail application. While KMail has many features and shows itself as a powerful application, configuring it to work with your email may not be as easy as it could be. Basically, KMail is not one of those “automatically configured” email programs such as GNOME’s Evolution mail reader. It is the small features, such as those found in the Calendar application which make it difficult to add web calendars, really can make using the system harder.

In my opinion, the KDE project is large, perhaps so large that resources are stretched too thin in respect to the applications. This comes down to application choice. In my mind, using Firefox for the web browser, and perhaps another application for email such as Thunderbird, provides a smoother desktop experience. I personally believe Konqueror is lacking as a web browser is because it plays the role of web browser and file browser. This kind of functionality deserves two applications. Working with GNOME, Nautilus is the file browser, and Epiphany is the web browser. This separation in projects shows itself to be beneficial when using both programs, as they are equally suited to do the job that they were designed to do.

KOffice is another example of features over functionality, although keep in mind this is the 1.6.3 release I am talking about, not the 2.0 release made for KDE 4 which is much better than the previous Version.

My reasoning behind the problems found in KDE are either:

1) Resources stretched too thin on development (possibly due to KDE 4)

or

2) There are too many features to be supported well.

KDE 4 is on a good track, and although it is not finished or complete, it is much better than KDE 3. Konqueror has been moved to a web-browser only (although it can be used as a file browser in KDE 4 as well) status in the applications, and Dolphin has become the new default file browser. I hope this means that Konqueror will be improved greatly over the next several months.

In conclusion, KDE is not a bad desktop environment, and is perfect for the power user or Linux geek who wants to use all of the features and make the system perform in a certain way. There are also many applications that are the best applications in their category, such as Amarok, which is arguably the best music player for Linux. K3B is also one of the best CD burning applications available for Linux as well. There also educational applications for astronomy, math, chemistry, and a various other subjects, and really the only choice for educational applications for Linux. KDE is a good choice for a desktop environment, even in the face of several issues. KDE 4 is going to be even better than KDE 3 once it is complete, or stable, at least. Many distributions actually make customized versions of desktop environments and add improvements and features, and Kubuntu is no exception with Restricted Manager, and Adept Package Manager. From my experience with using a straight-up KDE installation on a basic Ubuntu Server installation, Kubuntu gives a basic KDE experience, and after switching out OpenOffice.org for KOffice, you will have the KDE-only system that I have mentioned here.

Soon, I will test working in a GNOME desktop environment, with all default GNOME applications. Which distribution I will use (possibly Foresight or Debian…) is yet to be determined. Will the features be too limited? I will find out soon enough!

Apple, Google Gear Up For Developers

Apple's annual Worldwide Developer Conference

(WWDC) in San Francisco will now include a track for iPhone developers.

Four days after the release of the beta of its
href="http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3733786">software

development kit (SDK) for the iPhone, Apple said this week there has

been over 100,000 downloads of the software. WWDC is June 9-13.

Conference attendees will likely be exposed to final, or very near-final,

features of the finished SDK, which is due out by the end of June. It's

clear from the program that Apple expects interest from developers working

on some pretty flashy applications, though not based on Adobe's Flash
animation

format, which the iPhone currently doesn't support.

The agenda says attendees will be able to learn from Apple graphics and

media engineers about media-rich mobile applications and cutting-edge

handheld games for the iPhone. Sessions will include techniques to animate

user interfaces, render interactive 2D and 3D graphics in real-time and how

to support video download and playback.

In addition to the iPhone, there will of course be plenty of sessions

related to Apple's bread-and-butter Macintosh line and "Leopard" OS X 10.5

operating systems. A third track is focused on IT issues like setting up,

integrating, deploying and managing Leopard, Leopard Server, and iPhone OS

technologies in heterogeneous environments.

Google's new marquee event

Google's two-day
href="http://code.google.com/events/io/index.html">Google I/O "Web

Forward" conference is a new event slated for this May 28-29 in San

Francisco. A Google spokesperson said its
href="http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3680916">Developer

Day will continue to be held, but the company plans to take it on the

road as a worldwide tour set of events. "We expect Google I/O to be a

marquee event and a hot ticket," said the spokesman.

Five tracks are planned, including a focus on Google's new
href="http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3710656">Android

mobile phone and
href="http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3708816">OpenSocial social networking platforms. Java and Ajax tools, Web APIs (define)

and other programming tools will be covered as well as sessions on

developing applications that leverage Google Maps.

More information on where OpenSocial, currently being deployed in a 0.7

release, is going will be covered in a session "What's Next for OpenSocial."

The "Building an Android Application 101" session is designed to help

developers new to the platform.

The Google spokesperson said to stay tuned for news between now and the

event that promises to heighten developer interest further. "We have some

exciting stuff in the pipeline," he said. "We haven't put all our cards on

the table yet."