What is machine learning/artificial intelligence?

Work Assistant: Testing resolutions

Not new year resolutions. Just plain old screen resolutions.

Gertrude is staring at the sloppy blinds on the window from her seat in a tenth floor building meditating on the application the team is building for a possibly mass audience.

There are a couple of brilliant utilities available on the internet created by very kind people that would help her QA/tester colleagues test pages on different screen resolutions in increasing order of easiness to set up, but in reducing order of control.

1) The Web developer plugin for firefox. Install as you would any plugin for firefox. Techies would take more kindly to it for tailoring screen resolutions. And for a heap of other things as well.

2) A website called Viewlike that works like a charm. You can instantly see what your application would look like on an iPhone, a Wii browser and a range of resolutions between 800 x 600 and 1920 x 2000.

Morris, her imaginative colleague wishes that this could work on any virtual browser. Kit, the person on the other corner, however is simply thrilled that this works on an internally hosted application.

(Post script: Gertrude finds on more searching that there are indeed many more sites that offer this feature - test website resolution,  testsize, markhorrell, chrome extensions etc etc. But these above two remain her favourites visually)

What's a collective noun for a gathering of techies?

Depends on where you are, really.

Here is Gertrude's very selective and incomplete compilation of names - some delectable and some, more ceremonial - of developer meetings and conferences in technology companies and communities:

I/O in Google, or Atmosphere if you are invited to their CIO and IT chiefs' meet.

Chirp in Twitter

PDC Professional Developers Conference in Microsoft  or MIX  for web developers

F8 in Facebook

WWDC World Wide Developers Conference  - Apple rather formally

MAX in Adobe of Internet application developers

Disrupt in TechCrunch, occasionally.

DevStation - (not devastation as google might helpfully suggest) in Sony for PS3 developers

SATURN of architects in the SEI Architecture Technology User Network

ClueCon for Telephony and VoIP related techies

SugarCon in the context of SugarCRM's open source CRM software.

QCon when in a democratic community of developers

DevWeek  likely, of strong IT professionals

PASS Summit for Database-y people

StarEast for Software Tester People

GDC Game Developers Conference for video game developers
GreenNet for a merger of technology and climate change related thinkers

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper  perhaps to reinforce a point!

Hyper on names, harping on networks and hyping up misnomers

Perhaps it was Sir David Attenborough who had once said that human beings like classifying, organising and naming things around them. Species. Pets. Places. Diseases.

Gertrude contemplates that this is also true in the abstract kingdom of software and technology. Here, distinctly shaped machines, wires, plastic and metal have been labelled, aliased and branded. Untouched spaces, unseen procesess and unheard instructions have been honoured with what are now household names.

People of all ages adopt it rather willingly; learn new jargon, acquire new computer related hobbies and even use their extremities in hitherto unfamiliar finger acrobatics with varying degrees of skill.

All good. Gertrude is fairly amiable to such activity. She was preoccupied all of last evening understanding three letters. www.  Then she realised she must first understand the word Internet. The mass of cables that holds together people around the world with information at each end of the wires. The universe's electronic alter ego. Alter e-go, to be more catchy.

In the real world, people talk to one another over phone, by letters or in person.  The internet is a lot like that. Each method of reaching out is roughly the equivalent of a network, Gertrude reasoned. So there is etiquette, rules and even tools involved in each of these networks. All of these networks, the cables, the satellites, the attached devices and the rules, make up the internet. Not surprisingly, the networks, the cables, the satellites, the  attached devices and the rules - all have names.

Gertrude has heard people say web to mean the all of the internet. She would like to tell them that the (world wide) web is the name given to only one of its networks. The internals of the web, where people visit ebay or facebook, are different to the internals of the POP network where electronic letters are exchanged. Networks may cross each other's paths. Like when Gertrude uses the web to go to gmail and then it uses POP to send the emails to someone else. The web might still be the most frequently used network in the internet.

Within a network, each of its component has a name. The massive computers whirring away in the corners of cyberspace supplying the pages or masses of data are called servers. In increasing order of cleverness, the names of devices that direct the data to their homes are hubs, switches and routers. Cables made of copper wire, aluminium wires or even glass fibre carry the data. They are named twister pair, coaxial and optical fibre in that order. There are probably names for data-carrying invisible satellites in ether whose names Gertrude isn't sure of. She knows bluetooth can carry data wirelessly over a short distance.

Data now arrives at the client computer that asked for the data.  The computers who want to send or receive data from others of their species must have a special bone in their bodies called a network card. These network cards have a unique serial number called a MAC Address tattooed in them. Gertrude is fairly sure that the IEEE and the makers of the network cards who are responsible for this are not likely to run out of large numbers any time soon.

A lot of the data on the world wide web is indexed and labelled and categorised so it can be easily be shown to people looking for them. Spider is the name given to little programs suitable for crawling all over the web and trawling for information sitting on servers. So people take trouble to make their data extra-clear to the spiders. The spiders come back with data about the information to another program called the search engine which classifies and organises this data about the data. To go completely the other way round, it is also possible to hide some pages from search engines. There is a chowkidar-like program named firewall to scrutinise the data between networks to see if it can pass through or not.

So people only need to remember the address of the search engine. The address is called a URL. Not even the most technical of her colleagues think of it as a universal resource locator. Humbug! Its a rather ambitious name.

The URL is typed into a browser. A browser understands the meaning of URLs depending on where you type it in. The URL has a lot of dots separated by words. A URL takes you where you want to go. Gertrude smiles at the verbs - for the internet -  which have a lot to do with  reaching out - navigate, surf, browse and address.

An address proves that a computer exists in the network. This address is a number called an IP address. IP addresses are three dots surrounded by numbers. This is quite different to a MAC address which is physically inscribed inside the heart of a computer. The IP address is a concept. Fickle. Not as committed as a post code. Someone responsible invents this address.

Clients have IP addresses. Servers have IP addresses. The responsible person is a domain name registrar whose sole profession is devoted to naming or numbering. This person or organisation would need to be authorised by ICANN, a superior group of people who assign names and numbers.

Clients may have a different IP address each time they connect to a network. It would be rather inconvenient if servers did. So servers get given a fixed IP address. Trouble is, there may be many servers who provide data on the same thing say, google. What we know as google might actually be a colony of computers with different IP addresses cloaked under a more endearing name.

To prove this, on her little old PC, Gertrude does Start > Run > CMD and then types: ping www.google.com. And she sees an IP address. Then she does the same thing a bit later. Sure enough, a different IP address appears.

So www.google.com is a domain name. The dot com is rather like a surname you cannot get rid of! The ICANN people have a list of close to 300 surnames for domain names which include country codes dot co dot uk and the old fashioned dot com,  dot org and the like. It is exploiting Libya's and USA's country code that unorthodox names like bit.ly, and del.icio.us have flourished.

The surname is a top level domain name. Stuff to the left of it is called a second level domain name. Stuff to the left of that is the third level domain. This can go on for a hundred and twenty seven levels. A most remarkable prime number to be chosen. 127 is 2⁰ + 2¹ + 2² + 2³ + 2⁴ + 2⁵ + 2⁶

A top level domain name usually won't usually be a physical computer on the network. It is only the second level onwards that there are actually computers available for entertainment. At this level and beyond, they are called hostnames.

Gertrude was just talking to Charlie yesterday who visited a place in Angelesey in North Wales to spend time in a caravan. The place is llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochuchaf. Now thankfully, the ICANN people allow domain names at each level to be up to 63 letters. She wonders if 63 is 1 bit short of 8 bytes (8 times 8 bits is 64 bits is 8 bytes). with the one 1 bit reserved for something secretive. Or just plain superstition. However, in all, a domain name can be 253 letters long. Presumably, this includes the  many dots and the surnames.

Within a domain, there are heaps of structured and categorised pages waiting to be opened and read. Each of these pages has an address too called a URL - carefully named and decorated so that search engines spiders can find them easily. Some pages have ghastly names. Gertrude does not want to name and shame anyone right now. So no examples. But some of them have beautifully crafted ones. Like in the online version of the guardian.

Gertrude has a carefully nurtured grouse against things like tinyurl.com and twitter, which force people to cram and zip these ornamental URLs into encrypted unsightliness causing people to get afraid of them and ban shrunken URLs and for other people to invent things like untiny.com to unshrink the URLs.

When you type the URL in the browser and hit enter, it is called a request to the server, as opposed to an order or an instruction to it. So if Gertrude only types in facebook.com, the browser  automatically sticks the http://www. This is because stuff that is accessed through a browser usually is on the world wide web. Naturally it follows the rules of the web. The  www - dub dub dub - stands for the web. The http stands for the rules of the web. Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Wait a second. Shouldn't it be hmtp://www - as in Hypermedia Transfer Protocol?

IT and meaning: Say that again

Gertrude's mum was on the phone a few minutes ago.

There was news. Of  a minor eye surgery for her mum.  Of the neighbour's daughter eloping with the grocer. Of food, promotions and air travel. Skype conversations and a visiting cousin. One more thing, said her mother, I will need an iPad for a few days. Excellent, said Gertrude and forthwith invoked names of her friends in New York who could source one.

There was a minute of silence at the other end. And protest. But Gertrude, I won't even be able to read a book with my iPad. Sorry ma? Eye pad. Not iPad.

IT and Nature: Penguin, Deer and Metal

To an ordinary person, a penguin is a well-insulated flightless aquatic creature roaming in the wild, perhaps in the poles, stomping around like podgy lawyers in their suits. Hardly a symbol of great leaps in technology. Gertrude saw very clearly in the intervals of chomping through some peanuts, that computers had newness bubbling around them. Computers had odd connections to a penguin, a deer and some form of metal. Not to forget, even sometimes the stuff she was eating. Kernels.

Ages ago, Gertrude had taken lessons in computers on the first floor of a three storey builing about six minutes away from home. She had theory lessons and she had lab lessons. In the lab, she used something called DOS. She had to learn by rote some phrases like copy con, mkdir and rename in order to pass her exams and to get the large humpback white and black machine to cooperate with her. She was told that this was the operating system of the computer with who she was corresponding.

To Gertrude, the operating system was like a shop assistant who never went to sleep and ceaselessly handled requests from the customer and from the proprietor of the shop.

Anybody could ask this shop assistant to bring out all the stock from the Personal Accessories section, or a very specific bag from the top shelf on the left most side and he would oblige. The operating system was like that: fetched files and data from anywhere in the computer and knew where to find them. You could shut the shop, but if you knocked on it by clicking a button, the efficient shop assistant would wake up and switch on all the lights, just like the computer booted up.

The Kernel is the part of the computer that manages how people make requests of the shop assistant, and how much the shop assistant remembers and how much he runs around servicing people's demands.

There are operating systems for a computer, for a network and for phones and for routers! There are commercial ones like Windows from Microsoft which everyone's neighbour should own by now. There are also open-source operating systems like Unix. This means that Gertrude doesn't have to pay for the operating system. And if she wanted, she could also write programs herself to make the little shop assistant inside the computer do things that he didn't already do.

That said, for decades now, people have commitedly tried to come up with smarter operating systems (OS) and have been even more committed in naming them. The greatest sorrow for the poet in Gertrude is to have known of an open source OS carelessly named Haiku. The OS called RTOS was created by a company called RoweBots. There is Acorn, an OS symbolic of an eatable. AmigaOS like a friendly Spanish word. Apple again, for fruit eaters with exorbitant variants like Newton, Lisa and Macintosh. The prize for the most proper techie names would surely go to IBM for featuring godimportant and unpronounceable names like OS/2 MVS/XA TOS/360, DPPX, ACP, UTS.

Gertrude could not bring herself to get interested much in operating systems for little hand held things. Sure, there is the Android, iPhone OS, Blackberry (again, fruits) Palm OS and Newton OS. But there is Linux as well. Linux is a remarkable open source operating system created by a certain Linus Torvalds. Apparently Linus had a heated debate about whether Linux was a microkernal or a monolithic kernel. Whatever that means! Linus contracted penguinitis around the time there was a Linux logo design competition. A chap called Larry Ewing designed this now famous little mascot and the bird was named Tux. It was either short for tuxedo or Torvalds UniX. Gertrude gasped when she realised that Facebook runs on Linux (as per the LAMP stack of - Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)!

Gertude confesses that she is even less inclined to think about router operating systems. She is already struggling to understand Network Operating Systems and would be grateful for any help. Although she has read about Ghost, all she has picked up is that if you have a (dumb?) computer (these days called a netbook), an invisible operating system over on the internet can manage your files and programs. This operating system and all the paraphernalia would be sitting on a cloud. But of course! Several, several people could reach out for this through their web browser. Is a browser operating system different from a network operating system? Novell had the OS called Netware. Perhaps that was used for computers in a private network?

Interestingly, the concept of the deer and the metal are also browser operating systems. The Gazelle is from Microsoft and Chrome OS is from Google. The Chrome OS runs on top of a Linux Kernel. And Gazelle has its own little elf. The world would wonder about corporate battles, the open sourceness, the security, who develops new features, support to various devices like printers, support to competing browsers and assorted programs. Gertrude shares in these questions and adds one of her own. Would they have a mascot?

IT and meaning: Who do you think you are?

The idea of the semantic web in Gertrude's head was now remarkably in the shape of Reginald Jeeves - well informed, perceptive, sensitive to needs, quick, personal, relevant and perhaps even manipulative.

Part of what was now happening all around, she thought as she sat pondering on her sprained ankle, was that everything needed to have a meaning and be relevant to anybody who used the internet.

How does a group of alphabets be understood meaningfully by an illiterate computer? Apparently by structuring. So they (you know, them, some one, that's who) create lists and lists of endless things in computers that might look something like this.

Composers: Muthuswami Dikshitar, Sebastian Bach, Tan Dun, Ali Farka Toure

Types of Music: Classical, Folk, Film, Western, African,

Century: 18, 19, 20, 21

These lists have to be kept in a structure that some people have agreed on and follow some rules and grammar that those people have agreed. Some of these rules are called RDF and OWL. RDF is Resource Description Format and Web Ontology Language has been mysteriously abbreviated to OWL, leaving no suspicion that we might be talking about a nocturnal hunting bird.

Gertrude doesn't know where to look for a list. She read about DBpedia having vacuumed information from Wikipedia and done clever things to them. They probably stacked up and organised and split up and sliced and reorganised and classified and chopped and referenced and cross linked all the facts from Wikipedia in some databases.

Gertrude plans to use a language called SPARQL. To start with, this language is - sparkle - grossly misspelt. It is also one of those extra-ordinary acronyms that self reference and contain another one within it, just to make her feel like a complete idiot. Would anyone have guessed that it is an acronym of Sparql Protocol and RDF Query Language? How much reading for an ordinary mortal to comprehend a mere six letter word. They'd better not use this one in the Sunday newspaper word jumble.

The plan is to use SPARQL to ask questions of this massive data store in DBpedia. Gertrude is considering learning this language when she is a bit old. Would it have evolved better or got extinct by then?

So she could know which musicians in Asia composed or performed South Indian classical music after the eighteenth century. She might know the kinds of architecture during the time of King Bruce of Scotland. However, if she learnt it a bit early, she could have her own wolfram alpha like site. May be she could get her friends Draak and Spencer to help, she muses. They are a sharp lot, she nods to herself.

As a mild distraction, Gertrude's quick fingers spell out her name on a website that declares that from her name alone, it could find her digital footprint and suggest subjects of interest to her, people who are her peers, and a provide her a personalised newsfeed. Intriguing. The results seem compelling. Very true. Like a surveillance camera on the internet, all her deeds and thoughts are concentrated into an image of word pockets. She goes back and repeats with names of various web personalities. She spells out various names, names of software rockstars, political personalities. Then she tries out less eminent personalities like her school geography teacher. Not so clever now, eh!

Searchenginitis may have a cure

It is a disease. Gertrude is still trying to pit one search engine against the other until she cannot cope with herself any more. She is gripped. She searches the net for search engine search comparisons and ends up with many sites that help her sustain her delirium.

• Blind Search comparing and voting for results from Yahoo, Google and Bing without the familiar ambience of the search banner, font and logo

For Google Vs Bing

• Bing And Google. A direct compare.
• Stringy - Again a Google Bing search comparison
• Black Dog - to do a Google Bing search comparison

Introducing firefox and Wolfram

• Google and Wolfram search comparison using a Firefox addon

Then there is Yahoo Vs Google from

• Google Guy and
• Twingine. Only, it can substitute one of them with Bing at will.

Veering away now: What is Yahoo!7, anyone? There seems to be, from Yahoo!7, a search engine called Alpha which has been in the Beta state. It comes up with classified search results arranged in quadrilaterals in the periphery of the main results.

With all the three big (or should she say b.y.g.) names , add a fourth one to compare using:

• Mixxr. Which throws Twitter in as a contender

Supposedly visual is..

• Langreiter. A slightly incomprehensible join-the-dots-like comparison of Yahoo and Google

GoScout itself a search engine, it compares results using a medley of search engine comparisons with names of ancestors - like Lycos and Ask - she had heard of in the far past as a teenager.

And, a Google Bing amalgam (which sounds a bit disturbing?)

• Bingle. which doesn't need much elaboration.

Collecta! A search engine for now. The use-and-throw result set. What is hot off the press. Turns stale later. That is a whole other topic, Gertrude decides. She is exhausted as she comes across an unwieldy search attribute comparison tool from google called Google Squared. This time she is away by a few degrees from the Semantic Web. Isn't she?

Work Assistant: The camera crew

Gertrude is undecided about which tool to use. She needs to design a modified version of the existing screens in the application they are about to build. She also needs to record an error on the screen that happened after a few taps and clicks.

There is a plethora of tools to pick from. Each name rolls off the tongue quite differently.

Happily enough Gertrude's first option, Fireshot a Firefox add-on, works on Internet Explorer as well! For free. Fireshot takes still pictures. It has a very easy to use set of options for image-screen-window copy-paste-edit-email-upload. The blur and the glow features for edit are significantly likeable.

The Fireshot Pro version has additional printing and usability benefits.

The only tiny flaw: although it says it can capture screenshots with Flash movies, it ends up restarting the movie in progress and therefore this image captured is never satisfactory to Gertrude. It could well be a case of PEBCAK (problem exists between chair and keyboard), but she won't admit it.

Aviary has a handful of tools for image editing. They are named after splendid birds like the Toucan and Phoenix. Talon seems to be the firefox extension for the screen shot part. At first glance it seems to insist on getting a user account, but it turned out to be a suggestion, not a constraint.

When she chooses to edit, it opens Aviary's own set of in-browser tools. They take a few seconds to open up, but they are honestly very very grand. Much joy in annotating, pinching, resizing and viewing the image and the modifications as 'layers'. Gertrude has to remind herself that all of this was happening in the browser!

SnagIt is a paid-for tool from Techsmith with a 30 day evaluation license. Images can be tagged as a bug, important, personal and so on. The tags acquire meaning only when viewed within SnagIt's editor. All the annotation and highlight features are crisp and bold. The interface seems very straightforward. And it happily works on any kind of application - browser or non-browser! Remarkably,when she hits the Print Screen key with the right-click menu displayed, she can easily take snapshots of the menu options!

It can even record videos. Sadly, the experimental one turns out a bit grainy.

Another tool, Screengrab does exactly like the name says - helps copy and save portions of the screen. It is a firefox extension. Even without an email or edit feature, Gertrude finds it pretty functional and immediately useful.

On a small detour: Picnik is not strictly a work assistant, but it delights Gertrude immensely with what it can do to photographs! It is very mentionable! The interface is marvellous and Gertrude marvelled. Even when it is starts up, instead of the stiff status bar filling "Loading ...23%" type messages she sees adorable text like "Painting Sky", "Growing grass" .... ooh!

Techsmith has another treasure. Jing, Gertrude spells out the name in disbelief. It is a desktop application that perches on the top of her screen like a twenty-watt-bulb. It can capture images. The screencast it creates can be described as superlative. It tempts her to say that old-fashioned text-heavy defect reports should be banished where possible and replaced with these easy swf replays from Jing. And the best thing is that it is all free! Wonder what the Pro-version can do!

At least one decision is made. Gertrude urgently needs to get over the habit of Alt+Print Screen > (Start > Run > MsPaint) > Ctrl+V.

A rhyme on Wikipedia

For a while, the only online pedia Gertrude knew was Wikipedia. But now she is writing a whole poem using websites that rhyme with pedia. Of these sites, some are wikis, some have information.

There's Expedia for booking trips. Softpedia for all kinds of software downloads. Then, a Wookieepedia with a Star Wars theme. For those inclined to American politics, PalinPedia. Corporate Social Responsibility discussed on CSRPedia.

There are also ones called HairPedia, Knit-e-pedia and CigarettePedia for guess what. There are also pedia-s for kids' cartoon series and a TV Series and their names she forgets. The woven plant fiber has its own Wickerpedia.

Microsoft seems to have a SharepointPedia whose purpose Gertrude has still to work out. WebOpedia used to be a friend when she was just warming up towards IT; not to be confused with webpedia that makes an attempt to look like it has technical definitions.

For people who could not care as much about computers as about posting pretend-intellectual comments on philosophy, literature, academia and the like, there is a Smugopedia. There are probably heaps more such originally named sites that rhyme, and she cannot think of any more.

Her friend helpfully binged and found InspectApedia and some more - utterly appalling pedias.

Perhaps she will quickly end the verse with Encyclopaedia..

IT and Nature: Cloud Computing

When she first started to hear of cloud computing and its definitions (computing is moved to a 'cloud') appeared rather self referential to Gertrude. It amused her in mild amounts. At school, she had often chuckled while learning that sulphuric acid was an ingredient in the manufacture of sulphuric acid.

Cloud computing seemed to make more sense than the manufacture of an irrelevant acid. For a company online Gertrude concluded, that it meant less worrying about an important computer suddenly malfunctioning. Less worry, because their online existence would be sustained by the combined effort of a vast number of computers. So, it would be as easy as opening up a tap to full-volume if they wanted to pile on more hardware for storage or processing power. This would be on a need-basis as the website yo-yo-ed between unknown and popular. And for the company, it would be pay-by-meter for how much they kept the tap open.

So, actually, a cloud had to be something tangible (someone had to know where it was or own it, right?) like servers and so on. Stacked in some place (may be, called a cloud) for consumers to subscribe to it. The subscribers didn't have to worry about not getting connected if there was heavy traffic to the site. They didn't even have to install anything to be able to access the software they wanted. Like installing Flash to watch movies or play games. If they had an internet connection, all their data and information processing would happen wherever they were.

For some people, Gertrude found eventually, the concept of cloud computing was dé ja vu. And some even said it was to reduce the IT industry's carbon foot print. All very very incredible.

Do I know of applications that use Cloud computing, Gertrude wondered. Facebook, Youtube and Google documents seemed compelling examples. And Sliderocket, an online slide creation tool, which you-know-who would love.

She wanted to find out if there was also the possibility of collaborative multi-platform visualisation tools such dabbledb being on a cloud?


Gertrude suddenly wondered if the cloud meant something to her personally. If Gertrude didn't have to to teach her mum over phone how to install Skype or Picasa and then find it in Program Files it would be much relief! But again, her mum wouldn't approve of storing personal finances with Google. Surely not! Some people had thought of these things already and said it was a trap!

Gertrude remembered her last flight which had been quite bumpy and not very reassuring. A lovely co-passenger had offered her company and conversation and asked her to imagine a fluffy white cloud, where every security she wanted was inside the cloud. She did. It worked. As soon as the flight ended, Gertrude had let go of the cloud.

A New Verb?

Gertrude imagines that Bing stands for bing is not google; another one of those clever recursive acronyms in the IT world where one thing is trying not to be another thing. Gertrude was excited about Cuil when it came out - supposed to be the biggest search engine a while ago. Does anybody use it, she wonders. Stephen Wolfram's got everyone talking about the new mathematical computational engine and some worrying about how much to trust the data. Anyone know Worio, a discovery engine? And there's even dogpile. Nothing derogatory. It is a collection all the most famous search engines put together.

There's all sorts of search utilities - Gertrude herself knows of the existence of image matching tools and media search tools. She is in silent awe of those awkward algorithms, locked inside a tiny chip somewhere chugging away like elves and trying to find your baby picture from a massive cupboard and even match the tune playing in your head. Personally, Gertrude wishes there were more fun tools like wordsmith and word waldo.

Back to the new thing. Bing. If this decision engine of Microsoft turns out as earth-shattering, Gertrude will mentally prepare herself to use sentences like: I've spent hours googling binging Or something like I have forgotton the lyrics of the song Top of the World, so I am going to have to google bing it for you.