From semantic Web to being taken over by technology

So I was having a nice geeky conversation with a friend of mine about this series of books where humans could extend their ability to take input through machines, and also dump their personality into a computer and transpose it to somewhere else (like a bird). Humans are now immortals and can do things we can only imagine. We talked about enhancing what you see with information added by the machine, like you can already do with an Phone, augmented reality I believe it is called. Take a video of your location and someone will tell you this is a restaurant, here is the menu. This is a famous historical building, buy the ticket now and so on.

We went on on a lots of crazy stuff and it was a really stimulating conversations. I could not really explain why the vision made me feel a little uncomfortable. After all, God-like life with infinite possibilities is quite interesting. Something very Taoist about it, except you become the Tao. All an illusion of course, if I can be the Tao, I can be pointed to and so I cannot be the Tao. Augmented reality has something I find scary which is someone would tell you what it is you are looking at. And from now on, everyone looking at the same thing will have the same narrow view of what they are looking at.

The I was watching this video about the semantic web, it is all related, bare with me. All about how you cannot really impose one single taxonomy on the world. There is not such a thing as one way to look at something. When machine are involved I cannot help thinking they have to be programmed in a way and thus already have an interpretation of what they are looking at. If we do use them predominantly to be in the world, we risk to view everything the same way.

Another weird thought occurred to be, people are now constantly posting information about themselves (twitter and all) and we are now becoming instruments ourselves. I see more and more people being obsessed with  sharing more and more information while events are currently happening than they actually forget to process the feelings and the implication of the events itself. We are not really very good at reporting an event and understand its ramifications at the same time.

I suppose it is a long way to say the more I think about it, the more I think we need to also unplug and just be. This will lead to better life experience, fuller life experiences and better creativity. Or maybe I am just starting to feel my age :).

Ah Microsoft!

So I am trying to update my contact application. I have really been maintaining the xml directly that is a little sad. So as I am about to try the new Visual Studio (2010) I am thinking what better way to get acquainted than to update the little application and finally out enough in there that I won’t be the only one using it.

Time to discover as usual Microsoft changed everything since last time I cared. I do miss Java sometimes.

For starter, there is still not a very good way for me to store a simple database in an xml format. Entity Framework, Linq to XML, ADO.NET (those I the ones I know of) are of no help. Object serialization seems to be the only way to get it done.After all this time I can’t believe there is still nothing there do encourage the use of simple file format as the database. You can have SQL Server and you are ok but who wants that for a simple list of contacts.

Then I am looking at the application framework. So I played with Smart Client before, it was ok. Just a little too complicated for a simple application. So now I am having another look and ouch. We have PRISM (new version of smart client as far as I can tell), MEF MAF, Unity. What is a man to do? I also now discover that we have new patterns MVVM, which seems to be been created specifically for WPF (and Silverlight). Now as much as I like the separation of concerns for building an application (who has ever heard of a developer with good eye for graphics), I cannot help wonder about a new technology which requires its own new pattern (and the other ones were pretty generic to start with). The caveat of course is that if you are doing ASP.NET then you can stick with the MVC framework they have created for it.

Now one of the benefit of going with Microsoft technologies is a unified environment (as opposed to Java where everyone wants to create their own framework). If you try to apply good practices, you first need to research all the stuff Microsoft has in progress and then check 3rd party vendors one. That is already a 6 months project. You need a team just to check where we are at, what is not quite finished and where you think it is all going. You will have an aversion to use 3rd party products because Microsoft will come up with something which will kill competition and they will not exist next year. Even Java seems to have standardized on SpringFramework (for the most part only of course).
It should be easy to get started, but anything you create with the tools out of the box seems to be rooted in the 1980s. You just cannot write anything that looks good at of the box. Again, you need to look into 3rd party controls because you don’t even get a decent grid (sorting, grouping with icons) with the regular tools. I think Microsoft is slowly eroding their best competitive advantage. A set of unified tools for you to program the Microsoft world. Is Office 2010 using .NET as the macro language yet or is it still stuck with VBA?

Too much information bad for Democracy

Sorry, I have not really had time but I saw this one and could not resist passing it on: Obama: iPod, iPad don't empower.

Not sure I agree with everything there but still interesting. I suppose busy people don’t have as much time as we do cannot process all the information that is available. I still think there is too much, we need to be able to identify what matters and focus on certain areas.

That being said, tools (like iPhone and iPad) do not make more information more available, although they do make it accessible in more places. We just need to make sure we have tools on those devices which allow us to filter that information.

Although I think the point we should make is that just because information is available that we have to look at it at anytime during the day. I have heard of people not being able to sleep anymore because they were reading news in bead on the iPhone. Of course who has not heard of family dinner where no-one is talking because everyone is texting or checking the internet. I think the toys are great but we need to learn how to switch them off.