Spiritual computing

Today I attended a talk on “spiritual computing” by Dr. Craig Warren Smith, who works at the Human Interaction Development Laboratory at the University of Washington. Since spiritual computing isn’t well defined, much of his talk was devoted to examples, followed by a definition, which frankly I didn’t have enough time to absorb.

What I did get out of Dr. Smith’s talk is that spiritual and religious traditions have a lot to say about what is meaningful to people, that they have developed a lot of technology over thousands of years to further their spiritual goals (he called mass the “killer app” of Catholicism), and the computing field should tap into that knowledge as it designs its products. Unfortunately, we didn’t get into many specifics, although Dr. Smith did mention mindfulness, where a person becomes completely aware of his or her thoughts and actions at the present moment, which comes from Buddhism.

Overall, a thought-provoking and worthwhile talk.

My life in bite-sized nuggets

As usual, I haven’t blogged as much as I’d like, but I have been regularly uploading my photos, so my Flickr photostream is a better representation of my life than my blog. Here’s what I’ve done since my trip to Orlando:

Trip to Taiwan during Chinese New Year. It was great seeing a lot of my relatives, as well as playing tourist in Tainan and Kaohsiung.

Trip to Rochester, New York. It’s not your typical tourist destination, but I was born there and one of my friends was studying there, and I had frequent flyer miles to burn. It felt good to revisit my roots, even though it was snowing in April.

Meeting up with friends. This includes a dinner with high school friends, my 10th-year Caltech reunion, Jonathan and Polly’s wedding, ice skating, and CHI.

Lots of hiking. We’ve visited a lot of places I’d never been to before, such as Sweeney Ridge, San Bruno Mountain, Crystal Springs Park, and St. Joseph’s Hill.

Currently, we have a family friend visiting us from Taiwan. She said she wanted to go see the Gay Pride Parade last Sunday, which I’d never been to. My reaction: I really enjoyed it. I was struck by the sheer joy of the people in the parade — you could tell they were so happy to just be themselves, that they didn’t need to hide who they were. The crowds weren’t too bad, since they were spread out along Market Street, and we took BART in to avoid the driving madness. On the other hand, the parade is really long, about 3½ hours. I would go again, and I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t gone to go! But now that I’ve seen the whole parade once, I’d only stay for maybe the first 1½ hours the next time. (8/6/07 update: I’ve posted my parade photos.)

Song of the moment: “Something About You” by Level 42. An ’80s classic, and Level 42’s only U.S. hit.

More on Rich Internet Applications

There are a few players I didn’t mention in my previous post on Rich Internet Applications. Laszlo has its own framework for building Flash-based apps, and they have plans to make their framework target Ajax as well.

Which brings me to the one platform I think has the best chance of winning: the web itself. HTML and JavaScript-based applications may be a pain to write, but it’s slowly getting easier, as evidenced by the dozens of Ajax libraries that have sprung up over the past two years.

I see the rise of the web as an application platform similar to the rise of the PC. At first, the PC was absolutely pathetic compared to its more powerful cousins: RAM measured in kilobytes, cassette drives for storage, operating systems that didn’t support subdirectories. But slowly and erratically the PC improved over time, until it ate companies like Digital for lunch.

The same is going on with the web. At first, HTML was pretty impoverished compared to desktop operating systems. No persistent storage, no drag-and-drop… I remember when web pages all had gray backgrounds and when you couldn’t even fill out forms. But all of these capabilities have slowly been added, and now web applications are vastly more capable than they were five years ago.

Isn’t Ajax kinda ugly? Sure! So are the x86 architecture and the Win32 API, but those aren’t going away anytime soon. Neither is the web.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t keep evolving. There are two efforts that could greatly improve the current state of affairs: HTML 5 and JavaScript 2. HTML 5 adds features like offline data, while JavaScript 2 includes some badly needed features such as a consistent packaging mechanism and class-based OOP (which may or may not be a good idea). Whether they are successful depends largely on whether Microsoft bothers to implement them well in Internet Explorer, and Microsoft is participating in both projects, so there is some hope.

So I believe HTML and JavaScript will continue to dominate over any other RIA platform. Microsoft’s actions with Internet Explorer will help determine how smoothly we get to that future.

El Camino de la Muerte

On Thursday night I saw a documentary on the History Channel on Bolivia’s Yungas Road, also known as the “Road of Death.” It’s a major transportation route running northeast from the capital city of La Paz, but the most dangerous section is gravel, only ten feet wide, with steep dropoffs of over 1000 feet and no guardrails, and grades up to 14%, twice as steep as the maximum grade for interstate highways. Over 200 travelers die every year on this road. It’s completely insane. The photos must be seen to be believed.

Songs on my mind over the past month

I actually don’t mind having these songs stuck in my head, which is a good thing.

Last month it was “Rhiannon” (video 1, video 2) and “Gypsy” (video 1, video 2) by Fleetwood Mac. Triggered by listening to The Dance CD over and over again during my trip to Rochester.

Afterwards came “Sister Golden Hair” (video 1, video 2) and “You Can Do Magic” by America. Probably triggered by watching an infomercial for The Midnight Special.

Now it’s “World (That’s the Price of Love)” (video 1, video 2) and “Ruined in a Day” by New Order. Don’t know what caused me to think of those, but those songs are classic.

The Rich Internet Application arena is heating up again

Over the past month, there have been a slew of announcements that have the potential to rearrange the Internet development landscape. Building on the momentum of Flash and Flex, Adobe announces Apollo, a platform for building desktop applications using a combination of Acrobat, Flash, HTML, and JavaScript. This could be seen as direct competition to Windows, especially Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) apps.

Then Microsoft turns the tables and announces Silverlight, a spinoff of WPF which is a platform for building rich applications for the Internet and the desktop, on Windows and Mac. Version 1.1 will include a subset of .NET, allowing developers to create apps in .NET languages such as C# and IronPython.

And then today, Sun announced JavaFX, another attempt to make Java appealing to desktops and devices. So far it consists of two parts. JavaFX Script is a new scripting language that makes it much easier to build Swing apps; it’s been open sourced. (By the way, JavaFX Script has nothing to do with JavaScript, which itself has nothing to do with Java. Blech.)

JavaFX Mobile promises to finally make Java consistent and useful on mobile devices. From everything I’ve heard, the current Java solution for phones and PDAs, Java ME + CLDC, is next to useless without proprietary extensions.

While JavaFX sounds good, I don’t know yet if Sun is tackling the main problem with deploying Java apps: a 13 MB download for the JVM, as opposed to a 1.4 MB download for Silverlight or 1.2 MB download for Flash.

Who will win? Who knows! This promises to be an interesting ride.