Dale Dougherty

I recently bought a netbook and installed Jolicloud, a Linux/Ubuntu distro designed as a replacement for, or companion to, Windows. Jolicloud was a revelation, something fresh and new in the seemingly snail-paced world of desktop computing. The bold idea of Jolicloud is that the browser is the operating system. It's all you need and you don't need to even think about it. The browser is a core service that supports all applications but it can recede into the background and let applications take the foreground.

The Samsung N210 netbook had Windows 7 Starter installed. I'll admit my discomfort with Windows. It's actually not so much the operating system itself, as it is the ecosystem that surrounds it. The desktop is cluttered with icons from the manufacturer and other add-ons, which seem to activate on their own. I don't want them yet I can't disable them easily. I realized that Windows has become like a carnival, with barkers trying to get my attention (and money) at every turn. I tried Windows 7 long enough to realize that it was really no different on a netbook than it was on a desktop. Windows. Same old, same old.

In fact, I bought the netbook to see if it was suitable as a computer for my mother. I want to help her be connected online to her family but she was frequently confused by the Windows desktop and its many applications and pop-up windows. AOL was just as confusing, layered on top of Windows. I tried moving her to Gmail and removing what I could from the desktop but it still became cluttered and she became so confused that she cancelled her Internet service. (I don't live in the same city as my mom so my ability to provide ongoing tech support is limited.)

A friend, Alberto Gaitán from DC, recommended trying Jolicloud on a netbook. Jolicloud was developed by Tariq Kim, who also created NetVibes. He had a vision of devices running an Internet Operating System, influenced by ideas from Tim O'Reilly. Here's an excerpt from the Jolicloud manifesto:

Jolicloud ... combines the two driving forces of the modern computing industry: the open source and the open web.

Jolicloud transforms your netbook into a sophisticated web device that taps into the cloud to expand your computing possibilities. The web already hosts a significant part of our lives: mails, photos, videos, and friends are already somewhere online. Jolicloud was built to make the computer and web part of the same experience.

Jolicloud offered something new on a non-Mac device -- peace of mind. I found an operating system that was adapted to the netbook, just as Apple has modified its core system for different devices. As much as it is an advantage for Apple, it is a disadvantage for every other computer manufacturer to ship their devices with a largely unmodified version of Windows. One gripe I have is that Windows doesn't use the more limited display space efficiently.

The Jolicloud user interface is simple and well-organized. Jolicloud is derived from Ubuntu and indeed some of the features I'm praising may also be present there. Quite frankly, it's been years since I've explored a Linux desktop, believing them to be hopelessly clunky and awkward, a generic imitation of existing windowing systems.

But the big leap forward in my view for Jolicloud is how it adapts web sites to function more like desktop applications, an interface paradigm mashup of the iPhone and desktop. In Jolicloud, I launch Gmail as an application, and dozens of other services I use such as Twitter and Facebook can be organized as desktop interfaces. Like the iPhone, Jolicloud provides an Apps directory where you can choose applications to install on your netbook. In addition, Jolicloud provides cloud-based services for data storage. Jolicloud allows me to use a netbook as an alternate computer without really having to organize my data and service specifically for that computer. (I even find myself moving away from Mac-based software to web-centric services that I can use from any device.)

Prism

I learned that some of the magic behind Jolicloud's web-centric model was made possible by the Prism project from Mozilla Labs. Mark Finkle, a Mozilla developer, created Prism but he's now working on a Firefox mobile browser. Prism development seemed to stall for a while until recently. Prism, which will work on any operating system, allows you to turn a website into a standalone application, even creating an icon for it so that you can place in on your toolbar. If you find yourself fumbling through tabs to get back to your mail or calendar, Prism can help you move your key applications into separate windows so they can stand on their own as desktop applications.

On a netbook, Prism gives you a full-screen view of your application, and drops most of the browser functions. It's as if the browser disappears into the operating system as a core service, one that's shared by dozens of applications.

Interview with Matthew Gertner

I caught up with Matthew Gertner by email who has done work on Prism, particularly adapting it for Zimbra Desktop. He has been posting information about updates to Prism on his Just Thinking blog, an additional source of information on Prism developments.

Q. What I like about prism is that it makes one think of the browser as a service provided by the operating system; it allows a website to become viewed and organized as an application. It is a metaphor that is now much more prevalent given the iPhone and its apps. But Prism anticipated that direction.

MG. I am a great believer in web applications. Particular strengths are the use of well-established, simple and standards-based languages for application development, incredible multiplatform support and lack of explicit install/uninstall. At the same time, there are clearly weakness as well, tied in particular to the fact that the browser was never designed to run applications.

Prism is one attempt to get the best of both worlds. Environments like
iPhone OS and Adobe AIR take a slightly different tack. Rather than
using the same web languages for software development as the
traditional browser, they have their own languages (CocoaTouch, Flex,
etc.) and development tools. So I wouldn't make a direct parallel
between Prism and something like the iPhone. The latter runs apps that
are as much like traditional software as like websites. It's true that
some of the goals are the same, and they often use web protocols
(HTTP, XML, etc.).

The big advantage of Prism, at least in the near term, is that no
development is required to make an existing web app look more like a
traditional application. You just run it in a Prism window instead of
a normal browser window. You can then customize the app with more
desktop-oriented features (tray icon, popup notifications,
drag-and-drop, etc.). With iPhone or Flex you basically have to
reimplement the entire client.

Q. I am also interested in understanding the status of Prism. It has been available for a while and it looked the original project lost some steam and then it regained some life. Is that so and if so, what or who got it going again.

MG. Prism was invented by Mark Finkle (now working on Mozilla's mobile browser) as a Mozilla Labs project. These projects are basically experiments that let Mozilla try out new ideas without committing to making a new product. They can then observe how users and the development community react. In the case of Prism, it was quickly picked up by Zimbra (then part of Yahoo) for Zimbra Desktop, and they ended up hiring me to improve Prism based on their requirements. Both Yahoo and Zimbra were awesome about donating my work back to Mozilla so that other Prism users can benefit.

I also have a few other clients using Prism, and together their
contributions have helped move the product forward tremendously, even
if it's been a relatively drawn-out process as you point out. I can't
comment on Mozilla's future plans for Prism.

Q. Jolicloud makes use of Prism but I had not heard of Prism previously but it can be used on a desktop. Are you seeing it used in other contexts outside of Jolicloud.

MG. See above. The biggest user is probably Zimbra, but there are others I work with and doubtless many I don't even know about. Basically if you want a multiplatform single-site browser, Prism is still the only game in town.

More on Prism

I've downloaded Prism to my Mac and used it to replace my Mail App icon with a Gmail icon on the toolbar. You can "applify" any website.

I can see other uses for Prism, even for creating web-based content that looks less like a website and more of an interactive experience like the CD-ROM game "Myst." There's an opportunity to break away from the constraints of the current web design paradigm, and perhaps learn from the lessons of iPhone apps. Interactions can be embedded in the application without any dependence on the browser functions outside the view window.

I'm not so sure my mom can handle the netbook but I'm going to try it. Jolicloud does allow me to customize the interface to those applications (websites) that she needs to use, which is essentially email and maybe Facebook. That's what's remarkable about Jolicloud and the ideas that inspired it -- you can customize a device and simply its interface by integrating it more deeply with the open web.

In my Twitter stream today, Sylvia Martinez (@smartinez) retweeted a link to Seymour Papert's 1980 paper written for a Presidential commission that proposed that we provide a computer for every child in America. Long before One Laptop Per Child, Papert saw that computers should not be an "auxiliary" aid to learning but "fundamental" to changing how we learn. He understood that the computer by changing education could change our culture for the better.

I believe that the computer could be used as a powerful weapon to break down barriers related to gender, ethnic culture, class origin, and even genetic differences.

By no means do I believe that computers are the only thing needed to improve education but Papert was so right nearly thirty years ago in recognizing the potential for computers (and networks) to break down all kinds of barriers, and to open doors to opportunity.

On this same day, I heard from a physics teacher in California that he can't access the Makezine.com site. He was trying to download a project plan for the Wooden Mini Yacht in Volume 20 of Make to use in his class. His school district uses software to block access to any sites that have a "blog." The teacher said he calls up regularly to request access but even when he gets it, the change only lasts a few days and then the site is blocked again. It's a second such comment made by a teacher in recent weeks so I don't believe it's unique to this school. This is a high school teacher seeking free resources on the Web to use with students in the classroom. It's too bad that it's so hard for him to do what he wants. It is just one example of how our educational system fails to grasp the fundamental uses of technology.

After thirty years, Papert's call for action is still fresh today:

I believe that one of the most urgent national needs for the 1980s is to find ways to increase the technological sophistication of the education community, to create contexts in which educators can probe the potential effects of fundamental uses of computers.

It doesn't feel like we've seen much progress in education. Pappert made these strong recommendations but there was little urgency to act on them. Is that the pattern -- gather up the good ideas and then decide not to do anything with them? I was reminded of Taylor Marsh's recent article on a day-long Washington DC conference on the Innovation Economy. It was another talkfest about "what we should do" to improve the future of American competitiveness. One of the participants, Senator Mark Warner, said that we need "radical rethinking of high school and college. Does high school need to be 4 years, does college?"

After listening to a laundry list of such recommendations, Taylor concluded:

An innovation economy may be able to save our nation, but not with the current crop of political leaders, regardless of party, who don't seem to be able to take any good idea and move it forward. Small thinkers, vested interests, no political will to move forward together, with the upper crust stifling so many Americans who just never get a chance. [Can the Innovation Economy Save the U.S.? (HuffPost)]

Papert's paper ended with a warning: "Unless we do this, tomorrow will continue to be the prisoner of the primitivity of yesterday." Tomorrow is here and educators are still being held prisoners of the past. I just wonder if it's truly possible to move forward.

Science historian, author and Make columnist George Dyson will give a lecture tonight on the "Evolution of Technology: Darwin Among the Machines." The talk will be at 7 p.m. at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Mountain View. The talk is part of a series hosted by NASA Ames centered around the concept of evolution in honor of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species."

In his 1997 book, Darwin Among the Machines, Dyson wrote that in his life and work, he has attempted "to reconcile a love of nature with an affection for machines." So the evolution of technology was a natural subject for him.

Dyson notes that a digital universe (bounded by two singularities, one at T = 0 and one at T = ∞) consists of two species of bits: differences in space and differences in time. Digital computers are devices that translate between these two forms of information -- structure and sequence -- according to definite rules. The stored-program computer, as conceived by Alan Turing and delivered by John von Neumann, broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Our universe would never be the same. Turing's question was whether machines would begin to think. Von Neumann's question was whether machines would begin to reproduce. In 1953, when the structure of DNA was first elucidated, there were 53 kilobytes of random-access memory on planet earth. Biology and technology were already on a collision course. Species have survived in a noisy, analog environment by passing themselves, once a generation, through a digital, error-correcting phase, the same way repeater stations are used to convey intelligible messages over submarine cables where noise is being introduced. With the transition from digital once a generation to all digital all the time, the era of strictly Darwinian evolution is drawing to a close.

Dyson's talks are fascinatingly rich yet accessible to a broad audience. He illustrates them with primary source materials, many of which he has uncovered himself in his research. He is endlessly curious and continuously recombining the work of the past to explore new approaches to our future.

Our public broadcasting system should re-invent itself as a network for educational programming. Moreover, it should specifically focus on increasing public interest and engagement in science and civics. This is a vital public mission -- promoting science and technology literacy and creating a greater understanding of our own system of government.

Even in an age of YouTube, broadcast television has the ability to reach even those people who don't have ready access to the Internet. Television is a lowest common denominator, technologically speaking, and so it serves nearly everyone. That's why we should still care that some portion of broadcasting be allocated to serving a public good.

With digital TV, PBS stations now have four channels, which mostly run traditional programs at different times. The new capacity is not being effectively utilized for new programming. One if not two of these new channels should be dedicated to serving a public educational mission. And there are lessons to be learned from the Internet in how to produce new educational programming for these channels.

PBS is a network of independent affiliates, who are much more independent than their commercial counterparts. This somewhat fragmented network structure can be positive, if it strikes a healthy balance between national and local or regional programming. It's important that a good portion of this educational programming be locally targeted, perhaps in conjunction with local colleges and other educational institutions.

Educational Broadcasting in America

The American public broadcasting system began when President John Kennedy authorized the first funding for the build-out of a national educational broadcasting network in 1962. Then in 1967 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act, which authorized the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), he said the bill would give a "stronger voice to educational public radio and television." He added:

So today we rededicate a part of the airwaves--which belong to all the people--and we dedicate them for the enlightenment of all the people.

It's time to re-invent public broadcasting system as a plaform for innovation (to borrow Tim O'Reilly's framing of Government 2.0). It needs to be an open platform that encourages varied uses by the greater community, ones that frankly we can't even imagine today. It should also be a platform that integrates the Internet and takes advantage of community-building that is possible online.

Re-defining the Educational Network

1. Identify great high school teachers and give them a new forum for reaching a broader audience. Let us see what good teacher do and let more people learn from them.
2. Work with universities, many of whom are already providing open courseware. How can broadcast television increase usage of open courses?
3. Adapt presentations from conferences and public forums where speakers present on a range of important topics -- a scientific summit on climate change, for instance.
4. Use television to present short excerpts of educational content that can be explored in full online.
5. Explore new tools for presenting complex information such as Al Gore used in his Inconvenient Truth presentation.
6. Create a "live" national forum that showcases invited speakers on a wide range of subjects of national interest.
7. Encourage the audience to participate via Twitter, perhaps even displaying a stream of the tweets live on the broadcast.
8. Do more with less. Choose lightweight production methods and produce more content rather than placing big bets on large-budget productions.
9. Promote in-person learning opportunities in the local community as well as those online.
10. Shine a light on education itself, and examine in detail various programs and initiatives.

Science Programming

Civics Programming

Civics programming can tell the story of how American governs itself -- at local, state, regional and federal levels. More people need to be involved in telling that story and it's a story that deserves a larger audience. The Internet can be used to encourage more participation.

A program schedule could feature extended coverage on issues like foreign policy, defense, transportation, defense, health care and social service. Sadly, we know more about sports teams than we do the State Department. We catch glimpses of a war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Public affairs programming on TV has diminished in America and some of it was so uninspired that it deserved to go. Yet isn't public affairs worth doing on TV and can't we come up with new ways to do it well?

In View of All Citizens

At its best, public television would help make our Nation a replica of the old Greek marketplace, where public affairs took place in view of all the citizens. But in weak or even in irresponsible hands, it could generate controversy without understanding; it could mislead as well as teach; it could appeal to passions rather than to reason.

Maker Faire is here again, our fourth annual event in the Bay Area. Once again, you just won't believe how much there is to see and do at Maker Faire.

Makers were busy today setting up on Friday. In the morning, we had 400 kids visit the fairgrounds for a backstage tour and a chance to spend time with dozens of makers. By the end of the day over most of the makers had arrived. Over 750 came together for beer and a paella dinner outside -- and countless conversations.

This time lapse recording of the day gives you some sense of how all the magic comes together on Friday -- with a view of the rides on the midway rising up from the grass.

I hope to see many of you tomorrow. Bring the whole family. Remember to check makerfaire.com for information on parking and public transit options. We're open 10 am to 8 pm on Saturday and 10 am to 6 pm on Sunday.

Are iPods changing our perception of music? Are the sounds of MP3s the music we like to hear most?

Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford, was on a panel with me at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Mountain View, CA on Saturday. Berger's presentation had a slide titled: "Live, Memorex or MP3." He mentioned that Thomas Edison promoted his phonograph by demonstrating that a person could not tell whether behind a curtain was an opera singer or one of Edison's cylinders playing a recording of the singer. More recently, the famous Memorex ad challenged us to determine whether it was a live performance of Ella Fitzgerald or a recorded one.

Berger then said that he tests his incoming students each year in a similar way. He has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer "sizzle sounds" that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

I remember wondering what audiophiles were up to, buying extremely expensive home audio systems to play old vinyl records. They put turntables in sand-filled enclosures with elaborate cabling schemes. I wondered what they heard in that music that I didn't. Someone explained to me that audiophiles liked the sound artifacts of vinyl records -- the crackles of that format. It was familiar and comfortable to them, and maybe those affects became a fetish. Is it now becoming the same with iPod lovers?

Our perception changes and we become attuned to what we like -- some like the sizzle and others like the crackle. I wonder if this isn't also something akin to thinking that hot dogs taste better at the ball park. The hot dog is identical to what you'd buy at a grocery store and there aren't many restaurants that serve hot dogs. A hot dog is not that special, except in the right setting. The context changes our perception, particularly when it's so obviously and immediately shared by others. Listening to music on your iPod is not about the sound quality of the music, and it's more than the convenience of listening to music on the move. It's that so many people are doing it, and you are in the middle of all this, and all of that colors your perception. All that sizzle is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us. It's mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking back might find curious because these preferences won't be obvious to them.

On a related note, a friend commented recently that she doesn't understand why people put up with such poor sound quality for phone calls on cell phones, and particularly iPhones. "I can hardly hear the person talking to me," she said. "I don't think smart phones are making any improvement to the quality of the phone call," she added. "Is it not important anymore?" She wondered why people accepted such poor quality, and so did Jonathan Berger, but a lot of people just don't hear it the same way.

Driving through Napa over the weekend, I saw a roadsign that said "Milling Today" at the Old Bale Grist Mill. I had to stop and take a look. The restored mill has a 36' "overshot" waterwheel so called because water pours on top of the wheel, directed there by a long "flume" that brings water from a nearby pond. The Bale Mill operated in the late 1840s into the 1860s, spanning a period of time when Napa was part of a Mexican province to its becoming part of the Bear Flag Republic and finally the State of California. This mill was grinding wheat grown in the Napa Valley long before there were any vineyards, and the flour was supplied to miners heading out to the gold fields in 1848.

Inside the mill are two different sets of millstones, one enclosed in a box for safety. A docent demonstrated the operation of the mill, setting the waterwheel in motion, which turned the gears underneath the millstones, and caused the wooden floorboards to rumble. Eventually, as the momentum picked up, the millstones themselves began to spin. Out came a steady flow of wheat flour. The docent said that the phrase "nose to the grindstone" comes from the constant attention required of the miller who has to smell the wheat to check for ozone, which is caused when the two large pieces of quartzstone are rubbing against each other.

After the demonstration, the docent held out a book published in 1795 called "The Young Mill-wright and Miller's Guide" by Oliver Evans, an early American user manual for builders, inventors and operators. Check out a scan of fifteenth edition of the guide from 1860 on Google Books.

Oliver Evans was an inventor himself, and Wikipedia says that "his most important invention was an automated grist mill which operated continuously through the use of bulk material handling devices including bucket elevators, conveyor belts, and Archimedean screws." His book played an important role in the spread of mills in American, explaining the design, construction and operation of mills, even pointing out areas where new inventions were needed. The docent believed the book was used in the construction of the Old Bale Mill, which was probably built by people who had no previous experience building a mill.

The docent showed us the detailed diagrams in the book.

Then he identified an unusual feature found in the first edition. At the back of the book, there was a section that listed the subscribers for the book, and at the top of list were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In those times, to publish a book meant getting readers to commit in advance to buying it. An enterprising publisher/author would try to cover his costs before incurring them. I understood that much about the subscription model. What I didn't realize was something that the docent pointed out. He said printing a list of subscribers was an early form of a social network -- the list identified others who were interested in the same subject and whom you might wish to consult for a variety of reasons. If you were studying Evans's plans, you might want to correspond with someone else who was doing the same thing. Pretty cool.

The preface to the fifteenth edition of Evans's book says this about his fame and fortune:

The improvements in the flour mill, like the invention of the cotton gin, apply to one of the great staples of our country; and although nearly forty years have elapsed since Mr. Evans first made his improvements known to the world in the present work, the general superiority of American mills to those even of Great Britain, is still a subject of remark by intelligent travellers. Mr. Evans, however, experienced the fate of most other meritorious inventors; the combined powers of prejudice and of interest deprived him of all benefit from his labours, and, like Whitney, he was compelled to depend upon other pursuits for the means of establishing himself in the world. His reward, as an inventor, was a long-continued course of ruinous litigation, and the eventual success of the powerful phalanx which was in league against him.

Still, I think about how this old user manual and this old mill have endured.

If you watch sports, as many will do this with the Super Bowl on Sunday, you know that games can change direction. Something happens and momentum changes quite suddenly. A team that was piling up scores suddenly becomes tentative and defensive, as was the case with the Arizona Cardinals in the NFC Championship game, even though they held on to win the game. A team that is getting badly beaten inexplicably begins doing good things again.

An alert game announcer notices these changes, and comments on them often in advance of the results having changed significantly. Usually in football, it's a turnover, such as a fumble or interception, that opens the door for the other team to change the outcome. Sometimes it's a dumb penalty that incites the other team to action and gets their collective head back in the game.

You can probably guess that I'm really thinking in terms of our dreadful economy. We're on a team that's worse than the Arizona Cardinals ever were. We're up against the Bears, which is unfortunately not just a team from Chicago. The Bears are overpowering and we're really getting beat. Nobody's cheering and a turnaround seems impossible. It's hopeless until we see a sign that things could change. If you're a fan, you watch for these things and hope they'll happen. If you're a player, you've got to make them happen or you're defeated.

An essay by Paulette Miniter in the Christian Science Monitor cautioned people not to panic about their 401ks because stocks will recover before jobs do. She wrote:

Our retirement funds probably aren't too far away from getting back to work. Stocks are down 40 percent from their last peak, putting us deep in the bear den. But since investors can exectute trades much faster than corporations can start hiring en masse again after a recession, stock prices will likely rise before the economic recovery is official.

I don't know if Miniter's right but she's got a hunch that things might change and she tells us where to look. The essay got me thinking about what signs to look for that momentum might be changing. The stock market index seems inadequate as a scoreboard for the economy; it's a reflection of how gamblers think about the game in advance rather than what's actually happening on the field. I wish there was a better way to keep score. However, maybe it's not the score we should be looking at. It's the series of actions -- in the case of football, it's a sustained drive -- that lead to changing the score.

Tim O'Reilly and I saw Web 2.0 coming because we spotted fundamental changes in the way the game was starting to be played and believed that these were signs that momentum had shifted. The Web was making a comeback, executing with a new playbook, like the West Coast offense of Bill Walsh. The Internet/Web space of late 1990's shifted from teams with me-too plans easily getting funding to teams in 2002 that were organized around plans that nobody was funding. The remarkable thing was the determination of these startups despite little or no prospects for success. That is, they had few people believing in them, except eventually their fans -- people who began using services like Blogger, Flickr and Etsy in greater numbers. It's like a team that re-discovers why they're playing the game, and they see that their effort and exertion are causing the cheering in the stands, which only makes them work harder. They stop worrying about losing and focus on playing harder, and on each subsequent play they are playing harder than their opponent. That's why the score eventually changes.

I don't know what signs will show that things are turning around but I know we need to be looking. The signs might be incidental or accidental, but they will get you to start wondering if change is coming. They'll be early-warning signs that the Bears can be moved back a little and maybe scored on. It will get you believing that the Bears can be beaten, and this belief will occur to you as it occurs to others who will begin playing harder, too. Suddenly Big Mo' changes sides.

Dare I say this on O'Reilly Radar? I admire Bill Gates. If I had a vote for Person of the Year, Gates would get mine. Let me explain why.

This year, Gates made an important and potentially difficult transition at age 52, leaving Microsoft as CEO and devoting more of his time and energy to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It's a shift in focus, moving from defining strategy for Microsoft to a broader strategy for improving the lives of the world's poor. Bill Gates exemplifies what Tim O'Reilly is talking about when he says that those of us in the tech industry should increasingly "focus on stuff that matters."

In many ways, Gates represents the "best of us" -- it's not just what he's doing but how he thinks about what he's doing. He's a curious geek. He wants to find interesting problems to solve. He believes that smart, self-motivated people working together can make a difference. Bill Gates reflects the best qualities of a generation that has grown up finding the innovative ways to apply science and technology to impact our everyday life in mostly positive ways.

These thoughts about Gates were sparked by watching Charlie Rose's interview with Bill Gates this week. What comes through in this interview is the optimism of Bill Gates and his belief that technology is a kind of magic. Good magic. Powerful magic. Software is magic that allows people to do things they dream of doing. What's most telling is Gates's belief that the best is yet to come, that we're still in the early stages of realizing what can be done with this technology.

The second half of the interview is the best part, when Gates is talking about his life after Microsoft and his interest in the work of the Foundation. (Many will find the first half of the interview about Microsoft's past and present product strategy and Gates's belief that they can compete with Google in search uninteresting or irrelevant.) The primary focus of the Gates Foundation has been to explore ways to reduce common diseases such as malaria and rotovirus that affect the world's poor. Here's a section from a letter from Bill and Melinda Gates.

More than a decade ago, the two of us read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that were long ago eliminated in this country. One disease we had never even heard of—rotavirus—was killing literally half a million kids each year. We thought: That's got to be a typo. If a single disease were killing that many kids, we would have heard about it, because it would have been front-page news. But it wasn’t a typo.

We couldn't escape the brutal conclusion that—in our world today—some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: "This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving."

In the interview, you can't miss how committed Gates is to the efforts of the Foundation. He realizes that he's in a special position to see problems like the one above and formulate a plan backed by resources to do something about it. Yet he doesn't come across as a do-gooder. What excites him about the non-profit world is similar to what he enjoyed at Microsoft -- finding and working with smart people who are really engaged in issues and problems.

As much as I appreciate the goals of the Foundation, I found myself admiring Bill Gates as a person during the course of the interview. The truth is that while he was busy developing software, he's also worked on developing himself. He is the self-made American who has matured into a role model and leader. He is thoughtful and tactful where a younger version would have been brash and impetuous. Like Windows, improvement for Gates has required multiple iterations but the insistence on getting it right won out eventually. The newest release of Bill Gates is the best yet.

When he talks about improving education, he's not just analytical. He appears to be moved while describing his interaction with highly motivated teachers who see their profession "as a higher calling." Gates also tells us that he's watching courses on DVD while he exercises. He highly recommends "Big History" a series of lectures by David Christian, available through "The Teaching Company." I found it inspiring that he was "watching three hours on Modern Economics" over the course of a weekend while on a treadmill. That's lifelong learning in action. I just wonder how many present or former CEOs are that inquisitive.

Gates gives me hope at a time when I've grown tired of reading how the short-sighted schemes of Wall Street's top brass and other American executives have brought ruin to American business and our economy. They aren't leaders worth following. Gates is different. He deserves genuine admiration, in my view. He's more than a technologist. He's both a realist and an optimist. He's become a world leader worth listening to.

Open the door and smiley-face carolers sing a song that you can customize and send to others. That's the emoticarolers concept, worked up by Jason Striegel, our Hackszine editor, who leads the development side of things for Colle+McVoy in Minneapolis. The team created this clever holiday "text-to-sing" promotion for Yahoo Messenger at emoticarolers.com. A custom Make carol is here. (Reminds me of the Smileys book by David Sanderson that I developed many years ago.)

I asked Jason how they built the app and here's what he said:

The front end interface is written in Flash/AS3. It talks to a PHP backend, which uses the Festival text-to-speech software and some other Unix audio tools to render each of the four voices. Those all get compiled back into a single mp3 and sent back to flash, along with an xml file that tells the app how to animate the emoticons and custom lyrics. Aside from some of the animated bits, this could work as-is with an HTML/CSS/JS front end as well.

The process is pretty cpu intensive, so we had to use a number of load balanced machines to handle requests. They output files on amazon s3, all keyed by a unique id. If this becomes popular (fingers crossed), there's no database or anything that will bottleneck reads or writes, and it should just scale linearly as we add more boxes.

It's funny how the text-to-singing stuff ended up being only a small portion of the project.

As I write this, there is panic on Wall Street despite Washington’s $700 billion rescue attempt. The crisis is not contained by U.S. borders, but extends to Europe and Asia. Like many people, I’m incredulous. How could this happen?

Wall Street hired the best and the brightest, paid them handsomely, and gave them unlimited resources and technology. It turns out they were building enormously complicated castles made of sand. A great wave washed them away, astounding all the smart people who devoted their lives to speculation, not production. Their models based on historical data predicted future profits, not collapse. Few people saw this coming until it hit.

“It was the triumph of data over common sense,” said reporter Adam Davidson on the excellent episode of This American Life called “The Giant Pool of Money.” Economist Michael Lehmann in the San Francisco Chronicle called it “the triumph of ideology over common sense.” It’s obvious both common sense and the common man have taken a beating.

It’s hard to stomach that our government must bail out Wall Street. It really means we’ve bet our future on the same people who created the present situation. To paraphrase a joke I’ve heard: It’s like going to a casino in Vegas and rooting for the house. One New York Times reader expressed the frustration that many feel: “Why can’t we take half of the $700 billion and just build something?”

These events shake our belief that free markets work to the benefit of all. The fundamental tenet of capitalism is the “invisible hand”: Adam Smith wrote that “by pursuing his own interest [each person] frequently promotes that of the society.” This year, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said: “In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism — it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable.”

A headline in the Christian Science Monitor says: “With finance crisis, hands-off era over.” Government will need to be more assertive in regulating Wall Street. But I think it goes beyond that. I wonder if we, as individuals, have been living in our own era of hands-off. Have Americans become so disengaged that we’ve become dependent on some invisible force to provide what we need? Have we gotten used to leaving important matters to experts, until they turn out to be wrong?

Isn’t it time for us to become hands-on again?

We, the people, face enormous challenges. Apart from the economic mess, we know fundamental changes are coming because of global warming. Our dependence on fossil fuels is not sustainable. Change is coming, whether we want it or not.

Better we meet the challenges head-on rather than hide. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman summed it up: “We need to get back to making stuff, based on real engineering not just financial engineering. We need to get back to a world where people are able to realize the American Dream — a house with a yard — because they have built something with their hands, not because they got a ‘liar loan.’ ... The American Dream is an aspiration, not an entitlement.”

We have to believe it starts with each of us — not some faceless government or corporate bureaucracy. It’s time for us, individually and working together in business, to reconsider what it means to be productive, not just profitable. It’s time for us to reengage in how our government sets priorities for education, health care, housing, and transportation.

The DIY mindset celebrated in this magazine must again become an essential life skill, rooted once again in necessity and practicality. Our future security lies in knowing what we’re capable of creating, and how we can adapt to change by being resourceful.

A challenge this great can bring out the best in us. We need everyone, because every person has something to contribute. We need a showing of all hands.

Abstract for United States Patent 7,415,666

A method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed. In one implementation, pressing a Page Down or Page Up keyboard key/button allows a user to begin at any starting vertical location within a page, and navigate to that same location on the next or previous page. For example, if a user is viewing a page starting in a viewing area from the middle of that page and ending at the bottom, a Page Down command will cause the next page to be shown in the viewing area starting at the middle of the next page and ending at the bottom of the next page. Similar behavior occurs when there is more than one column of pages being displayed in a row.

Full text of 7,415,666

Perhaps patent examiners are unable to tell what's obvious or not because the very language in which patents are written is so obscure. Try parsing this sentence:

A document viewing component, such as in the form of a control hosted in a program, controls the scrolling operation, such as by containing a scroll control.

Most likely this twisted language is the work product of Workman Nydeggar, the patent attorneys on this one. No doubt they are responsible for this closing flourish:

While the invention is susceptible to various modifications and alternative constructions, certain illustrated embodiments thereof are shown in the drawings and have been described above in detail. It should be understood, however, that there is no intention to limit the invention to the specific forms disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, alternative constructions, and equivalents falling within the spirit and scope of the invention.

Patent 7,415,666 was submitted in March 2005 so it took three years for the patent office to take in all this mumbo-jumbo and decide to give its approval. So if the USPTO is going to approve nearly every patent -- and I'd love to see a list of rejected ones -- why does it take three years to do so?

Also, 7,415,666 was not the only good news for Timothy D. Sellers of Bellevue WA. This week, he had three patents approved, upping his own total to nine. He re-invented the toolbar, among other things.

Thanks to Richard Forno's of InfoWarrior for his posting to Dave Farber's IP list.

Tiger's adversary was Rocco Mediate, a delightful forty-five year old player ranked 158th in the world. Commentators said Rocco was the crowd favorite, and no one could root against Rocco. He was the everyman, given a special opportunity to "play the best player on the planet, one on one." No one truly expected him to win but he played well, fighting back after falling behind by three shots. He had to overcome his own nervousness and settle in to his own game. Incredibly, he had a one shot lead going into the 18th hole. Somehow, it became believable that Rocco might just win.

As much as I liked Rocco, I found myself pulling for Tiger again and again, as he fought back to tie on Sunday and at the end of eighteen holes on Monday. I have always identified with the underdog, and everything about Rocco made me pull for him. (I have rooted for the Dodgers and Red Sox, never the Yankees, who usually won in the end.) Yet, I realized part-way through the tournament that Tiger wasn't simply a favorite; he had become a superhero. I wanted him to win.

On the Monday broadcast, Johnny Miller remarked after Tiger hit an amazing shot out of a fairway trap: "That's a Tiger shot." It's like Tiger called on super-powers. I certainly wanted to believe he had such powers. What's more, Tiger's round of golf revealed a level of vulnerability that made yourself question if you believed in him. He grimaced after shots because of sharp pain in his knee. He was limping down the fairways. It was never automatic that Tiger would win. As the storyline developed, he heroically summoned his own strength, managed to overcome the physical pain, and obtain a victory. In the end, the real battle was not Tiger vs. Rocco; it was each man against himself, as the game of golf isolates for us to see so clearly.

Yesterday, we learned that Tiger won't play the rest of year, as his knee problems were more severe than he let on; he needs additional surgery followed by a long recovery period. It's bad news for golf and for the people who run tournaments. However, Tiger is not merely an action-hero and his accomplishments carry beyond the golf course.

According to Nike's ads, which feature Tiger's father, Earl Woods, Tiger's special strength is his mental toughness. His father says: "'I promise you that you will never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life.' And he hasn't. And he never will." David Brooks writes about Tiger in Tuesday's New York Times, adding that Tiger has become "the beau ideal for golf-loving corporate America, the personification of mental fortitude."

Tiger is the best. You want to watch "best"; you want to see what "best" does; you want to learn from "best". Even the best is not perfect, you realize. You wonder how you measure up against the best and you hope, like Rocco, you don't do too badly.

Does Woods vs. Mediate bring to mind the presidential race: Obama vs. McCain? There's the obvious: black/white, young/old, prodigy/warrior. Both seem worthy for different reasons. But, in the words of the old Exxon ad, who has a Tiger in his tank? I hope that we elect a leader who understands our vulnerability and summons our strengths. I hope that person can find the focus and determination to meet the challenges ahead and see us through to the end. I'd like to believe that one of them will prove to be a Tiger and inspire our confidence. I want the best to lead.

Today, in most schools, science is taught as a body of acquired knowledge, but not as much as a set of tools and practices that were used to discover that knowledge and expand upon it. Students are expected to learn from lectures and textbooks, not labs with hands-on learning and experimentation. Nothing quite embodies the practice of science like a chemistry set, a home lab that once was a favorite childhood gift has now vanished from the shelves of toy and hobby stores.

In 1964, Robert Bruce Thompson got what he wanted most for Christmas and his first chemistry set introduced him to a fascinating, new world. He went on to major in chemistry in college. Recently, a neighbor's teenage daughter started asking him questions about science, which she wished to pursue as a career, but she admitted she wasn't learning much science in school. Robert wanted to introduce her to the chemistry lab but realized it was nigh impossible to buy a good chemistry set in a store and he couldn't recommend any of the exisiting books on chemistry. So Robert decided that he could write a book himself and that it would start with describing how to build your own chemistry set and set up a lab.

The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments is Bob's seventh book with O'Reilly; he's written previously about PC hardware and astronomy. A man of many interests, Bob has put together a wonderful book that I'm proud to publish and it completely fits with Make's DIY ethic. Bob's book has the subtitle: "All Lab, No Lecture." What surprised me most about the book was how much Bob had tailored the book to home schoolers and other students who might be getting "chemistry-lite" in school. ("A student who completes all of the laboratories in this book has done the equivalent of two full years of high school chemistry lab work or a first-year college general chemistry lab course.") It also works for adults, like me, who were bored by chemistry in school and did poorly yet could see the fascination of a lab filled with vials, flasks and burettes.

The book is also a great example of collaboration as Bob has worked with Dr. Mary Chervenak and Dr. Paul Jones, each of whom hold Ph.D's in organic chemistry. Their insights are featured throughout the book, not just as subject-matter experts but also as experienced teachers and practitioners. Says Dr. Paul Jones: "Most students are aware of acids and their dangers but are more or less ignorant of the dangers of alkali (base). For instance, aqueous sodium hydroxide can blind you in a matter of minutes if not cleansed thoroughly and I've seen lots of kids who are quick to put on goggles to work with 0.01 M HCI but throw 6 M NaOH around like it's candy. Aqueous bases are every bit as dangerous as aqueous acids."

Concerns about the liablity of practicing science in school have led schools to offer less of it. (Sports is a more common source of serious injury.) This book offers a "real science" alternative. Bob writes: "One of the recurring lessons throughout this book is the importance of assuming personal responsibility for useful but dangerous actions -- understanding the specific risks and taking the necessary steps to minimize or eliminate them."

Bob will be featured at this year's Maker Faire, talking about his love of chemistry and his new book. He'll be in the Maker Shed area all weekend, doing some of the experiments from the b