Cutting Edge Computing

Face Recognition is Closer than You Think March 3, 2012

Over the last year I’ve switched from Snapfish to Google Picasa to place my photos online.  Snapfish was becoming increasingly difficult for some of my contacts to view, and some were reluctant to sign up for an account required for viewing.

Picasa, on the other hand, offered a granularity of viewing options (I don’t make my photos totally public; however, I do make them readily viewable to anyone who has the link to the relevant folder).

Picasa is interesting in that it includes an application on your computer for collecting and managing photos.  I recently discovered a photo category on the Picasa application called People.  When I first clicked on it, a disclaimer/policy message appeared.  I glanced at it before continuing, and only later realized that it wanted me to associate names with the facial images it had pulled from my photos.

Here’s what Google says about the Picasa name tags:

•Name tags help you organize your photos by what matters most: the people in them.

•Picasa identifies similar faces in your photos and puts these into the “Unnamed people” album. To add a name tag, just click “Add a name” and type the person’s name.

•After you’ve tagged some pictures, you can do creative things with your name tags, like finding all the photos with the same two people in them or creating a face collage.

I’m personally ambiguous about privacy.  I’ve adapted to many of the changes in expectations we’ve experienced over the last twenty years, while also declining to participate in some of them.  There is little of my persona that I wish to remain hidden, but there is danger in knowing too much about others.

Face recognition sounds like a bridge too far.  It’s not even every possible scenario, because face recognition has the potential to do a lot of good, such as finding criminals or missing persons.  But if I can take your photo, and within seconds know your name and all searchable details, then I know too much about you.

I am not a stalker.

A New Internet Connection Strategy November 21, 2011

Three weeks ago New England was hit by a very early winter snowstorm.  I estimated a foot of snow in my neighborhood, and totals were much higher elsewhere.  Power went out early, and didn’t come back on again for five full days.  I have a generator, which made life tolerable, but the real loss was broadband Internet, which came on only a few hours before electricity (if broadband is working, I can power the cable modem and wireless router with the generator).

Because I work primarily from home, the loss of broadband Internet was potentially a catastrophe.  I used to maintain a dial-up account as a backup (the power in the phone lines never goes down), but my ISP went out of business earlier this year.  Besides, I was paying too much for what was really an inadequate backup.

A couple of months ago I bought a new Android phone.  Among its features was the ability to turn it into a wireless hotspot.  Simply turn on this feature, access the hotspot with your computer, and you have your onramp to the Internet.

Of course, I’m using data, which is a costly commodity.  For most phones today, the calls are cheap, but the surfing is expensive.  My plan limits me to 1GB of data a month, but I usually don’t use a lot of data.  My bill for the days in question just arrived, and I incurred no additional data expense.

My reception isn’t good in my home, which is why I still have two landlines.  I was concerned about my ability to do just about anything on the Internet through my phone, but it performed like a champ.  In fact, I successfully conducted a webinar using the phone as my data connection to my slides.

Working this way on an ongoing basis would get expensive.  But it’s nice to know that phone-based wifi hotspots can fill in when you need them, even if you need them for several days.

I Still Own My Original 128K Mac October 6, 2011

My first computer was an original 128KB Apple Macintosh, purchased in 1984.  I still have it.  It still boots.

There, I got that bit of history out of the way.  As the news of the passing of Steve Jobs before his time crosses the planet, I can tell my own story of Apple.  Circa 1984, I had access to an academic discount, and had a choice between a Mac or a DEC PC, the latter of which might have been the smarter choice for someone hoping to latch on with the preeminent technology employer in New England at the time.

Of course, the so-called PC standard was already well on its way to becoming a mess, and DEC left the PC business and, in terminal decline, was acquired by first Compaq, then HP.

But who couldn’t look at the Mac and know that its graphical, mouse-driven user interface wasn’t the future of computing?  Bill Gates, for one, who even as he struggled to come out with a lame, barely-graphical Windows product still insisted that businesses demanded command line operation.  Later revisionist explanations insist that Gates also saw the future correctly, and simply obfuscated the discussion until Windows was more mature, but I’m not so sure.

So I chose wisely, and used my Mac productively for years.  With a developer discount available, I almost bought a Lisa for $5000, half the list price, which was the only way Apple had to develop Mac software.  But third party providers came out with very nice integrated development environments that enabled me to continue working on Macs.

(The Lisa and to an even greater extent these third party tools (THINK!, for example, which was acquired by Symantec) radically changed software development, but that’s a story for another day.)

Despite the hoopla and steady if lackluster sales, the future of Apple and the Mac wasn’t assured until the arrival of the laser printer.  Married to the Mac’s WYSIWYG interface, the combination became the de facto publishing standard almost overnight.

Still, the Mac was largely a niche product, not highly used outside of publishing and similar creative industries.  I don’t have creative skills, so by the mid-1990s it became clear that I couldn’t make a living by being a Mac expert.  Today I have a Windows Server network in my basement with about half a dozen PCs.

Jobs was eventually forced out of Apple, and the decline continued under a succession of uninspiring leaders.  He went on to found two companies, the wildly successful Pixar and the barely surviving NeXT.  Salesman and promoter that he was, he was able to convince Apple to acquire NeXt for an incredible $400 million, and the NextStep operating system became the basis for today’s OS X.

During his time outside of Apple, I had the uneven pleasure of working with one of his better known unauthorized biographers, Jeffrey Young, who authored The Journey is the Reward.  He was able to meet with Jobs only once, at the end of his writing.  Nonetheless, it was a compelling an instructive book, even though it encompassed his life only through circa 1990.

Under Jobs, Apple made highly successful forays into the consumer market, with the iPod and iPhone.  It may even be true that Apple more or less single-handedly made consumer electronics relevant and even important to every facet of our lives, including our business lives.

It should also be noted that there were failures galore along the way – the clunky Newton and Apple TV come immediately to mind.  But failure serves the important purpose of learning from our mistakes and directing our efforts to more productive pursuits.

There are certainly events in Jobs life of which he was probably not proud, and I think his infamous dichotomy between his public and private lives was driven by his desire to be known for his results, rather than how he led his life.  It’s an understandable sentiment, although it has perhaps led to part of the cult of unquestioned worship that exists.  None of us are perfect, but I think it’s better to be known as a whole person rather than the persona we choose to project.

It’s not clear the Jobs or Apple truly invented any breakthrough.  The Mac UI was based on work done by Alan Kay and Xerox PARC years earlier, and the technologies that comprised the iPhone were already well-established.  But both man and company had the unique ability to bring together different technologies into a package that truly pushed the boundaries of product design and implementation.  Of all of the possible creative and business skills, that may be the most highly valued.