Spam Riddle?

I don't think I receive any different kind of spam than everybody else. The usual mix of offers for loans, Viagra, cheap software, casino bonuses, free TV and a year's supply of my favorite soda... at least that's what the subject lines say. I don't know what the email message itself contains, though, because I delete them right away.

Today, however, I opened one message accidentally instead of throwing it into the trash, and it was different in that it didn't try to sell me anything, but "entertain" me with some sort of a poem (a bad one at that). Maybe it's just a brain fart of some weirdo with a secret message. I can't figure it out, can you? Leave me a comment if you're able to decipher this "code".

Expect differ only kept food high. Home who like knew leave. End cut, power, main your, a. Had, began law yes state. Will, their, string, example, he, cover. House four pattern year blue. Head other, my. Protect, color cell fruit place both. Control, often miss gave size run. Few keep poem small ready had. Develop ride, warm. Sing order describe. What middle, war word. Sit numeral notice foot caught include eye. May story every third, act.

Techie Advertising

I came across this funny banner ad from job-search company Dice. I guess, I only recognized it because it talked to the left side of my brain. (Good thinking, guys!) Being an ex-developer, I apparently still think in logical structures. If hungry then eat.

P.S. Note to headhunters: I am not looking for a job. And I rather drink Java these days.

Forget big-screen TV

This is the invention that I have been waiting for. Well, it's still more like a research project, but soon enough, we'll be able to scrap that bulky big-screen TV, or any TV for that matter. Got a wall? Any wall will do. Don't mind the wallpaper, that Picasso painting, or mounted family pictures.

Prof. Oliver Bimber from the University of Weimar leads a project that they call "Smart Projector." A beamer projects the image against any surface, after a 3D and color calibration figures out what the surface looks like. Then a piece of software renders the projection images (including movies at 25 fps) in real-time, by calculating the offset from the acquired calibration settings. Very cool.

The first demonstration of the SmartProjector technology happened in the vaults of Scharfenstein castle in Leinefelde. It looks like the team of researchers threw the beamer image directly against the brick wall. No screen, no white backdrop. Only rocks. Of course, there are still a few things to consider before this invention hits the shelves at your local geek store, for example, surface shadows or multi-angle viewing, but it sure beats the typical entertainment center setup with wardrobe-size back-projection TV screens, nicely framed in solid oak cabinets. Ugh.

Here is a short video clip (8MB Mpeg) that ran on channel RTL2 during "Welt der Wunder" (World of Wonders). Although it's in German, you should still be able to get the idea.

Konfabulator. Yeah, Yahoo!

When Google acquired Picasa, I thought, wow, buying a company and then give away their product for free? Interesting concept. Picasa is really a nice piece of engineering. Not quite Photoshop, but cool features, nice and intuitive user interface, and of course, the price is unbeatable.

Now, Yahoo has acquired Pixoria, maker of widget-wonder Konfabulator. And they make it a free download, too. Thanks guys, that's konfabulous! I've been playing around with Konfabulator widgets for about two years, and they make the desktop look so cool, that wherever I go, people ask what kind of operating system I'm running on my PC. I already switched the whole Windows XP interface to a Mac OS X look-and-feel earlier, and through the additions of the Konfabulator widgets, the OS doesn't really resemble anything remotely similar to the Redmond product.


It's going to be interesting to see how Vista will look like.

Photographic memory

I'm often asked "Where are you based?" My standard answer is "In an airplane", which is pretty close to the truth. While being on the road has a lot of flip sides (hmm, how many sides does a coin have?), anyway, it allows me to take my camera to lots of places around the world. I started to maintain a photographic memory of some of the more interesting places during my travels. Don't expect much of a travel report, though. Simply a few snapshots of a road warrior. Can you guess where this is?

Not quite Minority Report yet

In the movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise and his police organization can predict crimes, get to the crime scene before the bad guy does, and arrest the culprit before the deed is done. (That user interface of that "screen" which is used to assemble content like video, pictures, documents and audio, is very cool.)

Looks like those predictive analytics, that are gradually becoming mainstream in business applications such as sales forecasting, campaign management, or customer churn reduction, have also caught on in the New York Police Department. According to this Journal News report, some algorithm has predicted that a particular Yonkers street was about to be place of a crime, and so the NYPD sent the cops on patrol in the area, who were able to arrest the two punks and return the robbed cell phone.

Of course, it could have been pure luck, and there are areas in New York (as in every other metropolitan city) that allow those predictions simply based on experience and a wet finger in the wind. However, two catch the bad guys is certainly not limited to the streets of New York, Chicago, London, or Amsterdam. How about the white collar crimes on Wall Street and in the executive ranks? That's where predictive analytics should be also applied, so that we don't have another Enron, Worldcom, or Tyco case.

Open Source Minibar

Now here's something finally useful from the hacker community: Adam Laurie demonstrated at Defcon, how to empty a hotel room minibar or watch PayTV without getting charged. Or schedule wakeup-calls at 3am for someone else. Or check out the person in room 209. All with a simple laptop and a TV card. Pretty amazing that all those "hotel room devices" (that is, fridge, TV) use client-side authentication. Switch the client, and authentication is passé. Now, I wouldn't attempt to bring in my big-screen TV into a hotel (part of the reason is that I don't own one) but since every road warrior is equipped with a de-facto TV unit, those hotel software vendors better act soon. Until then, I will gladly watch Shawshank Redemption a hundred more times. And have a free Martini.

"It is - four - twenty - five - a.m. This is your wake-up call. Press 9 for another call in 10 minutes." Aarrgghhhh..

My next product offering: EIEIO

It seems that every IT vendor is suddenly in the integration market these days. Application integration, data integration, enterprise integration, process integration, portal integratoin, business integration. I'm sure there are more. In my area of focus, the combined offerings of ETL (Extract Transform Load), EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), EII (Enterprise Information Integration) - did I miss one? - will subsequently, obviously, and undoubtedly be superceded by Enhanced Intergalactic Enterprise Integration Orchestration... or EIEIO in short. Does someone have a number of a patent attorney handy?

The whole integration idea is the right thing to do, of course. But I'm missing one fundamental piece. How do companies make people work together? People Integration (PI = 3.1415926535... I can already see the logo) hasn't really worked that well. Not on the business side anyway. Organizations continue to work as silos, employees are often competing with the person from the next department. And if they're not competing, they may still work counter-productively, because they don't know who else is working on the same thing. People integration doesn't work in politics either, or in religion, or in sports. So why do we IT guys try throwing software at a problem that's largely unrelated to IT? Maybe CXOs should employ more psychologists to get a handle on "real integration".