ncubeeight

The upcoming release of Windows 10 operating system is exciting for a number of bold new technologies Microsoft plans to introduce, including the new Microsoft Edge browser and Cortana speech-recognition tools.  This release is called GWX for "Get Windows 10" and will reach all Windows users from version 7 to 8.1.  Particularly interesting to me is that it will be the first time Windows operating system pushes out software over mesh networks in a peer-to-peer (aka "P2P") model.  Over a decade ago software tools for creating peer-to-peer and mesh networks proliferated as alternative approaches to bandwidth-intensive content delivery and task processing.  Allowing networked devices to mesh and delegate tasks remotely between each other avoids the burden of one-to-one connections between a computer and a central hosting server.  Through this process the originating host server can delegate tasks to other machines connected in the mesh and then turn its attention...

Many iPhone users may have wondered why Apple prompts them with a message saying “Location accuracy is improved when Wi-Fi is turned on” each time they choose to turn Wi-Fi off.  Why does a phone that has GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) capability need to use Wi-Fi to determine it’s location? The reason is fairly simple.  There are of course thousands of radio frequencies traveling through the walls of buildings all around us.  What makes Wi-Fi frequency (or even bluetooth) particularly useful for location mapping is that the frequency travels a relatively short distance before it decays, due to how low energy the Wi-Fi wavelengths are.  A combination of three or more Wi-Fi signals can be used in a very small area by a phone to triangulate locations on a map in the same manner that earthquake shockwave strengths can be used to triangulate epicenters.  Wi-Fi hubs don't need to transmit their locations to be useful.  Most are oblivious of their loc...

I joined Mozilla as a staff contributor three years ago working on API partnerships, early Firefox Operating System content partnerships for our phones and identity management solutions for the web.  I found Mozilla to be one of the most compelling work environments of my career.  Beyond the prestige of working on a product that reaches 1 in 5 Internet users globally, I found the passion and inspiration of our community and coworkers infectious.  A huge number of people who work on Firefox products and tools are volunteers.  It’s amazing to be surrounded by people who work 100% based on the passion they have for their contribution to the web and its benefits to the global community.  At the FISL 2013 conference in Brazil, I had my first experience working with the Mozilla Representatives and community volunteers. I bumped into an engineer, André Natal , who wanted to create a speech-to-text engine for Firefox operating system.  (This enables tools l...

This post is a retrospective on the emergence of web-indexing approaches over the course of my time working in the building and distribution of search engines. Over the course of 25 years I worked at LookSmart, Overture, Yahoo! and Collecta. Some of my colleagues had asked me to summarize the shift I'd seen across the web over this period.     The beginning: open-web indexes Web indexing (also called crawling or "spidering" because of the concept of the web-like structure of html inter-linking) was a means of creating a private index of published html documents on the web in the 1990s.  Popular search engines would use keyword position in the document, frequency of keyword mention, font style and meta-tag data to determine a public document’s relevance to a given keyword query.  This manner of indexing and searching was the first wave of search engine mechanics.  Crawlers could start at the top node of any public domain and follow any link from t...

My team at BTLookSmart Japan I had the pleasure of launching a business in Japan in 1999.*  It was one of the early entrants in the business of search engine syndication, an industry that used to be dominated by Altavista, Inktomi, Fast Search and Transfer, and is now dominated by Google and Bing after many iterations in the business model. It was one of the most educational phases of my career.  The Japanese partnerships I built showed me that much of what I'd been taught in university about Japanese business was wrong.  Japanese companies were not averse to partnering with foreign firms.  Japanese customers did not necessarily favor Japanese-made products over foreign products.  These myths were touted by Kodak against Fuji Film in their WTO complaints against Japan in general and Fuji specifically.  And when I was in university, I was spoon-fed some of these same myths by some representatives in the American congress who favored market-protectioni...

There are many good reasons not to run.  But if you decide to run anyway, there are still issues that can get in your way.  I'll write this to address some of the ways that I've found to optimize my run and make it quite enjoyable.  As a rower friend of mine, Ken Clemmer, commented that rowing is the art of knowing what not to do as you strive for efficient motion.  Running is simple enough.  But there are some habits than can make running difficult or tedious.  I hope some of this is valuable. I took up running when I was a agile teen thanks to the inspiration of my high school track team and friends.  Over the years, thanks to genetics, exercise and nutrition, I have bulked up to an ungainly 6 foot tall stature.  But as the nimbler sports seemed to recede from me, running stayed a constant.  (I love rock climbing, but find it very challenging due to my weight to muscle ratio.)  My biggest hurdle in running has been managing asthma....

Have you ever had trouble remembering the login to one of your dozen or so online accounts?  Or have you ever had confusion over which user is logged into a given webmail or social network on a shared computer? Mozilla Firefox is rolling out a new browser-based initiative to permit the storing of all IDs associated with one single login identity.  You can think of it as a single key to your online identities instead of a keychain of dozens of unique keys.  BrowserID will be even more secure than the complex conventional manner of site login management as the user will be able to centrally control all accounts associated with your personal online content. Over the coming months I will have the privilege of working with their engineers to bring this platform to a broader audience through partnerships with leading browser,  email and social network providers across the web.  BrowserID will enable you to toggle between professional and personal online acco...