Twin heartbeats: watching a multi-core processor at work

Recently I started using a Lenovo (nee IBM) Z61t laptop, replacing my late lamented X40. The new computer sports a dual core Intel processor. This means it sort of has two CPUs.

It's fun to watch the two processors vie for work to do when a single-threaded task is at hand. I do a lot of work crunching search logs, and when you exceed about 32,000 rows in an Excel spreadsheet, things begin to bog down. Even gathering the data in a large Internet Explorer window can take a lot of CPU and a lot of real time. If you are running one single-threaded program, Windows reports your CPU as 50% or so until the task completes. The Windows Task Manager shows this in action. The "extra" core of the processor is available to handle other tasks, and the work appears to be divided equally between the two:

Click to see full-size image

If you're running more than one app, or if the app you're running is multi-threaded, then both halves of the CPU can do useful work. For instance, when I copy 200,000 rows of data from IE to Excel, the CPU runs at close to 100%.

My friends Chuck Severance, who literally wrote the book on high performance computing, and Bill Punch, who heads the High Performance Computing Center at Michigan State, understand all this full well. For me, an amateur observer of the end of Moore's Law and our multi-processor future, it's fun to watch.

Ladies and gentlemen, the amazing book digitizing machine

Last week I saw the incarnation of an amazing book digitizing machine, something that my friend Mark Grebner and I dreamed of circa 1999. This by no means is not to say that others did not imagine such a thing before us; of course they did. But it was exhiliarating to see the actualization of something so important.

Every year in June I join my wife at her professional association meeting, the Special Libraries Association, or SLA. Attendees include some smart folks: science librarians, law librarians, medical librarians, and more.

Like many conferences, SLA offers presentations and a trade show. At this year's trade show in Denver I was delighted to see this:

This is way, way, cool, even astonishing. The device has two digital SLRs aimed across each other at 45 degree angles, so as to shoot the even and odd pages at once. After the pages have been shot digitally, a robotic arm moves over, and a gentle vacuum pulls the right-hand page up and folds it over. Here's a short movie I took showing how this gizmo inhales a digital copy of a book

The company selling this device, Kirtas, is not the one serving the Google Book digitization effort. But the concept is the same, and Kirtas has a number of library customers who are scanning precious collections for preservation.

While I marveled at this device last week, Al Gore was about 400 feet away signing 500 copies of his latest book. I implored an SLA official to bring the former Vice President to see this, gizmo, as Gore once told an allegory of a schoolgirl in Carthage, Tennessee benefitting from a digital Library of Congress. Alas, his path that Sunday evening was scripted by Secret Service and event obligations. I'm sure Al Gore would've loved to see in action a device that can scan an entire book in minutes.

Mark Grebner has used consumer-grade digital cameras to digitize voter records for over 7 years now. The Kirtas device uses high-end D-SLRs to do the same, at much higher resolution, but the concept is the same.

Surgical masks when you fly?

Saw an unusual sight on my first flight since the idiot lawyer from Atlanta flew to and from Europe despite his TB infection: a guy in front of me wore a surgical mask the entire trip:





It could be he has a pre-existing condition, but my guess is this fellow feared risk of TB. That, of course, would be innumeracy: the odds that someone as selfish and stupid as Andrew Speaker are next to you on the plane are infinitesimally small.

Back during SARS you saw a fair number of people in airports wearing masks. That wasn't innumeracy; the disease was highly communicable and did reach North America. If or when Avian Flu hits, it will be strange to see everyone walking the streets wearing masks. But strange sights will be the least of our worries.

Mid 90s view of the future Web: cable modems, and the insights of John Naisbitt

It was the mid 1990s. The awesome possibilites of a future broadband Internet were before us. We introduced the Web to a famous futurist, and reported the dreams of how cable modems and content deals would transform the world.



In October 1995 my friend John Liskey arranged for Chuck Severance and me to interview some impressive folks at the Midwest Cable Show in Indianapolis. We interviewed the famed author of Megatrends, John Naisbitt. We had a cable modem set up at the show so we could demonstrate the future world of residential broadband. Naisbitt had been out of the country, in Asia, researching a book. It's my impression that he saw the Web for the first time via that cable modem.



Besides Naisbitt, I interviewed an engineer explaining a radical new device that provided Internet access to the home at 10 megabits per second. Dr. David Walker of the late, lamented Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) described the cable modem they offered at the time. Just a few months earlier,Liskey had a cable modem installed at my house; thus since summer 1995, making me, I claim, one of the first few hundred people in the country with residential broadband. (I have no way to verify this claim.) Dr. Walker gave the example of finding Beatles outtakes and bloopers on the Net, and how broadband could bring multimedia to the home. Looking back, he accidentally predicted both YouTube and RIAA lawsuits.

David Coles spoke optimistically to Chuck about @Home, TCI's venture at the time to deliver content over broadband to homes and small businesses.

Lo how the world has changed.

TCI is now long gone, devoured in the many mergers of the dot com era. @Home is a footnote in the history of broadband. And my Comcast cable modem in the basement offers service at a fraction of the speed serving our house in 1995.

Hmmm.... What is John Naisbitt thinking about today?

Check out the video, a wistful window into the excitement and anticipation we all felt in the 90s about the future of the Internet.

The peril of thinking that Gmail (Beta) is in production

For the last few hours, I've been unable to access my Gmail account. Error 502, whatever that is. I'm on deadline to finish an article, and some essential quotes are locked in my inaccessible Gmail Inbox.

Right up there on the Gmail logo, it says "Beta". They gave me fair warning. But I treat it as production, my total e-mail solution, a service I can trust.

My bad.

How many people think of Gmail as an industrial-quality, trustworthy, production service? What are Google's criteria for taking this product, introduced in April 1994, out of beta? When they do, what level of service can we expect?

Logistics conundrum: how do you evacuate a zoo?

IT folks spend a lot of time doing disaster planning, thinking through various scenarios, writing plans, and testing those plans. At my Day Job at Michigan State, my colleagues just installed some MSU servers at Penn State so that MSU can have a Web presence even if lots of technology in East Lansing gets wiped out.

Right now a fire in Griffith Park has the zookeepers worried. It's not immediately threatening to zoo, but yesterday they evacuated the humans. They said they considered evacuating the animals but decided not to.

I don't understand the logistics. How the hell do you evacuate the animals in a zoo? Build a land ark?

Does a large zoo have enough trailers and cages to hold all, or even a substantial fraction, of its animals?

Where would you take them? How would you care for them?

Facebook polemic: Flash as pamphleteer medium

Bill Moyers compares today's bloggers to the pamphleteers of the American Revolution. I think you could describe what I call the Flash polemic the same way. The style involves a professional-sounding, measured narration over words and images moving about the screen. Here's an example:



It's not just a polemic; it's a conspiracy theory involving the CIA, BBN, and DARPA.

I'm not sure I buy the conspiracy theory but I think the format is compelling. It's longer than an issues ad but it's shorter than a documentary. The production values are better than, say, a spot on local television, and much better than much of what you see on YouTube.

We'll see much more of this new form, I think.

http://www.albumoftheday.com/facebook/

Slideshare.net - YouTube for PowerPoint presentations

Last week I spoke at a conference called Computers In Libraries, otherwise known as CIL, produced by Jane Dysart and Information Today (infotoday.com).

A number of people asked for a link to my slides, which Lou Rosenfeld and I prepared for a talk we presented a month ago for the Information Architecture Summit (IA Summit) in Las Vegas. Lou and I are writing a book on Web search analytics.

Lou introduced me, literally and figuratively, to a site called Slideshare.net, organized by a friend of his, Rashmi Sinha.

I predict that Slideshare.net is going to be a Big Deal. I've already looked at a number of slide shows they host, and learned quite a bit from some presentations. Edward Tufte will spin in his grave -- and he is not even dead yet -- but a lot of important ideas are imparted in PowerPoint (et al) presentations.

Slideshare will have its own Zipf curve, more popularly understood as the Billboard Top 100 chart. A small number of important, useful, or clever presentations will command the attention of the masses. So it is, and so shall it always be. And we'll learn from these presentations -- style as well as content.

My slides from Computers in Libraries are at http://www.slideshare.net/richwig/search-analytics-conversations-with-your-customers.

Those crazy domains they create

Ever since 1995 or so, major corporations have aligned in odd ways and created silly domain names. MSNBC is probably the most famous conflation, but ABC / Disney still does goofy things with Go.com.

It's not just domain names. Corporate America also makes up stupid URLs, obviously drawn by committee. Consider:


'

So let's parse this. NBC of course is the famous TV network. It could've been worse; they could've created a meaningless domain under the corporate parent, e.g. nbc.ge.com.

Anyhow, they're advertising something that they want to place under their TV show "Heroes" (which I've never seen, and do not expect to see).

So we go to nbc.com, fair enough, makes sense. And we go to a folder named "heroes" which seems to make sense, if millions of people know that show.


And now we go to a subfolder named "cisco"? All of us rely on Cisco routers, but what does Cisco have to do with Heroes, or NBC, or GE, or anything else a consumer might care about?

Has Rewind on your PVR spoiled you too?

We've had TiVo-like rewind functionality in our house for a year or so. If you miss something, you hit Rewind, becase the set-top cable box is constantly recording.

This has spoiled me horribly. Now I find that when I'm listening to radio in car or office, I want to be able to hit Rewind and listen again.

When I was in Las Vegas a few weeks ago during March Madness, I wanted the TV in my hotel room to rewind so I could see a play I wasn't paying attention to. Of course, the Sahara hotel had TV technology not much advanced since the Rat Pack. (OK, OK, I exaggerate.)

In the Hard Rock Cafe in Vegas, while watching NCAA hoops, I mentioned this impulse to some young guys also watching the game, and they said they'd also had the same feeling.

It's got to be only a matter of time before every device that streams content also caches it for replay. I expect even the lowliest devices -- your cell phone, the clock radio in your hotel room, whatever -- will have a Rewind button.

Do you also feel the need?

There is no news in Detroit

Next Monday I'm going to do an interview with WDET, the major NPR station in Detroit. I was checking to see if they archive their interviews, so I went to the News section of their Web site and clicked on "Interviews." This is what I saw:



Click for full-size image


Yup, "Currently there is no news." I assume that this really means that WDET hasn't done any interviews lately (or today) but I had to laugh seeing that message from a major news organization for a major city.

CNN broadcasts compelling content but misses the BBC Best Bets idea

In the early days of the Web I attended a computer conference in Atlanta. I met a young CNN producer and talked about the Web to him. I ended up at CNN headquarters showing color prints of screen shots explaining the nascent Web, including images of the MSU weather pages, brainchild of Charles Henrich.

This morning CNN leads with video of a tearful five year old lad racing to hug his dad, back from war in the Middle East:



This is very compelling video. Whether you are a parent or not, if you watch this footage, it will tear at your heart strings. Now observe how CNN fails to promote its own content:



Amazingly you can't find CNN's own compelling footage on cnn.com. Search for it under "tearful reunion" -- CNN's own on-screen label -- and you get a lot of irrelevant fluff totally unrelated to the story.

CNN should implement a Best Bets regime. Period. Full stop. If someone at CNN sees this post, contact me. CNN doesn't "get" the notion of "Best Bets". Guest what, CNN -- the BBC, and the Financial Times, do get it. Is it CNN's plan to cede territory to them as you have to Fox News?

If a site visitor searches for a phrase that CNN shows on the TV screen, then it should match the user to that story on the Web.

Circa 1994 I visited CNN headquarters in Atlanta and showed producers and reporters this new thing called the World-Wide Web. It was pretty clear that only one guy, the producer giving me the tour, "got it" at the time. I sincerely doubt that in 2007 anyone at CNN understands that they can link search keywords and phrases to CNN content with incredible impact.

Here is a screen shot of CNN's home page at the time they featured the reunion:

Click for full-size screen shot

Memo to CNN: what your TV techs type into the Chyron also belongs in your Best Bets database. If it's worth telling a story to millions of people on cable TV, it's worth helping your Web site visitors follow the same story online.