I may be a bit late to the party but I was finally able to see the power of Twitter this afternoon.

I kept on getting an “Authentication failed” message when trying to log in to AIM. A few years ago I would not know what to do except ask my friends if they were having any trouble. Right now, I went to searched for “AIM” on Twitter and discovered that other people were having the same problem. Turns out it was a systematic problem and I wasn’t the only one affected. Being able to know more about this problem is a great benefit. There has been a lot of talk of the power of real time search and real time news but this was my first real glimpse into the power of Twitter.

My first action wasn’t to search for “AIM log in problem” on Google but to search for “AIM” on Twitter. It’s amazing to me that Twitter was able to replace a certain type of search. The majority of my searches will still be done on Google but it seems that for anything with a pulse – Twitter search is the way to go.

Twitter’s character limit is a great way to take advantage of the network effect. Having a low character limit encourages a lot more users to tweet thereby making Twitter feel alive and giving everyone else more information.

There have been numerous ideas of Twitter being used for market research and to get an early customer response – I can imagine that happening now and it’s mind blowing.

Image via Wikipedia

As expected, the article had it’s exaggerations (automatic cars driving at 250 miles per hour, inter-continental rockets, average work day of 4 hours ) but what struck me the most is how accurate the predictions about computers are:

The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance. Sensors in kitchen appliances, climatizing units, communicators, power supply and other household utilities warn the computer when the item is likely to fail. A repairman will show up even before any obvious breakdown occurs.

Computers also handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other utilities. Not every family has its private computer. Many families reserve time on a city or regional computer to serve their needs. The machine tallies up its own services and submits a bill, just as it does with other utilities.

Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees’ accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card’s number is fed into the store’s computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.

Computers not only keep track of money, they make spending it easier. TV-telephone shopping is common. To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center. You press another combination to zero in on the department and the merchandise in which you are interested. When you see what you want, you press a number that signifies “buy,” and the household computer takes over, places the order, notifies the store of the home address and subtracts the purchase price from your bank balance. Much of the family shopping is done this way. Instead of being jostled by crowds, shoppers electronically browse through the merchandise of any number of stores.

Compared to the rest of the predictions, this is amazingly close to what we currently have. There is still some emphasis on the server and treating computers as a utility that is not currently present but with the rise of Google Docs and other online tools, that is not such a distant notion.

This begs the question, why are the predictions so close when it comes to computers but so off when it comes to other technologies? More importantly, why does Moore’s Law apply to transistors but not to larger technologies? I have a few ideas:

• Infrastructure costs – it’s cheaper to replace modern day computers than modern day cars. Thus, innovation can happen at a faster pace as people replace their computers. Also, computers tend to work in a much more solitary environment than cars do; being able to drive a car 300 miles per hour is useless when the roads can’t take it and the laws prevent it.
• Experimentation – it’s easier for the average person to hack around on a computer than it is to hack around on a car. Thus, a lot more people are working on ideas and due to sheer numbers, more ideas are bound to stick.
• Brand new technologies breed creativity -
  

  Image via Wikipedia

  When computers were invented, no one knew what they were capable of and everyone had ideas as to how they could be used. Many people pursued their ideas and were able to create and improve on various technologies. Also, many teenagers and students were involved in embracing this new technology – and they didn’t know what was impossible so they reached for the stars.Now, everyone is so used to what cars are that people don’t even imagine what cars could be capable of. We may be approaching this same plateau with computers.

I’ll try to update these when I think of any more.

1. Use different passwords for different sites

You should have at least 3 different passwords:

1. E-mail Account

This account controls all your other accounts so protect it as much as you can. All other accounts can be accessed or reset if someone has access to your email.

2. Bank/Financial Accounts

These control your money so use a different password for these than for the rest of your accounts. In addition, you may want to keep your credit card account passwords separate from your bank accounts.

3. “Fun” Account

These may not be vital to your survival (unless you are a facebook addict) so a password compromise here may not affect you too much. In addition, these sites may not store your password as securely as the bank accounts so you don’t want this password being the same as the other accounts.

A good way to generate passwords is to contain some sort of “base” and add some prefixes or suffixes to it in order to come up with the password for the various sites. For example, I can have my base password be “orange”. For financial sites my password will be “orangeFIN22″, for my email it will be “orangeE33″, etc. Then you don’t have to remember an entirely different set of passwords yet they are distinct enough to avoid compromising all your accounts with a stolen password.

2. Don’t trust web sites that are able to send you your password over email

If a website is able to tell you what your password is, it means it is storing it in the database as either the password itself or through a transformation that is reversible (a becomes b, b becomes c, ..). This means that the site knows what your password is and can be easily accessed by employees of the site or anyone that has access to the database.

The proper way to handle user passwords is to hash it (one way map) immediately to some obfuscated characters and store those in the database along with an additional field that ensures each row is hashed differently. Then when a user logs in, the site will do this one way map and compare the result against the value in the database; omly if they match is the user logged in.

If you are interested in hashing, take a look at http://bretm.home.comcast.net/~bretm/hash/

How often do we look at the author before we read an article or blog post? And how does this impact the way we absorb it? Studies have been done[1] to show that the same words coming from two different people, one a professor and one an average Joe, are interpreted differently: the professor is trusted while the average Joe is not. This can be expanded to any source of information, anything from a book to a YouTube video. In the past, these sources of information were concentrated – not everyone could write a book, but now anyone can start a blog to spread their thoughts and opinions.

In such a world, it’s becoming increasingly important to come up with our own opinions and facts and applying a “trusted” filter may just be the shortcut we developed to not actually have to think about what we read. We need to be aware that knowing who the author is exposes the author’s biases but it also creates biases in the reader.

Try reading something before looking at who wrote it and see if changes how you read. If you can control yourself, don’t even look for the author after reading the piece.

[1] I’ll try to look these up and update the post.

A nice change of scenery for the long weekend. It’s amazing how quiet the nights are when you are not in the city.

Edit: I did a rough job changing the dates in the database so the posts should all have the actual post date now.

I can come up with a few good reasons to use brainteasers during an interview. One, you are able to determine how well the interviewee thinks as well as their problem solving ability. In addition, if the interviewee does end up getting a job offer, he or she may be more likely to accept it since it was a challenging interview and getting the job feels like an accomplishment – feels better when you have to earn something than when it falls into your lap. The fact that you even asked a brain teaser shows intelligence on your part and you want to attract people who want to work with other smart people, instead of being the big fish in a small pond.

Ideally, you would want to find some brainteasers that have multiple ways of solution so you are able to identify how each of the interviewees thinks but I think a variety of brain teasers can achieve the same effect. Below are few good questions/brainteasers I enjoy.

1. What was the last book you’ve read? What’s your favorite book? (Not a brainteaser but I believe a good question nonetheless)
2. You have a lighter and 2 ropes that are non-uniform. It takes a rope 1 hour to burn from one end to the other end. How do you measure 45 minutes?
3. You have 3 pairs of (x,y) points that determine a triangle. How can you determine if this triangle contains the origin? (http://projecteuler.net/)
4. Which is larger, 48736^95934 or 44390^96771? (http://projecteuler.net/)
5. How do you split a cake of nonuniform size between 2 people? Can you expand this to any number of people?

Feel free to comment or email me if you are unsure how to solve a particular problem.

In order to go into space we would need to have an advanced level of technology which could only be created through innovation. I am just worried that technological advances tend to be used as weapons first, and as humanity benefiting objects second. This may have been fine with the technology of old but we are approaching the level where a weapon can wipe us out. The non warlike use may not come to fruition if there will be no one left to develop it.

I just hope we realize that the next global war may be the last war we fight and that we need to control our competitive spirit. A quote that comes to mind is Albert Einstein: “I know not with what weapons World War Three will be fought, but World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones.” I’d just like to add that I’m not so sure there will even be a World War Four.