Author: rakesh

This is interesting. One of my cousins in India has just started using Ofoto’s UK site to upload photographs of their newborn daughter (lotta babies born in the past 2 months!). My first surprise was that I had to create a new account on the Ofoto.co.uk site. Hmm. I can type pretty fast and it’s not above my threshold of pain to create a new account, I guess, so OK, fine, I create an Ofoto UK account, wondering all the while why I can’t just use my Ofoto U.S. account. Now I can view the photographs, great.

So today, I decided I wanted to order a bunch of photographs from the Ofoto site and I wondered to myself, “Surely they have at least their back-end infrastructure setup so that the photographs will get shipped from their U.S. office rather than their UK office.” I’m probably wrong, though I’m not sure. It looks like the photos are going to get printed in the UK and then mailed from there — at least that’s what I’m left to conclude after the magnitude of the shipping charge I’m paying.

What are the implications of this kind of weak international infrastructure (besides the fact that it’s annoying to me as a user :))? It seems obvious to me that we live in an increasingly globally mobile society and that this is the type of user an Internet-based site should be supporting. It’s specifically within the grasp of any company, with technology and the Internet, to solve problems like these. Not doing so is bad operations, architecture and design.

Another perspective on this issue is that societies and communities that cross national borders are able to develop much more quickly today than ever before because of the Internet. Folks from all over the world have access to reams of data from other countries of the world. I can surf the website of Japanese companies, buy electronics from Hong Kong (like lik-sang), exchange e-mails with bloggers in the UK, etc. Look at how engadget has launched sites in Japanese, Chinese and Spanish. So even leaving aside people/communities/societies that are moving around, there are tons of people that are interacting across borders and societies and communities coming out of it. At the same time, I’ll temper these comments by saying that it is not like we live in a borderless world. There are still lots of things that stymie these cross-border societies and communities (language, probably a fair bit of culture, legal code, tarriffs). But the trend is definitely one that involves more global mobility and more cross-border communities and societies.

Two final observations:

1) technology companies should do what they can to cater to, where appropriate (like the ofoto / kodak gallery example above!), globalization trends because they are, I believe, up-and-to-the-right trends.

2) there will be exponential growth in technologies and services around globalization that will drive these trends and will be driven by these trends.

I came across the Koffka ring and the Checkershadow optical illusions earlier this morning. Very cool! Here’s the checkershadow in-lined:

(the square labelled ‘A’ and the square labelled ‘B’ are the same color!)

Seeing these two optical illusions reminded me of the rotating snakes optical illusions that I think were slashdotted a long time ago. He’s got a few new ones up that are as interesting and along similar lines as the original.

So I just tried Google Talk on a quick chat with Chris Pirillo and I have one quick comment: the simplicity reminds me of UNIX’s ntalk application. The good old days. 🙂

Something that I’d love to see in Google Desktop/Sidebar is a much better version of the Windows “My recent documents” feature. I’d like to be able to browse documents that I’ve opened in the past much like I can browse through my browser history. Maybe an application specific browser would be useful too (to effectively replace the MRU feature in Microsoft Word and Excel and promote it up a higher level in the OS). I remember reading that David Gelernter was developing some new paradigm for file management that could replace the traditional folder/sub-folder model. Maybe that’s something that could be implemented in Google Desktop? I’m sure Google has a name internally for things that they can’t do because they don’t control the operating system (like they can’t build searchability into the filesystem, for example — they have to instead crawl the filesystem) — “OS blocked”? Maybe Google would be “OS blocked” from creating something like this. It seems like a simple place though where they could do some innovation and make a visible impact on people’s user experience with PCs (and control more of the user experience). It’s a step away from their focus on search, but in many cases, I want to browse, not search. And the traditional folder/sub-folder model sucks when it comes to browsing because it requires stuff to be organized in the first place.

Related thought: It would be cool if my laptop had a GPS sensor built-in so I could not only browse by date/time, but also by geography, ie “I’d like to see all the webpages and documents that looked at or worked on while I was in San Jose last week.” That kind of association is more natural and seamless than folder or date/time.

I have to get in on the commentary because I think the idea of Google buying Skype is ridiculous. This article was posted on slashdot earlier this morning and the idea of Google buying Skype have been floating around in the blogosphere for a little bit now. I really doubt this happening. I’m inclined to agree with Dave that Google’s new IM package will be an eventual Skype killer (or force them to adopt an open standard rather than a proprietary one).

There’s a deep cultural difference between Skype and Google Talk, a difference that happens to be Google Talk’s only strong selling point right now: Google Talk is based on an open standard (Jabber). Skype is proprietary. Oil and water. Google’s not buying Skype. (There is one other thing that Google Talk has: it’s so freaking clean compared to it’s advertisement laden competitors — but I’m not sure how much that’s going to do to get people to switch).

Rob Pegoraro’s column in this weekends Washington Post was a general buyer’s guide to digital cameras and I liked the the no-nonsense advice he gave out until I read this:

That, in turn, undercuts one of the primary advantages of digital cameras — the ability to take one to as many places as possible. That’s also why I don’t recommend D-SLRs — “digital single-lens reflex” models that, like their film equivalents, let you frame a shot through the same lens used by the image sensor. They take extremely sharp pictures and do so extremely quickly, but they also cost far more and are hardly smaller than film SLRs. Hold off on any D-SLR shopping until you find you’re making photography a serious hobby.

I disagree here. The benefit of the extremely fast photo taking seriously outweighs the “downsides” of extra disk space. You don’t need to have photography as a serious hobby to get big benefits from a digital SLR. Fast photo taking is one of those things that’s hard to understand the benefit of until you actually have it. And I’m generally a photo geek and a technology geek so you might discount my opinion here, but my wife who is neither LOVES our Canon EOS digital, she absolutely swears by it. With a young baby (they never sit still!) or kids that play sports or perform in school plays or WHATEVER, the quick response time from a camera fundamentally changes the quality of the shots that you get — not in terms of pixel quality, but in terms of capturing what you intended to capture and not an image 1-2 seconds later.

Yes, the bulkiness is a disadvantage but it’s outweighed (no pun intended) by the shift in the results you get from digital SLRs.

Now if only the makers of smaller digital cameras (the stuff that Rob exclusively advocates) could put the storage buffers and whatever else gives digital SLRs a quicker response time on digital SLRs into the next generation of Digital Elphs, we’d have the best of both worlds.

Back in 1997, while I was still in college, I took a class on the history of the Palestinians and I was part of a subset of the class that went on a 2 week study tour to the Palestinian territories in Israel. Most of us stayed near Jerusalem and during our stay, we traveled to Ramallah, Bethlehem, the Gaza strip, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. Organized by student Allison Fine, the trip included private meetings between our group and key Palestinian leaders and intellectuals like Sari Nuseibeh and Haider Abdul Shafi.

I shot about 30 rolls of 36-exposure black and white film on the trip, probably the most significant photography project that I have ever undertaken. I got back to school and processed all of the film myself and put together quite an exhibit of phtoographs. I’ve always meant to put the photographs online because I’m really proud of the photographs I took on that trip but never got around to it until now. I hope to put up more of my photographs here along with captions and more information, but for now, I’ve uploaded a selection of photographs from the Palestinian Study Tour. All of the B&W’s were taken by me. Color photographs were taken by Adam Reiser. Adam, where are you these days?

In Chicago right now for a friend’s wedding and I went to buy them a gift from TheHoneymoon and I was surprised to find out that the site didn’t work properly in Firefox. All of the checkout pages had the action buttons “confirm order” and “place order” covered up by the footer of the page. TheHoneymoon.com, fix your website dudes!