"Tinku's Traffic Tips"

Is This a Can of Sardines, Or a Motorized Rickshaw? - WSJ.com

Wow -- that was a long winter :-) But something had to jolt me out of hibernation I guess, and this article was it. If you have never been to India, this article may have you wondering how 12 children can fit in the cabin of a tiny 3-wheeler vehicle. But those wiser souls who have experienced the "auto" first hand will certainly be nodding in sage understanding when I say "about time!".
Autorickshaws are the lifeblood of the Indian commuter, and the bane of the Indian pedestrian. These little yellow vehicles can dodge and weave through traffic with the best of the bikes, and with little regard for life and limb of either pedestrians or occupants. They are fast, cheap, noisy and the best way to get from A to B in a hurry. Still, this article had me in splits. Only in India would the traffic education for drivers involve a comic book with the titular character of "Tinku".. why is it that all wisdom invariably emanates from the mouth of a smart-alecky kid? Still, if this can ultimately result in safer driving and the loss of fewer lives, I'm all for it. However, given current population, traffic and mentalities, I think enforcement and voluntary adoption of such rules is going to be a challenge. The summary says it all ..

Riding in an autorickshaw is a cheap thrill. The vehicle has a roof but no doors, and drivers use a squeezable horn to honk as they weave in and out of traffic, ignoring lane dividers. Dirt and fumes are constant travel companions.
For many passengers, however, that doesn't sound so bad when "the alternative is hanging out of a bus," says S.V. Subramanyam, a doctor in Hyderabad. "So we prefer this," he said recently, as he squeezed into an autorickshaw with a half-dozen other people.

The more things change .....

Continuous Partial Attention

WikiHome - JotSpot Wiki (continuouspartialattention)

I was just browsing my feeds (on Google Reader -- what a blessing, and possibly a hidden curse) and came across an interesting article that I was going to scan-and-delete. But what then caught my eye was the term "continuous partial attention" with a link to the above article. What a fascinating description of something that I find I engage in a lot without being aware of it. From the article,

To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention -- CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.

With work tasks, home chores, social obligations and family interactions to deal with -- not to mention the scanning of blogs and reading of newspapers and articles to "stay current", I find that I am sometimes at risk for losing depth of perspective to breadth of awareness. I always thought of this as a time-management issue, but I think CPA hits the nail on the head by viewing it as an attention-management challenge. I especially liked the perspective on how CPA can be a good or bad thing.

Like so many things, in small doses, continuous partial attention can be a very functional behavior. However, in large doses, it contributes to a stressful lifestyle, to operating in crisis management mode, and to a compromised ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively. In a 24/7, always-on world, continuous partial attention used as our dominant attention mode contributes to a feeling of overwhelm, over-stimulation and to a sense of being unfulfilled. We are so accessible, we're inaccessible. The latest, greatest powerful technologies have contributed to our feeling increasingly powerless.

Why is this interesting? Well, there is a ton of technology out there that helps us manage our interests, manage our schedules, manage our relationships (birthday reminders anyone?) and manage our finances. But managing our attention .. that is a nuanced challenge that is something that we all can empathize with -- from a busy career professional to a working mom to a frazzled teenager. Something to think about ..

The joys of VMWare & Fusion

Thank goodness for the web and the millions of avid souls who spend the time and effort to document their experiences with new technologies, software installations and configuration, and actively participate in user forums online to share their knowledge with others!!

Anyone who follows my Twitter knows that I am an avid VMWare user. It started at work where I needed to have a Linux installation (specifically Ubuntu) in order to leverage usbnet to do some phone-related programming. Dual-boot was an option but was getting increasing frustrating from a multi-tasking perspective (given I had a single desktop at that time and was tied to using Outlook for email and other Msft utilities for other tasks). There are always workarounds, but at some point it was time to try something else.

And that's when I learnt about VMWare - the free player and the rich appliance marketplace -- that enables different "guest OS" on a given "host" machine with a different OS. In short order, I had a Ubuntu VM (appliance) running in my Win XP environment and I was a convert. Since then I have discovered so many of the benefits of virtualization -- not the least of which is the ability to suspend a VM on one machine, transfer the virtual disk to a different host (VM player) and resuscitate it there. It's been a godsend in terms of sharing completely-configured environments with remote collaborators -- no wasted time in getting different team members to wrestle with setup individually, and the ability to then debug others' problems using their own environment within your player, effectively replicating the exact scenario they encountered.

Since then I also have taken the leap to moving away from Windows and to the Mac OS at home -- VMWare Fusion was one of the main reasons why. And today, thanks to the support system on the web, I now have the best of all worlds. A Mac OSX desktop with a Fusion install that has a Windows XP VM (so we can sustain our legacy data, such as from Microsoft Quicken) and a Ubuntu VM (so I can write and test code, and also to replicate or migrate debug sessions from work). Amazing! And I couldn't have done it without the numerous forums out there.. so thanks to all those folks, and hopefully I can give something back on occasion by using this blog to document useful articles or experiences that I had in this context.

To kick things off, for the Mac-newbie (such as moi) here is a good resource on getting Ubuntu up and running successfully in VMWare Fusion (for OS X).

Looking forward ..

Well, January is almost at and end, and as usual a lot of time was spent this month on familiar themes. Completing reviews for the year past, scanning the blogs, news and tradeshow buzz to identify trends and opportunities, and planning for the year ahead. As a researcher, I am often faced with the same conundrum -- do we look at technologies in the short-term with an eye on "now" or do we extrapolate out to a few years and take an educated risk on what long-term projects will become valuable then. The mobile and wireless applications market is exploding, as there is increased focus on social media, information retrieval, rich interactive media experiences and broadband communications.
This year, I'm hoping to pay more attention to a small subset of these issues with particular emphasis on how privacy and context can help create more intuitive and usable experiences for mobile users. While these issues have immediate relevance, if the history of research in these areas is any proof, we still have a lot to learn, explore and innovate in the long-term.

An interesting Grand Central experience

On a whim, last year I finally signed up for Grand Central -- a beta service currently owned by Google that allows you to sign up for a centralized phone number. You can choose an area code and phone number (based on availability) and associate this with any "real" phone of your choosing. For instance, you can associate the GC number with your home number by default, and change it to refer to your mobile number when you travel. Calls made to the GC number are automatically routed to the associated real number.

Why is this useful? Well, GC allows online voice mail, ability to enforce features like call block etc., and in a sense puts YOU in charge of controlling access to the "real" phone number that you want to protect from spammers. It also doesn't hurt that I can give out this single number to friends, family or businesses and have it map to any one of multiple numbers (e.g., between myself and my spouse) and remain valid even if I change locations, carriers or technologies on my "real" phones.

I'd completely forgotten about my GC relay till today when I got a call from the Chicago Public School district on my home phone. That was odd. So, as is my wont, I let it go to voicemail - and was then distinctly puzzled to note that it did not activate either the answering machine on my home phone or the networked voice mail provided by our phone company. But I got a notification on my email account about a new voicemail on Grand Central. Interesting fact #1. The interesting fact #2 was that the message was not really meant for me. It was a public message directed at all residents of Chicago that normally correspond to the area code I chose for my GC number.

And that got me thinking. While single-sign-on, consolidated identities and virtual numbers all make sense in our efforts to exert more control over access to our time and data, can they in fact
make life more complicated? How many Chicago residents did NOT receive the public service message because they chose to use a virtual number with a different area code? That is not so far-fetched as it sounds -- a number of folks I know tend to chose the area code associated with their alumnus simply as a sentimental gesture. And how many folks like me would have chosen that area code for their virtual number, but found the message useless given their real location? To add to that, users must now try to guess the difference between calls that were directed at the real phone and those that were relayed by the virtual number. If the purpose of mechanisms like GC are to support this idea of "faceted identity", how well do they actually perform in practice?

This year, one of my hopes is to look at the issue of faceted identity a little closely. I first came across the term in danah boyd's thesis and this year, I'm seeing a lot of interest in Open ID and data portability that address the issue from a different angle. As more social networks proliferate and more people live their lives online, issues of identity and privacy are going to come to the fore. Scott McNealy is famous for saying "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it". I'd like to think differently. Recent incidents involving Facebook's Beacon and Google Reader's auto-notification of shared items show that users may put their data online but they still want control over who sees it and the context in which this data is shared.

All in all, 2008 is starting out to be an interesting year..

All's quiet on the western front..

It's been a really busy few weeks for me recently. I am just about to embark on a long-overdue vacation to India to see family after a very long time. I am quite excited by this, and just bubbling over with a sense of anticipation. In a sometimes chaotic world, we all need time to reset and recharge for the new year. As always, my timing is just a little off. Motorola is going through a transition in leadership and I will miss out on all the holiday cheer and water-cooler conversations about the upcoming year. I look forward to coming back revitalized and ready to pick up the mantle on new challenges and opportunities that we may face in 2008.

I can't believe 2007 is nearly over. So much one would like to do -- so little time. I expect the trip to India sparks new ideas and energize me as it always does. I've loaded up my camera, memory cards galore (not to mention a portable disk) and am looking to document life on the Indian subcontinent in all its technicolor, emerging-markets, motherhood-and-chaat glory. With six inches of snow currently piled on my doorstep, the warm muggy Indian weather will be an interesting change.

So, Happy Holidays to all -- and hope to continue posting (if sporadically) from India.

Is everything made in China?

I recently put myself on the waiting list for a "Chumby". For those unfamiliar with this, it is an alarm clock sized gadget that has built-in WiFi, an accelerometer, pressure sensors and a reasonably-sized touch-screen color display which serves as an ambient information interface. Think of it as a dedicated screen for widgets -- where the widgets can be picked up from a growing list developed by fellow Chumby enthusiasts. And (yes!!!) they also have a development environment. The device goes on open sale soon, but the initial run was open for purchase-by-invite only.

So, when I opened up my gmail to see the coveted invite, it took me next to no time to hit the button to confirm the order (I picked the black version). And today, I went online to track the shipment -- and was instantly envious. Here it is -- the route being taken by my precious Chumby en route to Chicago, Illinois.
1. Origin Scan at : Shenzhen, China (surprise, surprise)
2. Next Stop: Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong
3. Then on to: Anchorage, Alaska
4. Currently in transit to: Louisville, Kentucky.

Yes, even before I get to see it, the Chumby has seen more of the world in a few days than I will. I especially like the hop through Alaska. On the good side, Louisville is only a few hours away so once the package gets there, I should have it within the day. Can't wait.