This video of Amory Lovings at TED gives hope about the future use of oil. The speech is targeted at the US oil politics and the automotive industry and contains several innovative thoughts worth listening.

I bought the Logitech Ultra Vision webcam a month or so ago. The Windows XP/Vista installation was painless and took 2 minutes. But who’s using Windows these days?

Getting an image from it in Linux was quite a pain. It didn’t work out of the box. No plug’n play. Nothing. Just a black screen worth 70 € of hardware. Grrr….

But here’s the recipe how I got it to work in Ubuntu Linux 7.10. This doesn’t mean that it will work for you, too.
First I installed the uvc webcam driver. Learn more about it on http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/.

sudo apt-get install subversion
svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk tmp-uvc
cd tmp-uvc
make
sudo make install

Now you should have the driver installed. Better than nothing.
To get the viewer that can also take pictures and avis, try

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-devwget http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca50x/Investigation/uvc/luvcview-20070512.tar.gz
tar zxvf luvcview-20070512.tar.gz
cd luvcview-20070512
make
sudo make install

You should visit http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html for more information about luvcview. If you have done everything right so far, you can start luvcview with this command:

luvcview -s 640x480

I got the best image result by simply pushing the “Reset all to default” button in the middle of the screen.
And now, have some fun…

I read an article on cnet about a chat bot called ‘CyberLover’ that collects personal data in russian chat rooms. A chat bot is a piece of software that tries to behave like a real person participating in a chat. Normally conversations with these types of bots are quite boring. You can try out one specialized on science  here. There are quite a few bots out there and even Microsoft made it into the headlines with their latest creation.

But CyberLover seems to be very successful. I haven’t seen it in action but the article describes it like this:
It attracts visitors in dating chat rooms and lures them into private conversations where it creates reports of all the data it collects about it’s victim – including shared web cam images and other personal data.

This bot opens  a new door to automated social hacking attack or automated identity theft. And best of all, it has passed the Turing test.

The idea of the Turing test is to test the quality of an A.I. The setting is quite easy. One real person has to chat with a machine and another real person via some text channel. After the two conversations, the person has to distinguish between the machine and the other real person. If he can’t, then the machine passed the test to demonstrate intelligence.

After reading the article about the bot and it’s success one big question raised in my head:
Did the machine really pass the Turing test or did it’s victims fail?

Or maybe the technological singularity is coming…

If found this video is remake of the widely known “shift happens” video. The data visualization is better and it’s slower and better to follow.

It’s impressive every time I watch it. Earth and global politics in 10 years will be quite different from what we know today. The question is, what will be yours and mine part in the change?

Our world is heading into an ecological disaster and finally it’s not to the governments to change laws in order to stop this from happening – it’s completely our own responsibility. Everyone of us has to expend an effort and change his behavior. I’m glad there is no doubt anymore that the greenhouse effect is man-made and something has to be done.

So let’s start. But what can I change? I’m a senior IT professional like many of you are. Is there anything I can do? And is it even possible to make a profit from it?

Yes, it is! Do what you have been tought in university!

All we have to do is make computers think less. This means to simply optimize your code. We life in a time where hardware is so cheap and powerful that we usually don’t need to think in detail about the performance of the code.

Let’s have a look at an example:
If we write an enterprise application that performs poorly and uses 75% of your CPU’s processing power. The usual thing that happens first all around the world if the application scales to a bigger usergroup is that the tech staff buys a new server and clusters it to handle the load. In many cases they also buy Server running as a load balancer to balance the requests between the two machines. If you have a look at the current specifications of smaller servers. They start with a 350 Watt power adapter. To calculate the energy costs of this example, I take this formula:

(for one server!)

Because you now have to servers to handle the load, we need to double this amount of work.

This is the same amount of energy you need to run your 1000W microwave oven 16.8 hours every day. This is much energy we waste just because our example code performs bad. I read the 1kWh is equal to 1.5L (Liter) of gas. So here’s the equivalent of gas we waste if our engine has an average efficiency of 25%:

Or 2755.75 L every year.

That’s like doing a 125 km drive every day with an average European car and that’s of CO2 every day or 6.4t CO2 a year. If it’s possible to optimize the code to run on one machine, then we could save these fumes and could save the costs for the two servers, the triple maintenance and the energy.

And we have millions of applications like that distributed around the world.

Think about it. Save money! Produce greener code.
Thank you.