Life as it goes

Microsoft has done a good job in copy-pasting into Internet Explorer 7 many Firefox features, especially the long overdue tab browsing and zooming capabilities. The Mozilla foundation is now firing back with Firefox 2.0 released today.

I have preferred Firefox for the last year or so because of its ease of use in general. The ability to zoom was my favorite feature, the lack of which drove me away from Internet Explorer. IE7 is putting up a good battle, but Firefox 2 introduced a new feature -spell checker- that is likely to become my new favorite feature and help Firefox remain my default browser.
It feels good to have Microsoft on the defensive side of the browser market for once.

Every once and then we get so used to a given saying or tradition that we forget what they were supposed to mean in the first place. This is apparently the case of a political TV ad I saw this morning. It's run by Tom Kean Jr., state senator in New Jersey. He talks for long on why his opponent is totally bad and how himself (Tom Kean) is totally good. Then Mr. Kean ends his message with the canonical formula "I'm Tom Kean and I approve this message.". Is there any reason Mr. Kean thinks that a message in his own words and entirely presented by himself still needs his approval?

Milcom'06 is now over and we are back to work. Our presentation went well although we didn't have time to chat with other researchers after the talk. We were in a harry to catch bus and train back to NJ. I eventually missed the bus before getting another one to NYC and taking the path to Newark around midnight. Perfect excuse for coming in late this morning :)

A networked warfighter

I'm at the 25th military communication conference, proceeding at the Woodley park Marriott in Washington DC since Monday. The place looks packed with important looking military and civilian attendees. Important future partnerships, cooperative research works, and DoD contracts are certainly in play here.

I'm here with Dr. Swades De, but he is letting me present our work on Multi-Criteria Relaying in Multi-Hop Ad Hoc Networks Wednesday.

Parallel to the conference is a 3-day exhibition where engineering companies and defense contractors show-case their latest innovation in military communication. It seems all the big names are here, all vying to get attendees' attention to their cutting edge tactical and military communication equipments. Apparently no one wants to be left out. That's understandable; some defense contracts might just be at the corner. Who said protecting freedom cannot be a 'noble' task and a profitable business at the same time?

Everyday, on my subway commute to campus, I like to skim through a random book to see if I should devote more time to it later. This morning I picked up a book I bought nearly a year ago but never had time to read. The book is "Web Metric: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success", but it was not its subject that grabbed my attention.

The real eye-catcher was the title of the first chapter of book. It goes like this

"The Web is Great: Get Over it, Get On with it"

That surely is a wakeup call, not just about the web – I think the phrase is less pertinent today than it was in 2002 when the book was written, - but about every other ideas or enterprises in gestation. Often, we spend too much time contemplating how wonderful and successful an idea would be, so much so that we lose sight of the fact that the first requirement for the idea to be successful is that it be implemented.

Since the mid 90s, when the growth of the Web opened up a whole new realm of new opportunities, people of all sorts have conceived an undeniably large number of ideas. Some of those ideas led to startups, many of which survived and are now viable businesses. A few remarkable success stories even turned into huge corporations, the likes of Google, Dell, etc. However the largest part of ideas conceived never took the first step, that of turning into action. Granted, the majority of those aborted ideas were never supposed to lead to anything good, but certainly not all. So how many Google’s never got to the starting point?

I know I’ve had my fair share of "killer ideas" that never got to the starting point, and I know of friends who were even more prolific. They would have a thousands wonderful ideas per day. Unfortunately we spent all the time pondering the beauty and owe of those ideas. So if you have one of those "killer ideas" right now, remember "The idea is great: Get over it, get on with it."