Author Archives: Jesse

Google is not God…

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…but sometimes we treat it (and the Internet that it searches) as a god. That’s the point I was trying to get across yesterday. (Thanks for the link, Dean.)

It’s easy to get addicted to the amazing breadth of knowledge that has been digitized, transmitted, and archived via the Internet. Every minute we spend on the ‘net, however, is one less minute we could spend with the master of the universe and of us. And as I’m sure many of you realize, we only get a limited supply of minutes, and there’s no refill.

I guess what I’m doing is echoing the wisdom of others, like Darren – make sure that every minute of your life, regardless of what you’re doing during that minute, is dedicated to Him.

Blog for God.

Is Google God?

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It’s a kind of creepy proposition, and for a Christian, one with profound [and eternal] implications that need to be taken seriously. Is the Internet displacing our worship? The question merits attention.

In the words of Alan Cohen, the Vice President of an emerging Wi-Fi hotspot provider:

If I can operate Google, I can find anything. And with wireless, it means I will be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is why I say that Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too.

Read the full article by New York Times writer Thomas L. Friedman here.

R.I.P., Tellme Extensions

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For a few years (an eternity in Internet time), a telecom company called Tellme hosted a free service called Extensions. By calling 1-800-555-TELL, you could access one of thousands of voice sites published by people. Anybody who was willing to learn VoiceXML could set up one of these voice services. They recognized the caller’s speech without training, and could read information using either a pre-recorded voice or TTS.

Alas, Extensions are no more. Although both 1-800-555-TELL and Tellme Studio still exist, there’s no way for the average developer to publicize their work. This has resulted in a lot of useful hotlines, games, and even audio blogs shutting down.

Tellme doesn’t disclose the magic numbers of call volume and service fees that would allow these people to publish again, but rumor has it that the company doesn’t respond to inquiries that estimate less than one million* calls per month. That excludes your humble blogger.

Rest in peace, Tellme Extensions. I’m hoping some web hosting provider takes over for you and offers VoiceXML hosting for the masses at affordable prices – there’s a void that needs to be filled.

* LINK TENDING 1/11 – Removed dead link.

Subpoena Searcher

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If you’re one of the American consumers that the RIAA has “declared war on,” you may want to visit this site by EFF. It will look up your name and see if it’s the target of a subpoena under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

I don’t condone peer-to-peer file trading, and I don’t practice it. But I feel that if a company is going to try and collect millions of dollars from people for being music fans, they should have a right to know that they’re being spied on.

Just another example of the ridiculousness of corporate abuse of copyright law.

(Link via Wired.)

The Future of Applications

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Today, most people are used to two forms of software programs – programs that run on the computer in front of you, and client-server programs, that also run on the computer in front of you, but talk to another program (usually) running on another computer.

Recent advances in many varied technologies, including XML, greater availability of Internet bandwidth, and the ever-increasing supply of quality open-source software from places like SourceForge and the Mozilla Foundation are slowly causing a profound change in the assumptions of software design.

The software of tomorrow will most likely be based on the combined effort of code running on many different machines. This is not like the grid computing architecture I blogged about on July 13th. The difference is that rather than many computers doing the same calculation on a large collection of data, each computer in distributed software applications provides a specific function that integrates into the larger application.

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