Author: JP

I’ve written about them before. Solanaceae.

One family. Containing many of the genera I love, and some I still love but no longer partake of.

Solanum. The potato, the tomato and the eggplant.

Capsicum. The chili, the bell pepper.

Physalis. The tomatillo, the Cape gooseberry, the Chinese lantern.

Nicotiana. The tobacco plant.

The dhatura. The mandragora. And of course the original “deadly” nightshade, the atropa belladonna.

An incredible family, full of flavour, taste, adventure.

I was reminded about them while reading this in the New Yorker yesterday; thank you Lauren Collins, thank you New Yorker, for not hiding your light under a paywall bushel. [An aside: I am so hooked on capsaicin I probably get an endorphin rush just reading that article].

If you’re serious about chillies, you should read Amal Naj’s Peppers. It is the book on the subject; everything else is a jalapeno to his bhut jolokia.

And if you’re not serious about chillies, but like to dabble, here are ten tips:

• 1. Stay fresh. Most of the flavour I really enjoy is to be found in fresh chillies.
• 2. If you can’t stay fresh, stay close to fresh. Freshly crushed dried red chillies can be amazing. But only when freshly crushed. Within a week the magic’s gone.
• 3. If you can’t stay close to fresh, go whole. Dried whole chillies are a whole different ball game. Very versatile, you can put them in anything. Cook them in dry dishes and wet. Use them as garnish. Drop them into drinks like fresh buttermilk. Have them all by themselves.
• 4. If you must go powdered and can’t go fresh, go Japanese. Look for the right togarashi.
• 5. Quality, not quantity. Infinitesimal slivers of a “big” habanero or a high-end Scotch bonnet can release more oomph than you think. Practise cutting rings as thin as you can make it. Collect the seeds separately. Use them to make fresh powders.
• 6. Catalyse and enhance. Learn about using ginger, garlic, cumin, coriander, turmeric as accents on the chillies. My anchor spice is the chillie, and I build flavour around it.
• 7. Work on the secret stuff. Introduce asafoetida and tamarind, especially when you can get them fresh. Make a concentrated solution, literally a few thimbles full. And then use them to announce the chillies.
• 8. Know your limits and those of your guests. Study the Scoville index. Make sure you understand it’s a log scale. Most people who “like” chillies are those who have graduated from bell pepper to jalapeno. They don’t know about ear-popping. Some may have meadered a little further up the scale, perhaps all the way to birdseye. But that means nothing in heat terms. Most people bail out at the high end of habanero or Scotch bonnet. This is serious stuff, and you need to be careful with it. For most things I stop there, and don’t bother serving anything hotter to my friends. Even if they insist they can have hotter stuff. Leave the Nagas, the Bhuts and the Scorpions to the specialists. If you need gloves to handle the chillies, you probably don’t want to put them inside you. Not unless you’re seasoned, really seasoned.
• 9. Use vegetable oils to help bring out the flavour. If you don’t want to use oil, use soy sauce. Something liquid that frees the flavour up as you cook. Even for stir-fry.
• 10. Give people an escape route. Keep some plain dal and some dahi, maybe in raita form, on the side. Both dal and dahi can have chillies, so if you mean to give people an escape then keep both varieties, with chillies and without.

More later. I’m hungry and have a plane to catch.

You may have noticed that I travel quite a bit. Which probably gives someone in at least two organisations a mild headache. Only one of those two organisations is Google.

Every time I travel, I have reason to smile. Often. I’ve come to the conclusion that a sense of humour is one of the most important things you need if you’re a frequent traveller. I’ve tried everything else: staring quietly while smoke comes out of your ears; pretending that the only language you speak is an offshoot of Finno-Ugric; practising hyperselective deafness and blindness; following instructions to the letter. It doesn’t matter, somewhere between entering one airport and exiting another, your patience will be tried. Extensively.

So I have learnt to detach myself from myself as I go through the shenanigans of air travel, concentrating on observing everything around me as dispassionately as possible. What Bruce Schneier called “security theatre” I try and segment into Comedies, Tragedies and Histories; I have reserved the term Romances for now.

I try and spot Six Impossible Things before Check-in. I know, that’s cheating. It used to be hard when all you could do was queue at a counter. Now, with the web and the phone and the kiosk, even the impossible is commonplace, so much to observe, so much to smile at. How many times will I be asked the same question? How many ways can I get to “It is not possible to check you in at this time. Please take your documents with you and leave forthwith”.

When I’m the other side of the Comedies, I concentrate on other puzzles. For example, I analyse all the different ways I could get from my erstwhile location to the place I need to be at. Then I rank them in terms of the quality of the obstacle course so presented. Will they make me go downstairs so that they can make me go back upstairs somewhere else? Will they lull me into complacency by giving me a gate a stone’s throw away, only to bring forward boarding by forty minutes because we were going to be bused to the aircraft? That in turn makes me check the weather. If there’s blue sky visible and no hint of rain whatsoever, I discount the likelihood of buses. After all, what’s the point of sending passengers on to buses if you can’t watch them do their drowned-rat-with-gangantuan-hand-luggage act? Buses go with rain.

Once I get on the plane, I can play more sophisticated games. In how many ways can I be interrupted while trying to do something where interruption is not particularly enjoyable?

Which reminds me. The democratisation of the dev. Ah yes.

One of the things I do when I’m travelling is to observe and understand the DNA of the communications that take place. The terms and jargon that are the making of air travel. Take airport codes for example. IATA codes dating back to the 1930s are still in common use, paying no attention to political and geographical shifts in the eight decades that have passed since. So Mumbai is BOM, Chennai is MAA and Kolkata CCU. [Calcutta is where I was born, where I grew up. Kolkata is where I go when I visit].

I smile when I see them. I smile when I land in Beijing and see PEK. I smile broadly when I land in St Petersburg and see LED; I haven’t been to Nizhny Novgorod, but if I had I would have smiled at GOJ. All this gave me the incentive to look into the history of the codes. Last week I flew to and from EWR. Why EWR for Newark? Because the Navy reserved everything starting with N and the FCC wanted W and K to be similarly protected, poor Newark had nowhere else to go but EWR. And when I learnt that the mayhem actually had rules (like “the first and second letter or the second and third letter of an airport may not be duplicated with less than 200 nautical miles separation”).

I found it hard to believe that these codes were set in stone in the 1930s and left unchanged. So I looked into it, and I wasn’t surprised to see that there had been attempts to modernise the codes. I went and read up on the four-character ICAO codes and realised that there was a treasure trove of comedy there, to be saved for a rainy day when I would be taken by bus to the plane and off it. A part of me is still trying to figure out how ICAO told the Scots and the Welsh that their airports had the prefix EG (for England). O frabjous day! Callooh callay!

Poor Edinburgh. Someone thought that EDI wasn’t clear enough so it needed to be called EGPH. Uggh.

Why do these things happen? Because people need a common language, common labels, to be able to communicate with each other, to know when and how they mean the same thing or different things. You say tomahto and I say tomayto.

Take something as trivial as train timetables. I’m led to believe that there was no concept of global standard time until train timetables came along. Time was something that was local. The sun rose. The sun set. Stuff happened in between. Stuff happened betwixt. And that’s all she wrote.

Then people wanted to know what time the Stockton train was to arrive in Darlington. And they realised that this needed Stockton and Darlington to have a common view of time, a common frame of reference.

Time is a label. Which is why you should never be able to patent or copyright Tuesday. [Otherwise there will be a whole new meaning to Cat Stevens’ wonderful Tuesday’s Dead]. [If you really want to laugh, take a look at the conspiracy theorist conversations analysing the lyrics here].

Location is also a label. When and where are questions one should be able to answer outside copyright. [Which is why a part of me curls up and dies when I see monopolies in geographical information].

Life is full of labels. Labels that don’t just tell you when and where, but what as well. Part numbers. Chemical element names. Compound names. Generic drug names. The classifications of flora and fauna. SKUs.

Labels.

There’s one label more important than all the others.

Who. Yes, identity.

As the Cluetrain guys said, markets are conversations. Conversations that take place because of the relationships that exist. Conversations that may, and often do, lead to transactions.

Relationship before conversation before transaction.

If conversations are what make markets happen, then they need to be understood consistently by participants. You say tomahto….

I live in hope for a world where many of these conversations have most of their frictions and latencies taken away from them, so I can devote myself to growing chillies while printing new books and restoring old ones, and spending time with anyone who wants to discover the joy of reading.

For this world to exist, a number of things that are closely held today will have to be held more openly tomorrow:

• time, date and place labels
• identity information
• labels like part numbers and skus and bus names and hospital names and disease names and plant names and generic medicine names and doctor’s surgery addresses and primary care trust locations
• combinations of these that plot frequency, so people can inspect the incidence of a plant (or a disease) in a neighbourhood (or primary care trust)

Note I never mentioned detailed individual transaction-level information. That’s a different class of information, and something I will speak about some other time.

A lot of this is created using public funds. Some of it may be privately held, but is nevertheless likely to be regulated at industry level. Years ago, in a discussion between Doc Searls and Don Marti over at the Linux Journal, I remember them talking about information wanting to be $5.99. Not free, but close enough to free for someone to be able to recoup justifiable costs.

When I hear the term Open Data, this is what I think of. That one day soon, much of this will be available to the newly democratised devs, allowing them to perform magic. They have access to low-cost compute and storage and bandwidth already; the barriers to design and code expertise are reducing, as they move into the streams and filters and drains world; new barriers can and will emerge, such is the nature of the beast. But.

If the names and labels and frames of reference get freed up as well, time to value will shorten at a rate of knots. And adoption will grow as people see the value flow to them. And God will be in His Heaven and All will be Well with the World.

Utopia? Of course. Always. Particularly when the future’s here.

In this context, read what Nigel Shadbolt had to say today, both in the Times as well as on his ODI Blog. Go attend the ODI Summit taking place this week. [Sadly I can’t, I am committed to be at the Web Summit in Dublin, another don’t miss event]. Read the coverage on “smart disclosure” in Mashable earlier today.

One way or the other,  inform yourself as to what is happening in the open data space. Public open data. Private open data. Smart disclosure. Whatever.

Inform yourself. Because that data is the DNA that makes the dev even more democratised today. Big data is big. But. Big data is not that big if it has no frame of reference. A frame of reference that comes from open.

 

 

 

Science museums have always entranced me. I must have been around eight or nine when I was first taken to the Birla Industrial and Technological Museum in Calcutta, a wonderful institution. I went there regularly, sometimes out of sheer boredom. Not far from there was an ice rink. For a pittance I could walk around the museum in torrid heat, and then walk over to cool off in the ice rink. I never skated. I just luxuriated in the coolth for a while and then went home.

When I went there, I had no idea of the history of the place. For that I needed Wikipedia, from which I learnt that the site and historical mansion used to belong to the Tagores, and that it was bought from the Tagore family by GD Birla with the intention of making it his family home, and that he gave it to Jawaharlal Nehru to use for the advancement of science in India. I’m grateful to all of them.

It was a magical place. Magical, despite the muddy morass we often had to tramp through to get from exhibit to exhibit. Magical, despite the intense heat of every room, cubicle, bus. Yes, bus. Some of the exhibits were in buses, and they’d be sent around the country as-is. You had to make sure that the exhibits you wanted to see were “in station” at the time. Crowds and crowds of children all the time, laughing and yelling. But then that was true of every school, every neighbourhood, every maidan, so who cared?

We laughed and yelled some of the time, like when the Hall of Mirrors was in residence. But most of the time we were quiet. Spellbound.

I remember the first time I saw a room where everything worked via motion sensors. Doors opened as you approached them. Lights and fans came on as if by magic, some by sensing your presence, some requiring you to wave, some needing to be clapped into action.

I remember all that. Intensely. Even though it must have been 1967 or 1968.

In those days what mattered was access to viewing. When you have nothing else, then just being able to look is a luxury. Most of the time we looked at print and photo exhibits; occasionally we watched some film. Sometimes, if we were really lucky, we looked at physical objects, often built to smaller-than-life scale in order to conserve scarce capital. The motion-sensor room I described above was one of those “real” things, tiny, probably smaller than most urban bathrooms. But it felt huge. Because it lit your imagination.

I left India in 1980. At the time, I knew precisely one person who had a computer, Anu Thakur. He had a Commodore Pet, one of the earliest ones, he bought it in 1977, and he allowed me to touch it and feel it. He even taught me how to play Star Trek on it in 1978. He was an incredible guy, even had a Martin guitar and knew how to play flamenco style. I don’t know if he is still alive; if any of you who reads this knows him or his family, please pass on my regards.

The India I left in 1980 was one where you waited three years for a telephone line. A relatively thick line that came into the house and had a black Bakelite device with a rotary dial at the end of it. Remember them?

I couldn’t have studied Computer Science when I left India; the discipline had not yet made it on to institutional offers.

During the 1980s, the world of computing was in turmoil, with everything changing at a rate of knots. In the space of a decade, we learnt that “shifting tin” wasn’t the way forward, that hardware margins were history; that software and services, free at the time, were to be charged for; that character-based “dumb” terminals were to be replaced by the soon-to-be-ubiquitous graphical-user-interface PCs; that proprietary architectures were going to be supplanted by somewhat more open ones; that traditional “CODASYL” databases were soon to be replaced by relational ones. In the midst of all this, IBM and AT&T were considered too big to be allowed to continue the way they were, and faced significant antitrust moves against them. So IBM gave away the PC Operating System space (and found a grateful recipient in Microsoft) and AT&T freed up Unix.

That in turn helped the Indian software/services industry go ballistic; until then the barriers to entry to proprietary architectures were vast and unforgiving.

If all this wasn’t enough, during that same decade, the internet was quietly leaving defence and academia and proto-utopia to enter the mainstream, the beginnings of the web were being formed, and the first commercially usable transportable phones were showing up.

The 1980s were a decade of immense transition, setting the scene for what we see today. By the end of the decade the stirrings of democratisation were in place: the PC, the phone, Unix, and a move from hardware-only to hardware-and-software-and-services.More and more people had access to CPU cycles, to storage and to bandwidth and connectivity, a trend that continues to this date.

There was something else happening. In the past, telecommunications and computing were separate disciplines; and even within computing there were clear demarcations between general-purpose computing and embedded systems. As recently as a decade ago, when people were left with the “problem” of preparing for “Year 2000”, these were separate departments with independent plans.

All that was also changing. First, in the early 1990s, the distinction between computing and telephony began to blur; and within a decade, the separation between general-purpose computing and embedded systems became unsustainable.

[Of course, Shirky’s Law continued to show its power, and institutions continued to fight for the reason they came into being. But it’s a losing battle. And now it’s over, except for those who will not see.]

Today the democratisation of the dev is nearly complete. Linux, Apache. Mozilla, Android. Arduino, Raspberry Pi. Java, Ruby, Sinatra. Hadoop. GitHub. Storm, Cassandra, Kafka. Tessel.io, Pinocc.io. RepRap. These are all just examples, I could have filled this page if I wanted to. The individual names do not matter. What matters is the principle, that barriers to entry have come down sharply, and now anyone can develop software. For any market. Working on (almost) any device. With access to low cost tin and wire and pipe. And distribution.

Which is why I am so very excited by the announcement of the Salesforce $1m hackathon.

By now most of you know I work for Salesforce. It’s an amazing company, and one of the most amazing things about it is the platform at its core: what it is, what it represents; the sheer scale of the developer community around it; the number of apps built by customers; the size and vibrancy of the partner and ISV community; the smarts at the heart of its multitenant architecture; the daily transaction volume. Every way I look at it, the platform is something else. Incredible.

Now, with the hackathon coming up, I can see that many many more people will learn more about it and empower themselves to change the world where it means something to them. For nonprofits. In health, education and welfare. Affecting industry and logistics and distribution. In retailing, sales and marketing. Across the board.

Because it is now possible. More posts to follow as the stories develop.

 

 

[Note: This is a follow-up to my post yesterday on silos and streams and flows.]

Walmart changed how people thought about “bricks and mortar” retailing by connecting all their operating units together; their ability to track inventory and sales was remarkable as a result; in some ways, they had begun the journey of converting their stocks into flows, long before anyone else in their sector thought about it.

Amazon changed how people thought about “clicks” retailing by extending the edge of their distribution network to the home, with consequent effects on warehousing and inventory management. One book to one address rather than books in volume to a distribution outlet when stocks dropped below preset reorder levels.

Facebook came along and changed how people thought about all this by making the individual the centre of the distribution network, with recommendations streaming from individuals and streaming to individuals.

I’ve just chosen a few well-known examples; in truth, as part of the welter of innovation let loose by digital infrastructure, thousands of people have been transforming the way things are conceived, made, bought, sold, disposed of, and they continue to do so every day.

When you can connect things up, you can also find new ways of combining the things that are connected.

• Every time you use a map on a phone you’re combining your location with information about that location, usually drawn from some remote service via the public internet, the cloud. [An aside. None of this would be possible except for the internet, GPS and mobile telephony. Three technologies with deep military origins that were later made available to non-military people worldwide].
• The whole idea behind mash-ups is that you create value by connecting two things that were historically disparate in the analog world, and are now combinable in a digital world. Maps were just one of the earliest examples.
• One way of looking at augmented reality is that you’re taking something physical and overlaying it with something digital, drawn from the cloud.
• Many of the big data examples I see are really about rows and not columns; rows of data taken from different datasets and combined using a data element common to the different datasets.
• Even 3D printing is about combining materials in a standardised way to create standard components.

Talking about 3D printing: I had the opportunity to muse about how it will change the world of manufacturing, and wrote a brief essay for Scientific American on it. Read it and let me know what you think.

Which reminds me. I continue to be amazed at daily events in the world of 3D printing. It was only a matter of time before printing pizza was going to be possible; food printing is serious business now. I love the idea of using waste materials to make 3D printers. And then augmenting that idea by using recycled plastic to create the raw material for printing is pure genius. Building a “body on a chip” in order to test vaccines gets very interesting; maybe someday soon we will print simple physical avatars of ourselves just to test for allergies.

When things are connected, and especially when the connected things are expressible in mathematical form, combining is an essential component of the creative process.

Exciting times. I continue to be glad to be alive today. Despite so many things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silos. They’ve been around for years, millennia even; evidence of silos can be found in Tel Staf, c.5200-4700 BC. Storehouses of valuable produce, protecting and enhancing that value, connected into the supply and demand rituals of local markets.

 

 

They’re still around, but now they’re crumbling and decaying, with rats fighting over the grain that left’s behind. Largely empty, forgotten and forlorn, serving very little purpose other than to signal their obsolescence.

And I’m not just talking about grain silos.

 

There was a time when the post, the telegraph and the telephone formed separate and successful silos. Each to its own. And as they grew up, helped by the protection provided them through monopoly structures, they lived happily together in an even bigger silo called telecommunications.

There was a time when the computer and its peripherals and software and services formed separate and successful silos, each to its own. And they too grew up in holy and proprietary ways, making sure that customers had splendid isolation in the name of choice. And all was well.

 

There was a time when there were even more silos. If your computer wasn’t “general purpose” then you were allowed to build yourself a whole other silo, called embedded systems. And everyone stayed within their silos and honed their skills and built up their markets and never talked to anyone else.

Unlike grain silos, you couldn’t just transport information from one silo to another that easily; it required specialist skills and a lot of time and a lot of expense. Which kept some people very happy and a lot of people very poor. Maybe not that different from grain silos after all.

 

Those fairy tales are over. Now we have convergence. Actually we’ve had it for decades, but it’s all becoming more affordable and more visible and more useful.

We have a number of cats at home. Three, to be precise. They’re wonderful creatures.

Two of them, Mudpie and Midnight, are sisters. They’ve been with us for over a decade; we took them over from friends who were emigrating, so they’re really old.

 

So we wanted to have a younger one as well, to prepare for days to come we’d rather not think about.

Tiger. He was great. But one day he went missing, never to be seen again.

Some time later Lily joined our household.

She’s still in charge. Has us eating out of her hand, and she even keeps Mudpie and Midnight in check. Occasionally bullies them, until they realise they’re wiser than she is.

Convergence has affected our cats’ lives. They’ve been chipped. Now they and only they can use the cat flaps to enter our house. No more late-night raids from the neighbouring marauders, unwelcome visitors for nigh on a decade. And if I wanted to, I could set different rules for each cat. Even track where each cat was, and where it went the previous night. All our cats are outdoor cats, still keeping their mouser instincts honed, often bringing in rabbits and birds as well. Most of the time it’s okay; occasionally, when said mouse or rabbit or bird is alive, unharmed and running/flying/hopping freely around in the house, it makes for an interesting half an hour or so.

Lily, the youngest, is part of the iPad generation:

Yes, as the saying goes, there’s an app for that. You can get apps for kittens to play with.

Actually it’s not just kittens. There’s an app for everything.

And everything is connected.

All the time.

Everywhere.

[Pedants will write in and tell me that everyone is not connected, that there is a digital divide, that there are many parts of the world where this is just not true. And I will agree with them. And yet.  Please just go to Mumbai or Beijing or Nairobi and look around you and realise the future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.]

This interconnectedness and smart-phone-ness and app-ness of everyone and everything is blurring the lines between telecoms and general-purpose IT and embedded systems, bringing us a world of opportunity we could only dream of not that long ago.

Soon we will be able to say “If the doorbell rings and if the only person in the house is my aged hard-of-hearing aunt, then please switch on the light near the flat-screen TV in the living room because she doesn’t like using the computer to watch television, she’s old fashioned that way; but before you do that check if the person ringing the doorbell is that pesky brush salesman; if it is he, then don’t disturb my aunt, just let the Alsatian next door know that his favourite trouser leg, still attached to its human owner, is back in town.”

We live in exciting times. Silos have broken down.

Everything that’s connected is capable of sharing streams of information about state and status, accompanied by rich metadata to provide context. We’ve been able to do all this before, but not for everything and not instantly.

The instant bit changes everything. There are so many things we do that are based on information not being real-time. We rely on historical stocks of information because we’ve not been able to rely on anything else.

Like censuses. Remember them? As we’ve moved from millions of people to billions of people, they’ve become harder to do, more expensive, less accurate and very very time-consuming….. as long as the way we did them was the time-honoured way.

But some time-honoured ways are out of time and no longer deserving of honour. At a level of abstraction, the LIBOR scandal is a classic consequence of using a “stocks” process rather than a “flows” process.

There are LIBORs everywhere. The way we value things; the way we count things; the way we sound out opinions; the way we measure things ….. we’ve had to put up with taking samples of information and then extrapolating the samples according to some convention or another. Much of the information we see and use from traditional sources can be characterised as low-frequency snapshots of discrete samples aggregated and represented according to some agreed convention or other.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Now terms like real-time and all and continuous can be used without sounding like hyperbole. No more samples, no more extrapolation, no more conventional representations. Just the facts.

A whole new way of looking at information.  Information that emanates from everything and everyone, in a world where everything and everyone can “publish” and “subscribe”.

Information that comes as a live, “real-time” stream, as a series of streams; streams that get aggregated, filtered, personalised; streams that get aggregated, trended, analysed and projected; streams that help tell the past, the present and the future of  many small yet important things. Things that affect our health, our education, our welfare.

The technology architectures that have emerged over the past decade or so are built for this new paradigm, one of streams and filters and drains; one where there is no longer any difference between telecoms and IT and embedded systems; one where information comes from subscribing to flows and gaining insights from those flows, using personally chosen filters to make every firehose look like a set of comprehensible capillaries.

New paradigms come with new problems. The debates we continue to have about identity and intellectual property and the internet.

Subsidiary debates about privacy and confidentiality and sharing and anonymity and censorship and all the regulation those things bring with them, often creating new forms of trade protectionism as barriers get drawn on political lines. These debates have been going on for some time now. And in a John Lennon kind of way, life has carried on while we’ve been busy making noise about all this.

And life will carry on.

This new interconnected always-on publish-subscribe streams-and-filters-and-drains world is on us.

The silo was the symbol of stocks. The stream is the symbol of flows.

The stream is where some people live, and where more join every day. Tools continue to emerge, tools that help us harness the stream and navigate it. Tools to provide context; tools to filter; tools to visualise; to personalise; to aggregate; to imbue with enhanced meaning; to analyse; to project, forwards and backwards in time; to move, in geography and in culture.

The stream is here to stay. And I for one am excited.