The entire set of videos can be found in my Vimeo account.

What are they and are they the same thing?

We need a couple of definitions.

Web applications.

A Web Application is a website that provides some sort of substantive functionality other than simply filtering and presenting information. Evernote is a fantastic web app that stores your notes on a server, and allows you to create, group, and annotate your notes. Some folks say that a web app makes it clear that there is an application at the other end of your browser, and not just a bunch of static data. This is admittedly a pretty soft definition, but it’s reasonable. Another way to look at it is that a web app provides what would otherwise be a desktop application, but makes it accessible from a server so that users do not have to install and maintain an application.

Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 refers to web development frameworks and tools that can be used to create highly responsive websites and web applications. AJAX does this, and the conical example people give is Google Maps. AJAX allows data to be retrieved asynchronously while a prior page is being displayed and manipulated by a user, and minimizes the amount of a web page that must be replaced with the next refresh.

A somewhat newer approach is embodied in Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight technologies; in these cases, a web app is sped up by running more of the application’s logic inside a browser plugin (Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight), rather than making the client machine (which runs the user’s browser) continuously talk to the web server. The overall challenge is to make web pages highly dynamic (meaning the data comes from a database and is not hard-coded in the web page) while giving the user response times that approach those of a desktop application running on a dedicated or near-dedicated machine. While this is intractable at this point, it’s a good thing to hold up as a goal.

The Semantic Web.

This term refers to a still emerging body of software tools whose overall goal is to automate the collection and integration of information gleaned from websites. The idea is to free the Google/Yahoo user from painfully interactive, highly repetitive keyword searches where we continue to hone our queries until we seem to be finding the right stuff.

Semantic Web technology includes namespaces, which try to put more smarts in websites by having data tagged with widely shared, standardized sets of tags. And things like XML Schema and XQuery can be employed to leverage namespace technology to support high-volume, set-oriented queries of data stored on web servers.

More soon…

I have a handful of domains that I have bought on the GoDaddy site.  They also host a few domains for me.  And I use one of their email accounts quite heavily.  Their servers are fast, their web mail interface is intuitive and visually pleasing, their rates are highly competitive, and their customer service is great.  I’ve never had any problem getting someone on the phone who wants to aggressively solve my problem.

That’s the good stuff.  This is the bad stuff: the website

Their retail website is (somewhat ironically) noisy, confusing, and tangled.  I’m surprised they don’t have something a lot better.  They should find the guy who made their mail/calendar pages.

I wonder if perhaps the reason their retail web pages are so noisy is so that you can’t easily distinguish useful information from the countless ads that appear on the web pages as you try to perform a simple transaction.  Maybe they want me to have to read their ads figuring that on the average, it will lead to more sales.

The real bad stuff: spam.

The problem, though – the real problem – is the spam.  Over the past 19 months, they have sent me 255 pieces of spam.  That’s almost one every other day.  Seriously.  They consist mostly of short term coupons that will get me a discount – if I act fast.

A handful of them are below.  (I won’t make you look at the noisy images and other text that comes with these tag lines.)

HOLIDAY SAVINGS are available at Go Daddy. SAVE 28%* — Four Days Only!

SAVE 30% on .COM, plus special savings on other favorite domains!

you have from Wednesday to Wednesday to SAVE 20% OFF your order of $50 or more!*

Exclusive offer from Go Daddy  |  Call us 24/7: 480-505-8821  |

2009 has been an amazing year for Go Daddy – and we couldn’t have done it without customers like you! To say thanks, we’re giving you 15% OFF your order of $40 or more* when you order before midnight (PT) on December 31, 2009.

Time is running out. Act now to get 20% OFF* your order of $75 or more. This special offer expires soon, so don’t wait – order today!

Never pay retail.

The messages come at such a high rate that I never read anything from Godaddy, and have missed meaningful messages about my account account, because they were sucked in by my spam folder.   I leave them there, and when I decide I want to buy something else from Godaddy, I look at the most recent couple of coupons.  If there isn’t one that will save me 15 or 30%, I wait to make my purchase.  Clearly, you should never, never pay GoDaddy’s full retail price.

It’s fun to see just how many pieces of spam they send me.  Hell, I counted them.

There is a lesson here.

We are so used to being saturated with ads that GoDaddy isn’t even concerned about pissing off their customers with the noisy, buy-something-else-now website and their nonstop stream of spam.  Is the Web being ruined?

But, when it comes to GoDaddy, in all honesty, their reliable servers and motivated service people make it all worthwhile.  Honest.

It’s easy, if you’re my age, to be very excited about the speed of the new generation of multi-core processors and about ever-increasing Internet bandwidth.  Hey, I started out writing programs on punch machines that spat out boxes of “IBM cards”.  A medium sized program might need a wheelbarrow move it around.  We ran our programs on computers that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if we were lucky, we could squeeze in a half dozen compile-and-executions a day.  There was, of course, no Internet, and dialup technology was brand new.

I’m maybe the zillionth guy to brag about his experience with walking-to-school-in-ten-feet-of-snow computing technology.  But here’s the subtlety.  Faster and faster processing and data movement is more than a convenience.  It does more than gradually increasing the ease of getting computing jobs done.

There’s always another hurdle.

That’s because every now and then things get fast enough that something that was totally intractable in the past is now quite doable.  Managing multimedia on the Web is one such thing.  It seems like we’re almost there.  Soon, we’ll be able to stream large videos over home Internet connections.  We’ll have “real” animation on websites, not just choppy Flash stuff.  We can already edit video on modest desktop machines.  We can install large scale server-based database management systems – and have them run just fine.  Soon, many folks believe, we’ll be able to edit huge pieces of media online and search large server-based media databases effectively.

But just as we pass one horizon, we see a new, higher one out ahead.  It’s tantalizing, thinking about the things we can’t do yet, things that we’re not completely sure we’ll ever be able to do.

Here’s one.  Rendering.

I teach 3D animation.  I like to experiment with new applications and introduce them to my students.  Lately, I’ve been looking at a rapidly growing class of photorealistic renderers that can turn vector-based 3D Google SketchUp models into images that look like photographs, and in fact, beautiful photographs.  These renderers simulate the complex movement of light as it reflects off of and refracts through objects like glass and car paint and swimming pools.

In past entries of this blog, I’ve written about the explosion of animation tools and the the teaching of animation.  Desktop animation applications do tend to demand multi-core processors, several gigabytes of memory, and reasonably high end video cards.  But machines with such components are now cranked out routinely by Apple.  PCs intended for game playing make excellent home and small office animation engines.

Except for rendering.  It’s that process that takes twenty or thirty frames per second of animation and cranks out video that looks super-real.  That’s the bottleneck.  I teach Maya.  My students often find that their two minute videos can take hours or days to render.  Two things in particular can cause render times to explode.  Particle dynamics, used to simulate things like fire, is one.  The other is rendering.  Simulating light and its movements is computationally intense.

I use a product called Maxwell as a plugin to Sketchup and Maya.  One beautiful frame – and remember, that covers maybe a twentieth of a second of video – can take an hour on my several-core Apple iMac.

Imagine the day when it takes fractions of a second.

This is an update on Mozy.

Customer Service:

First of all, they have really ramped up their customer support.  My emails have been answered with phone calls.  Polite people who know what they are doing have talked to me on the phone and patiently figured out what was wrong – and then seen the job through to the end.

It works:

I have had to use Mozy, for real.  I have paid accounts with Mozy that cover a total of five machines (two windows, three macs), and one of them, a Windows 7 machine, retched and curled up a few nights ago.  I spent many hours trying to fix it, and finally went to my Mozy account.  My (huge) directory popped up in the Mozy client program in a few moments, and within just a few minutes, I had downloaded and restored what I needed, and I was up and running.

Still behaving oddly on macs:

I am still seeing some funkiness on my macs.  There are three problems:

1. The status window that supposedly displays the current status of a backup will sometimes stay at zero for a full day and then seemingly do the entire upload in a few moments.

2. It is common for uploads to take a full day or two, when the same volume of uploading from a windows machine will take perhaps a couple of hours.

3. The Mozy client generally reports a volume of uploaded files in a random fashion, saying I have upload 10 MB when I have uploaded a GB, and the like.

But – as painstaking as it is, Mozy is working on my macs now.

The new web and Mozy:

This is indeed the way I think backups should be done, offsite and automatically.  Many of us would rather run web apps then install cranky, bloated apps on our machines.  And we would like to be relieved of having to maintain, configure, and run backups – and check them all the time to see if they really worked.

Thanks, Mozy.

Here’s the reason: it has a lot to do with speed.

There’s a debate that has gone on in the computing world for the past few decades.  Will the cost of hardware ever plummet to virtually nothing?  Will the speed and capacity of memory and disks ever reach effective infinity?  Will the bandwidth of the Internet ever rise to the point where the cost of a computer is negligible for the average educated person?  Will the speed of computers and communication reach a point where the average educated person has no need for any more improvements?

Research sages have always shaken their heads and said no, this will never happen.  We will always find ways to use better and better technology.  And in fact, we will always demand cheaper and bigger and faster technology.  Remember, that a couple of decades ago, folks thought we would soon have no need for large server-based database management systems with their complex, clever software that optimizes the use of precious main memory – because memory would be basically free.  That has not happened.  What we do have are databases that are huge and getting bigger every day.  No matter how they grow, only a time fraction of them fit in main memory.

We have proved ourselves proficient at absorbing any technological advances that come along.

Here’s the salient fact: 3D animation will go from the desktop to the web app.

This includes Internet download speed.  Even as bandwidth increases, we are constantly warned that the saturation point will be hit – and that Internet brownouts are just around the corner.  But for those among us who are digital optimists, it seems that a technological milestone is about to be reached: we will soon be able to embed full fledged 3D animations in webpages, and users will download them in a blink of an eye.  Everyday machines will have the memory and video cards to easily drive them. Three color, 2D Flash movies that serve only as window dressing or to draw a quick laugh, will no longer be the limit of online animations.

Yes, Web 3.0 applications of the near future will contain meaningful videos, ones that convey real information.  They will provide technical training and abstract education.  They will be interactive, too, rendered in real time – and not simply downloaded as compressed video.

So, programmers of the future will be called upon to deliver web apps that present not just images and sound and video – but sophisticated 3D animation as well.

In short, it does not work – and I would strongly advise against buying it.

I reported in my last blog posting that my (paid) account on two Windows 7 machines was now working, after I had spent many hours playing with it. But I have to take that back now. It no longer works.

I have another (paid) account for two Snow Leopard machines, and it is a horrific failure on those.

Here are some thoughts on it, from the perspective of what can go wrong with a web app.

Server-based bugs.

This can be very frustrating – bugs that appear to be on the server side of the application, making it impossible for the user to fix things from their end. I have tried hard to experiment with every possible setting or piece of data that I can control from my end. This has been an exhaustive and exhausting process. I have done this sort of tinkering with many applications.

But unlike with the vast majority of web apps I have run, there seems to be nothing I can do to make Mozy work.

Widely-varying temporal behavior.

When you start Mozy up, it begins a long process of scanning the client machine’s drive and organizing the files it wants to upload. I assume it is also processing the files of mine that it has upstream. It gives some feedback as it moves from stage, but for me, at least, it simply spins forever. It seems to be working, but many days can go by, and it’s up to you to decide when to give up and stop it. And only very rarely does it actually upload any files.

Not knowing how much time to give it, and all the while letting it eat up cycles and memory, is more than frustrating. This application does more harm than good when it comes to managing your computer.

Unstable client-server communication.

The Mozy client-side program will sometimes, after minutes or hours or days of churning away, suddenly return an error message that says it could not communicate with the Mozy server.

Irrelevant help advice.

This is not a problem specific to web apps, but I figured I would mention it anyway.

I spent a lot of time pawing through the Mozy documentation, as well as Googling to see what other users are experiencing. It seems clear that I am not alone in my evaluation of Mozy. But I found nothing that appears to be useful for helping to get this app running properly.

A sucker.

I feel like a real chump for buying two paid accounts (each supposedly backing up two machines). Because I am an academic (professor of Computer Science), I will continue to monkey with it. That’s just how I am.

But the Mozy folks should be ashamed of themselves. A backup utility that is at best highly unpredictable is worthless.

One of the more popular offsite backup services is Mozy. I have two accounts, with each one supporting two computers. One on account I have two Windows 7 machines, and on the other, two Snow Leopard machines. This sort of application is becoming the method of choice for protecting files from loss.

But Mozy is an interesting example of technology that isn’t quite there yet.

A trait of new technology in general.

We do this a lot, excitedly jumping into emerging technology, embracing it, and putting up with its “tinker-with-me-nonstop” funkiness.

The Mozy backup service: the idea.

The idea behind Mozy is that you create backup sets and a schedule of when you want your offsite backup folders to be updated. You can, in principle, have your documents, mail, and other important files backed up late at night when your machine is idle.

The Mozy backup service: the reality.

But right now, I am on a Snow Leopard machine on which Mozy has been “Scanning for files” for many, many hours. It says that 0% percent have been prepared and 0% percent have been transferred. Reinstalling, including getting rid of all of Mozy’s support files and starting from scratch, does not fix the problem. Neither does rebooting or cursing.

Mozy likes to behave differently on my other Mac. It seems to scan okay, but then hangs up when it is time to start uploading. Right now, it’s been hung for several hours. In perhaps another several hours, it will stop and do one of two things: give me an error message that says that the connection with the Mozy server was cut, or tell me that my files have been backed up – which of course will not be true.

Yes, Mozy will actually tell me that the last backup failed, and at the same time tell me that all my files are backed up. When I go to the Mozy server to check things out, it turns out that my files have not been backed up for weeks.

On my two Windows machines, Mozy has yet another behavioral pattern. It actually works, as advertised. But this is only because I have spent many hours with it. And it is still not at a state where it can be left alone to do its thing, and I mess with it almost every day.

Welcome to the new Web.

The situation with Mozy and my machines is representative of how many new, Web 2.0 applications perform. To get things going and to keep them going, you have to either have an infinite amount of futzing time or you’d better be a programmer. Or both.

Mozy does indeed give specific error messages. They are numbered and if you look in their Help file, there are very understandable explanations of what the numbers mean. It’s just that the error messages returned don’t seem to have anything to do with what is happening.

There is a log file, too, with lots written in it. But the stuff in there seems to have nothing to do with what’s going wrong, either.

So that’s the lesson of the emerging Web 2.0 world. You are going to be more intimately involved with the web apps you use than you would imagine in advance, especially given the hype and promises made by vendors.

More on this soon…

One of my motivations for looking at vision problems has to do with developing technology that can be used to aid people with limited vision make full use of the Web.

Distorted vision.

This time, I’d like to look at an issue that is specific to people with vision problems that cause angular distortion, as opposed to vision that is very unfocused or opaque. This was my problem. Before I had cornea transplants, my vision was perfectly clear and somewhat unfocused; the dominant symptom was that the world around me was fragmented into overlapping, broken images. People who have had laser surgery to fixed their nearsightedness, but where too much of the cornea was shaved off, can have similar symptoms.

Why are the corneas so critical to vision? The corneas, which are the clear outer surface of the eye, prefocus light for the lens. If the corneas don’t do their job right, the lenses cannot do their job.

It’s called Keratoconus.

My corneas thinned as I aged, until they were so thin they lost their structural integrity. If you look directly into the eyes of a person, you could consider the top-to-bottom axis to be “u” and the side-to-side axis to be “v”. The front-to-back axis could be consider “w”. Imagine examining someone’s corneas, in particular, looking up and down the u axis, and right and left across the v axis. If that person has normal corneas, the corneas have a smooth, spherical slope into the w axis. My disease caused the slope of my corneas to vary significantly at various points across both the u and v axis. This caused light going through my corneas to be refracted at widely different angles. This created a sort of kaleidoscope effect.

The challenge for someone with kaleidoscope vision is to extract an accurate mental image based on your shattered view of the world. This disease, by the way, is called Keratoconus, which is basically Latin for “cone-shaped corneas”. The name comes from one of the primary symptoms used to make a diagnosis: super-thin corneas tend to get pushed outward by the center of the eyeball, turning the cornea from a basketball to a football (or cone) shape.

The parallel between Keratoconus and 3D model deformation.

I teach an introduction to 3D animation class, and years ago, I noticed that some of the “deformer” effects available in Autodesk Maya, (the gold standard in 3D animation) could be used to simulate the distortions caused by my eye disease. As part of my research at my university, I’ve been experimenting with using deformation effects available in Maya to compensate for the distortion caused by Keratoconus.

A couple of examples.

Below are two sets of images. The two with red characters on a white background contain the integer 7, showing a common effect of keratoconus: multiple, overlapping images. The two with yellow characters on black backgrounds are the word “cow”, showing another common sort of distortion; in particular, one shows a horizontal distortion, and the other, a vertical distortion.

Note: You may have to click on the icons below to download the actual images.

In the next posting of this blog, I will describe some of the deformation effects in Maya, and how they can be used to actually compensate for the problem caused by Keratoconus.

One thing we have discussed are the “mega apps” used by video, audio, and animation professionals.

These applications are highly sophisticated in their capabilities, vastly huge in the size of their interfaces, and because of these two things, it is very, very difficult to learn to use them by experimentation. You have to be trained, and professionals spend years learning to use them properly and creatively. These applications can be viewed as the ultimate challenge for the next generation of web application development. Can media and animation applications be deployed as web applications that would actually perform well enough? It would be a great relief to many artists and media professionals to not have to install and maintain their mega apps on their desktop machines.

But now, let’s look at what makes these applications so intimidating. Consider five questions that relate to complex applications.

1. 1. What does the application do?

How long it takes to answer this question and how much specialized terminology is sprinkled throughout the answer are very telling. Can you say what a 3D application does? How would you explain it to a non-animation professional?

1. 2. What does the GUI look like to the user?

The depth of this answer – in a literal sense – is also very telling. Mega apps have deeply layered interfaces, and at any given time, only a fraction of their capabilities are visible. Learning to peel back the layers and master these applications can be extremely frustrating and typically takes professional training itself.

1. 3. What algorithms are used internally by the application?

Animation, special effects, video editing, and other media applications do in a number of difficult-to-learn steps things that could take days or weeks or months to do manually. Figuring out how the application gets its job done and how that relates to the tasks a media professional wishes to carry out – that is what separates gifted artists from gifted artists who also have a gift for software.

1. 4. What is the process for using the application?

A typical mega application is so complex that there is no way that its two-dimensional interface on a single bit mapped display can walk the user through the suggested processes for using it. And, there is a creative element that is discovered in real time by the artist, anyway.

1. 5. What is the application’s role in media workflow?

In many media environments, like animation, a wide variety of mega apps must be used in a intricate, iterative, and ever-changing workflow. New apps come along all the time, old ones are extended and reengineered, and specialized products that hook up various mega apps into cohesive workflows are becoming a huge business in themselves.

So, what’s the lesson?

If you want to get a feeling for just how high the bar has been set for the next generation of web apps, think about your favorite desktop mega app (or the downsized, but still sophisticated version or competing product you might be using), and think about these five questions. Now think about the web applications you actually use. Note taking applications? List making applications? Mailers? Messaging apps? See how far we are from making the new web truly compete with the desktop world? Are we really going to switch to net computers that contain only highly limited operating systems and access applications only over the web?

Hmm.