I’ve been absent from the hallowed halls of LFI headquarters for the last week while I was recovering from an emergency extraction of all four of my wisdom teeth. While recouping, I spent a lot of time on the Internet reading news, catching up on television, and bolstering my photography knowledge. The nice part about all of this was that I was able to do it without sitting at my desk. Between my laptop and my iPhone (and with the help of my wireless network), I was able to have access to all the information and entertainment my little mind could hope for. What an amazing time to be alive, eh?

So here we are, less than four days away from the July 11th launch of Apple’s iPhone 3G, which promises to bring the web into our hands even faster. The simple fact of the matter is that the iPhone really changed my life. No, like REALLY changed my life. At parties I am able to look up answers to obscure questions that get dropped in conversation (Is that really a valid rule for calling shotgun???), I can actually do crossword puzzles now, I never miss an e-mail, and I am able to make good use of time by using Google’s tools for iPhone to digest the web when I have only minutes to spare. I can honestly say that my iPhone makes it easy to spend less and less time chained to my desk to keep up with e-mail, news, and other information. Put simply, the iPhone has made the Internet pervasive in mine and so many other people’s lives.

Chrysler’s announcement that they will offer optional in-car WiFi on all 2009 models is another sign that pervasive Internet is right over the horizon. Pervasive Internet… Think about that for a moment. The Internet, everywhere. Just providing web access to our information isn’t good enough yet. Web applications are going to get smarter about where we are and what we’re doing. Imagine GPSs that can sample driving speeds and in real time report over the Internet about traffic conditions on every road while other GPSs recommend alternative routes around congestion for drivers headed in that direction. Imagine being able to retrieve movies or music for your consuming pleasure in real time on your car stereo, your mobile phone, or even your wristwatch whenever the mood hits you! What if you were looking to meet someone in a crowded environment like a football stadium? Your mobile phones could help you find one another. Your car could schedule itself for maintenance because it’s able to check your personal calendar and make all the arrangements for you. Ultimately, information exchange benefits by gaining the new dimension of location with pervasive Internet access.

This is truly an exciting time to be someone who gets to work with these new technologies! Our client requests will grow beyond getting a brand message or functional application to the web. In the coming decade, we will have our clients ask us to create POP apps for their retail chains to alert customers to where stock is for their size/style preferences. In fact, we may start referring to “the web” as something from the “old days” of the Internet. The Internet will be far more than a place where pages are accessed. It is becoming media. It is becoming a service. It is becoming the greatest thing since sliced bread!

Join Jeremy Kolonay and Michael Wunsch as they discuss the technical implications of user-generated content campaigns.

 LeapCast LFI University Feb 8 2008: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Our schools are using abacuses to teach math and fountain pens to teach writing. My opening sentence is a gross exaggeration but the fact is most schools are using the tools of yesterday in order to teach the workforce of tomorrow. Specifically the way we teach higher mathematics is poor because the most useful tool ever invented for doing math is being almost completely ignored, Programming.

When I was in elementary school our computer class consisted of playing Oregon Trail and typing. By the time I got to high school they did offer a computer programming class as an elective. We did the basics, printing things to the screen, using control logic and loops, a great way to introduce somebody to computer programming. I consider that class to be a success but the entire methodology used to teach me mathematics in high school a failure. An intro to computer programming class such as the one I had in high school should have really been given to elementary school students. In high school where students are learning mathematics like algebra, geometry and trigonometry there is no excuse not to have a computer as a major part of that study. Specifically by writing programs that use the skills students are learning.

When you program on any non trivial problem you exercise your abstract thinking ability, your problem solving skills and have the opportunity to put mathematics that may otherwise seem useless, to action. You learn to develop methodologies to come up to solutions to problems. Geometry and trigonometry, 2D and 3D graphics offer a play ground where abstract problems can be visualized and there can be direct interaction. Algebra and pre-calculus are used all the time in non trivial problems, the concept of functions, recursion, set theory, algorithm development, all used when programming. The most important single benefit of programming for the math student is the application of his work to a problem who’s solution can be a lot more exciting then a number on a piece of paper.

Many students are using programmable calculators in the high schools but I feel even that is insufficient. If students were writing programs on desktop computers with an actual programming language that is used for more then just molding math then they could get the sense that they are learning a skill that may have use in their every day lives. Even if they don’t intend to be programmers they may have a web site in which they can use their new found programming skills to enhance their content.

Computers answer the question that is heard throughout high school math classes, “When will we ever user this stuff in the real world?”. Students are all too often expected to take it on faith that they will need math for some magical purpose later on in life. Many of them will not, there are numerous jobs some of which pay quite well in which knowing anything but basic arithmetic is not required. Many doctors and lawyers can probably go their whole careers without using any kind of higher mathematics and we generally consider those two professions as among the more educated amongst the population. The problem is of course it is not knowable in high school what career a student may end up perusing. All too often students in higher education do not peruse a degree in the field they really desire because they are afraid of the mathematics involved. I was one of those students who asked “when will I ever use this math in real life”. I wish now that I had seen that in the future I would need mathematics to do what I love doing. I paid for that lack of fore site in college where I had to play catch-up on the math front. I am lucky that I had enough background to get me though, I wonder how many students never even tried to peruse their dreams because lack of confidence in mathematics.

* Abacuses or abaci, I choice the less used abacuses because the word is Arabic and abaci is a Latin pluralisation of an Arabic word, see here.

Marketing people are horrible. Well, not all marketing people… spammers are though. I fight on a weekly and sometimes daily basis to reduce the amount of spam that we receive through our contact forms. We block IPs, catch certain words, and do various things to reduce the spam coming through the form — it’s an ongoing battle that has no end.

You know what’s worse than spammers? The people that click on the links in spam. Those are the people that keep the spammers coming back — if no one ever responded to spam, the spammers would surely stop spamming. but people keep clicking, and buying, and falling for scams. Why on earth would someone send thousands of dollars to some guy in nigeria that they have never met? Those people apparently have too much disposable income.

So I have a new idea to combat spam. If everyone participates, we can rid spam from the world forever. Really. Here’s the idea: anytime you receive spam, and are feeling like you might click on the link and purchase something, come fill out our contact form and we’ll sell you a website, or some SEO. If you feel like you’re about to go to the bank and get a cashiers check and postmark it for Nigeria, just send it to me. I won’t mind. If we all follow this simple plan, the spammers will stop spamming, and I’ll we’ll all be happy.

And we thank you for your support.

Did you know that the Internet is a series of tubes? Senator Stevens thinks so. It’s how the data moves around. Though tubes. Seriously.

Yahoo is building pipes. The pipes gather and filter data. Through pipes. Seriously. Sound familiar?

Yahoo’s pipes are a bit different from tubes though. First, it’s real. Second, smart people made it (as opposed to Mr. Tubes: Senator Stevens). The idea is that there are loads of data feeds (RSS feeds) out there carrying lots of information. The “lots of information” thing is the problem — there is too much information that we need to sort through and put together in meaningful ways.

Pipes is interesting in another way as well: it has an amazing interface. Imagine a data-driven Visio. You drag a data block in, set some parameters, link it to a filter block, and before you know it you’ve tied the iTunes latest releases of your favorite band to the corresponding YouTube videos and delivered the list to your favorite news reader.

The interface is slick, but it’s definitely technical and not for the un-savvy computer user. No one has yet to find a way to make RSS feeds more accessible, so it would be hard to expect a web application that organizes that data to be simplistic.

I wonder how Yahoo’s pipes will work when Senator Stevens’ Tubes get clogged. Maybe Google will release a tubes cleaning website. I think Drainle would be a catchy name, don’t you?

Let’s talk about AJAX. Not the detergent, although it does smell good. AJAX (in the Internet world) is a technology that allows a web browser to send and receive information to the web server without making the page you’re looking at refresh. That’s really all it is. I hear you saying “But what in the world does that mean?”

The idea is that if the page you’re viewing doesn’t refresh, and completely redraw itself a couple things can be accomplished:

1. Less information is transferred from the server. Browsers do a good job of caching things like images so that they don’t have to be downloaded again, but for every image on the page, the browser still has to ask the server if it has a newer copy. That’s a lot of talking back and forth, and it takes time.
2. The interface can be more responsive. If you’re viewing a long list of items, and you’re looking at the first page, when you click the next button your browser only has to load the next set of data — not all of the formatting, and images and what-not. Clicking on something doesn’t require everything to be reloaded again.
3. Money can be saved. (This is the part you business owners will like) Because less information is transferred overall, there will be lower bandwidth costs.

The concept behind AJAX has been around for a very long time. Swapping the processing of data from the server to the client and back again has been happening in cycles since the inception of the mainframe. AJAX in the form it is today has also been around quite some time. Around 1998 I built an application that used very similar ideas to get around having the page refresh, but in the past couple of years there has been a heavy focus by the web programming community to build code that does it in a very clean and efficient way.

As time passes AJAX will mature even further, and may become the core method in the way that browsers work, rather than simply one way of creating web sites.