Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz

Because that’s really what it is. Somebody that was not fitted and loosing big (aka Western Cultures) has just started a new game of Monopoly, and you and I are not getting any of the money in this new game. Some may call it the end of capitalism, but I would go even further, this is the end of Darwinism (and a prove that Hegel was looking at the past, and not the future like Marx wanted to see in it).

There are unknown consequences for any deep interventionist economic policy. Anybody who says so it’s either a fool or badly naive. But worse of all, intervention of this kind defeats the system as we know it, where the fittest survive.

Without intervention this crisis would have been a chance for those without debt to compete, i.e. the very poor.  All that we will see is further foreign investment from large sovereign funds, and that hardly benefits the poorest nations in the World.  I am very disappointed by our politicians lack of pro-activity and foresight.

We live in a culture that encourages risk, and hence competition and growth. But now we have simply wiped out the consequences of failure. The failed specimens survive, unlike what Darwin taught us …

One of the most useful recent additions to my Gnome desktop has been Beagle, Nat’s personal desktop search daemon. I also discovered that in Ubuntu Feisty there is a deskbar that traces all the actions you do from your desktop, including your web activity and beagle searches. The more you use it, the more relevant it becomes since humans are repetitive.

Then, it happened: Tim pointed me this morning to Beagle++, a semantic desktop search engine based on Beagle, and that triggered the thought.

There ain’t a semantic web. No, you read me well, there won’t be one. It won’t be the Web 3.0. No. The next revolution will be on the OS, not on the web.

Web 2.0, user generated content, and data mashups present a taxonomy of data available from an almost infinite variety of sources. And that will continue to grow. But understanding the meaning of data is something that belongs to our brains. The ability of a server to interact with a human being is very limited and it would require a tremendous flow of data between us and many servers out there. Whereas our desktops currently track much more information which can be used to understand the meaning of for example, a search query.

Eventually, the desktop and the OS will capture our facial expressions, our mood, our feelings. Really, it’s not that hard.

What this will mean is that the applications that deliver the semantic web will actually reside on our desktops, not on the server. There won’t be a need for processing on the server. The semantic analysis will happen on the desktop.

When you really think about it, it sort of makes sense. People are reluctant to leave a behavioral trail on the web, let alone have things such as feelings captured on somebody’s database. You want to keep that privacy, and ensure that sort of data lives somewhere where we have much better control of it: our desktops.

Web 3.0 will be about client-side applications, powered on Javascript, Flash, Java Web Start, .NET Smart clients, etc. The current browsers will change to integrate better with the desktop. The OS will change to feed a lot of behavioural data to the desktop. The desktop will control our semantic experience. The OS will become a browser, and the browser will become an OS. The OS will become a search engine, and the search engine will be our OS.

Don’t believe me? Well, I am not asking you to do so … my good friends at MIT have already proven it:

• Re:Search, a search engine on past search results: http://people.csail.mit.edu/teevan/rse/
• Exhibit, a CSS+Javascript mashup technology with no server-side processing: http://simile.mit.edu/exhibit/
• The Universal Information Client, a semantic office/browser/…: http://haystack.csail.mit.edu/home.html

Who said Gnome wasn’t cool?

I hate information locking and since I am paying for virtual private hosting I thought I would move out of blogger. I also changed the layout significantly, and used a theme by Neil Merton.

I came some time ago across an interesting buzzword, mashboards, which is really starting to show that at the end of the day what really matters is systems integration. Where we had mashups in the B2C world, we now have mashboards in the B2B world.

Mashboards will become a flourishing area for SaaS. They target the SMB market and address exactly the customer pain. I can see how we’ll be hearing about SOA for web in no time, or web-driven business processes, … Let’s wait and see how the analysts call this one. For the time being I’ll call them mashboards.

Scarcity is a requirement for a good to be economic. However, http://www.onethousandpaintings.com/ offer something that could be offered by thousands of artists out there. So, it is not scarce. Or is it?

Painting a Miro or a Picasso is only within the painters’ own ability, and I don’t want to buy some cheap street plagiarism. But some people actually do, and these copied paintings sell on the streets. They don’t probably sell to me and you, but they sell to a few to which the good is scarce. To those few, the painting either has an economic value, or its utility is fully artistic and they assign zero value to money. Assuming they are not infinitely rich, because they could buy the original Miro or Picasso, it only leaves us with two options: either they are infinitely stupid not to assign value to money, or the copied painting truely has some economic value.

Corolary: don’t try to market to everybody, but create scarcity for a few to which the goods have economic value.

Not the first blog, and likely not the last one. Too many tasks, and short of time. Priorities change. And here I am on a new blog, tired of running my own. I don’t like the chores blogging, and I hate the whole ‘hoo, haa, I got trizillion hits’.

Anyway, to the point, the objective of this blog is to prepare short articles for my forthcoming book on performance analysis for web applications.

And who am I you may wonder? I usually get referred as being a ‘technical architect’, some call me a ‘performance architect’. On my title now it says ‘enterprise architect - operational engineering’. Ney. Software and systems are nowhere close to been at the level of maturity of engineering, including the ‘real’ architecture, so I would hardly classify myself as an ‘architect’ anyway. I like drawing and painting though, and I am pretty decent, I think.

Some people call me a technical troubleshooter. I like this description much better.

A highly technology focused critical entrepreneur, I have been building software and systems for the last 22 years, only the last 8 doing it full time. It all started with a good old Sinclair Spectrum48 my dad bought me when I was in my early teens. It had a built-in BASIC interpreter and 48k of memory. The key thing to do with it was to play. And games, well, were not that good to be honest. So I quickly got tired of playing, it was not creative, it was not very stimulating.

So I started doing PEEK and POKE. Wow, what a difference it made. Now the little computer had become creative. And I got hooked to it. I evolved to an x286, where I learnt FORTRAN, PASCAL, C and C++. I wrote graphic libraries, windowing toolkits, learnt OOP, all in the late 80s and beginning of the 90s. It was wonderful. There was always so much one could learn. So much I could learn. At the time I was at School in Madrid, Spain, studying ‘Caminos’, a hybrid between civil engineering, applied mathematics and solid mechanics. School was tough, mentally exhausting for 6 years, and I found on programming, along with playing music, a great way to relax with my creative side of the brain. And then one day, like everybody else, I got my degree. Faced with the duty of earning my bread, I started working for Andersen Consulting. I did not really like the idea of doing too much of ‘civil engineering’ for various reasons, so I decided to try with Andersen as I could have the chance to do some programming on a ‘business’ context.

I learned a lot during the time I stayed with Andersen Consulting, but I decided to take a break from corporate life, and go back to school to do something with scientific software. That was also fun. My time at MIT was fun. I enjoyed it a lot, and learned a lot by working on MIT’s microscopic traffic simulators (MITSIM and DynaMIT). I learned CORBA, PVM, EJBs, component-orientation, layered architectures, and real-time simulation.

But I happened to get my degree, and started working. Back to Andersen Consulting, later morphed into Accenture, I have worked over the last 6 years building high performing transactional web applications on J2EE for Financial Services clients. I have done a bit of everything over the course of the last 6 years, ranging from low level kernel programming to business development. On the side I have always maintained contact with the open source community, and I maintain (somehow) caffeine, a hosted Java Virtual Machine (JVM) for the .NET runtime.

Nowadays I live in Kent, UK with my wife Reeta and daughter Anaïs.