It is this time of the year again. First, before I share my predictions for 2007, let us look at how well I did for my 2006 predictions.

• Microsoft Flight Simulator X comes close but this prediction didn’t come true because optical disks are not doing so well and the video game market is disappointing: 100 GB of storage on a single optical disk will be common by the end of 2006. Amazing video games using upward of 30 GB will come on the market and impress reviewers. I imagine a flight simulator containing the complete maps of the entire planet including every single house.
• Mostly true, see for example Google Analytics. Google will still be the most interesting player by the end of 2006. They will leverage their massive storage capacities to do amazing Data Mining and they will know, better than anyone else, what the pulse of the planet is. Google will start analysis social trends and will get into decision support.
• Not true. Generally speaking, year 2006 will be the year Data Mining becomes mainstream. Data warehousing will increasingly be a big deal for large corporations and we will see shortages in Data Engineering.
• I say this one came true. Thanks in part to fancy open source content management software, eLearning will grow in most universities. By the end of 2006, we won’t be asking “why eLearning” but “how eLearning”.
• Clearly, the Netflix contest and the surge of interest for collaborative filtering makes this one true. eCommerce will all be about personalization and Data Mining, and much less about work flow and web site design.

So, that’s 3 true predictions and 2 failed predictions. That’s slightly better than my 50% rate of last year. Let’s be daring for 2007:

• We will see something like “Google Games”.
• We will see something like “Google Slides/PowerPoint”. Google will offer a full office suite on the Web and it will be pretty good for 80% of the office tasks.
• Governments will take tougher measures to stop spam and other illegal online behavior. We will see a lot more cybercops around.
• Television will become more irrelevant than ever.
• Apple will continue to grow and gain mindshare.
• Since all machines will be connected all the time on the Web, OS-agnostic Web-based office software will be a big deal by the end of 2007 and it will start to make a dent in Microsoft’s monopoly to the point where Microsoft will have to acknowledge it and start reacting, in some way. We will come to see this as the end of an era: the operating system and office software will become secondary. The Open Document Format will gain some real mindshare, mostly in Europe.
• Ontologies, queries by natural language processing, Semantic Web, all these things will fail to make a dent in Google’s monopoly.
• Blogging will still be popular. Maybe the number of blogs will go down, but the quality of the remaining blogs will be good and the technology will improve. There will be tricks beyond ping/talkback to network the various blogs.
• Occidental universities will increasingly focus on continuing education. We will see more and more quality offers to complete one’s education with a master degree or certificate taken online. While it has been a secondary, and not so interesting, cash cow so far, it will become a vital issue in many universities as the number of foreign students starts to diminish.
• Video blogging will be common: I’ll be subscribed to at least two video blogs.
• Videoconferencing will be mainstream. My wife, my colleagues will be using it regularly. We will finally have “phones with pictures” though we will be using our computers to get the desired effect.
• Within academia, posting talks on the web using digital video will become common.
• The WS-* SOA stack will still go nowhere.
• For less than 4000$, I will be able to buy a PC or the equivalent, with 10 TB of storage.
• Carrying a laptop will be out. People will carry tiny computers, as cell phones are, but laptops are too large to be convenient. With most of our data and applications on the Web, we will stop breaking our backs. Hotels will start offering nice computers you use to do real work.

According to Wired, the Isreali army does not like roleplaying:

Israeli officials view a fondness for Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) as being indicative of a delusional mind, RPGers are out of touch with reality. “The game indicates a weak personality,” one security official said. “One of the tests we do, either by asking soldiers directly or through information provided us, is to ask whether they take part in the game,” he added. “If a soldier answers in the affirmative, he is sent to a professional for an evaluation, usually a psychologist.”

Ok. Where to start?

Back when I was in High School, we did play D&D, hidden in a corner, under the stairs. Yes, I admit it, I was a nerd. Oh! Didn’t you know that I’m a nerd? Though I prefer “hacker” these days.

Back then, there were serious concerns that playing D&D was like being in a dangerous cult. I was attending a very religious institution whose moto is now akin to learning to serve (s’instruire pour mieux servir), I kid you not! All the adults around me were horrified to hear about what we were doing. Things took a turn for the worse when we grew an interest for Lovecraft. As far as I know, none of us turned into a dangerous killer. One of is is a senior software engineer, another one is a robotics engineer, and the last one… I lost track. My point being that there is zero evidence that we turned into evil people, though we all gravitated toward nerdy jobs.

Now, I learn that in Israel, I would have been sent to a psychologist?

Ok. Let us face the truth: we all play role games. That is what life is. You can turn yourself into a soldier. Yes, you might kill people or get killed, but deep down, this is roleplaying. When American soldiers go to Irak to fight for democracy, is this reality? What is real?

Roleplaying has nothing to do with being delusional. These people know that they are not facing a freaking dragon in the physical world. Nevertheless, this dragon is real in that they interact with it, learn from it, and eventually can even kill it. This dragon might change their life (for example, they may get defeated and sink into depression… who knows?).

While we are at it. I hate the way we use the word virtual. Second Life is not a virtual world. The Web is not virtual. Email relationships are not virtual. They are not. They are real relationships, real worlds. A world where people dress up, meet, have fun, learn, get to know each other, build things… that is a real world.

This is not a simple matter of semantics. Saying that things are delusional or virtual amounts to dismissing it as having lesser importance.

Which one is more important? My so-called virtual identity on the web (represented best by this blog) or my so-called real identity (my physical body)? To many of the readers of this blog, by virtual identity is far more important since they never get to meet me. So, this Web identity is not virtual at all! Not for them! But my physical body might as well be virtual, for them.

We know of Jesus (sorry, I’m not religious at all, but this is a good example) through books. How is it different from knowing someone through email? Is Jesus real? Many people think so. Christians and muslims do, at least. Is he virtual? Any more so than me?

What is virtual then? It is is a representation of what is. The software model of a store is virtually the store: it represents the store, but it is not a store. Be careful though. Amazon.com is an actual store, not a virtual store! But my blog is a virtual notebook. It is not a notebook! But it can represent a notebook. If I use an icon to represent my identity, it is a virtual identity. But my identity on the Web is not virtual. In object-oriented programming, the objects and classes represent virtually the component of your system: the software class “Student” is a virtual representation of a student.

Please send this post to the Israeli army. Anyone?

Bryan O’Sullivan wrote an excellent Collaborative Filtering tutorial. He gives out the first Slope One Collaborative Filtering algorithm in Python that I know of. Excellent work.

I have been looking long and hard for a way to project slides remotely. I once proposed, on my site, that the ideal solution might be AJAX-based. I used with some success Webhuddle and even wrote a script to convert PDF files to a zip file of gif images for this purpose, but I don’t like to rely on a Java applet. I further tested Vyew which is AJAX-based, but found that it had unacceptable limitations (like the 50 slides limit!).

Finally, I found what I was looking for! slidePresenter is a great piece of software you can install on your server. It requires PHP, but is free software.

It works in a very simple manner. Clients connect to your site and see an image. You also see the image, but can press a forward (or backward arrow) to move the presentation forward (or backward). As you change slide, the client automatically changes slide. Installing it requires about 30 seconds. Uploading your slides is a bit trickier. If you have PowerPoint or PDF slides, you first have to convert them to images. In my case, I had to done some manual work to get slidePresenter to see my presentation, but the author will no doubt improve this over time.

Assuming you have a videoconference setup, using Skype for example, then you are ready to give (free) talks all over the world.

The new Java is out! Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that this is a minor release. Performance has improved, and that is always good, but I could not find any new feature to get me excited. Of course, speed, in itself, is a good feature!

Well, there is one minor feature which might be useful for teaching and in some context: you have the necessary classes to setup a small HTTP server.