Nabeel Al-Shamma

Climate change is somewhat off-topic for this blog, but it is right on target as something we all need to be talking about. At the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT yesterday morning, there was a great panel discussion about climate change, global warming and energy solutions. I’ll share a few highlights. Any errors or misquotes are obviously my fault.

Innovation and the Energy Crisis
Moderator: Robert C. Armstrong, Professor of Chemical Engineering and co-director of the Energy Research Council, MIT
Panelists:
Joseph Romm, Founder and Executive Director, Center for Energy & Climate Solutions;
Nathan Lewis, Professor, California Institute of Technology;
Kelly R. Fletcher, Sustainable Energy Advanced Technology Leader, GE Global Research

Robert Armstrong shared some info on the energy industry. Per the MIT Energy Council Report of May 2006:
- Energy is a multi-trillion dollar industry
- We consume energy at the rate of 14 terawatts of energy of which the US uses about a quarter [a terawatt is too large an amount for me to fathom]
- Anticipate doubling total energy production by 2050
- Anticipate tripling electricity production by 2050

Joseph Romm, who has a book called Hell and High Water coming out in January, talked about the need for action now. When he talks to leading climate experts they are very alarmed. Solutions will require huge amounts of capital when the world gets serious. We have to start to deploy all possible solutions today, we can’t wait for technology to solve this in the future. Though, new technology research and development is also needed. Dr. Romm’s blog is at climateprogress.org.

Nate Williams said that things are worse than Dr. Romm indicated. The issue is not about science at this point, but about risk management. We have four options to pursue:
- clean coal – has lots of risks
- nuclear – again, lots of issues, need breeder reactors because not enough uranium…
- solar – that’s where the energy is; we need improved efficiencies/technologies; we need a way to store the energy (he likes chemical fuels)
- biofuels

Kelly Fletcher talked about the need for strong and stable government policies around CO2. Whether a tax or a trading systems, we need a clear policy.

They stated the big issue is still education – people need to be made aware of the severity of the problem and the need to take action now. There was a poll on how much more people would be willing to pay on their utility bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the answer was less than $10/month. That suggests there is still not a lot of public resolve to address climate change. Even with that, the public is ahead of government leadership.

There was lots more great information and I hope to be able to post a link to a video of the panel (by keeping an eye on http://www.technologyreview.com/events/tretc/media.aspx)

Posted by Nabeel Al-Shamma at 07:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm at the MIT Emerging Technology Conference this week. Jeff Bezos just got up and talked about some of the web services that Amazon is providing, such as Mechanical Turk, S3 and now EC2. This was the first time I really heard or understood what EC2 is and it is pretty mind-blowing. They are providing the ability to store an OS image in S3, then load it into EC2 to execute on demand. You get access to a 1.7 GHz x86 CPU, 1.7 GB RAM with 160 MB disk. Basically, they are providing a scalable server in the sky, where you pay per CPU hour and data transfer. For example, they are charging $0.10/hour for CPU, which is about $70/mo for 1 CPU, or, $70 for 700 CPU's for one hour.

Also, for those who haven't looked at it yet, S3 is also very cool. Basically a storage service with three calls: get, set, delete, where you provide a handle and a blob. Again, very scalable and replicated storage, where you pay as you go.

What excites me about all of this is that they are removing barriers to entry for all of us to get our really cool products out. We don't have to deal with what Jeff calls the muck, liking buying servers, settting up data centers and so on. As he put it, "We make muck, so you don't have to."

Check it out at aws.amazon.com.

Posted by Nabeel Al-Shamma at 06:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This last Wed I was at the awards ceremony for the Flashforward Film Festival. I was totally blown away by the amazing creations of Flash developers. We saw ~30-second trailers of each movie or site, which was fine as we saw all 60 finalists (in 15 different categories). A number drew from commercial work for ecommerce sites, we saw some movies and games, and some animated artwork. All of the finalists work can be found at http://flashforwardconference.com/finalists. (I don't see the winners for each category posted yet.)

A few of my favorites:
http://www.dqbooks.com/
http://www.zumbakamera.com/bendito.html
http://www.reisenthel.com/ (click on products then use buttons at bottom)
http://media.academyart.edu/freeclass/index.html
http://illustree.at/referenzen/oe3_spot_english/ (this is hilarious)
http://www.cove.org/flade/ (very cool physics engine demos)
http://www.agencynet.com/
http://www.samorost.net/samorost2/

Finally, I wasn't quite sure where to put this, but it's my favorite quote from the overall show, by speaker Brendan Dawes while talking about digital watch that required pressing a button to see the time.

“Cool and stupid go together a lot of the time”

Posted by Nabeel Al-Shamma at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m here in beautiful Austin, Texas (I love that Austin is using Flash on their home page) for the Flashforward conference. The conference is put on by Lynda.com and I was fortunate to meet the very warm and gracious Lynda Weinman last night.

At the Adobe Keynote with Kevin Lynch, we talked about some of the cool stuff we’re working on right now. Also, we’re celebrating 10 years of Flash this year. Check out our Flashback at http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/special/flashanniversary/.

Kevin invited several speakers to come up, and asked each of them to share a sneak peak of something that has not been seen publicly before.

Garrett Nantz of Big Spaceship demoed the very cool Nike Air experience http://www.nike.com/nikeair/us/ on Linux using an early build of FlashPlayer 9.

Mark Anders of Adobe demoed Flex Builder 2 on the Mac, where he wrote a small app, PhotoDemo, pulling in photos from Flickr. He then converted it to an Apollo app, and ran it on the Mac from the desktop (and pulled up pictures of his birds, sure wish I could remember the tag…). As I mentioned in my first blog, we have an Apollo wiki on Adobe Labs at http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo.

Then Justin Cole-Everett and Mike Downey came up to talk about Flash Professional 9 ActionScript 3 Preview, now on Adobe labs, http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash9as3preview/. Justin showed us a particle effect script, running in both ActionScript 2 and ActionScript 3. With the new ActionScript 3 VM (virtual machine), it looked liked the effect was running about 10 times faster.

Mike then demoed PSD import with rich control over options. And, demoed saving a timeline to ActionScript 3 code. Very cool stuff!

Posted by Nabeel Al-Shamma at 09:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hello! Welcome to my first public blog entry. Let me tell you a little about myself. I’ll start with work. I joined Adobe about 15 years ago (after stints at several other companies, including some stuff at Xerox). I started as a developer on Acrobat 1.0, working deep in the guts of the program. In Acrobat 2.0, I did a lot of the API work for Acrobat & Reader. In Acrobat 3.0, I did a lot of the work to enable viewing of PDF in the browser. And, in between I did a lot of work on the data model, object store, page rendering, print path, font embedding and so on.

After that I joined our core technology organization, which does stuff like deliver graphics engines, font technology, scripting support, UI tools, XML libraries, PDF tools and more to most of the product teams in Adobe. I actually spent about half of my time at Adobe there, starting out as a developer and moving into management. Following that I formed a platform strategy group, which I did for a couple of years.

Then, this year, after the integration of Macromedia, I joined our Adobe client platform group. My role is to be the kind of guy who looks at cross-business and cross-product issues, and, who does some software architecture stuff as well.

When I’m not working, my favorite thing is to be riding my bike around the backroads of Sonoma County where I live. My main bike is a 2004 Specialized Comp Roubaix, which I have to thank a close friend for recommending to me.

My main areas of interest right now include electronic documents (big surprise;-) and Apollo. And, bridging the Adobe and Macromedia worlds. I expect to be blogging on these topics. You can read a bit about Apollo at http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo.

Posted by Nabeel Al-Shamma at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)