Pito's Blog

Robert Cringely has a relatively little known quasi blog, for some reason on www.pbs.org. The stuff is generally very good, and little noted. 

Given Microsoft's recent acquisition of Teleo, this recent post about Skype is interesting and timely: 

Expect Skype to be sold, another viral marketing success sucked up by big business. Expect it to go to either a major broadband provider or, more likely, to a big mobile carrier with no fixed telephone assets. And whoever buys Skype, expect them to throw money into making the company into even more of a multinational telecom headache than it currently is. (from Skyed on I, Cringely - read the whole thing!)

There even is a very well hidden RSS feed.

(Yes, remember the Cringley column in PC Week? Same guy!)

Technorati Tags: microsoft, voip

Posted by Pito Salas at 08:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

At a level of detail only a geek could love reading (or bother writing), Dan Bricklin gives us an interesting and fun  illustrated story of installing Verizon fiber to his home:

"...... Once that was all done, the installer cleaned up all the dropped wire insulation, empty boxes, etc., and we said goodbye sometime around 4 PM. I then connected my line to the router and plugged it into my laptop upstairs. Things work well." (from "Installing Verizon FIOS fiber-optic Internet service to my house")

I do have one question about the Terms of Service:

I ordered the 15Mbps down/2Mbps up service which has a list price of $49.95 a month before the discount. (They also have 5/2 for $39.95 and 30/5 for $199.95.)Terms of service say they "do not permit customers to host any type of server, personal or commercial". You know what they mean (maybe) but they do say it wrong (in an Internet application, each side often plays the part of a "server" as well as "client" -- they are using lay terms in a legal document)."

What exactly does anyone think people will use 2Mbps upstream bandwidth for?...

Technorati Tags: danbricklin, verizon

Posted by Pito Salas at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From my new favorite Podcaster, Todd of Geek News Central, I came across Flash Earth, a fun and beautiful animated globe that will give you hours and hours of family entertainment!

Technorati Tags: cool, cooltool

Posted by Pito Salas at 08:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the hairier and most interesting parts of Swing (Java's GUI layer) are the so-called pluggable look and feels (or is it looks and feel?.) Truth is that you can live a very happy Swing life without knowing how it works, but if you are curious or need to know for some reason... 

This document is a good summary, even though a little dated, if you are interested in really understanding it. Like many things it's not so complex once you understand it.

Technorati Tags: java, swing

Posted by Pito Salas at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Florida-202
Originally uploaded by claesk.

Posted by Pito Salas at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've subscribed to this list from OCI ("Object Computing Inc.")  for a while now. They always have interesting readable articles on one thing or another related to Java. 

If you are interested in Java, I recommend it!

Technorati Tags: java

Posted by Pito Salas at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times is running a series on the Evolution/Intelligent Design 'debate'. Quite interesting. I was startled to see this in the article, though:

Referring to the Discovery Institute, one of the main think tanks pushing the ID agenda, the New York Times says:

"A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary and mainstream groups - the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a year, including $50,000 of Mr. Chapman's $141,000 annual salary - and asserting itself on questions on issues as varied as local transportation and foreign affairs." (from "Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive", New York Times)

Posted by Pito Salas at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's something funny I came across: "Sex Tips for Geeks: How to be Sexy" where we learn such gems as: 

"While human beings often have sex for pleasure, the instincts that drive human mating behavior have been shaped by a deadly serious game of evolutionary selection.

Sexually attractive people are those whose characteristics suggest they are well equipped to help you propagate your genetic line successfully.

Good looks are sexy because they correlate with health and a robust immune system; wealth and status are sexy because they signal ability to sink high levels of investment into offspring, increasing their chances of surviving to reproduce" (from "Sex Tips For Geeks")

Technorati Tags: funny, Geeky, sex

Posted by Pito Salas at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"But I am compelled to do this.  And other than that, that's as far as I'm going to talk about my family's -- another personal tragedy due to this war."

Technorati Tags: iraq

Posted by Pito Salas at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I came across this review in "World Wide Words", an email newsletter (remember those?) about ... well, words. Here's an excerpt from the review:

"He takes readers through introductory topics such as syntax, case endings, grammatical gender, and the curiosities of Semitic nouns, in which a set of three consonants creates a template within which detailed meaning is carried by the interspersed vowels (so shalom, salaam, Solomon, Islam, and Muslim are variants on the root s-l-m).

He quotes examples in English of what seem to be abrupt changes in sense—resent three hundred years ago mean to appreciate or feel grateful for, practically the opposite of its modern sense." (from World Wide Words, "The Unfolding of Language")

Sorry, but I love stuff like that.

Technorati Tags: book

Posted by Pito Salas at 09:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As you might have seen over at our BlogBridge blog, we are experimenting with a new visualization of blog postings, right inside BlogBridge. I've taken to calling this the Kleppner Widget as it was invented by Paul and Andrew Kleppner who have been contributing some cool stuff of late.

This is a snippet from a pre-release build of BlogBridge:

What you are looking at is a display of 4 Feeds (Dan Gillmor, Joho the Blog, Emergence Marketiong and Pito's Blog) All the way over to the right you can see the visualization.

Here's how you read it: From left to right, each column is 1 day, starting today, yesterday, and back to 1 week ago. The number of dots in the column corresponds to the number of new articles or posts on that day.

Hey look at that: David and Dan are posting like crazy, Francois pretty good, and I am the laggard.

We aren't sure yet  whether this new visualization is the cats pajamas or too gimicky but we are quite fond of it. It will probably make it in the very first weekly release after BlogBridge 2.0 ships early next week.

What do you think? Too much information, or a nice compact summary of how active a blog is? And by the way, should the days run left to right (as they do today) or right to left?

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, visualization, UI

Posted by Pito Salas at 08:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Color laser printers are wonderful. The one I use is a Konica Minolta QMS 2200. We've had it for years and it works like a champ. Only thing is, the toner is really pricey. So pricey that I started suspecting that something was awry, so I kept a log of when I replaced what consumable and how much I paid.  It's a lot!

Yes, "consumable", because in addition to the toner there are a bunch of other things that 'wear' out and that you have to replace. The printer very helpfully says, "Replace Oil Roller"  and stops working. What the heck is an oil roller? I don't know but it costs $40 or so. It is actually quite cool how they have designed the inside of the thing to make each part easily replaceable with nice color coded numbered levers and knobs.

But anyway, this does seem to be the ultimate expression of the razor-blade/razor business. The printers are surprisingly reasonable to buy and then, expensive to operate.

For several years now I've been printing "two pages per sheet" on my color laser printer, hoping to save a few bucks. No not on paper, but on the 'consumables.'

Paper is cheap. Does anyone out there know whether two pages per sheet reduces the consumption of consumables? Intuitively, it seems like it must, but I've never actually been able to prove or verify this.

Technorati Tags: printer

Posted by Pito Salas at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was talking about search engines the other day. I guess Findory includes a search engine, but in my mind it's a lot more. Here's how they describe it:

"Our patent-pending technology personalizes the homepage for each reader, recommending content based on what they've read and what new content is being published. We crawl through thousands of news and blogs articles so you don't have to." (from About Findory)

You have to play with it to get the idea. For me it's especially handy to uncover other information that is somehow related to what I am writing about in my own blog.

For example, here's the page on Findory that has the most recent posts in my own blog. But the really interesting stuff to me is "below the fold" where I can see other information around the internet that relates to what I have written.

Very very cool. Recommended!

Technorati Tags: blog, recommended, searchengines

Posted by Pito Salas at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is just a quickie: did you know that you can just drag and drop the URL of a Podcast RSS feed (a.k.a. an RSS Feed with enclosures) onto the Podcasts list in iTunes? In other words, you don't need to surf the Apple iTunes catalog looking for your favorite show if you have the URL. This is especially handy if the Podcast you want to listen to has not made it to their catalog.

Technorati Tags: podcast

Posted by Pito Salas at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hey, I just came across this: 

"The Invention of the Pivot Table: The concept that led to today's pivot table came from the halls of the Lotus Development Corporation with a revolutionary spreadsheet program called Lotus Improv. Improv was envisioned in 1986 by Pito Salas of the Advanced Technology Group at Lotus.

Realizing that spreadsheets often have patterns of data, Pito concluded that if one could build a tool that could recognize these patterns, then one could build enhanced data models. Lotus ran with the concept and started developing the next-generation spreadsheet." (from Pivot Table Crunching)

Technorati Tags: improv, PitoSalas, pivottables

Posted by Pito Salas at 08:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My friend Paul English has written an interesting bit about spam and ways that we need to combat it: 

"The keys to ending spam are (1) to eliminate the ability for spammers to falsely identify themselves and (2) to then determine which Email Service Providers (ESPs) actually prevent their correctly identified users from sending spam."  (From Sender Identification Rollout)"

Paul makes  a very interesting analogy with Identity Theft - he calls it "Email Identity Theft."

In the following piece, Bruce Schneier writes some novel thoughts about identity theft, basically making the argument that scaring consumers about identity theft is exactly the wrong thing: 

"Identity theft solutions focus much too much on authenticating the person. Whether it's two-factor authentication, ID cards, biometrics, or whatever, there's a widespread myth that authenticating the person is the way to prevent these crimes.

But once you understand that the problem is fraudulent transactions, you quickly realize that authenticating the person isn't the way to proceed." (from Mitigating Identity Theft)

Bruce makes a point analogous to what Paul is saying - which is to put the onus on the service providers to not only prevent but importantly to shoulder the risk and liability:

"We need to make the entity that is in the best position to mitigate the risk to be responsible for that risk. And that means making the financial institutions liable for fraudulent transactions."(from Mitigating Identity Theft)

Technorati Tags: security

Posted by Pito Salas at 07:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

BlogOn is a conference being organized by the inimitable Chris Shipley.

The full name is "BlogOn 2005 Social Media Summit".

And yes, yours truly is on the advisory board FWIW.

The conference is in New York City, on October 17 and 18.

Look here for more information. 

You probably know Chris Shipley from the Demo conferences, in my book one the very best conferences for product people like me. I've been going to Demo for years; it's always a valuable way to keep up with what's going on. 

And here's a fun little wrinkle: If you register for the conference soon, and use a magic code which I will give you, the cost will be an astonishing $695, which is a 50% discount (while supplies last.) 

Register by clicking here, and supply this Discount Code: PS2005, and tell em Pito sent you!

Technorati Tags: blog, conference

Posted by Pito Salas at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Sifry of Technorati has an interesting analysis of the current dynamics in the Blogosphere: 

"Summary:

Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005
The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months
A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily
About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year
About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly" (from Sifry's Alerts)"

Read the whole thing for lots of other interesting tidbits!

Technorati Tags: blog, technorati

Posted by Pito Salas at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)