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Blog Posts
All my blog posts and articles
February 2005
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2005-02-01
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2005-02-01
A9’s Photographic Yellow Pages
Quite a bit has been written about this, so I won’t repeat except to relate my experience in setting up a breakfast with a friend of mine. Here is the link I sent him (so now you know where, but you don’t know when!)! Amusing to see the photo and the map of the place, isn’t it?
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2005-02-01
Link Spammers
I used to have comments enabled on this blog until I got overrun by link spam. With comments my readers could post responses to my Blog musings. I’ve since turned of commenting on this site. What is link spam? Suddenly one day you realize that some of your Blog articles have a very long list of random comments attached to them, each including a link to some random site. Who does this? Link Spammers.
Why do they do it? To drive up the page rank of PPR Sites. (PPR? Pills, Porn and Casinos). Here is one link spammers story.
January 2005
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2005-01-29
Too much information!
It’s one thing to be interested in blogs so you can read and learn and become aware of new ideas. But when it comes to joining into the discussions, watch out! No it’s more than the well known problem of following discussion threads across blogs. It’s just the ridiculous amount of stuff that gets written on any hot topic (like Folksonomies, for example.) If you want to contribute a half-intelligent idea to the debate, the number of links to follow and essays to read is very intimidating, and certainly the odds of uttering an original thought approach zero. So I’ll stop here.
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2005-01-27
Tags, Meta Tags, Meta Data, Yada Yada
Read more →It is of course impossible to keep up with the avalanche of discussion about the topic of tags, folksonomies, tagonomies. David Weinberger points to a (beautifully designed: love those pictures!) essay on the topic from burningbird with lots of good quotes and pointers to other essays. Wow, a lot to read! In my mind the crucial thing about this new approach classification is that it gets around the achilles heel of the traditional approach of meta tagging or controlled vocabularies, which is, that most people just don’t do it.
There...
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2005-01-26
Do Mac users have eye problems – Switcher’s Log – Part 2
It seems to me that all text and other Mac OS X user interface elements are a little bit bigger than their counterparts on the PC. Why is that? It seems like the same size screen fits less stuff when attached to a Mac OS X system than to a Win XP system. It’s annoying – it makes you feel less productive. I am hunting for some tweak software to adjust this but I am starting to think it doesn’t exist.
Why?
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2005-01-26
[BlogBridge Tip] Activate your BlogBridge service account
(If you are not a BlogBridge you will not find this very interesting) We notice many of you have requested a BlogBridge account but not activated it. Here’s the thing: once you ask for the account, you will receive an email with a link in it that you have to click. Until you click, your account will not be ready to us. (Our instructions need to be improved!)
Why activate? Because until you do, the wonderful benefits of the BlogBridge service will not be available to you!
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2005-01-24
[BlogBridge Tip] Themes
Did you know that BlogBridge has ‘themes’ ? Well today there are only two, but soon there will be many. A Theme is just way to set all the fonts and colors and other UI settings in one fell swoop. For example, the “Big Theme” uses larger fonts making them easier to read. Enjoy!
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2005-01-23
Blogging, Journalism and Credibility – Harvard
Read more →I was lucky enough to be able to participate in a conference on Blogging, Journalism and Credibility at Harvard University. I am not myself an expert on this but found the discussions extremely instructive. And of course I see possibilities that our BlogBridge software might play a role in this space in the future. So I am vitally interested! Many many people have blogged in great detail on this conference, so I won’t try to improve on that, except for this great little aha! tidbit: All the discussion in one way or another centered around the question of how blogging affect journalism and journalism might affect bloggi...
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2005-01-22
Day of reckoning coming for Microsoft?
Read more →You’ve heard this one before: there are more and more truly outstanding pieces of software coming out as Open Source. Everyone has heard about FireFox, right, the wonderful Web Browser from the Mozilla guys. I just came across news that Internet Explorer usage fell again for the 7th straight month, and it seems that FireFox is taking up the slack. Take a look at Thunderbird 1.0, another gem. Thunderbird is an email client and it’s a very nice piece of work. You can see both of these apps here.
I also recently read notice that there’s a pr...
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2005-01-20
Switcher’s Log
For close readers of this (yes all two of you), I was considering switching to a Mac as my primary computer. Basically I had a mac as a tirtiary computer, just for testing BlogBridge. I got to like it, and after a fairly careful study of the trade-offs, I’ve done it. As of now, my Windows box is off on a table ‘over there’ and my Mac is right here at my desk. Actually the switch happened yesterday and I’ve getting acclimated. Just for fun, I thought I’d record my experiences. Day 1-2: Basics are working. I am getting email with Mac Mail. I had to give up Trillian on Windows and tried using AVChat (the mac equivalent.) It’s ok but not that functional. Since then I’ve tried AOL IM for Mac (not too much better) but stumbled across Adium, an open source (don’t you love it?) Mac OS X-ified version of Gnu AIM (GAIM.) I just started using it 10 minutes ago, and so far, its every bit as good as Trillian was! Coolness!
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2005-01-17
Improv in Wikipedia
I got many comments from people about my postingsrecently about Lotus Improv. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a pretty accurate description of Improv and its history in the WikiPedia. By the way, I had absolutely nothing to do with writing it. Actually I am quite curious who did write it, because he or she was pretty well informed so I suspect it’s someone who was on the team from the early days, or knew someone who was. (Of course there are a few inaccuracies, but what the heck!) Cool
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2005-01-16
BlogBridge tip: Send us Feedback
Read more →(Non-users of BlogBridge, this wil not be interesting to you. But you have to ask yourself, why are you not using it?) As most everyone who uses BlogBridge seems to be subscribed to my Blog I thought posting a tip or news every so often might be a way to expose some thinking about BlogBridge to you all, so starting today I will be posting a regular item that I think would be of interest.
We very recently added a command to the Help menu, “Send Feedback” which we encourage you to use if you have any thought, complaint, bug report, or whatever that you would like to share with us. Just enter your text in the box and that’s all there is to it.
Note that we have plenty of users who are regular...
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2005-01-16
Peggy Noonan on Media
Peggy Noonan is a great, albeit a little on the conservative side, columnist that I read whenever I can. Here’s a good article she wrote on the Main Stream Media. Blogs and Dan Rather.
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2005-01-14
Four Hours on a Segway
Read more →I think the Segway Human Transporter is really cool, and I’ve read many articles about how they work and what they are like. But this past weekend I had the unique experience of spending about 4 hours riding around New Orleans on a Segway. Eye Opening. Here are some (surprising) observations and conclusions. It really works. It keeps you balanced, and once you get the hang of it, it’s quite easy to move forward, backwards, and turn. It takes about 10 minutes to be able to work it safely and then maybe another 30 to feel proficient.
The machine seems really heavy and powerful. Heavier than I thought. Like a lawnmower heavy. While it doesn’t move fast, it does have a lot of po...
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2005-01-12
Thinking of being a deserter
Read more →I’m seriously thinking about starting to use a Macintosh for my day to day work computer instead of a PC! Can you believe it? Why?
My research so far says that a fast Mac running OS X is comparable, price performance to a Wintel computer. I’m a big fan of wonderful design and while I think Windows XP is really nice, I think OS X is just a little bit nicer. I will get a chance to learn Unix. I will get a chance to learn OS X. Change is good.
BTW, Not that that Mac is without fault – it certainly has its share of brain dead usability “features’, but all in all it’s just easier on the eyes.
But what do you care about what I use for development. The real excuse for this post is to quote you a...
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2005-01-10
[GEEK] Nerd Humor
Amusing. Do you recognize yourself? And while you are wasting time, how easily can you tell a programmer from a serial killer?
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2005-01-10
BCC Protocol – Email Morality?
Read more →What does the existence of “BCC” (which I think stands for the anachronism “blind carbon copy”) tell us about the social norms of emails? This thought occurred to me just now as I was the recipient of an email (corresponding to (3) in the not at all uncommon scenario that I describe below. It is an interesting piece of deception that we all participate in, isn’t it? Has anyone ever thought about the morality of email addressing?
Scenario:
X sends an email to: A, CC: B and C A does a “Reply all” so that B, C and X see the response A sends an email directly to X, BCC to B
Analysis:
X wants to tell A, something, and make sure that B and C also hear. X wants to communicate that the message i...
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2005-01-09
When I was younger I used to admire Ayn Rand
I really love her major novels although I haven’t looked at them in years. You know how you remember a novel to be great, but upon looking at it again 20 years later, you just don’t know what you saw in it? So, as I say, I remember really loving her major novels, but, thismakes me think again:
The United States government, however, should not give any money to help the tsunami victims. Why? Because the money is not the government’s to give.
From the Ayn Rand Institute. Link.
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2005-01-04
Folksonomies – Collaborative Classification
Read more →There has been a lot of traffic on this new meme “Folksonomies”. This Slashdot bithas many of the important links in it, and I can’t say that I’ve read all of it, so what I am describing below may be old hat. I am thinking that while Folksonomies is a kind of catchy, although hard to say or spell word, it is too narrow. Folksonomies, as I understand, refers to a community based way of arriving at a taxonomy of information, basically subjective judgements on what the information is “about.” We’ve seen this in http://del.icio.us and in http://www.flickr.com.
It seems to me that there are all kinds of meta data, some subjective, and s...