Blog Posts

September 2004

• 2004-09-14

  BlogBridge Beta 4: Sept 15, 2004

  Ok, guys, we have another beta release with lots of great new goodies! It will be up on the web site tomorrow hopefully. It sports lots of new features, which I will be describing when I have some more time to do it. For now, please go to the BlogBridge web site and look around. Some links of interest:

  New feature list describing beta 4 (version 0.5.6) Download new beta once it’s up by clicking here.

  [](https://i0.wp.com/s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1075723/12829350/web...

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• 2004-09-11

  Sept 11, 2001

  No words necessary.

• 2004-09-10

  Why Blogs are great, #102

  I am often asked what’s so special about blogging. I always answer, technically it’s pretty simple, so that’s not it. It’s that there are people in the world, who for their own reasons have chosen to write down their thoughts and opinion. I learn things that I would never have learned otherwise from blogs. Here’s the latest example. Now I am not a Bushie – by any stretch of the imagination, and I haven’t bothered checking the credibility of this post.

  But I find it a fascinating discussion of the analysis that is leading some to question the authenticity of certain documents that are purportedly showing that Bush had problems with his superiors in the National Guard back in 1972.

  I had not heard or seen this before. An interesting perspective. That’s why blogs are great!

• 2004-09-10

  Patterns from the master

  I came across a fascinating article,a transcript of a speech by Christopher Alexander, architect and author of “A Pattern Language.” Alexander is the guy who invented Patterns as they have now been broadly adopted by the Software Design community. In this piece Alexander tells of the thinking and objectives that led to the Pattern approach to architectural design – much more than simply cataloging patterns that were known work. He was hoping that when architects used these patterns they would be led, driven, forced into creating living and livable structures.

  In his words:

  ...

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  #design
• 2004-09-10

  Simulation is hot!

  Here’s an interesting link that continues on the theme from my previous post on Agent Based Modeling. This isn’t agent based, but it is kind of the most auspicious use of simulation one could imagine: “Computing the Cosmos. One of the biggest computer simulations ever run is illuminating the deepest mysteries of the universe.”

  #science
• 2004-09-08

  Agent Based Modeling

  And now for something completely different. I was reading this book: “It’s Alive” over the weekend. Particularly of interest to me was all the discussion about so-called “Agent Based Modeling.” Agent based modeling is a big word for simulations used generally to research and understand systems involving many independent agents. They often have very cool visual displays where you can see, variously the agents traversing their space, growing, reproducing, exchanging, consuming, etc. ...

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  #science

August 2004

• 2004-08-26

  What’s wrong with Feed Readers?

  Here are two very interesting posts on the question of Feed Readers:

  Glassdog asks “What’s wrong with Feed Readers” Rasterweb talks about “More aggregator maddness” Info Freako

  This is of more than passing interest to me of course, as it relates to the design ofmy Blog Reader: BlogBridge. Some of the ideas mentioned here are already planned for BlogBridge, but there are lots of good tidbits to insipre further work!

• 2004-08-24

  A new term: Blobjects

  A very thought provoking speech by Bruce Sterling at SigGraph 2004. Recommended. “When you shop for Amazon, you’re already adding value to everything you look at on an Amazon screen. You don’t get paid for it, but your shopping is unpaid work for them. Imagine this blown to huge proportions and attached to all your physical possessions. Whenever you use a spime, you’re rubbing up against everybody else who has that same kind of spime. A spime is a users group first, and a physical object second.”

  #technology
• 2004-08-20

  BlogBridge Starz!

  Finally. Ever since we started working on BlogBridge, I’ve been talking about helping a user slice and dice and sort through a ton of blogs and other channels, finding the good from the bad, the interesting from the boring. Remember the catch phrase “… the ability to follow hundreds of blogs without loosing your mind” which is sprinkled all over our web site. In our next beta you will see the initial instantiation of this idea.

  Channels (Blogs and other feeds) in BlogBridge are rated with from one to five stars (unique, isn’t it?) These stars will tell you how interesting these Channels are to you.

  ...

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• 2004-08-17

  eBay to assist in setting BlogBridge Price

  So, some day we will consider BlogBridgecomplete enough to actually be worth a few bucks. But the question is, how much? I’ve said many times, that even if every single cool idea I have is perfectly realized that the most one could expect is maybe $20 or $30 per copy. But even that is a lot. So, here’s a thought. Let the market decide.

  What we plan to do is to offer a limited number (say 10) of perpetual BlogBridge licenses on eBay with an opening bid of $1 and no reserve. And see what happens. Depending on how it goes we could offer twice that number of licenses an opening bid equal to the average price the first batch went for. And so ...

  Read more →

  #business
• 2004-08-15

  This Is Rumor Control

  This is a really interesting new sitewhere the posters, apparently well informed folks in the intelligence, defense and state communitycomment on what’s going on in the world. (Then again, it could be a 16 year old in Argentina.) They also have a sense of humor:

  

• 2004-08-13

  XP SP2 Shows Why Microsoft Is A Great Company

  I’ve said (and believe) that there’s no other company on earth that has the capability to develop, debug, beta test, deliver software on a massive scale like Microsoft. The number of configurations (both legal and illegal) of hardware, system sofyware, application software, languages, etc that XP has to be tested against totally boggles the mind.

  I truly believe that not IBM, Apple, BEA, Oracle or any of them have the capability to do this at the scale Microsoft does it.

  This at some level is a key competitive advantage and provides them the monopoly lock-in that they enjoy. So when that capability ceases to be a competitve advantage is when their monopoly will start eroding.

  So let your imagination run free: if all software becomes centralized on servvers, if massive scale software like XP becomes obsolete, when all hardware becomes so cheap that you just throw it out instead of upgrading it, maybe then Microsoft might loose their lock-in.

  Not before.

  #business
• 2004-08-13

  XP SP2 Makes a Hash Of It

  As you know, I am quite impressed with Microsoft’s ability to build and ship and deploy and sell and support software at an absolutely mass scale. Yet, on my second XP SP2 installation, it totally destroyed and hosed my computer. It took a superhuman effort (with Google and MSDN help) to recover it.

  Briefly, here’s what happened:

  The computer being upgraded (a 4 year old Dell running XP with .5 Gig of Memory and 40 G of Disk) lost connectivity to the server that had the upgrade pack on it (due to a wire being unplugged – duh.) This aborted the upgrade, and which caused the upgrade to try to unwind itself.

  Up to a point when one of those famous “...

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• 2004-08-11

  Microsoft Internet Explorer Blog

  The Internet Explorer team at Microsoft has a blog.It’s not too active yet. Still it’s an example of why I like blogs so much. I mean: how else and where else could I get up to the minute information about what’s going on with a product that affects me a lot? It’s great!

• 2004-08-10

  BlogBridge Beta 3

  We just put up BlogBridge Beta 3. Check it out. It’s got many neat new features, most particularly the BlogBridge Service which I wrote about recently. Here are the key links of interest:

  BlogBridge Beta Download BlogBridge Website BlogBridge Feature List Stories about the BlogBridge Service

  BlogBridge has reached the functionality now that it is my main Blog Reader. It’s more buggy than I would like, but that’s the nature of a beta, I guess.

  Finally the foundation is there for us to build some of the neat new ideas we’ve been talking about, like “Show only good articles”. Hmmmm. Clever trick!

  And let me know what you think!

• 2004-08-05

  Can you change the license of an Open Source product?

  This puzzled me. Once we released the BlogBridgesource code under the LGPL, it was out in the open, and published to the world. Had we forfeited the right to change the license? The answer depends on who owns and holds the Copyright to the code. As it is, all the code was either personally written by me (90%) or written by others who have agreed to transfer ownership to me. In other words, I hold a clear copyright to all the code, and that is the key. This makes it legitimate and legal to reissue the same source code under a new license.

  What existed before (i.e. everything up to 0.5.3) under LGPLwill ...

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  #legal
• 2004-08-05

  BlogBridge open source license

  I’ve done a little research about what the Open Source really means, legally, when it comes to BlogBridge. I wrote about this question a few months ago, and now, having consulted with people who know, here’s an update. First of all, start with the goals.

  BlogBridge should be available, in source code form and executable form to everyone who wants to look at it and use it. It should be a bona fida open source project. Reasoning: We will be able to recruit others to help us build it; It is a significant differentiator among the other blog readers out there; And we can legitimately use services such as Source Forge to manage the project and its source code. If ...

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  #legal
• 2004-08-05

  Two really cool new applications

  Today I was introduced by two totally different people to two really cool little utilities.

  Anagram.This application works with Outlook and pulls and structures contact information out of emails. Simply, you select the text with the name, phone numbers, address etc. in the email, type control-c twice, and up pops a new Outlook contact record all properly filled out. It does similar things with appointments etc. Super useful and perhaps a more politically correct alternative to applications like Plaxo (Thank you Esther Dyson)

  WordWeb. A tiny dictionary, thesaurus, word finder doo-hicky that lives in you...

  Read more →

  #technology
• 2004-08-03

  Joel on API Wars

  Joel writes a good analysis of some of the dynamics and strategy that apply to the evolution of the Windows APIs and programming paradigms in general. A good readl

  #programming
• 2004-08-03

  MSN Sandbox

  I just came across this – MSN Sandbox – where you can find various Microsoft goodies which are otherwise not available. Notable is LookOut the search product that MS has recently acquired. Haven’t tried it myself – I prefer X1.