April 2004

Outsourcing and Immigration (WTF Series, 3)

What’s the relationship between offshore outsourcing and immigration? Here’s an interesting connection. Immigration brings workers from other countries to this one. With outsourcing, we send the work to them (because with fast networks, we can…) For years Immigration was a hallmark of U.S. society, the melting pot and all that. Its fair to say that it’s been viewed positively. The people that are against offshore outsourcing today would have been against immigration in the past. (And I say that as an actual immigrant 🙂

Virtual People? (WTF Series, 2)

One of the reason that society needs people to transact with each other using real identities, maybe, is that in the end, virtual digital persona can’t own and transfer ownership. I can’t buy or sell or trade with a virtual digital persona. Corporations in fact are virtual people in some sense, and ...

Read more →

Welcome to Movable Type

If I did things correctly, you should not have noticed too much different. But today, with the help of Dennis Doughty, I’ve switched to using Movable Typeas my blogging software. It’s no picknick, let me say that. My only reason to switch really was to make it easy for me to post from different computers. Other than that, I was happy with Radio Userland, and in fact I will miss certain things I’ve gotten used to in Radio. We’ll see how it goes. Please let me know if anything breaks!

March 2004

RF-ID uptake slower than expected?

I’ve been a quasi-believer about RD-ID technology for a while now. I know more than several people who are investing their time and money into this space, but I am a fence-sitter. Briefly, why? - From what I hear and read, it doesn’t quite work reliably yet. The readers can easily be confus...

Read more →

Overview of Collaboration

I had the opportunity to be a guest lecturer at Brandeis University today, which was fun. Brandeis of course is my Alma Mater, so I was quite at home there. The course was about “Internet and Society” and the section was about Collaboration. Here are my slides, for those few who might be interested.

Behavior Signature Analysis (Demo Series

Behavior Signature Analysis (Demo Series 10) This is a little arcane but I thought it was an interesting pattern among several products launched at Demo 2004. “Behavior Signature Analysis” is the idea of learning something about the intent or higher level purpose of an activity by doing pattern ...

Read more →

Outlook 2003 Rant.

Outlook 2003 Rant. What were those guys thinking? Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those Microsoft haters. I love Microsoft. I admire their work. But in this instance...

Read more →

BlogBridge has spiffy new icons.

BlogBridge has spiffy new icons. More progress the last week or so, with the addition of some nicenew eye candy. It’s getting closer and closer to being usable for real. If you want to try it out, send me an email and I will tell you where to download it. (It’s not ready for prime time yet, though, just for playing around.)

Open Source Icons and BlogBridge

The beat goes on. Now that we have Unread working, the time was ripe to add several new commands to the user interface. With the help of Everaldo, I am now using the Crystal Icon Set, which has provided a wonderful face lift for BlogBridge. Feedback welcome! Also with the help of one of our offshore developers (in the Ukraine) there are major improvements (and more coming) in the rendering of the Blog Aricles, which now include support for a larger subset of html, including images and soon links.

BlogBridge update. In the last

BlogBridgeupdate. In the last few days I’ve made some reasonable progress on BlogBridge, both from my own personal efforts coding, as well as getting another developer involved in a small way. As time frees up, I am planning to invest more of my own time as well as getting others to contribute on this thing. Still Fun! (If you don’t know what BlogBridge is, check this out.)

BlogBridge Major architectural progress

We made some major new progress since the last update. Unread Management. The persistent RSS layer (Informa) has been updated to support Unread management. This has been carried through the rest of BlogBridge, using Bold in the Channel Guide and in the Article list in the usual way to show read...

Read more →

What you may not know

What you may not know about Eclipse. (Demo 2004 Series 10) If you are a Java developer and you haven’t checked out the Eclipse Development tool from www.eclipse.org, then you owe yourself a treat. Who knows if you get excited about that kind of thing, but it gives me *c...

Read more →

Flipstart from Vulcan (Demo 2004

Flipstart from Vulcan (Demo 2004 Series – 9): This is a weird little device. It’s essentially a Windows XP computer using thumb keyboard. The dimensions are (from memory, now 4″ x 6″ x 1″) It has a 30Gig disk, and fast chip. It also has built in Wi-Fi. It has a...

Read more →

Open Source, BlogBridge and Offshore

Open Source, BlogBridge and Offshore Development. I’ve been using several neat offshore development options in my work on Blog Bridge, a new kind of Blog Reader that I’ve been working on (very) part time. You can read all about it: here. There’s a developer in **Ru...

Read more →