Feeling like a Red Sox
Feeling like a Red Sox Fan. Kerry seems to have won the Democratic nomination, and convincingly. I’m rooting for him in the Big Show in November, right along many others, but, why do I feel like a Red Sox Fan?
Blog Posts
All my blog posts and articles
March 2004
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2004-03-03
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2004-03-03
Google Coolness. Well those wacky
Google Coolness. Well those wacky guys and gals at Google keep on coming out with neat new stuff. Check out http://www.google.com/help/features.html for a whole bunch of neat new searches. Among them you’ll find Vehcile ID Numbers (e.g. “AAAAA999A9AA99999”) and Patents (e.g. “Patent 5317686”) Follow the link above to see all the other cool encantations.
Is this the return of the command line? After all these years distancing ourselves from the infamous command line (remember 4GLs?) how are we supposed to remember all these weird encantations. GUI anyone?
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2004-03-01
Scoble on Search. Robert Scoble
Scoble on Search. Robert Scoble (of Microsoft fame) writes about a new search utility called LookOut. Scanning the web site, it looks pretty cool. The idea of going to Outlook to search the file system, though, is a little odd to me. I recently wrote about my favorite tool in this space, X1. Check it out.
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2004-03-01
Comparing this years Demo to
Comparing this years Demo to previous years (Demo 2004 Series – 7A) As I’ve been writing these little Demo reports from my notes, I realized that as I have been going to Demo for years (in fact I think I’ve been to almost all of them) I had perhaps an interesting perspective, and this little thoughtlet bubbled in my brain:
In the last few years, the burst bubble seemed to impact Demo by showing down to earth, obvious ROI products and services. This year there seems to be a few more out-there product and service ideas. I thought that was a positive development and perhaps a sign that we are recovering somewhat from the shock of the last 3 years.
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2004-03-01
Email is not dead (Demo
Read more →Email is not dead (Demo 2004 Series – 7) I continue to be an avid follower of what’s going on in the email space. Why? Here are some things to think about:
From my eRoom and Collaboration days, I’ve been very aware of the challenges to achieving adoption. My view is that the challenge exists whenever the adoption of a new application or system requires some degree of coordination between a set of users. Email is by far the greatest example of an application of computers which has very successfully overcome that barrier. I want to learn from that.
Second reason: I’ve observed that the tools we use to work with email (the general striucture email appli...
February 2004
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2004-02-29
BlogBridge latest
Read more →Just a quick note about what’s up with BlogBridge. My time has been severely drained by a new consulting project, so progress has slowed down more than I would like. The last while I was knee-deep in installation, deployment, upgrade facilities. I looked at a bunch of possible ways of distributing,installing and then upgrading the application, evaluating 3 of them in detail. What a mess! In the end I settled on Java Web Start. I used to think of this as a bit of a kludge, but it seems to be well suited to deployment and installation of Java apps, and with each release Sun seems to make it a little nicer. So that’s what I am going with.
I’ve learned far more than I ever wanted to know about ...
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2004-02-29
Forced to use Atom. Well,
Read more →Forced to use Atom. Well, it’s happening… My friend Paul English has been using Blogger for the longest time for his personal blog. I often complained to him that I used a Blog Reader (FeedDemon is my current favorite, until BlogBridge comes out 🙂 and wouldn’t be able to follow his blog until he had a feed…
Well as you may know, Blogger now has a feed, and it’s uses the Atom format. In the ‘tempest in a teapot’ department, you might have followed the Atom/RSS battle, which took an interesting turn when Blogger (=Google) decided to support only Atom as their format. Clever strategic move or small minded vindictiveness?
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2004-02-27
New in the world of
Read more →New in the world of Digital Photography (Demo 2004 Series – 4) The beat goes on in the world of Digital Photography. Two very nice (and one less nice) Photo Sharing products were launched at Demo this year. Quick notes on three of those.
PhotoSite from Homestead. This is a very nice simple online photo album. It’s customizable and has very attractive album pages. There is an annual charge, but it’s probably worth it.
Share-a-lot. This is a different approach. It’s a very easy, peer to peer sharing of photos with specific other people. This is a free service, so the question does arise how they make money. Visually it...
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2004-02-27
Real Virtual Reality! (Demo 2004
Read more →Real Virtual Reality! (Demo 2004 Series – 6) I am not clear as to whether Total Immersion is a product, company, research product or what. But they had the most compelling and memorable technology demonstration. It was an amazing virtual reality experience of what they called “augmented reality.”
Basically what we saw was a video and audio display in real time. The camera started on the presenter as he was talking. In his hand was a long stemmed rose. Except in real life, he was holding his left hand in a fist, and the flower was added virtually. Every move, translation, rotation etc of his fist was perfectly matched with the movement of the rose creat...
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2004-02-27
Adobe Enterprise document control technology
Adobe Enterprise document control technology (Demo 2004 Series – 5) They have come up with a policy server to control and log access to pdf documents. I don’t think it has a name yet.
It is very similar but much more limited than Liquid Machine’s product (and Authentica.)
They are all somewhat exposed to Microsoft’s recent DRM features in Office 2003. I don’t really know the details of Microsoft’s product but one likely fact is that it works only on Office documents which is a big limitation. P
eople sometimes don’t recognize that this is a severe limitation – after all, the whole world uses Office, doesn’t it. Well yes, but there are some key other formats out there which are every bit as sensitive as Word and Excel. Graphics (Photoshop, Illustrator) and Cad (Autodesk and SolidWorks) come to mind.
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2004-02-26
Amazing little rover “calculates its
Amazing little rover “calculates its own location in the universe…..on Mars”: I just can’t get enough of this amazing bit of engineering called the Mars Rover. Get this:
Opportunity also updated its “attitude knowledge,” which fine-tunes the rover’s information about its exact location and position on Mars….To adjust the attitude knowledge, engineers have the rover turn the panoramic camera to the Sun and watch the Sun travel across the sky for 15 minutes. The rover is then smart enough to take the Sun movement data collected from the panoramic camera to calculate its own location in the universe…..on Mars.
This is such an amazing little machine. That’s not even getting into the astronomy, orbitall mechanics, geology, physics, and who knows what other basic science that determines the core algorithms. Hats off to the team who built it.
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2004-02-26
Key Computing’s Xkey: (Demo 2004
Read more →Key Computing’s Xkey: (Demo 2004 Series – 3) By my informal survey, this was the favorite at demo. XKey is a tiny USB port device (kind of like one of those little USB flash devices) which, by plugging into a laptop, **transforms the host computer into a private, isolated, separate computer, connected by VPN to the corporate network. **
It’s hard to explain in a few words, but basically you plug it into the USB port while your computer is connected to your corporate LAN. Magically files, folders, exchange and outlook data, are all copied onto the device. When you take it and plug it into another (‘host’) computer, you get access to all yo...
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2004-02-25
BlogBridge Installation and Deployment
Working on installation and deployment features. We will be using Java Web Start for this. We have not yet decided how open to make this yet. Most likely initially it will be via ‘secret URL’. You have to ask to get it.
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2004-02-25
Demo 2004 Series – I
Read more →Demo 2004 Series – I just returned from the Demo 2004 Conference, and I have some news and ideas that I will be writing about in the coming days. At the highest level, Demo is a conference that I’ve been going to for years. It is in the same league or family as PC Forum and Agenda. You might call it one of the legacy conferences (… to contrast it with the new cool conferences such as the Emerging Technology Forum and BloggerCon.)
If you are interested in what new products are coming out of the mainstream computer industry, Demo is great. Chris Shipley who i...
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2004-02-25
Search Innovations (Demo 2004 Series
Read more →Search Innovations (Demo 2004 Series – 2) – Two interesting Seach products were showcased: Grokker 2 from Groxis and p-Zoom from Big On The Net. They were both variations of a similar idea, with very different visual interfaces.
The core idea is to take the results of a search engine of some kind, and cluster and organize them to make them more understandable. Not a new idea, and in fact, there have been several products who have done this, none of which I can remember right off. Both Grokker and p-Zoom seem to work but in my view they don’t do enough in an e...
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2004-02-14
New BlogBridge Web Site and other changes
Happy Valentines Day. As you can see, there is a new web site design. This one was created by a designer in China. I just thought I wanted something a little more professional. As for the software, there are several new developments. We are diving into the questions of unread handling. This is leading to new designs in several areas: there is now a BlogBridge Preferences dialog. Included here will be settings allowing Articles to be automatically set to unread under certain conditions. Also there will be some changes required in the low level persistence handling to track unread.
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2004-02-14
What’s funny about Office 2003?
What’s funny about Office 2003? Look at the extremely cool Office 2003 Tool to the right. Well, no I don’t really know all that it does, but note the example under the “Search For:” Who said Microsoft couldn’t laugh at itself? -
2004-02-13
Pecking order? Puleeze! Joi Ito
Read more →Pecking order? Puleeze! Joi Ito writes with apparent confusion about the a comment from Russel Beattie who commented that: “but boy it seemed like there were some serious pecking orders there.” (via Jeremy Zawodny.) While Russel’s comment is about ETech, a conference I am really sorry I had to miss, it certainly doesn’t surprise me, as it shouldn’t surprise Joi or others.
In fact I am always amused and bemused (what’s the difference?) at the highly structured set of social behaviors are exhibited at ...
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2004-02-11
Echo Chamber, redux: Are we
Read more →Echo Chamber, redux: Are we wasting our valuable brain cells duplicating each other’s work? There was an excellent and thought provoking presentation by Dave Sifry of Technorati fame at the ETech Forum. I wish I was there.
Well, here are four (4) different first hand reports of the same talk: David Weinberger, Joi Ito, Doc Searls, Dan Gillmor, and I am sure there were others.
I wonder how many people were in the ...
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2004-02-11
The 100-Million-Mile Network – Great article
The 100-Million-Mile Network – Great article about one of my favorite topics, the Mars Rover. There are several really interesting blogs about this project as well, that I’d recommend for the space buffs among you!