All my blog posts and articles
http://farm.sproutbuilder.com/2341/load/5QDs6GRmAGexSWMQ.swf 
Ok, you can tell I like this new gadget builder, SproutBuilder.
I’ve never had a simple way to create small (or big for that matter) Flash animations. Yes, I know it makes me regress to stupid jokes form my youth, but what the heck.
Of interest is that it took me about 5 minutes to make this flash animation while I was watching the Dems debate. Pretty cool.
Sites that have to support a huge amount of traffic tend to want to be static html. No matter how fast PHP or perl is, in the end, static pages win. So tools pop up to allow you to generate a templated site, but generate it into static html to kind of have your cake and eat it too. Webgen is one of those static web site generators. Here’s what it does:
“When webgen is run it combines the template with each of the page files and generates the HTML output files. During this process special tags are substituted so that, for example, a menu is generated. Actually, this website was generated with webgen and, for example, the menu that you can see was created dynamically. For more information look at the documentation!” (from Webgen)
Sadly we are to the last of the Demo 2008 events. I am writing at the 3/4 point and so far it has been an excellent experience. http://www.coveritlive.com/index2.php?option=com_altcaster&task=viewaltcast&altcast_code=4e17ea267c&height=550&width=470
http://farm.sproutbuilder.com/2341/load/cACdIgrQADCA209Z.swf
The widget to the left was created using Sprout – in fact they insist that those be called “Sprouts” – don’t ask me why. Notice how it’s spinning and counting down? It’s flash.
Sprout is a very cool service with which I can create widgets which are actually live Flash scripts that do interesting things. Sprout will host them on their servers, and let me link ...
Yesterday was a busy day! I saw lots of excellent products and ideas. I don’t know how useful the Liveblog was for y’all, but it was a handy way to have me take notes and concentrate on what was happening. You wouldn’t think you need help concentrating, but sitting in a big dark room for hours on end can wear out your attention span. http://www.coveritlive.com/index2.php?option=com_altcaster&task=viewaltcast&altcast_code=00e21c51b6&height=550&width=470
I’m at the Demo 2008 Conference today. Ever heard of Live Blogging? It’s when some crazy person decides to type a narrative of an event in real time. For fun and profit. I read about this product called Cover It Live to do just that and I thought I’d try it…. http://www.coveritlive.com/index2.php?option=com_altcaster&task=viewaltcast&altcast_code=36d660e56f&height=550&width=470
I saw Chris Jordan speak at Pop!Tech last year. Very interesting and impressive. These are huge photo shopped images that have kind of a macro/micro structure, so you see one image and then when you zoom waaaay in you see what it’s actually represents. Take a look at this cool animated feature from Portfolio Magazine.
You like Barnes and Noble? How about Border’s? Or do you prefer Amazon? Well, check out these amazing bookstores around the world!
Getting ready for the next segment, here’s my continued Liveblog of the event, using CoverItLive. http://www.coveritlive.com/index2.php?option=com_altcaster&task=viewaltcast&altcast_code=e59d0046db&height=550&width=470
Ok it’s now over. If you want me to liveblog demo again tomorrow, send me an email to tell me that you found it useful or fun or whatever!
It’s a little hard to explain and I didn’t manage to get it working myself yet, but still I am highly intrigued with Dapper. Dapper‘s tag line is: “Get more traffic to your site. Easily provide new means for people to access your content (such as RSS). You can use Dapper to create feeds, widgets, and APIs with your content and links.”
It’s a elegant and fancy screenscraping service, as far as I can tell. I think there may be a lot more to it and I intend to spend the time to learn all about it.
Here’s a really excellent screencast showing how Dapper works.
People wring their hands about the possibility of having Bill Clinton back in the white house as the first ever First Spouse, working mano-a-mano with Hillary. I like Bill Clinton a lot – I did when he was president and I still do. Yet I can understand the misgivings. In today’s New York times:
“Which raises an important matter. Do we really want a plural presidency?
This is not a new question. It was intensely debated in the convention that formulated our Constitution. The Virginia Plan for the new document submitted by Edmund Randolph and the New Jersey Plan submitted by William Paterson left open the ...
In the Portals and KM blog, a pair of great articles about “Enterprise 2.0”. Bill Ives has been following and covering Enterprise 2.0, which I’ve seen defined as “the Application of Web 2.0 technologies to workers using network software within an organization or business.” Check out these two articles each of which are quite useful surveys of what’s going on in the space:
Enterprise 2.0 Success Stories, The Best from 2007: “People are often looking for examples of Enterprise 2.0 successes. I am seeing a growing number of examples and wanted to collect them in one post. ...
This is what a discontinuity in a graph looks like 🙂 That’s the stock market from yesterday to today.
The discontinuity is this morning before we heard of the Fed’s “Shock and Awe” move, lowering the prime rate by 3/4 percent.
I’ve been learning and thinking about Facebook applications, which everyone else is also writing and thinking about… I will be posting about some of the interesting facts and insights as they come up. This one is fairly obvious if you think about it, but it may be a useful reminder.
*Facebook applications don’t ever let you actually store anything on the Facebook servers/service themselves. *
In other words, let’s say you add a really cool Facebook application that let’s you display and share all the books you have read, and let all your friends do the same. Everyone is writing reviews and marking thumbs up and down on these books, organizing them into bookshelves and what not.
All of tha...
Yes an online catalog can be funny. Click on the link to this Dutch site and just wait a few seconds. (Thanks Larry)
From the Wall Street Journal: “[snip…] Sun Microsystems Inc. has agreed to buy open-source software maker MySQL AB for $1 billion, and said its fiscal second-quarter net income nearly doubled on boosted margins, according to preliminary results.Sun is paying $800 million in cash and assuming $200 million in options to acquire MySQL.
The Swedish company makes open-source database software used by companies such as online search leader Google Inc., social-networking site Facebook Inc. and Finnish phone maker Nokia Corp.[snip…]” from ...
It’s just the title of this post that caught my eye: “What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory, Part 1″: “[snip…]The original document prints out at over 100 pages. We will be splitting it into about seven segments, each run 1-2 weeks after its predecessor. Once the entire series is out, Ulrich will be releasing the full text.[…snip…]” (from LWN.NET)
I don’t know about you, but it may be just a little bit more than I want to know about memory 🙂
I just came across this announcement for the ‘Battle of the Tech Bands’ on January 22 in Central Square (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.) “Musicians from Boston’s tech and tech-investment companies play their geeky hearts out—you pick the winners!”
Sounds like fun! Check out the Battle of the Tech Bands here!
Yes there’s been lots of rumors of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo, or Logitech. They come and go constantly. I am starting one (a rumor that is) that has not been mentioned Microsoft will buy Amazon. I will state my case, very briefly:
Amazon has been building an amazing platform of services for their online store which they make available to the world at large. I am sure you’ve heard of many of them available via Amazon Web Services, such as S3 and EC2. Newer ones like DevPay and SimpleDB.
Microsoft is feeling pressure from Google, that c...
iLike is this really cool, really popular service which compares the music you like with others’ tastes as they play music in iTunes. It’s a handy way to discover new music. As you can see in the screenshot to the left, it displays all this in a very nice little window to the right of the iTunes window. All very cool.
Not only do you see other related music that I may be interested in, it also offers me downloads of free, up and coming artists who might interest me.
And then, it shows me nice litte pictures of other iLike users who listen to Beethoven or whoever.