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  • 1 min read

Sharing a keyboard, mouse and multiple screens

Check out Synergy:

"Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s)."

Cool! Technorati Tags: interesting

  • 1 min read

Boston is thinking about city-wide wi-fi access

Michael Feldman of Dowbrigade has a really interesting report on something that I didn't even know was going on in Boston. Apparently they/we are thinking about providing wi-fi access across the city:

"However, there are a number of important issues to be resolved before one of these plans becomes operational: opposition from current ISP's and wireless phone providers, differing business models for paying for and possibly charging for the service, which of several competing technologies to support, and the proper role of municipal and state government in regulating access and content."

Michael has some fun with the 3×5 cards that are apparently the only way to ask questions from the panel - in the expectation of getting answers by email!

"On our yellow card we carefully wrote "We feel like we are watching C-SPAN. Why are you afraid to face the opinions of the PEOPLE?" and handed it to an efficient-looking aide and left to look up another cup of coffee. If the second panel was anything like the first, we were going to need it."

Anyway, check out the whole thing. It's a good read! Technorati Tags: boston, wireless

  • 1 min read

Dowbrigade and Bridge BlogBridge

Just a quick note of the very nice mention of BlogBridge by almost-famous Dowbrigade blog by the incredibly prolific Michael Feldman.

(Emphasis mine, throughout) Blog Bridge is the amazing new RSS reader and aggregator from Pito Salas. Sure, it makes it easy to subscribe, arrange, view and blog from anything with an RSS feed. But what really sets it apart is that it is written completely in Java , which means that it is platform-independent, works on any computer connected to the interenet, and it remembers not only what you are subscribed to, but which articles you have already read, or saved, or filed to read later. From anywhere, on any machine. Being used to the much simpler aggregator built into Manila, it took us a while to discover the utility of moving feeds into channels and groups, but now it seems second nature. There are suggested sample groupings to get beginners started, pre-packaged packets of feeds, which you can easily modify by adding and dropping feeds. (from Dowbrigade)

Wow, thanks Michael! Technorati Tags: blog, blogbridge

  • 1 min read

[BLOGBRIDGE] BlogBridge tracks unread articles!

One of the cool things about BlogBridge's (free) companion service, is that keeps track for you what you have and have not read, even if you are using BlogBridge on more than one computer! In other words, please sign up for the service, and set your synchronization options the way you want them (daily, each time you run BlogBridge, or manually.) Each time you synchronize, not only will your subscription lists be kept in synch, but also which articles you have or have not read. Important note on new BlogBridge 1.5.__ For those of you who are running our 'weekly' release of BlogBridge, you are now experiencing a faster, smaller architecture. One of the known consequences of this is that when upgrading to 1.5 from a previous version in many cases articles unread state may be lost. Don't worry, this is a once only, known occurrence! Thank you for your patience! Technorati Tags: blogbridge

  • 1 min read

What happens when your car’s (software) crashes?

Just an amusing little bit from the Wall Street Journal about the Toyota Prius:

"Some buyers of Toyota Motor Corp.'s Prius gas-electric hybrid cars are complaining that their vehicles are stalling or shutting down at highway- driving speeds, a problem Toyota attributes to software problems in the sophisticated computer system." (from WSJ, subscription needed)

And also:

In one complaint, a driver told NHTSA that the car shut down while driving at 60 miles an hour. The Prius continued to lose power as the driver pressed the accelerator. The car had to be towed back to the dealership for repairs.

Heaven help us! A whole new meaning to mission critical software! Technorati Tags: cars

  • 1 min read

New Radio Show: Open Source

Welcome back Chris Lydon! Those of you who have lived in the Boston area for a while (and who are NPR listeners) will recognize the name. Chris has been on local and national TV and radio, and a couple of years ago did some really early, innovative podcasting work (yes, before Adam Curry 🙂 Anyway, he is launching a new radio show, called "Open Source", and he is debugging it in public, which is pretty cool! Check out the show's blog for background and also links to the first three beta test shows. They 're great! Amusingly the latest show on his site is about Wikipedia (of which I am a huge fan) and this is Wikipedia's entry about Chris! (Wheels within wheels!) Technorati Tags: interesting, pbs, podcast

  • 1 min read

Eating your young

I came across this bit:

"Are we going to be a player in VoIP? Absolutely. Are we going to be prepared to disrupt our own business? Absolutely, Why? Because if not, somebody else will." (Techdirt)

It reminds me of stuff I used to say way back when, when I was making the case for building Improv (which was code named "BackBay", and as an R&D project "Modeler".) In those days, of course, Lotus (remember?) was the undisputed PC software leader, with 1-2-3 (remember?) being the wunderkind- unbelievable-cash cow for Lotus. I used to say things like "With Improv we threw out the rule book and went back to basics - what do people really need to build good spreadsheets?" What happened of course was that all that talk was great and even convincing while we were building the product, away from the eyes and ears of our field sales force and sales organization. Once the product was done and needed to be launched and sold, suddenly we weren 't quite as easily prepared to "disrupt our own business." Live and learn! Technorati Tags: improv, strategy