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  • 1 min read

Roku Roku Roku: Aint Technology Great?

Sb-M1000-Small This little gem really works! A StarTrek cool little device that sits on top of your stereo or TV set. It's called a Roku Soundbridge M1000. Has a remote control, built-in Wi-fi (which DOESN"T MEAN wireless fidelity, darn it) and various audio-outs to connect to your amplifier. Simple as pie. What does it do? All my iTunes music, playlists, radio stations, smart play lists, and so on, now, directly accessible, searchable and browsable on that cool retro looking illuminated display. And play them through your big speakers.**Very cool. Very recommended. ** Technorati Tags: music

  • 1 min read

What blogs are good for: Learning about Microsoft

So can you learn anything useful from a blog? I've often spoken admiringly to friends about Microsoft blogging. I've said that, it's not so much that people are giving away any trade secrets. You learn stuff that are not secret, but you probably would only find out if you ran into someone in a Starbucks in Redmond. Exhibit #1 (which I've used before, but continues to impress) Steve Sinofsky's Microsoft TechTalk Blog. Look at an amazing recent post on a topic of vital interest if you are doing business or doing partnering with MSFT.

"I've been asked quite a bit by people interviewing at Microsoft about "software release". This post will talk about our strategy around product releases for Office products, since we have been pretty consistent over the years and this represents a balance between some competing interests." (from Steve Sinofsy's TechTalk)

Read it if you are affected by Microsoft products at all.And who isn 't? Technorati Tags: microsoft

  • 1 min read

Learning about Open Source

MoldavePeter Moldave, a friend of mine who has helped me immensely with BlogBridge has (gulp) started blogging! Yup, another one bites the dust 🙂 Peter is a lawyer (at Gesmer Updegrove LLP), expert in intellectual property, patents, licensing, open source, and other legal matters of great interest to us computer folk. He also has a comprehensive site on all matters relating to open source, Check out his site and blog, it's very informative! Technorati Tags: blogbridge, opensource

  • 1 min read

Swallowing an umbrella

"The sword passes within millimetres of the heart, aorta, and other vitals but, surprisingly, few deaths related to sword swallowing have been described. A Canadian sword swallower did die, but that was after swallowing an umbrella." (from BMJ.com, the General Medical Journal, online, via MetaFilter.)

You do learn the darndest things on the web, don't you? Technorati Tags: funny

  • 1 min read

Wiki as in Wikipedia

I assume you know about Wikis and the Wikipedia. If not, click on the links to the left and you'll both find out and experience it, in one fell swoop. On BlogBridge we use a Wiki as a very lightweight project collaboration tool. Minimalist eRoom if you like. That's the kind that most often occurs to me. But if you think about Wikipedia articles work, they are actually meant to properly describe or define something that exists and has a name. In other words, they specifically are meant to be objective and timely. I've worked at more than one company where we, the CEO, or whoever was trying to write down , invent, or discover, for example, a company value statement , or a company strategy statement. It's a painful process on a lot of levels and when you are all done, it's not even clear that you've accomplished anything. What if you pretended that you were writing an entry in Wikipedia, for example of the company value statement. As a Wiki page, anyone in the organization could read, write, correct, update, clarify and append to the statement. It would be an interesting experiment if you could get it to work. If you did, you might have a better chance of getting some kind of common understanding and alignment, let alone buy in and agreement, than with other more top-down approaches. [inspired by a talk at the BlogOn conference, unfortunately, I can't remember which one.] Technorati Tags: blogon2005

  • 1 min read

For advanced nerds only: How the deathstar works

From How Stuff Works :

"There is no question that the last few years of world history have seen a fair share of chaos and disorder. With so much global unrest, governments worldwide are struggling to devise new methods to maintain order. The Galactic Empire's solution to order is the Death Star."

Read the whole thing! How Stuff Works has come a long way, with sections on Science, Health, Entertainment etc. Check it out!

Technorati Tags: cool

  • 1 min read

Google API -> Open Standard

I really like this idea that Dave Winer has put forward: "Let's make the Google API an open standard", where he says, among other things:

"We've asked for a plug-in architecture for search engines, and if we can't have that, a solid easy-to-program API is a pretty good alternative."

Read the whole thing - there are some really good insights there. Think of it, you could build a "search powered" application. Ok you can do that now, but you are limited to powering your API with Google and no-one else. What if you could let the user select which search engine to use? Google? Yahoo? Or some upstart whipper-snapper? If you are familiar with the various utilities that exist to make it easy to post to your blog (BlogJet, Ecto, and so on - there are several but those two are my favorites,) this is analogous. A general utility, allowing the user to choose from several back ends with different strengths and weaknesses. Isn't that cool? I get a nice graphical UI to post to my blog, whatever blog service I use. Powerful. And not coincidentally, also enabled by an API (the Meta weblog API) that Dave put forward some years ago. Nice! Technorati Tags: API, blog, google

  • 2 min read

[GEEK] OPML Validator

I just came across Dave Winer's new, beta, OPML Validator, which is a welcome development. While there is an OPML spec, having a validator too is a great, pragmatic , concrete way to give a big thumbs up or down to a particular piece of XML From the very start BlogBridge has supported OPML for import and export, as well as for various internal representations and communications. We obviously have done our best to write valid OPML, as best as we understood what that was. Still, what trumps every theoretical position on OPML validity are user cries of: "Hey, I can't import your OPML into XXX", or "Hey, you fail to import my OPML, but YYY has no problem with it." Our approach to this situation has been to follow what has been called "Postel's Law" (which I also learned from Dave Winer, ages ago): "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." And this has worked well so far, although there have been some sticky wickets that we've had to deal with. You end up feeling like you are chasing your tail trying to accommodate all the odd dialects. So, it's great that Dave has now put forward the OPML validator. Running our stuff through it, we do quite well. Click here to see the results of running the validator against a pretty big example of our opml. There are just two errors, each repeated multiple times:

  1. _" An element with more than just a "text" attribute should have a "type" attribute indicating how the other attributes are to be interpreted." _

  2. _" An element should only have known attributes." _

__ In each case we have specified additional attributes beyond the basic ones. Specifically they are: rating, queryParam, queryType, tags, tagsDescription, tagsExtended and icon. Some of those probably deserve to become part of the core set, while others somehow will have to become part of an extensibility model. We'll participate in the discussions as they develop. More to come! Technorati Tags: blogbridge, OPML

  • 1 min read

One more little meme

Here's another cute one I came across, at BlogOn 2005: " Trojan Mouse Strategy" - when you try to develop grass roots adoption of your software, bypassing IT. Technorati Tags: meme