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  • 2 min read

The Gates: What’s the point of taking pictures?

As I mentioned a few days ago, I went to see "The Gates" - Environmental art by Christo. My reaction: much better and cooler than I thought it would be. Not that there were any surprises - it 's exactly what it was said to be: a whole bunch of orange (oops, sorry, safron) rectangular 'gates' all over many of the paths and byways of Central Park in New York City. _H1U4252T.jpg

The impact of the scale of the project is perhaps what was the surprise. You stand one a path, under the canopy of one Gate - and for as far as your eye can follow the path, more and more gates. _H1U0870T.jpg But then you look around you, and in the distance, almost along the horizon, more and more gates, everywhere. It evokes the feeling of being part of a huge parade or ceremony. Surprisingly powerful. What's the point of taking pictures? I had forgotten my camera and as I was walking around it occurred to me: Flikr! Check this out! There are over 4000 pictures, and that only under one tag. Other than perhaps a picture with Me in it, I don't think there's any picture that I could have taken that is not already in this collection!

  • 1 min read

screencasting – Screen + Voice = demo

Jon Udell coins a term, screencasting: creating little informal movies from screen captures plus audio, used particularly for demonstrating softwaree and web features. He's had several really good ones, most recently showing off a really cute Google Maps hack. Well more than cute: impressive and very instructive. Anyway, I'm trying my hand at this in practice, both to learn about the new medium and to illustrate some BlogBridge features. After a bunch of false starts , playing with tools and utilities and microphones that aren't on here's my first quasi-successful attempt. I don't think it's quite practical yet. For one, at 6Meg it's way too big. But it is an interesting start. I will continue to look at it and report as I go.

  • 3 min read

Letter to all BlogBridge users

Dear users, ex-users, and future users of BlogBridge, As we are approaching our 1.0 release, we are starting to plan what comes next! It is a good time to take the pulse of people using BlogBridge regularly and tap into your collective wisdom! Before getting into that, there are a few preliminaries… We just released our 0.9 Beta, and 0.10 Weekly build. Check out the Weekly at http://www.blogbridge.com/install/weekly/blogbridge.jnlp. It is quite wonderful on all platforms 🙂 People say it's extremely fast and responsive. I regularly run it with 400 Feeds and it's snappy as anything. (I don't read 400 Feeds, it's more to stress test the app.) Also, have you seen these new features?

  • BlogBridge Themes allow you to tune the UI to what you want it to look like.

  • When you Subscribe to a Feed, or create a new Guide, you can get a list of suggestions

  • Discover Feeds can now run as a one shot command, or you can have BlogBridge constantly look for interesting feeds for you

  • A new command on the Tools menu to send us feedback

  • When you set up your keywords, they are now also synched to the BlogBridge Service so you have them wherever you are

  • Take a look at the Feed properties. There are several cool new things there

  • There's more but I want to keep this email short!

By the way, the Weekly is almost always the one you should be running because it will have the latest features and bug fixes. The Beta is there for when we mess up and release a broken Weekly, because we are more confident in its stability. Tapping into your collective wisdom: the main point of this email We are organizing a small meeting in the Boston (USA) area to talk about what happens next with BlogBridge. It will be a chance to chat about your experiences with BlogBridge. But more importantly we'd like to talk about what direction to take the product and the project, in terms of both features and strategy. You will really be able to influence what comes next, both in terms of that little feature you always wanted, or a major new direction for the project. As a practical matter, I realize that many of you are far away from the Boston area and wouldn't be able to attend. But I am hoping that there are enough BlogBridge users in the Boston area to put together a good meeting. Date and location have not been set yet, but I would expect it to be some time in March, and likely in Waltham Massachusetts. Of course we'd be very glad to also engage in an email discussion on the BlogBridge developers mailing list: blogbridge-devl@lists.sourceforge.net. (Those of you on the yahoo groups list will notice that there's almost no traffic there.) I will publish interesting nuggets on my blog as well as things develop. Please let me/us know as soon as possible how interested you are in participating in this meeting. By the way, the meeting will happen no matter how many or few people decide that they can make it, but of course we would especially like YOU to come. Best, Pito Salas and the BlogBridge team

  • 1 min read

Article about Podcasting in the New York Times

If you haven't heard about Podcasting (what, are you living under a rock?) the New York Times has a good introduction:

"Their show, mostly ad-libbed, is a podcast, a kind of recording that, thanks to a technology barely six months old, anyone can make on a computer and then post to a Web site, where it can be downloaded to an iPod or any MP3 player to be played at the listener's leisure."

Link to New York Times.

  • 1 min read

Have you seen Google Maps?

Unless you have been living under a rock (or have better things to do with your time) you will have seen Google Maps. Well, I only just tonight looked at them for the first time. Stunning! A spectacular web application. Highly usable and useful. And easy on the eyes! Here's a really good quick introduction to Google Maps from Peter Merholz's blog. . You'll find some screenshots illustrating key features, and some user interface commentary. And here's a link to google maps themselves. Check it out!

  • 1 min read

[Demo 2005] The Enron Corpus

The demos at this year's DEMO are quite good. One interesting thing I noticed is that there are several products connected to keeping companies out of legal trouble due to problematic internal and external emails, or to help get them out of trouble if they get into it. In several demos we were treated to examples based on the "Enron internal emails." The first two times I thought I was seeing a coincidental picking of the same humor by two seperate companies. But when it came up again, I went searching, and wouldn't you know that during the discovery process of the whole Enron debacle, an aparently extensive (perhaps complete) collection of their internal emails during the relevant periods were collected, and subsequently made public on the web. Here's an interesting paper, one of many, about te Enron Email Corpus So just watch out what you write in email!

  • 1 min read

Modesty isn’t dead

If you are interested in blogging you certainly have come across Robert Scoble's blog, the most prominent blog written by a Microsoft employee. Recently The Economist wrote a story about Robert Scoble at Microsoft. Nice article. Tip o' the hat to Robert Scoble for his response to this column:

Finally, I really don't deserve the credit for humanizing Microsoft. There were about 100 bloggers already doing that work when I got to Microsoft. In particular, Joshua Allen deserves that title more than anyone. He is our Jackie Robinson of blogger

And also, previously, this one:

The thing is, business is a team sport. Not one guy. If one guy could do it all Bill Gates wouldn't have hired 57,000 of us. So, these articles need to be shared by the more than 1,360 Microsoft bloggers who work in public.

  • 2 min read

Switcher’s Log, Part 4: So what software DO I use on Mac?

This is a topic of continuing interest to people who hear that I switched. Here are some general comments:

  • To a first order approximation what allowed me to switch at all was that I wasn't working on primarily Microsoft (C#, .NET, etc.) software, but rather open sourc-y, java-y, unix-y stuff which found a natural home on Mac.

  • I've been able to find all but one of my major, daily use applications on the mac. Either the Mac version of the same app, or an equivalent counterpart. (The missing link? Microsoft Money.)

  • Speaking in sweeping generalizations, I think that Mac OS X applications are prettier to look at, simpler and often simplistic compared to their XP counterparts.

  • As far as the more optional, less mainstream applications -- the little utilities -- many of them don't exist on Mac. For example Plaxo, SecondCopy, GetAnagram - three of my favorites on XP. These omissions are not enough to make me regret having moved.

Ok, now the list:

  • Applications I use every hour of every day:Mail, Addressbook and iCal , which together are supposed to replace Outlook , but don't quite. Eclipse, which is essentially identical on Mac OS X. BlogBridge of course, which is identical and wonderful on all platforms 🙂 Safari , replacing Internet Explorer and Maxthon -- not quite as nice. Adium , replaces and is nicer than Tillion.

  • Applications which I use very often: Photoshop, Dreamweaver, iTunes, Skype , which are identical on Mac OS X. iPhoto , replaces and is almost identical to Picasa.

  • OS X only applications which I use regularly:MarsEdit , which is the editor that I am using to write this post. QuickSilver , an app launcher, and Konfabulator , a visual trinkets app.

  • Windows XP applications which I really miss: Plaxo, SecondCopy, GetAnagram

  • 1 min read

Two really interesting bits missed by MSM

capt.rom10501301246.vatican_pope_rom105.jpg Here are two practical examples of how mainstream media ("MSM") sometimes overlooks really interesting or engaging stories which are well covered online (and I don't mean just blogs.) Have you seen these? Here's a really touching set of photos of Pope John Paul II shooing away some doves who were released as a peace symbol at some event. I bet you never saw that one. And wouldn't you have liked to see it somewhere, on TV, in the newspaper? How about this article? It talks about "Deep Throat", the secret source that gave Woodward and Bernstein key information that led to the whole Watergate scandal being blown wide open:

"Key Watergate witness turned Deep Throat sleuth John Dean is standing by his report in The Los Angeles Times that Bob Woodward has notified his masters at The Washington Post that "Throat" is ill."

Why isn't this covered anywhere else? Certainly a story of great interest to many many Americans. My point? MSM can overlook some of the best, most interesting stories.