Posts tagged #technology

I came across a fascinating research paper that puts LLMs head-to-head with human participants in a classic creativity task, and the results are worth sitting with for a moment. Ideas are Dimes a Dozen: Large Language Models for Idea Generation in Innovation examines how well models like GPT perform when asked to generate novel business and product ideas compared to actual humans.

The headline finding is both humbling and thought-provoking: LLMs can produce a higher quantity of ideas that are rated comparably in quality, but the very best human ideas still tend to stand out at the top of the distribution. What I find most inte...

You know I've been using Claude Code and friends extensively in my work. To the extent that most of the python that I generated in the last month was written by Claude Code. You might know that up to recently I was teaching at Brandeis University in the Computer Science department. While teaching software engineering and robotics - and this is true of the whole department - we spent a fair amount of time teaching students "program". Either of the main topic of a course, or as an incidental part of whatever the course was about.

Students would learn through lectures, reading and practice how to write relatively complicated programs in a variety of languages. But the practice, usually was to ...

Based on my own experience, some of my favorite books and blog posts, and advice from friends, I’ve come up with this. What do you think? What should I add? Please comment! This was my opinion back in 2015 I will create a new post showing what has changed!

Personal Effectiveness Rules of Thumb

When you have your best idea ever, always remember that the idea is just 1% of the journey Yes, ideas are cheap. At least in the world of software engineering and product development, everyone and their grandfather have ideas that may be great. The distance between the idea and the reality is great. ...

Heroku alternatives: Free Hosting Providers in 2023 –Now that heroku eliminated their generous free tier (an understanable business decision) all of us “freeloaders” are scrambling to find alternatives. This article revies what they consider to be “Top Free Hosting Providers in 2023”

A brief tour of the PDP-11, the most influential minicomputer of all time | Ars Technica –A wonderful exhaustive tour of the architecture and operation of thr PDP-11, a venerable early comouter. It helped popularize the interactive computing paradigm we take for granted today.

huginn/huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf. –Interesting package although I don’t have a use for it yet. It’s your own IFTTT built for geeks that you run on your ownn server. It’s got no UI to speak of. On the other hand, it has a sophisticated way to create logic around events and is extensible and open source.

GPS – Bartosz Ciechanowski –GPS is an amazing, complex and super interesting technology. People have a vague understanding that it involves satelites and so on. But there is so much more to it! Interactive article explaining how GPS works.

What is Steampipe? –Seems useful for someone. Just putting it on this list to track it. Here’s what the author says: “Steampipe is an fantastic tool from Turbot. Steampipe allows you to easily ask questions about your Cloud and SaaS Infrastructure”

Swurl – Search everything instantly –Played with this a little. While google already searches all those other sources still i like the formatting of the output. Not sure if i will continuw to like it ad i use it more. But intriguing! Author dsys: “Search Google, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Amazon, & many more sites all at once. See all the results in 1 organized view.”

Why Twitter Didn’t Go Down: From a Real Twitter SRE –Twitter supposedly lost around 80% of its work force. What ever the real number is, there are whole teams with out engineers on it now. Yet, the website goes on and the tweets keep coming. This left a lot wondering what exactly was going on with all those engineers and made it seem like it was all just bloat. I’d like to explain my little corner of Twitter (though it wasn’t

teaxyz/cli: the unified package manager (brew2) –This is pretty crazy/amazing (to geeks, i guess). I heard a podcast with the author and he convinced me. Looking at the readme, I am confused/impressed. Author: “the unified package manager (brew2). Contribute to teaxyz/cli development by creating an account on GitHub.”

The Largely Untold Story Of How One Guy In California Keeps The World’s Computers Running On The Right Time Zone. (Well, Sort Of) | by Daniel Rosehill | OneZero –Always a great story. People like this should be compensated!

Try these Google Docs Tricks 🪄 –There are a few really good ones here! “11 quick tips and hidden features”

Zulip: Slack alternative Chat for distributed teams –Now that slack changed its pricing model it may be time to switch. “Zulip combines the immediacy of real-time chat with an email threading model. With Zulip, you can catch up on important conversations while ignoring irrelevant ones”

Thoughtful: Google and HTTP –Google is a guest on the web, as we all are. Guests don’t make the rules.

The Standards Innovation Paradox –“The great thing about standards is there are so many to pick from!” Thats a joke, get it? Standards, like RSS for podcasts, have enabled emerging technologies to spread far and wide in the information age by making it easy for…

You.com | The search engine you control. –Good luck to the world with another search engine. Yes google is evil and I wish there was competition. But good luck! “You.com is an ad-free, private search engine that you control. Customize search results with 150 apps alongside web results. Access a zero-trace private mode.”

11 rules for buying an ebike, and the 11 ebikes to buy now You thought your family was going to be talking about web3 this Thanksgiving. But they’re actually talking about ebikes. Let’s help you prepare. Ebikes are about to change the world. They are already the best selling electric vehicles, and are selling as fast as factories can make them. March 20, 2022 at 02:22PM

Deskreen Deskreen is a desktop app that turns any device with a web browser into a secondary screen for your computer over WiFi. Deskreen can be used to mirror entire computer display onto any device screen that has a web browser. Also you can limit Deskreen to select only one application window view to share – very useful for presentation purposes. The best feature of Deskreen is to use any device as a secondary screen. To have a true extended desktop experience Deskreen should be used with Virtual Display Adapter. Also with no need for Virtual Display Adapter you can have a teleprompter with Deskreen using your tablet or smartphone, for that Deskreen has Flip Screen Mode that mirrors computer screen in web browser of your tablet (aka. flip screen horizontally). February 14, 2022 at 01:44PM

How to Monitor Network and Zoom Performance & Fix “Your Internet Connection is Unstable” on Zoom how to monitor network performance and Zoom performance and avoid the “Your Internet Connection is Unstable” message of doom. February 1, 2022 at 10:46PM

Descript | All-in-one audio/video editing, as easy as a doc. Record, transcribe, edit, mix, collaborate, and master your audio and video with Descript. Download for free →. August 12, 2021 at 01:55PM

nocodb/nocodb 🔥 🔥 The Open Source Airtable alternative. Contribute to nocodb/nocodb development by creating an account on GitHub. May 29, 2021 at 06:16AM

Wirecutter tests and reviews the best tech, appliances, gear, and more. You can trust our veteran journalists, scientists, and experts to find the best stuff.

A very little known feature of Google+ Is the “auto awesome” feature. I want to sing its praises!

On your smartphone. you can download the G+ application and configure it to automatically back up all your photos to Google+, even if you choose to keep them all private. A useful feature, but not unique.

But dig a little deeper and you will find that you can enable something called “auto-awesome”, When you do that the non-evil gnomes at Google will look at all your pictures and from time to time do some crazy fun tweak to it to make it more awesome. And it looks like they add different kinds of awesomeness from time to time.

The beauty here is that this takes literally zero effort on your pa...

About a week ago the new version of the Safari Browser came out for Mac OS X. I was swayed by the promotion and decided to use it for a while instead of Firefox 3.5. Here’s my take, subjective, not based on a scientific analysis:

If Safari 4.02 is faster than Firefox 3.5.1 it wasn’t immediately obvious to me. I think Safari starts up a bit faster but other than that, no noticable difference. The new ‘show all my most visited web pages in one screen’ feature is pretty, but wasn’t useful to me I was constantly annoyed that Safari would open a new window when all I wanted was a navigation or at most a new tab. (Yes I did play with the options but none of them fit my mode of use.) I missed cert...

I came across this video by Armando Fox with his views of what went wrong with the Obamacare website, from a deep technical perspective. It’s part of a University of California at Berkley course on SAAS Software Engineering. It’s very very good!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl5WFz6Gi28&w=854&h=480]

I’ve been using mint.com for years now but every month I hate it a little bit more. It’s too big, too slow, and too buggy. But it’s solving a problem that I need solved which is a comprehensive cloud based personal finance tool that covers banking, investments, credit cards, reporting and analysis. I can’t say that their decline corresponded exactly with when Inuit bought them but… it didn’t help either.

I’ve wondered why no one is tackling this space. I try them all and they all are lacking in one key way or another. Here’s a review from the New York Times From those, I’ve...

It’s obvious if you think about it, but this article drives some points home. If you use some kind of web service to read, listen, watch, charge, use, borrow or share stuff, that company not only knows what you’ve (read, listened to, etc.) They also know much more specifically how you did so: Did you stick with it to the end, did you do it from a particular place, at a particular time? Did you do it in one sitting or over a day or a week or a month?

If you then combine such observation across a farily large group of peope you can learn amazing things. Like how many people finish your book, or how far through it they get before abandoning it. Do they listen to the whole song? At what episode...

Forget Dropbox, I just heard that Box.com gives you 50gig for free upon signup. I just signed up and it seems like I got it. Pretty cool:

Box | Secure content-sharing that users and IT love and adopt:

Box lets you store all of your content online, so you can access, manage and share it from anywhere. Integrate Box with Google Apps and Salesforce and access Box on mobile devices. Learn More

But I wonder: how can they do it? Is storage so cheap now? Yahoo gives 100Gig free with Flickr.com.

And I also wonder, who needs 50gig free for non commercial use on Box.com? My first idea was to fill it up with movies, tv shows and so on.

But then I got to...

Fox News debuts bizarre, giant tablets in its outrageous new newsroom | The Verge:

Fox News has just unveiled a breathtakingly ridiculous newsroom, complete with novelty-sized Windows-based touchscreens, a Twitter wall, and a wannabe Minority Report-style display, which it hopes will connect it with generations of viewers who use smartphones and apps.

Pretty amazing that the govt is actually placing all the code for healthcare.gov on github for all of us to inspect. There’s only one commit, and it’s 3 months old. Also there’s a reasonable amount of developer information available.

Somehow I suspect that it is not all there or how fast it will be updated, but still whatever’s there is a big step forward from the SOP of the past!

...

I stumbled across this web site. I can’t say anything about their status or quality but I was suprised that someone developed what looks like a complete “university admin in a box” cloud based software. Maybe I can use it for Bootup Academy!

Get a Feature tour of Fedena – Management Information System:

Fedena provides user-friendly dashboards with login access to all the teachers, non-teaching staff, students, parents and management body of your institution. The various modules available in Fedena takes care of all the processes in your institution, right from admission of new students to generating transfer certificate, when the student completes the studies.

Seth Godin is said to have said that anonymous commenting is not a good thing:

“…Mathew, the forces for anonymous are running out of time. For almost two decades, the internet has been anonymous friendly, and what has come of it?…” (from GigaOm, via @davewiner)

Here’s what Rosie O’Donnel said about Twitter, which gets to a similar point:

“…Correct, and that’s what it is. It’s like standing on a stage in a darkened comedy club and people throwing shit at you and you still trying to do your act…” (from transcript of Here’s the Thing interview)

Very clever!

An Automated GPS-Free Location System For Cars | IdeaFeed | Big Think:

It works through the use of two simple cameras, which collect video data that is then compared to an OpenStreetMap area map. Through a process of elimination that takes place within an average of 20 seconds of driving, the system is able to figure out exactly where the car is. During tests conducted in Germany, it located cars to within 3 meters of their actual positions.

You probably don’t know what a social login button is so forgive this bit of geekyness. I am sure you’ve seen them: “login with facebook or twitter?” If an app or a site wants to “save you the trouble” of registering a username and password, they may “make your life easier” by allowing you to register using your facebook or twitter password. Conventional wisdom in the world of apps has been that this is a user requirement, and plus beneficial to the business as well. Here’s an interesting article that refutes that belief, at least in certain significant scenarios.

...

Here’s my five-step plan for world domination:

I am creating a comprehensive taxonomy of characteristics of smartphone apps. Much more detailed than a feature list: “is it on android or iPhone” but really micro. I will have 20 different user interface ‘styles’ defined scientifically. I will analyze all 11 different variations on viral growth models and describe them scientifically. I will classify the color schemes, fonts used, left versur right swiping, number of customizable characters, and that’s just the start!

Once I have that, I will have an independent panel of experts score the top one hundred smart phone apps on each of the facets of my taxonomy. With that I will have a 20...

Here’s what I think: If economic analysis says that technology does not contribute to the overall productivity of the country, check the analysis. It’s incorrect.

It’s self evident and obvious that technology – computers, smart phones, tablets, cloud computing, robotics, and on and on make us more productive. I say, send the economists back to the drawing board to look again.

Economic Statistics Miss the Benefits of Technology – NYTimes.com:

The meme is back. The burst of productivity during the dot-com revolution of the 1990s gave skeptics pause. But as productivity has slowed substantially in recent years, doubts have re-emerged about whether information technology can power economic growth like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine did in the past.

This is a tired topic but this article from the New York Times does have some good tips on managing your avalanche of email …

“…There’s no quick fix. But set aside a few hours one afternoon, brew a pot of coffee, get a tasty snack, put on your favorite playlist and roll up your sleeves. It’s time to tame your in-box…” (from “How to Lighten the Crush of Email“)

Read the article here.

Loomio is a new app looks quite cool and worth checking out:

“Loomio is a collaborative decision-making tool. Loomio reduces the cost of participation in decision-making, making it easy for any group to translate online communication into real-world collective action….Creating a world where it’s easy for anyone to participate in decisions that affect them. With the right collaborative process, groups generate better ideas, decisions and actions than any individual would by themselves. Loomio breaks down the barriers to participation in decision-making at every level: in neighbourhoods, community organisations, businesses, social movements, and local and national governance.Collaborative decision-making balances individual autonomy with the collective good.” (from Loomio.com)

This is an area I am quite interested in! I am planning to check Loomio out.

I am just as guilty as anyone of being overly addicted to looking at my cellphone, and that’s not an original observation! It’s a cliché that has been written and talked about ad nauseum.

This article points out that there was a time when men wore hats outdoors and the social norm was always to take your hat off when you were indoors or were interacting socially. Maybe the reason is that the brim of the hat covers your eyes and interferes with normal social interaction, wh...

It turns out that Kaspersky Labs is developing a brand new operating system specifically designed to be used in embedded industrial systems and industrial control systems.

In this article, Eugene Kaspersky explains why his company decided to embark on the creation of an operating system designed specifically and only for embedded industrial control systems.

The obvious question:

“First I’ll answer the most obvious question: how will it b...

What an antiquated term: Full Duplex. I don’t know if that term is used anymore but what i mean is this:

I use Skype on many many voice calls, either to other Skype users or to telephone. It seems to me that while the other person is talking, I cannot interrupt them. In other words, either I am talking or I am listening, but not both.

Am I mistaken? Or is my Skype set up incorrectly?

Full Duplex is a term that used to mean, maybe still means, that both parties to a connection can be active at the same time. Last time I used it, it was in reference to a teletype machine!

I am considering these Bluetooth Wireless Powered Speakers… which should I get?

Jawbone JAMBOX Wireless Bluetooth Speaker Braven 625s Wireless Bluetoothe Speaker Soundmatters foxLv2 Bluetooth Loudspeaker

They have all been positively reviewed in this and other articles: A Pocket Sized Speaker With Some Punch

This interesting, and I think, correct article, makes the argument that the word ‘innovation’ is being watered downand even getting cheapened. It says, about “innovation”,

“Regrettably, we now use the term to describe almost anything. It can describe a smartphone app or a social media tool; or it can describe the transistor or the blueprint for a cellphone system. The differences are immense.” (from ...

Funny insider lingo. I am sure you’d be able to do a similar video for Washington DC (politics) and L.A. (movies) and Kendal Square (Biotech). My word is computers. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR8zFANeBGQ]

I don’t pay much attention to Microsoft and Windows these days. I admit it, I am a hardcore Mac and Linux user, more comfortable in the unix shell than I ever was at a Dos prompt.

It’s easy to forget the layers and layers and layers of complexity that exist in any operating system nowadays, even a little Android tablet (which I am spending lots of time with lately.)

So this article is a good reminder of what’s happening up in Redmond. It describes the “next generation file system for Windows“:

“Our design attributes are closely related to our goals. As we go through these at...

Where in the US is hottest for Cloud Computing, or for Big Data, or for No Sql? Curious? Yeah, then you’re a geek. Here’s a quick interesting set of graphs that cover questions like that and others.

US Tech Hotspots: San Fran, Boston and Utah? from GigaOm

Due to an unusual set of coincidences I have 3 different Macintosh computers in my office today so I could run performance comparisons. After a brief bit of research I came across XBench, a free, open source benchmarking suite. I am not positive that it is the state of the art, but it’s quite popular. Here’s what I found:

Mac Pro, Early 2009, with 6 Gig of memory and a Solid State Disk (SDD) (MacPro4,1)

Overall: 234.09, CPU: 198.42 Memory: 474.51 Graphics: 379.61

MacBook Air, Late 2010, with 4 Gig of memory and a SDD (MacBookAir3,2)

Overall: 126.07 CPU: 149.17 Memory: 198.90 Graphics: 159.94

Macbook Air, Late 2011, with 4 Gig of memory and a SDD (MacBookAir4,2)

Overall: 199.85 CPU: 205.25 Memory: 508.89 Graphics: 316.38

I know, you want to know the units, and I don’t know them. But still you can see remarkably that the brand new MacBook Air is almost as performant as the huge towering Mac Pro, Pretty amazing and telling.

You may have noticed that this Blog is now hosted on SquareSpace. I’ve been pretty happy with it so far. While it is kind of a closed system, there are extensive customization features that allow me to get pretty much what I want.

And their support is 24×7 and very responsive. Although not necessarily always helpful. Note that I am not the first to observe this. Joannes Vermorel’s Blog says:

“The feedback from the Squarespace support has always two properties:

Extremely fast, my tickets are addressed within minutes. Extremely useless, canned answers co...

I’ve been playing around with each of the major tablets while considering ‘my next move’ 🙂

Oddly I have not been able to find a side by side comparison of their weights. After googling for 3 minutes. So as a public service let me transcribe my notes on this vital topic.

Apple iPad 2: 21.1 oz Barnes and Nobel Nook Color: 15.8 oz Amazon Kindle Fire: 14.6 oz Barnes and Nobel Nook Tablet: 14.1 oz Amazon Kindle Touch: 7.8 oz Amazon Kindle 4: 5.9 oz

Just one phrase that jumped out of the new missive from Zuck about privacy:

“As a matter of fact, privacy is so deeply embedded in all of the development we do that every day tens of thousands of servers worth of computational resources are consumed checking to make sure that on any webpage we serve, that you have access to see each of the sometimes hundreds or even thousands of individual pieces of information that come together to form a Facebook page.” (fromOur Commitment to the Facebook Community)

When I tell (non computer) people that it takes hundreds or th...

I was excited to hear about the Kindle Fire. But I was waiting to read some impartial reviews of one before running off and buying one. After all I am a big fan of the Kindle (gen 2) and enjoy reading books on Kindles. And, believe it or not, I don’t yet own an iPad.

So the Fire seems like a match made in heaven, right?

Well, today David Pogue, tech reporter of the New York Timeskind of reviewed the Fire (along with the other new, low end Kindles.) Well, the punchline is, he loves the new inexpensive Kind...

This link lets you see all the passages in Steve Jobs’ new biography that were underlinedby Kindle readers. All of them. Pretty interesting don’t you think?

An interesting article about this impending crisis. Although it’s impending, I had never heard about before, despite the claim that “This impending “flash crisis” is well known in system circles. It’s almost like a mini Y2K.” Ok, tell me more…

The core does make a great point:

“What happens when you blow up the “slow disk” assumption is that your entire software stack begins to crumble. When the cushion provided by those 10 ms of seek time goes away, CPU becomes your bottleneck. You have to start rethinking a lot of design choices.” (from Impending Flash Crisis)

Interesting…

I’ve been looking into changing up the primary (and only) disk in my 2 year old Mac Pro to a Solid State Disk (SSD). Based on what I’ve seen on the new Mac Airs I think it will boost performance a lot more than adding more memory would.

The problem is that these beasts are pretty expensive, so I am not going to replace my 400G Hard Disk with a 400G SSD. Instead I will have a much smaller SSD to boot from and run from, and leave the larger 400G to carry the load of large files that I don’t use a lot.

Here are a bunch of useful links that I have gathered in case you are thinking of doing the same:

...

Marc Andreeson has a really good, optimistic article in the Wall Street Journal about the future foundational role of Software in all industries of the world’s economy:

“[…snip]Finally, the new companies need to prove their worth. They need to build strong cultures, delight their customers, establish their own competitive advantages and, yes, justify their rising valuations. No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It’s brutally difficult.

I’m privileged to work with some of the best of the new breed of software companies, and I can tell ...

Check this post Connecting Web Apps with Web Intents "Android OS addresses this problem with Intents, a facility for late run-time binding between components in the same or different applications. In the Intents system, the client application requests a generic action, e.g. share, and specifies the data to pass to the selected service application. The user is given a list of applications which have registered that they can handle the requested intent. The user-selected application is created in a new context and passed the data sent from the client, the format of which is predefined for each specific intent type." (from Chromium Blog)

This is a really cool idea! If you are familiar with Android Intents it will make sense to you. Read the article if not. I wonder whether W3C will embrace this as a ‘good idea’. I think they should!

As you (don’t) know, I am teaching a course at Brandeis University about mobile and game development. So I follow stories about how to more easily create cross platform mobile apps with great interest. Check this post Adobe Software Updates To Help Devs Build iOS, PlayBook And Android Apps from TechCrunch: Adobe is today pushing updates to its application development software product Flash Builder and the open source Flex framework to enable developers to build apps for iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry PlayBook, following support for the Android platform (added last April).

The U.S. government is helping create parallel internetsand cell phone networks in countries where the government is suppressing free communications between their citizens. The idea makes sense and is, “pretty cool”: “The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.” (from The New York Times)

Read more about it in the New York Times: US Underwrites Detour Around Sensors.

It’s hard to believe, but here is what I got from Mint.com when I asked why my Bank of America info was not updating on Mint:

Hi Pito,

Thank you for contacting Mint.com.

According to our engineers, we can’t support Bank of America due to unsupported authentication and/or challenge question format. We are, unfortunately, able to support the addition of products from that account at this time.

We apologize for the inconvenience and we appreciate your patience in this regard.

Have a nice day!

Thank you, Naddy L. Mint.com

So, Mint.com no longer supprts Bank of America accounts. Isn’t Bank of America one of the biggest (or THE biggest US bank?)

I am most certainly not having a nice day. Time to move on from Mint.com.

Qwiki seems to create multi-media presentations on any topic at all. I picked an odd topic, like “BlogBridge”, and it did a half decent job. I don’t know how automatic or human-driven it is, but it’s interesting. Another interesting find is Fotopedia, “The First Collaborative Photo Encyclopedia”. It’s interesting but it suffers from an unclear mission. I think it’s trying to be wikipedia meets flickr, but I am not sure. As you can see from this link, there’s some actual connection to Flickr. Are they using Flickr to prime their pump?

After attending the Lean Startup Machine weekend a few days ago, I pay more attention to these ‘I created this startup in 3 hours’ stories. So when I saw this in Inc. Magazine:

“He’s an Israeli who sidestepped military service in favor of moving to the Bay Area to become Y Combinator’s youngest founder. Six months later, all eyes are on Daniel Gross, as he has almost $5 million in funding backing his search engine, Greplin. Oh, and he didn’t go to college.” (from ...

If you work with non-profit projects that collect or disseminate large amounts of public data, you would find this interesting.

Amazon offers FREE storage for huge public datasets. So in otherwords, Amazon’s ‘cloud based’ storage service (known as S3) will offer, for no charge, to store a dataset if it is open to the public and somehow for the public good.

From their site:

“Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications. Learn more about Public Data Sets on AWS and visit the Public Data Sets forum.” (from Amazon’s Public Data Sets)

Here’s the link: http://aws.amazon.com/datasets

When my computer turns on it can often take 30 to 120 seconds for my Samsung LCD display to wake up. Facts of the case:

Display is 213T and is something like 3-5 years old

Office can be cold

I am sure the computer is ready within seconds. It’s just waking up. It will play music for example right away.

In every other respect the display is fine

It has always done this

Do you know?

Scott Kirsner tweets:

“Invented at MIT, Sifteo cubes (tiny displays that talk to each other) are almost ready: http://bit.ly/eXsCQU / http://bit.ly/ehhZ1Q”

Sifteo cubes are similar (except much more expensive and presumably programmable) to Scrabble Flash, that have been around since last year. Interesting.

I’ve seen Path, the new "un social" network (limit 50 friends) plugged by pundits and journalists. I tried it and just didn’t get it. Didn’t know what it was for, who it was for, and why it was getting attention. So I am glad finally to come across a commentator who seems to agree with me… Check this post Path Adds 10-Second Video to its Anti-Social Network from Mashable!: ** Ultimately, Path appears to value style over function with an overwrought and contrarian approach to social networking.** For a service that intends to be deeply intimate in purpose, it’s an approach that so far feels cold and unwelcoming. Of course, it’s too soon to tell whether Path is destined for success or doomed for failure. The pedigree of its founders and investors assures us, however, that we will certainly hear a lot more from this startup in the year ahead.

Check out this really interesting Pogue article in the New York Times: “Gorilla Glass, the Smartphone’s Unsung Hero”. Here’s a tidbit:

“It’s the screen of every touchscreen phone, like the iPhone and Android phone, plus the iPad and iPod Touch. It’s an amazing story. Corning invented this stuff in the ’60s, but didn’t know what to do with it. Then a few years ago, someone showed a piece of it to Steve Jobs. The guy dropped a piece of the glass into a bag full of keys and shook it hard; it came out without a scratch on it! Jobs immediately seized on the idea of using it for his iPhone....

And, it’s leaving us: “The past four years have been a wild ride for us: growing something from nothing to substantial scale, providing a simple service that people love because it simplifies their lives. We’ve learned tons along the way, often by making big mistakes. We’re really sorry that this last lesson means that you’ll have to find an alternative to Xmarks, but the alternatives exist and you’ll have no problem finding them.” (from Xmarks Blog)

Again this shows how good ideas don’t always win.

This was an excellent idea, but perhaps it suffered from the classic-cliche-VC-quip “It’s a feature not a product”, or worse, “It’s a product not a company”. I...

From an article about Google’s hardware: “Google’s big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there’s a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers–each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.” (from CNET)

There are lots of other choice tidbits about the design of the millions (?) of tiny servers that Google uses to run its data centers. Quite interesting.

Have you heard of this thing, the Tor Anonymizer? Ok again admittedly another highly geeky system, but pretty fascinating. Makes you think that the handwringing worrying of the security wonks isn’t as over the top as all that. Tor is a sophisticated privacy tool designed to prevent tracking of where a web user surfs on the internet and with whom a user communicates. It’s endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistleblowers and human-rights workers to communicate with journalists, among other uses. (from Rogue Nodes Turn Tor Anonymizer Into Eavesdropper’s Paradise

Read the article, it’s a fascinating look into the world of security.

The more businesses reward me for showing up at their establishments, the more likely it will be that a bad guy would want to pretend that they were there to garner those rewards. I came across a very interesting paper that proposes the notion of ‘location proofs.’: Enabling new mobile applications with location proofs)

From the paper: “Location is rapidly becoming the next “killer application” as location-enabled mobile handheld devices proliferate. One class of applications that has yet-to-emerge are those in which users have an incentive to lie about their location. These applications cannot rely solel...

Check out this post Chefs and Editors from Dilbert.com Blog: And that’s your future of the Internet. The cost of content, such as this blog, and my comic strip, will continue to approach zero. The art will happen with the editing. Others have made the obvious point that editing will be important for the future of the Internet. All I’m adding is the notion that most editors have skill, but few are artists. The world of print publishing is driven by editors who are exceptionally skilled. But they aren’t artists. Newser is edited by an artist. He or she isn’t giving me information; he’s adjusting my mood. That’s art. That’s the future. (from: Chefs and Editors)

And in general, read Dilbert.com Blog!

The other day I wrote a post where I mentioned Google’s App Inventor, and I mentioned it with some skepticism. Today, a column in the New York Times that covers Google’s App Inventor in more detail, and comes to more or less the same conclusion:

“I’m happy for App Inventor. I wish it a long and exciting life. Surely it will have one in schools and computer classes, among other niches.

But for nonprogrammers on their own? Forget it. Android Hype Inventor is more like it.” (from the New York Times)

Google leaves products in Beta forever, they say. Not Google Wave. They actually announced Wave’s impending cancellation.

“But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.” (from Google Blog)

This really stinks, Google. I’ve begun to really on rely and evangelize Wave. It’s true that it took me a long time to understand it and had to do a good deal of convincing of other people to use it. For me it has been great.

Will I be able to live without it? Sure, nothing is irreplaceable. Google Buzz, on the other hand, lasted about 2 weeks with me. It was truly useless.

Check out Introducing the Google Command Line Tool(from Google Open Source Blog: ** "GoogleCL is a command-line utility that provides access to various Google services. It streamlines tasks such as posting to a Blogger blog, adding events to Calendar, or editing documents on Google Docs." (from: **Introducing the Google Command Line Tool)

.

A couple of New York Times articles today that point out (what others have pointed out too) that the roots of the disaster in the Gulf have a lot in common with those of the Economic meltdown last year: “AS the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico follows on the heels of the financial crisis, we can discern a toxic recipe for catastrophe. The ingredients include risks that are erroneously thought to be vanishingly small, complex technology that isn’t fully grasped by either top management or regulators, and tricky relationships among companies that are not sure how much they can count on their partners.” (from: ...

David Brooks of the New York Times writes about technology and risk, in the context of the drilling disaster in the Gulf: **“Second, people have a tendency to get acclimated to risk. As the physicist Richard Feynman wrote in a report on the Challenger disaster, as years went by, NASA officials got used to living with small failures. If faulty O rings didn’t produce a catastrophe last time, they probably won’t this time, they figured.

Feynman compared this to playing Russian roulette. Success in the last round is not a good predictor of success this time. Nonetheless, as things seemed to be going well, people unconsciously adjust their definition of acceptable risk.” (from**Drilling for Certainty, NYT)

Good article, check it out.

Lately because of one of my projects I am having to work my way through a bunch of long, semi structured documents containing things such as requests for proposals, government program reports, threat models and all kinds of things like that. They are in techno-legalese as I would call them: highly structured, with section numbering and 3, 4 and 5 levels of nesting. All in English, they look like the writers were getting paid by the word if you know what I mean. I need a more efficient way to locate those paragraphs of nuggets that matter to me. So what I’d like is kind of a local document index/repository, that would allow me to have some standing queries and easily locate sections in docume...

Following on on my post yesterday about “What we don’t understand.” As I was writing it, I was trying to use examples of simple things that just work without handholding, like an old dial telephone. Oh there’s an example. But did you notice how all the old examples are slowly falling away because they are also becoming too complex?

Cellphone: Ok it just works, but look at how fat the manual is. What percentage of users know how to use what percentage of the features Television: Oops. Do you have the right remote? Wow the picture’s on but no sound! Oh wait, the sound is for Channel 5 but the picture is the DVD Camera: Again, just weigh the manual iPhone: Forget about it. Yes it’s easy for a ...

Dave Winer wrote a bit recently called “What we don’t understand” that lists all the ways in which computers are still so confusing, not only to our elders but also to many others who’s brains are not just wired that way. I (we) am not talking about when your computer breaks, fails to print, hangs or crashes. That’s a different problem, also pretty unacceptable.

It’s just all the simple simple things. I agree with all his examples. Here’s one: how do you add a contact to the Address Book application on Mac? Oh click that tiny “+” icon. Oh not that tiny plus icon. This one over here. Or, how do you expla...

I came across VentureFizz. It’s a broad resource for Boston area techies: “VentureFizz can help you see what’s buzzing in Boston’s tech community” Particularly useful is their Event’s calendar, which as far as I can see is one of the better ones. An analogous site is Greenhorn Connect, which is trying to achieve something similar but seems more focused on up and coming entrepreneurs.

Stephen Wolfram is a genius. (Ok, he’s also a bit grandiose, self-promoting and arrogant, but I think he’s amazing. Kind of like I feel about Ray Kurzweil, another genius IMHO.) Wolfram|Alpha is his latest product, and it’s a fascinating experiment. I can only imagine the work that has gone into it, both the Mathematica foundation and the data collection, cleansing and organization. In my own experimentation with the site, I have had mixed results. It’s still growing up. I see the promise, and I am rooting for it. But for now it i...

This is an insider’s three-fer. In this article, Stewart describes his horrible personal experience with the Verizon Droid. It’s a fun read. Three angles: (1) It’s been years and years since I’ve seen Stewart Alsop publishing a product review. Stewart, years ago, was totally famous in the tech world as software taste maker par-excellence. Kind of like Walt Mossberg is today (whoops – you don’t know who Mossberg is?)

(2) All I’ve see...

“GPS satellites tell us where we are, but what tells them where they are?”. Good question. This article answers it.

Did you know of the Lexington Public Library’s role in the founding of DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and so part of the creation of the computer revolution we’ve been living through the last 50 of so years? “Other than our lunch hour visits to the Lexington Public Library to study their collection of business books, our experience had been limited to making budgets for engineering expenses at Lincoln. These did not, of course, include things like overhead, income, sales expense, accounts receivable, cash flow, balance sheets, etc.” (from Harlan Anderson’s blog)

Harlan Anderson was one of the founders of DEC.

Sunlight Foundation is a very cool organization that I’ve been close to. They are involved with many efforts to further government transparency and accountability, often using technology, but not only. Recently they ran their second competition looking for interesting and useful applications and tools to be built using or leveraging data published by government.

It’s a clever model: offer $10,000 or so to a winner who creates and submits the most interesting entry. Give applicants encouragement, publicity and assistance. I have to believe that this creates a groundswell of energy and hacking that furthers the foundations goals and uses the prize money in a highly leveraged way.

*““By setti...

I’ve seen a couple of “RSS is dead” headlines in the last few days, and even though I am on vacation I couldn’t resist a quick post. Googling, I see it’s actually something that has been floating around for a few months. My 2 cents: RSS is so thoroughly part of the plumbing now, there’s no way it’s gonna die. All kinds of applications, web sites, humongous services are totally reliant on RSS, it’s just that you don’t see it anymore. Sort of like XML is everywhere and of course, at least here in the USA, 120V AC, electricity, is.

Did you think you pay a lot for cellphone coverage? An article in the Globe and Mail about cellphone rates states that while Canada’s cellphone rates are really high compared to other countries, the USA pays even more: “In each category, however, services in Canada rated less expensive than those in the United States, which ranked most expensive in low and medium usage and sixth most expensive in the high-use category.” (from The Globe and Mail)

cellphone, costs, canada

Not that I care about Paprazzi countermeasures, but this is just c-l-e-v-e-r! Check this post Anti-paprazzi clutch bag gives pushy shutterbugs a taste of their own medicine from Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine: Celebrities looking for a way to combat those pesky paparazzi that doesn’t involve fisticuffs and a less than flattering mug shot will want to hope this new "anti-paparazzi device" makes the jump from concept to commercial availability. The concept is basically an LED flash built into a clutch purse that emits a photo ruining flash of its own when it detects the flash from a camera. ..

I found this article to be a good primer on what’s going on with open government data. Remixing Government Data: Through mashups and Web apps, third parties are making innovative use of agencies’ information… This is part of the impetus and inspiration for two projects I am working on, “Decentralized Data Discovery” and “Government SDK“.

If you live in the Boston area and somehow connected to technology professions you should be interested in this meeting being put on in June: What’s Next In Tech – Where will the next waves of growth will come from?

Date: Thursday, June 25th Time: 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM (ET) Where: Boston University, School of Management, 595 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, 02215 Price: $40

(If you are a student interested in attending this event and would like financial assistance, scholarships are available through www.stayinma.com.)

Take a look at the program, Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe has lined up a...

This weekend I had a chance to attend BarCamp Boston (4). As usual it was fun and interesting and I had a chance to hang out and talk with a bunch of interesting people.

If you don’t know how a Bar Camp works, it is of the genre of “Unconferences” and one of the keys is that it has no program, ahead of time.

Kind of a leap of faith, you know? Anyway, the image to the left (and click on it to see the enlargement) shows how at the end of the meeting the program is fully visible, and actually quite interesting! Click on it to see a big englar...

Check out this post Redesigning the Government: Data.gov: “One thing we’ve been most excited about here at the Sunlight Foundation is the concept of Data.gov. Due later this year, new federal CIO Vivek Kundra will release a new central repository for government data and research.

And while in this series we traditionally re-design federal websit...

Check out this post Meeting24.tv Keeps Online Meetings Simple: "Like Utagoe Live 100, meeting24.tv also has a similar minimalistic feel to it, which is supposed to make it easy for anyone to use – even those with little web experience. The service is based on the assumption that other online meeting solutions such as TokBox (which we covered three times), Cisco’s Webex, Polycom or Skype are just too complex. " (from: from TechCrunch)

I tried it, at least by myself. It seems to work but I am not sure that I am getting the most performance out of my Logitech webcam. Pretty cool.

Everything’s a camp today, Foo Camp, Bar Camp and now Transparency Camp. I am attending this gathering in Washington D.C. to get closer to what’s going on in the open government movement. This is a pretty succinct summary of what it’s about: “Convening a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, ngos, wonks & activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.” (from Transparency Camp)

What a new world! The degree of penetration of web 2.0, ...

I am often asked what technology someone should use to create their web presence. I know Ruby on Rails well, but I often also recommend checking out Drupal. I know much less about Drupal but I know its reputation and I know its track record. So I’ve felt comfortable with my view. But, check this post Content Management Systems just don’t work. from Sunlight Labs blog: “I don’t think I’ve ever been happy with a content management system. I’ve tried dozens, from the ever so simple blog engines like TextPattern and WordPress, to the more complex Drupal, MovableType...

A british organization (or should I say organisation?) called mySociety has done some really cool publically minded open source projects. Sites like FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow make so much sense and it would seem to me could easily be done here in the USA.

How about it, shall we do it. It doesn’t seem too hard!

Check out this post by Tom Steinberg where he muses about how they might be even able to do more: Why I Want a Million Quid:

“One of our key insights has started to become a hindrance. We love sites like FixMyStreet partly because th...

I read in Personal Technology (Wall Street Journal) today that Foxmarks, the handy, free utility that synchronizes my Firefox bookmarks between several computers, now works with Safari as well. Great. I tested it, and it does work just fine. This blog post is being written with another handy firefox plugin called Scribefire, which lets me post to my blog directly from a page in the browser. It works really nicely and I use it frequently. I recommend it. Unfortunately they don’t support Safari yet. So I am staying with Firefox, for now.

By the way, why am I even considering deser...

I’ve been discovering the mass of information that is created by the government and is very slowly making its way online. I will be posting my discoveries from time to time. The process of making public information available online seems to go something like this:

Law requires that information be collected and disseminated

People submit forms etc recording such information

Others then scan or otherwise process this information and puts it into a database “silo”

The database is put online onto a “silo” web site

Other NGOs or agencies then somehow get that data (often by scraping the web sites) and make it API accessible

It seems like there may be one or more years between each of these ...

I’ve known about Pandora for ages, and the last month or so have been using it again, a lot. It’s quite amazing: constant, free, music. Based on your interests. How does it work? Well just go to Pandora, set up a free account, and indicate, for example, an artist or style you like. It begins playing songs, one after another which people who’ve liked what you like have also liked. You hear a song or artist you don’t know, indicate with a thumb up or down how you like it. That’s it.

I have discovered artists I didn’t know, rediscovered some that I knew, or music that I loved and had not heard before. All for free.

One might ask, in a fa...

Check this post 30+ Must-Have Updated Firefox 3 Extensions from Mashable!: We’ve put together a list of 30+ must-have Firefox 3 extensions that we know you’ll enjoy, whether you’ve upgraded to Firefox 3 and are looking for something new to add to your browser, or have yet to make the upgrade and are looking for a reason.

Lots of good stuff there if you are a FireFox 3 user. Check ’em out!

Originally posted on Jun 27, 2008. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.

This New York Times article, “What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer” is pretty interesting, and makes sense at some level: “Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?” (from “What’s Obcene?”)

and then:

...

I always love Kevin Kelly’s writing and thinking and this article in a recent New York Times Magazine doesn’t disappoint. I have a hard time summarizing the article: Video is becoming more ubiquitous than static print as the main mode of visual communication – not just TV etc, but on any and all surfaces in public and private. This will lead to ways in which regular civilians can create, modify, scan and consume video with infinitely greater ease.

It’s a good argument. Here’s a semi random thoughtful bit:

“Some popular...

I have a new favorite web service: Mint. It’s a really nice implementation of kind of a “Quicken” online, but with a few unique wrinkles. Here’s what it does:

Automatically and periodically downloads all the transactions from all your various accounts, banks, credit cards, etc.

Automatically categorizes the transactions based on the indicated vendors. This works about 80-90% of the time

Allows you to manually override the categorization if you know better (and it learns from that and applies it to other transactions.)

Automatically suggests a set of budget rules, which it then monitors for you. These are also fully customizable.

Generates useful pie charts and in...

VRM is a concept that’s been floating around for a while. Evangelized (and perhaps coined) by Doc Searls, it has developed a strong following. In their words: “VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties.

CRM systems for the duration have borne the full burden of relating with customers. VRM will provide customers with the means to bear some of that weight, and to help make markets work for both vendors and customers — in ways that don’t r...

Another crazy-brilliant site, OpenStreetMap.org, is aiming to get all of us to annotate maps of all places on the planet. In other words, I know my neighborhood, let me log in and indicate what streets are called what, which ones are one way, where the intersections are etc. This may not sound so special if you live in Boston, or any other relatively built up part of the world. But for out of the way places where, one might presume, the bigco’s have not yet come through to annotate the sattelite photos, it sets up a rather cool, people powered way of capturing this inform...

Netflix has a box to stream video into my living room. TIVO has a deal with Amazon to do the same. Blockbuster is just coming out with their set-top box. Check out this interesting option from Myka: “The beauty of this box is that it takes the nerd-factor out of BitTorrent, giving you access to all the content (licit and illicit) available on the P2P network without requiring advanced skills. The Linux-based box connects to the TV using HDMI, composite, S-Video or SPDIF connectors ...

Because of a couple of projects that I am working on, I thought I might be able to use some tool for an online survey. I have two particular requirements:

respondents can be anonymous respondents are allowed to complete the survey in multiple sittings. In other words, they can go back to a form and continue where they left off.

I thought others might be trying to do the same thing so it would be nice to share my personal (non scientific) findings:

The three that seemed to come up in my web search are: Wufoo, SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang. All three have a free option that allows a basic survey to be done and som...

Scott Kirsner of the Innovation Economy blog, as well of the Boston Globe says that: “To me, the biggest way to make Boston more competitive and innovative right now is to do a better job connecting students with our innovation economy. Which is why it pains me that our trade associations and networking groups make it so hard for students to get involved.” (from Innovation Economy)

He goes on to grade a variety of formal and informal groups who put on meetings regularly in the greater Boston area. It’s a ...

Check out this post Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism: “So far the proposition that a global superorganism is forming along the internet power lines has been treated as a lyrical metaphor at best, and as a mystical illusion at worst. I’ve decided to treat the idea of a global superorganism seriously, and to see if I could muster a falsifiable claim and evidence for its emergence.” (from: from The Technium)

Another great essay by Kevin Kelley. He’s such a great writer. Here are some other wonderful passages:

“This megasupercomputer is the Cloud of all clouds, the largest pos...

Halo, from HP. Really? Unfortunately it is outrageously expensive. Can’t find the number online but I heard 50-100K.

“The Halo studio—designed by DreamWorks Animation in partnership with HP—provides life-size, real-time, eye-to-eye conferencing with outstanding audio and no delay. Halo gives the sense of being in the same room together. And best of all, it’s right down the hall.” (from Introducing Halo)

Esther Dyson wrote this very interesting Wall Street Journal article about how online advertising is changing. This article is very relevant to my new product, SWIFT, which I have hinted about before. She says: “The current online-advertising model will become less effective, even as it gets increasingly sophisticated. New players are emerging to devalue the spaces that the ad giants are currently fighting over. Companies you’ve never heard of called NebuAd, Project Rialto, Phorm, Frontporch and Adzilla are pitching tools to Internet service providers that will enable them to track user...

(updated at 12:08pm Sept 2) “In a posting on a company site Monday, Google indicated that a version of the software, called Chrome, would be available for download on Tuesday. It said the software is designed to make it faster to browse the Web and easier to run applications without downloading software to a computer. The product will be offered on an open-source basis, meaning others can modify the software code.” (from The Wall Street Journal)

Also see Silicon Valley Insider for interesting commentary:

“If you...

I’ve written about some of the considerations that go into the choice between physical infrastructure and new SAAS services such as Amazon’s S3 and EC2. I also covered why the fact that you are comfortable relying on a hosting provider for rack mounted servers (so called ping & power) doesn’t mean necessarily that you would come to the same conclusion about SAAS services. Here’s what the Wall Street Journal had to say about that tradeoff a little while ago:

“Today was a bad day for a new computing model that could one day be the norm. Amazon’s S3 service –which companies can use to rent da...

From TimesOnline, a good reminder to not forget that we do live in a USA bubble sometimes, and don’t pay enough attention to the rest of the world: “A little over two decades later, Arkady Volozh is the chief executive and one of the founders of Yandex, Russia’s most popular internet search engine, a company now valued at £2.5 billion. Widely described as Russia’s answer to Google, Yandex was launched only eight years ago but is now visited by 8m people a day. More impressive still, Yandex and Volozh are credited with humbling Google, by denting its global domination.” (from “Russians dent Google’s world domination”)

Hmm, let me try the ...

On a project I worked on recently, I asked myself whether I should make one or more of Amazon’s awesome web services (AWS – Awesome Web Services) a mission critical part of the infrastructure of the product. I wrote yesterday about the considerations that go into deciding to rely on services like Amazon’s web services as key infrastructure components. Of the five I mentioned, these two considerations were especially confusing to me:

What is the comparable reliability?

If the whole scheme doesn’t work out, how hard is it to switch?

On the one hand, the reliability of running a bunch of servers in a data center is fairly well understood, as...

After an interesting comment on my previous post on Electric Cars topic, “Who Killed the Electric Car” suddenly I am seeing stuff about this topic all over the place. Here’s a great article from the current Atlantic Monthly about GM’s new shot at electric car fame and fortune (hopefully)

“Still, he hesitated. GM had called him because of his deep experience with battery-driven electric cars. In the 1990s, he had...

My Treo 600 recently died a hard death. I had to learn a new cell phone, a relatively low end one, and it was a serious undertaking.

Someone I know recently did a 90 minute drive in 3.5 hours because their car’s GPS inadvertently was set in the ‘avoid highways’ settings and they were in unfamiliar territory, without a map, and so had no choice but to follow the long way.

I’ve seen this idea suggested elsewhere, but how a cell phone for people who don’t read manuals? Why can’t a cell phone be as easy to operate as a regular telephone? (Yes, the new home cordless sets with built in answering machines are almost as complex as cell phones!)

It seems someone has finally done it!Thank you KDDI, Kyocera and Toshiba.

Originally posted on Sep 19, 2005. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.

By now if you probably heard about Cuil, the new search engine that claims to be the biggest (since when does size matter when it comes to search engines?) And secondly is being given a PR pass because it was created by ‘ex-Google employees’ – I guess that’s a major element for success? Anyway, after doing my obvious test searches, like Curacao, Arlington Mass, and BlogBridge, I thought I would try each against an actual useful search I had been doing over the weekend:...

If you haven’t seen this and you shoot a lot of digital photos, you will love this product; also seems like a great gift: “Upload photos automatically from your digital camera to your computer and favorite photo site with the world’s first wireless memory card.” See Eye-Fi web site.

I got the big new release of FireFox 3.0. Looks fine. Actually looks mostly the same. I am not sure what the big changes are but I am trying it out to see how it goes. I know one regular headache with FireFox for me has been that it would pin the CPU for no apparent reason. The closest I came to seeing a pattern is that it seemed to have to do with pages being opened that had Flash scripts on them. But I can’t say I ever verified that. All I know is that fairly regularly when my system got slow, I would see FireFox at the top.

If that’s all that FF3.0 fixes, that would be enough for me.

Update: I just saw this link about FireFox 3.0

Adam Green points to Scoble who re-discover and discover, respectively, Amazon’s street by street, address by address, photographic coverage of the map of, what, the universe? It’s a neat new user interface of something they’ve had for a while, actually, but still, quite cool! some nuggets:

“Will I use it? Hell, yeah, it is damn useful. I can point you to Border Cafe in Harvard Square, which just happens to be one of the best college student dives in the country.” (from Darwinian Web, Adam’s new blog)

and…

“But, if you need to know what ...

Here’s something I hadn’t seen before: I IM’d a friend of mine at a Big Company and the message got rejected because it included a URL. I have to suppose that it’s any URL that gets bounced, but who knows? So the workaround? I sent the text for a Google query that returns the same url.

Further details: Discussing it with him, the logic seems to be that someone could send an employee a phishing link in an IM message.

Check this post Twitter’s Lead Architect Leaves: It’s Not You, It’s Me from Mashable!: "While I’ll give Cook the benefit of the doubt, I can’t think of a more pressure packed job than being responsible for the scaling of Twitter, a service that has continuously struggled to keep up with its growing user base. Was Cook forced out as the scape goat for Twitter’s technical woes? Who knows, but as someone that was with Twitter since the beginning and likely an owner of some valuable stock options in the redhot-in-spite-of-itself startup, it seems unlikely he’d leave completely on his own terms."

From a few previous posts you know that I have a curiosity about congestion pricing as a way to allay traffic jams, while raising money to improve infrastructure and alternative transportation. In a recent post in the Freakonomics Blog, which I recommend, there’s an interesting Q&A on that very topic that you may want to take a look at.

“Most people now recognize that congestion is a serious problem and that something...

I’ve wondered and written before about the ‘downside’ or ‘risk’ of building your application based on one of the excellent SAAS services from Amazon. And I do think they are excellent. But check this post Amazon Web Services Gets Another Hiccup from TechCrunch: "Amazon does not guarantee 100 percent uptime for its Web Services, although it does strive to achieve that. And data centers go down all the time, no matter who is hosting your data.But more and more companies are relying on Amazon to be able to scale their computing resources on demand and do it cheaply by paying only for what they need. Many Web startups are building their entire businesses on top of Amazon’s Web Services, and even an hour of unavailability is unacceptable. At least this one happened during the middle of the night."

I bet you’ve not heard of another crazy-cool service from Google, Google Sets. I first read about Google Sets some months ago but didn’t bother looking until today, Sunday, when i saw this interesting article about Google Set’s patents. This is from that article:

“Google Sets is one of the first services that were added to Google Labs and it’s a cool way to find list of related terms. Google Sets is a tool that generates lists from a small number of examples by using the web as a big pool of data. You enter some items and Google Sets finds other items that tend to co-occur frequently with your examples. For...

This is relevant to the discussion about congestion pricing, mesh networks and avoiding traffic jams, a topic that I am getting interested in as you could see from this previous post. [… snip] Now help is at hand. As satellite-navigation devices become more widely used, networking effects are making them more powerful. This is because vehicles themselves are starting to relay real-time traffic data—and he more that do so, the more accurate traffic information will become. [snip…] (from The Economist)

Read the whole article and you will see that it’s more than just GPS devices that are being called to duty: cell phones as well as verbal reports can get integrated together into an overall picture of where the traffic is and how to avoid it.

Check out this very interesting article that suggests that placing mesh network nodes in cars is a far better way to implement congestion pricing than what has been tried so far. The short paraphrase is that you can place mesh network nodes in cars and they can talk to an urban network to gain access and pay for access to the cngestion pricing zone.

And, here’s the cool wrinkle, in doing that also get an urban wifi network ‘for free’.

You have to read the whole article to follow the chain of reasoning but it’s quite interesting.

I am starting to follow the world of mesh networks and things related to that. One immediate question that has popped up is: now that there are cell towers everywhere, what advantage might there be to creating a new national or global or mobile network based on mesh technology? I am just an ignoramus so far on this, but in that quest, I came across this article.

“It was the first step in an initiative Verizon began last fall in an effort to open up its network to entrepreneurs interested in creating devices and mobile applications not sold through the company’s retail stores.” (from Verizon Details Its Open Wireless Plans)

Does this allow the creation of a new class of device placed in homes or cars or what-not that uses the cell network as it’s backbone?

Here’s a new online light weight database product that picks up where QuickBase leaves off and goes crazy. It’s called blist. It has a far snazzier (and more complicated) user interface than Quickbase. In good old SAT fashion, Quickbase is to Blist as Google Docs is to Buzzword, which by the way, you should check out also!

I am not taking sides, but next time you need a web based, light weight, list or database, you should check out both QuickBase and blist.

Several products I’ve worked on recently have relied on Amazon’s really impressive web services. I’ve written before about how much I admire services such as S3 and EC2, solid, commercial quality infrastructure services. They address (and? or? solve) a big problem that application builders have:

“How many servers will I need, how many users will I have, how much storage will I need … and in the end, how much will all that cost?”.

They solve this by offering key components of infrastructure as a “software as a service”, SAAS. Starting with permanent storage, which is delivered by S3, followed by ...

This is really cool! Check out this post from Autoblog: Filed under: Safety, TechTwo things plague GPS users: being forced to deal with dubious direction vocalizations and the amount of time spent looking at the screen when you should be paying attention to the road. MVS is developing a solution and it’s likely the most revolutionary concept to date.

The system is comprised of a series of mirrors that project a three-dimensional line onto the windshield giving drivers a heads-up display of their intended path of travel.

(from: ...

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.

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 ...

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.

Andy went to FlexCamp last week and was good enough to write up his observations. He says: “The new Flash 9 Player puts Flash squarely on par with Java (technology-wise), with a high-performance JIT VM (AVM2), a real programming language (ActionScript), and a mature tool set.” (from blog.payne.org)

Yes , but, I think the biggest, biggest deal about Flash and Flex is that some huge perc...

You know I am a fan of Google. But lately I’ve had some conversations which have sensitized me to noticing the quality of Google’s search results. As I’ve written elsewhere, the world of Search Engine Optimization is all about manipulating Google’s search results to help businesses make money. Let me give you a case study. Right now in Boston we have the musical Mama Mia playing at the Colonial theater. If I wanted to find out the times and prices of tickets, I might search for “...

13 port USB hub Yeah very geeky, eh? All I was able to locate was 7-port USB hubs. Why not daisy chain them? I have reason to believe that while logically it should not matter, in practice it does.

My reason is that I’ve read tech notes on at least one device that told me specifically to plug it directly into the USB 2.0 port of my computer and not into a hub. which made no sense to me, but made a difference in fixing a problem I was having.

In the end I bought another 7-port hub (which seemed to be the flavor I saw most often) and plugged them together in a way to have as few “hops” as possible. All seems to work ok.

In fact who knows if internal to the 13 port hubs there are 2 7 port hubs, daisy chained. Anyone know?

I am not an expert in the semantic web but Freebase looks like it to me. I am surprised more hasn’t been written about it. It is absolutely amazing and head-spinning. I will have a hard time describing accurately, hence the headline. For me, it seems like Freebase does what the Semantic Web guys have been talking about forever.

In Freebase’s own words: “Freebase.com is home to a global knowledge base: a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone. It could be described as a data commons. Freebase.com is enabled by the technology of Metaweb, which is described at ...

As you may have heard, I’ve been learning all about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) lately. I just came across this amazing little service called the DigPageRank Pagerank Checker. The story goes something like this. Google assigns every single page in the whole internet a numerical score called the Page Rank (PR). It somehow says something about how important that page is and consequently how high it should appear in your Google search results.

Like Astrology, ...

Newser.com is a new news site, with the tag line: “Faster, Smarter News.” Seems like it does some kind of automatic classification of news by one of 9 major topics and organizes it automatically and attractively. It may or may not be trying to personalize what it displays for me. To my eye it is similar to Daylife.com. Remember Daylife? It flashed pretty good a few months ago, but haven’t really heard much more about it. Again I am not sure whether it does any personalization or how that works.

As someone who follows these kinds of products pretty closely, I don’t immediately see the key differences. Do you?

I’ve been living inside a couple of [tag]Google groups[/tag] lately, posting questions and waiting for answers. (Which ones? Ruby on Rails: Talk and [tag]Active Scaffold[/tag]: Ruby on Rails plugin) Much to my surprise and [tag]productivity-loss[/tag], it’s not possible to request an email alert when someone posts an answer to your question. Odd, this is a oldie-but-goodie feature in many many mailing lists. So I am reduced to checking manually every day or so. (You can see it annoyed me sufficiently to bother writing this 🙂

You remember back in the stone ages we all interacted with computers by typing [tag]command lines[/tag] at a prompt. Then in the bronze age, the [tag]GUI[/tag] was invented and we used mice, menus and windows? (Oh some of us still preserve the old traditions of course using the ancient language of the unix-people?) Today the Google Search box is becoming the new command line. There’s almost no end to the non-search things you can type into google to get answers.

I just discovered this one:

“65 degrees f”

Gets you a conversion of 65 degrees Fahrenheit to 18.3 degrees Celcius.

Others that I already knew about:

5 * 12 => 60 AA 123 => Flight information for American Airlines flight 123 define abacus => dictionary definition of the word abacus AAPL => stock price and chart for Apple

It goes on and on.

Google is the command line shell for the web. [tag]Gshell[/tag].

Semapedia is a quirky project that wants to get us to put these special little barcodes on everything on the planet. The idea is that you walk up to something, say the Eiffel Tower, or my house, point your cell phone camera at it and a click or so later, you get a nice article on the screen of your phone, describing it.

I first read about it in Jeremy Wagstaff’s ‘Loose Wire’ series.

Quirky, in a Don Quixote kind of way.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of traveling lately and have been experimenting with those noise cancelling headphones. Actually I couldn’t convince myself to spend $350 on the Bose headphones who, by reputation anyway, set the standard. I spent about $50 on a pair of Sony noise canceling headphones (at RadioShack no less.) My assessment: I give them a solid “B”. They do cancel noise, but not all of it. And having nothing to compare themm with, I am always wondering how much better the better ones are.

So, today, in David Poque’s column in the New York Times comes this article: ...

I follow Chris Pirillo’s blog and other writings religiously. Two recent, contrasting posts really caught my eye because I think they reflect the popular bias against software. That is, people are glad to pay a lot for hardware gadgets at the same time as they feel really unhappy about paying even a pittance for software. Today, in “I Purchased an Optimus Maximums keyboard”, Chris says:

‘No matter, I’ve placed an order for what will likely be known as the most expensive keyboard in the history of the world.

“Why?!”

I keep asking myself the same question.’ (...

You might find find this interesting and/or useful. WebsiteGrader does an SEO analysis of your site and gives you ideas on how to make it better. According to their site: “Website Grader is a software tool to help measure the marketing effectiveness of a website.”

Here’s a column that I can really relate to, and a topic that I’ve written about more than once before. “Computers would be nothing without programs to run on them, so why do we spend so much time drooling over our hardware — physical bits and pieces — and so little over the software that makes the bits and pieces do what we want them to? And why are we so stingy about paying for software?” (from Blind to Bargains, Loose Wire)

Read the whole article, it’s really interesting!

Useful and interesting information from Google for Webmasters. Chec out this post from Google Operating System: Google Webmaster Central shows the most popular 100 phrases used by other sites to link to your site. If you go to Statistics / Page analysis, you’ll find a list of anchor phrases, obtained by removing punctuations. Google’s algorithms use those keywords to understand a page better.

(from: The Most Popular Anchor Phrases for Your Site)

On Mac, I’ve been using only FireFox for a while now. But lately I’ve seen some things that have made me nervous. More than once I’ve seen FireFox peg the CPU for no apparent reason. Recently I had bad experiences with the latest latest release of the del.icio.us add-in. So I decided to scan for the other browsers out there to see if I was missing out. I installed Camino, Safari and OmniWeb and tried to use each one for real work. Well they are pretty and may be fast, I don’t know, but, guess what, I am back with FireFox. Three reasons stopped me dead in the water before I got hooked on any of the alternatives:

The really handy Performancing blogging add-in seems to only be available with FireFox None of the others have the very nice incremental search (type ctrl-F) that FireFox has And in the end, I really didn’t see any fundamental differences or advantages over FireFox.

So I am back.

Dear readers: have you seen FireFox pegging the CPU from time to time? Any fixes or explanations?

Dave Winer says it well (as usual): “Here’s another reason why WordPress is so popular — they belong to Ye Old Schoole of Shitty Software …snip]” (Read “WordPress is shitty software”)

I was glad to see that the FireFox add-in for del.icio.us was revised to combine the features of the ‘old one’ with the features of the ‘new one’. That’s good. Unfortunately it looks to me like the new and improved plug-in is still a bit buggy, sending FireFox into a tailspin – window activation weirdnesses, apparent loops hogging the CPU. I look forward to the next rev, because the concept is right on.

Check out this post from Lifehacker:

“Want to play with RSS feeds? Try xFruits, where, according to tech enthusiast Steve Rubel, you can “teach your feeds all kinds of new tricks.”

He’s not kidding around, either: you can create a PDF file from an RSS feed, send an OPML to your mobile, aggregate, and lots more. I played with it a little bit and was suitably impressed by all the options; it looks like they’re even adding the option to create RSS feeds for your desktop files soon. â_” Wendy BoswellxFruits ...

People are really crowing about Vista’s new "instant serach" and how wonderful it is and better than the old Windows XP Search functionality. Yeah I can’t disagree, but it’s amazing how it’s 20 years on before that glaring-glaring-glaring hole in Windows was fixed. (And sure, Mac OS X has had Spotlight for a while now, but I am not in love with it. I have only a decent amount of disk space and a fast processor and a lot of memory, and I can’t say it’s fast. In fact when I want to search for an email I always go into my browser and use Google Mail’s search feature…Anyway… Check out this post from ...

Check out this post from Between the Lines: [snip…] “Yesterday Amazon’s S3 service suffered an outage that lasted more than long enough to miss the company’s self-imposed goal of 99.99% availability, at least for the next couple of months. Last November, Google Calendar was unavailable for the better part of a day. And famously, Salesforce.com suffered a string of outages this time last year. Unfortunately, my business relies on all three of these services.” [snip…]

(from: A cautionary utility computing tale)

Recently I talked to someone who was tr...

I am enhancing the backup methodology here at BlogBridge Enterprises and was selecting a new 500Gb external hard disk. One choice I made was whether to get an Ethernet, i.e. network attached, hard disk or connect one directly to my Mac via USB-2 or FireWire.

Admittedly being too lazy to do calculations I guessed that the limiting factor on speed of a hard disk would be the hard disk transfer speed itself not the speed of Ethernet-100 vs. USB-2.

Not sure if this is actually correct, but I opted for the convenience of being able to place the hard disk anywhere rather than having yet another contraption attached to my computer.

I had lunch with a bunch of guys who know about ...

Check out this post from Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger:

As a comparison, I have three PCs. Two of which have never crashed in their entire lifetimes. And I use my PCs nearly around the clock. I have two Macs too and haven’t seen this problem on those.

(from: Apple rebooting problem hits us…)

Huh? two PCs who haven’t crashed in their entire lifetimes? Must be something that happens only at Microsoft (yeah, I know he’s not there any more.) Or he got those two PCs for Christmas. 2006.

Check out this post from Schneier on Security: "I’ll be the first to admit it: I know next to nothing about MySpace or Facebook. I do know that they’re social networking sites, and that — at least to some extent — your reputation is based on who are your "friends" and what they say about you.

Which means that this follows, like day follows night. "Fake Your Space" is a site where you can "hire" fake friends to leave their pictures and personalized comments on your page." (from: Hacking Reputation in MySpace and Facebook)

Read the whole thing: Hacking Reputation in MySpace and Facebook

Ok, assembled masses: I’ve rearranged my office and now my USB connected printers are farther away from the computer and closer to an ethernet connection. So, what I need is a USB hub which connects with an RJ45 rather than to a computer. I guess that would make it a Netwrok Enabled USB hub.

Can’t find it on the web, but maybe it has a different name. Anyone know what I need?

Technorati Tags: networking, USB

Scoble writes about the Zune. Also check out the video of the demo and detailed briefing about Zune. Here’s another interesting article about the Zune from Geek News Central! Technorati Tags: zune ipod scoble

For you Wifi junkies, here is a list of America’s Most Wired Cities – Forbes.com and another list of America’s most unwired cities. Thank Jayne!

This one is totally cool for you gadget freaks: Lexus Self Parking Car Video and Review – Gizmodo

Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact

New model segway.

(tags: segway technology cooltools)

TechCrunch Â> Blog Archive Â> Google Research prototypes ambient audio contextual content

A totally cool, crazy and clever Google Labs hack. Check it out!

(tags: audio google technology tv)

I came across a cool series of podcasts, done by Adam Green, on the history of the personal computer software industry. Actually Adam told me about them 🙂 You can find them here as well as directly under the iTunes podcast section.

I just listened to the first episode, about software naming with some good stories about how Visicalc was named and the fact that Ashton-Tate was not named after a parrot called Ashton, and of course that Jeff Tarter is not retired.

p.s. Adam has a really interesting blog called “Darwinian Web”Also follow his escapades with Ruby

I’d heard about it but had not seen a picture. This from Ray Ozzie’s blog:

“As of last week I’m now using/testing the upcoming Treo 700w, and it’s great! The pipeline of cool devices about to emerge is stunning, and the software platform incomparable. Much to look forward to, and many new ideas for Jack as to what we might do with these devices’ capabilities…” (from Ray Ozzie’s Blog)

Check out the Treo 700 here!

Technorati Tags: treo

Tim Bray likes Adium, the Mac OS X inter-network IM client. He says:

“Software of the future will be Open Source, will have a sophisticated and smart user interface, will take responsibility for making sure it’s up to date, and will meet essential human needs. Like Adium.” (from ongoing, Tim Bray’s Blog)

Hmm, couldn’t agree with you more 😉

Technorati Tags: future, software

Robin Good has some interesting predictions and prognostications.

“If you stop looking for a second at the hundreds of interesting new tools and events happening online, what are the key trends you see? Where among the new emerging online media, should you be looking next when trying to understand where to invest your future energies and money?” (from New Media Predictions 2006: What Will The Web Future Bring?)

Worth reading.

Technorati Tags: future, media

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? Yah...

I recently had to buy a new cell phone, and learning how to use it reminded me again about how complicated these things are. How many out there have not bothered to learn something as simple even as programming in some commonly called numbers? I know I probably use only 30% of the features.

A buddy of mine had the idea that what the cell phone makers should do is to design a cell phone specifically for the elderly.What would it look like? Probably exactly like the phone they use at home. Big buttons and hardly any functions.

While we are modifying cell phones, who is going to be the first build a pedometer into a cell phone. Perfect for aging baby boomers suddenly worrying about their health!

Technorati Tags: cellphone, babyboomers

And in classic Blogosphere form, you can find a report on the report from Nicole-Ann Boyer on World Changing, where she says:

“With the FT riding high as the world’s best daily for the business intelligentsia, take heed large organization types: if you ever needed a piece to put in front your boss’s nose and add credibility to some of your open source ideas, this should help.” (from World Changing)

She goes on to comment and link to some especially interesting parts of the FT Special Report.

I guess that makes this post a report on the report on the report. Can anyone spell **e-c-h-o-c-h-a-m-b-e-r?

**

Technorati Tags: dangillmor, opensource

My new cellphone supposedly has GPS capabilities. It has to do, apparently with the new E-911 standard, which requires a cell phone to be able to tell emergency responders where a cell call is coming from.

I’m a pretty big GPS aficionado and I thought GPSs had to have these big ugly antennas, complex expensive circuitry, and lots of software. I don’t understand how all that stuff can be crammed into a tiny little phone.

So I got to thinking that they were just using the term ‘GPS’ loosely, and that instead what was going on is a much more simplistic triangulation between cell towers which, I suppose could produce a rough ...

At a level of detail only a geek could love reading (or bother writing), Dan Bricklin gives us an interesting and fun illustrated story of installing Verizon fiber to his home:

“…… Once that was all done, the installer cleaned up all the dropped wire insulation, empty boxes, etc., and we said goodbye sometime around 4 PM. I then connected my line to the router and plugged it into my laptop upstairs. Things work well.” (from “Installing Verizon FIOS fiber-optic Internet service to my house“)

I do have one question about the Terms of Service:

I ordered the 15Mbps down/2Mbps up service which has a list price of $49.95 a month before the ...

From my new favorite Podcaster, Todd of Geek News Central, I came across Flash Earth, a fun and beautiful animated globe that will give you hours and hours of family entertainment!

Technorati Tags: cool, cooltool

I was talking about search engines the other day. I guess Findory includes a search engine, but in my mind it’s a lot more. Here’s how they describe it:

“Our patent-pending technology personalizes the homepage for each reader, recommending content based on what they’ve read and what new content is being published. We crawl through thousands of news and blogs articles so you don’t have to.” (from About Findory)

You have to play with it to get the idea. For me it’s especially handy to uncover other information that is somehow related to what I am writing about in my own blog.

For example, ...

Color laser printers are wonderful. The one I use is a Konica Minolta QMS 2200. We’ve had it for years and it works like a champ. Only thing is, the toner is really pricey. So pricey that I started suspecting that something was awry, so I kept a log of when I replaced what consumable and how much I paid. It’s a lot!

Yes, “consumable“, because in addition to the toner there are a bunch of other things that ‘wear’ out and that you have to replace. The printer very helpfully says, “Replace Oil Roller” and stops working. What the heck is an oil roller? I don’t know but it costs ...

Dave Sifry of Technorati has an interesting analysis of the current dynamics in the Blogosphere:

“Summary:

Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005

The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months

A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily

About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year

About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly” (from Sifry’s Alerts)”

Read the whole thing for lots of other interesting tidbits!

Technorati Tags: blog, technorati

There was a recent interesting article in the New York Times describing some new, unusual search engines:

“Search engines are so powerful. And they are so pathetically weak. … When it comes to digging up a specific name, date, phrase or price, search engines are unstoppable. The same is true for details from the previously concealed past. For better and worse, any information about any of us…” (from New York Times)

None of them blows me away, but in case these are useful or of interest:

www.clusty.com www.vivisimo.com www.grokker.com www.mrsapo.com

Technorati Tags: searchengines

I recently wondered out loud (on a couple of mailing lists) how much action there is with RSS and Blogging within the Academic/Research/Scientific community.

The reason for that question was that I was considering that with those folks refereed, scholarly articles are what counts which seems diametrically opposite to the casual, ad-hoc, first-person rants that are generally associated with blogging. (Ok I am just exaggerating to make a point.)

I learned that there’s actually lots and lots going on with RSS and Blogging in that world. Here are some interesting from a more or less random collection of serious science and academic pubs all of which have RSS support of some kind. T...

Scoble has been really picking on Technorati recently, and I can’t figure out why. Given the megaphone that Robert has it has got to be really hurting Technorati. There has been a lot of detailed commentary about this, some of it quite good, for example David Berlind and Dan Farber on ZDNet and Padawan.info.

My modest contribution to the debate is this: Why does it shock anyone that the number of links reported by T...

Scripting News: 7/15/2005: Dave points to the New York Times article by Rich Meslin, Blogs 101. It’s a very nice collection of Blogs of general interest as a good introduction to the world of Blogs.

“If you want to get the feel of Web logs and blogging, visit some of these sites. Most blogs carry links to other blogs on related topics or that the author likes. This page is under development; feel free to suggest your own finds. Business and sports suggestions are particularly welcome.” (from New York Times)

It’s a really nice starter list, but Rich, how about providing your list as OPML as well?

Technorati Tags: blog, OPML

This is not about patents, it’s about technology. In Google’s recent patent application they reveal some interesting and possibly surprising tidbits of how they rank your web site. (via Sadagopan’s weblog on Emerging Technologies,Thoughts, Ideas,Trends and Cyberworld)

“How many years did you register your domain name for? If it was only one then Google could hold that against you. Why? Because the majority of Spam websites only register a domain name for one year. A domain name registered for a longer period implies that the owner is more likely to be legitimate and serious about their web site.” (from Buzzle.com)

Technorati Tags: google, searchengines

You can do your blogging by typing into a web browser form provided by the Movable Type service. But boy is that clumsy and awful.

So for a while now I’ve used so-called “blogging clients” which provide a nice rich interface to write and edit the posts, and then use the server’s APIs to actually send the update or change up to the server.

On Mac, I use the fairly wonderful Ecto for OS X – Recommended!

On Windows, I tried all the free ones that I found recommended, and only w.bloggar was stable enough to actually use, although I didn’t like the user interface. I also tried tried ShartMT and Ecto for Windows.

Despite my best efforts, neither one was stable enough to use. In the end, I found and am now using the BlogJet– Clean and simple.

Francois, reacting to something written by Jason Calcanis, makes a very good point in this discussion about feed and blog aggregators needing to have a way to make money:

Jason:

“A number of people have asked me how I handle folks lifting our RSS Feeds and putting advertising against them. The first step I take is sending an email like the one below letting people know what we allow and what we don’t allow. I always CC our legal counsel and include a screen shot.”

...

Interesting article about counting blogs makes a good point right off the bat:

“First, let’s step back and consider why we’re counting blogs at all. You no longer see articles that attempt to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Web by stating how many Web pages there are.

But blogs are still in the process of entering mainstream consciousness, so numerical credibility is important; bloggers themselves cite the statistics a lot.” (from Wall Street Journal Online)

Technorati Tags: blog

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

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.”

M...

Just an amusing little bit from the Wall Street Journal about the Toyota Prius: “Some buyers of Toyota MotorCorp.’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

I often hear folks beat up Microsoft Windows for being a breeding ground for viruses, spyware, and all sorts of malware. Bad Microsoft for being so sloppy!

There was a recent exchange between Scoble and Dan Gillmor, where Scoble defends Microsoft against what he feels is an unfair attack:

“But, today, he took a shot at Microsoft that I thought was unfair. Here, I’ll wait while you go and check out his post.

*“I would have written a different beginning to this story, roughly as follows: In winning and sustaining its monopoly in the operating system and browser markets, Microsoft has exposed countle...

Richard MacManus made a statement in a post last week which elicited a lot of very interesting responses:

“Competition for Bloglines: We’re nearly halfway through 2005 and there’s still no heavyweight competition to Bloglines, in the web based RSS aggregator stakes.”

The comment thread on the post is excellent and interesting, so I won’t parrot all that stuff all over again. If you are interested, take a look there. (I especially recommend this response from Michal Migurski.)

But here’s my question: isn’t it ...

Microsoft and Apple are arguing about who came up first with the idea of having a pervasive search capability built into the OS Apple is shipping it imminently in Tiger, and Microsoft, eventually, in Longhorn.

Well let’s see: Windows had a broken Find command in the start menu forever. Apple has had find in the finder forever. Microsoft was talking about this kind of pervasive Find capability since Cairo.

“As described by Nash, the Cairo directory will maintain separate stores for files and the directory, but the file system will be extensible so users can add attributes, such as who created it, to a file identifier...

“They stripped Mr Kumaran naked and left him by the side of the road – but not before cutting off the end of his index finger with a machete. (from the BBC)“

There, I got your attention, didn’t I? That’s from the always fascinating monthly mailing on security, Crypto-Gram, from Bruce Schneier. He has a very interesting piece on “New Risks of Biometrics”, where you can see the law of unintended consequences in full bloom:

“It’s certainly possible to design fingerprint readers that test for “liveness”: pulse, body temperature, et...

Would you believe that someone is reading blogs on DEC PDP-10’s, DECSYSTEM-20’s and MULTICS computers? What, you never heard of those? Oh, nevermind…

[I wrote this in response to this post, which had generated a lot of commentary. I liked what I wrote so much I decided to post it here too :-)] I can’t count the ways when someone looked at some great new product and said something like, “I did something just like that 20 years ago as a PhD thesis”, or comments like that.

“Visicalc, oh that was just like some mainframe financial modeling system I used on Mainframes…”

“Quicken, oh that’s just a glorified spreadsheet…”

“Windows XP? Oh a total ripoff of the Mac, which in turn was a ripoff of the Star.”

“Salesforce.com? Big deal, nothing more than Siebel running as an ASP”

“Oracle – gee ...

Scoble (and everyone else) comments: “We bought Groove and made Ray Ozzie our CTO.”

Except, according to the New York Times:

“Mr. Ozzie will join Microsoft’s two other chief technical officers, David Vaskevitch and Craig Mundie”

Interesting definition of “Chief”. I wonder whether the New York Times got it wrong?

Dave Winer points to Kevin Shofield’s defenseof an “unfair, infamous post saying that Microsoft can’t ship software anymore.” Scoble links to the thread, without comment (which is understandable, not wanting to be too partisan.) In my opinion, and agreeing with Kevin, Microsoft actually shows an absolutely amazing ability to develop, test, and deliver software of mind boggling complexity to a huge user base. They run ...

In case you’ve come across the flaming debate about how the Google Toolbar is evil, you will appreciate this post: **“I’m a bit wary about throwing myself in the middle of the whole Google Toolbar AutoLink business (Dan Gillmor has a good summary and lots of trackbacks to opinions, pro and con), but I’m sort of dumbfounded that so many people are so vehemently against it”

That’s from Kottke.org, but it could just as easily be me speaking. My sentiments exactly. Read Kottke’s post. One more teapot tempest AFAIC

Correction:** While I still agree with most of what Kottke said, there’s one factual error. When I played with the toolbar it automatically changed a web page to turn addresses into links to Google Maps.

You’ve heard this one before: there are more and more truly outstanding pieces of software coming out as Open Source. Everyone has heard about FireFox, right, the wonderful Web Browser from the Mozilla guys. I just came across news that Internet Explorer usage fell again for the 7th straight month, and it seems that FireFox is taking up the slack. Take a look at Thunderbird 1.0, another gem. Thunderbird is an email client and it’s a very nice piece of work. You can see both of these apps here.

I also recently read notice that there’s a pr...

I think the Segway Human Transporter is really cool, and I’ve read many articles about how they work and what they are like. But this past weekend I had the unique experience of spending about 4 hours riding around New Orleans on a Segway. Eye Opening. Here are some (surprising) observations and conclusions. It really works. It keeps you balanced, and once you get the hang of it, it’s quite easy to move forward, backwards, and turn. It takes about 10 minutes to be able to work it safely and then maybe another 30 to feel proficient.

The machine seems really heavy and powerful. Heavier than I thought. Like a lawnmower heavy. While it doesn’t move fast, it does have a lot of po...

I’ve been using Microsoft Money ** (their personal finance package) for years now (after having switched from Quicken probably 5 years ago.) I really like it, for what it is. In January of each of the last few years it seems, I shell out another $60 for the latest “upgrade”, install it, and immediately kick **myself when I find almost no new functionality.

It seems like the graphic designers get a turn to play with all the art work and colors but as far as new functionality, nothing. I wouldn’t be surprised if the M$ is down to 4 people, with the highest operating margin of any product.

This has gone so far now, that they don’t even pretend by putting a “What’s new in this ...

In the realm of interesting visualizations, check this oneout. It’s a Chess game where the computer’s ‘thought process’ is displayed as it figures out the next move. Via “Bad Magic Number” who said “It’s quite an interesting cross between art, programming and chess. “

There are many interesting things about GMail, so this is either going to be a long post or one of a series. First things first: GMail is now my primary email provider. Yes, you heard that right. It’s free, does a great job with spam and I can continue to use Outlook. Life is good. First of all, what is GMail (for those of you who have been living under a rock!) GMail is Google’s free, web based, email service. Its major claim to fame, at least initially, was the 1 Gig of free Mail storage they provide. Kind of amazing isn’t it? When it first came out, that got all the attention. In fact it seems to have forced Hotmail and Yahoo mail to increase the a...

* “Scientists at the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problem.

With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use” *

[From 1954 Popular Mechanics Magazine, from Peter Grossman]

...

A very interesting piece about how people are beginning to use Instant Messaging instead of email. It’s quite counterintuitive, but it does seem to correlate in one particular college student I know pretty well. “Youth use email to talk with parents and authorities (including corporate emails like from Xanga); it’s where they get the functional stuff. They check email once a day. They get notices there, but they’re **mostly disregarded. **

IM is where the action is. Youth see this as their digital centerpiece, where they communicate with their friends, thereby maintaining th...

Everyone wants to give me a toolbar! I’ve successfully fought back Yahoo’s and am a happy user of Google’s Toolbar. Now A9 has a toolbar too.

Have you checked out A9? It’s Amazon’s Search Service. What does Amazon want with a Search Service? Don’t ask me! Does the world need another one?

I guess I am all for trying to improve on what exists. But in the case of A9, they license Google results and then “add value.” For me the value isn’t persuasive yet.

But geez, do I have to decide now between the Google toolbar and the A9 Toolbar? Puleez!

But here’s a tidbit for you: if you use A9 then you get a little discounton your Anazon book order. It’s only 1.5% (or so 🙂 but still if you order a lot of books, it could add up!

I’ve written about this before, I think, but I am once again pleasantly amazed by Google. I momentarily blanked out on the name of the ‘other’ conservative blogger – other than Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) that is.

So I asked Google, what sites are related to Instapundit? And here’s what it says. Number 2 on the list: Andrew Sullivan. Yup, right answer!

Cool or what?

A very thought provoking speech by Bruce Sterling at SigGraph 2004. Recommended. “When you shop for Amazon, you’re already adding value to everything you look at on an Amazon screen. You don’t get paid for it, but your shopping is unpaid work for them. Imagine this blown to huge proportions and attached to all your physical possessions. Whenever you use a spime, you’re rubbing up against everybody else who has that same kind of spime. A spime is a users group first, and a physical object second.”

Today I was introduced by two totally different people to two really cool little utilities.

Anagram.This application works with Outlook and pulls and structures contact information out of emails. Simply, you select the text with the name, phone numbers, address etc. in the email, type control-c twice, and up pops a new Outlook contact record all properly filled out. It does similar things with appointments etc. Super useful and perhaps a more politically correct alternative to applications like Plaxo (Thank you Esther Dyson)

WordWeb. A tiny dictionary, thesaurus, word finder doo-hicky that lives in you...

Jon (and many others) really like Bloglines a lot; I recommend his article – there’s a lot to learn there. I want to address just one point, which is Jon’s prediction of the coming world domination by web apps. There’s an interesting paradox, inconsistency or contradiction here, if you look at the following qoutes from his piece:

“Web applications such as Gmail and Bloglines are already hard to beat. With a touch of alchemy they just might become unstoppable. “ “… that Bloglines, like Zope, handles foldering about as well as you can in a Web UI — which is to say, well enough. With an intelligent local cache it could be...

Another article in the New York Times about RSS: “Called R.S.S. (the initials are variously said to stand for Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication and more obscure formulations), this increasingly popular online tool turns a morass of disparate information sources into an automatically generated and neatly organized index of the latest articles and postings” You know we are not yet mainstream when the abbreviation periods are included in the name R.S.S. I mean when’s the last time you saw H.T.M.L. or for that matter I.B.M?

Scoblebemoans the fact that folks aren’t all using the XML Icon, and he cites Random Bytes.

(Lucky Random Bytes for being mentioned by Scoble. As they say in Holleywood, you can say anything you like about me, just as long as you spell my name right.)

While I have always felt that XML icons, RSS, RSS Versions, and other geeky things should be hidden from regular users, for this point in time, Scoble is right.

Until we have nice 1-click subscribing with user meaningful gestures rather than rss.xml, some elementary standardization around a name and an icon is highly desirable.

Now to add insult to injury, using ...

Various peopleare saying that Opera, with it’s new release, is the first email client to integrate RSS access. Not true. Oddpost, a very nice and unique web-based mail client has had this for a while. I recommend it.

Good evening sportsfans. There’s a new version (4.5) of iTunes for Windows. All I can see after a quick look-over is a new feature called “Party Shuffle” that appears to create a quasi-random mix, based on a few parameters. Suitable for parties, I guess 🙂

One of my computers has gone totally haywire with spyware, popups popping all over the place, and more. Here’s the new spin, which I hadn’t seen before.

When surfing the web, arbitrary words on web pages are turned into links, and when you innocently click them, you are sent off the deep end with ads, popups, software installing itself or claiming to do so. It’s really ugly. I had never seen that before.

Anyway, my usual medicine for thar problem was Ad-Aware. It’s free, and it has been very effective in the past. In this case, it didn’t successfully clean the machine. In fact it seemed to have no noticable effect!

I checked Download.com, where an app called Spy Sweeper was said to have been the PC Magazine Editors Choice. I ran that and it was far more successful. At least with the regular spyware. The word highlighting one is still there. More later.

I have installed an interesting application – BlogJet. It’s a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” — Pablo Picasso

And here’s the clever thing: the preceding two paragraphs are automatically offered to me when I install BlogJet, which encourages me to try it, and at the same time, advertise it. In fact, I found out about BlogJet when I saw this post. Very clever. I think I am going to like this utility! (And this last paragraph was indeed written by me, myself…)

David Coursey writes an interesting bitabout how the competitors to Microft Office (i.e. Star Office, Word Perfect, what not) need to get themselves an Outlook competitor, because that’s the only (or main) reason standing in the way of folks switching from Microsoft. A couple of points:

I can’t believe that David feels that Outlook 2003 is so much better than the previous version (Outlook XP.) I am usually a Microsoft fan but in this case there are various really bad design choices which make Outlook 2003 a constant aggrevation for me to use. The Spam filtering is one thing that is new and goo...

In the accompanying photo you can see one of the ubiquitous TV screens sprinkled all around the Spanish subway system. They display up-to-the-minute information about arrivals and departures, in real-time, also ads and other commercial announcements. Very useful!

But wait, look closely: This is a Windows based application, if you can believe it! There’s a big fat Windows error message displayed in the middle of the screen! If you look really closely, you can tell it’s in Spanish!

A good little insight from Rafe Needlemanin his new column over at ZDNet. “The reason it won’t last: If you can get a telephone with any area or country code, the whole idea of a vanity area code will eventually evaporate. It won’t be like a real-world address, which for the most part still represents a physical location. While roaming cellular phones have already begun to make area codes irrelevant, VoIP will finish the job. Soon, area code will be one of those anachronistic telecom terms, like dialing, that doesn’t mean anything close to what it once did. “

If I did things correctly, you should not have noticed too much different. But today, with the help of Dennis Doughty, I’ve switched to using Movable Typeas my blogging software. It’s no picknick, let me say that. My only reason to switch really was to make it easy for me to post from different computers. Other than that, I was happy with Radio Userland, and in fact I will miss certain things I’ve gotten used to in Radio. We’ll see how it goes. Please let me know if anything breaks!

I’ve been a quasi-believer about RD-ID technology for a while now. I know more than several people who are investing their time and money into this space, but I am a fence-sitter. Briefly, why?

From what I hear and read, it doesn’t quite work reliably yet. The readers can easily be confused by multiple tags, mis-counting or mis-identifying. While the advantages over bar-codes are very real, they don’t strike me as real enough to effect the kind of rapid industry change that fans of the technology are betting on. The backbone infrastructure that will be needed to process all this super-detailed new data doesn’t exist yet. It strikes me that it might be an effort of Y2K propor...

Outlook 2003 Rant. What were those guys thinking? Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those Microsoft haters. I love Microsoft. I admire their work. But in this instance, and one that affects me directly and daily, boy do I feel let down!

I’ve been using Outlook 2003 for a few months now. While it has some nice new features, the one feature I use the most and arguably the most important because of its prominence is so-called ‘Navigation Pane.’ Not to rub salt in the wound, but, why, oh, why

Can’t I resize the ‘Favorite Folders’ panel? Can’t I hide the ...

RSS/Atom: An idea whose time has come. Dave Winer is reaching out to the Atom people to try for the grand unification of the two formats. If you look back at the history of how Atom came to be, and the public record of the debates, disagreements, potshots that have come before you see that this is a couragous step for Dave to be taking. It’s a first step which we all hope will lead to something great.

People should read what was written closely: particularly that this is not meant to be a final proposal but an opening set of ideas on how the unification might be accom...

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?

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.

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?

...

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?

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 ...

Microsoft Money 2004. Disappointing. I started preparing my taxes and so I thought I might upgrade my Microsoft Money to the 2004 from 2003. I am a fairly comprehensive user of Microsoft Money, and so every year I do this, and frankly almost every year I am disappointed.

There are almost no new features, enhancements, simplifications or whatever. Am I a sucker? Every year, I probably wait 2 to 3 months after the upgrade comes out to order it… I am well aware of their tack to extract yet another $50 from me (less the $20 rebate which) but I still fall for it, in the hope that even if nothing visible changes, bugs are fixed that will save me time even though I never am aware of it. Still I’d say if you are thinking of upgrading to 2004, you can safely skip it.

I want RSS to disappear. The question was posed, “What do users want from RSS”? I thought long and hard about this and here’s where I come out.

Speaking strictly as a user, what I care about are RSS applications. I care about reading, scanning, writing, absorbing, learning from, contributing, and sharing. So what I want from RSS is to disappear into the plumbing, and in every way possible enable and encourage great applications to be designed and built.

All kinds of wonderful new stuff that is yet to be invented. Authoring tools, reading tools, syndication applications, content applications, distribution servers, mass political blogging platforms, search engines and indexes, ra...

It’s easy to predict the future. Tim Bray has just concluded an interesting series of postings on what he calls TPSM or Technology Predictor Success Matrix. I’ve had a belief for a while that actually it’s easier than you think to predict the future of technologies. I will limit my comments to technology and computer related predictions, but I bet this applies to other fields as well. ****

Want to see? I predict that in the future:

Computers will be able to recognize handwriting Computers will be able to understand human spoken language There will be pervasive, high bandwidth, wireless connectivity

And ...

Walt Mossberg: “You may never go back to Internet Explorer again.” In the current episode of Mossberg’s Personal Technology, he sings the praises of tabbed browsers. Of course old hat.

“The Web browser is probably the most frequently used category of software in the world. But in recent years, the browser most people rely on — Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — has been stagnant, offering very few new features.”

He recommends Safari for Mac (of course,) and NetCaptor for Windows.

Of course in knocking Internet Explorer he neglects to say that both NetCaptor and MyIE2 are relatively thin skins over the core IE ActiveX controls. So much credit still goes to Microsoft. Sorry!

On Windows, I’ve found MyIE2 somewhat better than NetCaptor, but both are better than IE.

Old news, and the link is no longer working: CRN: “NewsGator 2.0, which pulls news feeds in RSS or Atom …”: First Time I’ve seen a commercial announcement of Atom support. Full Quote:

“Also on Wednesday, NewsGator Technologies announced version 2.0 of its NewsGator news aggregator at CES. NewsGator 2.0, which pulls news feeds in RSS or Atom syndication formats from sources such as online news Web sites, blogs, and newsgroups, now lets users synchronize their news collection efforts on multiple machines, such as their in-the-office desktop and their on-the-road laptop. The new edition also offers an application programming interface (API) that corporate developers can use to build customized news apps for employees. NewsGator 2.0, which collects news feeds and then displays them within Microsoft Outlook 2000 and later, will ship Jan. 19, and cost $29 per user.”