was moebius recursive (goto mobrec.com)

PLEASE UPDATE YOUR FEED LINKS

2006-07-23T09:55:00.000-04:00

Please update your feed link to point at the active blog at mobrec.com .

This Blog Has Moved to mobrec.com

2006-04-16T10:20:00.000-04:00

Over time I have grown increasingly more frustrated with the limitations of Blogger. After testing the blogging waters with Blogger in earnest for a year or so, I have finally found the time over the long weekend to move to a self-hosted option where I am running Wordpress. What a difference a full fledged blogging software makes -- I am still absorbing all of the options and plugins and starting to make additional plans for all of the new found flexibility. And the newly released Wordpress Widgets made the transition much easier.

From today forward, updates will be on mobrec.com or via this feed.

As for Blogger, it is time to say: "me, I disconnect from you".

A bag of peanuts to anyone who actually gets the musical reference (without googling it first, of course).

technorati tags: blogger, wordpress, webhosting, mobrec, widgets

Sun Open Sourcing Some Tools

2006-04-14T14:36:00.000-04:00

Moved to mobrec.com

Sun announced earlier in the week that it is open sourcing (via netbeans.org) some significant enterprise-level tools. These include:

* 2-way UML modeler for architecting and reverse engineering complex enterprise applications. UML tools generate diagrams and keep them in sync with source changes without adding markers to the source code. Full support for the current version of the UML specification is provided.
* A set of XML infrastructure and visual editing tools which help enable developers to manage complexity in their XML files. These tools are intended to provide a base that can be extended by third parties.
* Orchestration and SOA tools are included for building composite applications. These leading-edge SOA tools leverage the business integration technology and expertise from Sun's acquisition of SeeBeyond.

I am quite happy to see that there might finally be a decent open source two-way UML tool available. Last time I looked at this space, there was not much on offer and what was there was pretty sketchy.

Hey, I know that Sun's tools aren't as "cool" to use as Eclipse but there is no reason why the Eclipse community can't swallow hard and look at how to incorporate these new tools into their IDE.

technorati tags: sun, netbeans, ide, uml, development

CL1P.net : The Internet Clipboard

2006-04-14T14:15:00.000-04:00

I recently discovered a handy little tool at cl1p.net that lets you 'store' a chunk of text or a small (less than 2MB) file at a URL of your choosing and then retrieve it again using the same URL. As the site states, clip has some interesting use cases:

Getting around firewalls. With cl1p.net you can easily move data from one machine to another. All you need is a URL.

Enhance Instant Messages. Instant messaging clients do a poor job at sending large blocks of text. With cl1p.net you can create a cl1p and post the URL in an instant.

Improving productivity. Cl1p.net is the fastest way to post to the Internet. Why go to the trouble of logging into e-mail just to move data?

technorati tags: clipnet, clipboard, tools, utilities

RedHat Acquires JBoss

2006-04-14T14:00:00.000-04:00

I was a little surprised at how little coverage there has been of the RedHat acquisition of JBoss -- could it be acquisition fatigue or general disinterest. The latter is a little hard to believe considering that both parties have at some point been the darling (or bane) of the open source community/movement. With the general love/hate relationship with RedHat, I'm not sure that having the bombastic Marc Fleury on the roster is going to be much more than a liability.

This blog post over at zdnet was one of the better I saw on the merger.

technorati tags: redhat, jboss, opensource, merger

Now with Ajax

2006-04-14T12:40:00.000-04:00

This posting has moved to mobrec.com

This week I saw an announcement on Ajaxian that several high powered engineers were leaving Sun Microsystems for JackBe. I recognized all of the names of the engineers from the influential Core J2EE Patterns book that they collectively co-authored.

Unfortunately, visiting the JackBe web site does not give a very good first impression, particularly the large-ish advert that might as well read "make your company fully buzzword compliant with our Ajax assessment!!". This reminds me of around 8-10 years ago when every consulting company was offering a 'Java assessment' or 'Java Jumpstart' and how such things will give you a 'technical/competitive advantage' to anyone who would take the bait. Repeat the same for client-server, object-oriented programming, eCommerce, agile programming, INSERT_YOUR_FAVORITE_HERE.

This is not to say that Ajax does not have value (it does, when applied appropriately), but it is to say that anything can be oversold.

technorati tags: sun, ajax, jackbe, hype, consulting

FlashBag

2006-04-14T09:26:00.000-04:00

You can just hear it now: Is that a couple of gigabytes in your pocket or are you just happy to see me!?

This is an interesting take on flash drives: the more data that you put on the drive the more it puffs up. Not sure how practical this is, but it is definitely a novel indicator of free space on a storage device.

technorati tags: flashdrive, visualization, fun, humor, ideas

Semantic Web Adoption

2006-04-09T10:22:00.000-04:00

Earlier in the week, the Guardian had a great article titled Spread the word, and join it up. It covers some of the usual ground about how HTTP was about presentation and the semantic web is about Data and serves as a good introduction to the topic.

What some of the later comments in the article got me thinking about was how the forces behind the growth of the web and the adoption of open source may (finally) be driving factors behind the growth of more semantic content on the web. The web, I think, really changed the thinking in most corporations in that it became 'okay' to share without having to control the sharing.

Open source changed the way that corporations and individuals thought about collaboration and product development. Adopt some time tested code into your own (internal) project and be that much further ahead in the development cycle. Contribute some code or even an entire project to the open source community and (based on the merit of the code or product) see it take on a new life and grow in ways that the originator never imagined.

Stir in the relatively recent development of products and even companies having APIs (web 2.0?) that allow users to combine them in new and creative ways and you have a pretty interesting environment for your data, which, after all, is what the semantic web is all about.

Now, get your data 'out there' in RDF and see what creative linkages and constructions that can be crafted on the web. In some cases, I can see this having a real multiplying effect -- as more and more quality data is available in a machineable format the value increases -- much like the network effect that was seen with fax machines. While the fax network effect was strictly about point to point communication, the semantic web impact will be in bringing together diverse data sources in new ways and creating new value in the combinations.

technorati tags: semanticweb, rdf, opensource, ideas, guardian

A New Twist On CAPTCHA: KittenAuth

2006-04-09T10:15:00.000-04:00

Rather than use the awkwardly warped (and many times unreadable-to-humans) CAPTCHAs there is some work at presenting a matrix of photographic images and asking the (presumed) human viewer to pick out three of a kind. The first place I saw this was KittenAuth on thepcspy.

technorati tags: security, captcha, antispam, webdev

Domain Name Fun

2006-04-09T08:54:00.000-04:00

Yafla has an interesting and amusing analysis of registered internet domain names and some of the characteristics they exhibit:

If you want one of the 676 possible two-letter sequences, for instance for an acronym or abbreviation, you're out of luck: They're all taken. Even allowing for digits, giving 1296 combinations, again every single variation is taken.

Of course, that's ignoring the fact that .COM registrars now mandate a 3-character minimum length, so it wouldn't be an option anyways.

Of the 17,576 possible three-letter sequences, again every single one is already taken. Adding digits to the mix (note that I'm intentionally ignoring obtuse dashes for such short domain names, though technically they are legal from the second character onwards), giving 46,656 permutations, yields a larger number of garbage domain entries (either REGISTRAR-LOCKED, REDEMPTIONPERIOD, or with no nameservers), giving a false hope of 228 seemingly open domains, yet they aren't actually available.

technorati tags: dns, domainnames, speculation, fun

Apple Boot Camp: Running Windows on an Intel-based Mac

2006-04-06T06:13:00.000-04:00

Unless you were doing research on computer viruses and poorly written commercial software, why would you do this to a perfectly good Mac?

technorati tags: mac, apple, intelmac, windows, bootcamp

WW2D - Java-based Google Earth-ish Application

2006-04-02T10:24:00.000-04:00

I just stumbled across WW2D, which is a Java-based application that allows you to view and zoom through publicly available map data much like Google Earth does. Granted, it's not as polished as GE, but does provide much of the same functionality. One big plus, is that you can export a give image location once you locate it (you can't do this without handing a wad of cash to Google in GE).

I like that WW2D has quite a few user configurable layers, so that I can overlay the satellite image with the USGS Topo Maps for a given view. In fact, the image accompanying this post is a Topo of my neck of the woods.

Another cool thing is that, since it is a Java app, it can run on multiple platforms (Mac, Linux, Unix, Windows) with the same code base. I'm not sure when other application vendors are going to clue into the power (and portability) of Java for these types of applications. I would even say that if a startup requires a desktop component and it is not written in Java, then they really don't get it.

technorati tags: maps, topo, googleearth, java, satellite

Wookiepedia

2006-04-02T09:54:00.000-04:00

For Star Wars geeks who just can't get enough, there is now the Wookiepedia.
A+ for the individual who came up with the play on WikiPedia.

technorati tags: starwars, wiki, wikipedia, scifi, fun

Changing Time Made Easy

2006-04-02T08:40:00.000-04:00

It's that time of year when the clocks leap forward by one hour in North America. I find it amazing that so few companies make it easy for consumer goods to deal with this twice yearly event. Why don't alarm clocks, microwaves, etc just deal with the time change? No, Really.

The irony is that I can go to Target and buy a $12USD digital watch that can automatically adjust to seasonal time changes, but the sorry clock in my $XX,000 car can't make the same adjustment? Seems odd to me; I can't believe that more products can't incorporate that two cent component and a simple way to say what timezone you are in to free consumers from having to manually make these changes.

technorati tags: time, clocks, products, timechange

Give Me Back My Data

2006-03-26T09:24:00.000-05:00

This posting has moved to mobrec.com

I've been thinking about all of the places that 'allow' customers to do the data entry tasks for them with little in the way of reward back to the customer. Think about it, you get to key in all the information for your airline reservation, but what do you get in return (ok, maybe a discount, but hear me out)? What I would like to see happen is that more online companies provide value added information in return.

For example, when I make an airline reservation, why can't the airline shoot me an iCalendar with all of the departure/arrival information that I can drop into my calendar? If I order some merchandise from an online vendor like Apple that requires a signature on arrival, why not provide me (again) with an iCalendar that I can easily add to my calendar so I can make sure someone is available to sign for the delivery? You would think that the delivery companies (UPS/DHL/FedEx) would be all over this as it saves them the time/effort/fuel associated with re-delivery. For that matter, why not give me an Atom/RSS feed that allows me to easily track the package. Once the package is delivered, they can trash the feed URL. Actually, the same would be cool for the airline example as well.

This isn't such a leap -- many banks allow you to get your transaction information in a format (QIF) that you can easily import into Quicken; why not for the more mundane stuff as well?

But the thing that would really make this work, is to craft the value added data so that it would work with mobile devices. That way I don't need to be tied to a feedreader or calendar that is on my desktop computer, I can be anywhere. This is obviously important for the air travel scenario. Perhaps part of the problem gets solved by having a feed reader that can send SMS messages based on certain feeds changing (like my flight schedule). You can sort of make that work now with Yahoo alerts, but a more integrated solution would be preferable.

One last thought: perhaps an interim method of bridging the data gap is to provide the scheduling information in a microformat like hCalendar and embed it in the confirmation/receipt screen (HTML) that is typically provided by a web site. It could then be mined out with PiggyBank or some other GRDDL-like scraper. Not perfect, but at least avoids the re-keying that is required now.

technorati tags: rss, atom, icalendar, mobilecomputing, ideas

Happy 5th Mac OS X!

2006-03-25T16:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, March 24th, marked the fifth anniversary of the release of the new Macintosh operating system from Apple: OS X. Shortly after the release of OS X 10.0.0, I bought my first Mac -- something that I thought would never do, but found it an easy transition on for my home computing needs.

I have never been a big fan of Microsoft's poorly written, buggy, generally awful software. I 'celebrated' the release of Windows 98 by removing all MS products from my home computers and replacing it with Linux. I found Linux and the applications available on it to be more that adequate for my needs.

One catalyst for my interest in Apple was that just before the release of OS X, I bought my first miniDV camcorder which had a built in firewire connection. This made me start thinking about doing more video editing and iMovie sounded like a good entry point. Also, I liked the idea of having a commercial OS with the power and stability of BSD/Mach under the covers with some decent eyecandy of a user interface. OS X had plenty to offer here. So in April of 2001, I took the plunge and bought a Graphite iMac and a shiny new copy of OS X 10.0.0.

The early days with the new system where interesting, just trying to figure out where things were configured or even located. I also found myself many times just saying 'screw it' and dropping down to the command line to get some work done instead of clickity-clicking around in the GUI. Software update was awesome and I was very pleased at the steady stream of new applications, bug fixes and updates that came my way.

I also remember all of the whining when Apple 'dared' to charge for an OS upgrade (*gasp*). My though was, I've gotten a free ride for this long, why not drop the $79(?) dollars for an update? I was a little less enthusiastic when the free 'iTools' where re-swizzled into the for-fee .mac .

iTunes made it too easy to solve a long standing problem I had with music. I had tons of CDs, but no good way to locate and listen to discs when I wanted to. The solution at the time, a multi-disc boom box was just not cutting it as far as variety and accessability were concerned. iTunes made it very easy to rip my CDs and play.

When the first iPod came out, I thought, 'great, now I can have something to listen to at work' and bought the first of three iPods (a 1st, 2nd, and 4th generation). With the iPod I was 'buying up' less for features but more for iPod disc space to carry around my ever growing iTunes-based music collection. I also thought that the 3rd generation iPod was a clunker user interface-wise (it was the only one with the separate menu buttons). I was so tempted to buy one of the 'I had an iPod before you even knew what one was' t-shirts I saw last year, but resisted the temptation.

With the purchase of a slimserver first, then several Roku units and an Apple Airport Express (as well as Tivo Desktop allowing for the playing of iTunes music through the TV) it became even easier to play iTunes music wherever in the house it was desired.

I was pretty vocal about singing the praises of my newfound Mac experience at work and slowly more and more co-workers were dumping their PCs for iMacs and Powerbooks. While my first iPod was met with questions like 'why would you need something like that to listen to music on?' -- now iPods are everywhere in cubicle land. One of my neighbors even bought a Mac last autumn because they got so frustrated with trying to edit and organize pictures on their Dell desktop. I showed her iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD and some of the work that I had done in those apps and she had a new iBook within a week!

That was a bit of rambling Apple nostalgia, but it felt good.

technorati tags: apple, macintosh, itunes, osx, evangelism

isolatr (The Anti-social Web)

2006-03-18T10:16:00.000-05:00

This is really funny, in a Web 2.0 sort of way.

technorati tags: isolatr, web20, fun, humor

Book: The World Is Flat

2006-03-18T09:58:00.000-05:00

I just finished The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman and have to say its a bit of a mixed bag. First, I found the book to be over-long, especially since the entire premise of the book in presented in the rather verbose introduction and then slowly tortured for the next four hundred pages or so.

Granted, some of what follows serves to expound on some of his introductory points but frequently it ranges into breathless, almost infomercial prose about certain big corporations that the author loves to name drop again and again and again.

In later chapters he starts ranging more into politics and this is were he starts to get both annoying and contradictory.

First he posits that no two countries participating in a global supply chain would dare go to war with each other. Really. I guess he missed the part where the US attacked Iraq, nominally over oil supplies (that the US wants to control). It seems the current (US) thinking is to go to war in order to control a global supply chain and not to protect it.

Next he spends an inordinate amount of time slagging off Islamic countries and enumerating their perceived shortcomings with various economic figures and assertions. Thomas, I'd be interested to hear those same numbers for Israel, as well. How many new patents are created there per year? What is their GDP growth? How does it compare to other countries in the region? With Europe? If the constant loans from the US are any indication, probably not well. My point is that he needs to be careful about where he shines his spotlight and to do it evenly and without bias.

It is also curious in this discussion that there is no mention of Turkey and the reforms that Attaturk put into place after the second world war. Granted, Turkey is not exactly a world economic powerhouse, but they have gone a long way toward separating religion from the government and economy. Also, I note that toward the end of the book he's back to swooning over the high tech situation in Malaysia (an Islamic country), where is laptop coincidently was built.

And speaking of the laptop, did we really need the tedious two page recounting of where every part in his laptop might have come from? I could have done without it.

Finally, the assertion that anyone who is concerned about the side effects of globalization (pollution, natural resource over-consumption, etc) is a 'socialist', 'communist' or 'Trotskyist' is gratuitous and something that I would expect more from Fox News than an even handed discussion regarding globalization.

Overall, I found this book overly long and ponderously presented. It would have made a very nice short essay (preferably without the race-baiting and political posturing).

technorati tags: books, globalization, technology, economics

Rojo Relevance Not Very Relevant To Me

2006-03-18T09:11:00.000-05:00

The new home of this content is on mobrec.com, please bookmark this article there (if you are so inclined).

There has been a lot of discussion about some new features that have been added to Rojo, an online feed reader. One feature getting the most buzz is the 'new' relevance feature.

I don't get it. For one, I have been a Rojo user since the shuttering of the excellent Searchfox, and I have had a 'by relevance' option for months. It was never clear exactly how 'relevance' was being determined, if at all. In response to a comment that I posted on techcrunch someone pointed me to this write up on readwriteweb that includes the following:

First, the purpose of "relevance" is to do for feed reading what smart search engines (like Google) do for search results -- figure out what to put on the front page. Many readers are overwhelmed by the number of new stories coming from their feeds every day. So Rojo Relevance is about sorting those by "relevance" rather than date, to put the good stuff on top.

So basically, as Rojo defines it, relevance is absolutely useless to me and should more accurately be called 'popularity'. I want it to be relevant to what I am interested in, not the beauty contest/what-everybody-else-is-reading dogpile. That represents value to me.

I'll say it again: that was the beauty of Searchfox: it paid attention to what I read and ordered my river of news according to that, so that everytime I sat down to read, I was greeted with what I wanted to read first. Searchfox also was smart enough to mark a page of links as read as I advanced pages; this way, if I was interrupted in reading, I could simply hit refresh and get any new postings as well as the unread ones from my previous session. Apparently this is a very difficult concept for Rojo and others to understand and implement.

Can someone please implement a real relevance ranking in a feed reader and not another implementation of digg?

technorati tags: rojo, feedreader, searchfox, relevance, attention

South Park and Scientology

2006-03-17T20:30:00.000-05:00

I hope the Scientologists don't turn violent over a cartoon depiction of their religious beliefs. Or is it about Tom Cruise? Or both?

technorati tags: religion, southpark, cartoons, fun

RFID Tag 'Virus' Nonsense

2006-03-15T17:00:00.000-05:00

Computerworld is running a article about how some researchers are warning of the perils of RFID viruses. In a word, bullshit. An RFID tag is simply a data source and, typically, very little data at that. If you have a poorly written application that does not do the appropriate data validations you can create a problem for yourself regardless of the source of the data.

This is worth repeating: the issues identified in the article included SQL Injection, buffer overflow(!) and other classic examples of exploits that can be applied to any poorly written application. The fact that an RFID tag was the data source does not make it a specific RFID issue -- it's just data.

So if someone creates a 'virus' and puts it on an RFID tag, great. You can write a virus and embed it in a JPEG image or mp3 file. However, unless you have an application that specifically looks for the virus payload and provides an execution environment there is absolutely no way that it can do any harm to your computer system unless it can actually execute the virus code.

One last point about data security. Hopefully, the industry has learned (via rampant indentity theft) that putting personally indentifying information in an RFID tag is a very, very stupid thing to do (and may actually be illegal in some locations). It is likely that the RFID tag would only have some sequential number/identifier that is read and tied back to some other more meaningful definition/data elsewhere. So if a bad guy gets the RFID identifier, they still have to know about the other system, locate it, compromise it and make sense of the data relationship. Could it happen? Sure. But is it as simple as the press makes it out to be, probably not. Bonus points to the implementers smart enough to encrypt the RFID data in the first place.

Here is a rather contrived scenario from the article:

For example, airports are considering using RFID tags to track baggage. But Tanenbaum warned that this application could pose a large problem if an RFID tag is read and delivers a much larger set of data in return. A false tag on a piece of baggage could exploit a buffer overflow to deliver a virus to the RFID middleware. Once the virus code is on the server, it could infect the databases and corrupt subsequent tags or install back doors -- small programs that allow for the extrication of data over the Internet, Tanenbaum said.

Right. Or you could have the appropriate data validations in you processing system and not worry about RFID data or data from any other source for that matter.

technorati tags: rfid, virus, hysteria, security, datavalidation

Origami, Nothing to See Here

2006-03-10T00:25:00.000-05:00

Microsoft has 'innovated' again by introducing the Apple Newton 13 years after Apple originally did. From my previous post you might derive that I was a big fan of the Newton and was a bit surprised by the complaints about the form factor.

Yet here we are in 2006 and MS has produced an even larger, heavier unit that even the largest Apple Newton. Have a look at this MS article that describes how the Newton was the wrong form factor, it should have been smaller like a Palm Pilot or larger, like a tablet:

The Newton hardware could have been developed along a number of lines, making it either larger or smaller. Instead, it was left in that dead zone of being too big and heavy for a pocket and too small to have a large, visible screen.

So which part of the 'dead zone' does that leave their new product in?

technorati tags: origami, microsoft, apple, newton, pda

Your Blog Is Locked

2006-03-09T23:57:00.000-05:00

I returned from my trip to San Jose this week to discover the fine folks (or bots) at Blogger had determined that my blog was a splog:

Your blog is locked

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

You won't be able to publish posts to your blog until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We'll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than a business day.

If we don't hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within 10 days.

Awesome. So how did it determine that my blog was a splog? Golly, it must be because it is linked to by, oh, about 6 external sites according to Technorati (clearly suspicious). Maybe it's because I have links to my Flickr, last.fm and other personal information so that no one could possibly find me and report me for my 'spam blogging' activities.

Added irony: when I spell checked this posting with Blogger's own spell checker, it suggested 'blocker' as the correct word for 'Blogger'. It also suggests 'degenerate' for 'Technorati' as well.

I don't suppose that I will ever actually get an explanation (or an apology). Time to consider looking for a new place to host this blog? Maybe.

technorati tags: blogger, blogging, spam, splogs, suckage

Defeating TiVo Commercial Skippers?

2006-03-04T13:32:00.000-05:00

Collision Detection has an interesting post on how KFC is attempting to thwart people who fast forward through commercials by making a commercial that is tailored to skippers. The idea is that if they put a single frame in the commercial with, say a code to get something for free, then people will actually not only watch the advert but watch it frame by frame to find the embedded code.

Of course, this sort of overlooks the fact that only one person needs to do this, then post the code to their blog or discussion forum to save everyone else the trouble. Sounds a bit dubious to me. Time will tell.

technorati tags: tivo, adverts

Encyclopodia

2006-03-04T13:24:00.000-05:00

With a little ipodLinux magic, you can make that old iPod (aka last year's model) useful again by converting it into a portable version of the wikipedia.

technorati tags: wikipedia, ipod, ipodlinux, encyclopodia, ipodhacks

Video Game Romance (or Not)

2006-03-04T13:18:00.000-05:00

This music video is absolutely hilarious whether you're a geek or not. Sad thing is, I know people who to which this would personally apply.

technorati tags: fun, humor, xbox, videogames, geeks

More Python

2006-02-22T17:53:00.000-05:00

PBS is set to release six new Monty Python specials this year, one for (and focusing on) each of the original Pythons.

technorati tags: montypython, pbs, humor, fun

Gadgets as Security Tokens

2006-02-22T17:42:00.000-05:00

CNet has an article on how RSA is looking to turn PDAs, cell phones and other common gadgets into security tokens than can be used for strong authentication.

technorati tags: rsa, security, authentication, gadgets

Handwriting

2006-02-22T17:20:00.000-05:00

An interesting article at the Guardian on The Death of Handwriting. I have definitely seen a trend in this direction at work, especially now that wireless access is available throughout the entire campus. People bring their laptops to meetings presumably to take notes, but more often to check email, IM and do other things rather than focus on the meeting. I am a bit of an oddball in that I show up with my (paper) notebook and pen to take notes and jot down diagrams. I find good old paper and ink to be much more expressive and versatile in this situation.

I have noticed that with all of the time I have spent on the computer over the years that my penmanship has deteriorated and I am making a concerted effort to do more writing (versus typing). When I was in college I was proud of how well I wrote and even had several profs comment on the legibility and layout of written work.

I guess it is in the same vein as my using an analog watch; I find myself drawn to good ole paper and ink to capture my thoughts during the day. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

technorati tags: handwriting, writing, analog

Language Skills

2006-02-22T17:15:00.000-05:00

The BBC has a posting on how Britian Lags Behind on Languages. I thought that was the USA's job!

technorati tags: bbc, language

Instructables

2006-02-22T17:04:00.000-05:00

Instructables is an interesting web site where you can show people things that you made and share how others can make them for themselves. Definately some creative and handy people posting on this site.

We like to think about the physical world as something that is programmable. We like to think of objects or stuff you make as 'code'. In other words, we are approaching the physical world as something that is describable and replicable.

technorati tags: ideas, creativity, instructables

Back From Paris

2006-02-20T17:57:00.000-05:00

Just got back from a long, rainy, cold weekend in Paris. Some pictures on Flickr.

technorati tags: paris, travel, photography, flickr

Trendy Web Design

2006-02-11T16:50:00.000-05:00

Current style in web design describes what is 'hot' in web page design. According to the post, great sites share a common set of attributes:

* Simple layout
* 3D effects, used sparingly
* Soft, neutral background colours
* Strong colour, used sparingly
* Cute icons, used sparingly
* Plenty of whitespace
* Nice big text

I tend to agree with most of these attributes, but find some of the sites that use somewhat jarring color combinations and not enough contrast between background and font color annoying. For me, simple and clean is always better -- which is a far cry from web design 10 years ago when it was all about 'spinning logo, flaming logo' eye candy.

technorati tags: webdesign, webdev

Anagram Version of London Tube Map

2006-02-11T16:36:00.000-05:00

A version of the famous London tube map where the station names have been turned into anagrams is online. I have always found the original to be quite a good guide at getting around London and navigating stations and line changes. Perhaps having an anagram version of it is the only confusing bit about it.

technorati tags: london, tube, tubemap, fun, humor

Word Of The Day from the OED

2006-02-11T16:31:00.000-05:00

I just discovered that you can get the 'word of the day' emailed to you by no less than the folks who bring the world the Oxford English Dictionary.

I find the OED a great resource to have around. We have the Compact OED version of it that has 9 pages reduced onto a single page (versus the pricy 20 volume edition). To read the entries you need to use this sort of half crystal ball magnifier that is provided along with the Compact OED. It's a little funky, but thats part of the fun.

If you are curious as to what went into producing the OED, I highly recommend The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester.

technorati tags: oed, wordoftheday, dictionary, vocabulary

Music From Failing Hard Drives

2006-02-11T16:01:00.000-05:00

What will those crazy kids come up with next? Have a listen, and check out the comments for the tracks as well.

technorati tags: fun, electronica, music, technology

Perth Australia Google Earth Fun

2006-02-04T10:18:00.000-05:00

Any theories on Perth's 'hovering car'? (More Google Earth fun).

technorati tags: google, googleearth, satelite, perth, fun

Self Serving Tech Journalism

2006-02-04T10:03:00.000-05:00

Here is an example of a blatantly self serving article on Publish. Running under the tabloid-ish title of 'AJAX Poses Security, Performance Risks' the author goes on to make some vague statements about security and AJAX then segue nicely into a company that has a product (gasp!) that addresses the froth stirred up in the previous paragraphs. Frankly, I would strongly recommend against considering a product that 'advertises' itself in such as disengenuous and sensational manner.

Perhaps it should be pointed out that the security statements made in the article are generally true of any web development technology (basically, if you are dumb about securing your app, someone will exploit it) and that other fact-based explorations of the topic have shown that AJAX can actually improve performance significantly (on the order of 61%).

technorati tags: ajax, webdev, security, performance, bsdetector

Most Expensive Cities

2006-02-04T09:47:00.000-05:00

I am not surprised that Oslo, Norway has taken over first place as the most expensive city in the world (knocking Tokyo out of first place). We vacationed in Norway a few summers ago. While Norway was quite beautiful, it was easily the most expensive place that we have traveled to. I remember sitting in a restaurant in Bergen after having just ordered a hamburger. I calculated in my head that the burger was going to cost me over $20USD (probably even more expensive now). Oh, well, it costs what is costs. All in all I enjoyed Norway much more than Alaska (Alaska being a very poor value for the money) and would return to Norway before Alaska any day.

Of the other cities on the list, I found Copenhagen to be the most 'affordable' of the Scandinavian cities I have visited, London is certainly expensive (an not a great value, either). I don't recall Geneva being overly expensive, just cold, rainy and desperately boring (it was December, granted). Commentary on Paris will be reserved until we return from a short trip there mid-February. Tokyo and Reykjavik both remain on our 'someday' travel list, expense aside.

Here is the list from the Guardian:

Most expensive cities
(Last year in brackets)

1 (3) Oslo
2 (1) Tokyo
3 (8) Reykjavik
4 (2) Osaka Kobe
4 (4) Paris
6 (5) Copenhagen
7 (7) London
8 (6) Zurich
9 (8) Geneva
10 (10) Helsinki

technorati tags: travel, expenses, world

Old School Terminal Emulator for Mac

2006-02-04T08:56:00.000-05:00

This Mac application really takes me back to when tubes were hot technology. Back in the day, when I was learning programming in college, I had the patience-building experience of programming on a hard copy terminal (the DecWriter) for the first year or so. Round about the beginning of my second year, they began to introduce VT-52 and VT-100 terminals with manual dialup acoustic couplers at a blazing 300 baud. There was one terminal that ran at 1200 baud that people would literally fight over (or come in when the lab opened and stay on it all day).

Anyway, back to the app: this is an emulation of an old tube terminal, including screen buldge/warp and variable brightness of pixels. Apparently, it even simulates cursor studder. Really makes one appreciate the state of computing these days!

technorati tags: mac, terminal, nostalgia, fun

What Time Is It?

2006-01-29T15:32:00.000-05:00

I think that using technology in humorous ways is a noble task, especially when it has the effect of humanizing things. At least thats the way that a posting over at BoingBoing struck me -- its about a "watch that displays cheeky 'approximate time' messages".

I was a teen back when LED-based digital watches first became affordable and thus, widely available. I always had to chuckle whenever anyone with one of these watches was asked the time; they would quite earnestly respond "10:42" or "3:28" not "quarter to eleven" or "three thirty" -- no siree, they knew exactly what time it was, because that's what their watch displayed.

Of course the matter of the exact time depended on what source they used to set their watch by and the not insignificant matter of how well the watch actually kept time. Of course you can now buy a watch that synchornizes itself with Naval Observatory time, but I still like to keep 'human' time -- "half past eight" instead of "8:29" for me.

And for what it's worth, my timepiece of choice is an analog watch with a manual movement (no batteries).

technorati tags: watch, time, analog

Apple Newton Nostalgia

2006-01-21T10:21:00.000-05:00

tuaw is reporting that there are several ports of the Newton OS to Linux based devices that support X Windows, including the too-hip Nokia 770. Very cool.

The Newton was way ahead of its time and for me, was the first and last truly usable PDA. I've still got mine knocking around here somewhere...

technorati tags: newton, linux, apple, nokia

The Value of JSF for Web Development

2006-01-21T10:11:00.000-05:00

TheServerSide has a long and heated discussion on the value of using JavaServer Faces for web application development. This was sparked by a blog post with the somewhat incendiary title of "JSF: The 7-Layer Burrito I Won't Eat Again".

My question is: why does every discussion about JSF usually end with someone bringing up Tapestry rather than dealing with the merits and liabilities of JSF?

technorati tags: jsf, webdev

Making Javascript More Like Ruby

2006-01-21T10:01:00.000-05:00

Over at Ajaxian, there is a discussion on Kavascript which is an attempt to make javascript a bit more like Ruby and Perl.

The general consensus seems to be that this is a very, very, bad idea (pre-compilation = debugging nightmare).

technorati tags: ajax, ruby, javascript

Star Wars Actors

2006-01-21T09:59:00.000-05:00

Someone actually when to the trouble of using the magic of IMDB to create a list of the non Star Wars movies that have the most Star Wars actors in them. Tied for the top? Flash Gordon and Labyrinth.

This makes me think about earlier in the week when my wife and I were watching a detective show on BBCAmerica called Touching Evil. One of the characters in that episode was the same actor that plays Chancellor Palpatine/Emperor in the Star Wars movies. This caused my wife to exclaim, 'of course he did it, he's the Emperor!' Turns out, he did.

uh, hope that didn't spoil it for anybody.

technorati tags: starwars, fun, imdb, trivia

Some Quick Links

2006-01-21T09:26:00.000-05:00

Edd Dumbill has some commentary on the apparently appalling state of the underlying code in the new apple offerings.

Like sushi and folding paper? Then download and fold some PDF sushi.

Interested in web API mashups and curious who has mashed up what, then have a look at the Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix.

Finally, some thoughts about ruby as a scripting language in the browser.

technorati tags: ruby, ajax, sushi, apple, mashups

Exploring the Flickr Tagspace

2006-01-15T10:50:00.000-05:00

information aesthetics has a pointer to two fun tools for exploring the growing Flickr tagspace: tagnautica and flickr tag browser.

Both use a similar visualization paradigm with the 'keyword' in the middle and related tags in a formation around the keyword. You can explore the related tags (and thus change it to the current keyword) by clicking on the bubble of your choice.

Shameless plug: I am an avid Flickr user; a random sample of some of my photos can be seen in the right gutter of this blog or directly at Flickr.

technorati tags: flickr, visualization, tags, tagging

Samsung Portable DirecTV Reciever

2006-01-15T10:32:00.000-05:00

Gizmodo has a brief piece on a new Portable DirecTV Receiver that has been introduced by Samsung. The unit appears to be about the size of a portable DVD player, but no word on whether it even has the capabilty to run on batteries (I would guess not). One thing that is really not clear from the writeup is how you actually get the satelite signal -- is there some external antenna? do you still need clear southern exposure? The answers to those last questions might make it a bit less 'portable'.

Just think, you could combine this with some built in Tivo-like PVR capability and you have a pretty powerful combination.

Arrives in March of 2006 with a $499 price tag.

technorati tags: directv, samsung, satelite, gadgets

Still Struggling to Define Web 2.0

2006-01-15T10:17:00.000-05:00

I really enjoy the World Wide Words web site. A recent entry is struggling with a familiar issue: how does one define 'web 2.0'. Unfortunately (and not surprisingly) they don't have much more success than others who have tried.

That aside, I find the site fascinating -- but, I have always been interested in linguistics and word origins. For example, you can find out why the abbreviation for pounds is lb, and whether the word shot (as in a shot of whiskey) has anything to do with cowboys buying liquor with bullets.

They have a site feed, so why not give it a try? It may be just the thing to get some beneficial stimulation for your brain.

technorati tags: web20, words, wordorigins

Effects of Learning and Lack of Sleep on the Brain

2006-01-15T10:07:00.000-05:00

New research confirms something that many probably already knew: Learning new things helps to 'rejuvenate' the brain while lack of sleep undoes that effect.

I can definitely attest to the sleep deprivation part. There have been a few really long plane flights (New Zealand, South Africa, Thailand) combined with time zone shifts and minimal sleep that have left me struggling to do simple things like calculating the gratuity to add to a bill or to maintain any sense of direction once we are on the ground. A good nights sleep does quite a bit toward addressing this.

technorati tags: cognition, learning, sleep, brain

Intel-based Mac Non-Starters

2006-01-15T10:00:00.000-05:00

Here is a link to an important issue that should not be overlooked in the cloud of hype around the new Intel-based Macs from Apple: there are somethings that you can't run any longer on the new hardware.

technorati tags: apple, mac, macbook, macintel

802.11a Now Supported by Apple

2006-01-15T09:54:00.000-05:00

Hidden in the announcements from Apple regarding new Intel-based Macs is the detail that they are now supporting the 802.11a wireless networking standard. Here are some of the details from TidBits:

802.11a was declared dead by Steve Jobs back in Jan. 2003 when he introduced AirPort Extreme, and it seemed rather dead at the time. The advantage of 802.11a is that it has no backwards compatible mode with the older, slower 802.11b standard.

802.11b and g work in the 2.4 GHz band, and 802.11b runs at a maximum of 11 Mbps of throughput, or a net of about 5 Mbps. 802.11g has a maximum 54 Mbps, or a net of about 20 to 30 Mbps depending on add-ons and other factors.

The reason that the lack of compatibility with 802.11b is an advantage is that a network that sports both b and g adapters has worse performance than a g-only or any 802.11a network. The older "b" devices bring down the whole network, reducing the amount of shared airtime available for faster transmission.

802.11a has emerged in corporations and universities as a preferred tool for deploying voice over IP (VoIP) whether for campus calling or Internet telephony (VoIP to a gateway out to the public switched telephone network).

technorati tags: wireless, apple, macbook, networking

Websites in a Blink

2006-01-15T09:44:00.000-05:00

I really enjoyed Malcom Gladwell's book Blink and noticed that a recent article in Nature provides further evidence that all it takes is a 'blink' to decide if a web site is worthy of attention or not.

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

technorati tags: blink, webdev, cognition

NPR Stations Google Maps Mashup

2006-01-12T17:50:00.000-05:00

NPR has a nifty little Google Maps Mashup that lets you locate the nearest NPR affiliate and find out the estimated signal strength at your location.

technorati tags: npr, googlemaps, google, mashups

SearchFox RSS Reader to Cease Operation

2006-01-12T17:20:00.000-05:00

I received an email from the creator of SearchFox a day or so ago stating that SearchFox would be ceasing operations as of January 25, 2006:

SearchFox Users,
Thanks for all your help in making SearchFox what it is. We have enjoyed providing this service, and hope that you have enjoyed using it. Please export all of your links and an OPML file with your RSS sources before the site shuts down. In accordance with our privacy policy, we will delete all personal information on January 25 after we shut down the services.

Esteban Kozak

I am very sorry to hear this as I had been using SearchFox as my sole newsreader for several months now. The user interface was clean and easy to use, but the feature that I liked the best was how it would notice what I read and prioritize subsequent feeds so that (more often than not) what I wanted to read was at the top of my river of news.

I guess now I need to find the second best online news reader available. Google's offering is just horrible, Bloglines (which I started with) is still pretty feature poor and Rojo really needs to do some work on usability. Interestingly, many of the features being requested by users of Rojo would, if implemented, make it on par with SearchFox. Any suggestions on online feedreaders that you are happy with?

technorati tags: searchfox, feedreader, rss

Google Maps Now Available for Mac OSX

2006-01-12T07:28:00.000-05:00

Get it here.

technorati tags: google, maps, mac, osx

Chuck Norris 'Facts'

2006-01-11T16:45:00.000-05:00

This site is absolutely hilarious (or so I thought): Chuck Norris Facts

technorati tags: fun, humor

Anti-Telemarketer Script

2006-01-11T16:28:00.000-05:00

If you are prone to getting annoying telemarketing calls, you might want to try the Counterscript.

The Direct Marketing sector regards the telephone as one of its most successful tools. Consumers experience telemarketing from a completely different point of view: more than 92% perceive commercial telephone calls as a violation of privacy.

Telemarketers make use of a telescript - a guideline for a telephone conversation. This script creates an imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and the consumer. It is this imbalance, most of all, that makes telemarketing successful. The EGBG Counterscript attempts to redress that balance.

If you are highly motivated, you can send in the results of your counterscript so that it can be tabulated.

technorati tags: humor, fun, telemarketing

New Yahoo Go = So What?

2006-01-06T15:44:00.000-05:00

I read several announcements today about the new Yahoo Go service. After searching endlessly for an actual URL that linked to the offering, I finally found one. I'm sure I won't be the first or last to say that the offering should have been called 'Yahoo No Go'. The computer portion of it is not currently available and will be PC only, the 'TV' portion of it is also a PC app (and also not available). Ah, the mobile portion is available for Nokia series 60 phones -- I'm in luck, I have a Nokia 6620 that fits the bill.

I download the ~1.7MB app and install in on my 6620 with great interest after having seen the screen shots and read the hyperbole from the CES announcement. The ygo.sis file expands to take nearly 4MB of phone and memory card space, then goes on to download another app for connections. After the initialization, I try out the apps. One by one, I grew less and less impressed. Yahoo Go, it turns out, is just 4MB of bloat that does nothing more than start the WAP browser on the phone (which wants you to login to Yahoo again!) to display the services that are already available to you through the Yahoo mobile site. Accessing the Yahoo mobile site directly using the Opera series 60 browser provides a much better user experience that this. What a total crock. Hell, Cingular's J2ME IM application kicks the crap out of this thing (even as a single tasker). Google's J2ME Maps implementation makes Yahoo's effort look like the brown stuff in the bottom of a college dorm fridge.

I then went about removing this craplet from my phone, but, guess, what? As part of the removal process, it wants to 'phone home' to Yahoo and waste more bandwidth before it will remove itself (shades of Microsoft). It's no wonder that Yahoo recommends that you allow the app to connect whenever it wants to (versus letting you know that it want to make a connection). I finally had to go into the Nokia AppManager and delete the various pieces of it manually.

Based on this experience, Yawnhoo needs to try harder and put out something useful (other than hype).

technorati tags: yahoo, yahoogo, suckage

High Tech Road Reflectors

2006-01-03T16:59:00.000-05:00

Mavromatic has an article about a company that has created road reflectors that are capable of measuring a vehicles speed and using a built in camera, capture the license plate number (and presumably issue you a ticket).

I just wonder how well these things would do in a climate that regularly requires snow removal (and potentially inadvertent camera/detector removal).

technorati tags: speeding, traffic, hightech

Guy Kawasaki Blog

2006-01-02T09:09:00.000-05:00

Guy Kawasaki has a blog now. 'What's a Guy Kawasaki?' you ask -- well, just read the blog to find out.

I have enjoyed Guy's books in the past with Rules for Revolutionaries, Selling the Dream and The Macintosh Way being three of my favorites. The blog promises to be just as rewarding -- I found the Mantras versus Missions post to be spot on.

technorati tags: apple, blogs, strategy

Macworld Expo Speculation

2006-01-02T08:49:00.000-05:00

Not surprisingly, ThinkSecret has some interesting speculation regarding what Apple might announce at Macworld Expo next week. Seems that they believe that there will be a 'media-savvy' Mac mini and a content distribution system.

In an effort to appease media companies wary of the security of digital rights management technology, Apple's new technology will deliver content such that it never actually resides on the user's hard drive. Content purchased will be automatically made available on a user's iDisk, which Front Row 2.0 will tap into. When the user wishes to play the content, robust caching technology -- for which Apple previously received a patent -- will serve it to the user's computer as fast as their Internet connection can handle. The system will also likely support downloading the video content to supported iPods but at no time will it ever actually be stored on a computer's hard drive.

Some of this squares with Apple bumping up the .Mac iDisk bandwidth cap to 1 terabyte per month (then removing that notation from the .Mac status screen). There was also the recent announcement of a podcasting server being made available in the Education market.

One thing is certain, the hype, rumor and speculation will only continue to heat up regarding the Macworld Expo announcements.

technorati tags: apple, mac, macworld, dotmac, podcasting

ReminderFeed

2005-12-31T11:39:00.000-05:00

If you spend entirely too much time (how could that be?) keeping up with things in your feedreader of choice, you might find the services of reminderfeed to be valuable. Basically, you set a date, time and description, then use the subscribe buttons to have your feed-based reminder delivered to you.

You could always use this in conjunction with alerts function at Yahoo to have this reminder delivered via SMS to you mobile phone. Perhaps that will be a option directly from reminderfeed in the future.

technorati tags: reminders, feeds, calendar, webtools

Evil Lottery Practical Joke

2005-12-31T11:24:00.000-05:00

Some 'friends' of this guy thought it would be fun to record on Tivo the previous days winning lottery draw, then buy a ticket with the winning numbers and show him the recorded draw as the current winning one. Needless to say he gets more than a little excited (quite a bit of profanity used).

technorati tags: lottery, tivo, fun, humor

How To Tell The Difference...

2005-12-30T06:20:00.000-05:00

...between 'Web 1.0' and 'Web 2.0' .

Too funny (and sadly true).

technorati tags: web20, humor

Adding The New Feed Icons

2005-12-28T15:46:00.000-05:00

Microsoft has agreed to use the feed icon found in Mozilla (aka more MS Innovation). Here are the 'new' feed icons. This post really doesn't serve any other purpose that to allow me to upload the icons so that now I can link to them in blogger.

If you prefer your feed icons all pixel twiddled in a thousand different ways (and available in EPS, SVG, PSD, PDF, PNG, JPG, and GIF formats), then FeedIcons is the place for you.

technorati tags: rss, atom, feeds, icons, buttons

Running In the Rain

2005-12-28T15:02:00.000-05:00

The BBC have an interesting article titled "Do you get less wet if you run in the rain?". The article delves into the 'serious' mathematics and physics to consider in answering the question. I won't spoil the conclusion -- read the article.

However, I did appreciate one of the post comments which reminded me of my Intelligence and Effectiveness rant from the other day:

Alternatively, ignore the maths and get an umbrella.

technorati tags: science, physics

Science and Religion

2005-12-25T14:01:00.000-05:00

I recently finished reading a book that got me thinking about the relationship between science and religion. The book in question is The Universe In A Single Atom. A reading of this book, coupled with current events should give anyone pause for thought.

First, it was refreshing to read that in Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama encourages all monks (and lay people) to have a knowledge of science. It is in no way perceived as a threat to religion. In fact, both are seen as a way of understanding the nature of reality by means of critical investigation. This is not surprising, as one of the fundamental tenants of Buddhism is to 'believe only what you have found to be true yourself' -- religious dogma is not forced on the follower. Throughout the book, the position held is that the benefit of science is that it can work to ease suffering at a physical level. Religion can strive to do the same for mental suffering. Contrast this with the veritable war on science that is coming from the right in this country and you have to wonder about the nominal aims of such a course of action. For religious fundamentalist, there is no place for science (or any opposing view point for that matter), only blind faith.

One longish quote from the book expands on a more enlightened view of the interplay of science and religion (in this case Buddhism):

In one sense the methods of science and Buddhism are different: scientific investigation proceeds by experiment, using instruments that analyze external phenomena, whereas contemplative investigation proceeds by development of refined attention, which is then used in the introspective examination of inner experience. But both share a strong empirical basis: if science shows something to exist or to be non-existent (which is not the same as not finding it), then we must acknowledge that as a fact. If a hypothesis is tested and found to be true, we must accept it. Likewise, Buddhism must accept the facts -- whether found by science or found by contemplative insights. If, when we investigate something, we find that there is reason and proof for it, we must acknowledge that as reality -- even if it is in contradiction with a literal scriptural explanation that has held sway for many centuries or with deeply held opinion or view. So one fundamental attitude shared by Buddhism and science is the commitment to keep searching for reality by empirical means and to be willing to discard accepted or long-held positions if our search finds that the truth is different." (emphasis mine)

The book develops with the Dalai Lama exploring various scientific topics such as quantum physics and neuroscience and how they compare and contrast with Buddhist scripture and cosmology. He even states openly, where, in light of current science, some of the cosmological explanations for the origin of life seem quaint at best and in many cases are regarded as a point in time view of the world rather than an enduring truth. Other areas examined at the intersection of religion and science are human values and ethics.

Overall, a very thought provoking read.

technorati tags: science, religion, buddhism

Intelligence and Effectiveness

2005-12-25T13:58:00.000-05:00

Seeing this article about Google and their recruiting and hiring practices reminds me of an observation that has been backed up by experience over the years. That observation is that intelligence does not lead to effectiveness. In fact, it can lead to some of the more misguided actions and conclusions that I have ever seen.

The seed of this observation came when I was working at a small consulting firm that had an external consultant as it's chief technology person. This guy was incredibly bright, but had created a system for merging and reporting on data using flat files that was very nearly unmaintainable. Since the task of maintaining this train wreck was passed onto me when I was hired, I immediately started looking at ways to make the process more automated. It seemed a natural fit for importing the data into a database and driving the transformations and reporting from there. Here is where the fun started, I mentioned my plan to bright-guy and he launches into this red faced tirade about how it will never scale and database b-tree algorithms were too inefficient, he knew because he had written his own b-tree algorithms, etc. This rant went on for at least ten minutes. While he was ranting away (and in between mildly disagreeing with him) I was typing away in r:base (of all things) and knocked together a prototype that basically proved, well, he was demonstrably, dead wrong. He poked and prodded on the prototype for about a half hour, then finally conceded that 'things had changed with data algorithms in the last few years'. Indeed.

Intelligence is great, but it needs to be pragmatic and relevant. When I discuss this with others, I usually take it to a non-technical domain, just to remove any of the techno-zealotry that surrounds most of software and technology. For the pragmatic developer, if you ask them to make mashed potatoes, they will either know how to do it or consult a cookbook for some reasonable guidance on how to achieve the desired outcome. The bright-guy, will likely produce some studies around the required crushing force of a potato, white papers on starch combinations, argue that beans are more appropriate for mashing and possibly even conclude that mashing potatoes is not possible. I'll take the pragmatic guy and his results any day. He will achieve a quality result in the amount time the bright guy spends on arrogant tirades and irrelevant research whose aim is to refute your request rather than respond to it.

Another great example, is then I was hired into a financial services company that up until my arrival were utilizing high priced consultants from Microsoft. Nine months before, there were given a somewhat simple task -- to take a set of financial formulas and create a DLL that would allow a suite of financial planning tools to use a common implementation of these formulas. Three guys (1 PhD and 2 MS degreed bright guys) worked on this for nine months. Nine months. What they came back with was the proclamation that it was impossible to implement all of the calculations in a single function call. Not only was this not what they were asked to do, how they could have ever reasonably conceived that implementing calculations in that manner was a good idea was beyond me. When I gently pointed out the problem with their approach, the response was an unapologetic 'you think you can do a better job, fine...but just look at our stock price!' No mashed potatoes for that company. The good news was that after a few more months of my mopping up their crap and making much more progress than they had in nearly a year, they were (finally) shown the door. They were even ethically challenged enough to try to recruit me before they left. No thanks.

On another occasion, I was the tech lead at a consumer electronics manufacturer. I successfully migrated them from a load of mini computers to a client server based environment, got them connected to the Internet and built a web site for them back in the days when Mosaic was THE browser and Mozilla (soon to be the Netscape browser) was a rumor being discussed on Usenet. I digress. When I left, the CEO of the company proclaimed that he was going to get a real bright guy 'to take them to the next level'. So he went to Carnegie-Mellon and hired a MSc grad. What an unmitigated disaster. I kept hearing from people who where still there that this guy would do things like reboot production servers, power off network hubs and other clueless activity. After less than six months, they let this bright guy go (apparently with a lavish severance package to keep him quiet and avoid embarrassing the company and the CEO any further).

I have also had occasion over the years to interview Computer Science PhD grads for various tech positions in business. Inevitably, I'll ask what their thesis topic was and then ask how that it could be applied in business or industry. It is frightening the number of blank stares that simple question receives. It is always a bit telling when the answer is that it has no application in business. It is even more telling when I suggest a few applications that make them sit up in their chair and an sheepishly admit that they never thought of applying their work in that manner.

Lack of relevance is also the problem with asking cute little problem solving questions in what are supposed to be technical interviews. This seems to be a cliquish thing that really has no bearing on software engineering-type problem solving. I don't solve word puzzles for fun, because frankly, at the end there is no result (the term 'mental masturbation' comes to mind here). However, solving a technical or business problem is enormously satisfying because in the end there is a tangible, relevant achievement.

technorati tags: intelligence, hiring, jobs, problemsolving

Old School Tech Skills

2005-12-25T13:39:00.000-05:00

Something that I have noticed working in IT for the last 20 or so years is that the critical thinking and problem solving skills appear to have diminished with the most recent crop of CS grads. Perhaps this is an unfair characterization, maybe there is less emphasis on 'the fundamentals' in the current CS curriculum. As an example, if you give a set of requirements to a recent grad, their first instinct is to go try to download something from the Internet and start customizing it. While I applaud the apparent desire to re-use existing code bases, Im not sure that this practice makes them prudent or dependent on the work of others for productivity. A similar issue exists when a problem or issue comes up -- zoom, straight to Google. If someone else hasn't solved the problem, well, then it must not be workable -- better download someone elses work and 'fix' the problem that way. The other symptom is that inevitably, when asked to do something new, the newbies will insist on having a training class on it. Suggest picking up a book and building a prototype to learn and you will be rewarded with a grimace as if you had asked them to drink their own vomit.

I contrast this with my education and career where I felt that I had a good grounding in fundamentals (how operating systems, programming languages, databases, networks and other building blocks work). Having these in place, I have successfully been able to apply and extend by knowledge base without being dependent on someone else providing me with an answer. I remember one of my first jobs, I showed up and was told, 'we just bought this minicomputer and we need you to set it up'. Ok, hadn't done that before, but love a good challenge. I took the manuals home, came in the next day, setup the mini, did development on it and it was solid for years. This has been repeated over the years as, at various times, I was a database administrator, network engineer, computer operations manager, software developer, development manager and so on. In each of these roles, building on the fundamentals and previous experience seemed natural to me -- I wasn't dependent on someone else solving the problem for me.

There also seems to be the glamor effect at play here as well. Because there is so much access to so much 'stuff' via the Internet, new developers feel the need (if not the RIGHT) to only use the tools and practices that are cool at the moment. The whinging that accompanies constraining the technology set can be deafening. In retrospect, somehow I have managed to use the tools at hand to solve the problem at hand without needing to do it with the 'tool of the moment' or wasting time on 'if only...' . Oh well, this presents the opportunity to mentor and lead by example. Maybe an old dog can teach some (not so) new tricks.

technorati tags: problemsolving, education

RSS based Package Tracking

2005-12-23T16:00:00.000-05:00

This holiday season, I created my own little mashup by combining this web service (created by Ben Hammersley) to track a FedEx package via RSS and the Yahoo Alerts service to notify my mobile phone when the FedEx status was updated.

The combination worked pretty well (Yahoo Alerts sent several false/duplicate updates). It would be nice if all of the major shipping carriers provided this as a service. Tracking multiple packages via RSS is much simpler via RSS than having to go ping individual websites. The option to couple this with SMS notification is a big plus for critical, can't miss shipments.

technorati tags: yahoo, rss, tracking, sms, fedex

Free Videos From iTunes Store

2005-12-23T15:35:00.000-05:00

Apple is making two videos available free via the iTunes Store. One is a Saturday Night Live skit and the other is special on the new Battlestar Galactica series to start in January 2006. These are the first free video offerings from Apple.

technorati tags: apple, itunes, video, ipodvideo

Innovation Happens Elsewhere

2005-12-23T15:16:00.000-05:00

There is now an online version of the book Innovation Happens Elsewhere, which discusses using open source software as a business strategy. Even if you are developing your own 'proprietary' software, leveraging the sheer amount (and in most cases, quality) of open source software can provide for speedier startup and time to market.

If you are interested, the dead tree version was published in April 2005 and is available from amazon.

technorati tags: opensource, oss, books, business

AJAX Powered Language Translation

2005-12-23T15:11:00.000-05:00

AjaxTrans is a very nifty utility that provides a similar service to BabelFish and Google Language Tools. Namely it translates text from one language to another. The twist is that it performs that translation as each word is typed (avoiding the page refresh).

English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are supported.

technorati tags: translation, ajax, language

Yahoo Javascript Developer Center

2005-12-19T17:22:00.000-05:00

Yahoo has made available a clearinghouse for programatic services on Yahoo for Javascript developers. Highlighted are interactions with Yahoo Maps, Music Engine, Widgets and Search including AJAX and JSON options and examples.

How get crackin' on those mashups.

technorati tags: yahoo, ajax, javascript, json, webdev

Safarilicious

2005-12-18T15:18:00.000-05:00

Safarilicious is a nifty little utility that allows you to export your Safari bookmarks to del.icio.us. It also allows you to only upload bookmarks that do not already exist on del.icio.us after your initial push takes place. Initial tagging of the uploaded bookmarks is driven from the folder structure of your Safari bookmarks.

technorati tags: safari, mac, delicious, bookmarks

Google Firefox Extension and Music Search

2005-12-15T11:11:00.000-05:00

Google has introduced a new Firefox extension that displays Blogger Web Comments for the site that you are currently viewing. This reminds me of an IE plugin from around 1996 that allowed you to view post-it note type annotations that were placed on websites and viewable through the plugin. It wasn't long before this became abused and if I recall correctly, the company went out of business. This approach seems to have only slightly more accountability in that it ties back to a blog. Then again, Blogger blogs have been notorious of late for their splog activity.

Google has also recently introduced some functionality to make it a bit easier to search for music on the Internet. According to the Google Blog, the search works only for well know artists by name and primarily for US based artists (though I did get results for David Sylvian, oddly enough). The results include links to reviews, lyrics and online stores to purchase some releases. Not surprisingly, I didn't see any purchase links to Amazon (though there were links to the iTunes store). It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

technorati tags: google, firefox, musicsearch, blogger

Google Homepage And The March of Widgets

2005-12-14T15:31:00.000-05:00

Google has added some new content and options to their personalized home page. In addition to drag and drop screen layout, probably the biggest news is the creation of an API to allow for developers to create their own widgets and content. It's no netvibes, but it is getting better.

First Apple introduces widgets behind the desktop with Dashboard, Yahoo recently provided widgets on the desktop (as well as on newer Tivo DVRs), Opera is pushing widgets on mobile devices and now Google (not surprisingly) is pushing widgets in the browser (or on the web, if you will).

I believe that there is room for all of them; consumers will decide where and how they want their functionality and information delivered to them.

technorati tags: google, widgets, webdev

Video Killed The Photojournalist ?

2005-12-14T10:47:00.000-05:00

A very insightful post from David Leeson on how the emergence of High Definition Video (HDV)cameras may become a 'threat' to some photojournalist. David's stance is that frame grabs from HDV are of a quality that is perfectly acceptable for print use. An obvious advantage that video has is that you have a frame rate approaching 30 frames per minute, so if you are shooting action you stand a better chance of getting just the right moment.

He also delves into the attitude of some fellow photojournalists, that using frame grabs is 'cheating'. These sorts of comments can be traced back to any sea change in photography and concludes that HDV frame grabs are probably just the next step in the evolution of how images are captured and communicated.

Hat tip to Doug Alcorn for the link.

technorati tags: photography, hdv, journalism

OpinMind

2005-12-13T16:59:00.000-05:00

OpinMind is an interesting take on blog search engines in that it attempts to categorize the blog content as either positive or negative. I would guess that it somehow uses the surrounding text to make the determination.

You can also do comparison searches by putting a 'vs' between two terms. Just for fun, I tried a few, with mixed results: Peace (91%) beat out War (42%), but then again Life (50%) lost out to Death (65%). It probably has all the statistical relevance of Magic Eight Ball, but can be kind of fun to see the results (like the perennial favorite 'Ginger vs MaryAnn').

technorati tags: blogsearch, search, opinmind

Tips for Del.icio.us Users

2005-12-13T16:45:00.000-05:00

I found this piece on The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users to be a handy reference to some features that I have yet to discover/explore on del.icio.us. I just recently starting using the for: tag to push bookmarks that would be of interest out to other del.icio.us users that I know.

The inbox functionality sounds interesting:

The inbox is a mystery for many folks, but it's a powerful tool. Your del.icio.us inbox allows you to track what's been added to particular tags and to track what particular users have bookmarked. There are a couple of ways to begin using your inbox. You can click the 'inbox' link at the top of any page when you're logged in and then click the 'edit inbox' link on the right side. Or you can just click the 'settings' link (top right corner) and then click the 'inbox labels' link under the 'experimental' section. Either way will get you to the same page where you'll see a couple of text entry boxes. One is for adding USERNAMES and the other is for adding tags. If you know the del.icio.us USERNAME of someone you want to track, enter it in the 'user' field and hit the subscribe button. If you have a particular tag you want to keep tabs on, enter it in the 'tag' field and hit subscribe. Once you get the hang of this, you'll fill up your inbox in no time.

technorati tags: delicious, tags, bookmarks

Share iPod Music On Network

2005-12-08T15:20:00.000-05:00

The ShareiPod application will allow you to share the music on your iPod with having to upload your music to a computer. Remember to place this app in your startup items so you can share your tunes whenever you connect your iPod.

technorati tags: ipod, apple, musicsharing

iPod Dangerous To Your Health

2005-12-06T12:57:00.000-05:00

The Guardian note that Doctors issue warning on iPod finger, the latest hi-tech ailment. Not surprisingly, you can develop a repetative stress injury from most anything, including your favorite MP3 player, the Apple iPod.

"Handheld music machines are extremely popular and users are constantly using small, difficult buttons with the same finger in a repetitive motion," said Carl Irwin from the British Chiropractic Association. "The nature of modern technology means that these devices are only going to be getting smaller, and I would not be surprised if hand and finger related injuries become one of the most common repetitive strain injuries that chiropractors treat."

technorati tags: ipod, apple, ipodfinger

Badgers and Web 2.0

2005-12-03T12:02:00.000-05:00

The Register have an amusing commentary on Johnathan Schwartz of Sun making the somewhat questionable statement in his blog that Sun is going to become the dot in Web 2.0 .

As for the badgers, well, you just have to read the Register's writeup.

technorati tags: sun, web2.0, humor

Warning Labels

2005-12-03T11:58:00.000-05:00

Now there is an easy way to make your own warning labels. How? you ask. Cruise on over to warning label generator and warn away.

Just don't stick one on this site :)

Free Hostname For Your Mac

2005-12-03T11:38:00.000-05:00

nonstopmac has a detailed description of how you can use DynDNS to obtain a free hostname for your Mac.

Why would you ever want to do this? Well, its one way to make it easier to connect to your home computer when you are away from home. As the Internet is a wild place, you also need to take adequate precautions regarding what you expose and how. From the nonstopmac writeup:

For those who are still wondering what am I talking about, DynDNS can be used for giving your IP address a good-looking hostname. This is especially useful in situations where you are using dial-up access or ADSL connections with dynamic IP addresses. By using the DynDNS service with a combination of their software installed on your computer, you can be always available through the same host name. You can use this setup when you are hosting a web server on your local computer or when you want to use service like Virtual Network Computer (VNC) to access your desktop from a far away location. In both of these scenarios, you will need a static address, so the DynDNS service comes quite handy.

technorati tags: dns, mac, remoteaccess

Sun Microsystems Giving Away Software

2005-12-01T18:44:00.000-05:00

Sun has announced that they are giving away (providing for free download and use) of all of their server side software and developer tools. I assume that they hope to make money off of services and support (like Red Hat). This also allows them to claim some karma by now having 'free and open source software' while making a last ditch effort to compete with Windows.

Frankly, it feels like an act of desperation, as they have seen the open source community eating their lunch in the software arena and Intel in the hardware arena. It also feels like a real opportunity for anyone with an interest in Sun software to download and have a look.

technorati tags: sun, opensource, freesoftware

Free Games for the Mac

2005-12-01T18:31:00.000-05:00

If you are a Mac owner looking for a little pleasant distraction, cruise on over to iDevGames and check out their selection of over 30 free games for the Mac.

technorati tags: mac, macintosh, games

New Tivo Applications

2005-12-01T18:21:00.000-05:00

Tivo have announced new Online Services for Tivo series 2 owners who have broadband capability (like me!). Several of the services are tied to Yahoo! (Photos, Weather and Traffic). Others include the Live364 Radio Network, movie information and ticketing via Fandango and the ability to listen to Podcasts.

Apparently, some screenshots of these functions were leaked last week by a beta tester who claimed that they would not be available until some time next year. Tivo was a little more prepared and announced them today. I priority registered both of my units and the confirmation screen said it would take 'a few days' to push out the update. Very nice.

Hopefully, this is the just the beginning for Tivo services and the catalyst for more services being re-purposed from the web onto consumer electronic devices.

technorati tags: tivo, pvr, yahoo,

New Mac Mini Rumors

2005-11-29T16:36:00.000-05:00

Think Secret is reporting on rumored new features of the next iMac Mini. It will be Intel-based, include Front Row 2.0 and some Tivo-like functionality.

While the specific model and speed of the Intelprocessor in the new Mac mini is unknown, sources are confident thesystem will be ready for roll-out at Macworld Expo San Francisco, inline with other reports Think Secret has received that Intel-based Macs will be ready some six months sooner than originally expected.

Thenew Mac mini is also said to sport a built-in iPod dock, a feature thatwas scrapped from the Mac mini Apple first introduced one year ago.Other hardware specifics are unknown, such as whether the Mac mini willfeature video recording out of the box or whether an add-on will beoffered for those looking to employ the Mac mini not as a secondcomputer but as their living room command center.

technorati tags: apple, mac, macmini, pvr

Amazon mturk Still Broken

2005-11-27T18:02:00.000-05:00

I thought that I should follow up and have another look at mturk to see if Amazon has addressed the performance and functionality quirks and issues. Nope.

Granted, the home page loads quickly, but when you actually get into the meat of the app and try to do something with it, it is still crap. For example, viewing the list of 'HITs' available shows one with 350 available. Ok, request a HIT for that one. Buzz. Returns a screen that states:

There are no more available HITs in this group.

Great. Honest mistake. Wrong again. The same HIT group shows up on the screen again, stating that it has 350 HITs available. In fact, clicking on any HIT group other than the one that lists 30000+ HITS available (and also has the lowest per HIT payoff) gets you the same message.

It's amazing to me that this thing has been around for weeks now and still operates like some CS101 I-just-learned-how-to-code-sort-of web app; especially with all of the resources of Amazon behind it.

technorati tags: amazon, mturk, suckage, webdev

Mobile Ajax with Opera

2005-11-20T17:28:00.000-05:00

Opera has released a beta of their Opera Platform SDK that allows developers to more easily create web applications for mobile phones. The big news here is the ability to create AJAX-style applications where the meat of the application can reside on a server rather than on the phone. I foresee this being a huge benefit as it will allow for the repurposing of existing web services for providing mobile services. Hopefully, this will translate into a flourishing of mobile apps for smartphones.

Along with this announcement, Opera has apparently synched all of the versions of its browser to make it easier to do cross application development. I updated the Opera Mobile browser on my Nokia 6620 to version 8.5 and noticed a bit of a performance increase, the welcome addition of a password manager and the ability to zoom web pages. It should be noted that the 8.5 browser release is different that the Platform described above.

I also have to wonder what Nokia's reaction to this will be. They recently previewed some screen shots from their Apple webkit-based browser, but there was no mention of an SDK or framework to leverage AJAX-like development. Nokia's new browser is also only compatible with their newest phones (many of which probably won't see the light of day in the US market for upwards of a year). Perhaps this will serve as a wake up call to the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world to help developers more easily create mobile apps (and leverage existing resources in the process).

technorati tags: opera, mobile, webservices, webdev

What Time Is It There?

2005-11-20T16:43:00.000-05:00

Gchart is a nice little Google Maps mashup that allows you to input the names of countries or major cities and find out what the local time is as well as international calling codes. Right now it's 10h45 AM (tomorrow morning!) in Wellington, New Zealand -- I'd love to be there.

And Now For Something Completely Different

2005-11-17T12:27:00.000-05:00

A new species of lemur has been named for former Monty Python member John Clesse. It is named "avahi cleesei" and as the anthropologist points out, lemurs don't do silly walks, but they do do silly jumps.

Riya Gobbled by Google?

2005-11-17T12:17:00.000-05:00

Rummors are flying today that yet-to-be-launched photo recognition site Riya is to be acquired by Google. It would certainly make another fine addition to the Google arsenal.

More as things develop (or don't).

Sherlock Holmes Reloaded

2005-11-17T12:09:00.000-05:00

The Standford University is making available the Sherlock Holmes stories as they originally appeared in Strand magazine. You can subscribe to them via print or receive a notification to download the PDF when it becomes available.

Distribution will start in January of 2006.

Adding to Information Overload

2005-11-17T12:02:00.000-05:00

If you are a total newsfeed and IM junkie, you can combine these to add to your own personal information overload by using immedi.at Using this site, you can be notified via MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, and AIM/ICQ of things of interest in your news feeds. From their site:

Use immedi.at to be notified instantly when:

* news on a certain topic is posted
* your competitor does something of interest
* something interesting happens with a favorite sports team
* your name or company is written about
* you receive new email

The second to last bullet seems a tad on the Narcissistic side, but, hey, every one has different needs.

Sun Java Studio Creator Now Free

2005-11-07T17:59:00.000-05:00

If you have been even remotely interested in trying out JavaServer Faces, you might want to pick up a (now) free copy of Sun's Java Creator IDE (was $99USD). Versions available for Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and Windows.

If that version of Creator floats your boat, you may want to sign up for the Early Access program for the Creator 2 over at java.sun.com to see what the next generation of tool might be able to do for you.

Yahoo and TiVo

2005-11-07T17:35:00.000-05:00

Not sure what the big hubbub is over the the Tivo/Yahoo announcement. Apparently, you can now schedule TiVo recording from the tv.yahoo.com site. When TiVo introduced the Home Media Option a few years back, online scheduling was always something you could do directly from the tivo.com web site. Having to traverse the flash advert laden Yahoo gauntlet for anything is torturous at best (and for me, simply to be avoided).

I was curious to see if there was more to this, so I followed the registration link. I stopped cold at the prompt that wanted me to enter my TiVo credentials into a field that read:

This one-time step links your TiVo® box(es) to your Yahoo! ID, so you can schedule recordings from Yahoo! TV any time.

So, if I proceed, then it would appear that Yahoo would now have access to my Tivo viewing habits (and giving nothing of value in return). Of course, I am making an assumption here about what the nature of this 'linking' is.

Additionally, Yahoo continues to show it's disdain for Mac users by creating a registration page that causes Safari to crash unnecessarily.

No thanks, Yahoo.

Tim Bray Goes Off on WS-Interop

2005-11-07T16:56:00.000-05:00

I tend to agree with Mr Bray's WS-Interop posting. Much of what is being created under the guise of standards feels like it is just making real interoperability more and more elusive. From a pure interoperability standpoint, introducing SOAP into an interaction just tags on non-value-added bloat with the 'benefit' of having the interaction be more toolable (and you more dependent on the tools).

WS-* isnÂt about standards. ItÂs about what Microsoft (there are partners, but itÂs mostly Microsoft) chooses to implement while waving the WS-banner and retroactively shaking Standards Fairy Dust over the process. Which is OK, as far as it goes; I get the impression that ~~Indigo~~ WCF is actually some pretty neat software that will be useful to a lot of Microsoft customers, and Sun has a stake in the ground saying weÂre going to interoperate with the Microsoft WS-stack. Do I think this stuff is going to Change The World? No. Do I think that this is the real future of Web Services? No.

Standards have their place and certainly serve large corporations to help cut through the sometimes dense forests of (ad hoc) internally adopted technologies. However, on the wild, wild Internet, simple is better. This is not to say that standards have no place; afterall, there wouldn't be a Internet without TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, HTML, etc. In the end, the simplest, most open solution tends to win.