Friday, March 8, 2002

CNet: Cracks in Cisco's empire. "The Byzantine state of Cisco's technologies has even led to problems in the company's internal organization. Sources say former Chief Technology Officer Judy Estrin grew frustrated by the various technology fiefdoms at the height of the Internet boom in the late 1990s. At the time, Cisco was known as a sales-driven machine that reaped huge windfalls, often at the expense of long-term equipment strategies. Estrin initiated a major effort to update and streamline the company's code, but sources say delays in software improvements and new features stretched into years." SkyPilot Network, Inc. Wireless LAN Broadband. "At the heart of our technology is a simple, yet very powerful approach to communications: an organic, mesh network that we call SkyPilot NeighborNet." [Hmmm.] Forcing Upstreaming Of All Website Elements. [The prolific Russ Lipton continues...] PocketMail USA. "Just compose a message on your PocketMail device, dial into the PocketMail service, and when you hear the PocketMail service answer "Welcome to PocketMail", simply hold your PocketMail device against your telephone reciever and press the PocketMail button. Only moments later, you'll have sent and recieved all your e-mail!" [To the point eh?] Macrobyte: AttSearchEngine. "It's a tool for indexing the attributes, or properties, of objects in a database, and for searching the indices that it creates. Use it as the engine behind a Frontiertm- or Radiotm-based web search engine, or for performing queries on databases which are completely unrelated to the web. It indexes more than just text. A lot more." [Go Seth!] [Yesterday I installed Ranchero's Contextual Menu Plugin. Today, I wrote a quick script to take advantage of something in Internet Explorer's Contextual Menu. If you click on a link, rather than say just the page, the contextual menu will contain the "Frontier scripts" contextual menu. That means I can call Frontier. All I really need to do is kick off a script. After that, anything that Frontier can talk to is fair game... which is practically everything. It's the closest I've come to having some of the glorious Menu Sharing functionality back. Yes!] * 11:31:12 AM    comment

Sputnik, Inc.. Glenn: "I haven't had time to absorb the shock of their tiny beep orbiting our known Wi-Fi world." [Awesome!] Sheila: "Mysterious snowy night pictures...with bonus mystery kitten.") Late Night with Daniel * [I know that folks love to hate Microsoft, but Excel on OS X is incredible. I had one of those lurching moments that occur when you cut yourself off from things that you haven't thought about for years... like a native copy of Excel at the ready. When I went to update my development schedule I face planted into the realization that I haven't bought Office:mac v.X. (It's expensive, and I'm not working.) Fortunately, I had grabbed a copy of the "test drive" when I went to the Apple store to see Jobs' keynote. Cool. The install is no harder than dragging a folder onto my drive. Double click my file, Excel launches. I love it when things work! Excel is paying attention to what you do and attempting to help. This might drive an Excel expert crazy, but I don't mind. Nice list functionality, with sorting. Defnitely easier than what was going on before. Some key commands are gone (at least as a default). A few burnt brain cells... but overall, they've done a great job. Kudos to all involved. Now I have to find a way to earn enough money to buy the product... twenty-nine days from now.] [I installed a frsh copy of Frontier on my laptop when I switched over to OS X. This reset the WormHits counter. This machine doesn't really act as a server except in a test sense. It has already collected 16 WormHits. People who write worms like this really suck.] 9:08:22 AM    comment