Updated: 3/27/08; 6:20:11 PM.
A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Blog
Thoughts on biotech, knowledge creation and Web 2.0
        

Thursday, April 24, 2003


Hydra chaos: When people type too close together, things get hopelessly mixed-up. [Hack the Planet]

This sort of thing happened less and less as the group figured out some norms to deal with the collaborative environment. What Wes has here is part of what I would like to see. It should just take a click of a button to convert the Hydra text to html and publish it to a blog or wiki. If the annotators could also be included, that would be fine. this way others running a different operating system could benefit from the program's power.  11:10:52 PM    



NetNewsWire and Spring Earn Top Awards in Inaugural Mac OS X Innovators Contest. NetNewsWire and Spring earn top two awards in the inaugural Mac OS X Innovators contest. Here's the official announcement. [O'Reilly Network Articles]

Two great pieces of software and the envy of most other OSes.  10:20:18 PM    



Well, you saw no more notes from me about the meeting because I spent all the time using hydra. Someone would create the notes, we would all help write it (I especially loved adding links), we'd add our email addresses to the bottom and the creator would email us a finished copy. Very sweet and also very fun to watch. Others kept asking what I was running and spent some time downloading their own copies in order to participate. The coolest thing was being able to join a collaborative note being created in the room next door, at a meeting I could not be at simultaneously with the one I was in. It was like reading the closed-captioning of a TV show. Not as good as being there but almost as useful.  9:39:47 PM    


Hydra as A Collaboration Tool

I've started using Hydra in order to get notes for the meetings. This software is a great tool for having many people all collaborate inreal time for taking notes about the meeting. People can correct what others say, add links to external sites, etc. It is almost more fun than actually listening.  11:36:44 AM    


SARS Watch

SARS is becoming more and more worrisome. A good place to get some updates about SARS is SARS Watch. Written by a non-doctor but good blogger. In particular some of the disturbing work suggesting that the coronavirus may not be the whole story. There is still some epidemiology to be done.  10:21:43 AM    


"Daddy, Are We There Yet?" The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet

Alan started off with a nice set of examples of where computing was 40 years ago.[Using an iBook, along with about 3 other laptops]. He made the point that the printing press did not really take off until the next generation after it was invented by Gutenberg. The original generation used the press for looking backwards. The next generation realized you could use the press for discussing 'current' ideas.

Some great videos of where we were in 1960s. Some amazing stuff on time-shared, 192K machine. They got sub-second response because they WANTED it to be. Today we are willing to accept much, much less. They were doing collaborative work at SRI in 1968.

We have people using computers today that are barely able to do more than ones developed 40 years ago. Several generations of kids who would most likely 'get' much of this. [Maybe they have but just through video games not through computers?] Kay implied the same, indicating that kids can use two-handed inpur - game pad.

He showed some excellent uses of computers and kids. Doing real science. Kids can learn about real science by proper use of computers. Great demos and video of understanding gravity.

Internet was designed to solve N-squared problem. But group collaboration is a 2 to the N which increases faster. Looked at pre-alpha attempt to make it work. Lots of applause. Used a variety of computing power. All written in smalltalk. Did some 3-D rendering of quickly drawn items. All done using TCP/IP. Squeak is on 25 platforms, bit identical.[There are some great downloads at Squeakland.]   9:38:12 AM    



 
April 2003
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30      
Mar   May






Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website.
Subscribe to "A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Blog" in Radio UserLand.

Click to see the XML version of this web page.

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


© Copyright 2008 Richard Gayle.
Last update: 3/27/08; 6:20:11 PM.