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Sunday, January 25, 2004
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eMachines M5310 NoteBook - Excellent
If you're in the market for a new laptop, I'd highly recommend looking at the eMachines M5310. I bought one at Best Buy just before x-mas for under $1100 (after rebate). Fully loaded, with built in wifi, 1.8 ghz processor, 40 gig hard drive, the works. And best of all, it has the wide 15.4" screen. The wide screen is a pleasure to use. Helps you be very productive as you can now have several windows open with room to spare.
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Lightweight open-source Wiki software - Kwiki
Kwiki is a very cool, robust Wiki software program that runs on Perl. Super simple to install and get going. It saves your wiki pages as plain text. Exactly what we needed, as we weren't comfortable hosting this sort of thing on someone else's machine. It even has a search feature built into each page, that searches your entire wiki. O'Reilly's Perl.com had a writeup on Kwiki earlier this summer.
A Wiki is basically a web page that is editable and extensible thru any browser. A wiki makes it very easy for anyone in your organization to publish and edit things that are useful to keep online. You edit the page in a simple text box, and use very simple syntax.. eg: surrount a word with asteriks *bold* to make a word bold, or preceed a list of words with * and it makes a bulleted list, or 4 dashes ---- make a horizontal line. Here are some more of the formatting rules.
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Bill Joy interview
Cool interview with Bill Joy in Wired. Some quotes from Bill:
"I try to work on things that won't happen unless I do them."
"The ideal project is one where people don't have meetings, they have lunch. The size of the team should be the size of the lunch table."
[Microsoft] "They took systems designed for isolated desktop systems and put them on the Net without thinking about evildoers, as our president would say."
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Venture blog has a good piece on the shifting technology adoption curve. If you haven't read Moore's Crossing the Chasm by now, go read and heed. Venture blog notes that the early adopter market is growing. My theory is that this is the case because we've learned how to make things easier to use. Your company is not going to score any non-technie customers unless your product is intuitive and predictable. We're just getting better at product design.
For example, just making it easier for someone to mail a photograph. When I purchased my digital camera in 1997, there were probably 10 steps I needed to go thru to email someone a photograph. Not only that, but I had to be at a PC to do it. I'm an engineer, so I had the patience and the 'problem solving' ambition needed to make it work. Most of the world isn't interested in making pieces of hardware and software work together. They just want it to work with a push of a button.
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Lights in the sky as text messages
Amodal Suspension is a new work of "art" in Japan that uses beams of light in the sky to help communicate messages between people. It's an artistic venture at this point, but it does seem to have some practical significance. You basically use your mobile phone to email the spot-light system that you have a message waiting for someone. That person happens to be walking by and sees the various beems of light in the sky and can log into a Java app on their mobile phone and pick their spotlight out on a graphical interface and can "catch" their message.
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New Radio Userland Book
Radio Userland is now available in bookstores. Nice writeup with simple to advanced feature explanation. A quick glance thru this at the bookstore answered many questions I always had. I just moved my Radio s/w to a new machine, and the book helped me to understand a bit about the directory structures involved with the backend. Bummer that an explanation of "trackback" didn't seem to make this printing. It's the feature I seem to have the most trouble with in Radio.
The author, Rogers Cadenhead, has a blog (not running on Radio). This blog you're reading now is running on Radio :)
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© Copyright
2004
Al Nevarez.
Last update:
2/7/2004; 3:13:44 PM.
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