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Thursday, December 25, 2003 |
Cheap, reliable Audio and Video conferencing results in richer, more intimate conversation. (SOURCE:BarlowFriendz: Entering CasualSpace...)- I've had the same experience with Skype to London and with iChat to Zurich; the fact that it's quick, easy and free leads you to use voice in a different way than you would before. It's not a just a call that's taken down; it's another medium that enriches your interaction. Also, if you do it often enough, you start to get a much better idea of the environment and context of the people you are calling.
QUOTE For awhile, we talked as though we were on the phone, and I marveled at being able to conduct a zero-cost trans-Pacific call. (Of course, there's nothing particularly new about voice over IP. But it's never been so stupidly easy to set up, in my personal experience, as it is with iChat AV. Also, it never sounded this good before.)
The really interesting shift occurred as we drifted back to what we'd been doing before we started chatting, leaving the audio channel open as we'd did so. We could hear each other typing. One of my daughters entered the room and spoke to me. Joi heard her and said hello. They had a brief conversation, their first since she was a little girl. Joi and I returned our e-mail. I wanted to set up an account on Technorati and broke in to ask him how to do it. He walked me through the process. There were other occasional interjections. I could hear the sounds of construction going on in his house.
For a long time, it was as though we were working in the same room, each of us alone with his endeavors and yet... together. Though half a world away.
This feels significant to me. Even over shorter distances, people rarely think of phone calls as being so casually cheap that one would simply leave the connection open for ambient telepresence and occasional conversation. To create shared spaces that span the planet, and to do so whenever you feel like it, and to leave them unpurposefully in place for hours, is not something people have done very often before.
The next step is to make those shared spaces larger, so that multiple people can inhabit the same auditory zone, entering and leaving it as though it were a coffee house. This will change the way people live.
Big deal, you think. You can do this with conference calls now. But you don't. Conference calls are expensive and unstable. The sound quality usually sucks if you're using a speaker phone. I think this is different. It certainly felt different to me. I had the same shiver of the New that I got years ago the first time I ever used telnet and realized that I could get a hard disks to spin in any number of computers thousands of miles away just by entering a few keystrokes.
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] 
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Phillip Pearson: "I wrote a Python script that downloads a web page, then examines all linked pages to try to find their RSS feeds." [Scripting News]
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XML for the rest of us. 
"The relational database is designed to serve up rows and columns," said BEA's Adam Bosworth in his keynote talk. "But our model of the world is documents. It's 'Tell me everything I want to know about this person or this clinical trial.' And those things are not flat, they're complex. Now we have the way to get not only the hospital records and prescriptions but also the doctor's write-ups."
The doctors and bankers will get that, just as the highway patrolmen already do. XML documents, flowing through XML plumbing, can now deliver very real and tangible benefits. For the publishing geeks who started it all, it's a moment to savor. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] By the way, Adam Bosworth said a great many other interesting things in his XML 2003 talk. For those of you not inclined to watch this QuickTime clip -- and in particular for the search crawlers -- I would like to enter the following quote into the public record. ... [Jon's Radio]
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 RSS Winterfest is a two-day conference, Jan 21-22, for people who use RSS. An audio conference that you participate in over the telephone. No charge, but registration is required. Should be very interesting. I'm doing the opening session, from a conference room at Harvard Law School, with people who are using RSS, and we'll talk about what they want to do with RSS, what they like about today's software, what they don't like; products and services they might want to buy. How do you feel about ads in RSS? How can schools, businesses, the government, better use RSS? Comment here. [Scripting News]
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Wow. K-Logs is still growing (nearing 1,000 members -- many are senior people in organizations across the globe or amazing innovative individuals). This is probably one of the top weblog related groups on the Web today. Nice. I will do my best to get this moving again. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Randy asked me to deliniate some of the features I would like to see in my syndication feeds/services. My problem is that as I attempt to scale the number of feeds that I am watching (I am over 100 right now), it is getting difficult to manage.
Here are some features that I would like to see:
- A synthetic feed editing interface. An easy way to create a selection of weblogs that combine into a single synthetic feed. A simple point and click interface that lets me deselect and add feeds to that synthetic feed.
- Query based synthetic feeds. The ability to run a search query against a selection of feeds which creates a synthetic feed. The ability to do this against Google News would be nice too (I have built feeds based on Google News feeds already, but it is a pain).
- Blogrolls of synthetic feeds. The capability to build a simple blogroll of those synthetic feeds (a nice box/list that fits into the weblog format). Radio has this, but it would be nice to see the feature set improved. It would also be nice to see something like blogrolling.com for synthetic feeds.
- Simple ways to share synthetic feeds. Simple publishing methods either through a service or via a publishing tool.
- A rating system for synthetic feeds. This is particularly important for query based synthetic feeds. I would like to see a darwinian system for the best feeds developed for specfic topics.
- A packaged way to create "Feedrings" that replace "Webrings." This would allow me to create or join ad hoc "birds of a feather" syndication rings with other writers. "Join my technology Feedring" etc. The mechanism for people to subscribe to these feedrings would be on the front page of all members.
- Simple hand edited feeds. A simple system to select the best feed items from a synthetic feed and republish it as a feed. I know that many weblogs do this already on their main page or in a category. However, a service that makes these edited feeds easy to share and rate would be nice. A best of the best feed for a specific topic would be nice for archiving.
- Feed networks that leverage networks of affiliated individuals. A system by which ratings on specific feed items flow up to a single combined synthetic feed. A slashdot approach to finding the best. I could set my threshold level at three votes within the community of webloggers and not see anything below that. This could in turn be used to create a group weblog. This is perfect for a campaign weblog.
This is just off the top of my head. Some ideas overlap. Hope this helps. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Rules for Bookmarklets. (SOURCE:Rules for Bookmarklets)- Going to need this in the future
QUOTE
Bookmarklets are, as you know by now, Javascript code. Most bookmarklets are designed for manipulating the contents of the currently loaded web page directly (like text highlighting) or somehow use it as input in a process (like a keyword search or a listing of links). A few bookmarklets don't use the content of the current page. Examples of these are a bookmarklet presenting an ASCII table or a color table. Most of the time, however, you want to use the current page in some way.
There are a few rules you should be aware of when you design your own bookmarklets.
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Brent Simmons - Real artists ship (no matter how boring or excruciating the last inch is!). (SOURCE:inessential.com: Weblog: Comments for ‘On shipping software’)- Brent is a great writer and a great software developer. If you have never shipped a software product or been involved, this post is a must read.
QUOTE
I actually picture in my head a weird little scene. I see a big field of grass with a line drawn in it, like a line on a football field. And then I picture a giant brick wall moving forward slowly but steadily toward that line. The line is the shipping mark, and the brick wall is the software. Nothing can stop that wall.
Part of shipping is attention to detail. It can get boring, tracking down and finding all the million little things. (Unless you’re a software developer, you may have no idea how much of software development is just about all the little details. It’s housekeeping. It can be overwhelming if you’re not used to it.)
Another part of shipping is making hard decisions. When do you stop? How do you know if a feature can wait until a later release? How do you know which bugs you can live with and which are deal-stoppers?
And another part of shipping is anxiety. What if there’s a terrible bug that doesn’t appear, despite all the testing, until right after it’s released? What if you made the wrong decisions about bug x and feature y?
What you do is just do the best you can—and when you make mistakes, you deal with them the best you can. You get better at shipping software every time you do it. Experience is your teacher.
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Rescue your teeth with Mexican dentistry. Amazing first-person story of a guy who couldn't afford the full set of caps his teeth needed and was looking at a lifetime of dentures, who became a medical tourist to Tijuana and got the work done for a fraction of the cost in Mexico.
I mentally multiplied $715 by 28 and groaned. Either my teeth were about to become the most expensive thing I ever owned, or I was going to lose them and likely have to start wearing dentures at the age of 39...
Once again we found tales of $120 caps, and of an entire industry catering to American medical tourists. In several places along the US-Mexico border, clusters of dentists operate within convenient driving distance so that an inexpensive bus tour from Las Vegas or a trolley ride from San Diego could bring you to where this cheap care was available.
Nowhere did we find a horror story -- indeed, everything we read was very enthusiastic. We did research and began to lay plans. Link (via Electrolite) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Mary Jo interviews Don Box.
Mary Jo Foley has an interview with Don Box. I was thinking about this today. Indigo (which is what Don is working on) really is going to change how we look at our computers. I am years behind Don. The stuff that team is working on is that far ahead of most of the rest of the world. Think of a web without a centralized server. Think of services that run on my computer and give stuff over to your computer. That's Indigo. [The Scobleizer Weblog]
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Feedster and News Aggregators.
One more: Feedster has come out with a web based aggregator. Scott is doing some interesting stuff over there. I track what all the blogs are saying about various things (like Longhorn, or Linux) through Feedster. Why? Because I can perform a search, and Feedster will make that search into an RSS feed that I can subscribe to. You know how you felt when you first saw a killer application? (For me, it was Pagemaker). This is a killer service. The idea that a search term can then be a syndication feed is going to change the world. You watch, if Google and MSN are smart, they'll do that for all search terms.
Feedster has dramatically changed search for me. Has it for you yet? [The Scobleizer Weblog]
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Dreaming of something else.
Sarah Allen has got some coolio new Laszlo components coming......
... but it look slike she's day dreaming about X-Mas or something.
There are times that I become immersed in a project and it feels as if it swallows me whole.
It can be awful. I remember one of those times working on a project, part of a large team at a fairly large company. They took the whole team to see the movie "Groundhog Day." It was eerie because that's what it seemed like to work there. Every week you would be a week away from the deadline. You would work super hard and do different things every day, but seemed destined to repeat the same events over and over again. In the movie, this guy would keep waking up on groundhog day and kept repeating that one day until he got it right. Software projects are like that sometimes.
It can be wonderful. You wake up in the morning with visions of new and interesting ways to appoach the problem. You can feel it all coming together. It is a frentic race to make real as many possibilites as you can within the constraints before the deadline. If only you had one more week, one more day, one more hour, you could add that feature or fix that tricky bug. There's more you want to do, but real software ships. It wouldn't be fun as a research project. The whole point is to get it into the hands of real people for whom it will make a difference, as you imagine it will. In fact, you have this insane belief that just once more line of code, one more bug fix, and two extra pixels will make all the difference.[Sarah Allen's Weblog] [Marc's Voice]
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I wish there was a "kit" personal version of this plane with modular electronics/computer upgrades for improved flight characteristics. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Blogging + an RSS reader = Public Relations on the cheap. (SOURCE:PR on the cheap)- Blogging + an RSS reader = PR on the cheap! Amen!
QUOTE
Big firms all have some budget for public relations — not only to generate media hits, but also to track references made about the business or its products. Many small firms can’t afford to hire a professional and are too busy to track company buzz themselves. So many are turning to news aggregators.
ActiveWords, a five-person software company in Winter Park, Fla., relies on NewsGator ($29). The product tracks every public reference made to the company, whether it be in a news story, on a Web site or in a Weblog.
UNQUOTE
[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Listening Top Ten Countdown. (SOURCE:Rebecca's Blog)- My summary of Rebecca's summary. Read her full post for the link to all the details. Something to work on in 2004.
QUOTE
- Stop talking.
The Top Ten Tools for Effective Listening, Dr. Philip E. Humbert, Resources for Your Success!
...
- Notice your own filters when listening.
The Top 10 Variations on an Ineffective Listening Theme, Susan W. Abrams, Coachville's Top Ten
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- Don't argue mentally.
Effective Listening, Gregory Wells, Davis and Elkin College
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- Inhibit your impulse to immediately answer questions.
Tips on Effective Listening, Larry Alan Nadig
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- Adjust to the situation.
Listening Effectively, John A. Kline
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The situation is never what we anticipate it to be. That's right, NEVER. However, the situation often matches what we anticipate it to be. Why? We don't really see situations as they are. We perceive them based on our filters. And those perceptions are strongly influenced by what we are looking for. (Remember that Jeep Wrangler?)
- When in doubt about whether to listen or speak, keep listening.
Be an Effective Listener!, Dianne Schilling, Women's Media
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- Don't assume you have to do anything but listen.
A Dozen Ways to Shut Up and Listen, Joe Wynne, Gantthead
Listening is sometimes all that someone wants from us. They receive it as a gift when they get it.
- Work at listening.
Ten Keys to Effective Listening, Ohio University
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- Listen generously with a willingness to be influenced.
Listen Generously: You Might Even Learn Something, Deborah London Baker, London Baker Group... UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Intro to blogging for information professionals. (SOURCE:Boston Chapter Bulletin)- Excellent. Are we all not 'Information professionals' today, or does this just apply to librarians?
QUOTE The bottom-line is that blogs and RSS feeds are valuable tools for the information professional. Blogging is a good fit for information professionals because we value content and it is the content of the blog that matters most. Weblogs are just another way of communicating and organizing information. So perhaps we shouldn’t just settle for one orange tic-tac, but be open to exploring more of them.
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Emerging Tech's self-organizing conference-within-a-conference. At this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, there are 27 night sessions reserved from allocation by the organizers, left open to be a "self organizing conference-within-a-conference." The idea is that ETCON attendees propose sessions on the open wiki, and vote on which they'd prefer to attend.
We're not looking for polished presentations. We'd prefer "white board" sessions on your works-in-progess, rough demonstrations with promise, concept and code (with an emphasis on running code, even if it doesn't yet fully represent the concept). You should be prepared to take input, answer questions, engage in discussion, and be open to altering your conceptions and mucking about in your source. Oh, and have a good deal of fun while you're at it. Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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On shipping software. I learned at an early age the importance of shipping software.
My first software award
It was 1982, I was barely a teenager, and I was at a computer fair where young geeks from all over Delaware were competing in a programming contest.
We were paired up at random with other geeks. (Early extreme programming?) Our mission: to write a BASIC program that sorted an array of strings.
Each pair had a computer to work on—we were in a room full of Apple II Plus's (or perhaps Apple IIes). We had a time limit, something like two hours.
I discovered quickly that my co-geek didn’t actually know much about programming, so I just kind of talked to him as I wrote the program.
We faced a big decision right at the start. Should we use the slower, but easier to implement, bubble sort algorithm? My comrade just kind of shrugged and agreed. I laid it on the line: if we do it this way, I said, we won’t win, because it’s too simple. It won’t impress the judges. But at least we won’t be embarrassed: we’ll have a working program.
So I wrote a little program that wasn’t fast but that actually worked to sort an array of strings. After we were finished, I told my Dad I wanted to go home, since there was no way we were going to win. So we left.
But—you can see it coming—we did win. Someone else from my school accepted the award on my behalf. I still have it.
Lesson? Shipping is important.
Showing up
It’s kind of like what Woody Allen said, “90% of life is just showing up.” Software is the same: it has to “show up” first. If it doesn’t ship, it doesn’t exist.
I bring this up because I hear from people and read on weblogs about software that’s pretty cool but that never gets done. It doesn’t make it out into the world. And I often wish I could transfer some kind of magical shipping-energy over to the developer.
I don’t know why these projects, some of them in quite advanced stages, don’t ship. I know what I do: I myself don’t even conceive of not shipping. Once I have committed to a piece of software, I just keep going.
The brick wall of shipping
I actually picture in my head a weird little scene. I see a big field of grass with a line drawn in it, like a line on a football field. And then I picture a giant brick wall moving forward slowly but steadily toward that line. The line is the shipping mark, and the brick wall is the software. Nothing can stop that wall.
Part of shipping is attention to detail. It can get boring, tracking down and finding all the million little things. (Unless you’re a software developer, you may have no idea how much of software development is just about all the little details. It’s housekeeping. It can be overwhelming if you’re not used to it.)
Another part of shipping is making hard decisions. When do you stop? How do you know if a feature can wait until a later release? How do you know which bugs you can live with and which are deal-stoppers?
And another part of shipping is anxiety. What if there’s a terrible bug that doesn’t appear, despite all the testing, until right after it’s released? What if you made the wrong decisions about bug x and feature y?
What you do is just do the best you can—and when you make mistakes, you deal with them the best you can. You get better at shipping software every time you do it. Experience is your teacher.
Trust
Going back to my experience at that computer fair in 1982... I learned another important lesson. It’s not just that shipping is important—I also learned that I could trust myself to look at my resources and the amount of time available and the goal and make a good call. I learned I could trust my judgment. That doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes—I have and I will. But I think this self-trust is important to shipping software.
(An important point though is that self-trust doesn’t mean don’t listen to other people. The opposite is true. You want as much feedback as possible. The buck stops with you, though.) [inessential.com]
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Trusted Computing FAQ. I can't think of any applications or services that would make me want to turn on the trusted computing platform. Can you? Virus protection is perhaps the only sales point (which will drive the corporate systems to it in droves). [John Robb's Weblog]
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Portable Compact Flash CD Burner!. (SOURCE:AFTERBURNER- Portable Compact Flash CD Burner! Digital Photographers.net Secured Shopping Cart via email from Roel)- Very cool for photographers on the go who don't want lug a laptop. A bit pricy at $299 US but I am sure it wil be half that price 6 months from now
QUOTE
- This product is so cool to use either in your office or out on the field. It enables you to burn directly to CD from the Compact Flash Card(or memory stick, etc type card- comes with adapter!). It burns to CD-R or CD-RW disc without the need of using a computer. Single-touch operation and portability makes using it a snap!
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- In the office: copy the CF card onto your hard disk, remove the CF card and stick it in Afterburner... it makes a very cool assembly line-type workflow.
Given it's compact size, there's no need to worry about having enough capacity on your camera's memory card when you are on the go. It can also be used as a memory card reader and CD-RW by connecting the unit to your PC via USB 2.0.
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Doc digs up a essay he wrote in '98 on how to make a great presentation. Nice. Thanks. It is now logged in my backup brain. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Throwaway email addies with RSS-syndicated mailboxes. Dodgeit allows you to create throw-away email addresses (for crappy registration sites), and then delivers the email that comes into the resulting mailbox as an RSS feed that you and everyone else who can guess at your throwaway email addy can read. That's pretty sweet.
Pick a throwaway address, say: deeznuts@dodgeit.com Give that address out whenever you need to. Check deeznuts from homepage of dodgeit.com. Subscribe to RSS feed to keep an eye on the mailbox. Get it? Link (Thanks, Phil!) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Small tech in big appliances. My Small Times column this month is online. It's about how microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)--the tiny machines that trigger the airbag in your car and squirt out the ink in your desktop printer--are now being integrated into white goods.
"I'm not talking about an accelerometer-laden Rosie the House-Cleaning Robot, although she may be on deck soon, too. I'm talking about newfangled washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, ovens and even refrigerators that will ease the pain of some household chores while keeping your utility bill in check." Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Red Versus Blue season two to premiere at Lincoln Center. Red Versus Blue is a series of comedy short films made by scripting avatars in the game Half Life Halo and recording screen-movies of the results, then adding voice-over and sound-effects, a process called "Machinema." The first two episodes of the next season will be screened at Lincoln Center on January 3. That's pretty cool -- it's almost as if Homestar Runner came to Carnegie Hall.
We are extremely pleased to announce that Red vs Blue Season 2 will debut on January 3, 2004 at the Lincoln Center in New York City. We're extremely honored to be invited back to this prestigious venue and we hope that any Red vs Blue fan in the area will make it to the 9:30 PM show. The plan is to show Season One in its entirety and then show Episodes One and Two of Season Two. Also, the entire cast and crew of Season One will be on hand for the event, which is a milestone in itself -- we have never been in the same place at the same time. So, if you want your RvB DVD signed by the cast, this may be your one and only shot. Link (via Ambiguous) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Recreating gone Disney rides online. Nice NYT piece about the ongoing efforts to rebuild old Disney rides as CGI, using the Web to coordinate volunteers:
At least two other sites are creating virtual versions of discontinued Disney rides: Adventure Thru Inner Space (www.atommobiles.com/cgi-project.htm), a Disneyland attraction that gave visitors the experience of being smaller than an atom, and If You Had Wings (dizneyworld.net/iyhw.html), a Disney World ride to exotic travel destinations. Although these re-creations have not been authorized by Disney, a spokesman said the company "appreciates their passion."
Why do Disney rides inspire such allegiance? "Disney is one of the few organizations that produce elaborate dark rides, that invest in story line," explained Cory Doctorow, a technology activist and writer whose recent novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," is set in a Disney World of the future. Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Hypertext Now: Link Types. (SOURCE:Hypertext Now: Link Types)- Perhaps it is time to use link types. Hmmm.
QUOTE Randall Trigg, a hypertext pioneer whose work has always epitomized the finest qualities of the field, may have been too good a scientist in his early work. His 1983 doctoral dissertation, describing a hypertext system for scientific writing, addressed a topic of great importance with such authority (and pointed its own weaknesses so candidly) that it deterred many designers from building upon its foundations.
The key section of Trigg's dissertation -- long inaccessible but now, available on the Web -- proposes a catalog of link types. Simple links, like those familiar to all of us, simply point to a destination without explicitly indicating what the destination contains or why the link exists. Trigg sought to remedy this state of affairs by listing the varieties of links that might be expected to appear in scientific writing. A vocabulary of link types might prove useful in a variety of ways:
- Readers could use link types to understand the structure of an argument.
- Computers, by interpreting the link types, could provide behind-the-scenes assistance to readers. For example, if the computer knows whether a link leads to a citation or a counter-argument, it might be able to make better choices of window size and layout.
- By providing a rich but finite vocabulary of link types, the system could encourage writers to create richer and better-structured arguments.
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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SlimBrowser - free tab browser add-on for IE. (SOURCE:Tabbed browser with popup killer via Jon Husband's Wirearchy)- Looks good, but I'd rather use Mozilla if I need a tabbed browser. Still, there are times when only IE Windows will do (because of bad IE specific code) and it's better to have a tabbed IE than the regular boring 'not to be enhanced until Longhorn' IE.
QUOTE SlimBrowser is a tabbed multiple-site browser. It incorporates a large collection of powerful features like built-in popup killer, skinned window frame, form filler, site group, quick-search, auto login, hidden sites, built-in commands and scripting, online translation, script error suppression, blacklist / whitelist filtering, URL Alias. It brings you convenient and comfortable browsing.
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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You need a license to say "I have a dream". Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is still in copyright (as is almost everything else familiar in our lives), and Dr King's heirs strictly enforce the copyright. Wendy Seltzer points out what this means for free expression and political commentary.
You can always quote a few lines without asking permission, but that's likely to be the same few lines that have become cliched with repetition. Quote the whole speech to make a more substantial point, and you face thousand-dollar license fee claims from the estate. Quote them to make a point critical of King, and you may be denied a license entirely. Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Of course, the loss of 4,730 high paying software jobs is worse than it appears. There is a cascade of job loses in other sectors of the economy as the result of each job lost in the technology sector. For each new employee at Micrsoft, it is estimated 6.7 jobs are created (4.0 for other segments of the tech sector). Assuming that IBM can mimic the Microsoft effect, 31,691 jobs will be lost. @ an average salary/wage of $50,000 a year, that is a net impact of ~$1.6 billion a year to our economy.
Will the recent surge in offshore software jobs start a new wave of unionization in the software industry? Not the old type of union, but a new one built on the same technologies that are being used by Dean and others to build a strong and aggressive community (it could grow quickly if done correctly). All it takes is for IBM to lose a couple of sales due to IT managers that are part of the community for them to get Ford's religion (pay your workers well enough to enable them to buy your products -- or in IBM's case, buy products from companies that buy IBM products and services).
WSJ. In one of the largest moves to "offshore" highly paid U.S. software jobs, International Business Machines Corp. has told its managers to plan on moving the work of as many as 4,730 programmers to India, China and elsewhere... Some workers are scheduled to be informed of the plan for their jobs by the end of January. After that they will be expected to train an overseas replacement worker in the U.S. for several weeks... Unlike low-wage manufacturing, the U.S. computer-services jobs to be moved overseas by IBM typically pay $75,000 to $100,000 or more a year, according to one person familiar with the operations. In contrast, hiring a software engineer with a bachelors or even a masters degree from a top technical university in India may cost $10,000 to $20,000 annually, analysts say. [John Robb's Weblog]
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John Stafford points me to Electric Shoebox. A cool dynamic DNS local app that lets you share photos with friends and family. Personally, I think it would be more powerful with P2P. He also pointed me to Abacast, streaming P2P distribution for radio stations. Very cool (Adam Curry will love this). [John Robb's Weblog]
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Flocking CGI orcs are too smart to stand and fight. Computer animators have been using cellular automata in their crowd scenes for ages, granting the dancers in the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Orcs in LotR the liberty to autonomously determine the fine details of their movement, creating realistic mob scenes that appear to contain a cast of thousands. The problem is, as the programming for the automata gets more sophisticated, they start to express non-linear behavior.
In the climax for The Return of the King, the animated forces of evil kept running away from their enemies.
"So each of these computerized soldiers is assessing the environment around them, drawing on a repertoire of military moves that have been taught them through motion capture - determining how they will combat the enemy, step over the terrain, deal with obstacles in front of them through their own intelligence - and there's 200,000 of them doing that..."
"For the first two years, the biggest problem we had was soldiers fleeing the field of battle," Taylor said.
"We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away." Link (Thanks, Yoz!) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Google tracks packages. Google will now search for UPS, FedEx and other numbers:
UPS tracking numbers example search: "1Z9999W999999999"
FedEx tracking numbers example search: "fedex 999999999999"
Patent numbers example search: "patent 5123123"
FAA airplane registration numbers example search: "n199ua"
FCC equipment IDs example search: "fcc B4Z-34009-PIR" Link (via Kottke) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Spamware dissected. This is an amazing technical dissection of a piece of spamware that was implanted on a savvy user's webserver, a hunk of code that cleverly turned the machine into a piece of a distributed spamming cluster.
After the identification, the client sends the report command, and sends a list of exactly 1000 items, each item composed by the e-mail identification number (as shown above), and two other arguments, the first one is an error code that determines if the e-mail has been sent (for instance, 6 means 'Timeout connecting to host', 11 that the e-mail has been sent, 9 means 'Timeout reading from socket', ...) and it will be clearly shown in the next paragraphs, and the third one that I haven't identified yet, but it could be a flag to know if the e-mail address has been treated. It seems that it is the report for telling which e-mail address is valid. Just to be sure, I executed the daemon with its configuration file slightly modified, changing the /dev/null to real files to watch its logs. As seen in the daemon's configuration file, there are three different logs: logfile, speedlog and out. The last one (out) is always empty, but the other two contain interesting things: As seen in the daemon's configuration file, there are three different logs: logfile, speedlog and out. The last one (out) is always empty, but the other two contain interesting things; following is the speedlog file: Link (via /.) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Don't forget python.scripting.com. Hasn't been updated in a while. I could see this being a group effort to keep up with all the developments in PythonLand. It would be a natural next step for scripting.com. I'd subscribe for sure. I could even see putting ads on that site. [Scripting News]
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Dave Megginson's strange creations. According to this report, my talk at XML 2003 this morning was "trippier than expected." I like that! However, mine couldn't have been the trippiest. That honor goes to Dave Megginson for his talk entitled "Strange Creations: Prototyping XML Data on the Desktop." With tongue firmly in cheek, he explored a variety of experimental ways to view and interact with XML data. The one that brought the house down worked like a text-based adventure game. "You are in a dark room called PubXS document. You can go north, south, east, or west." ... [Jon's Radio]
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Gizmodo. 
Sony's new WiFi phone (it isn't a cellphone like it says in the article) is interesting. If the phone ran off of Skype you could wardrive encrypted untraceable phone calls. That is a combo that would drive the FBI nuts. It is possible that in the future running an open WiFi access point would be illegal. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Verizon uses .NET for billing.
While the tech press is busy calling Morton Thiokol, you might also call Verizon and ask them what platform they choose to do all their cell phone bills on. About a week ago, I met a guy who works on the team that programmed that system.
Well, I wish they were a little less efficient about charging me for my cell phone use -- I sure wish that system would blue screen and stay down for a while. :-) (The developer says it stays up and does its job very well, thank you very much, although he asked me not to name him).
Yeah, he uses Visual Studio .NET to do his job. Might give you some idea as to what system they picked. :-) [The Scobleizer Weblog]
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Rocket Scientists and Computer Change?.
The computer press loves to write about it when Microsoft loses business to other computer companies and/or movements. On the other hand, ask yourself why no one has written about Morton Thiokol lately. They just changed computer systems for their engineers. They exhaustively compared systems. Their findings would make a good article in Business 2.0, or Baseline Magazine. But, you'll probably never read about them and their choices -- reporting on how political bodies, in say, Munich, are choosing our competitors makes for far more interesting copy.
Don't know who Morton Thiokol is? Why they build the Space Shuttle's engines, among other things. They are the world's leaders in solid rocket engine development and production. I love their Web site's title tag: "as a matter of fact, we are rocket scientists!"
Go ahead, call them up and ask them what computer systems they now use to design the Shuttle's engines. I'll wait. And, while you're at it, ask them how the performance is on their new systems. Ask them why one engineer refused to do any more work until he got one of the new workstations. And ask them how much money they saved (they were using boxes from a computer company headquartered in Silicon Valley).
Heh. I think I'll change my motto to "I only use stuff good enough for rocket scientists." [The Scobleizer Weblog]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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Amazing free downloadable paper-motorcycle kits. 
Amazing gallery of spectacular origami. 
CUDDLE (Cousins United to Defeat Discriminating Laws through Education) is an NGO that advocates for the rights of cousins to marry one-another. Here's a handy chart they've produced to show just how related you are to that cute girl (who looks a little like your mom) in the next pew at the Bar-Mitzvah. 
