 |
Thursday, March 25, 2004 |
Removable Media For Our Minds.
In my latest article for TheFeature.com, I report on the first baby
steps toward "memory prosthetics," systems that could someday enable us
to google our entire lives. "Too often, our memories don't serve us well. We lose
our keys. We forget names. As we age, the home movies that play in our
heads begin to look like fifth generation VHS copies. But what if we
could rewind to yesterday? Indeed, what if we could watch our entire
lives flash before our eyes with the click of button? The possibility
is not as far fetched as one might think."
Link
[Boing Boing] 
|
|
Disney Ink Shop.  Disney
has launched a custom T-shirt shop with a seemingly infinite number of
images to choose from. some of the art is awesome, owing to the fact
that it was drawn by the good old Disney studio cartoonists. I've found
several ukulele related images already. Link
[Boing Boing]
|
|
Don't think about pink elephants.
According to a new Harvard University psychological study, the thoughts
we push out of our brains during the day seep into our dreams at night.
The reason may be because the prefontal cortex--the part of the brain
we use to plan and organize complex cognitive processes--doesn't work
as hard when we're asleep.
"Maybe this is why students dream of sleeping through an important
exam, why actors dream of going blank on stage, and why truckers dream
of driving off the road," one of the researchers told Scientific
American. "Dreams are where our thoughts go when we try to put the
thoughts out of mind." Link
[Boing Boing]
|
|
Time to try OpenOffice.org?. I haven't even read this,
(link discovered on Slashdot) but I
don't need to. When Microsoft publishes a comparison like this, they
validate their competitor. OpenOffice.org has never really interested me
very much, until now. :-) [Eric.Weblog()]
|
|
Book Review: You Need to Be a Little Crazy. I recently read a good book entitled You Need
to Be a Little Crazy by Barry Moltz.
The subtitle is "The Truth About Starting and Growing Your Business".
It's a book about entrepreneurship, with lots of good stories. It's not
specific to software, but the book does contain a fair amount of high-tech
cluefulness.
Moltz speaks with experience. Although the book includes case studies
of several other people, the author tells many of his own tales. In fact,
I think these personal glimpses are the best aspect of the book.
Somewhat by definition, entrepreneurs are surrounded by people who do
not truly understand them. Running a small company is therefore one
of the loneliest jobs in the world, especially because hiding this
feeling is one of the success criteria. Entrepreneurs need to know they
are neither alone nor unique. After reading this book, I found myself
believing that Barry Moltz and I have a lot in common.
I particularly enjoyed his various postmortem remarks about the dotcom
bubble, liberally sprinkled throughout the book. Granted, hindsight is
20/20, so it doesn't take a genius to say that a lot of boneheaded things
happened in the 1990s. Still, Moltz says it well.
Best of all, the book is just plain fun to read. I devoured the whole
thing on a plane ride. [Eric.Weblog()]
|
|
Helping RSS Newbies Find Relevant Feeds. Ultimate Feed List?
"I got an e-mail from a teacher yesterday asking for some tips on
where to find appropriate RSS feeds for K-12 teachers to use in their
classes, and he said he'd had little luck finding a site that collated
them all together. I hadn't really poked around very much on this, but
I think between the feeds from Moreover, (which actually has a feed on 'firearms industry news'), coupled with the even more refined Moreover feeds you can find at Syndic8, and those listed at Weblogs compendium,
there's certainly enough to get started. But even in these three there
are a lot of newspaper feeds that aren't listed. My big question is
whether or not there's an "Ultimate Feed List" that's collecting all of
these into one place..." [Weblogg-ed News]
I don't know of an ultimate feed list, other than finding someone
with a similar need and hoping they already have a subscription list
you can steal.
This is why I'd like to see a concerted effort - in the library
community at the very least - to provide either an aggregator with
pre-populated feeds or opml files of feeds by type of library or
interest. Get the K-8 teachers to list their favorite sites and provide
the feeds in an opml file that a new user can import in order to get
started. Same thing for 9-12, reference librarians, academic librarians
(even better, by specialty!), medical librarians, law librarians,
technology librarians, etc.
Hmmm... maybe I'll have to set up a wiki for this, too, and then I could point users at it when I give presentations about RSS. [The Shifted Librarian]
|
|
Pydoc - online docs of all the Python modules installed in your system. Python is awesome and so is Pydoc
From Simon Willison: Pydoc:
QUOTE Pydoc is awesome; I don't know how I missed it for so long. Simply type the following at the command line:
pydoc -p 8888
Then point a browser at http://localhost:8888/ to browse interactive
documentation for every Python module available on your system. This
includes moduldes installed in your site-packages directory. If you
keep code you've written yourself in site-packages you'll be able to
browse the documentation for that too. If you're even remotely
consistent about writing docstrings you'll be amazed at how useful the
resulting documentation is. I can't believe I only just discovered this! UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
|
|
Hold the Presses: A Non-Microsoft-Funded Windows vs. Linux TCO Study. From Microsoft Watch:
The Yankee Group and Sunbelt Software have teamed to do a truly
independent total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) study that pits Windows vs.
Linux. And Windows fares quite well, despite the lack of Microsoft
influence. But there are still bright spots for Linux, too — especially
among smaller businesses with custom vertical applications and/or no
legacy networks to support. Check out our synopsis of Yankee's findings here. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley]
|
|
The Firefox opportunity.
The future of "great Windows applications," we're told, lies with
Longhorn's next-generation presentation subsystem, Avalon, which will
reboot software development sometime in the latter half of this decade.
Of course, even Microsoft can't wait until then. Consider InfoPath.
It's a great Windows application and a rich Internet client that had to
ship in 2003. Its foundation is none other than Internet Explorer -- or
rather, the suite of components and Internet standards on which
Internet Explorer depends. Could InfoPath have been built on a Mozilla
foundation instead? You bet. And the result wouldn't just be a great
Windows application. It would be a great application, period. [Full
story at InfoWorld.com]
After I wrote this column, I checked out an interesting new application that I wish had been built on a Mozilla foundation: Onfolio.
You can't fault Onfolio's creator, J.J. Allaire, for targeting the
overwhelming majority platform: IE/Win. Of course as a .NET app,
Onfolio targets a minority within that majority. We live in interesting
times! ... [Jon's Radio]
|
|
The Hawk has the best Microsoft News. By the way, whenever a big news story breaks regarding Microsoft, I immediately go to "Watching Microsoft Like a Hawk."
That site points to a wide variety of news about Microsoft and in the
few years of reading it, I've seen them link to just about everything
of note regarding Microsoft.
If you wanna see a wide variety of stories on the EU decision (and Microsoft's official reaction), there's a bunch over there.
They do a "Watching Google like a Hawk" site too. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
|
|
Night of the Living Dead on Archive.org. BoingBoing reader VonGuard says:
What with all the zombies here today, i figured it was a good idea to point out that the copyright on Night of the Living Dead has lapsed, and now the whole danged blasted movie is available for free on archive.org. Man, Archive rules.
Link
UPDATE: Travis, a member of the BoingBoing tribe on Tribe.net,
says: " Before 1978, any copyrighted work had to have a copyright
notice on every distribution, otherwise it wasn't considered
copyrighted. George A. Romero mistakenly left out the copyright notice
when he distributed his 1968 film NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The
copyright has not recently "lapsed," but was in fact never enforcable,
which is why we have dozens of "pirate" distributions of NIGHT OF THE
LIVING DEAD and innumerable knock-offs." [Boing Boing]
|
|
Home Glow. 
Luminosity is the new black. Loop.ph is a design group "exploring reactive luminous surfaces in the built environment." Products that respond to the activities of the human beings using them. Things that emit light, things worn or lived in. Here are a few:
wallpaper that glows as more sound is in the room Link
responsive window blinds that glow Link
a light blanket Link
Link to Loop.ph home with show dates and locations (Thanks, Bev!) [Boing Boing]
|
|
Lessig's Free Culture, free online, under a Creative Commons license. Larry Lessig's new book "Free Culture"
-- which is about the value of freedom to cultural production -- is out
in stores today, and, unlike his previous two books, Larry has foudn
the leverage to convince his publisher to let him release the full text
of the new book online under a Creative Commons license. He credits me
with providing the ammunition he needed to convince Penguin to allow
him to do this -- which is extraordinarily flattering -- but however he
got there, I'm glad he did.
A landmark manifesto about the genuine closing of the American mind.
Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of
America's most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus
is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the
past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and
technologies. In his two previous books, Code and The Future of Ideas,
Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise
of the Internet. Now, in Free Culture, he widens his focus to consider
the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful
wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the
long-term damage they're inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that
fosters innovation.
All creative works-books, movies, records, software, and so
on-are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is
possible-technologically and legally. For more than two hundred years,
laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and
allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs. The original
term of copyright set by the Constitution in 1787 was seventeen years.
Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting
the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an
essential government role. What did he know that we've forgotten?
Link
(Thanks, Larry!) [Boing Boing]
|
|
© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
|
|
|
Noted without comment. A follow-up to 
