Friday, October 25, 2002

Tony, what do you think the UoPhx experience will be like when it uses weblogs instead of email for group discussions and team projects? 11:58:37 PM

I just got thru entering all the due dates into my Palm... wheh! I've basically got stuff to do every night during the week. Let's see if I can be very disciplined, and get it all done during the week, to leave my weekends a bit free... (riiiiiight). 11:57:27 PM

I'm going to start posting some of my older school assignments to my Stories section. My first post runs all the way back to PHIL/251. 11:51:13 PM

Ideas are easy. The right idea has some value. Implementing an idea is difficult. Fully implementing the right idea is harder still. The over-value of ideas in general was the bubble that burst and caused the stock market collapse of last year. I once read a business man quoted "let's share the idea, but compete on the implementation" and that meme has resonated with me ever since. Watson, for example, was an idea that was clearly being carried in more places than one (Hey, even I thought of that!). At first, Dan was crying over Apple's Sherlock (Hey, they took their idea back!), but I think he finally understands that the idea was the easy part. Can he still compete on execution: for instance, can he provide better plug-ins for power users? Indeed he can! Open source software follows the same logic: the ideas for interlacing architectures are easy (and good for society), and there's still room to compete on implementation and execution. And despite the lack of any traditional business model, the pure collaborative efforts are pacing the closed efforts with ease. lessThan ramble on greatherThan 11:39:20 PM

5:45:55 PM

Hey Steve, just saw an announcement regarding POOF, PHP framework, which is NOT listed in the PHP foundry. A quick google search reveals a few more frameworks, but not as many as I would have anticipated. extremePHP looks interesting. Also, here's a nice slide presentation which describes why frameworks are useful. 3:43:26 PM

Canesta keyboards (if you can call it a keyboard) looks to the coolest thing yet for portable computing. Very, very, very cool. I hope they release a compact flash or SD card version of this so I can add it to my Toshiba e740. Funny... I'm taking a course at UCSD on ubiquitous computing - today was the first day our class met. I'll be sure to bring this up at our next meeting, as this sounds like it could be a killer app! [PSquad's Corner] Wacky geeky stuff.  Though I can't help thinking that a little bit of plastic that you could roll out on a surface (maybe with a little clip to keep your PDA upright) would be much easier to do. Though not as geeky though :) 10:25:50 AM

More and more anecdotal evidence that consumer perceptions of Apple products are dramatically changing. What's so dramatic about it? That personal computer buyers, by and large, are seriously considering a Mac product line, either for its ease of use, or for its UNIX underpinnings. ...I think that the major driving forces for this were the migration of gaming away from PCs, and the iPod. 10:16:27 AM

So, apparently, now that their digitization is complete (although flawed), the USPTO is going to destroy their paper collection of papent filings. Edison's Ark was started to save this collection, "literally rescued from the trash". Ug. Hey, if we digitize the Library of Congress, let's destroy all the paper books, too. Check out these great these great patent diagrams. 10:00:53 AM