Wednesday, February 26, 2003

The Signing This morning, Paulette and I signed all the documents for our first home. All the stories you may have heard are true. The stack of legal papers is daunting. What's funny is both Paulette and I started reviewing it page at a time, and after several pages, one of the loan people asked if we intent on reading every page. I guess both of us are just in the habit of reading contracts before we sign them. Once we got a glance at everything (and it was all in order), we started signing. First, the load officer would pull the top page of the TBD stack, I'd sign, then Paulette, then the page would go face-down on a DONE stack. This process itself took almost 15 minutes. About half-way thru the stack, I thought to ask "has anyone counted the number of signatures in this thing?" Of course not. I should count the signature lines in our copy, just to see... but I'd have to guess almost 100 signatures. Anyway, it's pretty much a done deal now. We wire the rest of the money next Thursday, and pick up the keys the following day... weeeh! 11:51:43 PM

Kunekt - Business Cards as RSS Feeds Interesting concept. Instead of handing out numerous copies of your business card (data), now just point everyone to one copy stored as an XML file. Not sure what the benefit is in having it in RSS, though... 10:37:22 PM

Mikael Frederiksen becomes CEO & President of Cycore I'm starting to wonder what happened to the last crop of 3D companies, so I figured I start another channel for 3D. This press release rekindled my interest in the space. UPPSALA, Sweden, February 11, 2003 - Cycore, the market leader in interactive 3D for e-communication, today announced that Mikael Frederiksen will replace Bengt Starke as CEO & President of Cycore as of Monday, February 10, 2003. Bengt Starke will remain in the Board of directors of Cycore. In addition, the Shareholders Meeting on January 30, 2003 elected a new Board of Cycore. In November, Cycore implemented a new shares issue from existing investors, leading to a major change in the ownership structure of the company. As a consequence a new board has been put in place under the chairmanship of Mr. Jens Jordan. Secondly, Cycore is also now putting more emphasis on a strategy where it keeps the on-line, mass market activities but focuses more directly to a partner/OEM oriented software company. As a natural consequence of this Bengt Starke will, as of Monday, be replaced by Mr. Mikael Frederiksen, who has a strong OEM background. Bengt Starke will remain on the board of directors. Mikael Frederiksen, 42, has extensive experience from a number of start-up and growth companies. Most recently, Mikael Frederiksen worked at Nycomed, implementing new sales & distribution strategies. 12:29:45 PM

Semantic Web Journal Very cool! Welcome to the website of the Journal on Web Semantics! When designing the journal, we didn't just want to set up just another print journal, since we felt that the Semantic Web deserves and enables more than just paper and papers. This website, besides publishing preprints of the accepted papers, as aiming at more. Pure technology is only one aspect of semantics and the Semantic Web - maybe not even the most important one. Social aspects: sharing of technology, to learn and to be able to built-upon each others experiences is crucial. However, the traditional scientific process is still focusing on papers, neglecting other means of knowledge sharing. Consequently, not only scientific papers should be submitted, but anything that helps to learn from each other: demos and code, ontologies and code, initiative descriptions and code. Did I mention code? The journal website (and the print journal for descriptions), after a review process, will publish accepted material. All of this is only possible when the community gets involved - by submitting and reading papers, code and anything else that you feel deserves publication (please submit papers to jsw@cs.man.ac.uk and anything else to me). But also by other means - providing or contributing software that helps to run the site. In the longer run, this website is following the "eat your own dogfood" philosophy - technologies described and software submitted will be used to drive the website. Let's create the future we want - together. Now when will they have an RSS feed?! :-) 12:18:55 PM

Why RSS? There's an interesting cross-blog discussion going on about RSS. Follow the links: "Maybe one day Corante will get RSSfeeds. I almost completely missed this Part II. Almost nobody reads blogs anymoe. Everything comes in through RSS." [Marc's Voice] "Actually, a tiny technical elite reads RSS. Everyone else reads on the web. Maybe that will change. I'm not sure." [EVHEAD] "If I grab an RSS feed of his site, half the pleasure of visiting is taken away from me. The issue of RSS is about more than just textuality. Websites are still to some extent billboards, as they were back in 1995. But the slogan is often, 'Come for the scenery; stay for the entertainment'." [three legged pi] Of course, all of you know where I come down in this debate. If you're a casual blog reader, then that last course of action is for you. But once you start reading 20+ blogs on a daily basis, an RSS news aggregator becomes a huge advantage. There's no way I could read 190 sites consistently and thoroughly without one. So at some point, you have to decide what's more important to you - the style or the substance. In my case, it's the substance. And Corante, my foot is tapping while I continue waiting to read your content.... [The Shifted Librarian] There will definitely be a category of people who read dozens and dozens of weblogs regularly, and desktop aggregators will be their reader of choice. Will there come a day when everyone has a desktop aggregator? I think so, although that day may be very far away indeed. 12:15:10 PM

Time Magazine Discovers Craig's List If you live in the San Francisco area, you're probably quite familiar with Craig's List. Sometimes I wonder how anything ever was done in a time before Craig's List. While there are plenty of big name sites with lots of marketing dollars, most people looking for a job or a place to rent look to Craig's List first. It's been that way for ages. So, it's a bit surprising to see that Time Magazine has just discovered Craig's List. I know that the site has expanded to many other cities, but unfortunately, the article doesn't say how well it's catching on in those places. [Techdirt] We're actually quite familiar with Craig himself. He's always down at Reverie Coffee on Cole Valley. A quirky guy. It was pretty cool to see his picture in Time and recognize the unique lamps hanging from Reverie's ceilings :-) 12:06:30 PM

7.6 billion miles later, Pioneer 10 falls silent Jed sez: "Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to venture out of the solar system, has fallen silent after traveling billions of miles from Earth on a mission that has lasted nearly 31 years, NASA said Tuesday." It's 7.6 billion miles away; in only 2 million more years, it should reach Aldebaran. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Jed!) [Boing Boing] Such a huge distance away. I wonder if our first contact with another life form will be from a dead satellite. 12:03:56 PM

ASCII Art stereograms AA3D is a random-dot-stereogram ASCII Art generator: feed it a 3D map and it will spit out a grid of ASCII characters that will converge to a 3D image if you stare at it in just the right way. LinkDiscuss (via Stuff About Things) [Boing Boing] Arg, my eyes hurt! 12:02:11 PM

XrML and DRM Something for Macromedia to consider? I'd like to think that, some day, I can have a blog channel that is subscription-based, but there are few ways to address this now. Microsoft details new rights management tech [via InfoWorld: Top News] Lately I've been looking into digital rights management and technologies that can help support paid content. I picked up this piece about forthcoming technology from Microsoft on this front, and was happy to learn about a new emerging standard, XrML, the extensible rights markup language. Microsoft is a investor in the founding company behind this specification (ContentGuard, a Xerox PARC spin-out). I really like the approach taken with XrML. It's flexible and extensible enough to work with a very wide variety of content types, access and distribution models, encryption schems, and vendors. If major content formats like Windows Media, Office, Macromedia Flash, Adobe Acrobat, XHTML, MPEG, and others support this we could finally have the basis for secure, paid content. [Jeremy Allaire's Radio] 11:56:32 AM

Full Post RSS 2.0 Feed Okay, I can take a hint. I've resisted for a long time, but some of my readers want a full post feed for my blog. Fine. Here you go. I originally resistsed because I didn't really see the point. Plus... [Jeremy Zawodny's blog] Yeah! Another convert to full content in RSS! 11:54:06 AM