Monday, April 15, 2002

Men's Fashion Guide, part 1. The Morning News: Men's Fashion: Part 1, Suits. "And now, the man's little black dress if he could wear it into battle: the suit." [diveintomark] 3:37:40 PM

Uberman's sleep schedule. Over the past month, I've managed to convert my sleep cycles to something called the Uberman's sleep schedule. The end result is that I am sleeping roughly three hours a day. How did I do it? Is it safe? [kuro5hin.org] Hmm.... should have tried this in undergrad. 3:22:19 PM

[Scripting News] Peter Drayton: "Google2RSS is a command-line tool that runs a query using the Google Web API and spits out an RSS 0.91 feed containing the top 10 hits."  [rosewater] 7:20:23 AM

Teens Peer Ahead. Having trouble getting through to your teenager? Maybe he's moved to CyLandia—and maybe you're next. [Technology Review - Computers and Electronics] [rosewater] 7:19:26 AM

Google tests search tools for developers. The search company is testing a service that lets Web developers search its vast Internet database and list the results on their own sites. [CNET News.com] 6:46:49 AM

Desktop webservices and composite applications.  One of the most exciting aspects of desktop webservices is that I can build pages on my desktop that automatically aggregate data from across the web and from webservice enabled corporate applications.  This is effectively a personal portal that could include search (Google) of the Web/LAN/desktop, financial info from a place like Yahoo finance, corporate sales data, corporate financial data, corporate inventory data, news (RSS),  and even data from peer web services (data entered or auto-aggregated by co-workers in a structured format -- contact lists, bookmarks, calendar entries, spreadsheets, etc.). Better yet, I have complete control over the presentation of that data.  With a little programming effort, I can incorporate business rules (with tools that can be automated for me) that do things for me based on that data.   I could also attach a post button to all the data I collect so its easy for me to share it with co-workers via my weblog.  It puts me in control.  This is the ultimate composite application.  A borg that consumes all others.  I don't want to learn or interact with hundreds of different websites or application specific clients.  I want it all on my desktop, running in my browser, where I can modify, manipulate, and publish it. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 6:42:52 AM

Three reasons Google Web Services are great (if you don't get this now, you will...): 1) I have a ton storage space (even on my shitty laptop -- also known as MSLT).  I want to get data I think is important down to my desktop (it's a trivial storage issue).  I also have tons of excess horsepower.  Most of my apps chew up less than 5% of my processor's power.  I want this expensive processor to do something or its not worth upgrading (hello Intel!!).  Getting data on a regular basis from Google and other sources uses these resources.  It also, most importantly, allows me to manipulate it locally, using powerful desktop tools. 2) Microsoft, BEA, and IBM (except for Sam Ruby and his work on Axis for Apache) aren't needed to make this happen.  Without the big cos at the center of things, this paradigm scales and takes off. 3) I want to be able to publish the data I get (to my Intranet or the Web).  Radio does that for me.  I can leverage a desktop app that allows me to add annotations to the data I collect.  Imagine this applied to everything that changes often: sales data, inventory data, financial data (both corporate and from someplace like Yahoo finance), and systems data.  I would now have the ability to see the data (in real-time -- hello Vinod!), manipulate it using whatever business process I import as a tool (Radio tools are both easy to build and install -- just drop the tool in a folder), and publish the result. Nice. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 6:41:58 AM

© Copyright 2002 Douglas W. Burke.