Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Samsonite with Bluetooth. You travel often. You like stylish hard luggage. You use Bluetooth. You need a Samsonite Suitcase with Bluetooth [from: JB Ecademy] [jbond's blog at voidstar.com] OK, it's a stretch. This one's more along the lines of techhnology in search of a problem than of some sort of revolutionary product. There may be some slight merits to storing identity and ownership info in the suitcase, and it'd be pretty cool to have my Nokia vibrate (or better yet, ring a custom ring tone!!) when a thief makes off with the luggage, but in general it seems Samsonite's just trying to "one-up" the competition in any way they can. To quote the Jeff Goldblum character, Dr. Ian Malcolm, in Jurassic Park, "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." 3:45:23 PM    comment []

Napster Co-Founder's New Venture. Like Napster, Sean Parker's latest endeavor involves sharing. But this time it's personal information, not music, which isn't likely to rile the music industry. By Xeni Jardin. [Wired News] OK, this is a cool idea, but there are other competitors in the market already (for example, Yahoo!'s address book service provides a custom version of Intellisync that allows users to sync their Yahoo! address book with the Palm Desktop). There are a couple of reasons I think keep these solutions from being more broadly adopted, particularly by BigCos: * Poor security - or at least the perception of poor security. Individuals may not think twice about moving other people's names, addresses, phone numbers, and birthday info around over open protocols on the Internet, but corporate users take a pretty dim view of this type of practice as it opens them to possible legal liabilities on the grounds of privacy and information protection. * Narrow client-side support (only Windows, only Outlook, only Palm Desktop, etc.) * Proprietary - This, again, may be more of a perception than a reality, but today there seem to be no standards underpinning any of these products, other than the standards that are supported within the client-side tools (stuff like vCard). 9:31:21 AM    comment []

Why some Java applets fail to load with an "applet not initialized" message. I knew it had to be cert-related. This problem has plagued me for months with both corporate intranet applications and various Internet sites. While it's pretty annoying to have to move certs around from Win to Mac, at least the work-around exists. 9:08:25 AM    comment []

802.11 Planet - Tutorials. I was looking round for good "How to" guides about WiFi and came across the 802.11 Planet - Tutorials. Good stuff and worth reading if you want a primer into WiFi. [from: JB Wifi] [jbond's blog at voidstar.com] Hey, not only is this a great WiFi tutorial site, but they've cataloged WiFi hotspots in quite a few cities. Even Minneapolis offers quite a few listings! I know where I'll be going for drinks, dinner, etc. 8:32:16 AM    comment []

Kewl Mac OSX trick: Mount remote disk images locally through a browser. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] How simple, how elegant, how "Mac"! Disk image files (.dmg) become remote volumes through the adoption of a new protocol prefix -- "disk://" -- which, when it replaces the "http://" in a URL that points to the image, tells Mac OS X to mount the image instead of downloading it! Thanks to Adam Curry and Mac OS X Hints for helping to surface this subtle feature. 8:19:47 AM    comment []