One Canuck's Radio Weblog

  Thursday, 23 October 2003

.< 10:33:28 PM >
EE Times: From October 13, 2003;...

EE Times: From October 13, 2003; Casting a wider, deeper Net [Tomalak's Realm] 'Since the dot-com bust and the wider economic slowdown, there has been much speculation about a new killer app to reignite the technology sector's fortunes. A conference on emerging technologies held recently at MIT suggested that elusive agent may be hiding in plain sight in the form of the Internet. Intel Corp., which is especially active in this pursuit, described a two-pronged plan to retrofit the Internet by means of PlanetLab and a network composed of miniature hardware called Motes. If they come to fruition, the two ideas could radically reshape both the electronics industry and consumer products.'

< 10:28:33 PM >

'Severe security threat' diverts El Al aircraft to Hamilton
Hamilton's John Munro International Airport was alive with RCMP tactical units, police and security teams on Thursday morning, after an El Al flight was diverted because of a "severe security threat." F U L L S T O R Y
[CBC News]

< 10:26:16 PM >

Amazon launched its book-searching feature today; we were talking about this idea all the way back in late 1996 when I worked there as catalog manager. It's so cool to see it come to fruition. My friend, old boss, current officemate, and colleague Steve Roth had this idea way back in the mid-90s: why not have a site at which you could search fulltext, see a little context, and then buy the book? It took a long time for rights, technology, and integration to make it happen. I've been using O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf for a few months, and it's a similar idea taken a step further. For a fee per month, you're licensing the rights to search and read any page in a book on their site up to a certain number of books at one time. You can search for free, actually, and the results are useful because they show context. All of this is to the good for authors: it allows our work to be seen as useful in context, and to increase sales based on utility. [GlennLog]

< 10:23:21 PM >

Wired News: The Great Library of Amazonia. An ingenious attempt to illuminate the dark region of books is under way at Amazon.com. Over the past spring and summer, the company created an unrivaled digital archive of more than 120,000 books. The goal is to quickly add most of Amazon's multimillion-title catalog. [Tomalak's Realm]

< 10:21:32 PM >

Rogers Cadenhead has posted another sample chapter from his new Radio UserLand book on the outliner. "When I began using Radio as a version 7 beta tester three years ago, I thought it was heresy to create Web content -- much less source code -- in an outliner. These days I'm an outliner junkie, writing programs, magazine articles, and everything else I can in either Radio or the Java Outline Editor (JOE)." [UserLand Product News]

< 8:07:37 PM >

Bill Clinton reaches a deal with drugs firms to slash the cost of Aids medicines for developing countries. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

Meanwhile Bush covers his oil buddies butts and bombs the bejeepers out of Baghdad.

< 6:55:26 PM >

The federal cabinet has shelved the plan for high-speed rail in the Windsor-Quebec corridor - not the first time its resurrection eventually. At the same time, CN is at least upgrading the track between here and Halifax. [montreal city weblog]

Darn. My guess this is in part due to lobbying from the airline industry.

< 12:33:58 PM >

President Bush tells Australia it has a "special responsibility" for security in the Pacific, as he is heckled by some MPs. [BBC News | World | UK Edition] 'When Green Party Senator Kerry Nettle shouted protests about the US-led war in Iraq, Mr Bush smiled and said: "I love free speech".

The 18-year-old son of Mamdouh Habib, one of two Australians being held at a US military prison in Cuba without charge after the Afghan invasion, was dragged out after yelling: "Hey Bush, what about my Dad?"

Outside parliament up to 2,000 demonstrators staged protests against Mr Bush's visit as police mounted an unprecedented security operation.'

< 12:32:06 PM >

Some 600 new species of fish have been found in a giant census of the oceans and thousands may still be discovered. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

< 12:24:31 PM >

This week Apple will release Mac OS X version 10.3, the next edition of its three-year-old operating system. Is it worth the price? [New York Times: Technology]

Panther's lookin' mighty yummy. Another fine article from Mr. Pogue.

< 12:06:11 PM >

"Flash in the pan" may be the best term for millions of Web logs. [New York Times: Technology] Perhaps most biting, the study found that the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends. Are blogs just that old friend from the 90's, the Web diary, dressed up in new tools?

The answer is yes and no. Perseus itself offers some significant caveats to its study. For one, only blogs on blog-hosting services like LiveJournal were studied. Blogs maintained by individuals on their own servers were not included, and one could argue that the most influential blogs fall in that category.'

Hey, what's wrong with teenage girls keeping their friends up to date?

< 12:01:21 PM >

Canon today posted firmware 1.1.1 for the EOS 300D / Digital Rebel. This is the first firmware update for this camera and appears to be a fairly mild update with fixes mostly to USB communications. [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]

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