|
Underway in Ireland
 |
31 October 2002 |
15 SECONDS -- Learn how the pros and cons of different non-standard HTTP tunneling techniques have shaped current XML Web services technology.
|
|
OPEN -- Months ago, the Open Mailing List discussed how far someone could go to publicly name and shame someone in Ireland. Now victimised users from eBay are starting to put up websites exposing those who defraud.
|
|
Open: Evolution in the Mobile Phone Market OPEN -- Several Open thinkers (specifically Brian rezoned, BHG, and Gaddo) mentioned some interesting points concerning the current evolution of the Irish mobile market. Distilling their ideas risks marginalising some of their emphasis, but here's what I took from the mailing list comments.
- Mobile phone manufacturers have spent years trying to refine their operating systems. Microsoft has just started this process.
- Microsoft has succeeded in achieving full spectrum dominance before. That feat will be more difficult today.
- Phones don't have to have Bluetooth, or IR, or a camera. They have to work and be affordable.
- GPRS is too expensive.
|
|
Landing in a World Where Computing is a Utility BALLYBLOG -- I am toying around with some "first mover" technology and sincerely believe we're able to bolt everything together because of three serendipitous evolutions in technology. - Our back office staff can avail of a rendering grid which allows them to create things on their desktops and send them over the network for rendering. A few years ago, your desktop created, then rendered, while you sat idle.
- We have built in elements of autonomous computing so that the deployed computers monitor themselves and correct erratic behaviours. This makes the deployed computers more like utilities rather than mere computers.
- We sit on top of abundant bandwidth, a factor that makes continuous connectivity a reasonably-priced commodity. That's good for everybody.
Uploaded by Radio TransNote on a train, using Nokia D211 and Vodafone HSD.
|
|
OPEN: Design Your API First OPEN -- We are building an extensible application by defining an API that the outside world must go through in order to access the data in a centrally controlled location. We think this is the surest way to maintain data integrity.
Uploaded on the train from TransNote with Nokia D211 using Vodafone HSD Services.
|
|
NEWS com -- T-Mobile will be adding hot spots in Delta, United airport clubs, expanding service T-Mobile already has in some American Airlines Admiral's Clubs. Analysts' reports indicate 40 million business travelers are "mobile professionals," or people who work on the go with technology, and 20 million travelers use the three major airlines' club lounges each year.
[80211b News and Alan Reiter]
|
|
Get Your Free Copy of Office Ben Hammersley -- When commenting on the (free) Open Office, Ben Hammersley remarked, "I'm as much a power user as anyone, and I've not been able to find any downside at all. Everyone can still read my documents, and I can read theirs." The newest version of Microsoft's Office Suite will only work on Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 and Windows XP. This forced-upgrade strategy has tenebrous implications for many businesses running on fixed IT budgets, who say they may turn to StarOffice or OpenOffice.
Sent on a train by Noka 9210i as e-mail to blog.
|
|
CNET -- Monet Mobile Networks, a new wireless Internet service provider is offering speeds up to 20 times faster than typical dialup services using the CDMA20001xEV-DO standard in North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. EV-DO, as it's nicknamed, offers downloads at speeds up to 2.4Mbps, and leading wireless carriers Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS may be considering building EV-DO networks by 2005. Both companies now use the CDMA standard, which is adaptable to the faster version. Verizon says it is already testing EV-DO networks in San Diego and Washington, DC. Meanwhile, Monet plans to focus its business strategy on bringing broadband Internet access to rural areas, which typically are underserved. For $40 a month, Monet subscribers get unlimited Web access, three e-mail addresses and 5MB of data storage.
Sent by Noka 9210i as e-mail to blog from Shanowen Road WiFi hotspot.
|
|
|
30 October 2002 |
SUN TIMES -- "Web sites are colorful and noisy and clicky, but when you get down to how content is organized, a Web site really isn't more sophisticated than an analog newspaper." Andy Ihnatko likes the Radio Aggregator. He recommends NewzCrawler for Windows and he recommends reading RSS feeds to stay up to date.
|
|
ELECTRIC NEWS -- Vodafone has shifted its emphasis on email support from companies towards individuals. ENN says the move anticipates a robust uptake of MMS, part of Vodafone Live! I got my promotional literature last week and all I need now is a Nokia 7650 to climb aboard. Well, I also need to budget for the higher costs of connectivity, because MMS use will cost nearly four times as much as my SMS and GSM use.
|
|
Will Durant -- I need to follow this advice from Will Durant: "One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say."
[Quotes of the Day]
|
|
Sjoerd Visscher -- Everyone with an interest in easily connecting to XML needs to look at Xopus. Q42 doesn't have a marketing department, and their Xopus site looks daunting.
All actions in Xopus are schema controlled. If the schema doesn't allow it, the user can't do it. This doesn't stop with structural actions, like 'can you add one or more Authors to a Book', but markup is also restricted by the schema. Can a user only add bold and italic, or also lists and tables? And if the user can add links, is he then allowed to add a target attribute? This is a big issue for CMSs, where the site designers want to give the site a consistent look and feel, but where the editors keep messing things up.
Xopus provides the standard Word-like interface, like toolbars, context-menus, and some dialogs. But a user must do more than edit some XHTML. For example, the University of Groningen allows teachers to edit course descriptions and other course related data using Xopus. The two options they had before were either teach the teachers to use an XML editor, or build huge amounts of html forms more or less by hand.
The teacher doesn't even have to know the storage structure of the CMS. If he wants to edit his course, he fires up his browser and he surfs to the webpage of the course. And because the system can recognise the teacher, an extra link appears to edit the course. When clicked, the Xopus toolbar slides in and the course data becomes editable.
|
|
LAW MEME -- Excellent discussion on the heels of ENN Opinion, Economist writing and Reuters reporting concerning whether all web info is publicly accessible. We talked about this issue on the Open Mailing List several times during the past two years. Wired thinks security by obscurity could be threatened by this Swedish legal review.
|
|
|
29 October 2002 |
Sighting: Dell OptiPlex SX260This small-footprint computer can easily be mounted on the
back of a flat panel monitor. Because the SX260 is a modular unit, unlike some competing all-in-one designs, it can also sit horizontally or vertically on or under a desk.
|
|
Cuppa Firewall DUBLIN -- I glanced at financial figures for a leading training and development company and noticed that they spend more on the coffee bar than they do on digital security. Across town, an affiliate company bolted down their newly installed DSL connection with an independent firewall. Security must come hand-in-hand with new always-on connections, or companies will never know an intruder is visiting.
|
|
DIGITALMASS -- Ireland gets to see Microsoft Tablet PC technology this week. I have used a stylus with W98 for over a year and Palm stylus since last century. The Windows software was never as good as the Palm technology, so I am eager to sneak a peek at what's coming our way in time for Christmas.
|
|
How Long to Make an Hour?How long does it take to develop one good hour of classroom training? How long to develop one good hour of computer-based training? I spend nearly onw work-week (38 hours) to develop one good hour of computer-based training. I can create one good hour of classroom training in 10 hours. Rosalyn Zigmond, president of Educational Design Group LLC,says "An hour of training is good when learners understand the material well enough to applyit to their jobs and improve their performance." That is why I like proficiency-based objectives.
|
|
|
28 October 2002 |
MACROMEDIA -- Good thoughts about Web site usability on DesDev.
- Get to know your audience and design for them—not for yourself or your colleagues
- Test your site with inexperienced web users
- Make the content on your first page rich and explanatory
- Archive content after redesigning or changing a site
- Include useful search terms in meta tags and titles
- Provide contact and copyright information on every page
- Provide search options
- Maintain consistency of design
- Think about noise, movement, or anything that spins twice ... no, wait ... three times
- Proofread the text on your sites
- Provide printer-friendly pages
- Enhance your pages—don't replace them
|
|
Flash MX -- Check out how washingtonpost.com coverage of the local area sniper shootings uses Flash MX for its maps and descriptive details. The Montgomery Country information includes video. Here's another one : ShelterNet provides Canadian women fleeing abuse with a ColdFusion MX and Flash MX interactive map to find a shelter near them.
[Matt Brown's Radio Weblog]
|
|
Adam Curry -- You can hear Adam Curry's audio-blog post on the webtalk guys radio show where Mitch Ratcliffe guest hosted. It also arrives as an enclosure in this RSS feed, so if you aggregate with Radio UserLand, you will automatically receive the mp3 file for immediate playback.
|
|
Sighting: Sony Electronics Offerings SONY -- Sony wants to tie its computers into all things entertainment. I've seen interesting things in European Sony Centres. - Vaio Media is an alternative to Windows Media Center with its own interface for audio, video, and data management. Different PCs on a home network can use it to easily share content.
- Click to DVD makes it elementary to transfer video from a camcorder to a DVD.
- RoomLink is a little wireless device that attaches to your TV, allowing you to use your PC's media on the TV.
All these things reflect Sony's business model. Sony aims to boost sales of digital camera, MP3 players, camcorders and TVs with its PC business, and vice versa. Once you get over the fact that Sony's memory stick is proprietary, the experience is rather seamless.
|
|
My Sony Vaio Experience BALLYBLOG -- I've liked Sony's laptops since the early days of the Vaio. It took me a while to understand that the name stood for Video Audio Integrated Operation but shortly after I figured that out, I bought a Vaio laptop. That was in December 2000. I dropped the Vaio several times during the course of an academic term, ultimately cracking an internal hinge attach point for the screen. Within a dozen times of opening the screen, I shorted out the motherboard. That meant I got 14 months of use out of the Vaio. I had the laptop on a 24-month payment plan and my finance plan says I have two more months of payments remaining. Will I get another Vaio, eke out wireless connectivity issues with my TransNote, or move up to a Powerbook?
|
|
|
27 October 2002 |
Sighting: Think Solutions IBM -- The Think Solutions campaign aims to make owning PCs less onerous. One application allows users to carry laptops between wired and wireless networks without having to fiddle with internal settings. Another program continually duplicates everything a user does on his PC to a special area on his hard drive. If a machine dies, the user can more easily get running again.
|
|
Alsop's Outrageous Cellular Call FORTUNE -- Stewart Alsop believes CDMA will unseat GSM as a worldwide standard by 2010. What he argues is heresy in the world of cellular phones. Nonetheless, the facts show that CDMA makes for better phone calls and for better data services. It is easier and cheaper for wireless carriers to install and upgrade. And it will enable those carriers to find new revenue streams by hawking high-speed data services. That's the kind of performance advantage that leads to a real competitive advantage. And competitive advantages have a way of overwhelming even well-established technical standards. Alsop has eight years for the market to prove him right.
|
|
Why Women Should Rule the World FORTUNE -- Kim Campbell, former Prime Minister of Canada, has a solution for today's scandal-riddled world: women leaders. "The qualities that are defined as masculine are also the same qualities that are defined as the qualities of leadership. There is virtually no overlap between the qualities ascribed to femininity and those to leadership." Yet in several studies, Campbell said, "results show that when you have a critical mass of women in an organisation, you have less corruption."
Lest you think that all we aspire to for the world can be accomplished by male-dominated organisations, I have only to say to you: Enron, Taliban, Roman Catholic Church.
|
|
What'a Happening to the Shannon Knowledge Network? THURLES, County Tipperary -- I pinged a few servers that should be in the Tipperary Technology Park and they're not there. They were supposed to be part of the Shannon Knowledge Network. Technology parks in Tralee, Thurles, Birr and Ennis were to link together as part of a world class business environment for knowledge-based companies. It meant having the Thurles servers positioned so as to take advantage of the upturn in the world economy when it comes about. Those servers are not running anymore. Maybe there's another reason, but it looks like the Thurles link of the Shannon Knowledge Network is offline.
|
|
Siemens Takes Risk with GSM in America SIEMENS -- Virtually unknown in the United States, Siemens is walking into the American market with its GSM technology. Siemens makes only GSM equipment, not the CDMA equipment that dominates the US. The trend is not with GSM. The two big networks that use CDMA, Verizon and Sprint, are winning market share from AT&T Wireless and Cingular, the carriers that switched to GSM.
I think American wireless carriers will quickly enter 3G space and standardise early on UMTS. This standardisation could marginalise Siemens, a company with little expertise in the faster space.
I think American carriers have discovered that CDMA works better. CDMA systems transmit clearer sound, plus the system is better suited for data. Carriers also know CDMA is easier and cheaper to install. It's CDMA-based companies like Sprint that are making real offers of new data services to customers earlier than networks running GSM. All these facts spell trouble for Siemens' entry as a GSM network provider.
|
|
More e-Government Services Needed for Ireland DUBLIN -- If Ireland aspires for world leadership in the realm of e-business, the government must seriously consider putting the following things online: - Registration of new companies
- Search of trademark and patent databases
- Application for work permits
- Tendering for state contracts
- Filing of company annual returns
|
|
|
26 October 2002 |
Irish Immigration Policy Needs Work DUBLIN -- Immigration has lurked below the surface of Irish political debate for years but now politicians have to take charge of the issues if they want to stay in control of the situation. Before coming to Ireland, I knew the country as one of emigrants. I count my great-grandparents among the millions of Irish who emigrated to the United States. Today, the issue has inverted to where Irish fear immigrants. Public concern focuses on the long-term effect of immigration on urban communities and jobs. Getting a work permit is no longer a straight-forward event. I consumed more than five months with the paper chase. A consultative process undertaken by the Department of Justice last April reported
"Immigration policy and practise are significant aspects of the exercise by a country of sovereignty. In general terms, a state has the right to choose which non-nationals to admit and which not to admit to its territory and to decide what they may do while in the territory and when they should leave." I have experienced Irish immigration policy first-hand and believe the government's approach is anyting but sensitive and coherent. The status quo needs revisiting because it is not a system in which the public can have confidence.
Bernie Goldbach: Refused Leave to Land in Ireland
x: 26121
|
|
Facts About Irish ICT Sector 
ICT IRELAND -- The Irish ICT sector remains resilient but much quieter than in the Y2K days.
- The sector employes almost 100,000 people in 980 companies, which is up from 47,000 in 1993
- Seven of the world's largest software companies have a base in Ireland.
- One-third of all PCs sold in Europe are manufactured in Ireland.
- Total exports of ICT products and services amounted to €31bn in 2001, representing 33 percent of all exports.
- ICT exports grew by 23 percent a year over the period 1993-2001, 1.5 times that of non-ICT exports.
- Output of ICT products and services was equivalent to almost 16 percent of Ireland's GDP in 2001. This increased by 18 percent a year over the period 1993-2001, twice the rate of overall GDP growth.
- The indigenous software sector currently employs 18,000 people, compared with 3,000 people in 1992.
- Exports by the indigenous software sector grew by 28 percent in 2001 and amounted to €1.4 billion.
|
|
Accelerating Entrepreneurial Development Paul O'Dea -- According to the MD of International Ventures, ICT Ireland has identified several key areas which have a major impact on the ability for an economy to promote ICT start-ups and help turn them into global players. - research and development
- market access for ICT start-ups
- access to funding and finance
- people skills required for ICT start-ups
- government policy.
In order to sustain Ireland's position as a high tech economy, the viability and strength of the indigenous sector is crucial.
|
|
Restricting Advertisements by Solicitors Will Cost Golden Pages DUBLIN -- New solicitors' regulations due to come into force in November could cost the Irish Golden Pages more than one million euro in lost revenue. The Solicitors' Advertising Regulations 2002 will severely limit the contents of advertisements and will effectively ban personal injuries advertising. The Irish Golden Pages features dozens of pages of classified ads from solicitors, most of which will be outlawed by the new regulations. The Dublin area Golden Pages carries more than 63 pages of large display ads for which solicitors would have paid in excess of €1,087,000.
The Bar Council estimates that 40% of earnings by its members are from personal injuries. Barristers earn a massive chunk of their money through negotiations privately with each other on behalf of their respective clients before the issue ever gets to court.
|
|
Irish Employers Cannot Legally Monitor Employee e-mail Ciaran O'Mara -- If you monitor the external phone calls and Internet e-mail of employees, you may be violating an EU regulation that outlaws surveillance of workers' communications. Surveillance of employees in the workplace is controlled by the 1995 Data Protection Directive and the 1997 Telephone Privacy Directive. Article 5 of the Data Directive says member states must "ensure via national regulations the confidentiality of communications. In particular, they shall prohibit listening, tapping, storage or other kinds of interception or surveillance of communicaitons, by other than users, without the consent of the users concerned." Ireland has not legislated for any exceptions or restrictions to Article 5 since May 2002. O'Mara, managing partner of O'Mara Geraghy McCourt, cannot see how any solicitor could safely advise an employer that he can monitor employee communications.
|
|
World Class Needed for World Stage Barry Maloney -- "The boom days are gone now. Technology leverage in a world market, with world-class management, is what is going to make the difference."
|
|
What Is Enterprise Ireland Doing to Spur Start-ups? TORNADER INSIDER -- Listening to the chatter at an investment conference in Media Lab Europe, it's easily to discern that Enterprise Ireland has allocated €95m for Irish companies and expects this to leverage €400m in further cash. You can get money easier if you're running a company in the border, midlands and western region. Ernst & Young's European survey says VC investment in Ireland increased from €15m in 1Q02 to €88m in the second quarter.
|
|
Irish VC Depression DUBLIN -- Venture capitalists invested EUR 208m in Irish companies in 2001 but just EUR 124m in 2002. This is a depression. It has led to the Sunday Business Post rewarming CNET stories in its technology section because there aren't Irish success stories at the moment. Since 2000, venture capitalist investment has dropped spectacularly. About EUR 2.4bn in venture capital was invested in Erope in the first half of 2002. That is down 46% on the amount for the second half of last year, according to a survey by Ernst & Young and VentureOne. This is a killer for start-ups. A venture capitalist usually looks for at least 25% return on investment and needs to see results within a year. Irish technology no longer performs at this level.
|
|
Sebastian Fielder -- Good stuff on weblogs in education including nice group weblog using RSS to incorporate guest columnists.
|
|
Glenn Fleishman -- I wrote my weekly technology column in The Irish Examiner on the same topic of powerbook convergence that Glenn Flieshman filed for The Seattle Times. In Ireland, there are several PowerBooks with single or multiple boots into flavors of Linux and (mostly) BSD Unix.
[GlennLog, Mac Net Journal and dws.]
|
|
Locals in Lanesborough LANESBOROUGH, County Longford -- Justine McCarthy visited this quintessential Irish town and reported on the trip for readers in The Irish Independent. Some readers want to know how 50 new arrivals from Turkey have influenced the local landscape. Tractors trundle down the main street, past the smattering of pubs and over the Shannon into Connaught. It is especially pretty in the summer when cruiser ply the Shannon but, in winter, it is a quiet place. In the Lough Ree Area Development C-op, the chairman Ciaran Mulloly, is cogitating on the number and variety of non-Irish born people who have recently moved to the town. In addition to the Turkish men, there are Finns, Latvians, Chinese, Filipinos, English and French. "It's the sort of multi-cultural mix this community has never experienced before and will find it difficult to deal with," he says. Diversity is always a difficult challenge for a homogenous society.
|
|
|
25 October 2002 |
AUSTIN, Texas -- Jennifer Lee writes in the NYT that the data contained in a hand-held says a lot about its owner, whether that person is a corporate tycoon or a petty thief. "It's an alter ego," said Larry Leibrock, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and has been a consultant in many forensic cases involving hand-helds. "It represents their aspirations, who their contacts are, where they spend their time, their tasks and objectives, and how they completed those."
|
|
DUBLIN -- Vodafone Ireland launched their MMS services yesterday and although I can see compelling reasons to upgrade to a first generation camera phone, I can't say a wide variety of my friends have the money or inclination to do the same. Research by J.D. Power and Associates shows that renewal periods for handsets are gradually creeping upwards to 18 months, meaning any wholesale change to MMS capable phones is going to take time to reach a mass market. However, I also believe friends who bought a phone to avail of WAP may feel inclined to buy up now. I would bet on the Christmas 2002 mobile phone market generating more revenue than last year.
|
|
Adam Curry -- We know Dave Winer is working on making his outliner better. Many of us want to blog in the outliner. Adam Curry is especially enthusaistic. It's how I think about my weblog, especially the homepage will be so much more fun to maintain when I'm able to promote or demote posts at will, without breaking comments, permalinks and other assorted CMS stuff. It will forever change the way I post to my weblog and it wouldn't surprise me if this type of tool catches on with bloggers and online publishers.
|
|
ANTI PIXEL -- Using these buttons means you're on the road to cross-publishable content grounded in validated RSS code.
|
|
ECONOMIST -- From some work done in the Xi Skunk Works, I know that people like sending text messages to their television screens. They like it even more when they can text to everyone's television screen. Gartner's figures show that 20% of teenagers in France, 11% in Britain and 9% in Germany have sent messages in response to TV shows [...] This has much to do with the boom in reality TV shows, such as Big Brother, in which viewers' votes decide the outcome. Most reality shows now allow text-message voting, and in some cases, such as the most recent series of Big Brother in Norway, the majority of votes are cast in this way.
|
|
NASA and UIOWA -- Sounds converted from plasma waves in outer space will form the basis of a musical performance in the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium tomorrow. A physicist at the University of Iowa has been recording the waveforms for over 40 years with instruments on NASA's Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini, and over 24 additional spacecraft. Data was captured near Jupiter, Venus, and other planets, then transformed into sound patterns. The resulting tones became the conceptual basis of a musical composition called "Sun Rings," which the Kronos Quartet will debut October 26 at the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City. You can hear plasma wave instruments, Galileo in Ganymede's magnetosphere, and Voyager's passage through the bow shock of the solar wind against Jupiter's magnetosphere.
|
|
INFORMATION WEEK -- Joan Soat reports that PanIP LLC has sued more than 50 companies in the last seven months, claiming that their E-commerce Web sites infringe its two U.S. patents. The patents, No. 5,576,951 and No. 6,289,319, cover, respectively, an "automated sales and services system," and an "automatic business and financial transaction-processing system."
|
|
TIME MACHINE GO -- Among the hundreds of sites sits dubberley.com, written in Dublin (or is it Dubberlyn) this week.
|
|
MOTION COMPUTING -- I have a computer that looks and feels like a leather-bound diary. It's a TransNote from IBM. It's an older version of a Tablet PC and unlike the tablets, it has a touch screen. Motion Computing offers a Tablet PC and it features
- full Windows computing power with pen and audio input
- does not need a keyboard
- is portable, non-instrusive and wireless
Like Tom Krazit at Infoworld and Russell Beattie, I think the Tablet PC is part of a natural evolution in personal computing, towards corridor workers. This is niche kit, targeted at health care and large sales organizations, that need usability above all else. But analysts interviewed by BBC Technology News don't agree. And Walt Mossberg cautions readers to wait a generation before buying this kind of product. Slashdotters are just about evenly divided between the detractors and the potential advocates.
I would be wary of the Tablet PC supplanted the Gemstar or Hiebook e-book readers. Pesonally, I believe people buy dedicated readers, instead of paying out for all-in-one devices.
I have written on the Compaq TC1000 and it felt just like paper. This is the best tablet computer on the market. It's the size of an American page (8.5 inches wide by 11 inches deep), 0.8 inches thick and lightweight. A base configuration including a 30G-byte hard drive, 256M bytes of RAM, USB 2.0 ports, and the GeForce2 Go 100 graphics card from Nvidia Corp. costs $1,699, and it is available directly through HP at its Web site. A version with a built-in 802.11b card also sells for $1,799.
Slablet Pictures from Win Supersite.
"Tablet PCs Seek Developers" by Ephraim Schwartz in Infoworld.
"Gateway Takes to Tablets" by Michael Kanellos 18 Nov 02.
|
|
|
24 October 2002 |
DUBLIN -- Today marks the Irish launch of Vodafone Live! Ireland is probably the most text-happy mobile phone population. Will that communicative population send photos as often as they send text messages? The networks are off to a good start because you will be able to send MMS messages across Ireland and through the two major networks. This is the beginning of a framework on top of which new applications will sit.
|
|
DUBLIN -- I've got 22 pages from MLE's e-Sense Conference in an A5 notebook that deserve distilling online. I started by blogging the conference live, assisted in a great way by Tim Kirby at Xi Creative. The nicest touch about the technology is it worked effortlessly. I would write a short comment in a draft e-mail on the Nokia 9210i, scan it for correctness, then send it to an address where it published automaticaly to the blog. This is simple knowledge management and the kind of service that most agencies should ensure is offered to conference participants.
|
|
DUBLIN -- As Emily Dubberley writes, there needs to be more open wireless hotspots in Dublin. After all, Ireland's capital claims to be on the mainline of the Information Superhighway. That would mean WiFi hotspots should be near the major train stations and accessible in the lobbies of the bus terminals as well. Isn't that what one would expect of a truly connected Information Society? WiFi hotspots are in Heuston Station, The Westbury, The Burlington Hotel, The Towers JurysDoyle Hotel, Bewley's Hotel Ballsbridge, Bewley's Hotel Newlands Cross, The Shelbourne, and the Hilton Dublin. Emily appears on Newstalk 106 with Daire O'Brien tomorrow. The radio station is holding its share of 3 percent of Dublin listeners, according to the latest MRBI/JNLR figures.
MRBI/JNLR audience share figures, regarded as a more accurate assessment of radio listenership, are included in the biannual report due in early 2003. A total of 3680 people were interviewed in the latest measure of the "reach" of the stations.
x: 1013
|
|
|
23 October 2002 |
Meg Hourihan -- When people talk about making money through their blogs, their discussions focus on blog content and explore donations, advertising, or some type of sponsorship model as the means to compensate bloggers. Very little progress has been made towards finding viable economic models because people still think of Weblogs as personal sites. Most people don't blog full-time. They learn to blog to supplement genre-specific content that complements an existing marketing message. That new content attracts customers, increases revenues, and makes the blogging employee more productive. That's making money through blogging.
|
|
Mark Hurst -- Tim Kirby pointed out Marissa Mayer's insights on Google's lean, unintimidating and highly successful interface design.
"When you see a knife with all 681 functions opened up, you're terrified. That's how other sites are. You're scared to use them. Google has that same level of complexity, but we have a simple and functional interface on it, like the Swiss Army knife closed."
|
|
Dave Winer -- Work is underway that rewrites Dave's weblog outliner so it works with Movable Type.
I have the outliner saving, although the formatting is really sucky. Adam Curry emails to remind me that he wants this to work with Radio and Manila. But first I want to make it work with Movable Type. Everyone will expect that it will work with our own blogging stuff. The chance to blow people's minds is to show it working through the open interface of a competitor's product. This is how we show web services working, as they were always supposed to, eliminating lock-in, allowing us to enhance each others' products, and to take the fear out of serving our customers. The BigCo's don't get this, they patent stuff and have powwow's among execs who have no idea what the software is used for. Heh. In the meantime us little folk are building a market. This is a big deal. Tim Kirby is watching it. So is Emily Dubberley.
"Mena Trott Talks Movable Type" to South-by-Southwest Interactive, 22 Oct 02.
|
|
SMART MOBS -- Mitch Kapor: "Up Periscope!".
The few key words there are "securely" and "without... expensive server computers." This sounds like real, secure Peer-to-Peer groupware, and -- as Gillmor observes -- it is potentially a big deal. Think of having a good and inexpensive alternative to Microsoft's bloated, insecure, and costly Outlook and Exchange products and attendant infrastructure. Then realize that Microsoft's email and calendaring software have many firms and organizations locked into Microsoft's software upgrade extortion. Kapor, founder of the software company that sold the influential and hugely successful Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program in the 1980s, is funding the initial work through a non-profit foundation.
|
|
DUBLIN -- Emily Dubberley visits Dublin to finish her novel. Plus, she is on Newstalk 106 on Friday (25 Oct 02) with Daire O'Brien. But you have to question her true motivation as she also has a short list that requires her to inspect all Dublin pubs frequented by journos and as she sets up her cantenna array to sniff open WiFi hotspots. Actually, I think I'd like to do those things as well. Hope she blogs her observations as a kind of WiFi Pub Crawl.
|
|
|
22 October 2002 |
Reive -- If you're thinking about going to New York City, you should read about NYC before you go.
|
|
CNET -- The US Direct Marketing Association thinks it's necessary to advocate a federal anti-spam law because unsolicited e-mail has become so noxious. Until now, the DMA has opposed the majority of anti-spam bills in Congress or offered only lukewarm support. But the ever-rising tide of junk e-mail has made the influential trade association rethink its stand. "Even legitimate business' messages are not being looked at because of the get-rich-quick schemes and pornography and so forth," Jerry Cerasale, the DMA's vice president for government affairs, told Declan McCullagh.
|
|
CHRONICLE -- A report from the U.S. Department of Education confirms the notion that
distance education appeals to working parents, especially women, more than to other groups. The report is based on a study of distance education during the 1999-2000 academic year. The study data show that of women who took college courses, 8.5 percent did so through distance education, versus 6.5 percent of men. Nine percent of college students over 24 years old took distance courses, compared to 6 percent of those under 24. The results confirm what many have noted: distance education offers those with work and family responsibilities the flexibility to advance their education when they are able.
|
|
Open: Chatroom Software OPEN -- Recommendations for chatroom software: - Build-a-chat" from Themechat uses Perl and HTML with a little bit of javascript. The javascript is only there to minimise flicker on the refresh. It costs $69.95 and is recommended by Brian Walsh.
|
|
|
21 October 2002 |
KIRBYCOM -- Although I have coffee and exchange development notes with Tim Kirby several times a week, his blog often takes our mutual paths into even higher orbits, like posting Movable Type from Radio. We've discovered we don't have to tell each other what we're doing because our RSS Explorers keep us abreast what we need to know about each other. Some might think that's freaky, especially in Ireland where everyone chats about everything. But for me, I like the economy of time I get in trusting Radio to tune into noise I need to hear. You cannot always depend on human memory to produce the same clarity of expression.
|
|
Gerry Sighting -- Gerry McGovern discovers mailing lists. "Subscription allows you to regularly communicate with your target readers. It allows you to establish an ongoing relationship. It is a highly efficient and cost-effective way of making sure that your message is reaching its target."
[OLDaily]
|
|
LAW MEME -- SearchKing, a company that charges money for artificially inflating its customers' Google rankings, is suing Google for having fixed its algorithm such that SearchKing's googlebombing doesn't work anymore. SearchKing claims that Google purposefully reduced "SearchKing and its related web sites' rankings has damaged the company's reputation and diminished its value." For a company in the business of artifically boosting PageRank scores and selling ads whose price is based on the boosted PageRank, this takes a lot of nerve. SearchKing is asking for a preliminary injunction (this marks the first time LawMeme has seen a legal document with a "your ad here" banner attached). The King does have a point: when your "business" consists of shoplifting and the corner store installs a security camera, you're going to go out of business quickly enough that an injunction is your only hope. On a similar note, Nigerian 419 scammers are planning a class-action suit against the FTC for telling people how their scam works.
[LawMeme]
|
|
Dave Winer -- There's support for HEAD requests in Radio's aggregator but it hasn't been released yet. Dave is thinking seriously of not releasing it at all and instead going with ETag support. Simon Fell has an excellent and brief Busy Developer's Guide to ETags. They're etter than the HEAD-based protocol, because they only require one call to the server. This gives servers who are getting pounded by aggregators a really clean way to respond.
|
|
WIRED -- Blogheads are discussing who is the sniper? says blogbytesman. Noah Shachtman writes in Wired that "conspiracy theories have long been an Internet staple. But a dearth of evidence about the sniper -- and the phenomenal explosion of blogs -- have brought (4860 pages of) online speculation to a screeching crescendo."
|
|
XI BLUE -- When Apple's Ireland team visited Xi Blue, there was some coffee chat about the iStudent programme running at Apple UK. As Tim Kirby explains, it's a flexible lease rental programme that offers an opportunity to lease an iBook and PowerBook computers for a one, two or three years with an option to buy the equipment for a nominal fee of just £50, after the term expires. Students are offered the option to purchase an AirPort card and/or an AirPort Base Station; the AppleCare Protection Plan, which gives you up to three years of Apple-certified service and support, is also included.
|
|
 BALLYBLOG -- Just around the time that O'Reilly and Associates were holding the first Mac OS X Conference in early October, I started getting a couple people a day visiting this blog to see Gianni Jacklone. (In fairness, half of the people visiting my stuff about Gianni have come to read about Britney's Lesbian Lust.) I linked to Gianni's OS X "it's the bomb" because his tall chiseled frame is there for the ladies. Jacklone has tech cred, but credit Apple for silently winning substantial converts from the Unix and Linux world on the back of OS X capabilities.
|
|
BLOGSPACE -- I really want to see an RSS feed from Glenn Fleishman, but like in other cases, I cannot get my news aggregator to pull info from Blogspace. Maybe it's a UserLand-Blogspace thing. Maybe Blogspace is slow. Maybe I'm not fast enough. Anyway, Glenn has an excellent piece in The Seattle Times about why programmers use Powerbooks and it's more persuasive than the Switch ads.
|
|
|
20 October 2002 |
I Want Broadband for Christmas  KILKENNY, Ireland -- I want an always-on Internet connection for Christmas. I wish Santa would come to my doorstep and promise me DSL. I know I'm different from a lot of other local residents because when researchers asked Irish whether they wanted broadband, only 14% said they would be "very likely" to sign up for the service. A full 25% of the Irish population said they were "not at all" likely to become broadband customers. That means more bandwidth for me!
|
|
TEXTISM -- Dean Allen will release Refer 1.0 pretty soon. His Refer Tools is a module of the Textism CMS. They offer up-to-the-minute tracking of incoming referrers to a web site.
|
|
Kevin Werbach -- Web services continue spreading. Service Grids: The Missing Link in Web Services is one of a series of working papers by John Hagel and John Seely Brown. Hagel and Brown point out the need for management and monitoring infrastructure to make Web services function in real enterprise environments. Where a year ago all the Web services companies were building development tools and basic SOAP wrappers, now the emphasis has shifted to ensuring performance, reliability, security, and cross-organizational integration. This is nuts-and-bolts stuff, as it will create the software architecture of the next 20 years. Kevin Werbach thinks it will be distributed infrastructure and he describes it for the panel at Supernova! The good ideas emerging around P2P, grid computing, and the semantic Web will all play a role.
|
|
Squeezing More Music and Playing It to Suit You REAL -- Although the music industry flatly refuses to admit as much, MP3 tracks recorded by people like me have prompted sales of CDs more than any of the industry's own stuttering marketing schemes. I started buying CDs for my collection after downloading tasters of new tracks. Thanks to my personal MP3 player, I carry around more than twice the music that my car's CD can play. With my Real burner, I can go up to 128k and rip surround sound. It's simply stunning. I need to shift how and when I play my music. I cannot be tied down to dedicated music players at home. That's one big reason why I will never buy a copy-protected CD. Why limit yourself to one format?
|
|
XI CREATIVE -- An underdeveloped market for corporate video exists in Ireland. Corporate videos are much more powerful for conveying info that long,written documents. If a medium-sized business needs to develop a video -- for a produc tlaunch, corporate profile, trade show or taining -- Xi Creative should be the first port of call.
|
|
SKILLNETS -- The second 3-year programme is open to employers in Ireland, with submissions due by 25 Nov. Companies can recover between 50% and 75% of their training costs by applying through the programme. Skillnets showed dozens of companies how to access national certification and third level education services.
|
|
LEXONOMY -- Amy Warner's "Taxonomy Primer" would help those building thesauri or a Table of Synonyms needed to populate meta data on a Web site.
|
|
Ireland Votes for the United States Federal Model ALL OVER IRELAND -- The citizens voted for the Treaty of Nice. An analysis of the voting patterns could suggest that Irish want a European government model similar to that of the United States, where a Senate of sorts sits with two votes from every member nation, regardless of the size of the nations sitting. Karlin Lillington offers a wide-ranging and accurate view of the core issues.
|
|
REGISTER -- "Microsoft has yanked another of its fraudulent user testimonials, in this case a fictitious twelve-year-old boy raving about a fictional homework assignment and the indispensable insights he received from MS Encarta Reference Library in preparing it."
|
|
|
19 October 2002 |
Kevin Werbach -- Yale Law School is holding "Revenge of the Blogs," a conference on Weblogs November 22, featuring
This follows a recent blogging panel and course at Berkeley.
|
|
Book: Women Who Kept the Lights NEWS SCAN -- Honorary Subscriber:
Abbie
Burgess Grant.
The remarkable American woman, Abbie
Burgess Grant (1839-1892), spent 38 of the 53 years of her life as a
lighthouse keeper, a highly atypical occupation for a
woman. Burgess's career tending lighthouse lamps began in 1853 one
week after her father, Sam Burgess, was appointed Lighthouse Keeper at the
Matinicus Rock Light Station, a windswept 32-acre granite island 18 miles
off the Maine shoreline and 25 miles from Rockland, the nearest
port. Although her father held the title of Lighthouse Keeper, she
was the one
actually doing the work. Her father was often off lobstering to augment his
income, and she became responsible for lighting the whale oil lamps and
performing other duties around the island. As one of ten children living in
an isolated environment, her invalid mother mostly home schooled her, but
the limited education she received did enable her to read and
write. When Captain John Grant, a friend of the family, succeeded Sam
Burgess as the Matinicus lighthouse keeper, Abbie stayed on to help train
Grant. The new keeper's son, Isaac, was the assistant keeper. A romance
quickly developed between Abbie Burgess and Isaac Grant and they were
married within a year. Abbie was officially appointed assistant keeper at
$440 per year. The couple had four children at the Rock before Isaac Grant
was appointed keeper of the White Head Light Station in 1875. Abbie
was a heroine upon several occasions, risking her safety and
well-being for the sake of her family and "those that go down to the sea
ships." In January 1856 her father left in his sailboat to pick up supplies
in Rockland, leaving Abbie alone with her mother and younger sisters. By
the afternoon a storm began with large waves and gale winds and increasing
over the next three days, leaving Matinicus Rock practically underwater.
Abbie moved her mother and sisters to the island's north lighthouse
tower
only a short time before a gigantic wave swept the island and destroyed the
original keeper's house. The island remained inaccessible for the next four
weeks, during which time Abbie kept the lights burning and cared for her
mother and sisters. Again in 1857 her father was away for three weeks
during a stormy period. That time the family's food supply was reduced to
one egg and a cup of corn meal mush a day before supplies
arrived. She died in 1892 in a house on Maple Street, Portland,
Maine. In 1960 historian Edward Rowe Snow organized a gathering at her
grave. A little metal lighthouse was unveiled at the foot of her grave, and
Poet Wilbert Snow read a poem that called her "the friend and guide of
sailors through dark nights."
["Women
Who Kept the Lights: An Illustrated History of Female Lighthouse
Keepers" by Mary Louise Clifford and J. Candace.]
|
|
On the Train -- I just overheard a teenager sitting down the aisle ask a friend, "Do you have Google?" as she went about describing how to find her class log online. On News.com, Wharton radio ads suggest listeners Google for "Wharton West" rather than remember the longer domain name. After all, if you paid for top billing, why even worry about a domain name? Meanwhile, Plasticbag reports Google got a mention in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Willow: Have you tried Googling her?
Xander (shocked): "Willow, she's only seventeen!"
[Google Weblog]
|
|
Richard Wiggins -- Perhaps the best way to handle search engine visibility is to author pages in accordance with known searches. For any given Web presence, whether intranet or global, the top 500 unique search phrases entered by users represent at least 40 percent of the total searches performed. Good metadata architecture should do this already, but it's difficult to enforce metadata standards across a large enterprise.
|
|
HANDY ru -- Palm Info Center spotted pictures of the next-generation Palm. The pictures show the screen of the Tungsten T at various angles and a side by side comparison with a HP HJournada 568.
[lockergnome]
|
|
LOCKERGNOME -- Some spammers are slipping ads through a hole in Windows. They use the messenger service, which is the channel normally reserved for sysadmins to send warnings to users when a server is scheduled to go down for maintenance. Now some advertisers are using it to send bulk messages to anyone connected to the Internet with an accessible address.
|
|
|
18 October 2002 |
Let's Uninvent It | BALLYBLOG -- Ever have something you wish could be uninvented? Coming from Lancaster Dutch Country, I've seen the Amish shaking their heads and wondering aloud at "what in the world are those English doing?" Right now, stuck on a train overflowing with boisterous students, I wish I could uninvent automatic doors. They're a nuisance as they open and close. I'd rather have them close off the rowdy bunch between carriages and let the cold draft suck their loud mouth energy away. | | | [x: 17] |
|
|
TV over IP | >> I think the Premier County should have a TV over IP. It shouldn't hog a lot of bandwidth. Streaming services with two minute shorts sounds just about right. | | | [x: 350] |
|
|
Ireland's Fortitude in The Information Age | BALLYBLOG -- Perhaps the biggest investment Ireland has made in the Information Age is the human resources and IT infrastructure behind local government initiatives. The hiring practises alone reveal courageous management. Many of the IT specialists come from outside the civil service. These newly-hired professionals aren't mired in a government career path. Rather, they are linked to well-defined skill sets as programmers or Web designers. And they're good. | | | [x: 26121] |
|
|
| JD on MX -- The Washington Post is talking to the experts and the punters are blogging about the cameras. Everywhere the cameras. "The average American is caught on camera eight to 10 times a day, law enforcement officials say." |
|
|
[x: 261] |
|
|
Matt Mower -- How about using blogs to improve language skills? One of Matt's friends commented on his imperfect English and suggested her help for improving it. She is going to start Radio blog, so he thinks:
- She makes a special category, which is not visible in her blog, but has an RSS feed.
- Then she uses this category to comment on my posts pointing to errors and suggesting improvements.
- I subscribe to this RSS, get my personal feedback and correct posts.
For multinational companies this could be a solution to help their employees developing language skills and overcoming fears of writing in foreign language. |
|
| [x: 109] |
|
|
|
|
Arid Desert of Venture Capital Funding | BOSTON -- Bleak news on the VC front. In 2001, for the first time ever, America’s venture capital industry generated a negative return. This dismal performance will repeat in 2002. Most of the money invested by east coast VC companies in 2000 is likely to be lost. Most of the start-ups are failing because they were ideas, not businesses. While poking around different offices, it's easy to see that the American VC industry faces a huge liquidity crunch because the lack of exits for venture capitalists to generate a return on their investments. In the late 1990s, many new companies could plan for an IPO and benefit from a huge windfall. That’s not happening now.
Some considered IPOs as the bellwether of the Irish Celtic Tiger boom.Now that IPOs are difficult, VCs focus on the potential for trade sales. This puts a premium on forging strategic partnerships. VCs will not put money into a company without an exit mechanism being considered. This has created a high hurdle for new companies searching for VC funding. It's not much better for later-stage companies. Several start-ups discovered their companies were valued less during second and third rounds of funding than their initial valuations. That’s depressing for founders.
But I've seen fund mangers who are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into mature businesses that show growth potential linked to the new business brought by an innovative acquisition. | | | [x: 109] [r: 3733] |
|
|
FORTUNE -- The print edition of Fortune magazine often arrives to my Irish mailbox two weeks late. Even so, there's illuminating reading. David Kirkpatrick has written two articles that spotlight the declining fortune of big media in the eyes of the consumer. In Turning Out the Consumer, he explains how media companies are defeating their long-term interests. In Listen to People Who Listen to Music, he heard media executives telling a discussion panel that they wanted to enter the digital future.
They then proceeded to lay out the criteria for how they'd like to do it--by encrypting all movies so they could only be viewed on approved devices that electronically monitored your rights to see a movie, and by inaugurating a complex system of payments that would vary based on how long you intended to use a movie. If you wanted to keep it and indefinitely play it on all the devices you own, you'd pay a much higher price than if you just watched it once or kept it for two days. But such unlimited usage would cost considerably more than we pay today for a movie on DVD. The word the executives used most often was "protection" -- they aim to protect their products from the depredations of their untrustworthy customers. Is there any doubt why highly talented programmers want to defeat this obnoxious perspective? | | | [x: 26121] |
|
|
| Kevin Werbach -- A thoughtful 148k white paper discussing Open Spectrum, alongside ideas for cognitive radio, ultrawideband, and software-defined radio. Werbach envisages a world of non-scarce spectrum where high-speed wireless data networks drive community activism, economic recovery and unparalleled innovation. Plus commentary from the Slashdot Rabble. |
|
| [x: 109] |
|
|
|
17 October 2002 |
|
Sneak Peek -- I just got a look behind the curtains of the South Tipperary County Council Web site. Two newly-hired IT specialists crafted an original information site, taking some very courageous steps forward in making public information more accessible to the taxpayers. This is definitely 21st century Web work and a fine example of sending tax money effectively. |
|
[x: 26121]
emailed to blog from Nokia 9210i over Vodafone HSD. |
|
|
Event: e-Forum Breakfast EVENT -- e-Forum Breakfast, Guinness Storehouse, Dublin, 0800 5 Nov 02. Mary Hanafin and Chris Horn take your €35 and talk about the state of the Nation's Information Society.
[x: e1]
|
|
Event: Sedona Conference 24 Oct EVENT -- Sedona Conference, Clontarf Castle, Dublin, Ireland, 24-26 Oct 02. The role of digital media in the educational sector will be the central theme. Over 100 delegates from around the world are expected to attend. The opening speaker is Edward de Bono, management theorist. Other speakers include Jerome Morrissey, director of Ireland's National Centre for Technology in Education, Chris Horn from Iona, and Stephen Heppel, Apple Master.
[x: e1]
|
|
RESEARCH BUZZ -- A quick look at the changes in Yahoo and a handy directory too.
[x: 109]
|
|
RADIO -- After I updated my Radio Root, I started getting a "comments" hyperlink in some of my News Aggregator stories. It's part of a Radio Update.
|
|
DIVE INTO MARK -- As Mark Pilgrim writes in Dive Into Accessibility, "virtually all accessibility guidelines are about adding, not subtracting. Have an image? Add alternate text. Have navigation? Add a skip link. Have those wacky dynamic Javascript menus? Add regular text links. Whatever kind of exciting stuff you have now, keep it, but add this too."
|
|
Ruth Maher -- Wants to be a female bear in her next life. "If you're a bear, you get to hibernate. You do nothing but sleep for six months.
Before you hibernate, you're supposed to eat yourself stupid.
If you're a bear, you birth your children (who are the size of walnuts) while you are sleeping and wake to partially grown, cute, cuddly cubs.
If you're a mama bear, everyone knows you mean business. You swat anyone who bothers your cubs. If your cubs get out of line, you swat them, too.
If you're a bear, your mate expects you to wake up growling. He expects that you will have hairy legs and excess body fat.
Yup, I wanna be a bear!
emailed to blog from Nokia 9210i over Vodafone HSD.
|
|
MACLACHLAN ie -- An Irish patent application is effective only in the Republic of Ireland, but if applications in other countries are filed within a period of one year from the date of filing of the Irish application, then the original Irish application date can be claimed as a "priority" date under an International Convention to which most developed countries adhere. You can file a patent directly with the Irish Patent Office in Kilkenny. If the filing has a technical description of the invention, accompanied by drawings, you will establish a priority date. This kind of application is insufficient to achieve the grant of a patent, as it lacks so- called patent "claims". The claims are the legal language which define the scope of the monopoly being sought for the invention. At any time within the twelve month period, the applicant has the option of completing the basic priority application by filing claims, or of filing a new application claiming the priority date of the initial application. So this means one could modify filings in a minor way and still ensure patent protection.
|
|
Jonathon Delacour -- "Given the paltry stipend one receives as a tenured faculty member of the University of Blogaria, the professoriate's ongoing fascination with the Blogging for Dollars controversy should hardly come as a surprise. AKMA, The Happy Tutor, Steve Himmer, Tom Matrullo, Mark Pilgrim, Shelley Powers, Dorothea Salo, Jeneane Sessum, Halley Suitt, and David Weinberger have all weighed in to the debate."
[x: 109] [r: dive into mark/further reading]
|
|
Karlin Lillington -- While walking along the Grand Canal with herd of geeks, Karlin distinguished between an introverted mathematician and an extroverted mathematician. "An introverted mathematician looks at his shoes while he's talking to you, while an extroverted mathematician looks at your shoes while he's talking to you."
|
|
KIRBYCOM -- Tim Kirby picks up the theme of "knowledge sharing" by pointing to a "personal knowledge sharing and its use in research," an essay by Sebastien Paquet.
[x: 109]
e-mailed to blog from Nokia 9210i over Vodafone HSD.
|
|
PHP BB OPEN -- Ken Gunderson from Team Cool swears by the PHP BB, since "PHP pretty much spanks Perl these days." So we're going to use it as the back end of a training site.
[x: 109]
e-mail to blog from Nokia 9210i over Vodafone HSD.
|
|
Spam Certified as Virus-Free
OPEN -- Ross Cooney had a bad SPAM day yesterday. One of his clients got hijacked when using their dial-up Internet connectiion. They got hit when their cmail open relay took delivery of about 5,000 emails advertising a great way to save money on mortgages. They then used SMTP auth to relay the emails through Cyber Sentry and guess what happend? The spam was certified as virus-free as it was dispatched from the Dublin screening servers.
[x: 109]
e-mailed to blog from Nokia 9210i over Vodafone HSD.
|
|
John VanDyk -- "I'd be interested in talking privately with anyone who is using RSS for knowledge management. I'm putting together a session for a national symposium in April on RSS."
|
|
Dave Winer -- ESPN uses RSS enclosures. I don't know how they work, so I'll read Don Park's note about big binary objects as RSS items. Radio has this feature. Radio Enclosures now use a new distribution model, one that gets rid of the click-wait for large media objects. Winer terms it "virtual bandwidth."
|
|
ROAMAD -- Here's technology that allows cellular WiFi. You can build a WAN using 802.11b. I wonder if any Irish operators are considering this kind of platform? "RoamAD has already deployed the first stage of a metropolitan-wide (100 km2) Cellular Wi-Fi network that provides end-users with secure non line-of-sight mobile broadband connectivity to the Internet, office networks and the PSTN. Within the RoamAD network, end-users already enjoy ubiquitous coverage and the ability to roam with 100% committed bit rates of anything up to 330Kbps."
|
|
|
16 October 2002 |
VISUAL THESAURUS -- Visual Thesaurus takes a submitted search term and returns similar or associated words. According to OLDaily, Visual Thesaurus was created from ThinkMap, a general purpose visualization engine.
|
|
MISCHIEF MAKER -- Lousianna asks, "Where are we going and why am I in a hand basket?" And affirms the delight possible by randoming clicking around our Blog World. She reminds me I have to create my own list of 100 things about me.
|
|
NEWZOID -- Get your fill of wacky headlines from Newzoid's headline generator. Daniel Young has been generating false come-ons with this technology since 2001. You can even roll your own. Newzoid polls online news headlines and does a simple amalgamation, so you get things like "Finnish Police Took Dresses During Night Visit," "Iraqis Fighting Back In Playground," "VH1 Vogue Is Dense, Demanding," and "Ex-Taliban Official Questioning Safety Of Slower Loan Growth"
|
|
NEWZOID -- Get your fill of wacky headlines from Newzoid's headline generator. It's been generating false come-ons since 2001. Newzoid polls online news headlines and does a simple amalgation, so you get things like "Finnish Police Took Dresses During Night Visit," "Iraqis Fighting Back In Playground," "VH1 Vogue Is Dense, Demanding," and "Ex-Taliban Official Questioning Safety Of Slower Loan Growth"
|
|
AD Marwick -- It's worthwhile to read Matt Mower's musings as he digests knowledge management technology by AD Marwick. The book argues that knowledge includes both the experience and understanding of the people in the organisation and the information artifacts, such as documents and reports available within the organisation and in the world outside. But there's much more. Marwick is especially sensitive to tacit knowledge, saying "The key to knowledge creation lies in the mobilization and conversion of tacit knowledge."
|
|
Adam Curry -- It looks like Adam and other blogoholics will be able to convert their brain droppings to blog posts very soon with Dave Winer's outline2blog tool.
|
|
REUTERS -- As Intel's CFO Andy Bryant tells it, the Tech Economy is not recovering. This fact has caused an nagging sore spot in the whole of the Irish economy.
|
|
NEW YORK TIMES -- Mixed results in revenue and profit at Motorola. The company is still reeling by the bad Turkish debt, as that little drama continues unfolding in US District Court. Turkey -- the country where German firms routinely carry bribery fees as legitimate (and grant-adided) costs of doing business.
|
|
Jack Kapica -- Kapica lists 10 rules of e-business failure, inspired by the recording industry's imaginative approach. "It's easy to fail in e-business; what's hard is failing magnificently. The Big Five music-recording companies have been transcendent in this respect. Their combined efforts have gone beyond killing their e-businesses and are close to destroying an entire industry."
|
|
|
15 October 2002 |
Slow Economy with Closed Doors Business Week -- With Europe's economy growing at less than 1 per cent annually, does it make sense for Ireland to rebuff practising IT professionals at her gateways? Speaking from personal experience, that kind of two-fingered attitude does not make Ireland a progressive place worthy of foreign investment.
[x: 261 r: 3537] Aboard Virgin Rail with an IBM TransNote using Nokia D211 card.
|
|
They Make Jeeps into Everything Karl Ludvigsen -- The Corvette celebrates its golden anniversary this year, one year before my parents mark their 50th wedding anniversary. Both events have one thing in common -- the Jeep. My dad drove a Jeep as a US Army medical corpsman before coasting into my mom's life at Fitzsimons Army Burn Unit. Major Kenneth Brooks presented his wife with a Jeep too, in 1950, and her rejection led to him creating a sports car design that later became the Corvette.
[x: 350 r: 3535] Aboard Virgin Rail from IBM Transnote using Nokia D211 card.
|
|
Jared Spool -- Interesting metaphor in Jared Spool's Acrobat presentation about "Scent of a Web Page." He includes useful tips concerning layout and page objects, to "ensure a good scent."
|
|
Jerry Weinberg -- Tom Bowden talks about "Weinberg's Zeroth Law of Unreliability." If a system doesn't have to be reliable, it can meet any other objective. I have to get Jerry Weinberg's Quality Software Management Vol 2 on my book shelf, so I can read Chapter 19 at a leisurely pace.
|
|
MACROMEDIA -- The Dreamweaver MX Certification exam is almost ready. It is tough. It will be released for DevCon, but you will be able to take it locally after October 27th at a VUE testing center. There's a good article on DesDev (photogenic image too) with additional details.
|
|
Phil Wolff -- Next week, UCD host a Knowledge Management Seminar, but exceptional info exists right now in Phil Wolff's excellent resource, a dijest (sic) of commendable stature.
|
|
MIT -- There's an Interdisciplinary Symposium on Reputation Mechanisms in Online Communities planned for Saturday and Sunday, April 26-27, 2003 at MIT. Funding for this symposium is provided through grants from the National Science Foundation (award number 0209136, CISE/Digital Society & Technologies) and the MIT Center for eBusiness. Some of the invited presenters could be soporific at best, but the event promises to illustrate ways of improving trust on the Internet. The 19 Sep 02 print edition of The Economist carries an article about a study comparing web use in a region to the degree that people think others are trustworthy and good. So mainstream publishers are interested in the veracity of electronic content.
|
|
ONLINE ie -- If you let your aggregators do your browsing, you'll definitely discover affiliated interests. This morning, I discovered Online.ie has a feed for my Palm. I didn't know that! But the feed appeared inside one of my FeedReader and now I want to grab its RSS file. The story that got me started is about how The Register does more than report. "There are lots of tech outlets that re-write press releases and take tech company statements at face value. I expect more of the Register. Look into some of the complaints about what is broken in Google's page ranking that were in Wired's article." Nice commentary.
|
|
Karlin Lillington -- Herself a nomadic hack, Karlin found this Salon story about Kevin Barbieux, a homeless blogger in Lousiana. Barbbieux sleeps in abandoned buildings or shelters -- and writes a daily journal that has made him an Internet celebrity. It's a mark of a digitally homogenous society when Dublin's homeless enter the blogosphere.
|
|
DIVE INTO MARK -- Shortly after reading how Mark's dog ran away, my stray Pomeranian just about became homeless again. I legged it after him, into a blacked-out housing estate that had just lost power to its street lamps, and found him cornered by a sheep dog. The sheep dog had a mouthful of the Pom's hair and both dogs were snarling at each other. So I guess my lost dog story, one I blame on Mark starting the thread, is more exciting than the original. I missed my night deadline as well.
|
|
MOBILE COMMERCE WORLD -- Deutsche Telekom-owned T-Mobile USA announced a deal with Borders through which it will install 802.11b networks in over 400 of the book and music chain's US locations. T-Mobile is the company whose "HotSpot" service pumps wireless bandwidth into over 1,200 Starbucks locations (projected to increase to 2,000 stores by 2003).
|
|
Dave Winer -- One distinction about outliner users and everyone else is outliners think about thinking. Outliners are aware of their own process. Only people who think about thinking get to a place where they can invest in being more efficient in their thinking. Some people say they don't think in outlines. Winer says, "Hanging information on a hierarchy makes it easy to forget it and focus on new ideas and relationships. It's a good way to relax intellectually." I use Mind Maps and distill my monthly topics into one cross-referenced document, showing me interesting places where things fit together.
|
|
|
14 October 2002 |
IA SLASH.org -- Victor and Joshua are both talking about story telling as a method for communicating possible actions or paths when interacting with web sites. Victor mentioned an IBM seminar about story telling. There is probably a good deal of learning material here.
|
|
|
13 October 2002 |
Jenny Levine -- For months I've been trying to get to the back end of several sites I read through hypertext, but now I discover The Shifted Librarian has most of the RSS feeds of sites I like to read in my aggregator.
|
|
Good Languages for Mathematical Computations OPEN -- Dave Wilson has "been piggy backing on Excel via COM in order to do some calculations as ColdFusion isn't the best of tools for performing
mathematical routines. Now, this is not ideal either as it requires Excel to
be installed on the server and takes up valuable processing time." He's looking for languages better suited for mathematical processing, preferably with the ability to connect or extract results easily. He wants to avoid COM because CFMX doesnt work too well with COM now and COM is becoming an obsolete technology with MS pushing .Net and web services instead.
|
|
WIRED.com -- Wired's staff explains the philosophy behind the Wired News Design. After the switch to XHTML and complete adoption of CSS, Wired News pages now load faster, and are at once more accessible to all Web browsers and specialised browsing environments used by the visually or physically impaired. By stripping out font, color, and margin rules from the markup, and aggregating all those style rules into just a couple of CSS files, design changes can be propagated to thousands of pages instantly. That's progress.
|
|
Sam Ruby -- Noah Mendelsohn's DevCon slides are online. The opinions and analysis are his alone, and not necessarily IBM's, but the contents ©2002 IBM. More details at Schema Secrets.
|
|
LM ORCHARD et al -- If you mix the Blogwalking idea with Adam Curry's Audioblogs, you could arrive in a shopping queue where you buy a Nokia Communicator 9210i. I blogwalk with my 9210i, using it to send blog items over email. I blogwalked this upload that way. Then I cleaned it up with Radio a few hours later. In my case, my Radio is off most of the time my 9210i is publishing. This idea deserves a lot more reading.
>>Blogwalking as an "Essential Web Writing" topic anyone?
|
|
DECAFBAD.com -- Leslie Michael Orchard argues it's all about the conversation, not the referrer logs.. Yet Mark Pilgrim's Further Reading RSS starts with the referrer. When I first started browsing, I wanted to know bookmarks of others. When I started reading news reports of the tech world, I wanted URLs. When I refined a way of searching the Web, I needed to figure out ways to drill down to first-hand info. Mark Pilgrim's further reading RSS takes this search for reflective knowledge into the blogosphere, and that should create a "nice game of follow-the-leader for referrer log watchers," in L.M. Orchard's words.
|
|
|
12 October 2002 |
Marc Barrot -- Check this out, especially the Endless Web Page demo. Clicking on an icon causes the linked outline to be inserted directly in the current page, as a child of the node that carried the link. While the linked outline renders, a small globe replace the icon. Once the linked content is inserted, the iconn reverts to a normal twisty outline wedge. This is the in-browser version of what Dave Winer and UserLand created for Radio's outliner. This is instant rendering, happening on the fly as you browse through the current page.
|
|
Mark Pilgrim -- My Radio says I've written something like this already, but I'm doing it again because of feedback I've received following my piece published in The Irish Examiner. And because James Robertson makes a better point: "Mark Pilgrim calls into question how XML standards are developed and used. See Mark's comments on RDF, for example."
|
|
SLASHDOT.org -- Cliff explains in Slashdot why this hasn't been a good year for music lovers since the RIAA has removed the kid gloves. In the past 3 months they have declared war on their own customers, silenced Internet Radio, and are targeting 3 other P2P networks for shutdown. At about this time last year, they wanted unprecedented access to your personal property. [...] The RIAA has waged war on the Internet rather than try and use the technology for the benefit of their artists. Now there are people willing to play by the rules, but the RIAA is unresponsive, and their web site seems to provide more questions than clear answers. Who do you need to contact? What forms need to be filled? What agreements need to be signed? By whom? What do you have to pay? How is this value determined? If you are planning on offering the RIAA's music, what do you really have to do to play their music legally?
|
|
Aaron Swartz -- Have you ever seen Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive Bookmobile? Aaron Swartz stepped aboard and wrote about it in "Mr Swartz Goes to Washington."
Unlike most Bookmobiles, this one didn't contain any physical books. Instead, it connects to the Internet Archive's servers in the Presidio to download them. Then the high-speed printer prints out the pages. The chopper cuts them in half so you can fold them together to make a normal-sized book, and the binding machine heats up the glue-smeared cover to hold it all together. The whole process takes about fifteen minutes. [...]
People have a hard time understanding the public domain," Brewster says. "It's an abstract concept; it's hard to grasp. The bookmobile changes that." He picks up one of the books he's made. "This is the public domain! The public domain means giving books to children. You want to extend copyright? You want to steal books from children? No one wants to steal books from children."
|
|
NEW ARCHITECT MAG.com -- In small Irish communities, you have to have a business model to sustain public information providers. The most generous of government handouts push you towards a money-making business model. If you can identify, then scrape, government information, you might be sustainable. That means setting up an aggregator, like we're using in the blogosphere. When implementing the public information model, you have to consider the protocol in use. There's no way any kind of walled garden approach is tenable.
|
|
Mark Pilgrim -- How cool is this? I'm on Virgin Rail in England posting to my Weblog in London using no wires to my IBM TransNote. (Mobile data services over Vodafone at 43k wirelessly are good to me but damaging to my wallet.) And because of Mark Pilgrim's innovative RSS 2.0 feed, my laptop comments will appear on Mark's blog. (On the second day, it said that 28 people have followed this link and arrived on top of Mark's post. But the Swedish post that points to diveintomark.org lost a bunch of character enhancements, so the behind-the-scenes parsing is probably limited to an English language character set.) Imagine wrapping Mark Pilgrim's code onto separate laptops -- let's say Tim Kirby's and Bernie Goldbach's -- as they both work in separate countries on the same project. If Mark's "further reading RSS feed" works as I think, the further readings on my blog will keep me updated on Tim's project work. That's v.cool laptop web services. I think it would be easy to spam this kind of referrer log system, so to keep its integrity intact, some form of look-back would have to be figured into the script.
|
|
|
11 October 2002 |
MIT -- Since late September, those with an online browswer can access 32 MIT courses free, including syllabi, lecture notes, exams and answers, and in some cases, even the videotaped lectures.
|
|
IA SLASH.org -- An xfml feed creates a facetmap, which is quite nice. Would be interesting to see if any clustering information visualization emerges out of these types of metadata experiments. Some nice services could come out of this. At the forefront, the application will help individuals map topics on disparate systems. It's puts a major emphasis on correctly classifying posts. Also, check out Drupal's externalpage module, which parses each blog entry for URLs and adds them to the site's search index. That should be helpful for finding duplicate entries.
|
|
INFOWORLD.com -- If Intel's Itanium infringes on patents, it does not bode well for Intel restarting its Fab plant construction in Leixlip, Ireland. The chip giant was ordered to pay out $150m in damages.
|
|
Joel on Software --  Check out Danny Goodman's latest version of Dynamic HTML. Joel on Software says it best: "It's the best reference on HTML. The new edition is 1400 packed pages that actually tells you what web browsers that are actually in use actually do, which makes it invaluable. It has been brought up to date with all the latest browsers and the newest HTML specs. If you're working with HTML in any way, shape, or form, this book is an absolute requirement."
|
|
TEMPLE BAR -- Dana Lyons turned heads in Temple Bar, wearing his trademark black cowboy hat as he discussed Cows with Guns over dinner with the directors of the Irish Animation Festival. What? An animated Cows with Guns?!? Well, if that happens, maybe the cows will get ray guns. Maybe a time machine episode, where the cows go back into the 30s, 40s and 50s, packing heat for the times and holstering guns from Europe and Japan. We could have cows with stamped metal squirt guns, cardboard ray guns, pyrotomic disintegrator rifles and space navigator guns. And cows with ray gun holsters, space costumes, rings, and necklaces. See the man in JJ's on Dublin's Capel Street, Friday evening, October 11th.
|
|
Cheap Bikes in Dublin, Ireland A public auction of bicycles will be held at Kevin Street Garda Station, Dublin, on Thursday 17th October 2002 at 1100. You can view the cycles the day before from 1000 to 1500.
|
|
|
10 October 2002 |
THE AGE.com.au -- Nathan Cochrane, Deputy IT Editor of
The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, told Declan McCullagh things he observed about Digital Rights Management when tracking down comments made by David Reed, Dan Bricklin and Ray Ozzie -- who can legitimately claim to have collectively done more than most to kick-start the PC revolution.
David Reed was chief scientist and VP R&D at Lotus. "This is what is wrong with Berman-Coble, with DRM, with TCPA, and with Gator. It's my computer, dammit. If I don't give informed consent, you can't use it."
Dan Bricklin, co-inventor of Visicalc, the first killer app for the PC "If you are an artist or author who cares more than about the near-term value of your work, you should be worried and be careful about releasing your work only in copy protected form. Like the days when "art" was only accessible to the rich, two classes will probably develop: Copy protected and not copy protected, the "high art" and "folk art" of tomorrow."
Ray Ozzie, inventor of what became Lotus Notes, the world's first groupware collaborative software for PCs, a killer app.
"With rich and open access, will contractual controls on use of Web Services data be sufficient, or will we need technical means of use enforcement? How far will Digital Restrictions Management creep its way into the system-to-system realm?"
|
|
Kwindla Hultman Kramer -- An excellent but depressing summary of Larry Lessig's day in front of the Supreme Court. As Declan McCullagh would tell you, blogging made a powerful statement the day the case was heard. Ernest Miller and Raul Ruiz of the Yale Law School’s LawMeme covered the Eldred v. Ashcroft oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court nearly live. Lessig gives his own post-mortem of the case, delivered from the front line. Everyone interested in copyright should read Lessig's blog from the front line.
|
|
STICKY SAUCE.com -- We have a Search Engine Strategies course that will soon include discussion of seven illegal search engine optimisation techniques. Although none of these are surprising, they are great discussion points when handling client requests for bent pages.
|
|
Metafilter's Matt writes about what the concept of public domain really means, aside from really old books and movies. Over the past 7 or 8 months that I've been working on the Creative Commons, I've come to recognize and respect what a true commons for our culture would mean. Of course, it's mostly imaginary, as copyright has encompassed almost everything from the better part of last century and limited the use of works.
There's the old saying that good artists copy and great artists steal, and that's not based on outright theft, but the acknowledgement that we are all influenced by others' work, and things like hip hop music and photoshop collages point out how great new art can be created when combining other works into new works. The Supreme Court heard arguments about the Creative Commons in presentations made by Lawrence Lessig yesterday.
|
|
|
09 October 2002 |
Paolo Valdemarin -- Like Paolo, I have bumped into some very smart people electronically. They hail from all parts of the world. They work with technologies and are involved in projects that interest me. So, how can we operationalise a method that would increase the opportunities for these kinds of contacts? How about encouraging the development of omnipresent expertise through collaborative technology?
|
|
LONDON -- Ben Hammersley just installed a community wireless network that covers all of South Molton Street in London. Help yourself to his generous bandwidth.
|
|
BOSTON -- We're talking in the MIT Enterprise Forum about first mover advantage and I cannot help but think it's a myth. "I would argue the first mover advantage is largely illusory," says Steve Jurvetson, of Draper, Fisher Jurvetson. "A company may say they are the only one doing something, but we usually assume there are at least twenty others doing a similar thing." So it puts added importance on establishinng the patent rights and protecting unique intellectual property. Being first in Ireland Valley or even the U.S. is no small feat, but can you be sure you beat the rest of the world?
|
|
LOGITECH -- The io Digital Pen is a lot like the digital pen I use with the TransNote. With the io pen, you must download its contents into a USB device. With the ThinkScribe, it transfers into the TransNote automatically. The software for the Logitech io pen was deloped by Anoto, a company whose pen-and-paper technology is emerging as a new standard for digital writing. The pen itself is the key component of an ecosystem that includes paper manufacturers Mead Cambridge Notebooks from MeadWestvaco, Post-it® Notes from 3M and productivity tools from FranklinCovey® in the US. The suggested U.S. retail price for the complete system starter kit is $199.
|
|
GUARDIAN.co.uk -- Ben Hammersley wrote this story in The Guardian last week, but my local news agents didn't get the copy. Thanks to my news aggregator, I caught the story on the rebound. It's about bringing the net to Eden.
In the village of Kirkby Stephen, in the Eden Valley, on the border between Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales, getting on to the internet is a major effort. With phone lines shared between remote farmhouses, and mobile phones a cruel fantasy, an internet connection here can drop as low as 12Kbps. [...] But all of this is about to change. EdenFaster, a local community organisation, is about to supply broadband internet connections to the entire valley, bringing 10,000 people, 500 businesses and 50 schools online with an internet connection 20 times faster than ADSL for half the price. They're doing it on their own because of a perceived lack of demand by telecoms companies. They're doing it wirelessly, and they're one of the leaders in the new revolution in ways to deliver the internet in the UK.
|
|
TAMPATANTRUM.com -- You might be a Longhorn, if:
- The Halloween pumpkin on your porch has more teeth than your spouse.
- You let your twelve-year-old daughter smoke at the dinner table in front of her kids.
- You've been married three times and still have the same in- laws.
- You think a woman who is "out of your league" bowls on a different night.
- Jack Daniels makes your list of "most admired people".
- You wonder how petrol stations keep their restrooms so clean.
- Anyone in your family ever died right after saying, "Hey watch this."
- You think Dom Pérignon is a Mafia leader.
- Your wife's hairdo was once ruined by a ceiling fan.
- You think the last words of the Star Spangled Banner are, "Gentlemen start your engines."
- You lit a match in the bathroom and your house exploded right off its wheels.
- The bluebook value of your truck goes up and down, depending on how much gas is in it.
- You have to go outside to get something from the fridge.
- One of your kids was born on a pool table.
- You need one more hole punched in your card to get a freebie at the House of Tattoos.
- You can't get married to your sweetheart because there's a law against it.
- You think loading a dishwasher means getting your wife drunk.
- Your toilet paper has page numbers on it.
- Your front porch collapses and kills more than five dogs.
|
|
Jon Udell -- Interesting thoughts on implementing local host web services.
|
|
PRESENTATIONS.com -- How about teaching three good reasons to stop using PowerPoint? Make it a short course in Flash MX and give people a powerful option to the PowerPoint mafia. Harry Waldman makes his case in an October 2002 Presentations.Com article.
|
|
Andy Chen -- Innovations funnel from ideas to implemented projects. Here's a diagram that illustrates this process:
If your Weblog is part of a knowledge network, you're also encouraging innovation. I think the "water to ice" metaphor describes the aggregation process that fills a meaningful portion of my day.
|
|
Ray Ozzie -- What if all e-mail done on company time was open to all in the company? Ray Ozzie thinks "people would be shocked at not having private email, and private hotmail addresses and Groove Spaces would appear when people wanted to do something privately." But people are creatures of convenience and habit, and more and more work would be done in the open. And what would be the benefit to the collective productivity if we could all watch and listen to the thought processes of the stars on our teams? What kind of interesting bots would emerge that started to watch and subscribe to relevant queries? Customer support interactions with customers should be watched by engineers every bit as closely as the public forums.
|
|
ALEXA -- Topgold slips out of the first quarter million. Alexa ranks Topgold at 280,438. I've watched the site slip from 116,018 years ago to its current position. It's more to do with established users of the Alexa client not visiting the personal site.
|
|
COMPUTERWORLD -- Thomas Hoffman explores Gartner's IT predictions and summarises them. - Adding bandwidth will become more cost-effective than buying new computers.
- Most major new systems will be interenterprise or cross-enterprise systems.
- Despite the complexities, interenterprise systems will provide a macroeconomic boost to companies.
- Companies will lay off millions of employees.
- The consolidation of vendors will continue in many segments of the IT market.
- Moore's Law will hold true through this decade.
- Banks will become the primary providers of "presence services" by 2007.
- Business activity monitoring will hit the mainstream within five years.
- Business units, not IT, will make most application decisions.
- The pendulum swings back to decentralized IT operations by 2004
|
|
O'REILLY -- My aggregator scrapes content from three of the authors of "Essential Blogging," a no-nonsense guide to the technology of blogging. The book gives detailed installation, configuration, and operation instructions for the leading blogging software: Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Blosxom. Without reading the book, Tim Kirby has chopped and changed a Radio local host. It also includes practical advice and insider tips on the features, requirements, and limitations of these applications. Chapter 6, "Advanced Blogger," is available free online.
|
|
Mark Pilgrim -- Dave Winer calls this "a beautiful essay" as Mark writes, "If it were April Fool's Day, the Net's only official holiday, and you wanted to design a 'novelty format' to slip by the W3C as a joke, it might look something like RSS 0.9x/2.0." In Winer's words, "If you aspire to design real-world formats and protocols, or if you just want to understand how they evolve, this is a must-read."
|
|
The U.S. military is being equipped with PDAs and other mobile devices loaded with translation software. Lt. Col Kathy DeBolt, a senior officer at an intelligence technology lab, says: "Should we, God forbid, go into Iraq, we'll have to ask 'Are there any chemicals here? Are there any facilities used to develop chemical or biological weapons?'" Translation software has been developed to assist conversations between speakers of English, Arabic, Kurdish and Farsi. The military's laptop war kit includes 1,500 briefcase-sized document scanner-translators, which could be used to make on-the-spot rough translations into English of documents written in Dari, Pashto and Arabic.
|
|
|
08 October 2002 |
Doug Salzwedel -- The Information Management Division of the Canadian Government's Treasury Board Secretariat is currently planning a metadata training course for use by government departments. The content and organization of the course will be based in part upon input received from a variety of sources. The objectives of the training course will be to assist metadata trainers in explaining: - What metadata is; how and why metadata is used for departments;
- Canadian government requirements for metadata;
- how metadata elements are applied to Web resources;
- The role and use of controlled vocabularies in metadata (including specific examples)
- Evolving trends and best practices for metadata;
- How to identify and use various resources (Web sites, metadata experts, etc.) for guidance on metadata implementation.
The Canadian government is seeking examples of metadata training plans, courses and other associated metadata training documentation in either English or French.
|
|
Paulo -- Check out Paulo's Theme Tool and turn out complex templates in Dreamweaver that work in Radio.
|
|
Lou Hirsch -- Now beginning to break into the mainstream, wireless classroom links will lead to new opportunities for online learning. As I've personally obsered, new learners seek learning in short bursts. But the jury is out on whether the wireless classroom will usher e-books back into the forefront. It's important to note that wireless e-learning suits people who dwell in very dense metropolitan areas, but are unable or reluctant to congregate at a particular place and time just to make courses cost-effective. Combining mobile wireless with Internet capabilities allows efficient delivery of the same course offering to individuals spread all over the globe. There is a viable business model in this form of course architecture.
|
|
Steven Den Beste -- A compelling essay on why 3G will fail. This time, information laced with technical details.
|
|
Jeremy Allaire -- Business and the military are trying to get desktops to be real-time in the decision process. Major software vendors need to bring real-time communications capabilities to the enterprise. Macromedia has focused on real-time connectivity too. Jeremy Allaire thinks the world of real-time communications is very immature right now. He knows most part people have natural associations between IM tools, or even web conferencing systems, and real-time. But he believes real-time communicatons involves more.
We need to move beyond thinking and talking about how we communicate to talking about how and what we do, what activities we perform in real-time. Communications augments social activities, and those social activities should become the real-focus for real-time application advocates. Talking to a sales person is one thing -- configuring a product with them is another. Getting a question answered about an insurance application is one thing -- jointly populating the form is another. Having a voice conversation with a room designer versus actually designing a room, visually.
|
|
NEW YORK TIMES -- Intel may have overextended its market when producing the Itanium 2, according to Technology Circuits in THe New York Times. Itanium 2 may not be as sure a bet as it looked even a few months ago. The 64-bit Itanium 2 boasts more than 200 million transistors and is designed to deliver top performance.
|
|
FARCES.com -- The entertainment industry is paying BayTSP, run by former black-hat cracker, Mark Ishikawa, up to US$50,000 per month to determine who is illegally copying protected works on the net. There is a copyright storm brewing.
|
|
|
07 October 2002 |
NEW YORK TIMES -- Amy Harmon reports the Internet music-swapping firm KaZaA, which has assumed the successor role to now-defunct Napster, is being sued in a federal court in Los Angeles by the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright violations, but the RIAA has several problems to overcome. First, there is a question of geography, since KaZaA is everywhere and nowhere: its distributor, Sharman Networks, is incorporated in the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, it is managed from Australia, its computer servers are in Denmark, and its developers can't be found. Second, there is an issue of jurisdiction: Sharman's lawyer says, "What they're asking is for a court to export the strictures of U.S. copyright law worldwide. That's not permitted. These are questions of sovereignty that legislatures and diplomats need to decide." And third, there is the question of whether giving people the tools (KaZaA's service) to break the copyright law is itself a copyright violation, even if KaZaA itself did not misappropriate copyrighted music.
|
|
ECONOMIST.com -- Scientists at the University of Notre Dame have created a new model of the Internet that differs significantly from previous attempts that used graphs depicting routers as points and the links between them as lines. These older representations are misleading, says Albert-Laslo Barabasi, because they miss two important features: Links in the Internet are "preferentially attached" -- a router that already has many links is likely to attract many more; one that doesn't, won't. In addition, the Internet has more clusters of connected points than random graphs do. These two properties give the Internet a topology that is scale-free, i.e., a small part of the Internet
will, when suitably magnified, resemble the whole. The scale-free aspect
means that the Internet is resistant to random failures -- one reason it's
proven so resilient over the years -- but it also puts it at risk for
deliberate attacks on the most popular hubs -- the sort of thing
cyberterrorists might attempt. Barabasi's research offers new insight on
how best to stop the spread of a computer virus. Rather than attempting to
block the infection by "inoculating" as many machines as possible, a
scale-free model suggests that treating a relatively small number of the
most popular hubs would be the most effective way to stamp out the virus
entirely.
|
|
SEAT GURU -- You need a seat-by-seat guide to the airlines so you can break down every plane in the fleets of American, United, Continental, Delta and US Airways, to see which seats have the best width and the most legroom. Did you know that seats towards the back have smaller distances between arm rests due to the curvature of the fuselage in the rear? Now you do.
|
|
SONYSTYLE-- Sure, this is only the Flash 5 Player on the Clie. When the Flash 6 player hits the Sony Clie, we're going to see world-class connectivity and communications features carried around in your pocket.
|
|
TELEGRAPH.co.uk -- According to Simon Goodley, Google may charge for some targeted searches or for its newsfeed.
|
|
LANCASTER, Pennsylvania -- If no one is investing in IT gear and everyone wants to squeeze more years out of what they have, wouldn't that mean Microsoft's .NET is trying to fill a hole that doesn't exist? I got that thought after reading the Washington Post Tech section today.
|
|
NEW YORK TIMES -- Michael Naimark thinks he can hide from CCTV cameras with the the aid of a $1 laser pointer.
|
|
|
06 October 2002 |
GRUB.org -- Grub provides a free for download, free to run, distributed crawling client, which is used to create an infrastructure (database + volunteers) that will eventually provide URL update status information for nearly every web page on the Internet. Grub's distributed crawler network will enable websites, content providers, and individuals to notify others that changes have occurred in their content, all in real time. Grub will provide update feeds of the content that it gathers via the clients. These feeds will be free for public consumption, with additional high speed, high reliability feeds available for a fee. It's just about ready for Windows.
|
|
Cutting Hidden Costs of Directory Assistance LONDON -- Using directory assistance to place a phone call normally costs around 12 cents per call and nearly triple when using the service to connect to oanother number. I've known staff members who call for a number they already know, then using directory assistance to connect them. That way, the number they dialed does not show up on the monthly phone register. They can be calling around for another job on company time, and the company pays for it.
|
|
XML Will Save You Money LONDON -- Save money by replacing your EDI system with XML. That's the gist of the coffee conversation at Starbucks. EDI is so 90s. XML is a lot cheaper and a better long-term investment.
|
|
David Weinberger -- How about Knowledge Mangement on a budget? Brother Dave would tell me that his paper napkin conversations constitutes elements of corporate knowledge because his HP teams often have Eureka moments in the canteen coffee breaks. And investigative reporters would tell you that nondescript Post-It notes provide important shreds of continuity on such things as planning permission approvals or the granting of telecommunications licenses. During my Pentagon days, verbal ephemera such as telephone conversations gave contingency planners essential elements of information that they used to move forward on timelines. Unless you put all these snippets into a central collection, you don't capture all this transferable knowledge for easy sharing. What about the 99 cent KM solution? David Weinberger's short essay proposes that low-budget tools such as email list applications and weblogs will get you far. In many ways, I'm trying to accomplish what he articulates in his article.
|
|
Thomas Jefferson -- "The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper."
|
|
John Farr -- I like the bits of Buffalo Lights that I've read and have to admit that I'm just as entertained by many of the reader comments.
|
|
 COSMIVERSE.com -- Sure, I am interested in how black holes form. And I also love Google's Science News Aggregator. But to satisfy my interests, I have to upgrade my connection speed at home. More than anything else, getting this story illuminates my quasi-chthonic existence -- far away from the centre of the Internet universe. I need speed to get closer to where it's happening.
|
|
Marc's Voice -- Marc Canter has started some great cross-talk about activity-based computing and its apparent manifestation in this cool tool for capturing, managing and distributing photos online. Why do we have to depend on complex tasks, involving digital imaging, scanning, resizing, uploading and checking photo content, when it's easier to get a computer to act like a rich media communications tool. Several online photo tools, like Ofoto and Shutterfly, make things simpler for the average consumer. We've still got a long way to go.
>>Rich Media Communications Course.
|
|
|
05 October 2002 |
Roy Tennant -- An excellent article on the importance of being granular. Roy Tennant explains granularity affects retrieval and impacts person-hours in Digital Library collections.
|
|
Kevin Werbach -- "The crash has lasted as long as the bubble." Kevin points notes the truly irrational upswing of the dotcom boom went from 1998 to March 2000, which is now two and a half years ago.
|
|
Dave Winer -- "The VCs were so stupid, who cares what they think anymore?" when listening to those presenters at the Next Generation Growth Harvard Business Conference.
|
|
Matt Brown -- Use CGI to get server information about your users. Once you get it you can use CGI to log it into a database or display on screen. It is easy to do this with app servers like ColdFusion and ASP, but to do it in Javascript is less documented but it can be done.
Here is a simple example of getting the user's IP address and displaying that back into an alert box.
<script>
var ip = '';
alert("Your IP address is "+ip);
</script>
You will need to save the file as .shtm or .shtml for the CGI portion to evaluate.
Here is a list of the variables available to you:
(for IIS and from the IIS help system. For other servers, there are more variables you can access so check in your server's documentation.)
ALL_HTTP All HTTP headers
AUTH_TYPE This contains the type of authentication used.
AUTH_PASSWORD The value entered in the client's authentication dialog box.
AUTH_USER The value entered in the client's authentication dialog box.
CONTENT_LENGTH bytes that the script can expect to receive from the client.
CONTENT_TYPE The content type of the information supplied in the body of a POST request.
DOCUMENT_NAME The current file name.
DOCUMENT_URI The virtual path to the current document.
DATE_GMT The current date in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
DATE_LOCAL The current date in the local time zone.
GATEWAY_INTERFACE The revision of the CGI specification used by the Web server.
HTTP_ACCEPT Special-case HTTP header.
LAST_MODIFIED The date that the current document was last modified.
PATH_INFO Additional path information consisting of the trailing part of the URL after the script name, but before the query string, if any.
PATH_TRANSLATED This is the value of PATH_INFO, but with any virtual path expanded into a directory specification.
QUERY_STRING The information that follows the question mark (?) in the URL that referenced this script.
QUERY_STRING_UNESCAPED Unescaped version of the query string; that is, a version that is not URL encoded.
REMOTE_ADDR The IP address of the client or agent of the client (for example, gateway or firewall) that sent the request.
REMOTE_HOST The host name of the client or agent of the client (for example, gateway or firewall) that sent the request. IIS 2.0 and 3.0 returned an IP address for this parameter.
REMOTE_USER This contains the user name supplied by the client and authenticated by the server. This comes back as an empty string when the user is anonymous (but authenticated).
REQUEST_METHOD The HTTP request method.
SCRIPT_NAME The name of the script program being executed.
SERVER_NAME The server’s host name, or IP address, as it should appear in self-referencing URLs.
SERVER_PORT The TCP/IP port on which the request was received.
SERVER_PORT_SECURE A string of either 0 or 1. If the request is being handled on the secure port, this will be 1. Otherwise, it will be 0.
SERVER_PROTOCOL The name and version of the information retrieval protocol relating to this request. This is usually HTTP/1.0. The protocol is returned in the format name/version.
SERVER_SOFTWARE The name and version of the Web server answering the request. The server information is returned in the format name/version.
URL Gives the base portion of the URL. Parameter values will not be included. The value is determined when the Web server parses the URL from the header.
[Matt Brown's Radio Weblog]
|
|
|
04 October 2002 |
Jack Schofield -- It's not possible to consistently get the print version of Online, the Thursday supplement of The Guardian, around Ireland. Online comes up missing even with Eason in Dublin. All the more reason to read the digital version of how to use Google to Best Effect.
Google has changed its algorithm recently and now the search engine cros-checks link text with the linked site. Google will discount ignore links whose text does not appear in the linked site. This all but kills off Google bombing. Mark Pilgrim notes that searching for "go to hell" no longer takes you to Microsoft. "Talentless hack" no longer finds ohmessylife.com, although it finds a lot of people who were previously participating in the Google bombing.
Unfortunately, the algorithm tweaks necessary to stop these two techniques have caused a wide range of collateral damage, apparently coming down hardest on medium-to-large sites that had previously been doing everything right (as far as page structure, link structure, accessibility, and general honest hard work putting together a usable and useful site).
|
|
IRISH ANIMALS.com -- denise cox runs a heart-warming site for lost and loving stray animals. I poked around it today because another stray dog just ambled into my life. If she's impounded, the odds are against her walking out of her cage and into a loving home.
|
|
|
03 October 2002 |
DIJEST.com -- As Professor McGee points out, one of the best advantages of klognets is that they provide Distant Early Warning that sense changes in the environment and route the signals to people best able to respond. Klogs are ideal for managing the flow of new knowledge. Mature knowledge is proven, structured, endorsed, refined.
|
|
SNOWDEAL.org -- According to NOP Research survey of 1,000 seven to 16-year-olds in the UK, "Six out of 10 youngsters questioned knew the term "homepage" meant the introduction to a website yet only 9% could explain the meaning of a preface in a book. While 38% knew a hardback was a type of book, 57% correctly answered that hard drive was part of a computer. Less than a quarter knew what to do if someone asked them to RSVP - to reply to an invitation - although 70% were aware what "www" meant in terms of the world-wide web. In the poll 25% said the net was their first port of call for help with homework, and 61% had helped an adult with using the Internet.
|
|
SOCRATIC ARTS.com -- Roger Schank's occasional column covers the evolution of education. He also maintains the very interesting hyperbook "Engines for Education", where he explains "what's wrong with the education system, how to reform it, and especially, about the role of educational technology in that reform". Engines for Education has short hyperlinked snippets that encourage self-directed exploration, such as a very nice section on "How You Know Things Without Trying".
|
|
Al Macintyre -- Ways to search just for blogs.
|
|
ENN.ie -- "Tensions between the board of Ireland's .ie domain registry and its chief executive came to a head on Wednesday, culminating in the suspension of CEO Mike Fagan." I watched this kind of procedure occur during the dotcom meltdown of an Irish company. Police normally arrive to persuade the focal personality to leave the premises. Normally, this kind of action does not occur for venial transgressions. In Fagan's case, he will be suspended on full pay (a package worth around €150k annually), then he will take legal action, then months will go on as private and public posturing occurs. IEDR is registered to trade at 14 Windsor Terrace, Sandycove. It's directors include John Scanlan, Patrick Frain, Mark Keane, Ronald Bolger, Frances Buggy and Canice Lambe.
Kieron Wood: "Web domain registry forced to disclose finances" in The Sunday Business Post, May 25, 2003
x_ref17
|
|
|
02 October 2002 |
CISCO.com -- Cisco unveiled its 3200 Series wireless router designed to enhance communications while underway aboard planes, trains, automobiles and ships. The service would allow police departments, for example, to deliver mug shots and fingerprint scans over an Internet Protocol (IP) network.
|
|
MUSIC DISH.com -- In front of a Congressional committee hearing, Back Street Boy, Kevin Richardson, testified that they have never received a royalty check.
|
|
FLOOD-TRIBUNAL.ie -- Even though the Flood Report sold out in record time, the Irish Government Publication Office is not planning to print any more copies of it. the , despite it having sold out in record time. According to Karlin Lillington, you can buy electronic (CD) copies, or you can download it here or here.
|
|
DIVE INTO MARK -- One year ago today, Mark Pilgrim's (now former) manager told him to shut down his weblog and remove all traces of it from his server. He tried to convince Mark that the Internet was too small to mix the professional and the personal. One year ago today, Mark gave him an answer, and Dive Into Mark blossomed. To celebrate this first anniversary, you should read Mark's CV, admire his cat, and link to his post.
|
|
BLOGOSPHERE -- Based on search engine requests for information, the most popular technology covered in this Weblog is "PVR" (119 requests), specifically the "TIVO" (60 requests). Macromedia's "Video Conferencing in Flash" intrigued 34 viewers. Another 34 wanted to know about the "Pocket Classroom". And 30 viewers wanted information about the "Sony Camera".
|
|
LONDON -- I think the most read topic in the technical blogosphere relates to WiFi. I attracted 68 requests for my June coverage of the idea. My stuff on "Warchalking" got 190 readers in July and in June. "Wardriving" attracted 68 others.
Drilling down into the evidence, early adopters want to read more about "WiFi Mesh" (85 requests) or discuss it (49 requests). Some need to know about Motorola’s Canopy (68 requests).
I think it's reasonable to conclude that many are trying to get "Last Acre Connectivity" (34 requests), a concept that transcends the unbundling of the local loop and is being well-executed by "Janda czfree.net" (66 requests).
|
|
PARC.com -- Xerox researchers are playing with enhanced thumbnails for Web searches. Their online demo recreates user tests that compare Enhanced Thumbnails to more traditional methods of displaying search results. Study participants were given a set of information-finding tasks to be done using a search engine. Their search results were displayed using text, plain thumbnails, and Enhanced Thumbnails.
|
|
WIRED.com -- Walking through the JFK Airport and NYC Penn Station concourses, I noted the rise of e-books. Now e-books are flying the Friendly Skies, as United Airlines touts their portability to their passengers. Did you know you can check out e-books just like library books? And take courses on them?
|
|
LONDON -- I host this Web server in London and once a week I look at some leading statistics, like the source of most of my direct links. Last week, on the heels of being denied "leave to land" in Ireland, I got most of my look-ins from Karlin Lillington's Weblog (a total of 34 clicked into here from her space), possibly after reading her take on my fate.
|
|
Hundreds Need to Increase Internet Speeds LONDON -- More people search and find this web site by looking at ways to "improve Internet speed". Last week, 227 people arrived on this Web site, after asking 8 different search engines for tips on improving speed. Some found answers on improving connection speed in the Topgold Forum. At the smaller end of the scale, down in handheld land, 193 people landed on this domain while looking for information about WAP Gateways or WAP in general. One of the lessons learned from this demographic is that bloggers should consider their potential handheld audience.
|
|
|
01 October 2002 |
KODAK.com -- Matt Frondorf is a statistical photographer. He is driving from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate, taking a picture every mile. The snaps hang in a nicely designed Flash app on the Kodak site.
|
|
SALON.com -- "It pays to place shapely young women on-screen mugging next to anything from flashy gizmos to fizzy sugar water. The pairing is arbitrary, but it engages a set of brain mechanisms that evolved originally to select mates, learn from serendipity, and remember intense experiences on which future survival might hinge."
|
|
PROXIM.com -- Proxim's Learning Center covers the basics of networking as well as the specifics of wireless network architecture.
|
|
Dan Gillmor -- After giving Jack Valenti a soapbox to make a statement, Dan Gillmor explains the music industry wants total control.
So the movie and music companies are going back to Congress for another helping. They are asking for laws that would force technology innovators to restrict the capabilities of devices -- cripple PCs and other machines that communicate so they can't make copies the copyright holders don't explicitly allow. Amazingly, the entertainment industry also wants permission to hack into networks and machines they believe are being used to violate copyrights.
Here is what it all means. To protect a business model and thwart even the possibility of infringement, the cartel wants technology companies to ask permission before they can innovate. The media giants want to keep information flow centralized, to control the new medium as if it's nothing but a jazzed-up television. Instead of accepting, as they do today, that a certain amount of penny-ante infringement will occur and then going after the major-league pirates, they call every act of infringement -- and some things that aren't infringement at all -- an act of piracy or stealing. Saying it doesn't make it so.
|
|
DENVER, Colorado -- Wireless ISP Aerie Networks of Denver uses equipment to run a high-speed wireless Web network in some areas of the country. Its patented equipment consists of radio receivers mounted to utility poles that shower an area with Internet access.
|
|
THE REGISTER -- Karlin Lillington identifies with Vodafone Ireland spamming. She has received unwanted SMS spam from 02. "The worst was their happy new year wishes sent twice in a row at about 4 am." Two years ago, I asked Barry Maloney, then the Digifone CEO, whether his company could guarantee that they would never send unsolicited text messages to me. He would not make that promise then, and the rebranded company is clearly on a path to availing a spamtext channel to the direct marketing industry.
|
|
LOGI3.com -- Jarrod Piccioni's Textbased.com Minimalist site has added a forum used by developers parsimonious with their page weight when discussing minimalist design theory and sharing links.
|
|
|
EPICURIOUS -- How about 
