Given that Dave is big on specialized clients for blogs then Phil's thoughts on a converged client are very interesting. 

Personally, I think blogging as a form will merge with all the other forms of digital expression. With email and IM first. With voice/video conferencing, streaming videos, browsing, and PowerPointing later.

Watch it change:

• as more people blog from their foto-mobiles
• as devices start to blog ("My car's day")
• as audiobloggers create radio shows and videobloggers create televsion programming
• as Sims characters start to blog.

Moving forward, see a convergent software client emerge.  [ Go ]

I'm not 100% sure I agree but it's very interesting.  Of course if a convergent client does emerge then we may as well send our check to Microsoft since they'll probably own it.

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Well I wanted to go over to Nosuch.org but I typed in .com instead and got here.  Cool looking to me at least.  And then when I got to Nosuch.org I found out what happens to geeks when they get old (and you ain't that old dude!):

Of the cool cold-thing family, dry ice is pretty tame. It's not as nifty as liquid nitrogen, for instance. But a puddle of liquid nitrogen doesn't hold the same potential as a slab of dry ice. For one thing, you can pick up a slab of dry ice and take it home.

That is the first thing that occurred to me when I realized what the smoking white brick was: what can I pick it up with? Not that I can do anything useful with it. It would just be cool to mess with, until it all melted away into gas.  [ Go ]

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If you're interested in search and retrieval then this Boston conference (April 7 - 8) might be of interest. I've attended in past years and Infonortics puts on a heck of a good conference.  [ Go ] 
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PhpPatterns is just that -- a source of design patterns for PHP code.  Will wonders never cease?  I ran this by a Java programmer I know that I have drawn into the PHP world and her comment was "I'd have never even thought to try patterns in PHP".  Just goes to show you that you can do good software engineering in pretty much any language (and language X is better than language Y debates are so lame as noted over here).  There is even a good start on a form validation pattern:

The Strategy Pattern is another mechanism to save endless reproduction of if / else statements. It is used in cases where there is a common "problem" which can be solved by one of many algorithms, for example validating the fields of sent by a form. As with most things object oriented, it allows for reuse and extensibility.

Taking the example of form validation, we have a prime candidate for a strategy pattern. The fields submitted from a form usually need to checked in some way before acting further on them, such as inserting them into a database. How often do we find ourselves writing procedural code like;  [ Go ]

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Apparently Mark P's Kit for Radio lets you setup scheduled postings for times in the future.  That's very, very cool but I haven't tried it yet.  This is definitely a feature that Radio desperately needs so good job Mark! [ Go ]
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Here's a good tutorial on iFrames or "inline frames" (which do look increasingly interesting since they are at least bookmarkable). [ Go ]
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Hmm... Isn't this nothing more than Microsoft copying David Gelertner?  Sigh. 

Engineers are working on software to load every photo you take, every letter you write - in fact your every memory and experience - into a surrogate brain that never forgets anything, New Scientist can reveal

It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to build multimedia databases that chronicle people's life events and make them searchable. "Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life," says Gordon Bell, one of the developers. [ Go ]

David Gelertner is a Yale computer scientist with a commercial company who makes software for this.  He calls it life streams or time streams (and I forget the url; sorry).

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