The Globus Consortium Journal: Overview of Virtualization Technology in Distributed Computing workshop. "Among the highlights was an interesting paper from Intel dissecting the
performance of Xen networking. A wonderful adoption scenario was
represented in the work from the University of Marburg where
suspend/resume properties of VMs are being used to improve backfill
strategies in the local scheduler - computations running in VMs are
simply suspended when a large parallel job is scheduled to run and
resumed afterwards. The remarkable part of this work was that it was
very much requirement-driven and has been voted into production by
users. Another interesting talk came from the Australian Partnership
for Advanced Computing (APAC) described their experiences using virtual
machines in production Grids for a couple of years now."
The endowment effect, the 9X problem and collaboration: Nice summary from HBS. "the "endowment effect" [is when] we value items in our possession more than prospective items that could be in our possession, especially if the prospective item is a proposed substitute. We mentally compare having the prospective item to giving up what we already have (our 'endowment'), but because we're loss averse giving up what we already have (our reference point) looms large.
And Gourville points out three factors that make the situation worse for product developers who want their offerings to succeed. First is timing: adopters have to give up their endowment immediately, and only get benefits sometime in the future. Second, these benefits are not certain; the new product might not work as promised. Third, benefits are usually qualitative, making them difficult to enumerate and compare. ..
Because of all of the above, Gourville talks about the '9X problem' -- "a mismatch of 9 to 1 between what innovators think consumers want and what consumers actually want."1 The 9X problem goes a long way to explaining the tech industry folk wisdom that to spread like wildfire a new product has to offer a tenfold improvement over what's currently out there...
Email is a channel technology. It creates a private conduit between the sender and receiver. Other parties don't know that the email was sent, and can't consult its contents. Wikis, del.icio.us, Flickr, Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube, on the other hand, are all platform technologies. They accumulate content over time and make it visible and accessible to all community members. [They also foster emergence, where structure emerges rather than being imposed by "groupware" products.] .. So the new tools are not direct substitutes for email; instead, they're intended to provide capabilities that email can't. Will they succeed? It depends heavily, I believe, on whether companies and their managers want technology platforms for collaboration. This desire will be an important factor in solving email's 9X problem. "
How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers: A 9-point checklist for evaluating open source solutions:
- "A thriving community: A handful of lead developers, a large body of contributors, and a substantial--or at least motivated--user group offering ideas.
- Disruptive goals:Does something notably better than commercial code. Free isn't enough.
- A benevolent dictator: Leader who can inspire and guide developers, asking the right questions and letting only the right code in.
- Transparency: Decisions are made openly, with threads of discussion, active mailing list, and negative and positive comments aired.
- Civility: Strong forums police against personal attacks or niggling issues, focus on big goals.
- Documentation: What good's a project that can't be implemented by those outside its development?
- Employed developers: The key developers need to work on it full time.
- A clear license: Some are very business friendly, others clear as mud.
- Commercial support: Companies need more than e-mail support from volunteers. Is there a solid company employing people you can call? "
Eleven Emerging Ideas for SOA Architects in 2007: Good listing of how web services are actually succeeding today. "This is where the World Wide Web continues to teach us effective techniques for service consumption and adoption. .. This is using the basic Web formats and protocols such as HTTP, XML, REST, and JSON as the "Unix Pipe of the Web" -- to quote a colorful phrase of Ray Ozzie's -- as the fundamental glue between systems. This allows widgets, Ajax applications, and mashups to be wired together so quickly it can almost be done in real-time with the latest tools."
d y n e : b o l i c -- a free multimedia studio in a GNU/Linux live CD: "You don't need to install anything, you don't even need an harddisk .. Download the ISO-image, burn your own CD, reboot your machine and you'll get back true love ;^)
dyne:bolic is shaped on the needs of media activists, artists and creatives as a practical tool for multimedia production: you can manipulate and broadcast both sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode and stream, having automatically recognized most device and peripherals: audio, video, TV, network cards, firewire, usb and more; all using only free software ..
It is optimized to run on slower computers, turning them into a full media stations: the minimum you need is a pentium1 or k5 PC 64Mb RAM and IDE CD-ROM, or a modded XBOX game console - and if you have more than one, you can easily do clusters.
dyne:bolic is RASTA software released free under the GNU General Public License. This software is about Digital Resistance ina babylon world which tries to control the way we communicate, we share our interests and knowledge." Integrating many multimedia tools, running with minimal system installation, doing automatic clustering for quick render farms: sounds real interesting.
Amazon S3 vs DreamHost: Good comparison of cheap generic hosting versus Amazon's robust storage service. The reader comments make many excellent points.
Web Applications 1.0: A framework for rich applications enabled by javascript in the browser. I'm told it's backed by Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera, among others.
SSH for Java: Lots of implementations of SSH clients in Java, under proprietary, GPL, or BSD lisences.
Wind Blade Technology: I started looking into sustainable energy in 2001, and found an active community that was open to sharing its findings and that was starting to use the internet to communicate. As I learned about RSS and weblogs, I thought that this area, like many in the IT world, would see weblogs grow, and with them a spontaneous division of labor to speed the spread of new developments would emerge. Blogs from universities, corporations, development institutions, non-profits, and from motivated independents would identify and highlight findings that mattered in specialized areas, and others who would otherwise search original sources would save time and effort by reading their blogs.
In the last 12 months, that dynamic has taken hold in sustainable energy. Starting in 2001, I kept a blog collecting important results I discovered in emerging energy technologies and developing country energy options, but now I find others are keeping close track and I can just follow their investigations. They include venture capitalists, investment companies, and independent engineers.
The Wind Blade blog (above) from six employees of Owens-Corning is an advanced example. They work in different countries, but all concentrate on the materials from which the blades of wind turbines are built. They write: "We accept the value of renewable wind energy as a given and we are
committed to helping it become more cost competitive and widely used." They work in a specialized but critical technology. Why? Well, the output of a wind turbine is proportional to the area swept by its blades, which is the square of the length, so even small increases in blade length matter. Longer blades need materials that are strong, light, and rigid enough to turn in moderate winds while flexible enough to bend rather than break in strong winds. New materials for blades continue to make wind power more economically compelling every year.
It will be interesting to see if these bloggers find an audience among other engineers, and if they retain their corporate backing.
Jyve Pro: "Everyone's an expert at something .. How to make money by talking on Skype." Service that integrates billing and directory listing for voice-based services, like translation, coaching, computer help desk, etc. Via Skype Journal. I wonder if Nuance's latest, well-reviewed Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 software could be integrated for some services as well. (NaturallySpeaking 9 is the first version of any voice recognition program that seems to get good results without having to train the program to each user's voice.)
Hacktivismo releases secure IM for dissidents: "to communicate across oppressive national firewalls, [consider] ScatterChat, a secure IM application
developed by an international group of hackers, human rights activists, lawyers and security experts. .. [It] is based on the open source Gain IM client and uses the anonymous Tor network to offer secure end-to-end encryption for both chat and file transfers, the developer group Hacktivisimo said on Friday. Installers for Microsoft Windows, as well as the software's source code, are available now, and packages for Linux and Mac OS X are listed as "coming soon."
It's designed for "nontechnical human rights activists and political dissidents" but could also be also useful for corporate environments and other settings where privacy is important, according to the groups Web site. .. The anonymity and encryption provided by ScatterChat ensures that [obscures] both the identities and messages of users". Good techincal doc on their site.
Skype Journal: eBay, PayPal, Skype by the Numbers: Cogent summary of statistics and other info about the three companies today.
IM Interoperability matrix: Useful reference to features and connections among AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google, Skype, and a few others.
The sparring and spin of the Google dance: "To test the effectiveness of these tactics, the Guardian created a spoof site and tried to force it up Google's rankings. Over one week, a number of tricks - some similar to those used by black-hat firms - were used to successfully push it to the top.
The spoof site was set up to promote eco-friendly flip-flops, a bogus product promising zero harmful emissions. The simple page featured a disclaimer to make the nature of the experiment clear, and a picture of the goods. At the start of the experiment, there were more than 11,500 results for "eco-friendly flip-flops" on Google, and the spoof site did not feature. Within two days of creating the site, Google's spider - the program that explores the web - had discovered the site and included it in its main index, but it appeared within the lowest 100 pages.
A second site was created which contained a large number of links to the first. Because Google rates the authority of a site partly by how many times they have been linked to, this ploy can makes a site appear popular. Within hours, the effect was apparent - the spoof site was now the top result in our test search, trumping the other 11,500 sites within days."
How to Start a Blog and Moving to Movabletype from Radio : useful references from Phil Windley.
SoftwareFor.org:: Software for Starving Students (SSS) version 2006.01 released, with many useful free utilities, both Windows and Mac.
Sipura SPA-3000 Small unit that provides voip and gateway functions. Interfaces for ethernet, and for "normal analogue telephone (or cordless) and a standard PSTN line. In
technical terms, this has both an FXS and an FXO interface - the FXS
interface allows a normal telephone to be turned into an IP phone and
the FXO interface provides connectivity to a PSTN line (or of course
another voip adapter which is locked by the provider). These interfaces
can be configured independantly using the onboard web interface where
when you log in as an admin user and switch to advanced mode, there are
hundreds of settings ..." Has instructions for remote control by Asterisk. About $100. It ought to would work with a virtual machine Asterisk, I suppose. (Spec sheet here).
OAI Registry at UIUC: Registry of XML schemas in use for various datatypes.
The W3C Markup Validation Service and The W3C CSS Validation Service: online tools to check your work
How to stress test virtual machines: Helpful test of system performance benchmark tools.
The Looming Attention Crisis: Nice quote from Herbert Simon: "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Even in 1971.
AJAX Web Database Project: A school project using ajax, php, and google maps to excellent effect for a classic database app. Source code supplied.
AJAX Translator: Great Ajax example. As you type the words of a sentence, they are automatically translated into the language of your choice. No doubt there are translation issues, but the immediacy is gratifying.
U3 and RoboForm: RoboForm is software to keep passwords and form-filler info for browsers like IE and Firefox. They have a version that keeps the info on a USB key for portability, and now has a version for the U3 device.
Business Blogging - Yahoo! Small Business hosts Movable Type: "get the power of Movable Type for blogging from a web host you trust: Yahoo! Small Business web hosting. All the features you need, with no installation required." $8/mo for 200 GB transfers and 5GB storage, with normal upgrades from there.
Gapminder: An interactive presentation for the "Human Development Report 2005" by UNDP, relating population, income and health across countries and regions over 50 years. Much improved in recent months. In 10 minutes, it conveys a lot about where the world is going.
RSS SMS: How to use yahoo alerts to issue SMS from RSS feeds, for free.
AJAX and E4X for Fun and Profit:
Functions to make Ajax easier in Firefox. Published code on
page. "What I came up with was a lightweight Javascript AJAX
class, with the
following APIs. Note that this was designed specifically for use with
Firefox 1.5 and above, though when I publish the full class
specification (this is still something of a work in progress) it should
work, with minor exceptions, on most browsers that support AJAX."
Objectifying XML - E4X for Firefox 1.1:
E4X is ECMAScript for XML, a language extension proposed to the ECMA
late last summer. "The principle behind E4X is simple, but very
profound. Currently,
Javascript is rather stupid about XML - if you want to manipulate XML,
you have to create a set of interfaces and use the W3C DOM and
frequently some VERY painful treewalking or convoluted XPath calls in
order to be able to do anything with it. .. [E4X] lets Javascript treat
XML as a native
application type in exactly the same way that Javascript handles
strings, numbers and regular expressions. [And] it "objectifies" XML.
In other words, it
lets you convert an XML document into a representation of an object,
without having to go through the long, involved steps involved in
working with DOM."
FTP File Sync: "Add robust FTP file synchronization to your web application (ASP, PHP, etc) in just a few lines of code. As
an ActiveX component accessible through COM, FTP Sync is easily
integrated into client side, or server-side applications and scripts.
FTP Sync requires no user interface and can run transparently in the
background or respond directly to an event.
With
both Uploading and Downloading Synchronization methods, FTP Sync can be
used in a multitude of applications. With FTP Sync enabled client
applications, you can easily deploy new files to every client
application simply by uploading updated files to an FTP server." Inexpensive.
Software That Binds, And Converts, And Retains: In two articles, Baseline magazine profiles the use of customer relationship management (CRM) software in churches. They track people so that visitors become members, members contribute and volunteer more, and members change churches ("churn") less -- all classic CRM. "Eighteen months ago, [pastor] Hand implemented a new process based on software from a company called ConnectionPower to improve the church's outreach methods. ConnectionPower features modules for such things as automating the visitor follow-up process, tracking donations and revenues, and creating a Web portal for members. It's priced from $1,000 for a small church to about $20,000 for churches with 6,000 or more members.
At [Hand's church], new visitors continue to fill out registration cards as they had in the past, with information such as family member names, ages, address [and] e-mail address. But now volunteers immediately type the information into the Windows-based ConnectionPower software. And now, each Monday morning, Hand or his assistant logs in to the system and see the names of the new visitors. .. The software then produces follow-up recommendations. For example, if a 28-year-old mother of two visits, the software prompts a volunteer of a similar age and background to make contact later in the week."
And the churches embrace podcasting and other media. "69%of evangelicals use the Internet to send, receive and forward spiritual e-mail and electronic greeting cards and request prayers online, according to a Pew Internet survey last year. That's compared with 51% of Catholics and 54% of Jews, the Pew Internet study said. .. Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale, an evangelical church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with 18,000 members, lets Apple iPod users download and take along a daily message from pastor Bob Coy, as part of what the church calls its Active Word Ministry. .. "If you don't have a parking lot, you can't get the people in the church to hear the message and ultimately lead them to the Lord. A Web site is as important as a parking lot to a church." "
Why free software: "you have three types of customers: those that will pay you, those that might pay you, and those that will never pay you. .. There were sufficient folks in the first category for us to get off the ground as a business, and enough in the second to grow the business. How did we do that? By leveraging the third category - the folks who will never pay us. I'll do anything and everything in my power to help the individual developers in my world for absolutely no money, because they give us relevance to the folks that will or might pay us. It really is that simple. Nor do we give everything away .. Like SugarCRM, most of what we do is free and available, but some isn't. To sum up: giving things away can easily grow your revenue opportunities, rather than undermine it." Then again, it ain't easy:: "Even JBoss has had difficulty converting those who download its software into paying subscribers - BusinessWeek earlier this year reported just five percent of JBoss users are subscribers."
How wikis are evolving: Several recent examples of how large numbers of collaborators can contribute and distribute information rapidly:
- Wikinews collected stories from "citizen journalists" during Katrinareporting, linking and photographing from Louisiana and around the world. Among professional journaists, the Online Journalism Review also assembled a wiki to aggregate crucial information after Katrina struck.
- The Katrina Information Map, a public resource for tracking or reporting flood damage. "most people are using the service to inquire about loved ones or report flooding on various streets."
- London bombings information was tracked in real time. Among other things, you can view every revision as it was posted to see how the information was released.
- The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2003 looking for evidence of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It put the 4000 pages of documents on the a Detention Practices Project wiki and asked readers of the community blog Daily Kos to rapidly read and review them.
- Authors Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig post their latest books online and invite readers to note errata or updates for the next edition. "Assembling pages of errata for my editor was a pain in the ass and very hard to use comprehensibly, especially when I got thoughts from readers in no particular order," Doctorow said. "Wikis let my readers self-organize it."
History's Worst Software Bugs: Cool story of software bugs with bad effects. First, why "bug"? In 1945, "engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark II system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."
My favorite story was an intentional bug placed by the CIA in 1982. The background refs are worth reading. "Operatives working for the Central Intelligence Agency allegedly (.pdf) plant a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased to control the trans-Siberian gas pipeline. The Soviets had obtained the system as part of a wide-ranging effort to covertly purchase or steal sensitive U.S. technology. The CIA reportedly found out about the program and decided to make it backfire with equipment that would pass Soviet inspection and then fail once in operation. The resulting event is reportedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in the planet's history."
Discover Music - Pandora: Neat service that generates a radio station by picking music that resemble a single artist or song. Way cool. An outgrowth of the Music Genome Project: "Over the past 5 years, we've carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world." [Thanks, Scott]
cosign: web single sign-on: Open source solution from the University of Michigan. License resembles BSD.
verydodgy.com: Silly fun site, with some useful google hacks (like remote-control webcams), and a perceptive article in FT about it.
Anapod Explorer vs. iTunes: 3d party iTunes replacement, supporting alternative file formats, file and playlist management systems, PDA functions, and web and streaming access to iPod contents. $20-30.
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET Web Hosting: Hosting with "long tail" pricing. "no contracts and no commitments .. If you'd like to talk to one of our sales reps to get a quote, you're out of luck. We don't have any. We also don't have any commissions, referral payments, or kickbacks. With NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, your money goes straight to the services you actually use"
- Data Transfers (Bandwidth): $1.00 per gigabyte
- Disk Space (Storage): $0.01 per megabyte-month
- DNS at $0.02 per registered domain per day, no matter how active your domain gets.
- Domain registration at $7.45 for a one-year .com and $7.68 for .net or .org.
Desktop Integration Bounty Hunt: Great idea. Corporations (primarily Novell and Google now) announce bounties for open source code that integrates open source desktop software in the Linux environment. "The goal of this contest is to improve the quality and functionality of the Linux desktop. .. Each task listed below has a bounty associated with it. Your job is simple: choose a task, do the work, fill out the claim form, and collect the bounty. "
New Worm Plupii Targets Linux Web Service Holes: "The three vulnerabilities it attacks through are the XML-RPC for PHP Remote Code Injection vulnerability; the AWStats Rawlog Plugin Logfile Parameter Input Validation Vulnerability; and the Darryl Burgdorf Webhints Remote Command Execution Vulnerability.
When Plupii is successful in infecting a server, it then sends a notification message to an attacker at a remote IP address via UDP port 7222 or 7111. .. Next, it opens a back door through one or the other of these ports. This enables an attacker to gain unauthorized access to the compromised system. Once in place, Plupii generates a variety of URLs .. in an attempt to find and infect other vulnerable systems.
The worm itself is easy to destroy. One need only delete the file: /tmp/lupii. The more significant problem is what the attacker may have downloaded to the server while it was active. Indeed, Symantec's Deepsight Alert Services recommends that, "Due to the ability of the remote user to perform so many different actions on the server computer, including installation of applications, it is highly recommended that compromised computers be completely reinstalled." "
Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far: Detailed detective work showing how Sony's DRM "solution" resembles the worst of malware, embedding and cloaking itself in Windows. There's potential legal liability for Sony in the process. Makes me want to avoid Sony and other proprietary DRM hacks.
 The Year of Rewards: Penestanan 2: When I travelled in Africa and Asia in the 80s, I shot a lot of slides. I dreamed then of a digital future where my camera would record sound as well as pictures, and where I could annotate the recordings and beam them out to my friends at home in real time. Even in 1983 you could see it would come, eventually. Now, here's a fine example from my friend David Lincoln. Today he's in Bali, taking a walk with villagers in their rice paddies.
Socialtext going open source: First with UI tools, then the whole product. Also noted: "One year free 5 person wiki at socialtext by mentioning "web20"."
Back to the Future: Introducing Email Subscriptions: FeedBurner now offers email subscriptions to RSS feeds, so newsletters can be automatically both RSS and email. Bloglet did it before, but it hasn't been updated in a long time. FeedBurner will integrate statistics on usage, among other things.
100 Million And Counting... How VC's have placed $100m into open source software startups in the last 5 months (Mar-Aug 05). No doubt they are reassured by Red Hat's rapid growth.
Orbeon PresentationServer: "Orbeon PresentationServer (OPS) is an open source J2EE-based platform for XML-centric web applications. OPS is built around XHTML, XForms, XSLT, XML pipelines, and Web Services, which makes it ideal for applications that capture, process and present XML data. Unlike other popular web application frameworks like Struts or WebWork that are based on Java objects and JSP, OPS is based on XML documents and XML technologies. This leads to an architecture better suited for the tasks of capturing, processing, and presenting information in XML format, and often does not require writing any Java code at all to implement your presentation layer." Runs under JBOSS or Apache Tomcat with LGPL license. Several other XForms support software were reviewed in 2003. Xforms book and tutorial also online.
ClamAV is a GPL virus scanner. Claims wide use in universities and ISPs. Got good reviews. Has ClamWin version for Windows as well as OSX and Linux.
U3 USB Devices Launch at DEMOfall: Sept 2005: "Several device manufacturers on Monday unveiled the first USB drives based upon the U3 standard, a method that enables users to carry, store and launch applications directly from a USB flash drive without installation. The U3 technology was first introduced at CES 2005 in January, supported by a host of software and hardware vendors. However, missing from the list is Microsoft, which has not committed to backing the standard.
In the United States, SanDisk, Kingston, Memorex and Verbatim will be launching smart drives for U3 and several popular applications are announcing software support for the standard. .. Software support includes AOL's Winamp, Cerulean Studios' Trillian, McAfee Antivirus and Skype among others. This support by high profile vendors is helping U3 to gain momentum and spur possible widespread adoption, according to Gartner Senior Analyst Joseph Unsworth. ..
U3 drives will begin to ship from various vendors beginning on October 15 in sizes ranging from 256MB to 2GB. The U3 group also announced it had signed a deal with I-O DATA of Japan to begin producing drives for that market beginning early next year."
Update your Linksys router with Sveasoft's firmware: "In its GPL Code Center, Linksys provides the source code for most of its devices. However, unless you're a programmer, this isn't going to do you much good. What can help you out is what Sveasoft has done with that source code. Based in California, this company has taken Linksys' source code and created new versions for replacing factory firmware. Basically, installing this firmware takes a limited functionality $50 consumer router and adds many of the features of an enterprise router. ..
Sveasoft actually sports three different families of firmware: Sveasoft firmware for Linksys WRT54G and WRT54GS routers, Alchemy firmware that works with a list of routers (which is free and adds a lot of the features listed above), and the aforementioned Talisman firmware."
Steve Lacey: How I put a podcast together: An audio gearhead takes on podcasting and shows how to do great sound. "My setup is way overboard. A cut down version of my setup with just Cubase, the E-MU 1820 and the Rode NT-1A microphone would work perfectly and give you great results. " [Thanks, John.]
Need Answers? Ask Anybody: NYT review of Google Answers (free lance general researchers that get paid), Ingenio.com (paid traditional professionals like tax lawyers and computer technicians), and Wondir.com (a no-fee exchange of questions and answers with optional tipping).
Vizu: Site that lets users create polls, link to them from their blogs, rank the polls and especially those who respond for how closely they predict other users.
ccMixter: Neat site with music remixes under Creative Commons lisences. Music is tagged and ranked by the listeners, making for interesting ad hoc browsing. Here's one downbeat selection.
Tactical iraqi: Self-paced language learning based on interacting with a computer game. "Tactical Iraqi is based on the Tactical Language Training System (TLTS) researched, invented and developed at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. TLTS rapidly teaches basic spoken conversational skills in languages that few people learn because they are considered to be very difficult. It is a self-paced system that gives people enough knowledge of language and culture to carry out specific tasks and civil affairs missions"
Customers of new UK ISP get to share all Sony music: "PlayLouder MSP, an ISP in the UK, has secured a license from Sony that allows its customers to legally share any song in the Sony-BMG catalog with any other PlayLouder MSP customer, and to download these tracks from any ISP customer in the entire world. .. PlayLouder MSP DSL costs about the same as comparable DSL offerings in the UK. For their money, PlayLouder MSP customers get their regualr DSL lines, as well as the right to share any song in the Sony-BMG catalog, even if it's out of print, in any file-format, using any file-sharing software, at any bitrate..
PlayLouder MSP is using audio-analysis software provided by Audible Magic to analyze the P2P traffic that it can detect on its network and count approximately how many times each track is traded, and will deliver that, along with a cut of its revenue, to Sony. They're also filtering traffic to the Internet to prevent Sony music tracks that Audible Magic recognizes from leaving its network via recognized P2P protocols and going to ISPs whose customers have not paid a license fee. However, they will not be stopping any tracks that Audible Magic fails to recognize, nor will they be resticting traffic using unrecognized protocols.
PlayLouder MSP has deals with many indy labels as well as Sony, and those labels will also get a proportional cut of the money that PlayLouder MSP takes in based on their network monitoring. The ISP says that it is negotiating with other major labels and hopes they'll come into the fold soon. .. PlayLouder MSP is live at the end of September if their schedule holds"
Copyright Flowchart: Amusing multi-stage chart to tell whether a copyrighted work has entered the public domain.
Educational Software for the PC Takes a Nose Dive: "In 2000, sales of educational software for home computers reached $498 million.. By 2004, sales of educational software - a category that includes programs teaching math, reading and other subjects as well as reference works like encyclopedias - had plummeted to $152 million .. Only 222 educational programs for PC's sold more than 10,000 copies in 2004, down from 447 in 2001. As sales began to decrease, retailers devoted less and less shelf space to these titles, making recovery for the industry more difficult. ..
[Why?] With free games and learning sites now available all over the Internet, parents are finding that they do not need to buy software .. The preschool and elementary school set is also moving toward portable gadgets like the LeapPad .. Older students, industry analysts said, are less likely to buy educational software when reference material and encyclopedias are free online. And there is the pass-along effect. Simple programs for toddlers and young children are often handed down among brothers and sisters because the titles and curriculums do not change much over the years. .. Other industry analysts and executives said that parents' frustration at installing new programs and the nearly universal availability of computers in classrooms have made using home PC's for learning less appealing.
Spending on teaching tools and toys had increased. Spending on tutors, she said, rose to $4 billion in 2004, from $3.4 billion a year earlier. Yet educational software is getting an ever smaller share of that consumer dollar. It is among the lowest-priced of any software category; in 2004 the average price for an educational program was $18"
BSD For Linux Users: Long but interesting comparison of BSD and Linux. "[Someone said] 'BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.' Now, I like that quip, not because it's some sort of absolute revealed truth, but because it gives a very good feel for some of the differences. The BSDs, in general, are very much more like traditional Unices than Linux is. A lot of that is because they're direct-line descendants of the BSD from Berkeley, which was a direct-line descendant of the original AT&T Unix. ..
BSD is designed. Linux is grown."
Selenium: "Selenium is a test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly in a browsers, just as real users do. And they run in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, Linux and Macintosh. No other test tool covers such a wide array of platforms.
Selenium uses a unique mechanism which allows it to run on so multiple platforms. Installed with your application webserver, Selenium automatically deploys it's JavaScript automation engine -- the Browser Bot -- to your browser when you point it at the Selenium install point on your webserver. Thus, you must have write access to the machine your web application server is running on to install Selenium. ..
Selenium was developed by team of programmers and testers at ThoughtWorks. It is open-source software and can be downloaded and used without charge." (Thanks, John)
HopStop.com - Subway and bus directions: Good service for finding your way within NYC, Boston, or DC, including walking directions, taking rush hours into account. Available in multiple languages and over mobile phones; good for tourists.
Google 'intelligence' fills in the blanks: Nifty feature. Ask a google query with a * and it'll search for pages that match. Example: Ann Arbor is the * of the midwest , or cgnet is a * .
Google adds RSS News feeds.
Padded Downloads: PAD is "Portable Application Description", an XML document that software packages include with descriptive info.
A Bright, Shiny Service: Sparklines: Nifty minigraphs  that can be generated on the fly and embedded into web text. The article also provides a good example of how to define and generate simple web services.
Secure RSS Syndication: Using greasemonkey to decrypt web content in the browser. Neat.
prefuse: an interactive visualization toolkit: "prefuse is a user interface toolkit for building highly interactive visualizations of structured and unstructured data. This includes any form of data that can be represented as a set of entities (or nodes) possibly connected by any number of relations (or edges). Examples of data supported by prefuse include hierarchies (organization charts, taxonomies, file systems), networks (computer networks, social networks, web site linkage) and even non-connected collections of data (timelines, scatterplots). Using this toolkit, developers can create responsive, animated graphical interfaces for visualizing, exploring, and manipulating these various forms of data. prefuse is written in the Java programming language using the Java2D graphics library and is designed to integrate with any application written using the Java Swing user interface library. " Many good demos at the site. See also JUNG, "the Java Universal Network/Graph Framework is a software library that provides a common and extendible language for the modeling, analysis, and visualization of data that can be represented as a graph or network. "
Posting, Subscribing, and Tagging: Nice summary of how they layer, what they're good for. "We are five years into the posting revolution, two to three years into the subscribing revolution, and maybe one year into the tagging revolution. We are just looking at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can be done with these techniques." And they're all carrying spam, too. I think we'll see them gamed heavily for political and PR purposes.
Fiddler HTTP Debugger: "Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler is designed to be much simpler than using NetMon or Achilles, and includes a simple but powerful JScript.NET event-based scripting subsystem." Configuring clients: "Fiddler is an HTTP Proxy running on port 8888 on your local PC. You can configure any application which accepts a HTTP Proxy to run through Fiddler so you can debug its traffic. WinINET-based applications (E.g. Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, etc) should automatically use Fiddler while it's running and the "Act as system proxy" box is checked on the Fiddler File menu."
An Introductory Tour of Mozilla's XUL: "XUL is an XML-based technology for expressing the GUI part of a software application. It has been used to express GUIs for applications as diverse as web browsers, email clients, calendars, calculators, spreadsheet editors, HTML editors, debuggers, and whole desktop environments. The free Mozilla platform—that is, the executable engine and libraries that accompany every Mozilla-based product—provides a fully-featured implementation of XUL. This article is a quick look at the main tags that Mozilla's XUL provides." Reference info available on XULPlanet.com , including an excellent tutorial.
The Podcast as a New Podium: NYT covers the new medium. Nice line: "Everyone is famous for 15 people."
Morae: Usability Testing for Web Sites and Software: "Morae is an all-digital usability solution that lets you see real users – including their verbal and facial expressions – as they experience your software, Web site, or Web application. Morae allows you to collect valuable data to improve user experience, navigation, information finding and much more." Just run their software on any machine with a webcam. You can watch, record, share and annotate the users' reactions to your software or website. Nifty. Software cost around $1300 for single-user single-reviewer.
Project Aardvark Midterm Report: FogBugz is developing copilot.com, to compete with gotomypc.com and logmein.com. I've requested a beta account.
Pod Person: PBS's Robert X. Cringely will be video blogging and podcasting this autumn, and the network is promoting it. Shape of things to come?
Google Maps API: "The Google Maps API lets developers embed Google Maps in their own web pages with JavaScript. You can add overlays to the map (including markers and polylines) and display shadowed "info windows" just like Google Maps." You need to sign up for an API key (like the search API key), limited to 50,000 page views per day. Documentation here.
Business Blog Tools: Useful comparison of 5 systems from Internet Week. Amazing - 4 years after Radio Userland, business blogs are mainstream and commodity-priced.
USAPhotoMaps : "USAPhotoMaps downloads USGS aerial photo and topo map data from Microsoft's free TerraServer Web site, saves it on your hard drive, and creates (GPS accurate) maps from it. " Has scroll, zoom, shows landmarks, routes, etc. (Thanks, Scott.)
EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers: Could come in handy someday. Covers liability, defamation, copyright, elections and workplace issues.
FreeNX and NoMachine: Fast and secure remote desktop system, like VNC or LTSP but faster and with many features:
- Runs single applications remotely
- Carries sound as well as screen and keyboard
- Has many clients - Linux, Solaris, Windows, Mac OS/X, PXE, Mozilla
- Can servers for several OS and can proxy to extend VNC and Windows Terminal Server
- Tight compression for fast service over dialup
- Uses SSL for end-to-end encryption
- Easy to install and demo in Knoppix
(As always, John's got the scoop...)
Speed Up Firefox with Pipelining. Sounds worth trying on broadband.
Distributed Internet Backup System: I've been waiting for this for years. From Scott Lemon and Phil Windley. "Since disk drives are cheap, backup should be cheap too. [You] should give your files to peers (and in return store their files) so that if a catastrophe strikes your area, you can recover data from surviving peers. The Distributed Internet Backup System (DIBS) is designed to implement this vision. .. DIBS encrypts all data transmissions so that the peers you trade files with can not access your data." Python source code available.
BlogMatrix: Tools and online services for creating and sharing videos and podcasts. Sparks
is a "solution for recording, sharing, finding and listening to podcasts [with]
- a multi-track recorder and mixer designed especially for the needs of podcasters
- automatic uploading of your podcasts to the BlogMatrix server
- a full featured podder and weblog reader for listening to other’s podcasts"
Korby Parnell's WebLog : A Brief [and Subjective] History of Corporate Blogging at Microsoft: How blogging began and eventually got institutionalized at MS. Includes a nice short list of corporate blogging guidelines. Related: the EFF Legal Guide for Bloggers.
DaVite: "DaVite is a Web invitation system, much like evite! or Yahoo! invites. You can use it to create a Web invitation that is mailed to all of your guests, who can then read the details, and respond online. Invitations are themeable, and can include user images, so they are completely customizable. " Open source. Changed little since 2002.
GroupServer: "GroupServer is a GPL open source collaboration server. It supports many-to-many interaction in groups and communities via email and an integrated web forum interface. Websites supported by GroupServer provide secure a personalised content structure with member directories, postings by topic, RSS and e-mail digest modes, document sharing, and web-based forum management. GroupServer renders XML content dynamically using XSLTs and is built on Zope and written in Python."
Microsoft: No IE7 for Windows 2000: "With Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 set to debut next month, Microsoft has quietly closed the door on Windows 2000 users planning to adopt the new Web browser. IE7 will require Windows XP Service Pack 2 due to internal security changes that rely on Microsoft's latest operating system release. .. Microsoft says the task is too complex due to security features not available in the older operating system. Company officials also noted that Windows 2000 is moving into the "Extended" support phase of Microsoft's product lifecycle as of June 30, 2005." Sounds like an opening for Firefox; there are a lot of Win2k desktops and servers that won't upgrade.
The Long Tail: The dangers of "Headism" Tight summary of the ideas and implications, comparing the head and tail in many dimensions.
Firm to use PR methods on online media and the blogosphere: I've been wondering when blogs and new media would attract PR professionals and political money. In this case, it's someone from Fox and Cato. "Next Generation Advertising has opened its doors in D.C. to produce online "virtual" public policy campaigns. Founder Richard Pollock says the goal is to use what is known as "rich media," video/flash, audio and animation for "entertaining, compelling and interactive" campaigns that can be posted on a variety of online sites. Pollock says Next Generation will also turn to influential Web-log sites run by bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers. Broadband now permits downloadable video to move around the Internet in a matter of days. In an online campaign, Pollock says, policy advocates are free of the time limitations of 30- to 60-second TV spots and can reach out to specific audiences by advertising precisely where they visit.
Pollock is a former Washington producer for ABC's Good Morning America and in 1993 won a daytime Emmy. He also was a senior producer for Fox News Sunday. Before founding Next Generation, Pollock was executive vice president of Shandwick Public Affairs and vice president of communications for the Cato Institute." [Via John Furrier]
Web 2.0 programming: First Flash MX, then AJAX, now more browser programming tools:
- Dive Into Greasemonkey: Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. Scripts can be shared. Has a compiler that generates full Firefox extensions, and a script generator (called Platypus).
- Piggy Bank 2.0: Piggy Bank is a Firefox extention that turns your regular web browser into a semantic web browser. Supports scraping and sharing. Uses Java for cross-platform consistency and deep functionality. Code, a paper, and a primer online.
Fundable: A web site for pooling money in small groups. "Get it to happen or get your money back." Could be great for non-profits, open-source coders or freelancers wanting to get paid for making a contribution, fans raising money to fund a concert, bulk buying, school projects, and more. (How about a private lottery: if we all chip in, one of us gets to go somewhere amazing..) [From Hugh Pyle]
Game skills pay off in real life: "there's a growing wave of research and firsthand reports about children, parents, workers, corporations and even medical patients experiencing notable benefits from computer or video games. There's also a push to change the mindset of people who dismiss video games as dangerous or worthless." Cites a variety of studies.
Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags: A rollup of Clay Shirky's writings on the collective organization of the web. "It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you're getting it wrong about the real world.
If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don't privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world. Critically, the semantics here are in the users, not in the system. This is not a way to get computers to understand things. .."
Sober-N worm still growing: "the W32/Sober-N worm has now been reported attempting to break into computer systems in over 40 different countries, and shows no signs of slowing down. Since the worm first emerged on Monday it has dominated the chart of most commonly encountered viruses. At the time of writing it is accounting for 79.29% of all viruses seen by Sophos's monitoring stations around the world. Sophos experts calculate that the worm is now accounting for an astonishing 4.5% of all email (legitimate or otherwise) sent across the internet."
The Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager: Fabulous java app visualizing parents' name choices since 1900.
Interesting use for the Mac Mini: "A few weeks ago I was visiting another one of my portfolio companies. They are in the process of rolling out the beta of their enterprise software product. But rather than risk any difficulties with download and installation, the company was shipping its beta as an appliance by simply loading the software onto the Unix shell of a mini and shipping the mini to its beta customers. Configuration of the beta at the customer premises then consisted of simply plugging in the power and the ethernet cable. Couldn't be easier.
Sure, I know that there are cheaper machines to be had running Linux on Intel processors. But the combined power, simplicity and beauty of the Mac mini can not be beat. I suspect we'll be seeing them popping up all over the place -- in the home and in the office -- in the coming months and quarters "
Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model: Scott Lemon writes about SCORM: "There is a good SCORM "brief description" here. It's a rich specification for the creation of courseware - educational software - that includes the course material, coupled with exercises and exams (assessments), and even some metadata about the "flow" of the course - the order that students have to accomplish different parts before progressing, and even scores that must be attained - along with where to send the results.
I had my first demonstration of SCORM today in the form of a government course being given by the Navel Postgraduate School. It was pretty cool ... a .zip file contained the entire SCORM course (something on marine navigation) and once loaded into Blackboard there was all of the course material, the exams, and for the student a way to begin learning."
FT/James Boyle: Deconstructing stupidity: Well written commentary on the "evidence-free zone" in which IP policy is made, both in the US and Europe. "If we don’t look at the evidence and we ignore the role of the public domain in fostering innovation, how can we possibly hope to make good policy?" Links to other useful articles.
The GoogleSmear: Juan Cole on how others use Google News and the blogosphere to spread falsehoods and smear (or at least distract) opponents.
Microsoft - Introduction to Windows Script Technologies: Useful reference, tailored for system administrators.
Stephano points to an interesting new programming language called Subtext, with a cool 17-minute demo, and quote my favorite professor from my undergrad years in the process. "Alan Perlis once said "a programming language that doesn't change the way you think about programming is not worth knowing"... Well, Subtext is not a programming language that you can use today to write your next blog with, but it made me think.'' Two key ideas: building a data structure rather than writing text, and thereby abandoning variables; and always executing code as it's written, like a spreadsheet, shortening the code/test/recode loop.
Mere mortals and great ideas: FT Review of the new book Democratizing Innovation. "[The book] argues that "users are the first to develop many, and perhaps most, new industrial and commercial products". This being so, competitive advantage might be expected to flow to manufacturers who systematically harvest this crop of ideas. For example, 3M, the industrial products group, has had programmes in place since 1996 to harness ideas generated by lead users. After crunching the numbers, von Hippel found that "lead-user-developed product concepts" at 3M were likely to be more novel, enjoy higher market share, have greater potential to develop into an entire product line and be more strategically important.
Mass-producing products developed by lead users is only one possible approach. Alternatives include selling toolkits with which customers can build their own creations, or developing products that complement user innovations.
This latter strategy is useful in circumstances where - to the consternation of economists - lead users give away their innovations. Thus the Linux operating system was developed by members of the open-source software community, many of whom are lead users of computing power. Since Linux is freely available, commercial software companies are unable to sell proprietary versions. Instead, they have responded with software and services that complement Linux.
The toolkits approach has been used by companies including International Flavors & Fragrances, which supplies customers with the tools to design their own food flavours.
These examples turn on its head the traditional division of labour between producer and consumer. .. This has profound implications not only for corporate management but also for public policy. If the goal of policy is to increase social welfare by encouraging innovation - and if user-generated innovation really is more successful than other types - then rules and regulations should encourage this activity. At issue here is patent law, legal constraints on product modification and tax breaks for research and development. Why should manufacturers get all the incentives when users do such valuable work? "
Mesdames et messieurs, the semantic web! "Wanna have a taste of what the semantic web will do for you? craigslist + Google Maps = http://www.paulrademacher.com/housing And there are still people thinking that the semantic web is about making everybody agree to one uber knowledge representation, bah." Beautiful application, perfect example of Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0. Reminds me of using gopher every day, then seeing Mosaic for the first time.
Folksologies: de-idealizing ontologies: Great short piece from MIT's Stefano Mazzocchi on folksonomies, ontologies, and how the semantic web can work to bridge the two. The philosophical intro is super. "categories are embodied, espression of humanity, not abstract metaphysical entities (Plato's ideas) that we aim to obtain. .. [Ontologies] are just contracts, a (more or less explicit) agreement between different parties. Language is a contract as well. So are categories. So is metadata. So are APIs, protocols, plug shapes and their voltage, meters.... you name it! Many make the mistake of associating an 'ontology' with Plato's metaphysical ideas..
The semantic web is a bad name for an attempt to make data interoperability scale at a web level. Ontology are a bad name to describe relationships between symbols. That's all there is, really.
Now, you use tags to categorize things for yourself, but instead of using a 'controlled vocabulary', taxonomy or ontology (depending on what field you come from, you will like to call them differently... which also is a metaproof of the point, but let's move on), you invent your own." He demonstrates how semantic web markup can distinguish terms that are identical with different meanings, and combine terms that are different with the same meaning. [Thanks for the tip, John]
Enterprise software defined: Excellent thread on how enterprise software is different. Includes excellent examples of very large databases, almost none of which use "enterprise database" products.
ActiveGrid - Grid Application Server: Interesting take on an application server with grid functions: "The ActiveGrid Grid Application Server is a next-generation application server designed to scale applications across horizontal grids of commodity computers. The ActiveGrid Grid Application Server is built on top of the open source LAMP stack. In contrast to traditional three-tier architectures, where statically defined applications are bound to a particular deployment architecture, the ActiveGrid Grid Application Server interprets applications at runtime and can deploy them using a variety of proven deployment models and multiple data caching patterns. .. The ActiveGrid Grid Application Server extends the open source LAMP stack with grid-aware features such as dynamic node registration, data caching, session management, transaction management and interface fragment caching. These features are implemented as an Apache Module and as libraries that run within ModPHP, ModPython, ModPerl and Tomcat. The ActiveGrid Grid Application Server interprets applications at runtime and can make decisions based on context, such as how to most appropriately cache a set of data across the grid, or how to render a form fragment for a particular type of client and user role."
U3 - New USB memory/device standard: "U3 makes the promise of anywhere, anytime, any PC computing a reality. By combining the widely adopted storage capabilities of today’s UFDs (USB Flash Drives) with the ability to transport and run applications from a small UFD, U3 ensures truly personal and portable computing. The U3 standard enables developers to create easy to use applications that minimize the complexities of today’s digital life. From your own email folders to healthcare history to fully functional work applications, U3 makes everything available anywhere without having to access multiple devices or lug around a laptop."
Memorex, Kingston, and Verbatim have promised products: "Called a smart USB flash drive, these drives enable consumers to carry all of their personal computer settings, applications and data for use on any PC wherever they go. The new Verbatim smart Store ‘n’ Go USB flash drives will be availabe worldwide [in 2005]. .. The U3 platform includes three components. U3’s hardware specification gives manufacturers the core technology to build their smart USB flash drives. The U3 software developer kit includes sample code, a standard set of application programming interfaces (APIs), and thorough documentation. The U3 Launchpad is a friendly graphical user interface that is used to access and run applications."
This could improve the utility of internet cafes: users can keep an offline personalized environment and secure information store for a small purchase price. Many of today's UFDs play and record sound; with U3, they could rapidly download and upload voice mail at an internet cafe to extend VOIP services (e.g., in developing countries). The U3 could be added to an entertainment device, like an MP3 player, radio, game machine or camera, making the net cost per user negligible.
Ourmedia.org: "We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches." Appears to build on the Internet Archive.
Blogcast: How to: The comments section gives links for using Windows Media Player to capture demos from your screen while recording your words. "The files usually end up in between 2 and 3 mb for about 6-8 minutes worth of blogcast"
Mapping Google: How Google Maps works in the browser. Turns out they use XMLHttpRequest, a hidden iFrame and the browser-based XSLTProcessor. Great to see that XSLT is now working well in browsers, both IE6 and Firefox. More info on it here, and a broader comment about "AJAX" here: "AJAX seems to be the new "buzzword of the day". In short, AJAX stands for "Asynchronous JavaScript And XML", an acronym coined by Jesse Garrett recently. The basic idea is very nice - you can actually perform client-side programming directly in the DHTML code, in the embedded JavaScript. And, while the DHTML page interacts with the user, it talks asynchronously in the background with the server through a variety of methods, notably by sending/receiving XML fragments." Used in Google Maps, GMail, and even Outlook Web Access.
The XML User Interface Language: (XUL) is a markup language for creating rich dynamic user interfaces. It is a part of the Mozilla browser and related applications and is available as part of Gecko [and Firefox]. It is designed to be portable and is available on all versions of Windows, Macintosh as well as Linux and other Unix flavours. With XUL and other Gecko components, you can create sophisticated applications without special tools.
XUL was designed for creating the user interface of the Mozilla application including the web browser, mail client and page editor. XUL may be used to create these types of applications. However, it may also be used any place you would use currently use a web application, for instance, when you need to be able to retrieve resources from the network and require a richer user interface .. This means you don't have to look for third party code or include a large block of JavaScript in your application just to handle a popup menu. XUL has all of these elements built-in. In addition, the elements are designed to look and feel just like those on the user's native platform, even supporting OS level themes in Windows XP and MacOS X. .. In fact, XUL is powerful enough that the entire user interface in the Mozilla application is implemented in XUL. "
Example: GeorgeNava.com. (Use Firefox to view.) Very slick, fast, pleasant to use.
OpenLaszlo: Next generation, open source, supported by IBM: "With Laszlo, you can:
- Develop standards-based rich Internet applications with one code base in XML and JavaScript
- Deploy them from any J2EE application server or Java servlet container running under Linux, UNIX, Windows or Mac OS X
- Display them in any Web browser enabled with the Flash 5 Player or above, reaching 97% of all Web-enabled desktops
Since 2002, Laszlo-powered applications have demonstrated proven usability, scalability and reliability in public Web deployments to millions of users."
A9.com > More Columns: Nifty. Amazon's A9 search engine can add columns of specialized searches to your search results, for a more specialized and personalized search experience. Reminds me of using the Google taskbar tool, but from a website instead of a desktop tool, and with the easy ability for third parties to add new search services.
Apollo 11 - 17 Mission First man on the Moon: panoramas.dk continues to collect great quicktime VR images, these from the moon missions of 30 years ago.
Google Desktop Search Plug-ins: Now there's an SDK to extend the Google Desktop search, to things like IM and IRC sessions, intranet pages crawled to your desktop, odd file formats (like *.url, *.vb), and open office documents. There's also a Firefox add-in to integrate desktop search into the browser better. Maybe someone will do an RSS search that returns whole items, rather than page excerpts (which I use all the time to look up stuff on my own weblog, and bloglines and other services do for other blogs). Makes we wish for a package that integrated all this into a simple-to-install linux (or even coLinux) desktop. [thanks for the tip, John]
vnc2swf - Screen Recorder: "Vnc2swf is a screen recording tool for X-Window (X11), Windows and Mac OS Desktop. Vnc2swf captures live motion of a screen through VNC protocol and converts it a Macromedia Flash(TM) movie (.swf). "
ObjectGraph Dictionary: Nifty demo of a dictionary that looks up with every character typed into an HTML form. Like Google suggest. The best part: they document How to do it. From ObjectGraph, a software contracting firm.
Radio Time: "TiVo for radio? You bet! Just like TiVo, you can listen, pause, fast forward, or move radio as MP3 files with RadioTime software. Listen to your favorite programs --anytime, anywhere. Record one airing or every broadcast of your favorite programs." Wonder if it has made peace with the RIAA?
BrightPlanet - Deep Query Manager: Enterprise software to search online data bases and combine the results. Emphasis is on the "deep web" that is inaccessible to search engines. They claim preconfiguration to 70,000 online databases and specialty search engines, extendible to include in-house databases, with a tool to automatically select the relevant engines for a query if desired. One package component does tracking, executing stored queries at intervals and reporting new results.
WordPress: "an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. .. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there. "
iftop: display bandwidth usage on an interface: "iftop does for network usage what top(1) does for CPU usage. It listens to network traffic on a named interface and displays a table of current bandwidth usage by pairs of hosts. Handy for answering the question "why is our ADSL link so slow?". "
Jon Stewart's Daily Show on Bloggers 02/16/05. Hilarious.
iPod Radio and Skype: "This post provides a "how to" on creating a personal iPod Radio that you can use in your Skype calls or simply leave running for your friends to call. The implications are disruptive, and the "ease of use" likely to further Skype's adoption when solutions are available for effectively using Skype as a broadcast service. It's perfect for low volume delivery of recorded messages off websites. Perhaps another zone for convergence between music, media and voice?" see also SkypeCasting: How to Record Skype Conversations
This builds on Skype's low latency, its high quality (if higher-bandwidth) codecs, and its ability to run in several instances on a single desktop. It's not just VOIP telephony, and beats streaming technology in having fast call setup and no server (being peer-to-peer). IP telephony seemed to me to be economically important but not functionally important, unless it could enable new functions. Up to now, making your own conference calls, keeping a line open for long periods, or integrating with other collaboration tools were valuable, but relatively minor, new functions. Skype's approach of adding high quality audio was intriguing ("the medium is the massage"). With recorded apps and closed user groups, we have SOIP, Sound over IP, with many apps, such as:
- personal or party-sized radio
- low-volume simulcast of events (I'd happily pay $5 to hear the music from my favorite jazz club when I can't make it; and I'd like to listen in on community or political meetings when I can't be there)
- recorded announcements (school reports, ski reports)
- intercom/surveillance: listen in on microphones anywhere
- PA systems: make an announcement from your PC, or PDA
- personal online dictation or transcription
Especially interesting is the ease of access from a telephone. Motorola is adding Skype to mobile phone handsets, and third parties can give a public phone number address to an SOIP destination. So any service you make on a PC can be accessed from phones, as well. Carriers may now reuse the phone numbers that used to connect to modems and faxes, and can carry calls from conventional phones into the new applications.
As noted by former BT CTO Peter Cochrane, unbundled VOIP like Skype has become as practical for road warriors as modems did in the 90s, and the results may not be pretty for the phone carriers. New applications may soften the blow a little.
IBM Cloudscape open source database: Late 2004: "IBM Cloudscape™ V10.0 is a pure, open source-based Java relational database management system that can be embedded in Java programs and used for online transaction processing (OLTP). A platform-independent, small-footprint (2MB) database, Cloudscape V10.0 integrates tightly with any Java-based solution."
Also: Q&A on IBM is open sourcing Cloudscape as ASF Derby. Open source code is available on the Apache Incubator Project site. Early 2005: IBM will partner "with Zend Technologies to create a bundle called ZendCore, which includes IBM's Cloudscape-embedded database and Zend's PHP development tools. Zend sells tools built on the open-source edition of PHP and offers related services."
MySQL Update: "Managers at Open Source database provider MySQL are squarely targeting the enterprise DBA and IT exec in 2005. With last month's major MySQL 4.1 upgrade, the Open Source DB now offers a set of new graphical query views, admin tools, and clustering support for high availability. .. [in 2005, they plan] MySQL 5.0, adding some more key features eagerly awaited by enterprises and ISVs, including support for stored procedures" and views and cursors.
Firebird Relational Database: "Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL-99 features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names since 1981.
Firebird is a commercially independent project of C and C++ programmers, technical advisors and supporters developing and enhancing a multi-platform relational database management system based on the source code released by Inprise Corp (now known as Borland Software Corp) on 25 July, 2000 under the InterBase Public License v.1.0. New code modules added to Firebird are licensed under the Initial Developer's Public License. (IDPL). The original modules released by Inprise are licensed under the InterBase Public License v.1.0. Both licences are modified versions of the Mozilla Public License v.1.1. "
IT Using More Open Source Databases: "Researchers at Evans Data Corp. have found a strong uptick in usage of a variety of Open Source databases throughout corporate U.S. In Evans' Winter 2005 Database Development Survey of developers and DBAs released this month, Evans found two-thirds use Open Source DBs, and 50% use (or plan to use) XQuery and other open web services standards with their data..
Aside from the traditional names of MySQL and PostgreSQL, Evans also found the FireBird Open Source databases making some inroads -- particularly in the "edge" sector of networking. Evans found FireBird is the most used database period for 'edge' applications, Microsoft Access is a close second (at 21%). In addition, MySQL and FireBird are locked in a virtual tie in the open source database space with each being used by just over half of database developers who use open source databases. ..
"Right now, if a developer wants to put together some type of project, and can't get the CIO to authorize the funding, he can now simply download a free database and build an enterprise-caliber project based on this database," [the analyst] said."
O'Reilly: Open Source Paradigm Shift: A restatement of Tim's thesis of the last few years. Some points I want to remember: "My premise is that free and open source developers are in much the same position today that IBM was in 1981 when it changed the rules of the computer industry, but failed to understand the consequences of the change, allowing others to reap the benefits. Most existing proprietary software vendors are no better off, playing by the old rules while the new rules are reshaping the industry around them.
I have a simple test that I use in my talks to see if my audience of computer industry professionals is thinking with the old paradigm or the new. "How many of you use Linux?" I ask. Depending on the venue, 20-80% of the audience might raise its hands. "How many of you use Google?" Every hand in the room goes up. And the light begins to dawn. Every one of them uses Google's massive complex of 100,000 Linux servers, but they were blinded to the answer by a mindset in which "the software you use" is defined as the software running on the computer in front of you. Most of the "killer apps" of the Internet, applications used by hundreds of millions of people, run on Linux or FreeBSD. But the operating system, as formerly defined, is to these applications only a component of a larger system. Their true platform is the Internet. ..
Sites such as Google, Amazon, and salesforce.com provide the most serious challenge to the traditional understanding of free and open source software. Here are applications built on top of Linux, but they are fiercely proprietary. What's more, even when using and modifying software distributed under the most restrictive of free software licenses, the GPL, these sites are not constrained by any of its provisions, all of which are conditioned on the old paradigm. The GPL's protections are triggered by the act of software distribution, yet web-based application vendors never distribute any software: it is simply performed on the Internet's global stage, delivered as a service rather than as a packaged software application. ..
And the opportunities are not merely up the stack. There are huge proprietary opportunities hidden inside the system. .. We saw this pattern in the PC market with most PCs now bearing the brand "Intel Inside"; the Internet could just as easily be branded "Cisco Inside". ..
[On open source style collaboration as a generator of value:] those that have built large development communities have done so because they have a modular architecture that allows easy participation by independent or loosely coordinated developers. The use of Perl, for example, exploded along with CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, and Perl's module system, which allowed anyone to enhance the language with specialized functions, and make them available to other users. ..
an observation originally made by Clay Shirky in a talk .. entitled "Listening to Napster." There are three ways to build a large database, said Clay. The first, demonstrated by Yahoo!, is to pay people to do it. The second, inspired by lessons from the open source community, is to get volunteers to perform the same task. The Open Directory Project, an open source Yahoo! competitor, is the result. (Wikipedia provides another example.) But Napster demonstrates a third way. Because Napster set its defaults to automatically share any music that was downloaded, every user automatically helped to build the value of the shared database. .."
Geeklog - The Ultimate Weblog System: "Geeklog is a 'blog', otherwise known as a Weblog. It allows you to create your own virtual community area, complete with user administration, story posting, messaging, comments, polls, calendar, weblinks, and more! It can run on many different operating systems, and uses PHP4 and MySQL."
 
dorkbot-sf: A local chapter of the international network of dorkbot groups, "people doing strange things with electricity." Just in the last month in SF: cool wierd constructions of robots, dystopian security systems, and real life laminar design tools for anyone to build the object they model in 3d in their computer. Spime builders international. (Thanks for the tip, Scott!)
Eggplant Demo: Neat testing application that uses VNC (from a Mac!) to run graphics-based user interactions against code under test. Good for cross-platform testing. Very good demonstration movie, too.
Mike Olson on XQuery and Database Technologies: I've been learning more about berkeley db and berkeley db xml from sleepycat software. They're open source for end users, and lisenced to software or hardware developers that embed it into products. This interview is interesting for showing how sleepycat thinks about sql vs xml, and for talking about xquery, xml schema and other topics. And the page carries a list of relevant links in its right margin for further reading.
Slashdot | Open Source Licensing and Slashdot | A Compact Guide To F/OSS Licensing: Reviews of two good books on open source licensing.
EPIC 2014: Very amusing flash projection of media in 2014. Worth all 8 minutes.
NexTag: Interesting comparison shopping site, esp for used and refurb computer gear. They show graphs of the price over the last few years, kinda like stocks except the slope is always sharply down... for example, an Acer Notebook.
Telligent Systems: "We manage and maintain 3 of the most popular Microsoft Open Source projects: The Community Server :: Forums (formerly known as ASP.NET Forums), a rich web based discussion systems; Community Server :: Blogs (formerly known as .Text), the most popular Microsoft blogging platform; and Community Server :: Gallery (formerly known as nGallery) a rich photo gallery application. "
Amazon A9 has photo yellow pages: Very cool: search for a service near a zip code, get a map that shows where things are, then see photos of the storefront and neighboring strees. "A9's so-calle |
