Ken Novak: XML and software

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 07:20:49 GMT

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."

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:44:26 GMT

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. "

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:05:13 GMT

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? "

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:36:07 GMT

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."

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 07:51:39 GMT

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.

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 17:08:41 GMT

Amazon S3 vs DreamHost: Good comparison of cheap generic hosting versus Amazon's robust storage service. The reader comments make many excellent points.

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 17:20:40 GMT

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.

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 07:57:48 GMT

SSH for Java: Lots of implementations of SSH clients in Java, under proprietary, GPL, or BSD lisences.

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 07:21:18 GMT

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.

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 09:02:27 GMT

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.)

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 08:34:17 GMT

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.

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 05:05:05 GMT

Skype Journal: eBay, PayPal, Skype by the Numbers: Cogent summary of statistics and other info about the three companies today.

Tue, 31 Jan 2006 07:52:07 GMT

IM Interoperability matrix: Useful reference to features and connections among AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google, Skype, and a few others.

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 00:57:28 GMT

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."

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 07:43:30 GMT

How to Start a Blog and Moving to Movabletype from Radio : useful references from Phil Windley.

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 07:42:03 GMT

SoftwareFor.org:: Software for Starving Students (SSS) version 2006.01 released, with many useful free utilities, both Windows and Mac.

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 23:41:26 GMT

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).

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 19:39:16 GMT

OAI Registry at UIUC: Registry of XML schemas in use for various datatypes.

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 18:10:27 GMT

The W3C Markup Validation Service and The W3C CSS Validation Service: online tools to check your work

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 18:05:45 GMT

How to stress test virtual machines: Helpful test of system performance benchmark tools.

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 17:04:23 GMT

The Looming Attention Crisis: Nice quote from Herbert Simon: "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Even in 1971.

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 07:15:37 GMT

AJAX Web Database Project: A school project using ajax, php, and google maps to excellent effect for a classic database app. Source code supplied.

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 07:09:01 GMT

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.

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 23:24:56 GMT

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.

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 07:23:08 GMT

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.

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 08:50:27 GMT

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.

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 16:24:35 GMT

RSS SMS: How to use yahoo alerts to issue SMS from RSS feeds, for free.

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:52:27 GMT

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."

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:41:31 GMT

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."

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:29:10 GMT

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.

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:12:28 GMT

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." "

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 16:45:32 GMT

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."

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 16:42:07 GMT

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."

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 07:19:26 GMT

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."

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 06:57:13 GMT

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]

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 22:13:04 GMT

cosign: web single sign-on: Open source solution from the University of Michigan. License resembles BSD.

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 19:13:57 GMT

verydodgy.com: Silly fun site, with some useful google hacks (like remote-control webcams), and a perceptive article in FT about it.

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 18:59:12 GMT

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.

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 18:47:04 GMT

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.

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:36:16 GMT

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. "

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 04:11:15 GMT

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." "

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 06:33:09 GMT

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.

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 07:44:11 GMT

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.

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 06:30:23 GMT

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"."

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 06:29:20 GMT

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.

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 07:35:16 GMT

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.

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 06:59:59 GMT

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.

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 08:08:20 GMT

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.

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 07:41:56 GMT

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."

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:05:41 GMT

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."

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 16:32:56 GMT

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.]

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 16:13:20 GMT

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).

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 07:13:08 GMT

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.

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 07:02:15 GMT

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.

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 06:36:18 GMT

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"

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 20:48:47 GMT

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"

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 20:43:29 GMT

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 06:18:00 GMT

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"

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 04:18:55 GMT

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."

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 06:25:12 GMT

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)

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 20:51:33 GMT

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.

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 18:39:33 GMT

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 * .

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 18:20:31 GMT

Google adds RSS News feeds.

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 17:37:54 GMT

Padded Downloads: PAD is "Portable Application Description", an XML document that software packages include with descriptive info.

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 17:35:55 GMT

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.

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 06:40:27 GMT

Secure RSS Syndication: Using greasemonkey to decrypt web content in the browser. Neat.

Sun, 07 Aug 2005 18:19:50 GMT

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. "

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 20:59:54 GMT

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.

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 07:09:43 GMT

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."

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 08:47:11 GMT

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.

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 18:04:39 GMT

The Podcast as a New Podium: NYT covers the new medium. Nice line: "Everyone is famous for 15 people."

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 01:07:58 GMT

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.

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 01:03:33 GMT

Project Aardvark Midterm Report: FogBugz is developing copilot.com, to compete with gotomypc.com and logmein.com. I've requested a beta account.

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 00:28:32 GMT

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?

Sat, 02 Jul 2005 07:57:05 GMT

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.

Sat, 02 Jul 2005 07:43:14 GMT

Business Blog Tools: Useful comparison of 5 systems from Internet Week. Amazing - 4 years after Radio Userland, business blogs are mainstream and commodity-priced.

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 17:18:04 GMT

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.)

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 06:11:43 GMT

EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers: Could come in handy someday. Covers liability, defamation, copyright, elections and workplace issues.

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 16:32:47 GMT

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...)

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 07:54:47 GMT

Speed Up Firefox with Pipelining. Sounds worth trying on broadband.

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 07:44:47 GMT

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.

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 07:41:51 GMT

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"

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 06:54:30 GMT

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.

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 23:22:16 GMT

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.

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 20:32:06 GMT

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."

Tue, 31 May 2005 17:18:04 GMT

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.

Fri, 27 May 2005 20:23:35 GMT

The Long Tail: The dangers of "Headism" Tight summary of the ideas and implications, comparing the head and tail in many dimensions.

Thu, 26 May 2005 08:04:19 GMT

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]

Tue, 24 May 2005 16:34:09 GMT

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.

Tue, 24 May 2005 07:35:26 GMT

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]

Tue, 24 May 2005 06:52:20 GMT

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.

Fri, 20 May 2005 17:07:59 GMT

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. .."

Thu, 19 May 2005 17:12:33 GMT

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."

Mon, 16 May 2005 16:56:43 GMT

The Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager: Fabulous java app visualizing parents' name choices since 1900.

Fri, 13 May 2005 17:10:58 GMT

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 "

Fri, 13 May 2005 16:49:15 GMT

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."

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 16:23:18 GMT

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.

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 08:19:21 GMT

The GoogleSmear: Juan Cole on how others use Google News and the blogosphere to spread falsehoods and smear (or at least distract) opponents.

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 06:42:21 GMT

Microsoft - Introduction to Windows Script Technologies: Useful reference, tailored for system administrators.

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 07:59:23 GMT

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.

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 07:02:01 GMT

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? "

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 07:11:26 GMT

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.

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 07:05:12 GMT

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]

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 06:43:10 GMT

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.

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 18:46:23 GMT

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."

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 17:58:25 GMT

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.

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 17:23:44 GMT

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.

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 07:30:40 GMT

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"

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 06:42:50 GMT

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.

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 06:32:32 GMT

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.

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 06:23:28 GMT

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."

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 06:25:14 GMT

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.

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 06:26:12 GMT

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.

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 17:41:20 GMT

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]

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 17:35:55 GMT

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). "

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 21:00:03 GMT

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.

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 20:49:41 GMT

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?

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 17:47:24 GMT

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.

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 07:31:47 GMT

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. "

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 07:16:58 GMT

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?". "

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 01:23:48 GMT

Jon Stewart's Daily Show on Bloggers 02/16/05. Hilarious.

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 17:11:01 GMT

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.

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 06:38:38 GMT

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."

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 19:46:17 GMT

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.

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 19:42:56 GMT

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. "

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 19:40:15 GMT

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."

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 20:09:29 GMT

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. .."

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 22:07:49 GMT

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."

Sat, 12 Feb 2005 17:54:52 GMT

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!)

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 22:49:43 GMT

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.

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 16:49:36 GMT

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.

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 08:15:41 GMT

Slashdot | Open Source Licensing and Slashdot | A Compact Guide To F/OSS Licensing: Reviews of two good books on open source licensing.

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 08:04:47 GMT

EPIC 2014: Very amusing flash projection of media in 2014. Worth all 8 minutes.

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 18:26:34 GMT

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.

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 06:42:00 GMT

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. "

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 08:39:42 GMT

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-called block view allows users to see storefronts and virtually stroll the streets of 10 cities, including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, where the company has collected more than 20 million photographs. It took a few days in each city to gather the images using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system receivers and proprietary software. "You can virtually go to an area, see the business and walk around the block," A9.com Chief Executive Udi Manber said of the service in an interview. "You get a feel for the neighborhood." ..

He added it takes just a few days to capture an entire city and that the eventual goal is to eventually add as many places as possible across the country. Other cities currently available are: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Seattle and Portland, Oregon." So I looked for pizza, it knew I lived in zip 94303 from a previous registration, and found most of the local places. I picked one I've visited frequently and saw shots of the street I know well. Could be fun just to find stuff where I'm going to travel, or to revisit neighborhoods where I used to live.

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 17:49:36 GMT

Xgrid: High Performance Computing for the Rest of Us: Apple's quick setup grid, in use at many academic institutions. Released Jan 2004. A Feb 2004 presentation has good examples from U Utah, including a PDF with rendered images. Controller and client run only on OS X today; agents can be OS X or Linux. A Stanford project is looking for volunteers to contribute time for chemistry research.

Cringely points out how cheap fast computing is getting. "Imagine a Mac Minicluster running Apple's xGrid software. Start with a 16-port fast Ethernet switch and stack 16 Mac Minis on top. That's a 720 gigaflop micro-supercomputer that costs less than $9,000, can fit on a bookshelf, and can be up and running in as little time as it takes to connect the network cables. High schools will be sequencing genes."

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 17:34:48 GMT

BEEP framework for building application protocols: Well written FAQ, technical intro and examples (like a reliable syslog protocol). Used in the xGrid system that runs on OS X.

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 16:44:08 GMT

Extension Room :: Nuke Anything: A nifty Mozilla/Firefox extension that adds a right-click button for removing any object from a page. I read that it can be used to remove ads before printing pages, or remove frames, or debug pages in development.

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 06:54:04 GMT

World Wide Panorama - Brooks Leffler - Refuge on the California Coast: Great site at Berkeley for panoramas, starting with Asilomar.

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 06:38:42 GMT

Wired 13.01: The BitTorrent Effect: Nice intro to the software and its effects. "One example of how the world has already changed: Gary Lerhaupt, a graduate student in computer science at Stanford, became fascinated with Outfoxed, the documentary critical of Fox News, and thought more people should see it. So he convinced the film's producer to let him put a chunk of it on his Web site for free, as a 500-Mbyte torrent. Within two months, nearly 1,500 people downloaded it. That's almost 750 gigs of traffic, a heck of a wallop. But to get the ball rolling, Lerhaupt's site needed to serve up only 5 gigs. After that, the peers took over and hosted it themselves. His bill for that bandwidth? $4. There are drinks at Starbucks that cost more. "It's amazing - I'm a movie distributor," he says. "If I had my own content, I'd be a TV station." [Update: It just passed 1 TB.] ..

[In] November Jon Stewart made a now-famous appearance on CNN's Crossfire. Stewart attacked the hosts, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, calling them political puppets. .. Delighted fans immediately ripped the segment and posted it online as a torrent. Word of Stewart's smackdown spread rapidly through the blogs, and within a day at least 4,000 servers were hosting the clip. One host reported having, at any given time, more than a hundred peers swapping and downloading the file. No one knows exactly how many people got the clip through BitTorrent, but this kind of traffic on the very first day suggests a number in the hundreds of thousands - and probably much higher. Another 2.3 million people streamed it from iFilm.com over the next few weeks. By contrast, CNN's audience for Crossfire was only 867,000. Three times as many people saw Stewart's appearance online as on CNN itself..

"Blogs reduced the newspaper to the post. In TV, it'll go from the network to the show," [and for that matter, MP3 reduced the album to the song]

The P2P technology company Kontiki produces software that, like BitTorrent, creates hyperefficient downloads; its applications also work with Microsoft's digital rights management software to keep content out of pirate hands. The BBC used Kontiki's systems last summer to send TV shows to 1,000 households. And America Online now uses Kontiki's apps to circulate Moviefone trailers. In fact, when users download a trailer, they also download a plug-in that begins swapping the file with others. It's so successful that when you watch a trailer on Moviefone, 80 percent of the time it's being delivered to you by other users in the network. Millions of AOL users have already participated in peercasting - without knowing it."

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 19:48:24 GMT

Flexbeta seems an interesting site for investigating beta software releases. They have articles, and also links to recent software, like VMware Workstation for Windows 5.0 Build 11888 Beta, with a direct link to a 51mb .exe download.

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 22:09:16 GMT

Google Mini 4.2 appliance: "Once installed the Mini crawls the content and creates a master index of documents ready to be accessed by a searched query. The software recognizes more than 220 different file formats, including HTML, PDF, Microsoft Office and WordPerfect. It can index up to 50,000 documents. Besides this, it helps site administrators to improve their site usability by generating reports on page errors and broken links, and provides reports on search term frequency that can be used to identify the most searched information and user’s expectation from the web page."

Sun, 09 Jan 2005 08:24:19 GMT

Web Access Log Analyzers: A long list of packages maintained by Uppsala Univ. in Sweden.

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 18:21:49 GMT

Attack of the Killer Xanga: How a blog entry on Xanga turned into a denial-of-service attack on another website (in this case, slashdot search). The comments about and by the hackers involved give a view into their motivations.

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 09:09:18 GMT

Google Suggest: Way cool interface that suggest search terms and estimates numbers of hits as you type. Wonder when it will make it into their toolbar? Here's info on how it works.

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 06:37:08 GMT

MaxMind - GeoIP Free Country: "GeoIP Free Country is a free version of our MaxMind GeoIP Country database. GeoIP Free Country enables you to test out our products, and the MaxMind GeoIP Country database is a [paid] drop-in replacement for GeoIP Free Country, should you require greater accuracy."

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 07:41:03 GMT

Windows vs. Unix software costs: Interesting analysis of a change that I've noticed in the last few years: Commercial Unix software is now cheaper than Microsoft software. There has been "price change - in opposite directions for Microsoft and the rest of the world. When you bought those 20 NT boxes to run SQL-server 7.0, say in March of 1999, those SQL-server licenses were a lot cheaper in both absolute and relative terms. SQL-Server 7.0 started at $508 per machine. You didn't need an enterprise class CPU license because users were counted as concurrent users [while now it counted as identified users] .. On the Unix side both the hardware and the software are cheaper today, but on the Windows side only the hardware is. ..

Unix software is now a lot cheaper than Windows software for similar levels of power and support. It's often not true among PC companies - HP and Adobe generally still charge more for their Unix products than their Windows products- but it is consistently true when you compare open market prices to Microsoft prices.

If you ask business people which costs more, Unix or Windows software, you usually get the kind of look reserved for idiots. Everyone knows Windows software is cheaper - that's a big reason so many people agreed to put up with the poor quality to begin with. Even three years ago that was true if you set scale aside as a consideration. Sybase for Unix was more expensive than SQL-Server for Windows - and people ignored the fact that Sybase served hundreds of concurrent users on big HP and Sun gear while SQL-Server worked for tens of people on Wintel gear. Today it's not true at any scale - and that's a big win for Unix." Why is this? My guess is the competition Unix is taking from Linux, which is cheaper still. Windows hasn't yet felt as much competition from Linux.

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 23:27:06 GMT

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." Another key tool: IE 5 Web Developer Accessories, including View Partial Source: "highlight the area of the Web page for which you want to view the source, right-click on it, and select "View Partial Source." [via John Sequeira]

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 08:21:22 GMT

Understanding Citrix's SpeedScreen Latency Reduction (SLR): Description of how Citrix improves upon terminal server on high-latency links. Reminds me of mainframe terminals and the "local echo" and "keyboard lock" buttons! "Citrix has long talked up as a benefit of MetaFrame Presentation Server.. imagine a situation without SLR where a user is typing a document via an ICA session with 400ms of latency. .. To the user, it would appear that there is a half-second “lag” when typing.

To address this, SLR’s Local Text Echo causes the ICA client to behave a bit differently. When enabled, a user pressing a key on their keyboard causes that key code to be sent to the server. However, at the same instant, the local ICA client software also draws the appropriate character on the user’s screen even though the actual screen drawing instructions from the server are bogged down in the 400ms latency between the client and server. Then, once the ICA client finally receives the actual updated screen from the server, it doesn’t have to update that character on the local screen .. [It] works really well. It works with all different fonts and font sizes. .. complex things such as highlighting and deleting large chunks of text exhibit the lag associated with the actual latency...

The other major SLR feature is something called “Mouse Click Feedback.” This addresses another common problem in Citrix environments with high latency, namely, the fact that users click on a button, become impatient, and click on a button again before the first click registered. Then, when the application’s response finally makes its way to the user, whatever the user clicked on comes up twice. Mouse Click Feedback works by adding the hourglass symbol to the arrow cursor the instant the user clicks the mouse anywhere within the boundaries of the remote ICA application. [The mouse isn't locked, but users generally respond to the hourglass by waiting] ..

SpeedScreen is automatically used on a MetaFrame server whenever a user connects to a session that has between 150 and 500ms of latency. As long as the client supports it, it's used." In another article, the author notes that SLR consumes more bandwidth, sometimes as much as 20% more; thus it's a tradeoff of more bandwidth for less latency.

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 06:57:35 GMT

Notes from ITP: Flickr-as-web-services edition: Clay Shirky reports on his students' latest obsession: pictures via Flickr.

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 06:56:21 GMT

Wysiwyg Wiki: Directory of efforts and hints for adding user-friendly editing to wikis. PerSpective is one interesting implementation in .Net, released under GNU. PurpleWiki caught my eye because of its support for fine-grained linking (like Englebart's Augment), although without wysiwyg.

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 06:20:38 GMT

ARSC Really Simple Chat - Manuel Kiessling's Homepage: "ARSC is an easy to install, simple to handle, cross-browser and cross-platform compatible, high-performance open source web chat system written in PHP, using MySQL. " Has a nifty feature for use during meetings -- normal web interface for users, customized display for a projector.

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 06:10:06 GMT

Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata: Well written examination of the use of free form tagging in public services like Flickr and Deli.cio.us. The author sensibly suggests that authors of more formal classification systems might learn about their user behaviour and preferences by incorporating an add-on folksonomy and studying how it is used. The author also asks how these systems might work in intranet or work environments.

I have a further suggestion in this line: utilizing social network info. I notice that folksonomies have two kinds of use: (1) referencing items that I made, which use only my tags, and (2) referencing items made by anyone. It'd be great to have something in between: reference the items that I or my nth degree-of-sepration friends have tagged. [via the always-insightful Clay Shirky]

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 05:50:32 GMT

Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new, short report on blogging: "By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is. " Also: 82% of blog creators are long-time internet users -- ie, have been online 6 years or more, and 70% have broadband at home. The jump in blog readers in the last 18 months from 12% to 27% stands out.

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 19:55:26 GMT

What is Konfabulator?: Haven't tried it but it looks very nice. "Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather. What sets Konfabulator apart from other scripting applications is that it takes full advantage of today's advanced graphics. This allows Widgets to blend fluidly into your desktop without the constraints of traditional window borders. Toss in some sliding and fading, and these little guys are right at home in Windows XP and Mac OS X. The format for these Widgets is completely open and easy to learn so creating your own Widgets is an extremely easy task."

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 06:33:07 GMT

What the Bubble Got Right: Paul Graham's happy review of the bubble, from Sept 2004. "When one looks over these trends, is there any overall theme? There does seem to be: that in the coming century, good ideas will count for more. That 26 year olds with good ideas will increasingly have an edge over 50 year olds with powerful connections. That doing good work will matter more than dressing up-- or advertising, which is the same thing for companies. That people will be rewarded a bit more in proportion to the value of what they create. If so, this is good news indeed. Good ideas always tend to win eventually. The problem is, it can take a very long time. It took decades for relativity to be accepted, and the greater part of a century to establish that central planning didn't work. So even a small increase in the rate at which good ideas win would be a momentous change-- big enough, probably, to justify a name like the "new economy.""

My favorite pithy quote: "Nerds tend to eschew formality of any sort. They're not impressed by one's job title, for example, or any of the other appurtenances of authority.. I thought it would be useful if I explained what a nerd was. What I came up with was: someone who doesn't expend any effort on marketing himself." (See also Paul's classic Why Nerds are Unpopular).

Mon, 27 Dec 2004 05:10:26 GMT

Start-Up Firm Launches Open Source Object Database: "db4objects is a commercial, VC and privately funded company with European roots and now based in based in San Mateo, Calif. The free GPL-version is available for download for Java, .NET and Mono.

There is also a commercial license for ISVs and services firms looking to resell db4obejcts. The db4obejcts database software, dubbed db4o, is already in use by Hertz, BMW's Car IT unit, and Spain's AVE (the high-speed train unit), company execs said.

The firm calls db4o is the first native object database for both Java and .NET, sporting an architecture that gives developers the "simplest and easiest way to directly store objects," according to db4objects' CEO Christof Wittig. Implementation is also designed to be simple, allowing devs to have db4o code up and running in under five minutes, Wittig added. "

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 08:34:53 GMT

Presentation Tips for People running Virtual PC or VMWare: Good tips for tech demos, even if you aren't running VMs.

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 08:29:57 GMT

ZoomIn for Windows: "ZoomIn is a screen magnification program allowing you to view any area of your screen under magnification. ZoomIn allows you to control the amount of zoom, view a pixels location and color, and save it as a bitmap. Use ZoomIn is a very simple program to use. Place your mouse over the main window and click and hold the mouse button then drag the "zoom" window over the area of the screen to enlarge. "

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 16:36:01 GMT

Magnolia 2.0 Upgrades Open J2EE Content Management: "Swiss-based Obinary has released Magnolia 2.0, the first upgrade to its Open Content Management project. .. Magnolia 2.0 is also the first CMS to support the Java Content Repository API (JSR-170). Magnolia 2.0 is available for free download from http://www.magnolia.info/ and can be tested online at http://www.magnolia.info/demo. Companies like Siemens Enterprise and numerous customers from the pharmaceutical industries are already using Magnolia today, the group said...

Magnolia 2.0 uses the open-source licensed JSR-170-implementation "Jackrabbit" as a content repository. Magnolia 2.0 was primarily developed by engineers and devs at Obinary, a software and consulting firm located in Basel/Switzerland that also offers commercial support, hosting, training and implementation services for Magnolia. " An advantage of the open JSR-170 is that it prevents "lock in" to a content management system by storing the content in a vendor-neutral store.

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 17:22:12 GMT

LogMeIn - Remote Access Software and Remote Control Software: A new competitor to www.gotomypc.com. Free version for simple remote control, $13/mo with file transfer and synchronization, free admin tools.

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 17:00:52 GMT

Finding a Product Idea for Your Micro-ISV: Part of a series on the "micro-ISV" -- ie, one-person software vendor. A few nice ideas:

Discover add-ons to existing products by trolling product-specific Internet sites and looking for complaints. "The sheer volume of whining on the Internet usually makes it easy to quickly fill your candidate list with add-on product ideas"
Choose your competition. "If you can't find any competitors at all, be afraid. This is usually a very bad sign. It means that your product might not actually have any market at all."
How to avoid having to hire a sales guy. Also: "It's important to realize that this sales guy issue affects your pricing decisions as well. Corporate buyers have limits. If you exceed these limits, they need lots of approvals from their superiors, which means you need a sales guy to hold their hand throughout the process. Avoid these limits (and the sales guy) by keeping your product price under $1,000, preferably under $500."

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 16:47:18 GMT

torrentocracy - about prodigem: "Prodigem is a content hosting service. It uses Bit Torrent peer to peer (p2p) filesharing to enable you to distribute extraordinarily large media files at an extraordinarily low cost. In fact, the service is currently free (but probably will not be forever). Prodigem is currently in a limited testers phase and will be opened to wider availability shortly. In the meantime, you can download content and see what's available from the Prodigem Torrent Tracker.

What is revolutionary here is that Prodigem completely automates the entire process of setting up bit torrent sessions for the distribution of your content. You simply upload your content via the web and with the click of a few buttons, the Prodigem servers are hosting and seeding your torrent for your content."

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 05:38:02 GMT

Get ${Stuff} Done with Groovy: "I've been using and very much enjoying Groovy, a scripting language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It's a great scripting language, and it provides you with access to all of the class libraries available for Java. In other words, you get all the benefits of Java without having to write so much bloody code all the time. " A jumping off point for the language. An example: using Groovy and Bloglines Web Services to make a 3-pane well-featured news reader in 150 lines of code.

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 05:55:50 GMT

Intelliseek's BlogPulse: Nifty tools and reports on what's active in blogspace.

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 07:53:47 GMT

Blog Torrent - Simplified bittorrent by Downhill Battle: "A greatly simplified bittorrent experience." Said to be suitable for sharing home videos, or other large objects.

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 03:11:12 GMT

Eliyon Technologies: "provides the most comprehensive source of information on business professionals available. Our growing database currently contains over 22 million executives, managers and professionals in 1,538,217 companies. " Impressive demo. A natural fit for LinkedIn or Spoke. Could impact journalism, business competitive research, intelligence.

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 01:19:25 GMT

Groove needs external interfaces: I wrote a comment to another weblog about Groove's limitations from a user's point of view; you can read it here.

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 17:51:37 GMT

Linux backdoors: Scott Lemon points to a paper on how to introduce back doors into Linux kernels, and speculates that as its popularity grows, Linux may become a more attractive target for hackers. I imagine uncontrolled distribution of hacked distro's (via bitTorrent, etc) providing a slow vector for the spread of hackable operating systems.

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 17:26:21 GMT

Adam Bosworth's ISCOC04 Talk: Nice rant on simplicity in protocols and systems: "That software which is flexible, simple, sloppy, tolerant, and altogether forgiving of human foibles and weaknesses turns out to be actually the most steel cored, able to survive and grow while that software which is demanding, abstract, rich but systematized, turns out to collapse in on itself in a slow and grim implosion. ..

Consider search. .. today half a billion people search every day and what do they use? Not Query by Example. Not Boolean logic. They use a solution of staggering simplicity and ambiguity, namely free text search. The engineering is hard, but the user model is simple and sloppy. ..

When HTML first came out it was unbelievably sloppy and forgiving, permissive and ambiguous. .. HTML is today the basic building block for huge swathes of human information. ..

You want to see the future. Don’t look at Longhorn. Look at Slashdot. 500,000 nerds coming together everyday just to manage information overload. Look at BlogLines. " More in this spirit here.

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 07:08:08 GMT

Salesforce.com as Nonprofit CRM Donor Management Database: For up to 10 users, "Salesforce.com provide their hosted [Professional Edition] CRM dB to nonprofits for free [as part of their] philanthropy and giving back to the community.. several nonprofits are using Salesforce, including the United Way. ..

Literally, within minutes of signing up for a free thirty day trail, I was phoned by an account manager to help me get started (not to make a sell since it was obvious I was a nonprofit). In seeing that I was a nonprofit, she got me connected with their nonprofit CRM manager who in turn got me connected with Clearport.org. Clearport.org is working with Salesforce to develop a template for nonprofits to help configure Salesforce for nonprofit data management processes (to be released sometime in the Spring)." The author likes salesforce's modules for management of contacts, loans, and donations, with Office integration and an API. He says Kintera has more features for marketing nonprofits, but salesforce covers the basics for free.

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 06:54:20 GMT

DotOrg Media: Good source for info about tech for nonprofits, including:

Open Source Survey Results

Using Open Source Software

A Guide to ASPs, Internet Services and Online Software

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 06:07:19 GMT

HitMaps: Awesome service to generate geographic maps of web page usage automatically. "Ghe display maps for ClimatePrediction.net [and other sites] now include a thumbnail display with a live daily update, which in turn links to larger maps of different views for world, continent, and a few country maps. .. Hits to a web page are collected by including the thumbnail HitMap image into the page. The IP of the page requester is translated into geographical coordinates and stored in a database. Once a day, the HitMaps map images (the thumbnail image and the rest of maps it links to) are updated according to the database..." Currently about 1400 sites are tracked, and the service is being upgraded to handle more. I'll try adding it to this site soon.

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 08:11:56 GMT

10x10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris: cool take on the news at the moment.

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 08:27:22 GMT

Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us make RSS delectable: Good review and comparison of these tools.

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:43:10 GMT

Hugh on the Bloglines API: Nice story of how he built a Groove interface to collect RSS from the Bloglines API.

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:27:49 GMT

Sifry's Alerts: Oct 2004 State of the Blogosphere: Good 4-part series with nice graphs. A few facts:

About 400k blog posts are created daily (about 4.6 per second)
About 4 million weblogs exist, at least 2m active
About 5000 corporate bloggers are active, with Microsoft, Sun and SAP the best represented companies
The number of blogs is doubling every 3-5 months, growing now by 12,000 per day, of which over half remain active (defined as having a post within the last 3 months)

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 07:05:57 GMT

312, Inc. LeanOnMe: "Using innovative Peer-to-Peer technology, LeanOnMe allows you to backup your files to your friends, family, or colleague's computer. This is all done quickly, easily, and safely, using encryption standards similar to that used by banks and the military. LeanOnMe is platform independent! (Windows, UNIX, Linux, Macintosh) " One time software sale, no monthly fees, $50 for a pair of machines.

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:01:31 GMT

Korean Cyworld - commercial blogging: "Cyworld is a popular site that provides personal homepage services. As of yesterday, the site surpassed 10 million members, or more than a quarter of the South Korean population. Within just a few years of launching, it has become an important part of mass culture. Cyworld's main feature is a type of Web log called a "mini hompy," short for mini homepage. Like other blogs, users can create various Web boards, produce online photo albums, and upload other content. Its specialized content includes a "mini room," which users can decorate with items from a cyber shop. Arcade games and music can also be bought to be included in one's hompy. These are bought with acorns, which cost 100 won (9 cents) each. Currently, Cyworld earns about 150 million won a day from acorn sales."

I was a Cyholic: Good description by a young user, with screen shots and insights into the social processes cyworld builds on (vanity, status-seeking, and even the pleasures of being stalked).

A recent essay by Clay Shirky provides a valuable counterpoint. Looking at mailing lists and SlashDot, he notes how a focus on personal computers and individual users obscures what they are used for. Networked computers are less like "boxes" than "doors" into a social space. Simple means and rapid experimentation can create a lot of value.

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 06:12:35 GMT

MetaVNC -- a window-aware VNC: Neat way to remote control multiple machines. "MetaVNC is a window aware VNC. MetaVNC merges windows of multiple remote desktops into a single desktop screen. MetaVNC also comes with its own task bar and application menu, which makes it easy to control applications or windows on different hosts. Furthermore, MetaVNC trys to merge remote desktops with local desktops."

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 00:27:49 GMT

Linux Open Logic Distribution Service: "BlueGlue is more than one-stop shopping for Open Source software. It provides a way for enterprise managers to impose consistency, better documentation and orderly upgrades on what can often seem like a very random Open Source world. Specifically, OpenLogic sells its BlueGlue Open Source tools platform as an annual subscriptions that include

software from more than 100 different Open Source projects,
professional documentation,
regularly scheduled updates, big fixes, upgrades, and
technical support.

Developer/architect training and consulting are also offered as optional upgrade services. Moreover, the BlueGlue platform automates some of the trickier aspects of using Open Source on enterprise tasks, including installation, configuration, integration, deployment and testing. "Many Open Source packages just don't play well together... so as part of our value-add, we have devised a knowledge based engine that integrates these together," Grolnick said. ..

OpenLogic releases a new BlueGlue release every 4 months, which aggregates all changes to all listed Open Source projects. Further, BlueGlue engineers confirm the bug fixes and code updates by taking the code through test cycles, and make sure that any integration that may have existed between Open Source projects before the updates remains intact. OpenLogic's BlueGlue is available on CD, in a subscription, starting at $199. "

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 06:25:30 GMT

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System: Sweet. Runs well. "S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It's totally simple, and it's totally standards-driven."

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 05:32:44 GMT

CoolText.com is a free online graphics generator. Choose what kind of image you would like to create, fill in a form and the image is created on the fly. Includes a font and texture collection. An outgrowth of Net-Fu software created at UC Berkeley.

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 05:33:16 GMT

NewsGator Online: An apparent competitor to Bloglines as a web-based RSS aggregator, from the company that has the succsssful Outlook plug-in aggregator.

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 05:30:27 GMT

Wikinews: Building on the large and successful wikipedia community, a news site is proposed, with review before publication and links to sources. "We seek to create a free source of news, where every human being is invited to contribute reports about events large and small, either from direct experience, or summarized from elsewhere. Wikinews is founded on the idea that we want to create something new, rather than destroy something old. ..

While Wikinews aims to be a useful resource of its own, it will also provide an alternative to proprietary news agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters; that is, it will allow independent media outfits to get a high quality feed of news free of charge to complement their own reporting. Thanks to copyleft, anyone can create their own free news source - even a non-neutral one - on the basis of our work. Even if our articles will initially be few, they will be free, permanently available and not require registration before reading.

While we are faced with many new challenges, Wikinews will adopt the key principles which have made Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia websites what they are today: neutrality, free content, and an open decision making process.

We seek to promote the idea of the citizen journalist, because we believe that everyone can make a useful contribution to painting the big picture of what is happening in the world around us. The time has come to create a free news source, by the people and for the people. We invite you to join us in this effort which has the potential to change the world forever." A potentially important source to open source intelligence.

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 00:58:11 GMT

pulver.communicator: New version of "Free World Dialup" SIP-based software for peer-to-peer VOIP, with additional features:

multiprotocol multiparty instant messaging (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN)
filtering incoming comms by contact lists
"social networking" - sharing and distribution of contact lists with your contacts
"call-me" links that can be sent to non-subscribers

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 06:00:18 GMT

Top 10 Google Myths: Brief summary of Page Rank and other topics.

Mon, 25 Oct 2004 20:32:04 GMT

One-stop way to read news, blogs online: Good end-user intro to the topic.

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 05:30:38 GMT

Remote Syslog with MySQL and PHP: "Msyslog has the ability to log syslog messages to a database. This allows for easier monitoring of multiple servers and the ability to be display and search for syslog messages using PHP or any other programming language that can communicate with the database."

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 19:39:46 GMT

Myghty - High Performance Python Templating: "Myghty is an all-new, Python based content-delivery and template system derived from HTML::Mason, an enterprise-quality web development system written for a Perl environment, the templating choice of Amazon.com and Salon.com among many others. Primary Features: Built from scratch for optimized performance under mod_python (2.7 or 3.1). Also runs in standalone, embedded library, or CGI context just as easily. Full featureset of HTML::Mason supported, including componentized development, methods, inheritance, autohandlers/dhandlers, output caching, smart exception reporting, etc."

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:01:20 GMT

washingtonpost.com - rss news: 125 feeds now available, specific to the level of columnist.

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 07:57:21 GMT

xpath2rss: "xpath2rss is Yet Another HTML->RSS scraper. This one's different in that instead of using regular expressions, as most do, it uses XPath."

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 07:41:48 GMT

Novell NetDrive: Webdav client for Windows: "NetDrive is a free client, provided by Novell, to allow access to Webdav servers from Windows, by mapping a drive."

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 17:15:50 GMT

Boycott Sinclair Broadcast Group: Real time example of using the Internet in politics. Check the user-supplied database of the Sinclair advertisers, and the wiki summary of the issues and up-to-date advertiser responses.

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 16:54:56 GMT

Joi Ito's Web: Will the tail wag? Excellent discussion on the implication of Chris Anderson's article, The Long Tail: "Will there always be producers and consumers of music and other content, or does the amateur revolution really take off and completely blur the consumer and the producer of content?" See also Charles Leadbeater's Amateur Revolution, where "From astronomy to computing, networks of amateurs are displacing the pros and spawning some of the greatest innovations.. These far-flung developments have all been driven by Pro-Ams -- committed, networked amateurs working to professional standards." (Ref my earlier posts on "open production").

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 06:42:46 GMT

Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset has released as Open Source on SourceForge.net: So developers can make MSI files with Microsoft tools for software distribution.

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 06:39:14 GMT

Open source startup interruptus? A skeptical opinion of startups SourceLabs and SpikeSource, aimed at supporting enterprise open source applications: "I find it hard to see how either company will be anything more than minimally succesful against the likes of Red Hat, IBM or HP. The semi-logical conclusion is that both companies were started with exit strategies already in place. Some free advice to the founders: Sell your companies. Sell them quickly. Take the first offer that comes in. "

A member of SourceLabs replies in a comment, "The goal is not to sell a certified stack, it is to sell support for a certified stack. We will give away the certified stack. You will only have to pay if you want support for it. Certification carries two purposes: the first is to make customers feel comfortable enough to run the stack, and the second is for us to make sure that it is stable enough to provide support for it."

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 08:19:08 GMT

Polese steps into open-source fray: Kim Polese, a former Sun Microsystems executive who was the original product manager for Java, is now at the helm of SpikeSource, an open-source software services company that launched on Thursday .. Services will include support and product certification as well as consulting for corporate IT staff during the application development and installation process, according to the company. .. By the end of the year, the company intends to launch a beta test of its services for the LAMP and LAMPJ "stacks" of open-source infrastructure software, according to the company's Web site. ..

SpikeSource appears to already have a competitor. Another group of industry veterans, including former Microsoft executives Brad Silverberg and Adam Bosworth, is backing SourceLab, which launched last week. The company intends to offer similar support and installation services around bundled open source components on a subscription basis"

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 08:10:08 GMT

Jotspot: Wiki with WYSIWYG editing, email integration, and database interfaces. Now in beta.

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 22:46:42 GMT

What is RSS: A tutorial introduction to feeds and aggregators.

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 07:03:10 GMT

Blogdigger and Feedster: Two RSS search engines. Feedster has some services to add to blogs (e.g., "search this blog" or "search my sources").

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 04:09:03 GMT

Magic Mirror (p2p) Backup: "Magic Mirror Backup works by copying the files and folders on your computer to other computers within your office. In exchange, these other computers also copy their own files onto your computer. This sharing of backups has quite a few advantages not the least of which are that it is extremely convenient and cost effective. " Linux and Windows versions. Free through v1.0.

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 17:07:14 GMT

Another sign that blogging is becoming mainstream: "Hoover's collects information about companies and sells it to other companies. Last year, they were acquired by Dun and Bradstreet. D&B was founded in 1841 and is .. "mainstream" in the business world. Yesterday I was surprised to learn that the Hoover's overview on SourceGear contains information which could only be found on my weblog. The byline says we are covered by an analyst named Jeff Dorsch, and I have never spoken with this gentleman personally. In the course of researching SourceGear, he not only visited my weblog, but also my silly Not-A-Legend site. I recognize that weblogs have obviously been steadily gaining traction over the last few years, but this still comes as a pleasant shock. I would have assumed that it would take several more years before firms like Hoover's and D&B would use weblogs in their research."

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 16:51:38 GMT

The Protocol Informatics Project: Application of bioinformatic algorithms, which decode DNA sequences, to computer protocols, allowing the discovery of protocol structure from captured data. Could be useful in network debugging, generating test data, or even discovering hackers. Other info: article in Wired, excellent presentation with diagrams.

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 21:07:47 GMT

Chatango: Sounds nifty. "Chatango is a new way to make contact with people online. It's the first tool for real-time, private, disposable, one-on-one in-page communication. The best thing about Chatango is that it can be added to any web page, like an eBay auction, or Xanga, or any web page. Your visitors can chat with you without leaving your page. "

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 20:42:27 GMT

Extend Microsoft Office SharePoint with hyper.net Publishing: "Hyper.Net, the content accelerator for the Microsoft .Net infrastructure, offers tight integration with Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001/2003, Windows Sharepoint Services and Microsoft Content Management Server 2002. The integration allows companies to quickly transform oceans of Office documents managed in SharePoint directly into fine-grained hypertext web content. " Demos and downloads online.

Also on sharepoint, BlueDog offers a downloable RSS generator for sharepoint data: "The Syndication Generator for Windows® SharePoint® Services is a web part based RSS generator. The web part is highly configurable and requires no access to the server once it has been installed. .. Drag/drop the web part onto your page, pick the list you wish to syndicate, and ... tada! Your feed is up and runing in no time flat."

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 17:19:26 GMT

Apache Agila: "Apache Agila is a new donation to the Apache Software Foundation consisting of a lightweight BPM engine and auxiliary services." OETrends reports "With Agila, devs would be able to automate workflows among various Java platforms, such as setting traction thresholds or moving documents (such as approvals, invoices, etc.) through the approval chain.

The core of Agila's technology was contributed to ASP by Gluecode Software Inc., a software and services company specializing in Apache-based projects. Gluecode currently ships its own Open Source BPM engine.

Agila, which means "eagle" in Tagalog, features a simple XML document format for workflow specification, basic administration, user management, task lists and notification services. Agila will become part of ASF's Jakarta Java projects. "

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 16:26:27 GMT

Imagination Cubed: Shared online drawing tool from GE.

Sun, 03 Oct 2004 20:43:16 GMT

getNoCatInfo.pl - mrtg script: Performs wget to scrape web pages for values and passes to MRTG for tracking and analysis. From Scott Lemon.

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 07:42:44 GMT

Bush debate response war room: "The Bush campaign has set up a network of Web sites to carry instant analysis of tonight's debate. The "Debate Feed" will provide the GOP spin in real time to as many as 5,000 conservative Web outlets, according to Wired News. "Our rapid response effort is based on the premise that no attack or no misstatement will go unchallenged," Michael Turk, director of the Internet campaign, told the Web site. A "war room" is outfitted with 15 computers and two TVs, monitored by two dozen staffers, ready to send out a Republican response or comment, Wired added. The Kerry campaign is not so well organized. It has e-mailed supporters who work with local newspapers and media, telling them the Kerry campaign will provide a response after the debate, Wired reported."

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 20:26:43 GMT

FeedBurner - Amazon Web Services Integration: "You can add the Amazon Associates service to any FeedBurner feed. Here's how the service works: FeedBurner detects your feed categories and then asks you to assign an Amazon store to any category for which you want to include the Amazon Associates program. For example, you might choose to associate the music store with your music category, DVD's with your Pop Culture category, and nothing at all with your Personal and Family categories. You, the publisher have total control over the frequency with which Amazon Associates links appear, and whether they should appear alongside really short posts or only very detailed posts."

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 17:39:26 GMT

Bloglines Web Services: New interface for more featureful RSS aggregators.

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 18:26:41 GMT

Kiwi Syslog Daemon: "Kiwi Syslog Daemon is a freeware Syslog Daemon for Windows. It receives, logs, displays and forwards Syslog messages from hosts such as routers, switches, Unix hosts and any other syslog enabled device. There are many customisable options available." Useful free version; for $99 it can do ODBC logging and more.

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 16:22:25 GMT

ipodder.org: There are groups active in turning iPods into TiVo-like radios, filling up with content served in RSS.

Sun, 26 Sep 2004 00:59:44 GMT

Five Across: InterComm: A new product that provides the essential tools of Groove, in a lightweight package that works for both Windows and Mac.

Fri, 24 Sep 2004 07:21:54 GMT

How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories: Why Google News shows so many second-tier conservative news sites. Google won't fully explain it, but Harvard fellow Ethan Zuckerman offers likely explanations. First, they are organized as alternative news networks, rather than just 'blogs'. Second, they use more specific phrases like "John Kerry" rather than standard journalism's tendency to use just "Kerry" after the first mention. The more specific term is considered a better match.

""You have to wonder why some of these wacky sites make the cut..". With an occasional exception, Weblogs are generally not found among the Google News results, so Zuckerman had some advice for aspiring political publishers who want to game the search engines: Don't blog -- start an alternative news network. Use terms like George Bush and John Kerry frequently, rather than their last names alone, in both your text and headlines. Publish new works frequently. What Zuckerman calls gaming the system, others call optimizing your site."

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 09:01:52 GMT

Iran's bloggers in censorship protest: "Earlier this month, three reformist websites - Emrooz, Rooydad and Baamdad - re-appeared in a stripped-down form after having been blocked by the authorities. One of them moved the content of its site onto a blog as a means of getting around the block.

It is thought that the number of Iranians keeping blogs is now between 10,000 and 15,000.

However, some recent reports have now suggested that Iranian authorities are considering the creation of a national intranet - an internet service just for Iran - which would be separate from the world wide web. This would potentially mean that users would not be able to access anything the authorities do not want them to see. But Mr Derakhshan said he and his fellow bloggers are working on a strategy to get around the intranet, using email subscription services. "

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 08:57:36 GMT

Bloggers as disruptive innovation for media: "disruptive innovations--those destined to change the structure of an industry--tend to attack from below. They usually first appear in a form that is in some ways inferior to the existing dominant technologies, and hence are unlikely to get the attention or respect of industry incumbents. They provide examples in industries ranging from steel to semiconductors. In steel, for instance, the challenger technology was "mini-mills" using electric arc furnaces to melt scrap. At first, the steel produced in these mills wasn't as good as the steel produced with the incumbent technology, the gigantic integrated steel plants, so they focused on an unglamorous and relatively low-margin market: reinforcing bar (rebar). Big-steel executives could afford to disregard the mini-mills and to focus on higher-end business.

I would bet that the comments made by some big-steel execs about their mini-mill counterparts were quite similar in tone to the comment recently made by a CBS exec about bloggers in their pajamas. After all, they (the big steel guys) had the vast facilities, stretching out for miles. They had the globally-recognized brand names. They had the big cash balances and large market capitalizations...

This kind of thing happens all the time. Manufacturers of mainframe computers--and their corporate IT customers--tended to discount the personal computer, which was initially a toy for hobbyists. Most incumbent telephone companies did not intitially perceive the Internet as a threat. And so on."

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 08:17:10 GMT

Speech Code From I.B.M. to Become Open Source: "I.B.M. plans to announce today that it will contribute some of its speech-recognition software to two open-source software groups. .. The software for speech-recognition applications once had to be custom built, but now packages of reusable and standardized tools are becoming available. The speech software can now be added to a Web application so that programmers can use familiar tools and need little additional training. ..

I.B.M. is donating code that it estimates cost the company $10 million to develop. One collection of speech software for handling basic words for dates, time and locations, like cities and states, will go to the Apache Software Foundation. The company is also contributing speech-editing tools to a second open-source group, the Eclipse Foundation.

I.B.M. has contributed code to open-source programmers in the past. In August, for example, the company contributed Cloudscape, a database written in the Java programming language, to the Apache Foundation. And I.B.M. is a leading corporate sponsor of open-source projects like the Apache Web server and the Linux operating system. "It's our usual play," Mr. Mills said. ..

Microsoft has developed its own standardized tools for making speech recognition applications, and in March it introduced Microsoft Speech Server 2004 for running speech-enabled applications. More than 100,000 software programmers have downloaded Microsoft's free software developers' kit for building speech applications on its Windows .Net technology."

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 08:12:25 GMT

Microsoft Community Blogs: How to find bloggers within MS. There are reportedly over 1000 bloggers at MS now.

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 00:38:13 GMT

Genezzo: A multi-user, multi-server distributed database, written in perl (!), still under development.

Sat, 18 Sep 2004 07:10:29 GMT

Groove app-launcher: 3-part mini-tutorial on extending Groove. "In part one I showed a Windows application using Groove Web Services to talk (in a very minimal way) to Groove's collaborative workspace services. Note that this is how Groove File Sharing works too: in that case, yes, GFS is a shell extension which talks SOAP to the local Groove instance.."

Sat, 18 Sep 2004 07:03:51 GMT

Jon Udell says it: This is exactly my motivation for this blog: "as I process my daily RSS inflow in Bloglines, it's very much in my own interest to put the few items of most value in a place where I can find them later. That I'm also putting them someplace where you can find them, that you may be doing the same thing for me, that we may collectively move toward standardized use of shared topics as we iterate this process, that reputation-based filtering may then begin to operate on the emergent set of topics -- all this is goodness, and may ultimately matter, but my participation (and yours) does not depend on these outcomes. Pure self-interest is a sufficient driver. "

Also like my authoring tool, Jon uses a "bookmarklet, so that selected text on the target page is used for the (optional) extended description of the routed item. This makes the items I route easier for me to scan. And for you too." At least twice a week, I search my blog to find collections of links for friends or colleagues. Cut and paste into an email, super quick. And the few that use news aggregators or bloglet for email delivery already get it as I write it.

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 17:53:30 GMT

KwikiKwiki: "Kwiki is perhaps the simplest to install, most modular, and easiest to extend Wiki. A Wiki allows users to freely create and edit web pages in any web browser. Kwiki is Open Source Software written in Perl, and is available on CPAN."

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 17:52:42 GMT

What is ecto?: "ecto is a feature-rich desktop blogging client for MacOSX and Windows, supporting a wide range of weblog systems.."

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 08:29:08 GMT

Spammers using sender authentication too, study says: August 31, 2004: "2.8 % of legitimate e-mail passes SPF checks, compared with just 3.8 % of spam, CipherTrust's survey showed. .. spammers have been faster to adopt the technology than legitimate e-mail senders, Judge said. "Spammers are now better than companies at reporting the source of their e-mail," he said. ..

Only 31 Fortune 1000 companies publishing SPF or Sender ID records, and only 6 % of CipherTrust's customers publish SPF records, despite the fact that the company's products can check for and validate SPF records, he said.

But Wong, who co-authored both the SPF and Sender ID standards, said that stopping spam was never the intention of SPF or Sender ID. The technology is merely a way to stop one loophole spammers use: source address spoofing. Evidence that spammers are publishing SPF records is a good sign, Meng said. "Spammers are buying into a future that will wipe them out," he said.

In theory, when all spammers are forced to publish SPF records, along with all legitimate e-mail senders, it will be easy for legitimate companies to develop e-mail reputations for Internet domains that do and do not send spam, he said. ..

Meng said that SPF was never intended as an antispam cure-all, likening the difference between SPF and antispam technology to the difference between "flour and food." "There are about 12 things that we need to do to fix e-mail, and this is one of them," Meng said, paraphrasing comments by Nathaniel Borenstein of IBM Corp., another antispam expert. "When we have all 12 in place, we'll start to win the war." "

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 07:31:52 GMT

Michael Helfrich describes a mobile WiFi cloud experiment during Strong Angel II: "The Pony Express was nothing more than a Chevy SUV, housing a Groove Relay, a yagi mast, and a 5-watt in-line linear amplifier between the PC's WIFI card and the yagi. The vehicle was driven in a large circle linking three camps, much like the [refugee] camp described above, spread across the big island. These camps had personnel with laptop computers and WIFI capability, but no uplink to the internet. As the Pony Express was driven into each camp, the devices would detect the mobile cloud and dispense their locally cached Groove payloads, while taking in messages that were housed on the relay from the other camps and from others around the world. The Pony Express moved from camp to camp, and to the base camp where the internet was available. ..

Actual applications were distributed to these far flung camps. From the base camp in Kona, we created a Rapid Assessment capability using the Groove Forms tool. The Pony Express was able to actually DELIVER the application to those in the field without any IT intervention. The space was created; the form added; and invites sent. Upon acceptance in each camp, messages were delivered back to the inviter and the space/application was delivered using the Pony Express. Subsequent data was delivered back to base camp automatically. It just worked."

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 23:58:12 GMT

Port Reporter (PortRptr.exe): "Port Reporter logs TCP and UDP port activity on a local Windows system. Port Reporter is a small application that runs as a service on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 this service is able to log which ports are used, which process is using the port, if the process is a service, which modules the process has loaded and which user account is running the process. On Windows 2000 systems, this service is limited to logging which ports are used and when. In both cases the information that the service provides can be helpful for security purposes, troubleshooting scenarios, and profiling system's port usage."

Sat, 11 Sep 2004 07:23:24 GMT

Wikipedia Reputation and the Wemedia Project: The rationale for the value of Wikipedia and other open-modification resources. Describes one test where a dozen errors were introduced, and all were corrected within 3 hours. Reminds me of "single text" conflict resolution, open source intelligence, and the codification of traditional knowledge. As long as there are enough authors paying attention, it may work for capturing collective knowledge.

Sat, 11 Sep 2004 06:58:04 GMT

Rick Klau explains FeedBurner: How it cuts bandwidth costs, records usage, and cleans up RSS, all at once.

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 16:47:06 GMT

Automated Tree Drawing: XSLT and SVG: XSLT code to convert a compact text syntaxes for a tree into XML, and from there into SVG for rendering in documents or onscreen.

Wed, 08 Sep 2004 17:22:07 GMT

Converting Between Julian Dates and Gregorian Calendar Dates: has formula and sample fortran code.

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 20:11:37 GMT

Overture- Search Term Suggestion Tool: Neat, to compare with Google AdWords.

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 18:00:34 GMT

Disney's Social Software Service: Magical Gatherings. Description of Disney's travel planner app, allowing groups to share a schedule, chat, vote, and browse together online.

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 17:23:03 GMT

June 2004 Phishing attack report: Useful background data from http://www.antiphishing.org/,

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 08:20:11 GMT

Must-download TV: "In recent months, a host of developers and TV enthusiasts have been working on ways to improve the TV trade online -- they're building sophisticated trading networks to record and encode and distribute shows, and they're improving peer-to-peer transfer systems to make downloading easier. The hottest new improvement is made possible by the merging of two of the Internet's newest innovations, the p2p protocol BitTorrent and RSS, the popular Web syndication standard. Together, these systems allow a computer to automatically find and download a user's favorite shows -- something like having a TV station designed just for you. " Examples: TV RSS Linux Client: "Gtk2-Perl Torrent RSS feed reader for linux."; and Buttress: "will be a Application to automatically download and run .torrent files from RSS feeds, without user input"

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 00:48:51 GMT

Copernican Inversion: Interesting new tool for making offline demos and traning versions of web apps. I wonder if it could be used for creating test suites and exercising web apps. Based on proxy emulation. From Dan Grigsby.

Mon, 30 Aug 2004 18:10:56 GMT

Axis Network Camera HTTP Authentication Bypass Vulnerability: Amazing securty hole: Axis makes widely used networked surveillance cameras. They have an onboard website for administration -- and that website is easily compromised. Furthermore, it's reported that many of these cameras are open on the public internet and can be found with google (not even a robots.txt file to prevent indexing). Incredible that a security products company would release such a buggy product. And it's also reported that the company didn't respond to hacker reports (normally companies issue info and an update before the hacker goes public.) "A vulnerability has been identified in several Axis Network Cameras, which can be exploited by a malicious person to bypass user authentication. Normally a user is required to input a username and password before access is granted to "http://[victim]/admin/admin.shtml". However, by sending a HTTP request with an extra "/" before the "admin" folder, it is possible to bypass the authentication completely."

Mon, 30 Aug 2004 08:04:41 GMT

Links to browser editing tools:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/itools-htmlarea/
http://dynarch.com/mishoo/htmlarea.epl
http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/spaw/

List-maker's comment: "HTML Area was real easy to configure and add to my blog software. It took maybe 30 minutes of fiddling."

Mon, 30 Aug 2004 07:58:33 GMT

Off-topic rant: Why are browsers such terrible writing instruments? Shirky's spot-on: "really, the browser has been around for a long time now; why should anyone even have to make an argument that autosave, undo, and re-sizing are good functions for an app to support?"

Mon, 30 Aug 2004 05:32:41 GMT

GmailFS: "GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. " Pretty neat - apparently similar hacks are available for yahoo or hotmail systems. One more step to "the web as platform".

Sat, 28 Aug 2004 17:45:17 GMT

RSS white paper: Clear introduction to RSS with comparison of aggregators.

Fri, 27 Aug 2004 02:50:41 GMT

Horizontal innovation networks - by and for users: 2002 MIT paper on what I've been calling open production, related to the book Enabling Innovation. Several examples, both techie and nontechie (like mountain bikes). "Innovation development, production, distribution and consumption networks can be built up horizontally – with actors consisting only of innovation users (more precisely, “user/self-manufacturers”). “Free” and “open source” software projects are examples of such networks, and examples can be found in the case of physical products as well. User innovation networks can function entirely independently of manufacturers when (1) at least some users have sufficient incentive to innovate, (2) at least some users have an incentive to voluntarily reveal their innovations, and (3) diffusion of innovations by users is low cost and can compete with commercial production and distribution. When only the first two conditions hold, a pattern of user innovation and trial and improvement will occur within user networks, followed by commercial manufacture and distribution of innovations that prove to be of general interest. In this paper we explore the empirical evidence related to each of these matters and conclude that conditions favorable to user innovation networks are often present in the economy." Related: a Jonathan Schwartz blog entry on how users are making IT decisions; personal uses of IT come to the office now, it's not just work going home.

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 00:35:03 GMT

GooFresh: Nifty little form for searching recent contents in Goggle. Shows how use call from your own site's form. I wish someone had javascript code so a browser could do the julian time conversion rather than relying on the script on ResearchBuzz's site.

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 07:36:38 GMT

Handy Backup "is an easy-to-use program designed for an automatic backup of your critical data virtually to any type of storage media including CD-RW devices and remote FTP servers. You can use Handy Backup to make a reserve copy of any valuable data on your system. Special addons are provided to facilitate the backup of MS Outlook, system registry and ICQ files. Restoring is as easy as clicking a button, but you can also use a number of advanced options. The program can be also used to synchronize files between two computers on a network." $30 one-time purchase.

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 06:47:14 GMT

Visual Mining of E-Customer Behavior Using Pixel Bar Charts : Nifty visualization technique for seeing multidimensional relationships in large data sets. (from Future Now)

Thu, 19 Aug 2004 06:01:10 GMT

Crypto researchers discover flaws: "MD5's flaws that have been identified in the past few days mean that an attacker can generate one hash collision in a few hours on a standard PC. To write a specific back door and cloak it with the same hash collision may be much more time intensive. Still, Hughes said that programmers should start moving away from MD5. "Right now the algorithm has been shown to be weak," he said. "Before useful (attacks) can be done, it's time to migrate away from it." " SHA-1 still looks good, but there are new approaches suggested toward cracking it.

Technology Review: Fingerprinting Your Files has a c lear and simple explanation of MD5 and SHA-1 hash functions, and how they can be used in applications, system security, and compression.

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 14:59:57 GMT

Streamripper: "an Open Source (GPL) application that lets you record streaming mp3 to your hard drive." It divides the mp3 webcast into separate files for each song. Instructions online.

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 23:59:36 GMT

Groove and other P2P hassles with XP SP2: Service pack 2 limits bandwidth for users with multiple simutaneous outbound connections. When running a P2P package like Groove, all network applicaitons slow way down. No resolution is posted yet.