Hektor the spray paint robot
Jürg Lehni and Uli Franke of the Czech Republic created Hektor, a robot that spray paints an Illustrator image onto a flat vertical surface….
Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.
Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 58 of 72.
Joel Spolsky on Resumes
Joel’s latest article is about what he is going through sorting through hundreds of applications for two internship positions open this summer at his company, Fog Creek Software. Joel offers some good advice on what not to do. I was hoping he would go into more detail about what does catch his eye in the résumé process. Fog Creek Software reads through résumés by hand, other companies parse and rank. One of the reasons I moved my weblog over to my domain is that I wanted to associate all of my work in one location. If someone sees an e-mail…
Opportunity lands on Mars
Opportunity landed last night and communicated back to Earth. It is on its side, 15 miles off the center of its target in Meridiani Planum. Arnold Schwarzenegger was at JPL to cheer everyone on. Total Recall takes place in 2084. If we do get to Mars in person by 2030, it would not be unheard of for someone like Coohagen to have the planet organized as a business 50 years later….
Bill Gates, honorary knight
Buckingham Palace is expected to announce tomorrow the planned knighthood of Bill Gates of Microsoft….
Haloscan comments moved
If you ever commented on a post at my old blog, I now moved the post to be a part of my new blog and its entries. The submit dates are off, but the main goal is to participate in a conversation. If you would rather have the comment removed just let me know….
RFID on the soccer field
The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Germany (yes, the MP3 and AAC people) is working on an RFID system for soccer balls and jerseys. The chip embedded in the ball has been worked down to the size of a fingernail. The biggest problem right now is suspending the chip in the middle of the ball to measure acceleration and protect against being pummeled as part of the outer skin. An article in German is available here, or you can use Google for the English translation. This technology would be a great coaching tool. Right now in pro soccer there…
Atom news
AtomEnabled is the new site for everything about Atom. There is a special area for developers with detailed information. Last night Blogger announced support for Atom. I have an Atom feed. I tweaked my RSS feed a few times, and now that Atom information is more easily obtainable I might start tweaking Atom a bit as well. After tweaking my feed makes its way through the FeedValidator to make sure everything is well formatted. My Atom feed gets less hits (6% of aggregator traffic) than my unpublished (Meta reference only) RSS 1.0 feed. (11%) RSS 2.0 accounts for 83% of…
Google gets social
Orkut Buyukkokten, a UI designer at Google, quietly put online today a social networking site named Orkut.com. According to News.com this social software was Orkut’s personal project at Google, one day a week, but remains the property of Google. Membership is currently invite only….
Presidential Market 2004
Presidential Market 2004 is a simulated futures market allowing you to buy and sell shares of the major 2004 presidential candidates. The highest valued portfolio on election day wins a trip to the inauguration in Washington, D.C….
Google bombing
Tom McNichol of The NY Times covers the growing practice of Google bombing: engineering search results to your whim….
iTunes Music Store RSS feed generator
Apple now has its music store offerings available as a customizable RSS feed. Interested in the top rock songs? How about rock, alternative, and pop?…
Eurekster searches social networks
Eurekster is a new search engine, currently in beta, that uses your defined social network to rank search results from Overture based on the search history of you and your network of friends. The social networking technology comes from RealContacts and the personalization technology is provided by SLI Systems….
Windows XP. Why not upgrade?
Scoble is wondering what Microsoft could do to evangelize Windows XP to users of Windows 98. My comment entry was getting a bit long, so I will post it here instead. Ask the average user and they have no clue when the support life of Windows 98 ends and why that might matter to them. I assume that Windows 98 users are mostly home users. The real question is will my stuff still work, how much will it cost me, and is all this change worth the chance that my stuff will not work as it is supposed to? What…
State of the Union 2004 transcript
President Bush has just concluded his 2004 State of the Union address. The White House published the transcript online….
Change in RSS 2.0 feed
Today I changed my RSS feed from excerpt to full text. I did not realize this was the default MovableType setting, but I do appreciate full text in other people’s feeds, especially for offline viewing. I would like to follow the best practices of blogging and incorporate any community tools that are out there, so please let me know if there is something I should be aware of….
IBM attempts to patent code separation
IBM filed a patent application last week for a “method and apparatus for conducting business via the worldwide Web in which business programming is isolated from Web user interface programming.” Can JSP + Java Beans + J2EE backend really be patented? Guess we will have to wait and see….
MusicPlasma
MusicPlasma is a search engine to help you visualize your musical taste. Enter a band’s name and you will see that band’s near neighbor relation. The “more the artist is famous or representative of a specific style of music the more the halo (circle) around the artist will be large.” For some reason Norah Jones eclipses Bob Dylan. Overall a very cool tool. Flash required….
Technorati beta
Technorati is now faster than ever before! Try out the new beta. Nice work Dave and Kevin!…
Yahoo! Research Labs
Yahoo! established Yahoo! Research Labs yesterday. They have an implementation of Nutch and hot searches of the day. Some good research papers on clustering as well. I would like to see a university partnership, similar to what Google has going on with Stanford….
Cingular makes AT&T Wireless bid
USA Today reports that Cingular submitted an offer to the AT&T Wireless board of directors over the weekend. The board is currently in session to consider the deal. AT&T Wireless has a current market capitalization of $27.9 billion….
A rush to block pop-up online ads
NY Times covers the move to create software to block pop-up advertisements on the Web. Microsoft claims that Windows XP Service Pack 2 will not block pop-ups unless users enable the feature. DoubleClick is developing technology that will work around Microsoft and other software vendors’ attempted blocks. “In December 2001, 1.4 percent of the Web ads measured by Nielsen/NetRatings were pop-ups or pop-under ads, which appear behind the main browser window. That rose to 8.7 percent in July 2003. But it has declined since, to 6.2 percent in December.” Microsoft already has anti-spam technology in client software such as Outlook…
Bill Gates’ Medina privacy buffer
Bill Gates has built a privacy buffer around his Medina estate according to an article by Warren Cornwall in The Seattle Times. The city will not let gates use the properties solely to house his cars, but some Microsoft employees occupy the houses to keep the codes alive. He now has a corridor to the main road, which makes sense to me….
Lego Mars Exploration Rover
Lego has an 858 piece set for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers. $90. CalTech receives a portion of the profits….
Family Guy quiz
Which Family Guy character are you? Take the quiz!…
Oldest active PC in the world
An IBM 5160 and its Intel 8088 processor (from 1983) is still in use today by PHI Data in the Netherlands. HP and Intel gave the company some new Pentium 4 computers with LCD screens, but they will continue to use the IBM 5160 to test matrix printers. Note to Scoble: Microsoft should have a press release and a party in the Netherlands when PHI Data purchases their first copy of Windows….