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New York Times on employer weblog intervention

of the The New York Times published an article in Monday’s business section on employer intervention over employee weblogs. I am featured in the article.

Women want compassion?

What do women want in a man? NPR’s Lori Gottlieb tackles the question of do women really want a sensitive man or do they just say that and date the beer guzzling NASCAR guy? I like Lori’s take on the subject. Women want someone to be sensitive to her problems but not sensitive about his own problems. He is in control and she can rely on him emotionally. There should be a follow up piece focused on the men….

Olympic medal tally by population

Australian Bureau of Statistics released a chart showing Athens 2004 Olympic medals taking into account a country’s population. Bahamas is #1 on the list with a total population of 317,000 and one gold medal. Even though the U.S. leads the total medal count with 25 gold medals it places 29th in per-capita medals….

Mark Cuban’s new blog

I am enjoying Mark Cuban’s new blog. An inside look at the industry from a well known source. During his 60 Minutes interview aired February 15, 2004 Steve Kroft mentions that “his email address is posted on the Mavericks’ Web site so he can get feedback from the fans. He answers as many as he can during halftime.” In today’s entry Mark Cuban creates a 360 degree view of reporter and his subject, and invites the public into an otherwise private conversation. I told them that rather than providing any commentary or quotes to them on this matter, or on…

FOAF Vocabulary Specification 1.56

FOAF Vocabulary Specification is updated to include a primary topic, personal profile document, and a tipjar. Version 1.56. I updated my FOAF file to include the personal profile document….

Wired News : BitTorrent meets RSS

Paul Boutin of Wired News profiles a new tool by Andrew Grumet to combine RSS and BitTorrent….

Caffeine.Net: Java and .Net interoperability

The Olympum Group released Caffeine.Net 0.1 after about a year of development. Use the best of both worlds. Caffeine transfers APIs between .NET and Java and can run code written for one platform on the other platform. Caffeine.Net is based on Mono and has a MIT license. (via Cafe au Lait Java)…

BitTorrent 3.4.1

Bram Cohen released BitTorrent 3.4.1 yesterday. Better support for peers with dynamic IPs. (see track.py) Clients also cache peers longer. Bencode is also faster, using int instead of long….

Starbucks digital music store

Starbucks will launch its own digital music offering next Tuesday, March 16, according to BusinessWeek. 250,000 songs accessed through a HP Tablet PC and burned in the store. Minimum purchase is 5 songs for $6.99 ($1.40 a song). The service will expand to 2,500 stores in the next two years….

PubSub EDGAR feeds

PubSub lets you create a RSS feed for any company or individual with a central index code in the SEC database. Very cool….

Star Trek: Borg Invasion 4D

Next week Las Vegas Hilton will open Star Trek: Borg Invasion 4D. The Hollywood Reporter reviews some of the technical aspects of the attraction. First Star Trek production to be shot digitally. They liken the picture quality to when stereo became surround sound. I was at the opening of Star Trek: The Experience in 1998 and I was impressed. The cast members supposedly had to go through 18 months of training before opening day, preparing them to deal with the toughest trivia Trekkie. The casino area surrounding the attraction is decorated to look like a casino from the 24th century:…

Salon Media Group reopens Washington, D.C. office

Salon Media Group will expand operations and reopen its Washington, D.C. office. The office is led by Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to President Clinton, and former staff writer for The New Republic, The Washington Post and The New Yorker. Salon.com has more than 3 million readers a month, of which 74,000 are paying subscribers….

Reuters : Resume Fraud Gets Slicker and Easier

Reuters published an article today about how background searches are now being manipulated in the hiring process. Phone numbers to confirm a phony degree, crackers adding a name to a university’s database, and even transcripts are for sale. “ADP Screening and Selection Services, in a 2003 study, found that more than 50 percent of the people on whom it conducted employment and education checks had submitted false information, compared with about 40 percent in 2002” How long will it take before third party verification services (think VeriSign Secure Seal) step in for hosted resumes? Would the market bite?…

Wall Street Journal : Microsoft’s failure to innovate

Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal asks: What does the world get for the 10% Microsoft tax on every PC? (via Slashdot) “When asked which research from its labs has made its way into Microsoft products, the list from Microsoft officials doesn’t exactly bowl over a listener: better software-verification techniques, digital media-player technologies, additions to the SQL database language.”…

Steve Gillmor interviews Sun EVP Jonathan Schwartz

Steve Gillmor interviewed Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president of Sun Microsystems’ software group, about Sun’s plans to include RSS feeds in everything they do. Schwartz also has some good insights into what makes good software for enterprise users as well as developers. “Right now the overwhelming, the preponderance, of feedback we have from customers about what they want from a desktop from Sun is security, familiarity, and affordability —and almost typically in that order.” “Developers don’t buy things, they join things. That’s the epitome of our developer strategy. Give them a community to join.”…

Adobe Designer public beta

Adobe Systems announced today the public beta availability of Adobe Designer, a new point-and-click graphical XML form design tool for designing and deploying intelligent forms in Adobe PDF or HTML….

New York Times : Tickle

Saul Hansell profiles Tickle in Monday’s New York Times. Create a site specializing in helping people discover various aspects of themselves. Add social networking and job connections and a smart business model develops….

BitTorrent 3.4

Bram Cohen released BitTorrent 3.4 yesterday. Notes lots of bandwidth savings and lots of bug fixes over last September’s point release….

Jason Shellen’s Google Blogger webcam

Jason Shellen, who works in the Blogger department at Google, has a webcam serving pictures of the Blogger office. (via evhead) Interesting that Blogger, Feedster, and Technorati are full of Mac people….

Wayback Machine brings my past entries to life

Before I ever started using weblogging tools I edited HTML by hand in weblog style. Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, I just went back to my UCLA site and gathered entries as old as October 2000. I tried to keep everything as it was, but took out broken images and patched up some code to make it XHTML compliant….

Vulcan Ventures Project Halo

Luke Timmerman of the Seattle Times wrote about one of Paul Allen’s new ventures last month. Project Halo will attempt to program a computer in the next 30 months to create a computerized tutor that’s smart enough to pass college-level Advanced Placement tests in chemistry, biology and physics. Teams from the University of Texas at Austin, Boeing Phantom Works, the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Kraka, Carnegie Mellon University, iSoco, Stanford Medical Informatics, the University of Southern California’s Information Science Institute, KSVentures and Klein Associates will compete to complete the task….

Verizon call forwarding to your airplane seat

Verizon Wireless now supports call forwarding to in-flight telephones in airplanes using Verizon Airfone service. $0.69 a minute, or $10 a month subscription plus $0.10 a minute….

Family Guy coming back in 2005

Family Guy will return to TV for as many as 35 episodes beginning in January 2005 according to an IGN.com interview with creator Seth MacFarlane. E! Online News also has coverage….

Cover Songs Database

According to the Cover Songs Database The Beatles are the most covered band and Eleanor Rigby is the most covered song. The most sampled song is Bob James’ Nautilus….

Tom Bridge leaves MacSlash

As of yesterday Tom Bridge stepped down from his role at MacSlash….

How the Mars Rovers phone home

Philip Chien of Wired News interviewed Jet Propulsion Laboratory telecom engineer Andrea Barbieri about how Mars rovers communicate back to Earth….

Mark Pilgrim’s new job

Mark Pilgrim is now an Accessibility Architect in the Emerging Technologies group at IBM. Congratulations Mark!…

Dan Schoenbaum on software worthy of Moore’s Law

Dan Schoenbaum, vice president of strategy for Compuware, writes about ways software teams can work together, and closer to the customer, to create better software. Weblogs are one of the ways software writers can be in direct contact with customers. I could not find Dan’s weblog….

Personal publishing to paper

While weblogs and e-books may be seen as personal publishing to some, there is still a large market for publishing-on-demand books. Gayle Feldman of the New York Times takes a look at new ways book publishers are focusing on smaller authors for publishing-on-demand. For $499 the Borders Professional Publication will get you an International Standard Book Number (ISBN), a listing on Amazon, and 5 copies made available on Borders’ shelves….

Dinner at Jing Jing

Last night I met Scoble for dinner at Jing Jing in Palo Alto. Don Park and Al Nevarez were also in attendance. Interesting conversations about the past and future of weblogging. Many people seemed to have tried out the trend, but the quality writing seems to have decreased. We discussed better methods of peer review and aggregation. Micah Alpern joined us at University Coffee Cafe. We talked about ways eBay should be preparing for Windows Longhorn. Reputation came up again, this time related to service reputation linked to a friend of friends or community. Does a weblog add eBay reputation?…

Apple Store San Francisco

Apple’s new flagship San Francisco store opens tomorrow morning at 10 A.M. Since May 2001 Apple has opened a new store every 13 days. An average of 1000 people visit each Apple retail store daily. Over 50% of purchases are from first time Mac buyers. Employees are trained for 3 to 7 weeks before they come to an Apple store. Apple had 1,352 applicants for the San Francisco store, and hired 70. 35 of these employees are trained in Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and similar software. 20% of the people who come into an Apple store visit the Genius Bar….

World snowball fight championships

Showa Shinzan International Yukigassen, the de facto world snowball-fight championship, takes place yearly in Sobetsucho, Japan. Sebastian Moffett profiles the tournament on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal. Players wear white jumpsuits and strap on a helmet for protection from the regulation snowballs between 2.56 and 2.76 inches in diameter. The game is combination dodge ball and capture the flag. Some teams practice year-round….

Security Information for Microsoft Windows XP SP2

Microsoft has a new site online covering the security changes in Windows XP SP2. I installed the new build on my Tablet last night and started poking around. Included in the SP2 builds are Tablet-specific improvements to handwriting recognition as well. When you start the computer for the first time you are presented with an Automatic Updates screen before you even see your desktop. On boot there is a window front and center (similar to Windows Tour) reporting on your computer’s current firewall, automatic updates, and anti-virus setup. Security Center is a new control panel, as is Windows Firewall….

President Bush Calls for Constitutional Amendment Protecting Marriage

President Bush announced this morning that he is calling for “an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of man and woman as husband and wife.” Some choice quotes from his speech: “After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence, and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization.” “The union of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith. Ages of experience have taught humanity that the commitment of a…

PassMark security

PassMark Security is a new company founded by Bill Harris, former CEO of Intuit and PayPal, to tackle the problem of phishing, or emulating a trusted site. Their approach is to show you a picture you selected at registration to be your relationship identifier. If you choose a horseshoe and receive an e-mail without that horseshoe picture, you know someone is trying to trick you. You can personalize your PassMark or choose from stock images, similar to an instant messaging program’s buddy icon. Mr. Harris serves on the boards of Earthlink, Macromedia, eOne Global, Yodlee, XTec, MyVest, and LowerMyBills….

Giant video screens at New York Philharmonic

Robin Pogrebin of the New York Times writes about large video screens making their way into some concert halls. A 15-by-20 foot video screen cutting the orchestra in two while they play Wagner and Brahms. How does this make the symphony more user-friendly? “[T]he younger generation is more responsive to visual stimuli” says Benjamin M. Rosen, a Philharmonic trustee who spearheaded and financed the experiment….

CodeCon

I spent my entire weekend at CodeCon here in San Francisco. Most presentations seemed to focus on the different ways we present ourselves to the world. ZeroConf to help others find what you have to share. Social software to define relationships and grant privileges based on those relationships. Anonymizers to hide you from the world. Versioning systems to track your steps. The highlight of my weekend was talking to Donald Knuth on Friday night at the Google party. I also had a chance to talk to Craig Newmark about his ReplayTV battles and his blogging experience….

Comment spam

Last night I had my first massive attack of comment spam. All from 212.199.169.153 over 10 minutes adding up to 10 garbage messages. It would have been more if not for my throttle setup. Annoying, but at least I can delete each one pretty easily. All the posts hit were recent posts, so turning off comments for old posts would not have helped in this case….

Predator remote controlled aircraft

Draganfly Innovation put together a scaled down General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Predator B aircraft for hobbyist use. “[C]an even be equipped with a GPS flight control unit for long distance, pre-programmed reconnaissance missions (20 miles effective range)” Starts at $600 without the camera attachment, or $750 with a wireless video camera and lithium-polymer batteries allowing for a 90 minute flight time….

MediaChest – social networking what you own

MediaChest is a social networking application to hook assets to social trees. A new spin on Distributed Library. Books, CDs, DVDs, and games. The games interface is the strongest and seems to be responsible for most of the early adopters. I would like to see an export as XML feature supporting library standards and the ability to search for friends instead of relying on an e-mail invite. Distributed Library has the edge by allowing users to search for goods based on their location. Check out my MediaChest library….

MozCC Creative Commons examiner

MozCC is an extension for Mozilla-based browsers that adds a button to your toolbar to examine the Creative Commons license of a site where one exists….

Convert Atom to RSS

2RSS.com has a new PHP service (free) that converts Atom feeds to RSS. Since you are passing an Atom feed as a parameter you do not even have to own the feed you are converting. A good way to read all the Blogger weblogs in a RSS aggregator….

Mainsoft Visual MainWin

Mainsoft Visual Mainwin allows Visual Basic and C# developers to compile J2EE bytecode. It also supports ASP.Net and ADO.Net class libraries. Supports BEA Weblogic 8.1, IBM Websphere 5.1 and Tomcat 5….

Apple RSS information page

Apple now has a RSS information page. NetNewsWire and FeedDemon get a mention too….

ConCon aftermath

Tonight I attended ConCon, a one hour briefing of talks and ideas from O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Kevin Marks introduced Technorati’s services. Ralf Muehlen introduced me to SFLAN. Cory Doctorow thinks that e-books now are where online music was in 1996: no one saw a reason why anyone would give up the tangible quality of a work. Kevin Burton is working on a plugin for Mozilla to export Orkut data for import into other formats such as FOAF. Scott Draves talked about his Electric Sheep project which is a very cool distributed genetic graphics engine. Tantek gave a quick overview…

The Economist on the science of love

Scientists believe that love is little more than an influx of bonding hormones, namely oxytocin and vasopressin, according to The Economist. “[A] relatively small area of the human brain is active in love, compared with that involved in, say, ordinary friendship.” “Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the…

O’Reilly Emerging Tech San Francisco

Next week is a small event in San Francisco, ConCon, for all of us who could not go to O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference last week. RX Gallery 132 Eddy Street @ Mason Monday, February 16, 7-10 P.M….

Gnomedex 4.0

Gnomedex 4.0 is going to take place from September 30-October 3 at Harrah’s in South Lake Tahoe. I should actually be able to drive this time! I will wait to see the conference schedule before confirming….

First same-sex marriage in the United States

Today Del Martin, 83, and Phyllis Lyon, 79, took their wedding vows in San Francisco’s city hall, becoming the first same sex couple to be officially married in the United States. The couple will celebrate their 51st aniversary this Saturday….

Exploding water balloons without gravity

Ever wonder what would happen to an exploded water balloon in zero gravity? NASA answers the question with 3 liter balloons….

New York Times interviews Bram Cohen

Seth Schiesel interviews Bram Cohen in today’s New York Times. Bram created BitTorrent while unemployed. His solo effort led to a job at Valve Software starting in October 2003….

August 14 Northeast blackout caused by software bug

SecurityFocus.com reports that the huge blackout of Northeast states on August 14 spread from Akron, Ohio due to a software bug in GE Energy’s XA/21 software system. 50 million people in eight states without electricity. The North American Electric Reliability Council is now directing power companies to be sure their software has the latest patches installed….

Fighting your parking ticket by phone or Web

If you live in San Francisco, New York City, or Washington D.C. you can now fight your parking ticket over the phone and/or Internet using ParkingTicket.com. They claim 75% of parking tickets submitted through their system are completely dismissed. Designed for corporate fleets, but good for the individual as well. They guarantee the ticket will be dismissed. They take 50% of the parking fee in return for its dismissal. Interesting idea, and they might be able to pull it off with a New York staff applying similar ticket tactics across the country. Looks interesting enough to try out. I wish…

Dave Winer’s Microsoft Research talk

Dave Winer’s lecture at Microsoft Research is now available online. Addresses “Weblogs, RSS, aggregators, OPML, content management, how we can work together, and the care and feeding of online communities.”…

Apple Store San Francisco

Apple’s new store in San Francisco’s Union Square is scheduled to open on Saturday, February 28 at 10 AM. It will have an Internet Café with 12 computers, a 32 foot Genius Bar, and a nice theater….

Graw Group Longhorn social networking

Microsoft Watch: “Four former Microsoft executives have banded together to form a new company that is developing social-networking software and Web services that will build on top of .Net and Microsoft’s forthcoming Longhorn Windows operating system.” The principals behind Graw Group include Jeremy Jaech and Ted Johnson, the co-founders of Visio. Dennis Tevlin and Peter Mullen are the other two members of the group….

NY Times on social networks

Today’s New York Times tackles the question whether people will pay to get friends. The article missed a couple important points about social networks beyond the typical sales, dating, or job lead. Social networks also determine product purchases, such as a book or DVD, and can enable a secondary market for exchange of such goods on a sale or loan basis. Some large companies like Microsoft have intranets and mailing lists that cover topics similar to Tribe.net’s tribes or Orkut’s communities. There are also internal book recommendations and the sale of second-hand goods. Unsolicited e-mail is a hot topic and…

Watching your laundry over the Web

A laundry room operator in Boston, Mac-Gray, has started installing a Web based tracking system for users of its washing machine facilities. You can monitor the minutes left on a cycle, see who is waiting to use a particular machine, and check usage data for an entire building’s facilities….

NY Times Ethicist on open WiFi networks

Randy Cohen, Ethicist for the New York Times magazine, says it is ethical to use an open WiFi network for casual Internet usage. Time Warner Cable disagrees and encourages you to personally sign up for their services….

Orkut launch party

Last night I attended the birthday party of Orkut Buyukkokten, which he cleverly double billed as an Orkut launch party so Google would pay for everyone. We were downstairs at suite one8one for most of the night. Interesting mix of people, including some Tribe.net crashers. The video projectors at the club were playing content licensed under Creative Commons. Suite one8one had no beer on tap and served me Guinness in a can: an act of sacrilege to an Irishman. This was my first social networks gathering. It was interesting to try to figure out how you may be connected through…

New Kind of Science for free

Stephen Wolfram is offering A New Kind of Science online for free. Wired wrote a long article in June 2002 about the book and the years of isolationist thinking that went into its creation….

Eric Rudder on Microsoft’s past and future

Tonight I attended an event featuring Eric Rudder of Microsoft. The Commonwealth Club of California gave Eric an award for being a person who will shape the upcoming century. I sat in the second row with my Tablet PC and have the whole hour recorded, if only I can clean up the sound from my built-in mic. It was interesting to hear Eric speak about software engineering as a profession in its infancy and therefore very prone to making mistakes. Brown’s computer science department will celebrate its 25th anniversary this year. Ten years ago computer science degrees were still not…

Chris Pratley on bug fixing

Chris Pratley writes about bug fixing within Microsoft and how Watson, a software reporting tool, has changed their debugging process. He follows up with a second post about attention to detail and how hardware obscurities sometimes lead to buggy software….

Java 1.5 Beta 1

J2SE 1.5 (Tiger) Beta 1 is now available. New for loop, metadata, and generics support among lots of other improvements….

TheyTookEverything.com

TheyTookEverything.com is a gift registry for the recently divorced. Smart idea….

Windows XP 64-Bit Edition

Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for AMD Athlon64 or Opteron processors is now available as a customer preview from Microsoft. 450 megabytes to download, and the software expires in 360 days….

Dynamap

Dynamap: Manhattan shows three views of Manhattan (streets, subways, neighborhoods) based on viewing angle….

NY Times : Airline Self-Service Kiosks

David Jones of the New York Times writes about the growing popularity of self-service kiosks at airline check-in and their growth into the hotel sector as well….

SWIPE toolkit

The SWIPE Toolkit demonstrates “the value of personal information on the open market and enable people to access information encoded on a driver’s license or stored in some of the many commercial data warehouses.” Covers how to decode your driver’s license and request your data from large data warehouses….

Mac lovers of Microsoft

Todd Bishop of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes about Mac lovers within Microsoft. You can also follow along with updates via their blog….

Galileo status

The Economist covers the current status of Galileo, a European Union system similar to our Global Positioning System….

Imaginary girlfriend

Would you like to pretend you have a girlfriend? There are over 60 women on eBay right now willing to be your imaginary girlfriend: write letters, talk on the phone, instant message, and even send underwear to the highest bidder. Most offer 4-8 week terms and include a break-up letter detailing how sad she is to see you go. Sounds like a great job for writers looking for work. Just create a fantasy and take in the money. Thank you Jason Kottke for the link….

Torrentz BitTorrent directory

Torrentz.com lists files available for distribution using BitTorrent. You can pull down entire Simpsons seasons!…

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….

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….

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….

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…

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….

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?…

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….

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….

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….

Xbox Live connecting the troops

Microsoft has set up Xbox Live connections at U.S.O. centers around the United States as well as overseas bases. Not only does this allow for good rest and relaxation time, but Microsoft gains loyal users. Using the same product every day in the helps sell products back home when those troops are on leave. It has helped Jeep and Coke, and should help the Xbox as well….

A machine can now do science

Economist.com reports on an article in the January 15 edition of Nature. “The robot scientist developed by Ross King of the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, and his colleagues, does everything a flesh-and-blood scientist does?or, rather, it does what philosophers of science say that scientists ought to do. That is, it formulates hypotheses from observations, conducts experiments to test them, and then formulates new hypotheses from the results. And worse, from the point of view of the human researcher, it does so as effectively as a person.”…

Personal Firewall Day

Today is Personal Firewall Day. Visit Microsoft’s Protect site to make sure you are doing everything you can on your PC. I use Norton AntiVirus 2004 on my computers. If you plan on using tax software this season there are often deals combining tax preparation software and antivirus solutions. Resolve to keep your computer and others free up-to-date and clean!…

Intel upgrades Centrino Wireless

Intel announced the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG network connection, a 802.11g compatible part for their Centrino bundle. It supports WiFi Protected Access (WPA) and can be updated via firmware to handle future standards such as 802.11i….

Math and Physics Applets

Paul Falstad has some sweet math and physics Java applets. Demonstrate the kinetic theory of gases, a 3-D quantum harmonic oscillator, and lots more!…

Eric Rudder

Eric Rudder, Senior VP of Developer and Platform Evangelism at Microsoft, will be speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California on Thursday, February 5 at 6:00 P.M. $10 for members, $18 for non-members….

The Sims Mafia

Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe writes about the underworld of The Sims Online, complete with mafia justice and underage brothels….

TunesAtWork

TunesAtWork is a specialized server for Mac OS X allowing you to stream your iTunes music collection to the world. Great idea and it is free….

Topix.net

Topix.net is a targeted news site using artifical intelligence algorithms to read stories from over 2,000 sources and classify them into 30,000 US cities and towns, 5,500 public company and industry verticals, 48,000 celebrities and musicians, 1,500 sports teams and personalities and more….

Cubs to receive portion of rooftop revenue

The Chicago Cubs will receive 17% of the gross revenue from rooftop businesses surrounding Wrigley Field, according to a report on ESPN.com. An extra $2 million a year for the club, or 2.5% of last season’s opening day payroll of $80 million….

RipDigital music conversion

RipDigital will take your entire CD collection and send you back DVD-ROMs full of 224kbs MP3s. $129 for 100 CDs, postage included. You can also have all of your music placed onto an external hard drive or music player….

Start your college coaches

Bobby night has added advertising to his coaches’ sweaters and Adidas now has larger logos on their shirt collars. ESPN examines the new trend of advertising placed on coaches, and which coaches may benefit the most….

TiVo announces TiVoToGo

TiVo is coming out with software in the fall which will allow you to move your recorded shows from your TiVo to a PC. A hardware key is required to view the files. You will also be able to program your TiVo from a cell phone or PDA. I am guessing that this software is written in J2ME….

NY Times review of MSN Direct (SPOT)

David Pogue of the NY Times reviews MSN Direct. “[T]he Microsoft Smart Watch is, to put it bluntly, for gadget freaks. It’s for early adopters, guys who love “because it’s there” technology, people whose pupils dilate at the mention of the word “wireless.” Others are likely to give these watches the backs of their hands – and not in the way Microsoft is hoping.”…

The numbers of a football game

According to NY Times analysis the Sugar Bowl had 16 minutes and 28 seconds of live action, or 7.3% of the 3 hour and 43 minute game time. In the NFL the Colts vs. Broncos had 12 minutes and 18 seconds of action in a three hour broadcast. (6.8% of the game was action, not counting replays) Soccer gives you close to 90 minutes of action in a 120 minute broadcast….

NY Times : Low-Fare Airlines Add Frills

NY Times article covers low cost carriers adding frills to their flights. Simpsons episodes, gift baskets, Kate Spade uniforms, all to spruce up economy class….

Apex to roll out game console

Apex to roll out game console with a 1.2 gigahertz Via C3 processor, and an Apex DVD drive for about $300. Interesting idea for competing with the consoles, until PS3 and Xbox 2 take it all away again….

Fending off virii

Caption: “Japanese businessmen hold a service aimed at fending off viruses and glitches for their computers in a purification ceremony conducted by a Shinto priest according to Shinto rituals at Kanda Myojin shrine in Tokyo January 6 2004.” Where are the Macs in this picture? Are they pure of virii and glitches?…

November Internet applications traffic

According to Nielsen//NetRatings (PDF) Windows Media Player is the top non-browser based Internet application for the month of November. 48 million unique users. AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger are surprisingly close at 28.3 million and 27 million respectively. Why is Yahoo! the top instant messaging program in the workplace? It installs without administrative privileges and easily bypasses the corporate firewall. Why does MSN Messenger have 37% market share? According to WebSideStory Windows XP is used by about 35% of Web users worldwide. 42% of Google users in October and November 2003 used Windows XP. Windows XP just happens to…

John Perry Barlow’s new blog

John Perry Barlow, songwriter and EFF co-founder, now has a blog. He chose TypePad as his publishing system….

Wikimedia fundraising

Wikimedia put online a cry for help and gathered $20,000 in about 24 hours. Impressive….

NY Times : Weighing Yourself in the Car

Yefim G. Kriger was rewarded patent No. 6,649,848 for a vehicle system that will regularly weigh drivers and scold them for being overweight….

Fast Company : Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation

Great article at Fast Company about Apple Computer, where it has been and where it is going. Interesting that the new store in Burlingame has Tuscan stone floors instead of the usual hardwood. The next step for Apple now that the G5 is out and doing well is to introduce a 64-bit OS. It needs to happen soon before Microsoft sounds off another “wait until Longhorn” trumpet. The G5 and Panther are tempting me to switch to a Mac. If I switch I would be giving up free software from Microsoft (I have free copies of Windows, Office, etc.) and…

Jakob Nielsen IM, Not IP (Information Pollution)

Jakob Nielsen wrote an article about the cost of unwanted interruptions. “One of the best ways of increasing the productivity of programmers is to give them individual offices.” Contract and overseas programmers do not have line of business interruptions of a phone ringing or a co-worker walking into a cubicle demanding immediate attention. Can U.S. companies whose primary business is not software handle a queue?…

What professional sports can learn from the 2004 Democratic campaign.

There have been many stories about how the 2004 presidential race in the U.S. is the first to embrace technology and therefore redefine democracy. When I look at the technology used by the Dean and Clark campaigns, I start to think about how similar technology can be used in the world of sports: specifically soccer. Imagine fans of the L.A. Galaxy both in southern California and around the world. They need to be connected and grassroots, similar to political campaign. The key players can only make so many appearances, but a conference call on a Meetup date could involve fans…

Sinulate – Wireless entertainment

Something new to add to your wireless device network at home. USB network controlled vibrators!…

The Deadweight Loss of Christmas

As most of the Christian world prepares for the mass of Christ, modernly known as Christmas, there are always economists to examine the utility exchange of gift giving. I buy presents for my immediate family only. In my case that is six people. My siblings receive small gifts and my parents larger presents. I usually aim for a rarity or something I know the recipient would not buy on their own. I stay away from anything I could partially benefit from just in case my intentions are called into question. And of course anything with a cord comes with my…

Pop-Ups Plague Philadelphia Police

Pop up ads for Viagra appeared on some Philadelphia Police’s mobile data terminals. Yes, pop up ads are a terrorist threat to national security!…

NY Times : eBay Trading Assistants

NY Times covers eBay trading assistants, businesses designed to place your gear on eBay for a 15-35% commission….

Sun Java Desktop System

I just received my copy of Sun Java Desktop System, 2003. 5 software discs and 1 documentation. Version 2003. November 2003, Rev A. I will try out the install later, after I see The Lord of the Rings….

On Search, the Series

Tim Bray’s On Search, the Series….

New York Times : Satellite Radio Extends Its Orbit

David Pogue of The New York Times covers the current state of satellite radio. What is most interesting is the gap in customers between XM and Sirius. “XM now has over a million subscribers; Sirius has 200,000.” I remember reading that 2 million users is the break-even point for both companies. I listen mostly to NPR while I drive. I am not convinced that satellite radio could outperform a MP3 player hooked up to my stereo system….

Google Print Beta

Google has a beta version of its book search service, Google Print, online. Sample search. Standard book URL is http://print.google.com/print/doc?isbn=? ….

LiveJournal Statistics

LiveJornal has posted some statistics on its users. 63.5% female, 94% unpaid. 27.7% updated within the last 7 days….

O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

I am thinking of attending the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, February 9-12, 2004. It will probably be $1200 out of my own pocket. ($766.50 for the conference plus Emergent Democracy Forum, $360 for four nights with shared room at Westin Horton Plaza, and I will be driving there and back from San Francisco) Have you been before? I am interested in learning new things and networking with really smart people not afraid to live life on the technological edge. I was one of the 230 proposals, but not one of the people accepted for the 45 slots. (Similar speaking topic…

RSS and BitTorrent

Steve Gillmor writes about how RSS and BitTorrent might be combined to share the bandwidth burden from a constantly pinged server….

FIFA Rankings

In the new FIFA World Ranking the U.S. outranks Germany….

Swastikas in the bookshelf

Steven Sinofsky apologizes for the inclusion of a clockwise swastika in Microsoft’s Bookshelf Symbol 7 font. Character code 0x7E. Star of David is 0x74. Microsoft released a tool to take the offending character off of your system. Yes, the symbol was used by the Nazi party, but has a history of a few thousand years. It was also part of Rudyard Kipling’s coat of arms!…

Google Search by Number

You can now search for a UPS or FedEx tracking number on Google, a patent number, FAA registration, and FCC equipment IDs. Full feature details….

FeedDemon 1.0 going Gold

congratulations to Nick for FeedDemon 1.0 going gold! I downloaded RC4b and I look forward to the final product….

Java Desktop System

I just ordered the Java Desktop System from Sun. $54.25 shipped. Should be interesting to experiment with….

Pretty women scramble men’s ability to assess the future

“Both male and female students at McMaster University were shown pictures of the opposite sex of varying attractiveness taken from the website ‘Hot or Not’. The 209 students were then offered the chance to win a reward.” “When male students were shown pictures of pretty women, they discounted the future value of the reward in an “irrational” way – they would opt for the smaller amount of money available the next day rather than wait for a much bigger reward.” New Scientist article about the ability of men and women to think rationally after being presented with a picture of…

Following around a Tablet PC user for a day

Scoble writes : “Maybe we should have a film crew follow a Tablet PC user around for a day.” An entire day would not be necessary. Just a typical meeting I think. Microsoft aims at the information worker and increasing productivity. It would be cool to define the purpose of the device in infomercial style. Have someone walk into a meeting with a 17″ PowerBook and someone with a Tablet PC. Both are very cool, but it is nice to compare functionality. The same method of questions you used to describe a sale at Best Buy could also apply here….

America West Airlines tray table advertisements

America West airlines now has advertisements on its tray tables. 4 week showings, minimum 8 week purchase, and design changes every 8 weeks….

NY Times : Starbucks WiFi flavors

Starbucks is offering content at its WiFi locations, regardless of your paid access to the outside Internet….

Longhorn and Mozilla: Birds of a Feather

Nigel McFarlane wrote a piece for DevX about the architectural similarities between Longhorn and Mozilla. Write down to the XAML vs. XUL comparison….

HBS Working Knowledge: Innovation

HBS Working Knowledge has selected its first weblog, Techdirt, as its featured Web site recommendation….

Licence fees and GDP per capita

How many months’ salary is Windows XP around the world? 10 month average in Africa….

NY Times : Stealth Inflation

Are companies now preying on busy lifestyles? NY Times writer David Pogue examines overbilling and miscellaneous fees creeping into monthly bills. My $39.99 cellular service plan comes to about $46 with all the line item fees. I am not sure if these fees are government mandated or something invented by my service provider for a quick buck….

Linux Tablet

Element Computer has released the Helium 2100, a new 14.1″ tablet running Lycoris Desktop/LX Tablet Edition. It costs only $999. The first device I have seen using a Via CPU….

Longhorn sold in Malaysia for $1.58

Longhorn alpha is on sale in Malaysia for six ringgit ($1.58) in Malaysia. The alpha is so hyped it is actually being bought!…

NY Times Magazine : Inside the iPod

Today’s NY Times magazine has an in depth look at Apple’s portable music player, the iPod….

SF Chronicle : Shame of the City

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Kevin Fagan has the first of a five part series on the homeless issue in San Francisco. He will probably be up for a Pulitzer for this one, along with photographer Brent Ward….

Woman knocked unconscious by trampling shoppers

A woman in Florida was trampled by a herd of shoppers at Wal-Mart. In the 6 A.M. doorbuster she was pushed over in the rush to grab a $30 DVD player….

Mao Tse Tung on guerilla warfare

Mao Tse Tung handbook for guerilla fighters is still the basis for a lot of the ground fighting we see today in places like Iraq….

A Framework for Soccer Video Analysis

Ahmet Ekin of the University of Rochester has put together software that filters out less interesting parts of a soccer game and focuses on the perceived exciting moments. His Automatic Sports Video Analyzer will send soccer highlights to cell phones during the 2004 Olympics….

Orgasmatron having trouble finding volunteers

A new device is entering clinical trials that delivers an orgasm on demand through a spinal implant. Stuart Meloy is struggling to find volunteers for the program. Towards the end of the article it mentions that an orgasm is a reflex response, and people with spinal injuries can still orgasm. Interesting….

Home Depot Center scorecard

The Torrance Daily Breeze has a very interesting Home Depot Center scorecard. “The Galaxy will also make the first profit in its eight-year history, team officials confirmed Friday. The team turned last season?s $3.5 million loss at the Rose Bowl into a modest $150,000 profit.” Doug Hamilton should keep Sigi Schmid as head coach. It looks like your revenue worries are not his fault, and you need to get some quality Latinos in your starting 11, not your head coaching position. Carlos Ruiz is the top Latino player in MLS and he was the work of Schmid….

Amazon to index British Library

Amazon announced a deal with the British Library to index its entire collection of 2.55 million books. I visited the British Museum last year and the library was amazing. It will be very cool to see more of these works uniquely identified….

Let them sing it for you

New site where you come up with the lyrics and each word is mapped to a clip in a music database. A new song is created with the clips taken from the word maps….

NY Times : M.L.S. Making an Effort to Attract Hispanic Fans

M.L.S. Making an Effort to Attract Hispanic Fans Some interesting stats in this New York Times article regarding Latinos and M.L.S. “In 2002, 30 percent of the people attending M.L.S. games were Hispanic. On the field, 20 percent of the players had Latino backgrounds.” Anschutz Entertainment Group owns part of the rights to the Mexican national team as well as the Libertadores Cup….

Ditch the cubicle

San Jose Mercury News on how Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Sun are moving away from typical office designs and into shared work spaces. In a month my company will change office locations. Better location but smaller, more cramped workspaces. The noise of shared work spaces bothers me, and while an office is a status symbol, it is also a very good way to escape the noise pollution and actually get some work done. When will there be noise shields for the cubicle farm?…

BBC : 50 Places to See Before You Die

BBC has a list of 50 places to see before you die. The Grand Canyon is #1. I live in San Francisco, #36 on the list. Definitely a lot of interesting ideas….

Robotic tickler

Not sure whose turn it is to tickle? A Dutch company has the answer. A pinball with a nylon fringe hovers an inch or two above you and a computer creates a 3D map of your skin for optimal tickling….

Smartmoney.com: Hot Jobs for 2004

SmartMoney.com profiles their Hot Jobs for 2004. “According to a recent Monster.com survey, 82% of Americans are dissatisfied with their jobs.” There are a lot of people feeling trapped in their jobs right now. Some escaped to a M.B.A. or law program, hoping things would improve by the time they got back. Those graduates are coming back, as well as a stagnating group who are happy just to have a job. It will be difficult to explain to a new employer why you have been working in a less than ideal job for the past few years, whether it is…

John Locke

John Locke : “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts” Ah yes, if only women followed this thought….

Sigi Schmid fired?

Sigi Schmid has been supposedly fired and is meeting with the Dallas Burn today about a new job. Jurgen Klinsmann as new coach? When has a top quality player other than Franz Beckenbauer been a good coach? I was not impressed with Klinsmann’s NSCAA speech on coaching strikers, but Jurgen is a nice guy and has been an assistant with the Galaxy for a few years now….

Berklee Shares

Berklee Shares is a collection of free course lessons from the Berklee College of Music. Movies, MP3s, and PDFs to help you learn bass, brass, DJ, drums, guitar, keyboards, voice, and winds. They even have lyrics analysis….

Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas

Microsoft released the Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas today. WordprocessingML is out now and SpreadsheetML and FormTemplateSchemas will be available on December 5. Should make OpenOffice projects a lot easier! I currently use Apache Jakarta POI to generate Excel documents….

x-ray specs

The dream of seemingly every young man, including Bart Simpson, teasing you in the back of many magazines, is now closer to reality. $2400 buys you infrared googles for color voyeurism….

Fast Company : The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know

Wow. Charles Fishman and Fast Company have put together a kick ass article on Wal-Mart. “It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined.” 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States go to Wal-Mart. “It also is not unheard of for Wal-Mart to demand to examine the private financial records of a supplier, and to insist that its margins are too high and must be cut. “…

Is your work/life balance off kilter?

Is your work/life balance off kilter? “Datamonitor claimed that 12 million European workers are asking for a cut in salary or seeking to work fewer hours because they’re too stressed.” “70 per cent of IT managers are worried that their staff are approaching burnout due to their work loads.”…

Feedster Builder

Feedster Builder will help you construct an RSS feed for sites without one. If you have a free Blogger account, this means you!…

Reasons Not to Invade Iraq

Time magazine carried an interesting essay by George Bush Sr. and Brent Scowcroft in its March 2, 1998 issue. Interestingly it has diappeared from the Time magazine archive, but the reprint is still available….

Bombardier hydrogen powered Embiro

Bombardier has a prototype named Embrio. What will personal transport look like in 2025? Looks a lot cooler than a Segway!…

MobyDock

MobyDock is a Mac-like application dock using DirectX. Interesting!…

Chris Hayes on Tablet PCs

Chris Hayes talks about how Tablet PCs can be used in sports. Good for player meetings and to illustrate plays. I agree, I just wish I had a better way to illustrate a play progression. I can illustrate a corner kick in soccer, but I think the lines representing player runs can be a bit confusing….

NY Times : Great Tunes, but Where’s the Cover?

New York Times covers the digital adaptation of liner notes and art that has accompanied music for decades. I will have an entire CD downloaded (pirated) but I will still go out and buy the CD for the artwork and lyrics. Pearl Jam usually thinks outside the jewel case. John Mayer’s site rocks because there are lyrics posted for every song. Too bad it’s in Flash. How long until download sites like Napster and iTunes embed lyrics in their media files?…

RecordStoreReview.com

RecordStoreReview.com reviews music stores in the U.S., Canada, England, Japan and more. Special tilt towards mail order, but good to see Amoeba Records is the third store added to the list….

Ireland gets black boxes in cars

Ireland now has driving data recorders, similar to an airplane’s black box. It is not mandatory, but there will most likely be a large reward in your insurance premium….

Google Deskbar

Google has a new Deskbar for Windows users. You can now search from your taskbar and have a small window display the results without opening you Web browser….

Google spidering IRC

Google has supposedly been spidering IRC channels. Source IP is 216.239.45.4….

Bill Cosby quote

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” – Bill Cosby…

BBC News : US raises spectre of conscription

US raises spectre of conscription by recruiting volunteers for the Selective Service System’s regional boards “to decide which young men are eligible for deferments, postponements or exemption from military service.”…

Microsoft Wallop

Part of Longhorn is Wallop, where you can share photos, blog, and interact with your friends. It’s invite only and I do not have an invite. :( This project was presented by Lili Cheng at the PDC. It is part of MS Reasearch’s Social Computing Group. Scoble? Any help?…

Shattered Glass

On Friday Lions Gate Films will release Shattered Glass, a movie about Steven Glass and The New Republic. To quote Charles Lane : “For the press, truth is, or should be, an absolute value.” Steven Glass fabricated sources and therefore stories for TNR. The best known case is “Hack Heaven” from the May 18, 1998 issue. Forbes broke the original story….

Borrusia Dortmund: The biggest club in Europe?

Borrusia Dortmund averages nearly 78,000 fans a home game. WOW. The average crowd in Germany is 36,492. In England 34,816. In Spain 29,345. In Italy 26,084. In the United States the MLS averages 14,677….

Dallas Fort Worth Star-Telegram on women sports idols

Today’s Dallas Fort Worth Star-Telegram has an article about women sports idols, specifically in the WUSA. Before WUSA there were leagues in Japan and Norway that provided opportunities after college if any players were interested. The idols were there, just not in person….

Everyone’s a Programmer

MIT Technolgoy Review profiles Intentional Software, a new company funded by Charles Simonyi. They aim to make writing code as easy as a PowerPoint presentation….

Got FoO

Got FoO is the coolest weblog design I have seen!…

The Economist : How good is Google?

The Economist : How good is Google? “Craig Pisaris-Henderson…reckons that Google’s operating margins on sites other than its own must be much worse than FindWhat.com’s (23%) or Overture’s (12%) because it has been wooing advertisers away from Overture by being more generous to webmasters.”…

Microsoft and Google: Partners or Rivals?

New York Times article today about Microsoft pursueing a buyout of Google. If I had $50 billion I would try to invest in Google too. If the deal goes through I wonder what will happen to Linux within Google. Dump your vi, we are a Visual Studio company now!…

Does Your Code Think In Ink?

Does Your Code Think In Ink? If so, Microsoft and PC Magazine might pay you $15,000 or other prizes….

Networked alarm clock

Westinghouse has a new alarm clock coming out in mid-November. You can set it based on your calendar information, it runs on Windows CE .Net. $500 was the best price I found though. It would have been a lot easier for Microsoft to start with a SPOT alarm clock instead of a watch. I need a new alarm clock!…

I really like the

I really like the work of William Adolphe Bouguereau. Good lighting, expressions, and realism….

Napster 2.0.6.1

I just downloaded the new Napster software. I search for “acoustic” yields 132 results. One of the things I like about iTunes, and what I end up buying, is the tracks I usually do not find on an album. I like the live, exclusive, and acoustic tracks in good quality formats. So far Napster has not come through with anything other than the standard album fare. I still have my 5 free downloads, so I will try out the full process….

Fortune : Is Office 2003 worth the upgrade?

Peter Lewis of Fortune reviews Office 2003, comparing it to the car market. I am still waiting on my new Office 2003 Professional packages to arrive. “[T]he fact is that, for the vast majority of humans on the planet, Office 2003 does not qualify for ?must have? status. There are dozens if not hundreds of improvements, but with a few exceptions ? mainly of interest to large corporations with thousands of employees ? they fall into the nicer cupholder, satellite radio, and optional navigation system category.”…

1990 Ancestry Map

State of Minnesota has a website graphically detailing the ancestory groups of Minnesota as well as the entire United States as reported in the 1990 U.S. Census. It is interesting to take a look at U.S. Irish….

KFC Makes Its Case for Health

Today’s New York Times profiles KFC’s new advertising campaign promoting fried chicken as healthy eating. From one of the ads: “The secret’s out. One Original Recipe chicken breast has just 11 grams of carbs and packs 40 grams of protein. So if you’re going low-carb, high-protein, go KFC.”…

PublicRadioFan.com

PublicRadioFan.com indexes public radio programs’ audio feeds….

The new car senses

Car manufacturers are starting to pay attention to fine tuning the roar of an engine or the smell of its interior, according to today’s New York Times….

Aeron wheelchair

There is now an Aeron wheelchair….

RFID tracking school children

Enterprise Charter School in Buffalo, New York has started using radio frequency ID tags to scan their students. If this had happened to me while I was in school I would have invented a way around it so it should be interesting to see how it all turns out. “”” The charter school’s 422 students wear small plastic cards around their necks that have their photograph, name and grade printed on them, and include an embedded RFID chip. As the children enter the school, they approach a kiosk where a reader activates the chip’s signal and displays their photograph. The…

Google considers online IPO auction

Google considers online IPO auction “Google executives, led by George Reyes, chief financial officer, met a number of leading investment bankers last week to sound them out about an IPO. The meetings marked the start of a process that is likely to lead to a stock market listing by about March next year, a person familiar with the IPO said.”…

HP Tablet PC

Check out the HP Tablet PC on the table in front of George W. Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chr�tien during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting on October 21. Bankok Post has a full story on the HP sponsorship of the event and the special voting software provided by Microsoft….

Acer : Tablet PC fees hard to swallow

Acer President Wang Chen-tang recently commented about why Acer’s Tablet PCs account for only 5% or its notebook sales. It’s due to the price of the OS. “The cost of a tablet PC is $200 (7,000 Taiwan dollars) more than its notebook counterpart. Of this difference, the hardware cost is only between $30 and $60. The majority of the difference comes from the OS license”…

eWeek : Microsoft Opens Windows Source Code to Its MVPs

eWeek : Microsoft Opens Windows Source Code to Its MVPs Microsoft is giving its Most Valued Professionals access to the more than 100 million aggregate lines of Windows source code….

Computerworld: Free hot spots pay dividends

An article in Computerworld finds that free hot spots pay dividends. For Schlotzsky’s Delis “Wi-Fi service brings in more than $100,000 per year per outlet in return for an investment of about $8,000 per restaurant for wireless infrastructure.” That’s for a T1 connection too!…

Microsoft Office 2003

Microsoft Office 2003 is now available. I have already ordered my upgrades and I eagerly await the chance to upgrade and develop….

Knowledge @ Wharton : A View From the Developing World

Knowledge @ Wharton article details some specifics about outsourcing to developing nations: specifically India. “According to a NASSCOM-Hewitt Associates survey, the average salary of a call center worker in India is $180 a month. This is five times the country�s per capita income. For a fresh college graduate, a call center job pays about 2.5 times as much as other job openings.”…

RollingStone.com: News: Carlton Goes Dark on New LP

According to Rolling Stone Vanessa Carlton’s new album will be “goth.” “”I’m twenty-three now, and I think I’m more evolved, more secure in who I am. I’m beyond the diary-confessional chapter of my writing.” Should be interesting at least. I saw Vanessa play 3 times last year and I was always pumped to see her play Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black….

BBCi – The Big Read

BBCi – The Big Read. Which is the best loved book in Britain?…

FeedDemon 1.0 RC1

The first release candidate of FeedDemon is now available….

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad OIC speech

There has been a lot of press today over a speech given by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad at the opening of the tenth session of the Islamic Summit Conference. The Prime Minister’s office has the full speech available online. While the world media has focused on Dr. Mahathir Mohamad’s comments regarding the Jews, in a larger context his speech is about the power of the Islamic world today and the abilities each of them know they are capable of. He uses the issue of Palestine as an world problem to unify his group and something that can be solved…

First iTunes album purchase

I just purchased Sarah McLachlan’s Live Acoustic EP 2003 from the iTunes Store. It is an iTunes exclusive, but not listed anywhere on her discography….

My first online music track purchase

I just bought Miles Davis So What from the iTunes Music Store. Also available as a free MP3 download from Miles Davis’ Web site….

R.E.M.’s high tech concert tools

CNN Headline News details some of the behind-the-scenes magic of an R.E.M. show. Tablet PCs, wireless Internet, and R.E.M….

Experience Visual Studio .NET Free Online

Microsoft has an online version of Visual Studio .NET 2003 running on a full-featured Windows Server 2003 hosted online. Three hours to play around….

Wynalda goes off

Wow. Eric Wynalda let it all out in this week’s column. “Bocanegra has been so much better than every other defender in MLS, it’s sick.” “April Heinrichs’ position needs to be reevaluated. She has lost the Olympics and lost the World Cup. Anywhere else in the world she’d be fired and looking for a college job right now. I can tell you what was wrong with the team ? it is run by four individuals who have nothing to do with the coaching staff.”…

Agents of Creation

Intelligent agents can be utilized by individuals to carry out a well defined goal on their behalf, as introduced in a recent Economist article….

Bit Torrent concerts

Sharing the Groove is a message board for the exchange of full concerts in audio and/or video. Radiohead, Grateful Dead, John Mayer, Led Zeppelin. Good variety….

Tablets in the Alias briefing room

Last night on Alias I noticed the computers in the briefing room were HP Tablets with docking stations. I have not been able to find any screen captures for confirmation….

Soulseek

Soulseek is an ad-free, spyware-free, just plain free file sharing application….

Book Promotion Tours on $0 a Day

Wired News article about book promotion tours which take place in the blogosphere at no cost….

Editor’s Note – Picture This

Smithsonian Magazine has a amateur photography contest. Catgeories are Americana, The Natural World, People, The Arts, Travel….

Kate Isenberg

Tonight I saw an acoustic rock performance by Kate Isenberg….

Microsoft Dissatisfaction Running High, Users Contemplate Switch

Internet Week asked its readers if they “seriously plan to dump Microsoft software.” Only 28% of respondents described themselves as satisfied Microsoft customers. I want Microsoft to drop legacy support with Longhorn. Launch a Virtual PC version of a legacy app if you need to, similar to OS X. Scoble mentions how manager performance is tied to users loving Microsoft. You will piss a lot of people off by forcing them to upgrade, but it’s best for everyone….

For Schwarzenegger, the Last Piece of a Master Plan

“Mr. Schwarzenegger began planning for politics 35 years ago. At a pancake restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif., Mr. Schwarzenegger disclosed to his friends what he called his ‘master plan’: become a movie star, make millions of dollars, marry a glamorous wife and hold political power over people.”…

Sony PSX

Sony’s new entertainment console, the PSX, looks pretty sweet. I wonder why they still license TiVo and even Windows XP Media Center Edition with all of their GigaPocket technology in place….

The New Yorker: Fact

Very thorough history in the New Yorker on suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge. Most people have no idea what a suicide barrier would look like. I imagine it would be under the bridge and a net to catch people within a jump range of 10 feet or so. No big deal, there is always construction out there anyways and some sort of safety net for the workers….

Bush Cheney 2004 Blog

The George W. Bush reelection campaign now has an official blog. There are specific RSS feeds on the economy and national security as well….

DepicT!

DepicT has a short film by Tony Roche : How to Tell When a Relationship is Over. My favorite bit is “You Find the Other Person Annoying.”…

Marriage Protection Week, 2003

The White House has a press release stating the week of October 12 through October 18, 2003, as Marriage Protection Week. Is a society, and therefore a country, and better off through the institution of marriage? Are Rosie O’Donnell’s adopted children less well off for their adoption into a lesbian household? The definition of a family should make for an interesting debate topic in the 2004 Presidental campaign….

Forbes.com: Creating A Killer Product

Forbes has a book excerpt on creating a killer product. What is your true competition? I like the Theodore Levitt quote : “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”…

Google search counter

Google has Frequent started experimenting with a search counter for individual users. It is cookie based and limited to small sample at the moment….

Boobiethon 2003

Robyn started the latest Boobiethon to raise money for charities. Veronika received $359 to run the Chicago Pets Are Worth Saving event. The rest of the money goes towards the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. I think more breast cancer fundraisers should promote themselves as fans of preserving the breasts we love. She has already raised about $1700 in a little over a day!…

Bill Joy in Fortune magazine

Fortune’s Brent Schlender interviews Bill Joy. “I’d really like to go and do something that’s more like Java�that starts from a clean sheet and that isn’t required by its compatibility with something else to be so complicated. Unfortunately, too few people get to do that in our industry.”…

The new HP Tablet PC

Rumor is that HP will announce a new line of Tablet PCs on October 13. The 1GHz Pentium M is part number DQ871A#ABA. I want one! One of my biggest complaints with the TC1000 is its lack of any GPU handling. Rendering a PDF page in Adobe Reader seems to take forever. The NVIDIA GeForce 4 Go 420 should help with that. I like my Compact Flash slot because my camera uses CF and I can take my memory from my camera and place it right in my Tablet with no add-ons. Maybe HP will have a trade-up version…

Hot-Spot Evangelist

Apple is hiring a Hot-Spot Evangelist in the UK. My favorite part : “Understanding and experience of implementing Microsoft Windows networks. Mac OS X knowledge a bonus, but not required.”…

Yahoo! Search IMVironment

Yahoo! now has a Yahoo! Search IMVironment for its instant messaging client. Include a yellow page search, a map, news, whatever, and it shows up alongside your IM conversation….

The Meeting Place

The Meeting Place is a dating system using computer kiosks placed in large nightclubs and social venues. Rocky Mountain News has a detailed article on the concept. I like the ideas of clubs and bars listing themselves on Friendster and patrons add their regular hangout as part of their network. It works especially well if the bar serves a specific demographic such as bikers, lesbians, or heavy techno lovers….

Tech Job Certifications That Still Matter

Newsfactor has a special report on Tech-Job Certifications That Still Matter. I wonder if Java is one of the over-supplied certs….

Megaman vs Metroid

Megaman vs Metroid Flash game. I own a top-loading NES and just bought a bunch of new games. Now you can play a new game in Flash too……

Wall Street Journal : What Doomed the WUSA

Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Allen Barra. His focus is on building the game from the grassroots, like minor league baseball, instead of focusing on big market plays like the NBA. I agree. I have had a similar conversation with Dave Oster, GM of the Lake Elsinore Storm. They are successful by creating an experience. They work with the local community, and secure promotional partnerships. Corporate sponsorships are all over the stadium and the sponsors are treated well. Merchandising gives small teams a competitive edge and forces creativity….

Alaska Airlines marketing

Alaska Airlines has a new parody site online. It speaks to people’s frustrations with flying and leaves subtle clues that Alaska Air is different. They even take a shot at Greyhound….

Google filesystem

Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung have authored a whitepaper on the custom Google File System….

Nick Rimando Suffers Torn Left ACL

“D.C. United announced today that an MRI exam performed today on Nick Rimando revealed that the goalkeeper has a torn left ACL. Rimando will undergo surgery next week and is expected to miss the remainder of the 2003 MLS season.” Nick blocked a penalty kick earlier in the game. Tough luck Nacho. Gotta be a soldier….

Blogging as a personal research tool

This week I was introduced to a new use for my blog : people trying to find out more about me. I was having some Beamish after soccer practice on Wednesday and some of my players knew things about me that I had never mentioned to anyone on the team. Today I checked my logs and I had about 11 unique visitors from my Yahoo! profile. (I use Yahoo mail as a social account) A few people I work with read my blog. One person was introduced to RSS for the first time today and I helped point him to…

Segways voluntarily recalled

Segway is recalling its human transporters for a software upgrage. If the batteries are near the end of charge you may fall. The software fix will probably decrease the allowed battery life. I assume all transporters are recalled, and Segway estimates 6,000 units. Are there only 6,000 Segways in the world?…

Landmark Theatres, nation’s largest art-house chain, purchased

Landmark Theatres, nation’s largest art-house chain, purchased by Mark Cuban’s 2929 Entertainment company. Landmark is my best choice for indie movies in San Francisco. I hope I still have variety of movies and not shut out movie houses such as Fox Searchlight….

SkyBox by Maytag

Maytag has a new home vending machine. 33 12-oz bottles, including longnecks, or 66 12-oz cans. Available exclusively at Amazon.com for $499. I want one for my cube……

Fedora : Savern test 2 available

Red Hat’s recent changes on the desktop platform are pretty interesting. If you are interested in Linux, or OS concepts in general, take a look at the Fedora Project. Fedora is focused on the total solution : core OS + packages. High on my wishlist is an update notification and installation for all packages on my machine, combining concepts from Red Hat Network and Ximian’s Red Carpet. Centralized updates in exchange for something either from the vendor or from my pocket….

Monopoly money

Hasbro released high quality PDFs of their Monopoly money. Print your own money!…

Macromedia – Central

Macromedia now has a public beta of its Central product. Create smart clients heavily loaded with Web services, and place them on any system supporting Flash….

Amazon.com developing Web search technology

According to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com has a new subsidiary, A9, to develop its own Web search technology. They are supposedly hiring 30 software developers but I cannot find the company’s Web site and there is nothing listed in Amazon’s jobs section….

Joel on Software – Bionic Office

Joel Spolsky has a very cool new office design, as well as ideas on what it takes to keep employees working optimally….

The Royal Society – Tim Berners-Lee

“The future of the World Wide Web”, a speech given to the Royal Society by Tim Berners-Lee on Monday, is now available as video-on-demand. RealPlayer required….

Sun’s software influence

The September 18 edition of The Economist carries an interesting article on Sun. “Sun is sending an unmistakable message to customers as well as to rivals such as Microsoft and IBM: software is shockingly overvalued.” “Sun now sees Java, a software brand, as a prime asset to be exploited.” Sun and Java have more brand weight in a corporate board than Red Hat. Sun is able to tout that it knows enough about security for its software to be deployed in the front lines of Iraq and inside the CIA that a corporation should entrust them with their data. The…

World-Wide Media eXchange

World-Wide Media eXchange is an experimental research project run by the Interactive Visual Media Group at Microsoft Research. Take a photograph, stamp it with longitude and latitude, and users can find your photographs on a map….

Fortune : Geek Eye for the Luddite Guys

The October 6 issue of Fortune examines a gadget makeover at the hands of a team of geeks. (Dean Heistad, Ted Larson, and Paul Ross) “all they wanted to do was send digital pictures of the kids to Grandma. Heistad came back with a shopping list that would get them that, plus a home theater, a wireless network, new computing, a tricked-out music system, and GPS positioning capabilities.”…

Yahoo Comparison Shopping

Today Yahoo released its new and improved shopping site, complete with comparative shopping. A search for a Sony Cyber-shot camera on Yahoo yielded 89 merchants and a PriceGrabber search found 69 results. Lowest final price on Yahoo was $520 compared to PriceGrabber’s $598, a 15% savings. Does this make PriceGrabber a prime takeover target? Yahoo and Google now have their own comparison service. PriceGrabber provides Ask Jeeves with a cobrand. AOL and MSN have the cash to spend….

Nature : Monkeys sense fairness

Nature profiles the work of Sarah Brosnan of Emory University teaching monkeys to exchange tokens for food. 80% of the monkeys rebelled if they did not receive an equal or better reward. Female monkeys were much more sensitive to the inequalities….

Philip Greenspun’s Weblog:

Philip Greenspun says “Java is the SUV of programming tools.”…

COMPAQ Support Library

COMPAQ Support Library on where to find the “Any” key….

Zagat’s Guide to WiFi

LA Times (free registration required) : “Computer chip giant Intel Corp. and the leisure class bible Zagat Survey have produced a guide to the best restaurants and hotels in America that offer wireless fidelity, or Wi-Fi, Internet access.” full article…

Mozilla 1.5 RC1

Mozilla 1.5 RC1 is now available….

Milton Friedman interview

John Hawkins interviews Milton Friedman. “all of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from unemployment” “Roosevelt’s policies made the depression longer and worse than it otherwise would have been.”…

Google Code Jam

Google has a new coding competition, sponsored by TopCoder. Bypass Google HR and get your code recognized!…

WUSA Suspends Operations

WUSA, the Women’s United Soccer Association, suspended operations this afternoon….

Pirillo Power Pack

Chris now has his own sampler pack courtesy of Peet’s Coffee. Very cool….

Canon PowerShot SD10

Tiny new 4 megapixel, 5.7x digital zoom camera from Canon : Canon PowerShot SD10. 3.6 x 1.9 x 0.7 in. and 3.5 oz….

$100,000

Ever wonder what a $100,000 bill looks like?…

Johnny Cash is dead

Johnny Cash died this morning of heart failure stemming from complications from diabetes….

Skype your way around the globe

Skype is a new P2P telephony and instant message application created by Niklas Zennstr�m and Janus Friis, the creators of KaZaa. The IM capability sounds like a good fit so people will be used to logging on and staying connected even when they are not performing the service’s primary use. Right now the app is ad-free but how long until it becomes infested like KaZaa?…

Robert Frost on education

Robert Frost : “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence.”…

Moneyball and Billy Beane

Next week I will be attending an event with Michael Lewis and Billy Beane as part of the Moneyball book tour. The moderator is Roy Eisenhardt, the ex-VP of the A’s back in 1985 who almost sold the team to Tampa for $37 million. What would you like me to ask on your behalf?…

Blogger Pro no more

I received an e-mail from Evan Williams tonight. “We’re no longer offering Blogger Pro as a separate product and we’re folding most of the features into regular (free) Blogger.” “You will continue to have access to features like RSS and post-via-email that are still not in the free version. You’ll also have priority support from our expanded team and new support system” For supporting Pyra I am presented with a Blogger hoodie. Where will new users get their RSS from? You may want to take a look at TypePad….

We Want Your Soul

According to We Want Your Soul, I am worth �14678 and 50% of people have a purer soul than I do….

Bill Joy to leave Sun

Chief Scientist Bill Joy is leaving Sun. Bill has been working mainly from Aspen for the past few years, but I have not seen any reporters pick up on his already shifted work schedule….

Open Office 1.1 RC4

Open Office 1.1 RC4 is now available….

20 and 40 GB iPods

Today Apple released two new iPods. Press release here. I want one. I keep thinking that I should wait until a Windows version of iTunes ships, or until after the next MacWorld until I place my cash on the table. Last week I attended an event sponsored by Mercedes USA. At the event I got to experience Sirius satellite radio for the first time. I am not inspired to buy a satellite radio unit or a subscription because I feel my money and playlist would be better served by an iPod. I can grab NPR radio shows online and sync…

College students fined for infected computers

Some colleges have started fining students for not properly maintaining their own systems against a virus attack. I am sure Apple will pick up on it and market the fines as monetary proof that Apple is a better total cost of ownership….

Workers need help turning computers on

One in seven workers need help turning their office computers on or off according to this study. “Research showed that about a fifth of staff asked for help to save or print a document and could not create a table on their screens to make it easier to write data.” On my first day at Callan I was told to wait for a member of our IT staff to turn on my computer for me. I write code, so I must not know how to work the machine? There are plenty of support nightmares out there….

IBM kicks off global Linux ad push

IBM is launching a global advertising campaign for Linux. I like the idea of experts in each of their fields contributing to one learner. The idea of a child may work against IBM as companies view Linux as new and unproven….

It’s good to be king

King Mswati of Swaziland has 10 wives and a fiance, and he holds a yearly festival where 50,000 bare chested women compete for his attention. Sounds like an interesting way to meet women. I hope he has better taste than Bill Clinton….

New Microsoft mice

Today Microsoft officially announced their new mice and keyboards. The wireless devices are available by the end of the month and the new wired Intellimouse Explorer is not available until February 2004. If you take a look at a close-up of the Wireless Intellimouse Explorer you will notice more well defined finger grooves and a scroll wheel chamber. My scroll wheel seems to always be blocked with gunk of some form, so hopefully the new design is more gunk resistant. There is a leather Wireless Intellimouse Explorer as well….

Israeli Scientists Crack GSM Mobile Call Security

An Israeli scientist said on Wednesday his team had found a way to break into mobile phone calls made on the popular GSM network, allowing eavesdroppers to listen in on calls and even take on a caller’s identity….

Tips for Candidates re Weblogs

Dave Winer has been doing a lot of research about political candidates and how they should be using weblogs….

Pimp Juice

Now you too can own your very own can of Pimp Juice….

Chinese food and Pirillo party Saturday night

On Saturday night I had dinner with Dave Winer, Robert Scoble and his family, Jake Savin, Brad Neuberg, Don Park, Steve Gillmor, Phil Wolff, Cheyenne, Pat Delaney, Bryan Bell, and a few other names I cannot remember. If I left you out leave a comment and I will edit you in. Brad is working on some really cool JXTA project named Paper Airplane which he plans to release into beta this week. Steve Gillmor is a little too RSS crazy and would like to do away with all e-mail and instead turn to RSS. I argued that his gripes with…

Revolve : The Bible meets Cosmo

Tommy Nelson has a brand new version of The New Testament geared towards teenage girls: Revolve. ABC News has a pretty comprehensive review. As a child I had a version of the Bible (old and new testaments) rewritten to appear as a comic. If I had been given a King James version it would have never been read. So I think different inroads for the same content is a good thing. In case you are wondering…I was raised Irish Catholic but I am currently consider myself agnostic and in defiance of any dogma. The last service I attended was Zen…

Robotic Freedom

Marshall Brain has a long but interesting article about what might happen when robotics and automation become as cheap as computers did in the late 1990s….

AppleLore

The Computer History Museum is hosting an event to celebrate Apple Computer’s historical contribution to the computer industry. The event is named AppleLore….

Location based services

MIT’s Technology review profiles some interesting location based devices and their use….

Tethered by a high-tech leash

MSNBC has a series of articles on “punching the clock in the new economy.” Especially interesting to me is Tethered by a high-tech leash. “[P]eople with Web access at home log in and work an extra 5.9 hours per week on average.” What causes someone to stay constantly connected? Fear of losing their job? A hope that doing so might single them out as an exceptional employee and get them the bonus, raise, promotion they desire?…

O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

I would love to go to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I downloaded most of the audience videos I could find last year and read the write-ups of the speeches. Now to actually place myself in the room and have some great ideas. Call for Participation proposals are due September 24. I will aim towards social software and see where it leads….

Did Blaster Cause the Blackout?

Did Blaster Cause the Blackout? “there is a very good plausibility that the recent East Coast power outage was due to an attack by an MSBlaster variant on the SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system at the power plant master terminal, or more likely at several of the remote terminal units (RTUs). SCADA runs under Win2000 / XP and the telemetry to the RTU is accessible via the Internet.”…

Irish Fat Tax

Reuters covers a move by some to cut down on obesity in Ireland. Cutting Irish alcohol and happy hours seems like a very dangerous endeavour for any politician….

Microsoft’s Big Role on Campus

Washington Post covers the molding of campus curriculum by Microsoft. Any language where the IDE is not free or relatively cheap to students will stifle learning. In one of my econometrics classes at UCLA students were offered scaled down versions of Stata for $50. I do not know one person who purchased the program for use at home. The professors were bound by lab hours and available workstations and their curriculum suffered as a result. Visual Studio .Net 2003 Academic is $100 at the UCLA Store. Visual C# .Net is $60. Yes, you could have students write in Notepad, vi,…

Soccer Conditioning

I just bought Sigi Schmid’s book on soccer conditioning. Looks like I will have to wait until October 25 until I get it autographed. It should come in handy as a refresher as I work towards my coaching license….

The Ghost in Your Machine

Business Week interview with Chris Forsythe of Sandia about cognitive machines. The Sandia news release is pretty interesting as well….

Community Books

There is a local San Francisco project where people can share books and videos. “The Distributed Library Project is an experiment in sharing information and building community in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Seems interesting and worth checking out. I posted most of my books online tonight. It was pretty simple to enter a ISBN and have the author, genre, and even a review from Amazon filled out for you….

WiFi in retail business

Today’s New York Times covers the use of wireless technology to improve retail experiences….

Toyota Prius parks itself

Toyota plans to release an optional feature for its Prius cars sold in Japan, according to Wired coverage. “A car will probably always require a driver for liability reasons.” A lot of people are uncomfortable with parallel parking, especially in tight spots, or a spot on the driver’s side. Although the article mentions the price tag as a downfall, I know some people who pay for a parking spot just so they do not have to parallel park….

FeedDemon gets top mark

ExtremeTech reviewed 6 RSS readers and gave FeedDemon the top mark (8 out of 10). “the Cadillac of RSS readers.” Congrats Nick! I am a regular user and even mentioned the product in Spider Hacks. I should participate more in the newsgroups to make this a really good app….

James Gosling: on the Java road…

James Gosling : One of the nice things about developing in Java on the MAC is that you get to develop on a lovely machine. I thought James would be using something like the SPARCLE….

Henry Hunan Weblogger Dinner

Anyone for a Chinese dinner at Henry Hunan’s next Saturday? So far it looks like at least Dave Winer and Scoble will be there….

Motion Hardtop Keyboard

Motion Computing has a new keyboard available that allows for a docked slate. Looks more flimsy than my Compaq dock, but much better than the standalone keyboard. Last month on a flight from Chicago I sat next to someone with an M1300. We compared Tablets, what we look for in a notebook, and our frustrations with the first generation technology. He was playing a balancing act with his keyboard propping up his slate as it moved around. I envied his 12.1″ screen and he envied my battery life and dock. I just lost my dock edge….

Higher level programming

Over the past few weeks I have been thinking about the current state of programming. Languages seem to be more and more designed for high level interaction with the heavy lifting done at the compiler level. This allows for bad programmers to not do things that will be too harmful. At the same time it allows for sloppy and imprecise code. Most people do not consider clock cycles, memory usage, or disc usage writing code or designing a database. Embedded systems like a cell phone may be different. The use of an int to store a Gregorian year value. String…

Secret blog

Chris Pirillo has a secret section of his site up. Same content as his normal weblog, just with a different background….

Heather Mitts

Heather Mitts has a pictorial in this month’s FHM magazine. For those of you not keeping track, last year the WUSA put together modelling packages for a select few women and shopped them around to men’s magazines. Although none of the women were featured in Playboy, Heather won the Playboy Online poll for sexiest WUSA player. The FHM shots look mostly the same, just with different outfits. I think Heather looks more sexy in her soccer gear, but that must just be my weird fetish….

Crash Different

I found an Apple testimonial video that had me rolling in my cube. If you are a member of the Mac cult, you may be offended. Otherwise, laugh your ass off….

Blog from a Smartphone

News.com reports that the new Mio 8380 phone from Mitac will “keep a diary.” Sounds like a blog to me!…

Pick your own college roommate

NY Times profiles some interesting roommate matching programs. I wonder how long until similar ideas make it out into the apartment or house sharing worlds? Most of San Francisco relies on Craig’s List for apartment listings, and some sort of profile matching system would be very welcome!…

TypePad is expensive

I like TypePad, but wow it is expensive! $50 a year is about what I paid for Blogger Pro and BlogSpot. Blogger Pro is supposed to have a lot of new features and I am supposed to be lucky to have gotten in at the price I did. It has Google magic now as well. I like being able to edit the HTML of my template. This feature allows me to put in things like AIM Remote and Yahoo!’s button. To do the same I would have to use TypePad Pro and pay $150 a year. Domain mapping would be…

PDC

Can’t afford it. My current company has no idea what makes Yukon better than database XYZ from 1991. PDC would be an investment in my personal future in the software and database development industry. Will I still be working at my company in 2005? Probably not. I will still be affected by the 800 pound gorilla’s new toolsets that change the software development landscape. I could drive the 400 miles to the show and take vacation days from work ($80 + 5 vacation days). I could sleep on a friend’s couch ($0). I could pay $10 a day for…

Phish for free using iMac

Last weekend Phish headlined the It Festival in Maine. They set up a 100,000-watt radio station and hooked up their fans with a CD-R and a selection of 150 live tracks to choose from. Now that Pearl Jam has left Epic, I wonder if they will do something similar? Very cool. “In addition to performing, the band set up a tent where fans could make their own free custom mix CD of live Phish tracks with iTunes. The tent ran at full capacity, with lines outside until 4AM each night.”…

Larry King and Howard Dean

CNN has a full transcript of last night’s Larry King interview with Howard Dean online. I think King was inappropriately dragged on the gay marriage issue. Dean stated marriage is a religious ceremony, and Vermont had enacted equal rights for gays, but not termed it marriage. Favorite quote : “That’s how you beat a president who can get as many $2,000 checks as he wants, is to bring three or four million new people into the process, give them a reason to vote, and then you can beat George Bush.”…

Howl for a Rendezvous

Howl is an implementation of Zeroconf (popularized as Apple’s Rendezvous) for Windows and Linux platforms….

Bentley College on Tablets

Bentley College has a marketing class focused on Tablet PCs, profiled in today’s Boston Globe. “Because it lacks the capability to show DVDs, the introductory version of the Tablet failed to ”match student lifestyles outside the classroom,” in the words of the Bentley project’s first research report. Subsequent versions of the Tablet are being designed to accommodate DVDs.” Will slate models ever contain DVDs or is the added weight not worth it? It makes sense for a Tablet similar to the Toshiba, which is essentially a regular notebook computer with a swivel screen. I do not want a desktop…

Readily available technology

AP : “A 15-year-old boy foiled an apparent abduction attempt when he pulled out his cell phone camera and snapped photos of a man trying to lure him into a car.”…

Tablets as a readily awaiting business tool

The Seattle Times has an article today about Tablet PCs used in the luxury suites of Mariners’ games for food ordering, updated score charts, and on-demand instant replay. “The laptoplike Tablet PCs can be loaded before each game with special messages for clients, PowerPoint slide presentations and contracts that are ready to sign with a stylus.” Cursivecode is leading the initiative….

Privacy Economics

Andrew Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota has released an interesting paper on the discriminatory pricing and the privacy implications. From railroads to Amazon.com, the history of the concept is well covered….

C# and Longhorn

I want to learn C# so I can create some really awesome applications for Longhorn. I have a good knowledge of SQL which should give me a pretty good head start. How do you plan for a platform that is years away when you do not know what tools we be already available and where will there be a niche to fill. I cannot afford to attend PDC, so I will already be behind in the tool development. Regardless of Longhorn, learning some C# seems like a good idea. I am a Java guy, so it should not be too…

FeedDemon

Nick Bradbury has put together a pretty cool RSS aggregator called FeedDemon. Written entirely in Delphi. It’s tough to code to .Net when the CLR is over 20 MB. You can bundle a Delphi or Python runtime, but I rather pull off of common libraries. Can a developer ship and require a 20 MB+ required library download? It’s tough in the small app world. I would love to roll out something that uses Microsoft’s P2P libraries, but I doubt anyone has that installed right now. If you build it, they will come……

Tim O’Reilly speech

Tim O’Reilly gave a great speech here at Gnomedex on open source software. Makes me want to go to Emerging Tech, and some of the other conferences he puts on….

Cute girl for governor

Georgy Russell, a programmer from Mountain View, is running for governor of California. Buy a thong and support her cause!…

Gnomdex

Day 2 of Gnomedex and so far so good. Nelson Minar had a good speech on an overview of Google, but was nothing I did not know already. Learning more about AdSense was something new for me. Cost per click and past click relevancy are both used to determine page position. Nelson hopped on IRC for the rest of the day, but I couldn’t find him at the Meet the Speakers part of the day. Eric Sink was interesting, and reaffirmed that I want to take a look at C#. Rob Malda was great, and unscripted. Met the wife. They…

MIT Media Lab’s take on corporate integrity

MIT Media Lab has a new geiger counter-style device that scans a barcode and emits noise based on a database query for environmental and corporate ethics. Pretty cool!…

MSFT Analysts Day

Today was Microsoft’s day-long brieifing of financial analysts. Lots of information out there, and I have not read through or watched any of it yet. Visual Studio 2005 is code named Orcas? Must be a Pacific Northwest thing. I need Whidbey so I can code for Longhorn….

The search for a Tablet camera

I was hoping that the Veo Traveler for Pocket PC would work with my Tablet. After contacting their sales department I find out that no, it will not work. I have a flap over my USB connectors, so even if I did find something like the Paceblade camera I would have to bend back the cover. PC Card slot and CF slot are exposed, so I am trying to find a camera to attach there….

Creative’s new webcam

Creative has a new mobile WebCam with swivel that docks to the top of a laptop screen (or in my case, my Tablet). Smaller than an iSight, but with Windows drivers, and a third of the cost. Still looking for mobile still capture for my Tablet….

Premier Pizza on Saturday Night

Scoble is organizing a meeting at Premier Pizza on Saturday night. I’ve never eaten anywhere featured on late night TV before….

My New Tablet

I have had my new Compaq Tablet PC for a little over a week now. I have an 802.11b network set up at home with 128-bit WEP and MAC address security. I bring my Tablet to work with me every day. My company is worried about having any devices it has not fully configured hooked up to its network, so I am not able to take advantage of wireless Internet, or any Internet, at work. The best use for my Tablet is loading something on the device and bringing it with me to someone’s office to illustrate the code,…

Jerry Springer the next Ohio senator?

Jerry Springer plans to run for Senate in Ohio. Why he has taken bought airtime for 30 minute infomercials in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, San Antonio and New York I have no idea. Seems like a publicity stunt that will not amount to anything….

Work at Google Blogs

Google has a job posting up for a Blogger Programs Coordinator….

UK Hulk is anatomically enhanced

Spanish toymaker Play By Play is supposedly shipping a 12-inch tall Hulk doll with a 2-inch penis according to this article in the Sun….

Self-healing minefield

DARPA has a cool new demo of a self-healing minefield online. The machines will rise……

Windows Server 2003 vs. WebSphere

Microsoft paid for a study comparing Windows Server 2003 running .Net Framework 1.1 against IBM Websphere (J2EE) on Red Hat and what I am guessing is Solaris….

Free soda in aggregate

Ed Kaim of Microsoft built a pyramid out of all of his discarded Diet Coke cans….

Jimmy Conrad

Lengthy profile of Jimmy Conrad in today’s Kansas City Star….

Geeks to Gold

Fortune magazine has an article in this month’s issue about how researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Center have come up with new data heuristics models such as the Web Graph Structure to analyze thought trends in text. Researchers are put before clients to drum up revenue and learn about big problems with big revenue potentials. Sounds like a good place to work, with some really interesting projects….

Computer Science’s lost allure

The New York Times has an interesting article on decreased Computer Science undergrads while the demand for graduate CS programs continue to rise….

Buying Sun

The New York Times (free registration required) has a good article today summarizing the rumored buyout of Sun. Since the rumors first surfaced on May 9 Sun shares have been trading at about four times historical volume. Seems like something is up and maybe it’s just a matter of JavaOne before we know what it is. As a member of the Java Community Process I am especially concerned….

Metallica as Iraqi torture music

The May 26 issue of Newsweek reports that U.S. military units are using Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” to break the resistence of Iraqi soldiers….

Spring in your step

Researchers in England have come up with a new soft-ground soccer shoe using springs to reduce shock….

Naked Cowboy

Naked Cowboy makes between $150,000 and $200,000 a year for performing in Times Square in his underwear….

A team from Stanford has

A team from Stanford has come up with new enhancements to what the world commonly knows as PageRank. They discovered that 80% of the pages on any given site point to other pages on the same site. Topic specific PageRank can become a reality, which definitely has huge possibilities for business intelligence applications….

Grub

I Grub daily. Over half a million crawls so far this month. Good work on pushing through the new client Kord and crew! Local crawl is working well….

The World of Google

What’s for lunch at Google today? Google is open about allowing employees to work on outside projects, or even heavily swayed R&D within the organization. How many companies do you know would except a failure rate at the expense of a production line? It is nice to see management thinking in terms of leaps and bounds and not inches….

Grokker

I attended a presentation by Sun Microsystems tonight and saw an implementation of Grokker by Groxis, Inc. Very interesting client rendering design. At 20 MB on top of a Java Runtime Environment I am curious to look at the APIs when they become available….

You’re In Control

Dan Maynes-Aminzade and Hayes Solos Raffle from MIT’s Media Lab have outfitted a urinal to serve as a gaming platform. The game itself reminds me of Duck Hunt. Given the static advertising above public urinals today, video monitors are probably not too far off either. “John Anderton, you look like you could use a Guinness!”…

I have over 15

I have over 15 gigabyes of music ripped onto my hard drive right now in either MP3 or WMA format. All retail CDs, purchased legally, but now much more efficiently indexed. Now the problem is having my music with me both at home and at work. My current player holds only 64 megabytes : not even a full album at 192 Kbps. I feel proud that my music collection can fit on only the high-end iPod 30 gigabyte model. MP3.com’s old model of proving you owned the music and then enabling access to it anywhere makes sense to me. …

Long day, world in a daze

Today has been a long day to say the least. I woke up this morning in a daze due to lack of sleep, and after I tuned my TV to CNN Headline News as I normally do before stepping into the shower I felt like I was having a bad dream. Must have been an Independence Day induced dream or something. Everywhere is on heightened alert, even my local Home Depot received a bomb threat today. It is so refreshing to see the support our population has contributed in terms of blood donations, medical help, and strangers offering persons stranded…

Graduation

I graduated from UCLA yesterday. I attended two ceremonies, with my family watching from the stands. The economics department ceremony was a lot more intimate, with only 650 graduates. The social sciences ceremony was bigger, but officially waving the magic wand and calling me a graduate. Hopefully I can find a good job in the next couple of weeks, and get on the career path before I need to go after my MBA. :)…

Turning a new leaf

I am now in finals week. The last finals of my undergraduate career (I hope). Anyone can attend UCLA and receive an education for free. That is right, for free. The acquisition of knowledge, the furthering of your personally intellectual goals: all at no cost. UCLA is such a big school that you can attend class for an entire quarter and never even be enrolled. All class are all available at the campus libraries for anyone to read. No professors check their rosters to ensure that all persons in attendance are on the class roster. So while some professors…

Looking forward

I am still looking for a full time job to step into upon graduation from UCLA. I feel I have a lot of experience and a solid degree, but the whole industry seems to be holding its breath and waiting for the dust to clear from the bubble burst….

California Adventure

I spent last weekend taking my sister all over southern California. We went to Disney’s California Adventure, San Diego Zoo, and *N SYNC : Larger Than Live. Busy weekend….

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