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….
Uncategorized
382 posts filed under this category, page 3 of 16.
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….
How to manage smart people
Scott Berkun on how to manage smart people….
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….