NFL.com is now the home of Tuesday Morning Quarterback and there was much rejoicing throughout the land!
Dare talks about using WinFS as a universal information aggregator. It sounds to me like he wants something like Dashboard. Though obviously Dashboard has a long way to go before it could do everything that Dare wants.
Joshua Allen responds to other posts which try to show how one gets more tolerant of software which sucks when you are writing software yourself. Joshua doesn't buy that argument and continues on about some of the wastes in software and how they can be a reason for long hours most coders work.
I was agreeing with all of this (and still do) but then he had to throw a crack about open source into the post. He wonders how many man-hours have been spent building a clone of Unix. Of course, there are so many other areas of open source software, it's just silly to try and only use those developing for the kernel as a proof for open source being one of the biggest black-holes sucking away human talent needlessly. What exactly should these people do? If they are enjoying writing code, what exactly is the problem? How is that affecting the human talent? If anything, it is making that talent even better.
AKMA sings the praises of Mellel. It's a word processor for OS X.
According to the creators, it is designed for scholars, creative and technical writers. I'm going to try it out and see if I agree with AKMA about how useful it is. Here are some screenshots. It is $25 for a license but you do get 3-years worth of upgrades which sounds pretty reasonable to me.
One of the most speculated things in the book of Revelation is what will be the mark of the Beast during the last days. It has been said that your Social Security number was the mark of the Beast as well as various other things. A new mark is now gaining attention. It seems a company is offering to implant a RFID chip into your skin and it will take the place of using your credit card.
Now, I'm definitely an early-adopter for most technology but this seems a bit much. I just can't see myself (or anyone I know) having something implanted in them just so they don't have to reach in their wallet or purse to pull out their credit card.
I'm watching the Manchester United-Blackburn match via Tivo. Yes, I know it is already over but now is the first time I've had a chance to watch it all day. I briefly thought about getting up at 4:30AM to watch it live but decided not to.
Anyways, both clubs start American keepers and I would guess that this might be the first time that has happened in the EPL. I could be wrong of course but I'm going to try and look it up. At any rate, it is pretty cool.
Foe posts the position statement for the development and use of RFID. The threats to privacy are real but hopefully some sort of middle ground can be found because I think RFID has great potential.
WIRED has an interview with Bill Joy. Some really interesting answers to various questions.
I've always said that all successful systems were small systems initially. Great, world-changing things - Java, for instance - always start small. The ideal project is one where people don't have meetings, they have lunch. The size of the team should be the size of the lunch table.Open source is fine, but it doesn't take a worldwide community to create a great operating system. Look at Ken Thompson creating Unix, Stephen Wolfram writing Mathematica in a summer, James Gosling in his office making Java. Now, there's nothing wrong with letting other people help, but open source doesn't assist the initial creative act. What we need now are great things. I don't need to see the source code. I just want a system that works.
My Wallop has been getting some pub ever since Microsoft's PDC a few weeks ago. Basically, it is a project being done by Microsoft's Research Lab which allows people to share photos, interact with friends and blog.
Scoble reminds people that Wallop is a research project and not a product so what you see now might never see the light of day for average consumers.
Boing Boing points to a some cool t-shirts with slogans for P2P, Nanotech and more...
Christmas is coming!
John Robb is writing a book about next generation terrorism. It'll be interesting to see how much he will blog about it.
Dare mentions that death in cartoons might no longer be taboo but I think it hasn't been taboo for a bit of time. I was actually talking about this tonight since Julia went to see Brother Bear this afternoon.
In the past few years, major characters have died in The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast (yes, I know the Beast was transformed but it's still a death). There's also the death of Bambi's mother which still haunts some of my friends. Even Spike and Julia died in Cowboy Bebop.
I don't really know how I feel about people dying in cartoons. Perhaps I'd rather have my kids be in the dark about the reality of life for a bit longer.
Diego describes a great ad for an upcoming soccer match between Ireland and Canada.
For anyone who had to deal with girlfriends using the song as a test of your commitment, the ad is especially nice.
The Berklee College of Music has created the Berklee Shares program which allows for the download of online lessons on various musical topics.
The cool thing about this is that they are encouraging the sharing of these lessons on various p2p networks. Since the lessons are licensed under the Creative Commons, the school is allowing the sharing of these as long as you don't alter them or try to sell them.
With Berklee Shares, "We can enter the file-sharing debate in a very pro-active and positive way. We're demonstrating a legitimate use of the digital networks to distribute authorized content," Kusek said.Kusek said the college does not condone stealing copyright works.
"We want to encourage a debate as to how we can best address file sharing as a music industry rather than try to sue it into submission, or pretend it doesn't exist, or let it grow and become even more disruptive than it has been already," he said. "We don't want the recording business to fall apart."
The first teaser trailer for the new Harry Potter movie is out. Looks very cool!
I'm digging the darker feel though it did take me a few moments to remember that Richard Harris passed away and is no longer Professor Dumbledore.
I realize that I've been a bit lax on giving soccer updates and thoughts. I have tons of excuses but obviously that doesn't matter. Anyway, I think it's awesome that Manchester United is coming back to the States next summer.
They won't be playing in LA again so I'll perhaps have to travel to see them. One intriguing thought is going to see them in Chicago, especially if the Cubs are in town. That would be incredible. Though, trying to win over the media might not be that easy.
Wired has story about how some folks are beginning to judge others by their iTunes playlists.
While this is funny, it is kind of silly if people are really worried about this intrusion. All one has to do is turn off the sharing option or only share certain playlists. iTunes gives all of those options.
Diego is looking for a framework for testing distributed systems. Some interesting ideas for what would make the framework useful:
This framework would work as follows: you'd have a "test listener" that can run on any machine, and a "test controller" app that can run on your desktop. Once the listener is running on the other machines (and maybe even on your desktop too) you can easily choose a JAR to deploy to all the target machines, then run it. The system automatically routes the output (System.err and System.out) to your "test controller" in multiple windows. You can control any of the clients through simple play/pause/stop/restart buttons. Clear the consoles, etc. You would be able to script it, so that this whole process can be run in loops, or automatically every day or every week, or whatever. You would be able to define output values to check for that can alert you of results that don't match expectations.
Dave and Brent talk about the guilt trips they've been given in bug reports. I can't say that I've been given guilt trips in the bug reports given to me but there is definitely some silly things that people say in order to get work done on a bug.
The Smart Mobs weblog points to an interesting service which will be launched in Australia before the end of the year. Basically, the company will send your mobile phone a SMS message which will be a picture message of a barcode. That barcode will be scanned and the various data housed in it will allow you to go to the event you bought a ticket for.
I was thinking of something very similar the other day after reading Matt's mini-rant on the silliness of keeping around paper receipts and the response from Matt Webb about the receipts being primary keys to a distributed database..
What if a company offered to send an encrypted copy of the receipt to your mobile phone/PDA/etc? There would be some basic metadata available to read so that you knew when/where you bought the item(s) but everything else would be encrypted. Then if you needed to take something back, you would either send the receipt back to a special address or use Bluetooth to transfer the file to the cash register.
I'm sure there are tons of holes in this but the idea has struck me as kind of cool.
Hopefully, the Star Wars universe, drawn by the team who brought you Samurai Jack won't let that happen...
Penn State and Napster have signed an agreement to allow students to use the new DRM-ready service. The unfortunate part of this is how students won't actually be able to own any of the music without paying an additional fee per song.
The Register talks with some students who are trying to fight it.
GooseQuill looks really interesting. It's a suites of tools which writers can use to write their manuscripts as well as keep track of various admin-type duties, like queries and invoices.
If you are looking for the Java implementation of Rendezvous that the folks at Strangeberry put together, it's now JmDNS. I guess there was some sort of legal problem with the JRendezvous name. Glad to see that's been dealt with.
Looks like Microsoft is trying again with being the keeper of your identity.
The heart of the Identity System is the XML-based Information Card, which lets users digitally exchange data about themselves with other users or servers. At its most basic, the Information Card is a mechanism for users and organizations to recognize one another, much like today's cell phones display incoming phone numbers as an identifier."The Information Card is a recognition infrastructure. It's like a vCard on steroids," said Kim Cameron, architect of directory services for Microsoft. The vCard is an Internet Engineering Task Force standard for an electronic business card. The Information Card goes a step further to add policy and cryptography features. Communication is protected using technologies such as IP Security, Secure Sockets Layer and Web services protocols.
Updated to fix the link!
Coming out of Microsoft's developer's conference, one of the biggest issues facing those at Microsoft is to try and bring the focus back on the products which are shipping now as opposed to (at least) three years from now. Scoble mentions this in a couple of posts.
Even when joking, it's going to be tough:
Also, he says that Quartz already does everything Longhorn will do in three years. That's also not true. But, I don't wanna pull an Andreeson, so you'll have to figure that out on your own. We've already hyped up the market enough about Longhorn. Go back to sleep for another couple of years. :-)
How do you pull back the hype lever once you've pulled the trigger? That's going to be difficult.
Some interesting papers here from the latest conference back in July. Specifically, the peer-to-peer information system for the Semantic Web looks cool as well as the peer-to-peer approach to classloading in Java. Fun stuff!
John Buccigross, host of ESPN's NHL2Nite program, writes a weekly column for ESPN.com. This week's is really interesting and as close to uplifting as you can get coming from a sports column.
Basically, he describes the four values of hockey which make the sport great. They are heart, courage, mental toughness and artistic expression. You would be hard-pressed to find a better list of values for life as well.
Matt speaks the truth about the silliness of requiring a receipt in this day and age. Almost all transactions, especially major ones, now take down metadata about the person so why do we need to keep a piece of paper?
Cool news from Ted Leung. He's joining the OSAF, the Open Source Applications Foundation. They are building Chandler, a new take on the PIM.
I look forward to the topics he will hopefully blog on as he gets into his job.
The DIET project has released their DIET Agents platform as open source. It's written in Java and released under the GNU GPL.
According to the web site, it's been designed using a bottom-up approach which allows it to be scalable, robust and adaptive. The tutorial also gives information about the platform and possible uses.
One of the local stations was showing the Blackhawks-Ducks game tonight. They had a horizontal line at the bottom of the screen with the score and time remaining. I hadn't seen one of those at the bottom before. It got me thinking as to whether or not anyone has done research on which scoreboards help the viewer and which annoy them.
For instance, any sport on the various Fox stations will have a horizontal scoreboard at the top of the screen. I haven't found it to get in the way but I think occassionally it will come into play. For football, ESPN and ABC still use the upper corners of the screen for a square scoreboard. In basketball, the scoreboard moves to the bottom corners.
One that is different from anything else I've seen is the scoreboard during Notre Dame games on NBC. It is a sort of bracket on the upper corner of the screen. Horizontally it shows the down and distance as well as the game clock but vertically, it shows the score.
Overall, I think these help viewers but I still would be curious as to which form people like the most.
Seth Nickell has a great post about the vision needed to accomplish things. His examples are for GNOME but they can be easily adjusted for any development effort.
The bottom line is that more things will get done if you have people buying into the goals that have been set.
Days like today make it difficult to be a fan. Well, not a fan in general but a fan of the Irish specifically. Sure, I could go through the various problems, bitch and moan about what needs to be done but really, what would be gained? I'd feel a bit better but then tomorrow I'd read more about the game and I'd start obsessing over things until next Saturday. The nice thing about following a baseball team is that there are multiple games a week so you can't really dwell on just one. With football, there's lots of down time which makes for way too much fan involvement.
I consider myself a fan for four teams, Notre Dame (football), the Cubs (baseball), the Bears (football) and Indiana University (basketball). There are plenty more which I follow somewhat but those four, I follow daily. Sometimes I think that number is too many especially after what happened in Chicago. I'm just now able to talk about it. A few people joking said I should be Steve Bartman for Halloween and I just looked at them in shock. It doesn't matter if the series didn't hinge on that particular foul ball but I look at it as a symbol for the loss.
Being a fan of a team transcends almost everything else in life. It lasts longer than relationships, isn't affected geographically and generally can't be ignored. Perhaps that isn't healthy but it's the reality. This struck me today when they showed a clip from the 1993 game between Notre Dame and Florida State. My life is so different in those ten years. I hadn't met my wife yet. I was dating someone else very seriously. I was going to school in Chicago with little thought of returning to Southern California. On a whim, we drove the 3 hours from Chicago to South Bend on a Friday morning, spent the day walking around the campus just soaking up the atmosphere. We bought two tickets for the game in the student section and watched one of the greatest games ever. Fast forward ten years and I'm a totally different person yet my being a fan of the Irish hasn't changed one bit.
To me, that's the amazing thing about sports and something which can't be easily explained or understood.