Friday, February 01, 2002

[Slashdot] Space Elevator May Become Reality - I always liked sci-fi books about space elevators.   'Course, the tether always ends up breaking and wreaking global destruction.  Wonder what this report says about that. 8:22:39 PM

O'Reilly: AppleScript on Mac OS X.  Sounds cool - scripting integrated into the OS and the applications, complete with access to web services.  And you can call Unix shell scripts. 8:15:52 PM

[Yahoo - XML] Sun ships Java tools for Web services. ... or sets of instructions, that connect Java applications with XML (Extensible Markup Language), a standard for exchanging data over the Web.... 7:54:23 PM

[Slashdot] TiVo, PVRs Not Making A Splash This is odd to me. The only thing I can figure is that their initial market doesn't have tipping power - not enough influence on other market segments than itself. 2:46:43 PM

John Robb has something interesting to say about knowledgement management. He sees weblogs as good knowledge management because it's a selfish activity. That is right. KM has to be something you do for selfish reasons. Not sure the payback on k-logging is big enough (he says its reputation). Here's the thing: personal knowledge management is hard. I think there are other things with better selfish reasons that will work better for KM. Oh, he also talks about logging IM and mail. 2:44:07 PM

[diveintomark] Print me. Another design goal: this site looks great on paper. It doesn't need a separate printer-friendly page, because it uses a media="print" cascading stylesheet that specifies how the printed version should look. The printed version only includes this main text; the navigation bar along the left and top are omitted. The font is changed to Arial (or Helvetica), which is easier to read on a printed page. Links are not underlined, and are not blue. Permalinks (those little "#" marks at the end of each entry) are not printed. The images that make up the nice curve on the main page are removed. It's not magic; it's only CSS. 2:35:02 PM

[diveintomark] Stripper urban legend. Snopes: "In the simplest of all terms, there is no 72-DD Kandy Kane, no Pretty Kitty club, and no boob-suffocated Daniel Greene." But did you know that Yahoo republishes supermarket tabloids now? 2:33:32 PM

[Daypop Top 40]"HBO.com: Candidate 2012" - Ok, most of the time, I think reality-based television is annoying but something I can safely ignore. Sounds like HBO wants to fund somebodies 10 year attempt to become president. If there's money involved, this definitely crosses the line. 2:29:05 PM

Creo's SixDegrees - sounds like these guys are getting close to the thing I want to build. Joel Spolsky says they'll be the Google of the knowledge management. Or something like that. 2:24:06 PM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] Mathieu has an e-mail to category script for Radio.  I have not checked it out yet, but it looks interesting.  Test first before using on your main Weblog please. 1:48:48 PM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] George Gilder attempts to spin the destruction of his picks for global domination.  Good analysis would have taken these factors into account -- you can't reasonably publish a financial newsletter without looking at financial factors.  1:43:59 PM

How the WayBack Machine Works -- Not sure if I linked this article before, but I just read it. It was great. Turns out they're running archive.org on hundreds of cheap computers that cost them less than $1mm. And they have 100 terabytes on-line already. In a way, their architecture is what Gilder predicted for the next decade - transistors are cheap and the speed of light is fixed, so move the transistors to the data and use more of them. He makes the point that most banks spend what he's spent, total, just to get a CPU - true!. Maybe there's a PS opportunity in building big systems with cheap hardware. Of course, his problem divides nicely, there aren't any hard coordination problems, and the subanswers combine in a pretty straightforward way. If I could have worked anywhere in the world at any time, I might choose to have worked at Thinking Machines with Danny Hillis and Brewster Kahle. They alway seem to have an interesting perspective. Check out Hillis's LongNow Foundation. 1:28:28 PM

[Tomalak's Realm] The Economist: How about now? GE's aim is to monitor everything in real time, Mr Reiner explains, calling up a special web page on his PC: a "digital dashboard". From a distance it looks like a Mondrian canvas in green, yellow and red. A closer look reveals that the colours signal the status of software applications critical to GE's business. This is almost certainly one of those things you could take to far. It also has the hallmarks of a good PS opportunity. 11:48:23 AM

[Daypop Top 40] Judge Orders God To Break Up Into Smaller Deities 8:19:49 AM

Now, see, in the story below, it would have been nice to actually have a notion of Wade in this system, so I could associate the story with him. 8:04:55 AM

[xmlhack] Jasc WebDraw available. Jasc's SVG editing tool, WebDraw, is now available for purchase from their web site. My friend Wade works at Jasc.   8:03:46 AM

[IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] The only hard problem in XML (ITworld.com) An article on the problem of giving names to resources, which is really just part of the problem of how you manage all this new stuff. 7:51:10 AM

[IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] SAML brings security to XML (XML Magazine) 7:41:12 AM