Nostalgia: In the mid-80’s the Sunday Matinees were sweaty, smelly, sometimes scumbag filled Slam Dance Fests, but man… were they fun!

The other day I was browsing through the Wayback Machine and discovered a number of four-year-old weblog entries I posted to my then homegrown blog tool. They weren’t earth shattering entries, but I figured I’d bring them back home.

So, after a few quick regular expression hacks I managed to format them for import into MovableType (complete way links to archived pages on the Wayback Machine)

Brewster Kahle, you rock!

This is nifty:

Google News Map: “Why not parse Google News, find the first name match and draw a map with the latest headlines on the coordinates of the countries.”

Last week I finally completed building my Home Theater PC (HTPC) — aka PVR (personal video recorder), DVR (digital video recorder), homebrew-TiVo or what my wife Catherine lovingly calls STeVo ;-)

On my Wiki I put together some of my initial observations and install notes for those of you interested in building one these boxes yourself [more here]

Michael Sippey has a couple of good comments regarding Salesforce.com’s recently released “Office Edition,” which integrates its hosted SFA tightly with Microsoft Office:

“The company that championed went overboard with their “no software” positioning is now touting their integration into the world’s most widely used piece of personal productivity software. Which really isn’t that big of a deal, when you realize that this fits in perfectly with Microsoft’s strategy of morphing Office into a combination productivity app and very rich client…”

“If you’ve seen any of the whiz bang demos of Longhorn, it’s abundantly clear that the browser is not where it’s at for Microsoft. Instead, it’s all about the rich client. While .NET application development isn’t for everyone, there’s enough interesting functionality in the new Office to enable the return of the power user — the former macro writer who can now leverage their VB skills to integrate data (through web services inside and outside the firewall) into their everyday working environment.”

As much as I love the “thin client”, the browser can’t do everything. Business users still do a majority of their work in Word and Excel. I’m increasingly amazed and at times alarmed at the sheer amount of “business logic” that is maintained exclusively in Excel Worksheets.

Although, I may not agree that this practice is necessarily a good thing, the reality is that it’s not going to change quickly.

However, providing a more fluid means to transact “business logic” between productivity applications like Excel and Word with ERP, CRM and various enterprise systems seems like a natural progression.

From the Dogster about page:

“Why Dogster? We are dog freaks and computer geeks, unafraid to admit that when we see a dog, any dog, our heads turn and we howl with delight. Who wants a cookie? Who does? Well, we do and we think it’s about time there is a social networking application that is truly for the dogs. We hope you do too! All the dogs in the house say Wooooof! … Wooooooooof!”

Bah! Social networking is for the dogs ;-)

Kazaa is promoting a BitTorrent-like distributed P2P alternative that can be embedded in other P2P networks and web links, which they are calling Magnet links (via Anil Dash’s Links)

More here…

“Magnet links allows users to directly download large media files saving website creators and bloggers money on bandwidth costs and effectively propagating files on p2p networks that attract millions of users per day.”

“Magnet links” uses…

“MAGNET-URI, [which] is an open URI-scheme and supporting practices/code for enabling seamless integration between websites and locally-running utilities, such as file-management tools.”

Anil Dash put together a first-class summary of the *nix goodies found in Microsoft’s Windows Services for Unix, which was recently re-released as a free download (passport registration required).

Even though I’m using Samba at home to connect my Windows and Linux file systems, it might be nice (and more efficient) to use the native NFS support in WSfU instead.

Bob Mould of Sugar and of course Hüsker Dü now has a weblog.

Welcome Bob! I certainly do remember with many of your songs still cycling through my playlists.

I was (and still am) fond of what the OpenCola guys created back in the P2P buzz days, but this recent spin-off, “Dude, check this out!” [DCTO?], started by a few of the OC founders and development managers, has me scratching my head — albeit OC did as well. So perhaps I’ll simply reserve dismissal and keep an eye on the progress.

For the most part DCTO seems to be a hybrid of Metafilter, Technorati, Feedster and the Delicious social bookmarks manager.

Here’s a quote from the site:

“Dude, Check This Out! is an entirely new application for finding, storing, and retrieving all the great stuff that you find on the Web. The Dude is the easiest way to share that stuff with your friends and other contacts, and it’s also a great way to meet people who think like you.”

In addition, it appears they are doing some clever stuff with all this meta-data:

“The Dude is powered by two extremely sophisticated search technologies: associative relevance and semantic search. The associative relevance search allows the Dude suggestion engine to suggest new items to you that are likely to be of interest to you, based on your likemindedness to other users.

Semantic search allows searches of the Dudesphere, so that you can find items on your own blog, or on the blogs of others. Our semantic search engine, called “ColaSearch (Collaborative Object Look-up Architecture Search) is the world’s first generic social search engine, and it will allow us to eventually rewire information content on the Web based on implicit social relationships.” (via the FAQ)