These guys have an entire library of old Apple ][ programs online that run within the browser. They use an ActiveX control that’s an Apple ][gs virtual machine emulator running within the IE… Sweet!

[with Virtual Apple]…”you can now relive, play, and enjoy old Apple 2 games and other disks through the internet and web browser. This web site uses an ActiveX application and Apple IIgs emulator to automatically download and play most Apple 2 disk images online. To play a game, just select the disk from the menu and click on Yes to automatically download the ActiveX emulator and disk images. (Note: Requires Internet Explorer and Windows) Don’t worry, there isn’t any spyware to worry about, and it’s completely free!” (via Boing Boing)

A back in my day, we surfed the net with rodents…

Via Wired News: “Back in 1992, when “yahoo” was something cowboys yelled and “ebay” was just pig Latin, the University of Minnesota developed a new way of looking at data on the Internet. Their protocol, called “gopher” after the UMN mascot, allowed archivists to present the mishmash of information in a standard format, and enabled readers to navigate documents on a world of servers using a simple visual interface.

After taking week off to spend with the family I’m getting back into the swing of things and stealing some time to blog.

To motivate myself this morning I read an out of the ordinary article in Info World regarding how ERP implementations are coming back into favor (again).

The topic of the article is of particular interest to me because I’m in midst of an implementation of PeopleSoft 8.4 and seeing many of the themes of this article played out in real-time.

Eric Sink, the man behind Marketing for Geeks, has just published an article for MSDN called Finance for Geeks, which is an overview of accounting principals from the “technologists” perspective.

Definitely worth a read if you’re starting a software company or working with finance systems.

I’d love to see this catch on…

Magnatune: “try before you buy.” It’s the shareware model applied to music.

Well, that’s what The Gender Genie is saying about me, which uses an algorithm to predict the gender of an author by analyzing a writing sample.

Damn!

Cool tech though.

CNET News.com has a well researched article on whether this is the End of the road for SMTP in a world that is deluged with Spam.

Some interesting quotes…

“The flaws are so severe, some now believe, that the protocol that gave rise to the most significant explosion in written communication since Gutenberg may no longer be capable of serving its purpose in a world of con artists, pornographers, virus authors and unscrupulous spammers.”

Need a quick throw-away email address for an online registration? Give Mailinator a try.

Interesting idea to combat spam.

This is the unfortunate result of the “every growing uphill battle with SPAM”, but apparently an email to me from Anders Jacobsen was rejected due to some of the drastic, but efficient, measures John has been applying to the server.

Anders brings up some interesting points, in that the automated rejection notices, from legitimate senders, present themselves as bad-mannered netiquette that penetrates the social fabric of the online world.

As I said in my response to Anders, “SPAM has effectively transformed an efficient means of communication into a bastion of nonsense.”

Nice!

Alex Feinman has created the ISO Recorder Power Toy, which “is a UI component that allows you to use CD-Recording capabilities of Windows XP to record and create ISO images.” (via Lockergnome)

There’s also a companion application called CreateCD, which “is a command-line tool that allows recording files and folders to a data CD from command line. … It can also be used from a scripts and batch files to perform automated backup on CD-RW.” (e.g. Robocopy backup scripts)

I can’t say that I agree with Mr. Conway of PeopleSoft in regard to his comment about .Net last week…

“PeopleSoft president and CEO Craig Conway has described Microsoft’s .Net initiative as the information technology equivalent of asbestos.”

“Conway then added that, in his opinion, Microsoft’s .Net strategy will not help business to control the costs of their enterprise applications, as it assumes code will be executed by PCs.”

Specifically, the second quote certainly seems a bit hypocritical since PeopleSoft up until version 7.02(?) was a hard-core Client/Server based application environment.

This is pretty slick — create your very own mug shot with Flash Face

SideBit’s Project
Locate IP will try to figure out where an IP is physically located.
It worked fairly well in my tests.

Even though I applaud AOL’s recent Spam lawsuits, catbird points out the irony:

“As much as I detest spam, I am having trouble cheering for a company that sends me unsolicited CDs in expensive and non-biodegradable tin cases every month. Which is worse, email spam or polluting the earth with waste?”

Allegedly for $10 per year, Mailblocks Eliminates Spam “and offers the powerful features you want in your web mail.”

According to Kevin it’s brought to you by Phil Goldman, who is one of the founders of WebTV.

From Discover “… the software will create a remarkably sophisticated assessment of your various social groups, showing you not only their relative size but also the interactions between different groups.” (link via BoingBoing)

I can’t believe it has been almost 10 years since NCSA Mosaic burst onto the scene. I remember making the jump from Gopher Servers and thinking, “Wow, this should make things interesting.”

It certainly did …

And Charles Cooper has an interesting perspective on What if Netscape had won?

Interesting Slashdot thread that argues the effectiveness of email, which is in response to this article.

Heh, this is probably old news to some, but I just read about this clever hack in PC Mag to block ads by modifying your local host file

Ha! This is very cool. Mark has created a Magnetic Poetry Generator that will create a word list based on the content found within a page you reference at the end of the path.

For example:
http://diveintomark.org/magnetic/http://news.google.com

BTW, Mark also has a hilarious 404 page as well.

I’d like to hear more on this, but according to Lockergnome, “Sun’s own engineers find developing common software applications in Java impractical…”

Interesting quote from DM Review Magazine: “The industrial age has been replaced by the knowledge age, with transformational effects on the economy and the workplace…”

I spent a few minutes today runing throught the product tour of Macromedia’s new light-wieght CMS application Contribute and I have to say that for $99 it seems to be very powerful… I need to test out a demo before I believe the hype, but it certainly has peeked my interest.

This isn’t released yet, but … “Taxomita is a web-based authoring application that lets you create distributed, hierarchical, faceted metadata, and use it to index any page on the web.”

Finally … “The World Wide Web Consortium today released the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 HTML Specification as a W3C Recommendation.”

Dean Allen of Textism writes, “Textpattern is a publishing system designed for those who want to write for the web. Its bells and whistles are many, but it is above all very simple to
use. Little knowledge of internet technology is required to install and use it;
the production of valid,
standards-compliant web pages is basic to its operation.”

From Scripting News: “I’m going to get a new job with a new title, and it’s going to be quite different from being the CEO of a commercial software company.”

Good luck Dave! Hope you have better luck than most these days!

Ok, this sounds very cool … Sonicblue’s new DVD player will be able to access content on PCs, such as photos, music and videos, via an Ethernet and wireless network connection. Sweet!

Good article about Groove GWS by Jon Udell of InfoWorld writes: “Enterprises are held together by scripting, in ways that we sometimes don’t like to admit. But there’s no shame in it. Wear your duct tape proudly. It’s getting more useful all the time.” Very true! (via ScriptingNews)

Brian Kernighan (Unix, C, Bell Labs fame) has set “to demystify computing for a classroom full of liberal arts undergraduates at Princeton.” Damn … that would be a cool course to take for anyone!

I must add this to my to-test list: “POPFile is an email classification system that has a Naive Bayes text classifier and a POP3 proxy. It works with any mail client using POP3.”

Read the first post in the Slashdot thread and I bet it’s your first thought as well :-)

Or perhaps this one … “Oak Technology demonstrated at the Intel Developer Forum last week a prototype that uses a recently approved communications specification to transform a commercially available DVD player into a connected part of a home network. The setup lets the DVD player access digital media files, such as digital video, images and audio, that are stored on a PC” [ more here]

For the past few hours I’ve been using Cloudmark’s new P2P based spam filter plug-in for Outlook and so far so good. In addition to my own simple home grown server-based phrase matching spam filter, I’ve only had one bogus message reach my inbox. If I factor out what my own spam filter nabbed, that’s roughly 1 spam out of 5. Not bad. However, given the P2P roots of Coundmark’s spam filter, I can only imagine that it’ll get better and better as more people use the system. So, start using it!

Short, but interesting interview with eRoom CEO Jeffrey Beir …

Some quotes: “Beir: A proprietary, fat-client, peer-to-peer, replicated, $49-a-client strategy is not a modern strategy. It’s a very ’90s strategy. Let’s step back to the business problem. A team of people needs to come together rapidly to collaborate on a mission-critical project. There’s rich content, and there are lots of applications. That dictates an architecture that must work very easily across enterprises; it needs to be agnostic about the platform; it needs to be thin-client so it’s easy to deploy; it needs to be enterprise-scalable and 24-by-7.”

This is a good read …

“Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are a technology with a lot of promise,
but their often-hyped potential leaves some designers feeling blindsided
by the 2×4 known as reality. This article sorts out the differences, and
makes a case for educating yourself now in preparation for the future.”

http://www.digital-web.com/features/feature_2002-06.shtml

Interesting … “Peer-to-peer software specialist Groove Networks on Monday will release a new version of its collaboration and instant messaging software.”

“Version 2.0 of the Groove software includes tools for integration with Outlook e-mail, enhanced support for Microsoft Office and new server tools for businesses using the service.”

“The new version includes an “Outlook onramp” tool that can automatically convert e-mail attachments into documents that can be shared through Groove’s collaboration tools, preventing those endless sequences of “Re:” messages, said Richard Eckel, vice president of communications for Groove. “People are seeing that e-mail is not a tool that really works for group discussions,” he said. " http://news.com.com/2100-1001-880508.html

I received this one from John and I can’t tell if it’s is a joke or not … Either way, it’s hilarious!

Software! Secrets! Exposed! “If you’ve ever dreamed about building a business that can stand the test of time, that can deliver consistent massive profits, that doesn’t take a genius to create and maintain you can now get your hands on the ultimate step-by-step guide to the secrets of the software business!”

“the ability to collaborate in many communities using the tools of hypertext, indexing, search, and cross-referencing.” Jon Udell explores Radio UserLand 8.0

an analysis of the enterprise enabled version of salesforce.com with some interesting quotes: “Sooner or later, the Windows file system will likely morph into a database — one that furthers the SQL/XML hybridization we see in SQL Server already. An application that uses file-oriented XML data now will be well-positioned to exploit a local database engine, if and when such a thing becomes a standard part of the installed base.”

the rise and fall of ArsDigita and lessons from the world of venture capital

from Inc.com an interview with Clayton Christensen On How To Compete With The Best

Werner Vogels from Cornell has an interesting presentation on P2P content syndication

“Analysts note that with Internet Explorer’s nearly 90 percent penetration, consumer behavior is not expected to change — especially if users would be required open their pocketbooks in order to make a switch.”

From: Computer News: Microsoft: AOL ‘Completely Mismanaged’ Netscape

I noticed that the Trillian IM client stopped connecting to AOL the other day. So, I went to Google to see if I could find a posting on Usenet via Google Groups about the blockage (because Usenet is were I always look first for breaking news). However, I inadvertently typed my search query ("trillian aol") into the main Google search box and to my surprise the first two links we labeled “News” and highlighted two articles posted today on CNET and The Register.

… a question asked and answered in detail by senior editor A. Russell Jones in article on DevX:

“The bottom line is: DHTML is dead for serious application development; browsers, as application delivery platforms, are past their peak; and the future of distributed, interactive applicationsat least on Windowsbelongs to .NET. If you’re developing these types of applications and you’re not learning .NET, you may want to rethink your career plans.”

MusicCity is close to releasing version 2.0 of Morpheus with support for searching Gnutella

the following are quotes from an interesting article titled “Culture of Collaboration”, which includes 10 recommendations for getting employees to adopt collaborative tools and use them in an effective way.

“The biggest challenge of getting employees to work together online isn’t a technological problem-it’s a cultural and organizational one.”

“The danger for many is overspending on collaborative technologies without making the cultural and organizational adjustments necessary to derive any benefit from them."

Publish magazing has an interview with Christopher Locke in which he talks about his new book, Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices

this sounds a lot like Web Parts … “OnePage Inc. and Enfish Corp. each released new software to enable corporate users to organize corporate information in portals … OnePage’s Content Connect Studio doesn’t replace portal frameworks from other companies; it augments them with the capability to create, manage and integrate portlets (pieces of code that capture and embed data) into many enterprise portal platforms”

From: New tools ease portal creation

not bad for an ASP “… privately held Salesforce has 2,800 companies that pay it to manage about 50,000 people worldwide, and it is on track to record some $25 million in revenue this year. “The quality of our revenue is special because it’s an annuity, so we know within 1 [percent] to 2 percent what we’ll have in revenue next month,” he says. The company has cash on hand to take it to breakeven early next year, Benioff says. “Our gross margins are on the order of 70 percent, and we could break even sooner, but we are investing in R&D, marketing, branding and increasing our enterprise capability.”

Trillian is an IM client, which currently supports AOL IM, ICQ, MSN
Messenger, IRC, and Yahoo! Messenger. It’s just over a year old and after
using it for a week it feels more stable than any Jabber client I’ve used
and worth the download if you need to cross-IM with people. (sorry dave, no
mac client ;-)
http://www.trillian.cc/

EverNet to debut peer-to-peer software that designed to be used as a content delivery network (CDN) … “Basically EverNet uses a thin client that lets users on a corporate network – or on the Internet – act as content receivers and distributors.”

“Tough economy may boost app hosting’s appeal, even among larger companies”

From: InformationWeek

found this post about Microsoft’s Farsite on Geeknews, but it sounds a lot like Ian Clarke’s “distributed decentralized information storage and retrieval system” (i.e. Freenet)

a good article and reviews in InfoWold about how P2P is becoming a core part of the enterprise:

From: Infiltrating the enterprise
“Content networks are leading the charge to formalize p-to-p technologies to reduce corporate costs and increase collaboration”

Reviews:
+ NextPage
+ Groove and HornShark

“As a browser company, Netscape laid the groundwork for the portal businesses it now finds itself struggling to compete against. Portals don’t spark the same fire they did just a short while ago. Excite.com, Yahoo, AltaVista and others have all lost their luster in recent months as they have found revenue much more difficult to attract than readers.” … However, $5B from AOL a few years ago isn’t something i’d cry about …

i must be missing something because this article talks about Juice and KnowNow as if they are doing something special by using “messaging technology” to facilitate enterprise application integration … to me it sounds a lot like a framework for web services. am i wrong?

Dan Bricklin has started a good primer on P2P vocabulary and how it fits into the computing world.

interesting essay on slashdot: “Not only am I unsure of what changes are coming down the road, I don’t think I dare predict whether they’re going to be changes for the better or worse. But whatever happens over the next decade or two … peer-to-peer music trading, legal or otherwise, is going to shake things up big-time.”

From: Slashdot | Sheet Music to Napster: Music Distribution Tech

found this one on geeknews: “A couple of months ago, as you all may remember, Scour Exchange took a dive, but said they were planning a resurgence … Anyway, Scour has finally released the beta software.”

“Despite the barrage of criticism and the financial knocks ASPs have had to endure, the industry is set to grow enormously over the next few years.”

“By 2005, global revenues for the ASP industry will amount to $24bn, representing annual growth of 89 per cent, according to research group IDC.”

From: ASP Still Going Strong

“Web collaboration ASPs provide a useful, rapid approach to implementing a collaboration strategy that reduces costs while increasing knowledge exchange and accessibility.”

“… estimated spending on Web collaboration ASPs is expected to climb with a growth curve that reflects the overall ASP marketplace. In 1999 IDC estimated that $250 million was spent on outsourcing collaboration. By 2004, the firm believes the figure will reach $2 billion worldwide.”

“The business benefits of leveraging a Web collaboration ASP far outweigh the drawbacks. With the services available today, companies can increase communication internally and externally. In addition, the investment in the internal server infrastructure needed to support collaboration is greatly reduced, if not eliminated.”

What is VNC? … it looks like a multi-platform light-weight and free version of pcAnywhere, but don’t take my word for it …

“VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a computing ‘desktop’ environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures.”

From: VNC – Virtual Network Computing from AT&T Laboratories Cambridge [thanks john]

“Wall Street’s interest in P2P comes after a decade of struggling to make so-called client-server networks handle the massive data-crunching jobs necessary to calculate changes in billions of transactions and millions of client portfolios.”

“Peer-to-Peer software companies are beginning to roll out new trading, collaboration and content management applications as the technology looks to prove itself in the world of business-to-business computing. "

“P2P software vendors and users are also looking at knowledge management, or making content more accessible. It’s one area in which analysts have praised the technology.”

From: Peer-to-Peer seeks B2B niche

this is actually sweet… “BadBlue provides searching, sharing, peer-to-peer (P2P) and customizability in a tiny footprint. Live sharing of Excel and Word data is supported. In addition, PE is perfect for web application development and deployment with its full-featured support of tools like CGI, ISAPI and PHP.”

“The architecture of P2P Content Networking mirrors the architecture of most businesses, namely one that is decentralized and distributed. Because of this, businesses are using it to cut costs, make employees more effective and improve customer service.” [thanks per]

From: Will P2P work in the enterprise?

wow, this sux … “Winstar on Wednesday said it has filed for Chapter 11 federal bankruptcy protection and filed a lawsuit claiming Lucent Technologies breached a partnership agreement.”

From: Winstar files for bankruptcy, sues Lucent – Tech News – CNET.com

“Uprizer Inc., the peer-to-peer upstart of Freenet founder Ian Clarke, today picked up a $4 million in funding from chipmaker Intel Corp. and other investors.”

From: Ian Clarke’s Uprizer Gets $4 Million

ever wonder how you can test if a web site is down and where it’s acutally located? check out the VisualRoute Server

Groove lands the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline as a customer; with over 100,000 employees, GlaxoSmithKline has agreed to purchase 10,000 copies of Groove 1.0.

Groove Networks also announced the release of its Groove Development Kit 1.0 (GDK), which allows users to create “p-to-p applications using just XML and scripting languages such as JavaScript.”

From: Groove ships p-to-p platform

most of this article is down on P2P as a pure-play, but i thought this quote was interesting … “A number of start-ups, for instance, are working on software to let people collaborate on office projects, or run programs over the Web as well as on local PCs.”

AltaVista – BabelFish Translation

“Used to be they’d gather in Washington, D.C. to discuss civil rights and freedom. These days, it’s all about the right to download copyrighted material. Will you join Napster in its ’teach-in’ next Tuesday at the Capitol? Declan McCullagh reports from Washington.”

From: Wired News

i got this one from john: “A computer virus that can infect PCs running either the ubiquitous Windows operating system or the increasingly popular Linux operating system emerged on Tuesday, which its discoverers say is a world first.”

From: News: Virus hits both Linux and Windows

“Finding and organizing information is the No. 1 problem in technology”

MWT’s mission: “to help people gain control of their digital data through software that lets them find their files more easily.”

Their product, Scopeware, is basically a P2P client, like gnutella, but designed for corporate use.

They have an interesting solution to the document management issue, because documents are stored on employees’ hard drives, but it doesn’t help document collaboration.

Here’s the Business Week article about them. (thanks kim)

ted sent me this one: “Thousands of confidential messages between the CEO of an Internet company and top executives have been posted on the Web, stirring up a hornet’s nest of corporate intrigue and providing a rare glimpse into a dot-com as it struggled to cope with a brutal shakeout.”

CNET Story
ICQ Logs [scary]

P2P extreme … “The Grid will not only enable sharing of documents and MP3 files, but also connect PCs with sensors, telescopes and tidal-wave simulators.”

From: The Grid: The Next-Gen Internet?

hmm, “…a stealth company that hopes to merge some of Akamai Technologies’ approach with a Napster-like model…” [more here]

Trellix re-positions it’s web publishing software as a an ASP [more here]

“Private corporate portals are growing at a much faster rate than public portals. According to the author of a recent study on the subject, “There are only so many portals that are going to make it in the consumer domain and the shakeout is going to continue, whereas potentially every corporation or division of a corporation may require or think it needs its own portal.” [more here]

finally, uncle orrin doing something i can dig … on Wednesday, “Senator Hatch said he was troubled by the potential fallout of the court’s decision against Napster and called for the Senate Judiciary Committee to hold a third round of hearings on the online music marketplace.” [more here]
note: he’s not really my uncle

P2P marketing … a salon article about how marketers are snooping napster users hardrives in order to send IMs with promotional URLs

Jeffrey Veen gets interviewed about his new book at webreference.com

i’m very interested to see what this is going to prove … Napster Ordered to Shut Down “Napster, the controversial file-sharing service that has been the scourge of the music industry since it was launched late last year, has been ordered shut down.” …

everything’s coming up napster … ZDNet: News: Napster fuels peer-to-peer uproar: “Venture capitalists can’t jump on the latest fad fast enough”

i found a reference to this on slashdot … Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol could be the next HTTP or used as the foundation for creating protocols that govern distributed file-sharing applications such as Gnutella, iMesh and Freenet.

another take on napster and gnutella … Freenet is a decentralized peer-to-peer network designed to allow the distribution of information over the Internet …

a web-based gnutella search client …