April 12, 2004

Gopher Net Nostalgia

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.

April 8, 2004

Flying the Two Way Web

After reading a bit about, Paper Airplane, my first impression is that it sounds a bit like Groove, but differs in that it’s integrated into the browser (Mozilla/FireFox currently) and built on-top of the Java JXTA and P2P Sockets framework. I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems worth a look even in its early beta state.

“Paper Airplane is a Mozilla plugin that empowers people to easily create collaborative communities, known as Paper Airplane Groups, without setting up servers or spending money. It does this by integrating a web server into the browser itself, including tools to create collaborative online communities that are stored on the machine. Paper Airplane Groups are stored locally on a user’s machine. A peer-to-peer network is created between all of the Paper Airplane nodes that are running in order to resolve group names, reach normally unreachable peers due to firewalls or NAT devices, and to replicate content.”

April 6, 2004

InfoPath Runtime Plea

At work, when I evangelize the benefits of using InfoPath as a tool for structured data collection and distribution, I talk about how, IMHO, InfoPath will someday unlock all the black-box business intelligence stuffed into Excel, Word, PowerPoint et al. In addition, I mention that it’s primarily an end-user tool that doesn’t require developers to implement any of those simple form-based workflow processes that deluge most corporations with endless forest killing paper forms.

April 2, 2004

Yo! G! Cease the Desist and Extend Your API!

For a little over a year I have been using a modified version of Julian Bond’s Google News to RSS script to pull news searches into my aggregator. I even had it pulling news feeds into a corporate intranet until the feed was deemed too “unfiltered” for corporate consumption.

If Google’s API included news (and other services such as Froogle, Groups and even Images), I, and I’m sure many-many others, would switch to the sanctioned API service in a heartbeat! Until that time, I’ll likely still use the script.

April 1, 2004

A better Slashdot Feed

BTW, If you’ve been annoyed as I have with ./‘s half-hearted RSS feed, which only includes a brief summary of each post and none of the threads, then you’ll be keen on AlterSlash‘s full post Slashdot RSS feed that includes high-karma comments for each post.

Nice!

March 31, 2004

Visualizing Google News

Marcos Weskamp announced on his blog yesterday a new application called newsmap, which displays the constantly changing panorama of Google’s News Aggregator (across countries too). [IMHO: This is probably one of the most useful applications in flash I have yet to see.]

“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.”

March 29, 2004

Commercial MythTV Box

An Australian company is selling pre-built MythTV-based PVRs for 1,799 AUD (~$1,345.50 USD) (via Boing Boing)

Although the price is roughly twice what it cost me to build my own MythTV box, I think this is a good trend.

There’s some excellent threads regarding this box on /. and the Myth-Users mailing list.

March 26, 2004

Missing: Silver 2000 Volkswagen Passat

So this morning I’m out walking my dog before I head off to work, chatting with my neighbor about the NCAA games at the Meadowlands the night before when I noticed that my car was missing from our driveway!

WTF!!!! It’s gone! Stolen while we slept during the night!

Called the police, insurance company, etc… Ugh! Frustrating!

However, if you happen to be in vicinity of West Orange, NJ and see a silver 2000 Volkswagen Passat with a black Thule roof rack, let me know, because apparently the driver “borrowed” it sometime early this morning without my consent.

March 24, 2004

Open Source Movies

I just read via Boing Boing that the copyright on the original Night of the Living Dead movie has expired and the entire film is available online for download via Archive.org! (Brewster Kahle, I’ll say it again, you rock!)

Incidentally, not only does the Internet Archive have a huge collection of Public Domain movies, it also has what appears to be a growing compilation of Open Source movies (and I don’t think they are talking about code)

March 23, 2004

ERP All Over Again

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.