For those of us who live in the Midwest, here's a Google Maps mashups for tornadoes in the US with both location, force of the tornado and the tornado's path plotted. There's information here on nearly 50,000 tornadoes between 1950 and 2005. You can search by state, county, and size of tornado.

Looking at F5 tornadoes for the entire country, it's pretty obvious where Tornado Alley lies. And also, Missouri appears to get fewer big tornadoes than the states surrounding it.

Jan Chipchase, an reasearcher for Nokia, has a fascinating article on the use of phones in Uganda. Although it's clear that people will move to individual phones if they're affordable, it's also clear that the benefits of having communication capabilities, even with shared phones, is very high. There have been other studies talking about the opportunities for microbusinesses as 'phone ladies' etc.

This article discusses some of the unique services that have arisen in Uganda:

Sente is the informal practices of sending and receiving money that leverages public phone kiosks and trusted networks. In Uganda the word Sente has two meanings the first being 'money' and the second 'the sending of money as airtime'. It works like this:

Joe lives in Kampala and wants to send his sister Vicky 10,000 Ugandan Shillings - about 4 Euros. He buys a pre-paid top up card for that amount but instead of topping up his own phone calls the local phone kiosk operator in Vicky's village. The phone kiosk operator uses the credit to top up his own phone, takes a commission of anywhere between 10 and 30% and passes the rest onto Vicky in cash. The kiosk operator then resells the airtime at a profit (it is after all his business).

Sente is particularly relevant in a country where there is limited access to formal banking infrastructure and is largely driven by necessity and convenience. The receiver doesn't need a bank account, merely access to a friendly phone kiosk, and the risk of theft is reduced because there is no need to carry cash. The Sente process can take as little as 5 minutes whereas using regular banking infrastructure can absorb a full day's time with additional travel costs (a comparison of costs between regular bank infrastructure and Sente are outlined on slide 29 of the accompanying presentation).

It's all about the 'self:'--networks that are self-aware, self-configuring, self-healing, self implementing.

...via Smart Mobs

Researchers at MIT are working on a system to power electronic devices without power cords:

...the researchers designed an emitter to make use of long-lived resonances with "non-radiative" objects. This keeps the energy close to the antenna until another object with a similar resonance comes within range—no broadcasting into space is necessary. The two resonating objects can sync their frequencies easily, which would then cause energy to "tunnel from one object to another," Professor Soljacic told the BBC. When not transferring energy to another device, "most" unused energy simply gets reabsorbed into the emitter.

The MIT team's system is designed for use in a home or office, as it can transfer energy to other devices within 3 to 5 meters of the emitter. However, the antenna's range doesn't have to be limited to just that, says Professor Soljacic. "This would work in a room let's say but you could adapt it to work in a factory," he said, adding that it could also be scaled down to be used on a microscopic level as well because the range would be determined by the size of the emitter.

Verizon and others are starting to offer dry-loop DSL or DSL without a telephone landline:

If you've got a cell phone and/or use Skype, Vonage, SunRocket, or one of the other VOIP providers, it's officially time to cut the cord, guys.

They're so embarrassed about it that they haven't told anyone, but Verizon is rolling out 'Naked DSL'.

...

It's less evocatively known as 'Dry-loop DSL'. You can now drop your land-line, but still get DSL from them. Verizon experienced *cough* technical problems issues for about a year with this.

Folk less generous than me might suspect that their marketing and accounting people were totally freaked at the implications of people no longer being forced to pay for their buggy-whip technology to get DSL?

...via BoingBoing

Vista and Office 2007 are set to be released on November 30th:

A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed that the planned release dates for Vista and Office are indeed November 30 after all, fulfilling Microsoft’s promise of delivering Vista in 2006.

That said, the general consumer versions of Vista are still planned for a January 2007 release, with the rumoured date of January 30 said to be on the verge of confirmation over the next few days.

Six Apart, makers of Movable Type and Typepad, have launched a new blog service called Vox.

Lithium-ion batteries have been around a long time. There are some 1.8 billion Li-on batteries in laptops and cameras and other devices. There are also about 6.5 million of Li-on Sony laptop batteries currently under recall for explosive tendencies (though most of them haven't and most likely won't burst into flame).

In addition to no-explosions, we all want lighter laptops, bigger hard drives, brighter screens and a longer time between charges and lithium ion batteries are probably approaching their limits. So, what's on the horizon:

In September, Zinc Matrix demonstrated a six-hour prototype for an Intel-based laptop. If all goes well, Dueber says, that battery could be on the market by the end of next year. Among those funding the effort are Tyco Electronics and Intel. Dueber says he has received about $36 million to date.

At best, though, Dueber's battery is only a sort of electrochemical methadone – same addiction, just slightly longer-lasting, with no flameout. No matter how much the industry toys with a single box of electrons, it will eventually encounter the same predictable roadblocks: too many components demanding too much power for any one battery. That's why Solicore decided to think small.

Based in Lakeland, Florida, Solicore is developing Li-ion batteries in ultracompact forms that can sneak into places batteries have never gone before. This might allow Solicore's cells to act as secondary batteries in a device. For example, one could be slipped behind a laptop's screen, where it would power just the backlight, taking some of the load off the main battery. To make such versatile Li-ion cells, Solicore has developed a new type of lithium polymer.

Lithium-polymer batteries use an advanced gel rather than a liquid to separate the cell's positive and negative poles. Solicore's proprietary polymer restricts electron flow so it can't be disrupted by heat or even a violent blow from a hammer, which means the batteries won't get caught in a thermal runaway cycle. This lets engineers make batteries without standard safety features, which means they can be made in virtually any shape or thickness. Some of the early models are as thin as sheets of paper, essentially printed and cut like credit cards. In fact, they are already being used to power a new breed of smartcards, which come with their own onboard display and may someday even have wireless capability. Solicore is working with Visa and others to bring the cards to market next year

It'll be awhile though before any of these batteries make it to market.

Great article in the Washington Post about how cellphones are changing the lives of fishermen, farmers and many others in India:

A convenience taken for granted in wealthy nations, the cellphone is putting cash in the pockets of people for whom a dollar is a good day's wage. And it has made market-savvy entrepreneurs out of sheepherders, rickshaw drivers and even the acrobatic men who shinny up palm trees to harvest coconuts here in Kerala state.

"This has changed the entire dynamics of communications and how they organize their lives," said C.K. Prahalad, an India-born business professor at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about how commerce -- and cellphones -- are used to combat poverty.

"One element of poverty is the lack of information," Prahalad said. "The cellphone gives poor people as much information as the middleman."

The Pew Internet and American Life Project asked over 700 technology experts to look at trends for the year 2020:

The highly speculative scenarios presented to respondents are all vaguely reminiscent of various themes commonly found in contemporary science fiction. From artificial intelligences dominating humanity to disgruntled Luddites engaging in violence, the poll looks more like an abandoned script by Michael Piller than a serious exploration of the future. Let's examine some of the more colorful quandaries, and see how many of the concepts have been prominently featured in Star Trek:

Attack of the Amish
Expressing belief that some who reject technology will perpetrate terrorist attacks against technological infrastructure, almost 60 percent of respondents agreed with the following scenario:

"By 2020, the people left behind (many by their own choice) by accelerating information and communications technologies will form a new cultural group of technology refuseniks who self-segregate from "modern" society. Some will live mostly "off the grid" simply to seek peace and a cure for information overload while others will commit acts of terror or violence in protest against technology."

Will disenfranchised LoTeks wreak havoc on society? Comparing future anti-technology vigilantes to modern day "eco-terrorists," Internet education expert and poll respondent Ed Lyell pointed out that "Every age has a small percentage that cling to an overrated past of low-technology, low-energy, lifestyle." Respondent Thomas Narten, a member of IBM's Internet Engineering Task Force, believes that "by becoming valuable infrastructure, the Internet itself will become a target," and FirstGov developer Martin Kwapinski feels that "random acts of senseless violence and destruction will continue and expand due to a feeling of 21st century anomie, and an increasing sense of of lack of individual control."

I'm not entirely sure how 'prominently featured in Star Trek' constitutes an argument for or against 'might actually happen,' but it's an interesting article, nonetheless.

According to the BBC, 80% of young people (in England, presumably) have mobile phones:

...78% of 11 to 17-year-olds believe having a mobile has given them a better social life as it meant it was easier to keep in touch with their friends.

By contrast, many young people - especially teenage girls - admit they would feel unwanted if the day passed without their mobile ringing.

Among those quizzed 26% said they would feel left out, compared with just 11% of parents.

Three-quarters of youngsters have had their phone bought for them by their parents, while half have their calls paid for by their parents.

The survey found that most parents (71%) believed mobiles were a useful way to keep track of their offspring.

However, only a third of 13 to 16-year-olds thought it was reasonable for parents to use mobiles for this reason.

One in three youngsters added that they use phones to keep in touch with people their parents did not want them to contact.

...via Smart Mobs

Here's an interesting article on research into mobile phones and business opportunities. Much of this research, it appears is taking place in Africa because the mobile phone use there is so pervasive ("Over the past five years the continent's mobile phone use has increased at an annual rate of 65 percent - twice the global average. In June of 1999, Kenya had 15,000 mobile phone subscribers. By the end of 2004 the country had 3.4 million subscribers, and in the last 18 months this number has grown to over 5.6 million, despite the fact that only 200,000 Kenyan households have electricity") and the mobile phone is <i>the</i> tool for all kinds of communication:

A large part of this boost comes from the innovative use of mobile phone technology by local entrepreneurs. In contrast to their use in the developed world, mobile phones in Africa are used for a wide variety of tasks, from sending money to family members to buying a fish from the market. Kenyan business men, farmers, and laborers are finding new uses for a tool thought of as simply a voice communication device in the West, and are coming up with original methods for solving their own problems. For example, contract laborers can now provide their phone numbers to potential employers and move on, instead of having to wait for hours at a workplace in case a job arises. Access to market information through mobile phones also provides rural communities with invaluable information about centers of business; many African fishermen check the local fish market prices on their phones to determine where to bring the day’s catch. The Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange (Kace), now provides crop growers with up-to-date commodity information via text message (sms). This allows farmers to access daily fruit and vegetable prices from a dozen markets, and many have quadrupled their earnings because they have access to information about potential buyers and prices before making the often arduous journey into urban centers to sell their produce. The community payphone, another innovation unique to the developing world, has helped bring mobile phone usage to the poorest areas of Africa.

Okay, they are not out yet. But they're coming....

Make them sorry they ever stole from you:

Thousands of mobile phones are stolen every month, according to Synchronica. If these are smart phones, they can contain sensitive information such as e-mail messages and computer files, potentially causing embarrassing data leaks.

Synchronica's mobile-phone management product can remotely lock and wipe data from Windows-based phones as soon as their owners report the loss. Companies can also turn on the "Synchronica Scream" feature.

"On average, it takes only 30 seconds for someone to notice that their phone is missing, compared to an hour for a wallet or purse," according to Synchronica. As a result, victims should be able to hear their phones scream out for them.

Qantas has issued on advisory on Dell laptop batteries--they can come on the plane, but you can't leave the battery in and plug in your computer. This is only supposed to apply to recalled batteries, but some people have had to remove any Dell battery:

Qantas is issuing an advisory to all passengers on its flights on the safe use of Dell notebooks following the recall of 4.1 million batteries announced by the PC manufacturer last week.

The airline said that although passengers would be allowed to carry their Dells either as checked or cabin baggage, they could only use them on battery power or through the aircraft power supply available in some first and business class cabins once they have first removed the batteries from the unit.

Qantas said cabin crew would be advising passengers of the measures which apply to any computer affected by the recall, that has not yet had the battery replaced.

However not all airports were following these procedures this week. One passenger who flew out of Canberra on a Qantas flight on Monday reported that he and his colleagues had encountered security personnel removing the batteries from all Dell computers, and taping up the contact points on the battery.

...via Gizmodo

Posted by dcoates at 02:16 PM

From BBC NEWS:

Costing $1,565, the 5150 had just 16K of memory - scarcely more than a couple of modest e-mails worth.

The machine was not the first attempt to popularise computing but it soon came to define the global standard.

It altered the way business was done forever and sparked a revolution in home computing.

"It's hard to imagine what people used to do with computers in those days because by modern standards they really couldn't do anything," said Tom Standage, the Economist magazine's business editor told the World Service's Analysis programme.

"But there were still things you could do with a computer that you couldn't do without it like spreadsheets and word processing."

...via Digg

How to Totally Fake Being a Geek:

Computer Systems: That elite snobbery comes out the hardest in this subject. It's easy, all you have to do is pretend to hate the mainstream choices: Windows, AOL, Intel. Assert Windows is inferior to (pick one or more) Linux, Unix, BeOS, or Macintosh. Act sympathetic upon hearing an email addy ending in "@AOL.com" and say, "Any idea when they're gonna put cable modem in your area?" Snort at Intel commercials and chortle "Give me an AMD Duron any day!" It doesn't matter, again, that you have no idea what you're talking about. When challenged for an explanation, pick any random nonsense and string it together. Insist that your choice is faster, more secure, less expensive, conductive to open source, more efficient, or whatnot. This is exactly how real live conversations between geeks defending their favorite software/hardware go all the time. The point is that you're faking an opinion. Like any random geek, you could still be full of hooey.

Now, when it comes to operating systems, the Geekosphere (I coined it! It's mine! You heard it here first!) has jelled around Linux and BSD. When it comes to Linux distros, you win points the older and more obscure your distro is. Simply look up the history of computing and pick machines and systems going back in 5-year increments; or just learn this phrase: "I run Yggdrasil on a PDP-11. Boy, it was a bitch installing all that from tape!" You'll need a snorkel to breathe underneath the pile of groupies that will sack you. *Any* BSD distro is obscure. The mere name "BSD 386" instantly repels suits like garlic repels vampires.
...
Applications: While there is the obvious prejudice for emacs, vi, Gimp, Adobe, Mozilla, Firefox, and etc., you're just as well off here letting the other person name a software tool that they use, then caw, "Get a REAL program!"

Programming: Learn not only the names of these programming languages, but the order in which I present them: Basic, Cobol, Pascal, Ada, C, Java, Lisp, Perl, Python, Ruby, Assembler. These are listed in order of "least cool" to "most cool". Now you know what to do. Whenever the person you're talking to name-drops any language on this list, simply pick the next one and assert that this is what YOU prefer. What to do if you meet an assembler programmer? Act like any other geek: impressed! Bug them to teach you how to write a tic-tac-toe game that uses artificial intelligence in assembler. Stand and pretend to absorb their explanation in one shot. Shake your head in marvel and mutter, "And all that time, I was trying to do it the hard way!"

Here's another thing if you're out-trumped by somebody who knows multiple programming languages, including the coolest: make one up! Yes, it's true, there are more languages and variants out there than any human being could possibly keep track of, and new ones get invented all the time. Just call it something like "B/arg3" or "Modico" and claim that it combines the best features of (insert random language #1) and (insert random language #2). The geek you're talking to will simply assume that they've missed the relevant Slashdot articles. Cover up line: "It just reached 'break-even' point last month."

...via Digg

Four countries have already committed to buying 4 million Linux-powered OLPC laptops:

A spokesperson for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program revealed July 31 that the countries of Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand have each tendered commitments to purchase 1 million Linux laptops through the U.S.-based program.

Several media outlets reported last week that Nigeria had committed to buying 1 million of the laptops, and others reported (incorrectly) that $1 million worth of computers -- or about 10,000 -- had been requested by the African nation.

OLPC program director for Middle East and Africa Khaled Hassounah confirmed to DesktopLinux.com July 31 that Nigeria has indeed committed to buy 1 million machines, and then revealed that Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand also have placed similar commitments.

...via Digg

This won't be news to everyone, but here are some things that make people hate your web page:

1. Invasive advertising: Cunnington says users widely despise ads that cover content, ads that flash wildly and ads that chew broadband.

2. Re-inventing the wheel: people do not want to have to learn how to use a site before they can browse it, Cunnington said.

3. 'Leap of faith' links: that means disclosing information on content and file size.

4. Attention-deficit Web sites: "Users have a special hatred of flashing icons and banners, because they draw the eye away from what is important and hinder their progress," Cunnington said.

5. War and Peace length: "A common mistake in Web design is to just [convert] a brochure to the Web. But the Web is its own medium, and communication has to change to reach users. Users are known to read 25 percent slower on the screen than on paper, read fewer words and don't like long pages which require scrolling down," she said.

In case you were thinking about building your own:

• The PC case or enclosure
• The PC electrical system, including power supply and cabling
• The CPU
• Various forms of storage that vary in speed and capacity, including:
• RAM
• Hard disks
• Optical drives, including CD and DVD drives
• Floppy disk drives (these are uncommon on many PCs nowadays, especially Home Theater PCs)
• A motherboard

...and so much more!

...via Digg

As more people get smart phones, they're looking for ways to make them useful for search and other web activities. Although Google and Yahoo have introduced mobile versions, there are also other players in the game:

While Google and Yahoo are trying to extend their Web search engines into the wireless world, mobile search startups like 4Info and Promptu are trying to make the most of what people use cell phones for today -- voice calls and text messages.

4Info, a Palo Alto, Calif. startup, is aiming to popularize text messaging as a way to search the Web, presuming that cell-phone users want quick answers rather than page after page of search results. By sending text messages to 4Info's designated shortcode -- an abbreviated phone number used for information services -- users can receive sports scores, weather reports, flight information, and even package-tracking data. 4Info plans to sell keyword-related advertising, and has struck a deal with Gannett (Research) to promote its text-message services in the pages of USA Today.

"People want answers, not links," says Amol Joshi, 4info's senior vice president for business operations. "Google has the disadvantage of being a Web search firm."

...via Smart Mobs

Pictures of prototypes for the $100 laptop for the OLPC project

An article at ZDnet about the Iowa State C6 virtual reality room:

The equipment in this room has not been updated in six years. But with money from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the C6, which is operated by the Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC), will receive new equipment this year for a grand opening in 2007.

The difference between the equipment currently in the C6 and the updated technology to be installed this summer, "is like putting on your glasses in the morning," said James Oliver, the director of Iowa State's Virtual Reality Applications Center and a professor of mechanical engineering.

The new equipment — a Hewlett-Packard computer featuring 96 graphics processing units, 24 Sony digital projectors, an eight-channel audio system and ultrasonic motion tracking technology — will be installed by Fakespace Systems Inc. of Marshalltown.

...via Smart Mobs

I've been in Gainesville, FL at the NETC 2006 conference with a number of other EIT and ECM people. I've learned a number of interesting things, talked to folks from other states about what they're doing with technology, and seen a bit of the University of Florida campus. I'm not making a presentation this year, but ISU Extension has been very well represented among the presenters giving talks on podcasting, SQL, videoconferencing, Filemaker, CSS and others, as well as organizing discussion roundtables.

The image above is from a presentation on content capture methods with Floyd Davenport, Robin Brekke, David Anderson, and Mykola Sarazhynskyy.

For Matt, who I'm sure knows them all by heart:

1. Not following basic typographic rules
2. Being too creative with navigation
3. Creating a cluttered navigation system
4. Making sure the site requires certain technology to work
5. Thinking that accessibility is only about blind people
6. Ignoring web standards
7. Not keeping search engines in mind from the start
8. Basing the site structure on your organisation structure
9. Using grey text on grey background
10. Skipping the feasibility study

...via elearningpost

Oh, wait, that’s ‘What to do with a dead Hard Drive…

Alan Parekh talks about the top 5 things to do with a dead hard drive, including:

 A Hard drive Clock

 and Hard drive Wind chimes 

Via Carnival of the Mobilists, some thoughts on what's likely to happen as people access the Internet more and more via mobile phones. I'm not certain that the stats say what the author professes they say, but it's an interesting article nonetheless:

So returning to my question. What happens when the majority of internet access is done with a mobile phone? It will not take long for the Amazons, Ebays, Googles, AOLs and Yahoos to discover that their users are more accessing via mobile phone than via PC. They will adjust their content to work on the phone and optimize for the small screen rather than for the PC screen.

Sound implausible? Think again. Only 14 years ago the majority of internet access devices were mainframe computers. At that time the web content standard was something called "Gopher". Today nobody formats for Gopher because the internet PC browsers (first was Mosaic, then Netscape, now Microsoft's Internet Explorer) became the predominant access devices.

That is bound to change. The trends are irreversible. The sooner you understand this coming change, the more you can capitalize on this transition both personally, and professionally. Spot the trends now, and be one of the early visionaries to this inevitable future.

Oh, and if you work for a content provider, consider these facts: There are three times as many mobile phones as PCs. Twice as many people use SMS text messaging as use e-mail. Users on the traditional PC based internet expect content to be free, but mobile phone users expect mobile content to be paid-for. Collecting money on the traditional fixed wireline internet is very cumbersome. Collecting money on the mobile internet is built-in. The world's biggest internet company by revenues is not one of the internet darlings - Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon or AOL. It is Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo's domestic mobile internet arm, i-Mode. And i-Mode alone makes bigger profits than the five internet darlings combined. Where will you put your best content? On the mobile internet of course.

Here's a report that says 'maybe':

Electromagnetic radiation from your mobile phone may impair your ability to make snap decisions, such as when driving a car, an Australian study shows.

The study, which will be published in the journal Neuropsychologia found evidence of slowed reactions, on both simple reactions and more complex reactions, such as choosing a response when there is more than one alternative.

The researchers found these effects after people were exposed to electromagnetic radiation equivalent to spending 30 minutes on the phone.

...via Smart Mobs

From Reuters, evidence that the digital divide is shrinking:

The digital divide is narrowing as citizens in emerging markets get online via computers and mobile phones, with some regions now on a par with developed nations, a ranking of Web-savvy nations showed on Wednesday.

"Encouraging is the apparent narrowing of the digital divide," said the annual study published by U.S. computer company International Business Machines Corp. and the intelligence unit of The Economist.

"This is particularly evident in basic connectivity: emerging markets are providing the vast majority of the world's new phone and Internet connections," the study found.

From Google Maps Mania, a list of resources for creating Google maps

...in broadband penetration:

The U.S. ranked 12th among industrialized nations, with 16.8 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants, as of December, the OECD said. Iceland overtook longtime leader South Korea for the top spot. Countries in Northern Europe filled seven of the top 10 spots, underscoring how the region is leading the way in taking up this pillar of modern infrastructure.

....

As recently as December 2001, the U.S. came in fourth in the OECD rankings, but since then it has fallen in terms of per-capita broadband penetration. The tumble has become the focus of debate in Washington tech-policy circles, as Congress recently considered amendments to communications laws. When the U.S. released its own broadband data in early April, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin wrote an editorial in the London-based Financial Times saying that the OECD rankings do “not tell the full story.”

...via Digg

An InformationWeek article which says that half of current corporate PCs probably wouldn't be able to run Vista, Microsoft's new operating system, if it were released today:

Assuming Microsoft does not suffer another delay, the cutoff point would be computers bought in 2006 or earlier. Gartner advises companies to replace notebooks every three years and desktops every four years. Given that most companies will take at least 18 months from the time Vista ships for planning and testing, by the time those organizations are ready to deploy the new OS, the useful life left on 2006 PCs would be about 17 percent on laptops and 37.5 percent on notebooks.

Among the major requirements of Vista, compared with Windows XP or 2000, is a graphics card that supports Vista's user interface and visual enhancements, which include translucent window frames and task bar, real-time thumbnail previews and task switching, enhanced transitional effects and animations. While these features within Aero won't be important for many companies, other improvements in the UI will, such as better window stability, smoother screen drawing and interface scaling.

In addition, computers will need at least 1GB of RAM to run Vista, and an additional 512MB if companies plan to use PC virtualization during the migration to run an older OS and Vista simultaneously, Gartner said, just upgrading RAM on a PC costs from $100 to $200 per machine for many companies.

This finding doesn't surprise me all that much considering that as of a year ago, many corporations appeared to still be running Windows 2000 on a lot of machines.

...via Digg

The Korea Times reports that courts in Korea will be experimenting with trials conducted on the Internet. The issue is not just convenience, but also education--the information will be open for anyone to view:

Although the court has not yet decided on a detailed framework, it plans to allow the parties in lawsuits to submit their list of evidence, legal documents and other data on Weblogs or Internet message boards to be operated by the court. The court decisions will also be announced online.

The court also plans to allow people to buy court documents and other requirements in preparing for their lawsuits through the Internet by credit card or mobile-phone payments.

Korea has one of the largest Internet populations in the world, with the penetration rate reaching over 70 percent.

``If the courts are able to develop a way to handle some of the court trials entirely through the Internet, we believe it will save a significant amount of time and also reduce costs in legal procedures in areas such as document deliveries,’’ said Judge Kim Sang-jun of the Seoul Administration Court.

Wired has an article on the best accidental discoveries, including X-rays, penicillin, and Silly Putty:

X-rays
Several 19th-century scientists toyed with the penetrating rays emitted when electrons strike a metal target. But the x-ray wasn't discovered until 1895, when German egghead Wilhelm Röntgen tried sticking various objects in front of the radiation - and saw the bones of his hand projected on a wall.

Penicillin
Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was researching the flu in 1928 when he noticed that a blue-green mold had infected one of his petri dishes - and killed the staphylococcus bacteria growing in it. All hail sloppy lab work!

Silly Putty
In the early 1940s, General Electric scientist James Wright was working on artificial rubber for the war effort when he mixed boric acid and silicon oil. V-J Day didn't come any sooner, but comic strip image-stretching practically became a national pastime.

...via elearningpost

Cameron Olthuis lists 75 web design resources on his blog that he uses every day.

...via Digg

A report in the Sydney Morning Herald on phishing and why it fools so many people:

The study conducted by Harvard University and Berkeley tested the responses of 22 participants to a range of websites, some fraudulent and some genuine. It found that a general lack of knowledge about security technologies made it easy to fool a large number of people.

"In our study, the best phishing site was able to fool more than 90 per cent of participants. Indicators that are designed to signal trustworthiness were not understood (or even noticed) by many participants," the report said.

Pop-up warnings about fraudulent certificates proved ineffective with 15 out of 22 participants proceeding to the website without hesitation, while other basic security measures such as checking SSL certificates and inspecting the validity of the URL were overlooked altogether by 23 per cent of participants. Their key approach was to analyse the content of a webpage to determine legitimacy, leading them to make incorrect decisions 40 per cent of the time.

...via Digg

Microsoft delays Windows Vista until 2007:

Jim Allchin, co-president of platform products and services at Microsoft, said in a conference call that the company decided to delay the consumer version of Vista because PC manufacturers required more time to test and prepare their systems.

Windows Vista was hit by quality issues that caused the release to be pushed back "a few weeks". But this prompted manufacturers to ask Microsoft to delay the consumer version until 2007 because they had insufficient time to test and prepare their systems for availability this year.

"Quality is the top-line message, and we needed just a few more weeks," said Allchin. "We will release to manufacturing and sit on the disk for the consumer launch."

Windows Vista was originally promised for the second half of 2006, but delays have plagued the operating system throughout its development.

Predictions are that Microsoft's new OS, Vista, due out later this yearwill require a minimum of 512M of memory with 1G recommended. Some indications are that 2G will eventually be the new standard configuration.

Samsung’s internal research recently published a figure claiming that the average PC system (including SI, OEM and home built computers) averages 871MB of DRAM in 2005, up from 620MB the year before.  The DRAM industry has traditionally seen large growth around the launches of Windows operating system such as Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows XP.  With large growth come large economies of scale, and ultimately lower prices for DRAM are on the horizon.  Furthermore, with cheaper DRAM prices, system integrators are free to integrate more memory into the magic 6-8% budget. With such favorable trends, seeing 2GB of memory as a standard in every PC by the end of this year would be of no surprise to us at all.

A Beginners CSS Tutorial from Enlighten Designs:

This guide will attempt to take you step by step, through the process of creating a fully functioning CSS layout. I will try my best to explain the concepts behind each step, but a lot of the time other people have already covered these things better than I can. Because of this there will sometimes be links to more information on external sites.

...via Digg

On the British television show, The IT Crowd, the first question the IT guys ask when someone calls is, "Have you tried turning it off and on?" If that doesn't work, they ask, "Is it plugged in?" So far, they haven't gotten past those two questions.

There are lots of good tips in Mark Minasi's 'How to Troubleshoot Any Network Problem.' And two of them are:

Check: Is it Plugged in?

Check it twice...

Okay, seriously, again I mean no disrespect to users or anyone else. It's just so easy to overlook the things that we can easily take for granted. I mean, when someone falls to the floor, do you immediately whip out your oxygen sensing probe and check that there's a detectable amount of oxygen in the room? I know -- the fact that you didn't also fall down kind of negates the need. But you know what I mean; we take the mundane for granted. And we take the reliable for granted; in billions of connections around the world transmitting gazillions of bits, things are plugged in 99.9999-plus percent of the time.

This is where checklists can be of help for two reasons: first, to remind you to check even the unusual stuff, and, second, as an excuse for asking someone else what sounds like an insulting question. Asking someone if everything's plugged in can make someone who's already upset more upset and angry.....

And

Reboot!

I have made this comment with tongue-in-cheek for years, but it does bear some truth: "the two most effective tools in the Microsoft world are 'reboot' and 'reinstall.'" (I should mention, however, that XP's System Restore has drastically reduced the number of reinstalls that I've had to do to that product, and I can't wait to see System Restore come to Server in Longhorn.)

I remind you about rebooting because where once we just knew that anything more minor than changing the background color required a reboot, modern Windows can do an awful lot of things without needing a reboot. Consider that you can take a vanilla copy of Server and add DHCP, WINS, DNS, IIS, and the majority of patches delivered for XP and 2003 in the past year... all without a reboot.

...

Hardware often needs "rebooting" after being reconfigured. Routers, modems and the like won't always show the effects of reconfiguration until you actually power them off and on....

MIT and the city of Cambridge are collaborating to provide free wireless to city residents:

A collaboration with MIT researchers may provide Cambridge with a free, city-wide, wireless internet service as early as late summer. The project will rely on a mesh networking technology that allows individual computers to become new access points, projecting the reach of the network beyond its original antennas.

The main goal of the project is to provide internet access to Cantabrigians who live in public housing, said Cambridge Chief Information Officer Mary P. Hart, though the resulting infrastructure will have a far wider benefit for city residents.

...via Smart Mobs

From an article at Digital Media Europe:

There are over 400 cities worldwide currently planning to deploy municipal broadband networks, and that number will double in 2006, making community broadband initiatives a very real and significant trend, according to a report from market research firm Visiongain.

Despite legal opposition and intense lobbying from incumbent telcos and cable companies, municipal broadband is well on its way. As of the first quarter of 2006, there are over 100 city and regional wireless broadband networks operational worldwide, more than 40 of which are in the US.

It's a concept car so it probably won't ever really go into production, but this Nissan has a dashboard-mounted Xbox 360:

It will not work while the car is being driven, but when parked, the Nissan Urge’s steering wheel, accelerator and brake pedals can be used to control the Xbox, which will come loaded with Project Gotham Racing 3. A 7 in video monitor will flip down from the roof.

Or maybe one of these other predictions for the coming year

Google will unveil its own low-price personal computer or other device that connects to the Internet.

Sources say Google has been in negotiations with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., among other retailers, to sell a Google PC. The machine would run an operating system created by Google, not Microsoft's Windows, which is one reason it would be so cheap — perhaps as little as a couple of hundred dollars.

Bear Stearns analysts speculated in a research report last month that consumers would soon see something called "Google Cubes" — a small hardware box that could allow users to move songs, videos and other digital files between their computers and TV sets.

Larry Page, Google's co-founder and president of products, will give a keynote address Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Analysts suspect that Page will use the opportunity either to show off a Google computing device or announce a partnership with a big retailer to sell such a machine.

...via Digg

For $29.00, you can get a USB memory card that will fit in your wallet.

we make money not art reports on self-healing paint for Nissan cars:

Nissan has invented a transparent vehicle body paint that repairs scratches on its own. Even if the car is attacked with a Y10 coin the paint should be able to cope with the damage. Within about a week, the paint will repair the scratch. "Of course, you could speed the whole process up by pouring some warm water over the affected area — that would probably repair it in a matter of minutes," explained a spokeperson.

...via Smart Mobs

via receiver, an article about innovative uses in mobile phone use in Africa:

One such regional innovation is the public mobile phone. We might consider mobiles as belonging to individuals, but in Africa, as elsewhere in the developing world, handsets often pull double-duty, used by multiple family members, shared among friends (perhaps by swapping SIM cards in and out), or perhaps by a whole set of users in a village or neighborhood. Across the region, many people make their living by selling individual calls on handsets. These micro-entrepreneurs play an important function in extending connectivity to people who can not afford their own handset, or who might only require an occasional call.

The most famous example of this model is Grameen Village Phone, formed originally in Bangladesh. Grameen Village Phone has recently introduced its programs in Uganda and Rwanda. A similar franchise model is found in the phone shops of South Africa, where tens of thousands of locations provide GSM-based telecommunications services. Developed originally to fulfill some of South Africa's universal access provisions, these franchises have proved extremely important to the townships and rural areas in the nation.

But these mobile-based payphone businesses need not have the backing of major telecommunications companies or NGOs. In West Africa, for example, "Umbrella Ladies" simply set up at the side of the road with a lawn chair, a mobile, and some shade from the sun; informal resale of individual calls are common throughout the continent. This is the local user innovation I wish to highlight in this article: the impromptu phone booth!

...via Smart Mobs

Wired's article on gadgets for gifts, including:

L33t replacement tiles for Scrabble

Roboraptor--the killing robot dinosaur

A $200,000 grand piano

...for those cold days in the office.

...via Shiny Shiny

Google Maps has taken off like a storm since it was introduced.

And while it's useful for finding your way home or locating a particular business, it's also being used for all sorts of interesting things:

--Free wireless coffee shops in Seattle
--Dublin, Ireland recycling centers
--Who's reopened for business in New Orleans
--Autumn leaves in the UK

From Wired:

Online search leader Google is preparing to launch a wireless internet service, Google WiFi, according to several pages found on the company's website Tuesday.
\
A Wi-Fi service, which offers a high-speed connection to the internet, would take Google even further from its search roots and move it into the fiercely competitive world of internet access providers and telecommunications companies.

...via Smart Mobs

Consistency versus the user's Current Knowledge:

When you think about consistency, you’re thinking about the product. When you’re thinking about current knowledge, you’re thinking about the user. They are two sides of the same coin. We’ve just noticed that the designers who spend more time thinking about the users are the ones that end up with more usable designs.

Why do we gravitate to consistency? Because it’s easier to think about. You don’t actually have to know anything about your users to talk about making things consistent. You only have to know about your design, which most designers are quite familiar with.

Current knowledge, on the other hand, requires in-depth knowledge of the users. And that takes research time and investigative effort. It doesn’t come cheap, like consistency does. But it produces much, much better results.

...via elearningpost

From John Hagel:

...The eBay presentation talks eloquently and at length about the role of Skype in accelerating commerce on eBay and opening up new lines of business, new monetization models and new geographies. I agree that adding voice to transactions makes for richer communication and reduces friction, especially in certain types of transactions and certain national cultures. But then again, adding shipping services helps to reduce friction as well – does that mean eBay should go out and buy FedEx? Yes, markets are conversations as Ross Mayfield reminds us, but does that mean you need to buy a phone company to participate or even orchestrate those conversations?

Pay per call lead generation models are an interesting step beyond pay per click models, at least for certain kinds of businesses. There clearly are interesting opportunities to cross market to each other’s user base (one interesting statistic from the presentation – there is only a 1% overlap in their US user base – although this can be read both ways, as either an opportunity or a challenge).

But here are the bottom line questions:

• Is this acquisition going to improve the performance of the individual businesses in ways that either would not be possible or at least would be much more expensive without an acquisition?
• Are there any other business relationships short of acquisition that could have produced these improvements in performance?
• Will the improvement in performance be sufficient to earn an acceptable return on the very high price paid for Skype?
• Why couldn’t eBay simply have licensed Skype’s (or any other VoIP provider’s) service and embedded it in its platform to deliver voice-enriched transactions or pay per call lead generation programs?

Why couldn’t they have negotiated cross-marketing programs to reach each other’s user base?

From Australian IT :

NEW ZEALAND Telecom today announced a $NZ220 ($203) million project to switch every telephone line in the country to an internet protocol platform within seven years to replace the existing phone network.

...via Smart Mobs

From the Globe and Mail: VoIP in the US is growing faster than anticipated:

The biggest factors in the numbers are cable TV companies, which are using VoIP to bundle phone service with their TV offerings in hopes of staving off competition from incumbent phone companies that are just beginning to get into the TV business.

Time Warner Inc.'s cable division is now the nation's second-largest VoIP carrier, trailing only Vonage Holdings Corp., one of the earliest commercial providers of the service. Vonage is estimated to have 750,000 U.S. subscribers, more than three times its level a year ago.

...via Smart Mobs

In Hermosa Beach, CA, the city offers free wireless:

Hermosa Beach, a California beach town of 21,000 will offer free broadband wireless service (802.11 a/g) to all city residents and businesses using WiFi-Plus, Inc. multi-polarity antennas as part of the most advanced wireless mesh WiFi system in the country.

City Councilman Michael Keegan championed “the vision to provide the FREEway to the Internet to the city like other basic services, as a public amenity and convenience”, following his experience with a Hotspot at his local bakery/café. “Hermosa Beach residents now have a choice to surf the Internet just as they surf the Pacific - with rad’ speed 5 times faster than DSL at up to 6 Mbs per second, and “glassy” conditions”. Said a city official.

...via Smart Mobs

More on the Philadelphia muncicpal wireless project:

Wireless Philadelphia aims to strengthen the City's economy and transform Philadelphia's neighborhoods by providing wireless internet access throughout the city. Wireless Philadelphia will work to create a digital infrastructure for open-air internet access and to help citizens, businesses, schools, and community organizations make effective use of this technology to achieve their goals while providing a greater experience for visitors to the City.

The BBC has been doing a lot of work toward making its content open and available to people. Now they've added APIs allowing people to remix BBC content for new uses:

BBC Backstage provides a way for programmers to integrate BBC content into their web applications - the only caveat being that it must not be used commercially. Information is made available through "application programming interfaces" (API) – software-based rules which allow a programmer to harness the BBC’s content – and include connections to news feeds, television and radio listings, travel information and weather data.

...via Smart Mobs

From a CIO Insight article:

In analyzing more than 6,500 data points from each of 22 top e-commerce sites, a new Keynote Systems report found that many sites were too slow, failed too often and often glitched during the crucial checkout period.

...via http://wwSmart Mobs

An article at Demos on some of the issues of municipal wireless:

Fast, reliable access to the internet -- broadband -- has quickly become an indispensable asset in American life. To the businesses and families who rely on it, the internet's basically priceless, offering security and opportunity as well as any financial asset. But since its inception in America, the internet has also been in the unique position of being a utility--a community asset--delivered exclusively by private businesses. So what happens when what's good for the community isn't good for the businesses' bottom lines? In the rural Midwest, hundreds of thousands of citizens get left without on-ramps to the Information Superhighway.

In last month's Washington Post, Verizon spokesperson Harry Mitchell was direct about why the company doesn't bring broadband to citizens in remote areas: "You've got to have a business model where you have a chance of making some money." This coming, incidentally, from a company with $68 billion in revenue in 2003.

Meanwhile, according to the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative, fewer than 10 percent of homes in rural America have broadband access. If you think that's not critical, tell that to the sixty Chrysler repair shop workers of Scottsburg, Indiana who were told in 2002 that they'd lose their jobs if they didn't get first-class internet hookups for their on-the-job laptops. Sixty solidly middle-class jobs in a population of 6,000 is no small matter--and that's why mayor Bill Graham stepped in where Verizon wouldn't. A quick analysis determined that the whole county could be blanketed in wireless internet by piggybacking on existing public power and water towers at a cost of only $385,000. The network was completed in less than four months. The city now charges its citizens and businesses $35 a month for regular access and $200 for a high-capacity T1 line (as opposed to the prohibitive $1300 a month it used to cost.)

...via Smart Mobs

The Globe and Mail has an article about bringing high-speed wireless Internet to far northern Inuit communities:

He [Itorcheak, Nunanet Communications] has been able to surf the Net from as much as 25 kilometres beyond where his servers are supposed to reach, convincing him it is only a matter of time before everyone in this massive, isolated land mass is connected. By January, the territory hopes to have high-speed availability in every community.

"We are already the most-wired society in the world," he says.

In a land where air travel is almost prohibitively expensive, he sees data transmission as one more potential resource for the Far North: meetings by video-conferencing, health care by video, family contact, weather information, tracking hunters and fishermen. . . .

In the US, Ubroadband connections have finally surpassed dial-up:

In the first quarter of this year, broadband connections for the first time overtook dial-up.

Cable and phone companies, between them, are expected to add 8 million broadband subscribers this year, to bring their total to 38.7 million.

...via Smart Mobs

silicon.com reports on the University of Dundee's installation of a converged network to offer wireless and VoIP:

The University of Dundee is installing a £2.4m converged network as part of a project to boost the IT infrastructure which will offer VoIP for staff and free wireless for students.

The network is part of the university's £5m Network Infrastructure and Communications (NetComms) Project - which is in turn part of the Network Improvement Programme, which kicked off in 2002 with the aim of creating a world-class network infrastructure for the university.

...via Smart Mobs

Flying, clustering computers via Smart Mobs:

A tiny helicopter that serves up a Web page over a wireless network has been made by UK scientists using off-the-shelf hardware.

The 70-gram prototype, is the first in a group of flying computers that are planned to one day combine swarm intelligence, the ability to maneuver like a flock of birds, and wireless computing, to process information the way cluster-based supercomputers do.

According to the Financial Times (where you can't read the full article without a subscriiption):

The US military is developing miniature electronic sensors disguised as rocks that can be dropped from an aircraft and used to help detect the sound of approaching enemy combatants.

The devices, which would be no larger than a golf ball, could be ready for use in about 18 months. They use tiny silicon chips and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology that is so sensitive that it can detect the sound of a human footfall at 20ft to 30ft....

...via Smart Mobs

Or, how to find WiFi with your clothing:

As an example of AwareFashion we designed a shirt that senses switched-on mobile phones in the proximity. The shirt looks like a fashionable normal shirt, however if mobile phones are near the shirt glows unobtrusively at the end of sleeves. The design is orientated at the human sensory perception. Humans sense their environment with sensory cells, that generate electronics impulses which travel though nerves tracts and are processed.

...via SmartMobs

What students get up to these days:

The Too Fast For Tracks™ project is being developed by Christopher Hall at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program in order to explore a rapid prototyping approach to toys. The Too Fast For Tracks™ system allows children to quickly set up and make alterations to a vehicles path though a system of infrared beacons. By placing beacons around their play space children set the rules that guide the vehicle. The open-ended structure of the system is designed to encourage spatial exploration and social interaction.

TheStompBox Project:

To use it all you do is plug it in to the cigarette lighter of a car (or a 12v supply when at home). It automatically boots up and links in to Verizon's "Broadband Access" service, turning itself into an access point. Turn on your laptop, join the network and voila -- you're on the net! It's just like using a hotspot (such as they have at Starbucks and airports), but it goes anywhere you car goes.

As long as I've got an always-on internet link in the car, why not make it do other things? As part of this project I've made it do live vehicle tracking via Google Maps, upload pictures from an on-board web cam and other tricks.

...via BoingBoing

The announcement:

Microsoft Corp. announced today that it will acquire Groove Networks Inc., a leading provider of collaboration software for the "virtual office." The deal unites two top innovators of technology that help geographically distributed workgroups be as productive as those that work in a single physical location. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

...via Get Real

A public library on Long Island is using iPod Shuffles to loan out audio books:

Checking out a new iPod now applies to more than shopping trips or web browsing. This week the South Huntington Public Library on Long Island, New York, became one of the first public libraries in the country to loan out iPod shuffles.

For the past three weeks, the library ran a pilot program using the portable MP3 devices to store audio books downloaded from the Apple iTunes Music Store. They started with six shuffles, and now are up to a total of 10. Each device holds a single audio book.

I gave a talk yesterday in Northeast Iowa on Computer Self-Defense, which is essentially how to keep your computer up and running, how to protect your data, how to steer your way clear of viruses, spam, spyware, and other pitfalls of network computing.

You can access the presentation (Powerpoint) here

There's also a handout: Computer Self-Defense--Six Things You Can Do to Protect Your Computer.

Comment spam is one of the banes of weblogs. Spammers use the high Google rank of weblog entries to boost their own rank. They waste resources, abuse the system, and interfere with regular people trying to communicate with one another.

Six Apart, Google, Yahoo Search and MSN Search have worked together to develop a new link attribute, nofollow:

The search team at Google approached us with the idea of flagging hyperlinks with a rel="nofollow" link attribute in order to alert their search spider that a particular link shouldn’t be factored into their PageRank calculations. The Yahoo and MSN search teams have also indicated they’d support this new spec, and we’ll be implementing and deploying this specification as quickly as possible across all of our platforms around the world.

There may still be a gender gap in the adoption of technology, but it may not be what you think:

In a couple of cases, women are embracing new technologies faster than men.

"The good news is that women are closing the gap," said Genevive Bell, a cultural anthropologist who works for chipmaker Intel. Overall, women are using technology nearly as often as men, Bell said, but they are using it differently.

In a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Intel, women were more enthusiastic about Wi-Fi than men, and they said they planned to use it in different ways. More women said they considered Wi-Fi to be a key feature in a new laptop.

"It's one of the first times, if not the first, that women have been the early adopters of a technology," Bell said.

Women and men want wireless access in airports, but more women than men said they want wireless Internet access in their doctors' offices and at salons.

...via The Shifted Librarian

An interesting article about a project to bring affordable broadband to a province in India:

According to Ajay Sahni, joint secretary, IT department, the Aksh consortium will also utilise the existing optic fibre lines of companies like Tata Teleservices before establishing its own optic fibre network across the state. Among other customers, the proposed broadband network will provide broadband services to 40,000 government offices across the state. This will enable the government departments to deliver various citizen services through eSeva centres, Rajiv Internet Village Kiosks and web-based online services. The network will also enable the rural folk to access video-conferencing, internet surfing among other facilities.

...via BoingBoing

From an article at The Feature on haptic interfaces:

Haptics (from the Greek term "to touch") is already a money-making technology in the gaming, medical, graphics and automotive industries. Typically, computers don't provide tactile feedback and must resort to sounds and visual indicators to represent things you'd normally feel in the real world. But haptics bring physicality back into the digital domain by generating the sensations of pressure, temperature, vibration and texture. Anyone who has picked up a game controller with a well-built rumble mechanism knows how much better the game-playing experience becomes when they can feel explosions, potholes in the road, collisions and so on.

Doctors and nurses in training can learn what it feels like to insert a catheter into a patient's arm by practicing on a dummy equipped with a force-feedback haptic simulator that lets them feel the pop of a needle puncturing a vein. Animators can use a 3-D armature device to mold a virtual clay lump on a computer monitor. And if you get a chance to take a ride in a late-model BMW, check out the iDrive knob, which can switch from smooth rotation to stepped clicks depending on the particular function it's controlling so that information is imparted to drivers' fingers instead of forcing them to take their eyes off the road.

...via BoingBoing

From Muniwireless.com:

The Pennsylvania Senate passed House Bill 30 which prohibits municipalities from delivering telecommunications services for compensation if it competes with private enterprise. The bill is now awaiting signature by Governor Rendell but he has grave reservations about the proposed law and won't sign it unless significant revisions are made, notably to the prohibition on municipalities offering telecoms services.

In the comments to this post comes an excellent follow-on from Philadelphia, a city that's proposing to spend $10 million on wireless for everyone:

The City of Philadelphia intends to aggressively pursue a veto of the Bill. The bill as it stands is not good for Philadelphia or the State of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia is ranked as the 33 most wired or wireless City in the U.S. With the implementation of Wireless Philadelphia, the City would have moved into the top 3 cities in the country. With just the announcement to create a business plan and funding model to implement Wireless Philadelphia, we have generated world-wide interest and support.

Today less than 60 percent of the city's neighborhoods even have the option to subscribe to high-speed broadband (DSL or cable modem). The City believes adamantly that any citizen or business should have the opportunity to compete in this global, knowledge economy regardless of a neigborhood's economic status or area household density. Affordable, universal access benefits everyone.

via shiny shiny...

Good article in NetworkWorldFusion on 'presence' as a rising killer app for collaboration:

Some say the numbers suggest that presence is well on its way to being that killer app.

"Just like in the late '90s when the No.1 thing on IT agendas was to Web-enable applications, I think the story of the next decade will be adding presence to applications," says Francis deSouza, president of IMLogic. "Every application can be made smarter and more efficient with presence."

The article acknowledges but doesn't address the need to manage your presence. And--I would say--your identity Sometimes you want to be 'working guy.' Sometimes you want to be 'home guy,' or 'hobby gal' or 'working on this important project that has nothing to do with anyone else person.'

Via Many to Many, Earthlink has released SIPshare, a proof-of-concept peer-to-peer file sharing prototype using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), designed originally for voice and video communications:

EarthLink believes an open Internet is a good Internet. An open Internet means users have full end-to-end connectivity to say to each other whatever it is they say, be that voice, video, or other data exchanges, without the help of mediating servers in the middle whenever possible. We believe that if peer-to-peer flourishes, the Internet flourishes. SIPshare helps spread the word that SIP is more than a powerful voice over IP enabler --- much more. SIP is a protocol that enables peer-to-peer in a standards-based way.

We've played around a bit here with Skype so I thought I'd note that they've launched Mac OS X beta client software.

...via Dan Gillmor

First Monday has an article on seeking an educational commons by Gary Hepburn:

Public schools and other educational institutions need to become more familiar with some of the opportunities that are emerging as a result of open source projects. Leveraging the potential of the Internet as a collaborative medium, open source development projects are producing software and other resources that have the potential to meet many needs of schools. As educators become aware of open source resources, they will immediately recognize the advantages of low%u2013cost alternatives to many commercial products that schools currently use and find expensive. They will also notice that open source resources lack some of the usage restrictions that characterize commercial resources. The low cost and flexibility of open source products makes them very attractive, but no less important is the way in which these resources align with some core educational values. In this article, I illustrate this alignment by exploring the promise that open source resources hold in supporting the ideal of an educational commons.

New Scientist reports on stealth wallpaper to keep company secrets safe:

A type of wallpaper that prevents Wi-Fi signals escaping from a building without blocking mobile phone signals has been developed by a British defence contractor. The technology is designed to stop outsiders gaining access to a secure network by using Wi-Fi networks casually set up by workers at the office.

...via BoingBoing

Dan Bricklin has an interesting essay on the need for Software That Lasts 200 Years. Among his criteria for what he calls Societal Infrastructure Software:

• Meet the functional requirements of the task.
• Robustness and long-term stability and security.
• Transparency to determine when changes are needed and that undesired functions are not being performed.
• Verifiable trustworthiness of all three of the above.
• Ease and low cost of training for effective use.
• Ease and low cost of maintenance.
• Minimization of maintenance.
• Ease and low cost of modification.
• Ease of replacement.
• Compatibility and ease of integration with other applications.
• Long-term availability of individuals able to train, maintain, modify, determine need for changes, etc.

Music and learning:

Duke University freshmen will get something even more trendy than a Blue Devils T-shirt when they arrive next month: a free Apple iPod digital music player.

The BBC has put out a (big, long) document about Building public value: Renewing the BBC for a digital world. I haven't read the whole thing (did I mention it is big and long?) but here's a couple of interesting bits:

At the heart of Building public value is a vision of a BBC that maintains the ideals of its founders, but a BBC renewed to deliver those ideals in a digital world. That world contains the potential for limitless individual consumer choice. But it also contains the possibility of broadcasting reduced to just another commodity, with profitability the sole measure of worth. A renewed BBC, placing the public interest before all else, will counterbalance that market-driven drift towards programme-making as a commodity. Only a secure and adequately funded BBC can ensure that broadcasting retains its cultural (in the broadest sense) aspiration.

And...

The BBC will launch a Creative Archive – free access to BBC content for learning, for creativity, for pleasure. The BBC’s programme archive is owned by the British people. Until now it has remained largely inaccessible as there has been no cost-effective mechanism for distribution. Digital technology removes this barrier

The creative archives mean that BBC content is available to the public for use in creative projects, for building more intellectual property and for learning. There's also some interesting stuff in the document on public value, public responsibility and a digital future.

Blogs are good.

Also mobile phones....

Shelter.nu has a good writeup on what topic maps are:

We keep trying to create technological solutions that resemble human nature so that the information can be processed and handled as good as possible by both man and machine. Sometimes the abstraction happens in the user interface, where we create a cute icon for a complex computation or write the word "do" when what really happens is "do, fiddle, tweak, load, count, compute, save, tweak, squiggle, save again, spit and you're done." Other times the abstraction happens on a data model level, creating tables in such a way as to make human sense. Maybe the abstraction is on a hardware level. And, in fact, bits of abstractions are everywhere, from the inner CPU out through software to the keyboard you type on and the screen you're viewing. Unfortunately, all these bits of abstractions don't necessary make it easy to grasp what is going on, because they are - surprise, surprise! - bits that more often than not speak their own parables, and don't form a complete story.

Topic Maps is an abstraction that tries to bring together quite a lot of these bits, from the data model to the user interface, making an effort to try to tell the same story across the many layers we have in computers. And as such, it not only permutes through the technical layers of "data model" and "user interface", but also the people involved in using it, from designers and developers, project managers and general management, to users and interested parties. John the developer can now speak in the same language as the user, which is no small feat in itself and one that should lower the cost of miscommunication.

...via elearningpost

The British Library has an interesting new application called Turning the Pages, which allows you to look at old manuscripts like Leonardo's Workbook page by page:

Turning the Pages is the award-winning interactive program that allows museums and libraries to give members of the public access to precious books while keeping the originals safely under glass. Initially developed by and for the British Library, it is now available as a service for institutions and private collectors around the world.

...via elearningpost

According to SmartMobs, the Gartner group has declaredIM one of Top strategic technologies for 2005:

Given the popularity of instant messaging, enterprises who want to keep employees happy and more productive will need to set policies for the use of instant messaging. In the future IM will be more integrated into applications, rather than an island of online dialog that vapourises when the window is closed.

Last week, Darin and I did a couple of presentations on Computer Self-Defense. One of the things we talked about was making sure your data is secure when you leave an organization or get a new computer.

Here's a timely article on data left on old hard drives from CSO Magazine:

...I took the drives home and started my own forensic analysis. Several of the drives had source code from high-tech companies. One drive had a confidential memorandum describing a biotech project; another had internal spreadsheets belonging to an international shipping company.

Since then, I have repeatedly indulged my habit for procuring and then analyzing secondhand hard drives. I bought recycled drives in Bellevue, Wash., that had internal Microsoft e-mail (somebody who was working from home, apparently). Drives that I found at an MIT swap meet had financial information on them from a Boston-area investment firm. Last summer, I started buying drives en masse on eBay.

NASA has a new device that allows them to 'hear' subauditory speech. In other words, to hear what you're going to say before you say it:

"A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal cords do receive speech signals from the brain," said developer Chuck Jorgensen, of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.

Posted by dcoates at 09:01 AM

MaxDesign has a tutorial on The benefits of Web Standards to your visitors, your clients and you:

2. What are Web Standards about? These 'Web Standards' are designed to:

deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users
ensure the long-term viability of any web document
simplify code and lower the cost of production
deliver sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices
continue to function correctly as browsers evolve, and as new devices come to market
For web designers and developers, Web Standards are about using standards (Structural, presentational, Object and Scripting languages) and best practices (valid, semantic and accessible code) to benefit your users, your clients and yourself.

...elearningpost

Here's an article about new laptops with built-in VoIP:

Manufacturers plan to start selling notebooks with integrated Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) this year and plan later to offer notebooks with built-in cell phone capabilities, Anand Chandrasekher, vice president and general manager of the Intel Mobile Platforms Group, said in an interview. The phone module will also let people review incoming e-mail and calendar information while the notebook remains in sleep state. Thematically, these additional communications features are termed Extended Mobile Access (EMA).

Searchenginewatch reports on Yahoo's new search capability:

Yahoo is rolling out a brand new search engine today, with its own index and ranking mechanisms, casting aside its long-standing use of Google-powered search results. The move is bound to roil the industry and sets in motion a new race for the claim of web search champion.

Phil Windley talks about whether companies whould develop their own or outsource development for new business applications:

Company IT departments don't build general ledger packages anymore for a good reason: your accounting software won't add to your competitive advantage. We do, however, see organizations trying to significantly modify ERP systems to change how paydays are handled, etc. In Utah for example, we modified SAP's payroll system to handle a special way the Highway Patrol had of paying troopers because they couldn't be convinced to follow a standard business convention. The end result will be a system that's more prone to problems now and more expensive to upgrade later.

Of course, Utah isn't a business, but if it were, they'd be deriving no special competitive advantage from the way troopers receive their paycheck. These kinds of system should be bought and business processes should be changed to ensure that the system requires as few modifications as possible.

One tricky part, of course, is convincing people that the way they've done things could change to a more standard practice and it wouldn't hurt the business.

Brian Alvey at A List Apart says Everything I Need To Know About Web Design I Learned Watching Oz:

Learn to thrive within constraints The first thing new web designers usually figure out is that the web is all about compromise.

If they are coming from a print design background, they are handed a box of 216 crayons, a list of a half dozen available typefaces and a 72 dpi limit on image resolution. When the shock wears off and they get used to working within these web limitations, they encounter page weights, arbitrary standards support and CSS hacks.

...

Don’t get too attached to anyone because they might not be around next week
I learned this one when I was working as a CTO in the twilight of the dot com years and our vendor contacts were changing almost daily.

When business was good, web developers would jump from company to company getting raise after raise. When business was bad, they would be pushed.

Luckily in Oz — and in real life — there has been a core group of characters that were all considered too important to be killed off

Christopher Alexander changed architecture, or at least how we talk about it, with his book The Timeless Way of Building. His follow-on book, A Pattern Language gave people a way to talk about the things they cared about in buildings and their surroundings but hadn't known how to talk about before. Alexander calls it 'the Quality without a Name,' the things that make a place worth living in or working in.

Mike Axelrod has an interesting post about traditions in software development that also talks about looking for things-that-work and common languages by which users and developers can create working applications.

Do we have a tradition yet? I think not. Are we close? I think so. The tools are still being refined; the ways of building are still being explored. The pattern languages are still unfolding. When programmers and the people that use these creations can speak these languages fluently and with ease, then I feel that we as a community will have moved that much closer to a real tradition in this craft that we are trying so hard to perfect.

Just as in days of old. Any villager could go to the local woodworker and ask for a chair, a table, or a house with a door and windows. And that artisan would build one just right. And perhaps, if it were a barn that was needed, the whole village would help. And each villager would know his or her role in building the barn. The elders would lead and the young would learn. And it would be built just the right way to fit the family that needed it and fit the land it was on and the village that it lived in. So too can our software creations fit just so and run just right and co-exist with so many applications in our world in just the right way. And like the barn raising of old sometimes a whole community may come together to create new software and build a better future. I think that if this is the vision, then I am indeed looking forward to being part of a new tradition

...via mamamusings

Apparently Microsoft actually says:

Not all features that are found on the Security tab are designed to help make your documents and files more secure.

Edward Felten describes what he calls 'insecurity features' and explains why Word's 'Password to Modfy' feature is one:

A classic example is the "Password to Modify" feature of Microsoft Word, as revealed recently on BugTraq by Thorsten Delbrouck-Konetzko. This feature allows a document's author to establish a password that must be entered before the document can be modified. That would be a pretty useful feature -- if Word actually provided it. But as Mr. Delbrouck-Konetzko revealed, it is easy for anybody to modify such a file without knowing the password. In other words, Password to Modify is an insecurity feature.

Jakob Nielsen lists his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003

Christina Wodtke has a weblog, Widgetopia, "a Collection of Widgets and UI elements from various websites, with notation of their sterling or plate metal qualities."

...via mamamusings

There's a new group blog called ATAC: Abusable Technologies Awareness Center, for discussing technology that causes concerns about privacy and security:

Welcome to the Abusable Technologies Awareness Center (ATAC). Our mission is to provide current and accurate information about technology that oversteps its bounds. Whether the concerns relate to unexpected privacy violations or inappropriate security, ATAC serves as a clearinghouse for informed discussions. Our panelists, all respected Computer Scientists introduce topics as new disclosures are made, and the forum is open to the public for discussion. This site is hosted at the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

Contributors include Bruce Schneier and Ed Felten.

Dan Gillmor has a list of geeky gift ideas including:

• USB plug-ins
• Internet phones
• Noise-cancelling headphones
• Tablet PCs
• Hybrid cars

Phil Windley points to a series of articles from Tom Adelstein on the use of open source software in state and local governments.

Adelstein is heading the Open Government Interoperability Project whose position statement says:

Aging infrastructure and legacy data processing systems have created a dilemma for communities in their attempt to meet the expectations of users. How do local governments meet these expectations with limited financial resources? Most localities face declining revenues and increased costs of providing services. Local governments struggle to maintain existing IT resources and have budgetary constraints if they wish to expand and/or upgrade infrastructure or systems.

One will find few communities with the financial resources necessary to meet its IT requirements. Two potential strategies exist that local governments can use to address these problems:

(1) less reliance on costly proprietary software by utilizing open source software where possible; and

(2) creating mechanisms to cooperate with other cities to share the cost of developing systems that address needs common to local governments.

Adactio has a set of Photoshop tutorials online combined with a download with macros for achieving the affects explained in the tutorials.

Time Magazine also has a cool inventions for 2003 list, including:

• The iTunes Music Store
• Digital Guitar
• The No-Contact Jacket
• The Robotic Cat
• Invisible Technology

ComputerWorld delivers a report on sales and use of the tablet PC after one year:

It's been a year since Microsoft Corp. launched Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and declared a new chapter in the history of personal computing to be starting. The platform hasn't caught on as fast as its biggest cheerleader was perhaps hoping but despite a quiet first year few are willing to dismiss the platform just yet.

Boingboing offers a pointer to Microsoft's new blogging tool.

From the Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing at Stanford University, comes How Everyday Things are Made. The site gives you 'online tours' on the making of jelly beans, wool clothes, airplanes, and food containers, among others.

Hey, it's not my title:

Tables existed in HTML for one reason: To display tabular data. But then border="0" made it possible for designers to have a grid upon which to lay out images and text. Still the most dominant means of designing visually rich Web sites, the use of tables is now actually interfering with building a better, more accessible, flexible, and functional Web.

Wilreless access is everywhere at Dartmouth:

In the late 1980s, Dartmouth College was the most wired campus on the planet, running 10Mb Ethernet into every dorm room. Today, Dartmouth is the most unwired campus on the planet, with 560 access points covering 200 acres. At a recent conference here, Larry Levine, the head of computing services, challenged attendees to find a single spot on campus and surrounding areas that did not have 802.11 coverage. Even the boathouse, adjacent sections of the Connecticut river, the ski lodge, and sections of the ski slope are covered!

From the folks who brought you Listamatic and Listutorial comes Floatutorial a step-by-step tutorial on CSS floats.

...via elearningpost

Louis Rosenfeld outlines a roadmap for implementing an enterprise information architecture.

Some things, he says, are worth doing right away, some you can get around to later, and some may never happen for various organizational reasons. Beginning with something that's highly-politicized or which a number of people or departments have strong attachments to in its current incarnation can stymie a project at its inception. On the other hand, getting some quick 'wins' up front can help later with the more difficult components.

...via elearningpost

Listamatic shows what happens when you take a simple list and apply different cascading style sheets.

Also check out Listutorial

Interactive Visual Explainers--A Simple Classification is the title of a feature article at elearningpost:

Interactives are one of the first experiments in interactive journalism. They are brief Web-based interactive visual explainers. They are designed to explain complex concepts or ideas. Of late, they are usually created in Macromedia Flash or Macromedia Director. Since the practice is new, different names are used to describe it -- "Flash Infographics", "Motion Graphics", and "Interaction Graphics" are some we've come across. We like "Interactives" because it embodies interaction--the building block of the Web--and thus does not bring across any preconceived notions from the print world.

The authors propose a classification for interactive visual explainers:

• Narratives--Enron 101
• Instructives--How Tornadoes Form
• Exploratives--Becoming Human Learning Center (click on 'Learning Center')
• Simulatives--What is a Print?
  Posted by dcoates at 04:00 PM

)( JIWIRE provides a directory of Wi-Fi hotspots around the world complete with maps and driving directions.

Toyota is bringing out a car that will parallel park itself:

Toyota has rigged its hybrid Prius model with special gear to accomplish the feat. It uses a rear-mounted camera and a computer program to perform the task, consistently making a perfect reverse park without the driver touching the wheel, said Toby Hagon, an editor of The Age, who test-drove the vehicle.

...via Gizmodo

Macromedia now has FlashPaper which allows you to share any printable document as an integrated part of a webpage.

...via elearningpost

WebMonkey writes on Metadata, Mark II:

So having a metadata-rich Web wouldn’t just improve our user experience as we search and surf the Web, but it would also augment the ability for "robots" or software agents to collect and process information on our behalf.

When people talk about the "Semantic" Web adding meaning to the Web, it’s not really for you and me — you and I generally understand whatever we're reading, and know which links we need to click to get certain tasks done — it’s about adding meaning that machines can process and navigate.

...via elearningpost

The Nebraska Library Association has an interesting article on Putting together a Public Computer for Spanish Speaking Patrons

...via The Shifted Librarian

WebServices.Org has an interview with Even Maler of Sun Microsystems on the future of web services security:

Q: What should businesses and IT professionals know about the status of Web services security right now?

Web services are currently being secured in very traditional ways, to the extent that they're being secured at all. Web services on the Internet, as opposed to behind a firewall, might be secured with HTTPS SSL mechanisms, which are quite common in online individual purchase transactions. It does a fairly good job of protecting the contents of the message while in transit. However, in more complex Web services scenarios, this solution won't always be adequate. If many intermediaries are transacting with the messages as they go from initial sender A to ultimate receiver B, the simple SSL solution might not be adequate. The standards are not cooked yet for securing the content of the message and the channel in all the ways that people would want.

...via Phil Windley

From WhatISNew comes 101 Reasons Not To Get A Tablet PC:

1. It's too expensive.
2. It's too small.
3. It's too big.
4. It's too heavy.
5. It's not durable enough.
6. I can't read it outside.
7. It can't get wet.
8. It's too slow.
9. It runs too hot.
...
101. If it were free, I'd get one.

PluggedInns.com lists what hotels in what cities offer high speed Internet connections. Some entries also have additional information including cost, location, wired vs wireless, etc.

...via Scripting News

Christopher Coulter (via Gizmodo) tells us:

Acer TravelMate - Wendy's Single and then Double and Triple Burger(s). HP/Compaq Tablet PC - Happy Meal Special with toy. Fujitsu Stylistic - Checkers Drive-In Classic Burger, Outdoor seating. Motion - Quarter Pounder (at the 50s fun-themed McDonalds). NEC - Soy, Air-Pumped Low-Cal Diet Special Burger. Toshiba Portege - Arby's Beef and Cheddar

and more....

Posted by dcoates at 01:14 PM

Wired picks the year's best stuff so far:

• pocket digicams
• portable photoprinters
• tablet PCs
• 802.11 g Wi-fi routers
• smartphones
• 17 inch LCD televisions
• DLP projectors
• Lhandheld televisions
• keychain MP3 players
• MP3 car stereos
• shower radios

We've talked about mobile computing for a long time, but we are now getting closer to the reality of nearly ubiquitous mobile computing. However, the form this takes may not be the form we expect. It will likely involved cell phones and PDAs (for while at least) and tablets and other devices.

Ray Ozzie has more on Extreme Mobility:

I believe we're currently in a transition period for personal computing: from a tethered, desk-bound, personal productivity view, to one of highly mobile interpersonal productivity and collaboration, communications, coordination. We're focused right now on devices and networks because we're coming at the problem bottom-up: preoccupied by gizmos and technologies' capabilities rather than focusing on how our lives and businesses and economies and societies will be fundamentally altered.

According to Arab News, Saudi students can now receive their exam results via SMS.

Samsung has released a cell phone with a TV tuner:

- The phone receives TV broadcasts over public access channels. - Tiny, high-performance antenna provides clear pictures and sound. - Channels can be automatically selected and the screen can be viewed either horizontally or vertically. - Up to 50 frames of TV broadcast can be captured and downloaded for use as a screen background image.

Japan Media Review has started a Keitai Log:

an occasional Web diary by a group of Tokyo college students who are researching the changing role of cell phones -- keitai -- in Japanese society. Check in every week for new musings from our keitai team reporting in from the wireless capital of the world.

In Japan nearly everyone has a cell phone and there is evidence that young people particularly are more literate with cell phones than computers.

...via Gizmodo

Gizmodo, the gadgets weblog presents a glimpse of what it would have been like in 1983.

...via BoingBoing

Danish scientists are adapting face-recognition software to create a weed-killing robot. Theoretically, the robot would target weeds and not crops, delivering herbicide or, eventually, pulling the weeds automatically.

The current state of face-recognition software, issues of terrain and weather, and adapting for different weed environments may make this a fairly long-term project.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal reports that the city of Milwaukee is establishing wireless access in two city parks:

City Hall is setting up high-speed wireless networks in Pere Marquette Park and Cathedral Square Park that will let anyone with a properly equipped computer or handheld device connect to the Internet. The networks should be up and running this summer, possibly this month.

The article also cites a security expert :

"It's a huge security risk. Whenever you use a wireless network, you are opening yourself up to the information you're sending being snatched out of the air by someone else," he said.

Sherwood said buying items over the Internet or checking an online bank account using a wireless network would be a bad idea.

Cory Doctorow comments at BoingBoing:

Sherwood is just sowing FUD here. First of all, anyone with a cablemodem connection is in the same boat as a wireless user: your communications can be captured by anyone in your neighborhood and read. This is also true if you're using the DSL in your hotel room -- and the connection in your office is sniffable by your sysadmins.

The most glaring inaccuracy is the business about buying stuff and checking a bank-balance over a wireless link. The security of this activity is determined by the presence or absence of an SSL connection. If your bank uses SSL (and all of them do), then you're (relatively) secure. If your e-tailer uses SSL (and nearly all of them do), then you're (relatively) secure. And if they don't, you shouldn't be doing business with them in the first place: sending sensitive information in cleartext over the Internet is insecure regardless of your connection.

Scientific American describes self-repairing computers

Our group of research collaborators at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley has taken a new tack, by accepting that computer failure and human operator error are facts of life. Rather than trying to eliminate computer crashes--probably an impossible task--our team concentrates on designing systems that recover rapidly when mishaps do occur. We call our approach recovery-oriented computing (ROC).

They began by looking at why computers fail. They found: We were a bit surprised to find out that operator error was a leading cause of system problems. Traditional efforts to boost the dependability of software and hardware have for the most part overlooked the possibility of human mistakes, yet in many cases operators' miscues accounted for more downtime than any other cause

Given this, they are exploring ROC computer design with the principles of speedy recovery, better tools for pinpointing problems when they do occur, support for 'undo' functions for all programs, and the ability to inject test errors

CNET News reports that Hewlett Packard is working on a robot that acts as your in-room avatar for a remote meeting:

Mechanical engineer Stan Thomas said that when he joined the team, he noticed that people spent more time looking at the robot's shiny metal parts than at the video screen that's displaying their co-worker. Thomas helped redesign the device to have a more human-looking (and less jarring) form--the current blue, plastic model resembles a giant Lego.

People seem to like the fact that the new model doesn't have arms, Jouppi said. Although the arms on the first version allowed the robot to perform simple tasks such as pushing an elevator button, researchers say people were put off by the fact that the robot could touch things.

Dave Shea has established the css Zen Garden to showcase CSS design:

There is clearly a need for CSS to be taken seriously by graphic artists. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The code remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external .css file. Yes, really.

There is also a link to a CSS Resource Guide.

Hasbro announces THIN-TRONIX which includes, among other things a poster phone:

This is a radical twist on the standard wall phone. It's a real working speakerphone that's just over 1" thick and meant to be hung on a wall. The Poster Phone makes group calls easy and fun. The eye-catching design comes in two colors. You can program up to five numbers into the Speed Dial memory and write those names in the erasable spaces on the poster. It's battery operated and comes with all accessories included. Just plug it into any existing phone line and dial away for endless hours of hands-free talk time.

...via The Shifted Librarian

Silicon Valley.com provides an overview of the basics for wireless at home:

Wireless home computer networking is becoming more and more popular, even as the buying process gets more and more complicated.

Just when consumers were getting comfortable last year with the concept of 802.11b, also known as WiFi, the industry trotted out the 802.11a standard.

When 802.11a turned out to be a flop, the networking industry rolled out 802.11g.
Now the story gets even more confusing with the arrival of A G networking gear that uses both the 802.11a and 802.11g standards.

A directory of Libraries with wireless networks.

It reminds me of the days when people kept directories of agencies with web sites.

...via The Shifted Librarian

Mobilemag reports on RadioYourWay

With Radio YourWay, users will have the ability to set a timer or record real-time AM/FM radio and listen to their favorite show at a convenient time and location of their choice. Recording is as simple as pressing a button to record a particular broadcast totally unattended or set it up to record daily or weekly programs. Radio YourWay also has the added bonus of the ability to use it as voice-recorder or to listen to skip free MP3 music.

For the unenlightened, a new way to express your displeasure.

Ah, the freshly mowed infield. The crack of the bat. The thump of a Nokia on the noggin.

...

Silicon Valley's first commandment now means that cell phones are so inexpensive that some fans don't think twice (or at all) about launching them onto the baseball diamond as a signal of discontent.

The latest phone chucking came at Wrigley Field, where drunken Cubs fans have grown tired of tossing home run balls back onto the field. In the eighth inning Thursday, some imbecile winged a cell phone instead and hit San Diego Padre Sean Burroughs in the foot.

...via Gizmodo

Six Apart (Ben & Mena Trott) announce TypePad:

Building on the established features of Movable Type, TypePad provides weblog publishing with versatile archiving, integrated comments, and customizable designs from a library of attractive and standards-compliant templates.

TypePad expands weblog publishing to include integration of text, photos and other media content. The combination of simplicity and comprehensive features will make TypePad the first tool that will empower users, beginners and experts alike, to reach the full potential of the weblog medium.

Bob Atkins has a detailed article on digital cameras and lenses and whether a good lens matters or not:

Based on MY particular film and digital workflow:

• Even on a 6MP DSLR like the EOS 10D, better lenses give better results
• Digital scans of high resolution film (Kodachrome 25) at 4000dpi on a FS4000US scanner yields higher resolution images than those shot directly with an EOS 10D. Not surprising, but confirmed by experiment.
• While 10D resolution is somewhat lower than ISO 100 film, it's very little affected by ISO setting so it's quite possible that high ISO digital resolution may be better than scanned high ISO film.
• From a practical viewpoint, 10D images printed on an inkjet from digital files are probably equal film up to maybe 11x14. They are certainly good enough to be very hard to distinguish from film.
• As an aside, if you want the ultimate in sharpness do it the right way. Get a large format camera and shoot film!

Gizmodo has pictures of the Banryu guard-robot. It's designed to prowl your house and keep an eye out for intruders.

But I have to say that 1) you better have a big house and 2) my dogs would kill it dead in less than five minutes....

The Los Angeles Times has an interestingarticle on how the remote control has changed not only how we view television, but process information as well:

Ever notice, for example, that network series rarely have theme songs like in the old days? Thank the remote. Notice that there are no commercials between the end of one network show and the beginning of the next one? Thank the remote. Notice (if you're old enough) that the commercials themselves are more sophisticated and less annoying than the ones the TV blared in the '70s? Thank the remote. Notice those endless headlines crawling across the bottom of your screen? Thank the remote. Notice (ladies) that you can tell a lot about a guy's control issues by watching an evening of TV with him? Thank the remote.

According to Mitch Kapor's weblog, Chandler 0.1 is now available :

The first release of Chandler, release 0.1 is now available! While we're still very early in the design and implementation process, we intend for this 0.1 release to make us a more fully open project. We have made the release available for download, opened up our bug tracking database, and opened our source code repository. We have also spent quite a bit of time in the past few weeks focusing on improving our code and documentation.

CNET reviews a batch of ultraportable laptops.

Top picks are the Dell Latititude C400 and the Toshiba Portege 3505 Tablet PC

BBC News reports on Ideal Home Show inventions including an Internet-enabled chopping board:

It contains a microprocessor-controlled system capable of browsing the web. It can download recipes and display them on a screen within the board itself providing inspiration for even the most uncreative cook.

And don't forget the internet toilet roll browser:

A unit installed in front of a toilet on the cubicle wall provides up-to-the-minute information on products, stocks and shares and lottery results.

An article at Extreme Tech on CRT Innovations says there are still a few reasons to choose CRTs over flat-panel LCD monitors:

The tried-and-true CRT-based PC monitor remains the best display choice for many applications, such as professional graphics design or animation, where color accuracy, luminance uniformity, color purity, black levels, and contrast ratios are critically important. Fast-action gaming and high-motion video are still best viewed on CRTs, because most panels suffer from motion blur or pixelation problems due to slower-than-required liquid crystal response times. Panels can't touch CRTs in the area of viewing angles and resolution scaling (when scaling up or down from their native, fixed-pixel resolution, panels still look pretty ugly in most cases).

Plus, for the moment, CRTs are cheaper.

According to Cellular News daily text messaging in the United Kingdom exceeds 55 million:

The total number of chargeable person-to-person text messages sent across the four UK GSM networks in February 2003 totalled 1.53 billion. February's figure takes the daily average to 55 million compared to 44 million in February 2002 and 28.8 million in February 2001.

As February's figures continue to show, texting has become the premier communication tool for the millennium. Six times (78 million) as many text messages were sent on Valentine's Day compared to traditional cards, as romantics across the UK sent messages of love to partners via text message.

According to Mobtopia, the US lags behind with a mere 1 billion text messages in 2002 (the UK total works out to around 1.53 billion).

According to Government Computer News, the US military forces in Iraq are using ruggedized handhelds and portable PCs to help with battle information:

Troops on the ground in Iraq are using ruggedized portable PCs and personal digital assistants to support operational and logistical applications.

Equipped with a Global Positioning System receiver and a tactical military modem, and coupled with a laser range finder, PCs and PDAs can be used to transmit firing coordinates to artillery on the ground or to aircraft overhead. They supply maps and personnel information for medical evacuations and carry maintenance manuals for military vehicles.

...via Gizmodo

Howard Rheigold's blog, Smart Mobs, has pointers to Eleksen's new soft cell phones-

...via Gizmodo

According to an article in Ad Age, the TIVO and its ability to skip commercials may be not be so bad after all:

Recent internal research by Procter & Gamble Co. indicates that consumers who fast-forward through ads with digital personal video recorders such as TiVo still recall those ads at roughly the same rates as people who see them at normal speed in real time.

Of course, the article goes on to say:

"That's probably not an unusual finding based on the way people recall things," Mr. Schar [who formerly oversaw P&G's market research department] said. "People hardly recall anything. So you're dealing with low numbers anyway, and differences with low numbers take a lot to be significant. So I could see how statistically you could make that case."

FrogPad introduces...Frogpad:

FrogPad is a one-handed keyboard to be used with any USB keyboard compatible Desk Top, LapTop, PDA, Pocket PC, Tablet PC, Wearable PC, and other mobile applications, gaming applications or Telematic form factors.

Russell Beattie at Mobitopia talks about the applications on his phone:

So I'm starting to pare down the apps I'm using on my phone. With the 7650 specifically you really need to choose which apps you use wisely because there's just not enough room to store everything and choose later. So far, here's what I've discovered are the best apps which I have installed on my phone.

First the Symbian Apps:

Yellow FTP is the killer app of my phone. It allows me to upload/download any piece of data I want and was the first app to show me that my handset was a real IP connected computer. I use this app to upload photos to my Moblog directory on my server and to upload/download text files to read on my eBook reader. This really allows me to manage the space on my phone better and is the inspiration behind DotMob. This app cost $25.

And of course, there's much more

Peter Lewis has an interesting article at Fortune.com on convergence, that is, devices that do everything you'd ever want--video, audio, Internet all right there in one device. But, Lewis says, is that really what we want:

Mr. Hanson gives this example: He takes his camcorder into the backyard to take video of his children at play. When he walks back into the house, he wants the camcorder to automatically communicate with other devices in the home. The TV might offer to display the video. The computer might offer to store the video, or to e-mail it to grandma. The game console might offer to incorporate images of the kids into a game. He wants to download music from Sony's online music service and transfer it to the music player in his car. He wants to order a Sony movie through his VAIO and have it streamed to the Sony Wega TV in the bedroom.

This isn't convergence; it's divergence.

And here's what's wrong with the picture:

It's far too complicated for a consumer audience, unless the consumers have a technical degree from the University of Pluto. Most Americans still connect to the Internet over dial-up modems. The VCR clock is still blinking 12:00. When consumers go to the electronics store to buy home networking gear, more often than not they return it because it's just too hard to figure out. That's not an exaggeration: The return rate for home networking products is well over 50 percent, according to retailers.

And that's just for connecting computers, not to mention a United Nations of devices that use different communications protocols, different operating systems, and different media formats.

Sony and Microsoft don't even know how to explain to Ma and Pa and the kids why they should want their PC to communicate with the TV. Stop someone on the street and ask, "Are you frustrated because you want to stream video from your PC to the video monitor in your bedroom?" Chances are you'll get slapped.

PhoneScoop shows us Frog Design/Motorola's new Wearable Technology.

Frog Design and Motorola today unveiled the "Offspring" concept design for a set of wearable devices. The individual pieces communicate via Bluetooth. A central device - the WDA - serves as the hub, and provides a wireless connection to an iDEN network. The design is only a concept at this point, although Motorola is preparing for user testing, and plans to bring a product based on the design to market within two years.

Devices include clip-on digital cameras, wearable digital assistants (WDA), goggles with heads-up display (albeit connected to the wall with a power cable), and a pen that saves what it writes in digital form.

Brighthand proposes that there are three technologies that could profoundly change handhelds

While the current crop of handhelds is good, it could be better. There are three technologies currently being developed that could significantly improve future handhelds.

These are:

1. Fuel Cells
2. Near-Eye Displays
3. Virtual Keyboards

According to Yahoo!News, McDonald's is going to offer wireless internet

Would you like super-sized Internet access with that burger and fries? In a further sign of the spread of wireless Internet technology, McDonald's restaurants in three U.S. cities will offer one hour of free high-speed access to anyone who buys a combination meal.

After an hour, you can buy additional time for $3.00 per hour or...buy more food.

Borders will also be offereing wireless access in 400 of their stores and Toshiba and Intel say they'll be setting up wireless 'hot spots' in coffee shops, hotels and convenience stores across the US.

...via BoingBoing

Via Gizmodo, a Bluetooth enabled pen that allows you to save what you write as you write it.

The NY Times has a good summary of the plusses and minuses of different PDAs and in particular discusses the PocketPC vs Palm OS issue.

An interesting article in Information Week on San Diego's use of a Google appliance and the impact it's had on their systems usability.

It's difficult to imagine getting more from a $23,000 investment in search technology than the city of San Diego has gotten from its deployment of a Google Inc. search appliance.

Whenever we attempt to make sense of information visually, we first observe similarities and differences in what we are seeing. These relationships allow us to not only distinguish objects but to give them meaning. For example, a difference in color implies two distinct objects (or different parts of the same object), a difference in scale suggests one object is further from us than the other, a difference in texture (one is more blurry) enforces this idea, and so on. Once we have an understanding of the relationships between elements, we can piece together the whole story and understand what we are seeing.

Boxes and Arrows has an excellent article on Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization

As someone on Blogdex said, "holy crap, that's cool!"!

BBC News reports on a project to bring internet connectivity to rural areas of Bangladesh using wireless technology:

Until now the students and staff of the Bangladesh Agricultural University have used a modem and unreliable phone lines to connect to the net, making it difficult for them to keep abreast of developments in their specialist fields.

Using the net involved a long-distance phone call to the capital Dhaka.

But, from today, they will enjoy fast internet access via a wireless link to Dhaka, thanks to a project funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Lufthansa is pilot testing onboard wireless LAN service for travellers:

Users will be able to download from the Internet at speeds up to 3M bps (bits per second) and upload, initially, at speeds up to 128K bps, according to Lufthansa. The upload speeds will later increase to 750K bps, it said.

Cory Doctorow, one of the people responsible for BoingBoing has published a science fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, out today from Tor Books.

This is noteworthy because Cory is releasing an electronic version under a Creative Commons license simultaneously with the hardcover version.

Google Labs has two new projects--Google viewer and Google WebQuotes

A TextArc is a visual represention of a text--the entire text (twice!) on a single page. A combination of an index, concordance, and summary, it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning.

Check it out.

34N 118 West is an exercise in interactive storytelling using Tablet PCs and global positioning software. The story itself changes depending on how participants move around the landscape, providing different pieces of narrative in relation to where a person is standing.

Barbie has a weblog

12/4/2002 Have You Heard??? You know I'm all about the latest in the wireless world. So imagine my shock when I heard someone's cell phone barking like a dog. I am totally not making this up. It's the newest thing. Musical rings are so yesterday. Well, I made a B-line to the cell phone store and guess what? My new cell meows! Fab or what?

She is also, apparently, a camgirl.

Wired News carries a recent article that says:

How's this for a stocking stuffer? A portable DVD player that projects the movie right before your eyes through a device embedded in your glasses.

According to a recent article at the BBC web site:

Staff in technology jobs work in the white collar equivalent of a 19th century factory, suffering from isolation, job insecurity and long hours, research has found.

The research is published in the American Sociological Associations' Contexts magazine.

The new BBC homepage adjusts so that what you click becomes easier to find. Links for pages you go to a lot get darker over time.

Using Weblogs in your business environment can increase employee communication and knowledge, save time and resources, and build reputation and confidence.

So says Bill Keaggy in Are Weblogs legitimate business tools? Yes, a recent article in NetworkWorldFusion.

I agree. I use this weblog to keep track of things I used to send to one or two people in email or mention when the topic came up (usually when I could no longer remember the URL or how to find the information again).

In addition:

These blogs are not only knowledge builders, they're reputation builders. Since 1999, a targeted audience from all over the world has visited my company's Web site to read the latest postings. With help from some contributors and other blogs, we've filtered the best resources on the Web for our employees, our customers and our industry.

...this is where I see blogs taking off for Extension and other educational groups. People want trusted sources. They want someone to keep up, interpret and distill information into something that more resembles knowledge they can use. Traditional web pages have their uses, but blogs are a way for us to reach people in new ways and enhance our reputation as well.

Tara Calishain has a book, Google Hacks coming out from O'Reilly in February, 2003 about 100 useful and productive things you can do with Google.

...via BoingBoing

In an article about programming and leaky abstractions, Joel on Software has a cool explanation of how 'reliable' TCP and 'unreliable' IP manage to get your data to you in an accurate and reliable fashion:

Imagine that we had a way of sending actors from Broadway to Hollywood that involved putting them in cars and driving them across the country. Some of these cars crashed, killing the poor actors. Sometimes the actors got drunk on the way and shaved their heads or got nasal tattoos, thus becoming too ugly to work in Hollywood, and frequently the actors arrived in a different order than they had set out, because they all took different routes. Now imagine a new service called Hollywood Express, which delivered actors to Hollywood, guaranteeing that they would (a) arrive (b) in order (c) in perfect condition. The magic part is that Hollywood Express doesn't have any method of delivering the actors, other than the unreliable method of putting them in cars and driving them across the country. Hollywood Express works by checking that each actor arrives in perfect condition, and, if he doesn't, calling up the home office and requesting that the actor's identical twin be sent instead. If the actors arrive in the wrong order Hollywood Express rearranges them. If a large UFO on its way to Area 51 crashes on the highway in Nevada, rendering it impassable, all the actors that went that way are rerouted via Arizona and Hollywood Express doesn't even tell the movie directors in California what happened. To them, it just looks like the actors are arriving a little bit more slowly than usual, and they never even hear about the UFO crash.

...viaBoingBoing

The Center for Digital Governement has released its 2002 Digital Government Survey. The survey evaluates how states are using technology in the areas of social services, law enforcement and the courts, digital democracy, e-commerce, management and administration, taxation, education, GIS and transportation.

States in the top ten include: Arizona, Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin.

Iowa only appears in the top 25 in the category of Law enforcement and the courts.

WiFI in the Big Apple

A company called Splashpower has developed a 'wireless power' system to recharge your portable devices without cradles and multiplying plugs.

At UCLA, they're using fractals (a matchematical way to model coastlines, mountains and other natural landscapes) to design wireless antennas.

Fractals, short for "fractional dimension," are mathematical models originally used to measure jagged contours such as coastlines. Like a mountain range whose profile appears equally craggy when observed from both far and near, fractals are used to define curves and surfaces, independent of their scale. Any portion of the curve, when enlarged, appears identical to the whole curve — a property known as "self-symmetry."

Using fractals may allow 'more' antenna length to be packed into spaces.

Derrick Story at O'Reilly.net writes about his Top Ten Digital Photography Tips.

Among the items discussed:

• Good outdoor shots
• Buying additional memory cards
• High resolution photos

Movable Type has released Movable Type 2.5

The new version integrates search capability, adds a new default template, and also enhances accesibility.

The City of North Vancouver has an online Graveyard locator.

You can type in a last name, a birthplace and/or a type of burial and the system will list possible matches and locate the burial site on a map.

Exchange emails with a handshake.

Two Japanese companies have developed a technology that turns the human body into a broadband-paced link so that information, like e-mail addresses, can be exchanged through a simple handshake.

My question--how would you turn it off?

According to New Scientist, a team of government funded US scientists are working on a new peer to peer network. The network, dubbed the Infrastructure for Resilient Internet Systems (IRIS), will speed up searches and information transfer over the internet, and aims to foil "Denial of Service" attacks by hackers.

This is particularly interesting in light of efforts by members of the information industry to regulate and, in some cases, shut down peer to peer file sharing.

Movable Type has set up TrackBack at Mac OS X Conference
to aggregate weblog posts from all over that are talking about the Mac OS X conference going on from Monday through Thursday this week.

John Patrick talks about bringing power to the people, where a group of residents have formed a cooperative, specifically, the Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative Association, to bring broadband service to their area.

According to an article at ZDNet, spam is now 36 percent of e-mail traffic

The Web Credibility Project at Stanford University is designed to study what makes people believe the information they find on the web. Based on the research they've conducted so far, the project has published 10 guidelines for web credibility

They include:

• Make it easy to verify your accuracy
• Show that there's a real organization behind your site
• Make it easy to contact you
• Make your site easy to use and useful
• Update often
• Avoid errors

According to Phil Windley's weblog, Utah has a plan for reorganizing IT for the state.

The goal is to increase capacity for developing e-Government intiatives that can cross agency lines and get at information in ways that are useful to the state's residents.

OTC in California is beta testing a plug and play device that will connect any two RS-232 devices together wirelessly.

Radio Free Blogistan has a recent entry comparing Blogger to Radio Userland.

Among the differences:

• The Radio client runs on your desktop computer; the Blogger client is browser-based.

• Radio Userland has a lot of built-in 'ping' functionality (ability to send auto-notices to sites that track new blog updates.

• Blogger provides a 'blog this' shortcut that makes it easy to do a blog entry for the web page you're currently on. Radio doesn't seem to have a similar feature

• Radio Userland makes it very easy to subscribe to syndicated news feeds and to blog entries received this way.

• Blogger is free (though there is also a pay version: Blogger Pro); Radio Userland is $40 per year with a 30 day trial period.

Phil Windley, Chief Infomation Office of the State of Utah, has a weblog.

He has also issued a challenge to his IT staff. He'll pay for the first 50 to 100 IT people who sign up for a weblog. There's a list on his home page of people who've taken him up so far.

Here's an O'Reilly.net column by Andy Oran on The Semantic Web

The concept of the Semantic Web is that, using XML and other technologies, web creators can formally tag text and objects so that automated agents can help us deal with information overload.

But how do we make all that up-front tagging worthwhile? And can tagging, even if it's all done and done excellently, really provide the queues that we, the humans using the system, need?

What we really need is a system that understands how we track and sort and interpret and makes that process simpler and broader.

According to a recent article at vnunet.com the IT workstyle--long hours, lots of deadlines, high stress--may be linked to increased risk for heart attacks.

The article quotes a recent report in Occupational and Environmental Medicince which says that men who work 60 hours or more a week and sleep less than five hours a night at least twice a week, can more than double their chances of having a heart attack.

A recent report by Jupiter Research indicates that many companies are spending too much on online content management systems.

According to the research, businesses without a large Internet presence may be better off looking at low-cost or even home-grown systems.

Understanding the specific needs of your orgnization can help target the right CMS for you. In addition, it's important to keep in mind that deployment, integration and customization can increase the final costs of the CMS system by as much as a factor of 6.

Meg Hourihan, in an essay at O'Reilly.net, tries to get at the essence of the blogger phenomenon.

Weblogs provide a way of organizaing information independent of topic. What weblogs become from that shared structure are myriad and fascinating.

John Grobol at Psych Central has a response to Hourihan's column.

A usability article by Peter Seebach at IBM developerWorks suggests that we ought to pay more attention to video game interfaces when designing programs for business and other everyday users.

Game developers know that their audience will walk if a program is unusable, so they tend to produce programs that are -- compared to most productivity software -- paragons of stability, convenience, and user control. If productivity software developers made the same kind of effort, users would spend a lot less time cursing the names of the vendors they're stuck with.

Among the things Seebach suggests we look to games for are: streamlining, reliability, approachability and adaptability.

Yet another recent article on reading the manual, this time in Wired News.

Company executives and marketing consultants say over half the calls to U.S. tech support address issues that are already discussed in manuals provided with products. And even though they suspect that no one in the United States has ever read an entire product manual, companies continue to provide them because they are legally required to do so.

Simply providing one of course, doesn't guarantee that it's readable or that the information is organized in a way that makes it possible to find what you're looking for. On the other hand, some manuals are surprisingly good and still don't get used as frequently as they might.

In addition, a 'good' manual in the United States might not work at all in, say, Hungary where, according to the article, the assumption is that everything will break and users demand do-it-yourself fixit instructions.

flashforward2002 -the Flash Film Festival has finalists in the following categories:

• Application
• Art
• Cartoon
• Commercial
• Experimental
• Game
• Information Graphics
• Navigation
• Original Sound
• Story
• Technical Merit
• Typography
• 3D
• Video

If you're looking for examples of what Flash can do, you might want to check it out.

Lucent, Qwest, XO Communications...the list of telecom companies with cash-flo, sales and customer problems just grows and grows.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, 24 of the nation's 29 top telecom companies that haven't file for bankruptcy recently are in danger of doing so soon.

According to an article at vnunet, the following are the top 10 reasons reported to and insurance company in England for why their laptop was no longer working:

1. Dropped off a bridge into a river
2. Dropped iron on screen
3. Dog chewed through cable
4. Reversed over by car
5. Spilt milkshake on keyboard
6. Left on car roof and dropped off
7. Fell down stairs
8. Water damage in hotel in Zambia
9. Book dropped on keyboard
10. Fell out of van

Here's a table of blogging tools and available features. Tools include: Blogger, Blogger Pro, Radio Userland, Grey Matter, Movable Type and others.

A recent article at vnunet.com cites a study from the University of Arizona, which says that the average work station has 400 times more bacteria on its surface than the average toilet.

Findability, according to an article called, The Age of Findability, by Peter Morville in Boxes and Arrows, is about designing systems that help people find what they need.

...a recent study by Vividence Research found poorly organized search results and poor information architecture design to be the two most common and serious usability problems.

In the past we haven't paid much attention to findability, but as sites get bigger, the nature of the information we're looking for gets more complex, and more interaction and our reliance on web-based information and large data systems increases, it will become more and more important to be able to quickly and accurately locate what we need.

Fossil has a wrist PDA. It can store addresses, dates, and to do lists downloaded from your handheld. Currently compatible with the Palm OS, a pocket PC/iPAQ version is in the works.

What makes websites work for children?

According to a Jakob Nielsen usability study, many of the same things that make them work for adults. Children are as easily confused by poorly designed websites as adults. In addition, they tend to view ads as content, like colorful designs, and respond favorably to simple text and narration.

The study was done with 55 children ranging in age from 6 to 12.

Want to know what was what and when was when?

Go to the Intel Microprocessor Hall of Fame. It lists all Intel's microprocessors from the 4004 released in 1971, Intel's first microprocessor to the Intel Itanium.

Is Anti-Virus Software Obsolete?

In an April 1, 2002 article at Security Focus Online, Paul Schmehl says 'yes.' Unfortunately, there's no good replacement for it--so don't throw away your virus-scanning software.

To be effective, virus scanning programs require constant updating. In addition, it's an essential part of their nature that they continually run the risk of disrupting your system.

So what's the answer? One possibility is behavioral blocking which detects viruses according to what they try to do.

Virtual keyboards let you type in air

Several companies are currently working on systems that will let you enter data on a handheld or other device without having to haul along a clunky keyboard everywhere you go. Devices currently either track muscle movements or angular movements of your fingers. The devices still have a ways to go before they're small and unobstrusive enough to be practical.

According to Carol Righi, PhD, user-centered design can be understood to include both art and science. Science exists in gathering market intelligence, user characteristics, wants and needs, tasks and feedback. But there is art in the process of creating an elegant design and in the different solutions different developers envision.

So how does the process move from science to art? Often, the team comes up with a 'subsumer,' a high-level entity that incorporates all the constituent requirements.

Things that facilitate design:

• Multidisciplinary teamwork
  
• Creativity
  
• Faciliity with data interpretation
  
• Familiarity with existing solutions
  
• Experience with User-Centered Design
  Posted by dcoates at 10:33 AM

Content Management for the Masses

There's an interesting article at Lighthouse on the Web about Fog Creek's CityDesk, a content management package that costs less than $350.

It only runs in Windows, has no workflow management, produces static pages and can't create valid XHTML. But it's also quick, easy to use and stores information as Access database files so upgrading later to a different program would be viable.

In a recent article in Technology Review called, The Internet Amenity, Simson Garfinkel says that wireless Internet service is cheap (no wires to run, not a lot of central equipment). What makes it expensive for a business to provide is the overhead--credit-card billing, technical support, security.

Open community wireless networks don't needs these services and some organizations (schools, universities, businesses) have decided it's easier, friendlier, and possibly cheaper in the long run to have an open network.

Computer scientists push to publish code powering genetic research

Open source versus protected code is an on-going debate in the software community. The conversation takes on another layer of complexity when the code is produced at a public university.

On the open source side, is the increased opportunity for collaboration, resource-sharing, and problem-solving. On the protected source side is concern for valuable trade secrets. Other issues include professional respect, federal funding, academic freedom, and public private partnerships.

The Internet was simple. Now, according to Bob Frankston in an article called, The Internet is Missing, it's complicated.

To make it simple again, he says we need to return to the basics: connectivity, 'real' addressing, encryption, and address stability.

UCD for different project types

User-centered design doesn't just apply when writing brand-new applications. It's actually important in each of the following types of projects:

New Applications Evolution of Existing Applications Rewriting the User Interface Selecting a Vendor Application

Among the core activities for ensuring a good, usable human-computer interface are: Audience definition, Task Analysis, Iterative Design, and Usability Validation Tests. User design should be considered through all stages of development including Requirements and Analysis, Design and Development, System Testing.

The second part of the article includes specific ways these activities can be applied to the four different types of projects listed above.

The webdesign firm, 37signals redesigned FedEx's current shipping form keeping in mind simplicity, how people look at information, and what you need to know and do when you're shipping packages.

The redesign provides an interesting compare and contrast, a look at what works, what doesn't and how sometimes simple changes make a world of difference.

37signals is also the home of the 37signals Manifesto.

Empty Pringles cans are being used as directional antennas for finding unprotected wireless networks.

According to a recent article at BBC New's Sci/Tech site, security company i-sec managed to find 60 wireless networks in one 30 minute drive using a Pringles can and a laptop computer.

Lighthouse on the Web says: Broadband Internet is Dead
Not, author David Walker, hastens to add, the technology of Broadband--cable and DSL, etc.--but the idea that broadband capability will make the Internet into something different.

A Jupiter Media Metrix study found that what's popular with broadband users is same old boring email, instant messaging and Web browsing that dial-up users use - plus security programs to block outside infiltration of users' PCs through those always-on broadband connections.

Essentially, says, Walker, broadband Internet users like the Internet as it is. They just want to use it anytime and faster.

An article at the 13th Parallel website, discusses ways to set up your content, use style sheets, and add behavior controls for different browsers to maximize the usability and accessibility of a site.

The basic steps:

1. Write your content
   
2. Implement the W3C standards
   
3. Define the appearance of the pages
   
4. Apply behaviors
   
5. Test for accessibility

One goal is to have the pages degrade gracefully when someone visits using an older or non-compliant browser. For a good example of this in practice, visit the 13th parallel article in IE5 and in Netscape 4.7.

...it's a useful article, BTW, even if they can't manage to spell 'separate' correctly.

Look what won the SXSW Web Competition.

That's right...it's Deep, Fried, Live!

What features do the top ten sites on the Web have in common?

According to an article called, Top Ten Web Sites Compared, at the Web Developers Virtual Library, Verdana is the most popular font, white is the most popular background color, and blue is the most common color scheme. The main page is on average 35 to 45K, plus graphcs, external Javascript, and CSS files.

Sites considered:

1. AOL
2. Yahoo
3. MSN
4. eBay
5. Disney
6. Google
7. Microsoft
8. Amazon
9. Lycos
10. About
    Posted by dcoates at 08:14 AM

The Iceberg Secret, Revisited is an article by Joel Spolsky on why developers and users sometimes seem to be speaking different languages.

So, what's the secret? This:

You know how an iceberg is 90% underwater? Well, most software is like that too -- there's a pretty user interface that takes about 10% of the work, and then 90% of the programming work is under the covers. And if you take into account the fact that about half of your time is spent fixing bugs, the UI only takes 5% of the work. And if you limit yourself to the visual part of the UI, the pixels, what you would see in PowerPoint, now we're talking less than 1%.

That's not the secret. The secret is that People Who Aren't Programmers Do Not Understand This.

If the product is unfinished, says Joel, make sure it looks unfinished to the users. If you show them a user interface that's 90% finished when the underlying mechanisms are only 20% finished, they'll be unhappy at how long it takes to get the final product.

A list of features to look for when evaluating Content Management systems.

Categories include:

1. Content Integration and Versioning
   
2. Workflow
   
3. Data Repository
   
4. User Management
   
5. User Interface
   
6. Applications
   
7. Deployment
   
   Posted by dcoates at 09:23 AM

According to a report from Step Two Designs, the most important thing to consider when evaluating Content Management Systems (CMS) is what organizational goals will be achieved by adopting the system. A clear understanding of what goals will be met helps you to evaluate different systems and to evaluate your success down the road.

Once you're clear on your goals, you will need to define the requirements of the system:

• Include all stakeholders
  
• Structure your requirements. Categories might include: creation, management, publishing, presentation
  
• Identify key requirements in each category

Before you get too far down the road on determining requirements, you should be sure you understand what content you're producing and what its purpose is.

The total cost of running a CMS includes the skills and resources needed, not just the initial dollar outlay for the CMS software.

If you've been thinking that the new iMac is ugly or you never really liked the look of the original orange iBooks....well, you haven't sufficiently considered the possibilities.

Intel has an ongoing project called Concept PC, part of their Ease of Use initiative.

Take a look. It's. . .interesting.

Web designers spend a large amount of their time trying to figure out simple, intuitive ways for people who come to their web site to find information quickly and easily.

Relevare has developed a system that they're calling an 'iconic interface.' You can see it on Relevare's own site as a set of increasingly smaller boxes all nested within biger and bigger boxes. Clicking on any of the boxes zips you graphically to that information. The icons zoom in and out using Flash technology.

It's an interesting way to represent the layout of the web site, but it can also be vertigo-inducing if you look too long at the graphics as they zoom in and out.

The Relevare site itself isn't quite as vertigo-inducing as the Rowing Vortal.

Check it out.

Estimates are that 95% of the fiber optics cable laid in the 1990s is 'dark,' that is, not currently being used to transmit voice and data. Most companies that lay fiber--predominantly telecommunications companies, tend to overbuild. Laying fiber involves digging up streets and parking lots. It affects the entire community and impacts businesses that may or may not ever benefit from the fiber itself. In addition, most companies have discovered that after investing huge amounts of money in laying the fiber optics cable they have no affordable solutions for going the 'last mile' and actually making the connection in people's homes and businesses.

"There's a lot of dark fiber out there that may not ever be lit," says Barry Moore, sales manager of Sprint's Seattle branch. Like most telecom companies, Sprint won't disclose how much of its Seattle network is in use.

CNN.com Asia's Sci-Tech section proposes the following list of 20 trends and technologies that they believe will have a significant impact on personal computing in the coming year:

1. 400 Gigabyte Hard Drives
2. 1 GigaHertz PDA's
3. Organic Light-emitting Diode (OLED) screens
4. Next-generation instant messaging
5. 802.11 wireless networks
6. Extensible Markup Language (XML)
7. Hyper-threading
8. Arapahoe: 3 Gigabyte Input/Output bus
9. Peer-to-peer networking
10. TFT computers (computers that fit on a pane of glass)
11. Magnetic RAM (retains data with the power off)
12. Presence Technology
13. Fuel cells for portable devices
14. Distributed computing
15. Voice Portals
16. Electronic Wallet (single storage for personal and financial data)
17. New cell phone network
18. 10 Gigahertz and up processors
19. Bigger, better digital cameras
20. Serial ATA storage (faster interface for disk drives)

CNN doesn't claim that all this technology will be readily available in 2002. Some of it will be released, some is still in the prototype testing area. All of it will be talked about, designed for, promised to consumers in the weeks and months to come.

According to a 1999 report by the National Safety Council, 53 million computers are expected to become obsolete; 80 percent will go directly to landfills, some will be recycled and many of the remaining machines will be donated to charities.

However, as the numbers donated to charties increase, so do the headaches since many of these machines are too old, don't work, and have no operating system. Accepting equipment that can't be used simply raises the cost for the organization as they have to find a way to recycle the equipment and still get the hardware and software that's needed to run the organization.
...from Charities Say No to Obsolete Crap in Wired News

The latest issue of InfoWorld (January 7, 2002) discusses a number of new technologies that are likely to reshape computing in the upcoming year.

'Disruptive technologies' are those technologies that are not quite ready for universal adoption, but which have the potential to completely change business and IT strategies. Often these are technologies that aren't yet robust, don't have a clear practical application and might be characterized by some as 'just a lot of talk.' But they are also technologies that as they mature and gain momentum will lay a foundation for new business models. Personal computers, the Internet, and cell phones are examples of technologies that were disruptive in their time.

InfoWorld lists the following as disruptive technologies to keep an eye on:

• Web services
• Microsoft.net and C#
• Peer-to-peer collaboration
• Serial ATA and Internet SCSI
• Benevolent Worms
• Instant Messaging
• 802.11 Wireless Networks
• 2G Handhelds
  Posted by dcoates at 08:37 AM