moebius recursive

I has been an interesting week for some much needed innovation in the web browsing space. First up was the introduction of Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs. This is a very interesting idea and surprisingly functional considering it is a .1 release. Sort of reminds me of QuickSliver on OSX, except targeted for Firefox.

Today comes word of Google’s Chrome browser that among other things, gives each tab its own process so that an errant tab can’t take the entire browser down (I’m looking at you gratuitous, Flash-encrusted sites).

I hold out more hope for these that the Titanicly overhyped and ultimately underwhelming Flock collection of plugins browser from a few years ago.

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browser, chrome, firefox, flock, google, innovation, mozilla, ubiquity

There is a great (and free!) Aperture Plugin that allows you to add or update the GPS data in your digital images called Maperture.

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aperture, apple, google, googlemaps, photography, software

Lively Kernel is another one of these technologies from Sun that is tantalizingly cool, but hopelessly unfinished enough that you really can’t commit to develop against it in a non-trivial way. Having it only work properly in Safari pretty much dooms it to obscurity. It is supposed to work in Firefox, but for me it only displays about the top two inches of the demo and that is it.

I think one of coolest features of all is that it is SVG-based under the covers. I think that SVG is a real sleeper technology that is going to emerge as an extremely powerful way of getting scalable user interfaces that go from mobile to desktop (and beyond).

Intro from Sun’s site:

The Sun Labs Lively Kernel is a new web programming environment developed at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. The Lively Kernel supports desktop-style applications with rich graphics and direct manipulation capabilities, but without the installation or upgrade hassles that conventional desktop applications have. The system is written entirely in the JavaScript programming language, a language supported by all the web browsers, with the intent that the system can run in commercial web browsers without installation or any plug-in components. The system leverages the dynamic characteristics of the JavaScript language to make it possible to create, modify and deploy applications on the fly, using tools built into the system itself. In addition to its application execution capabilities, the Lively Kernel can also function as an integrated development environment (IDE), making the whole system self-sufficient and able to improve and extend itself dynamically.

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software, svg, sun, technology, webdev

Here you have it yet another eye candy time waster. I warned you.

Technorati Tags:
fun, webdev

This Wired headline The Lagoons of Titan: Oily Liquid Confirmed on Saturn Moon made my twisted mind think of two possible immediate reactions:

1) Republicans push for a mission to Titan to begin drilling and extraction

2) Some late night infomercial claiming that they could even get a Titan-esque’oily liquid’ stain out of clothing

Technorati Tags:
dubious, fun, humor

I loved this blog post title Experience should guide, not constrain. Basically the point of the post was a recasting of the old cliche about ‘when all you have is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail’.

What the post really made be think about was the importance of having a breadth of experience in technology as well as depth in a few areas, especially if you are (or aspire to be) an enterprise architect. I personally have been lucky enough to work as a software developer, database administrator, network engineer, project manager and tech lead over my 20+ year career. I feel that each of these has helped me as an architect to bring all of that experience to bear on current issues and plans. Consider trade offs and side effects.

The converse of this is the puzzling phenomenon I have seen where people who only know Microsoft technologies declare themselves to be ‘enterprise architects’ when in fact they are little more than one-note technologist. This is particularly laughable in enterprises that aren’t 100% MS technology. These EAs probably only have about 5% of the picture — have they lost track of what the ‘enterprise’ really is. So it is no wonder that the way they ‘fix’ a problem is by insisting that it move onto the MS platform (which is my experience is usually the wrong answer).

So in technology as in life, grow what you know, keep learning and try new things.

Technorati Tags:
architecture, enterprisearchitecture, ideas

Keep this in mind when you hear the often repeated falsehood that the reason why the price at the pump is soaring is because of increased demand from China and India. Maybe a factor, but perhaps we should address the fact that the state of California uses more gasoline and diesel than China. That’s right, California has ~2.8% of China’s population but manages to consume more that an entire country of 1.3 billion.

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badideas, energy, ideas, propaganda

Who is surprised that the Bush Regime was feeding political talking points to Fox News? No one who was paying the least bit of attention.

And thanks to our impotent press in the US, they are only now (7+ years after the fact) starting to report on the growing, festering pit of scandal and illegal activity of the W regime.

Still to come: the swift-boating of Barack Obama and whatever October surprise the republicans have planned (martial law? attack on Iran?).

Technorati Tags:
dubious, politics, press, propaganda, suckage

Yahoo Shopping is a flippin’ joke — apparently their motto is ‘we don’t have a clue and we don’t give a crap’.

Over the weekend, I came across an item that I was looking for that was sold by a ‘Yahoo endorsed’ online vendor. I called their customer support number, only to find that it was disconnected. I called the ‘24 hour customer support number’ only to find it was the mobile phone number of a rather irate woman who disavowed any knowledge of the web site. Not looking good. I even tried to place a order for a token item just to see what would happen. Predictably, I received a message back from Yahoo about an ‘invalid merchant’ when I submitted the order.

Trying to be a good Internet citizen, I then sent an email to Yahoo pointing out that I was unable to get in contact with the vendor and it looked as if the web store was, in fact, defunct and asked them to confirm the status of the merchant. After all, you would think that they would be interested in weeding out dead sites to maintain some semblance of trustworthiness. Apparently not. Here is the response I got back:

Hello Rich,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Shopping.

Yahoo! Shopping is an online service that helps you find products you
want from a variety of merchants with online stores.

If you have a suggestion, request, or question for a particular merchant
featured in Yahoo! Shopping, you should contact the merchant directly.

Regarding your request, please direct all suggestions, requests and
questions to the merchant directly. At the stores web site, you can
find contact information in links such as “Info” or “About Us”.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Shopping.

Regards,

Theo

Yahoo! Customer Care

[Emphasis added] So the solution to my issue of not being able to contact the vendor is to (wait for it) contact the vendor directly. So either the person who responded to this request doesn’t even possess a fundamental grasp of the English language or they simply don’t give a wank. I can only imagine the round and round I would have to go through if I ordered something from an endorsed vendor and had an issue. No thanks.

Here endith my first and last attempt to do business with a Yahoo endorsed vendor (or Yahoo for that matter). You have been warned: any shop you encounter under *.stores.yahoo.net is suspect and you should find a safer alternative. Yahoo, everything about you sucks. That is why your bloated, Flash-encrusted carcass is overdo at the dot-com dead pool and will no doubt arrive shortly after Microsoft acquires and then kills you off.

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badideas, buyerbeware, crap, defective, dubious, suckage, yahoo

Who would have thought that the basic principles of loose-coupling, consistent interfaces and reuse would result in the developers doing less ‘grunt work’. Me for one.

“Doing an analysis of production support issues,” he said, “I was really amazed to find more than half the time they were working on issues relating to transactions between applications in this point-to-point environment.”

Point-to-point EAI connections caused unique problems because there was no consistency in the way integration was being done. That made it time consuming to maintain.

“Sixty percent of the time our application team was working to keep the spaghetti wet, to maintain the point-to-point contacts,” Kelly said.

Starting last fall, implementation of an SOA approach based on the webMethods Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) from Software AG has greatly reduced the maintenance tasks that kept developers from developing new applications, the CIO said.

“By moving to a robust messaging bus I could have robust interaction between applications and reuse services over and over and over for transactions between applications as well as moving data,” he said. “That greatly reduced the production support activities.”

Without an SOA environment such maintenance is a major cost for IT, Kelly said. Creating a point-to-point connection for a specific integration may at first appear to be a quick way to deal with an individual problem, but in the long term having the development staff spending the majority of their time on production support is not cost effective, he said.

Prior to the ESB implementation, the application team was spending 64 percent of its time on support issues and 36 percent of its time on value-added development.

“What’s happening now is those percentages are reversed,” Kelly said. “I’m finding now that 64 percent of the time my applications team is working on development and 36 percent of their time is spent on production support activities.”

Technorati Tags:
architecture, design, esb, enterprisearchitecture, soa, software, technology, webservices

Once again, The Onion knocks it out of the ballpark: Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency. We’ll never see anything like this from the ‘accountability president‘.

Technorati Tags:
fun, humor, politics, video

This puff piece over on Slate (Get Your Motor Runnin’) leaves me shaking my head. ‘So, are you tired of pumping $4+ gas into you Hummer? Then the ’solution’ is to go out and buy the largest, most fuel inefficient motorcycle that you can afford’. Yeah, that’s the ticket! Idiot. Apparently, anything under 650cc is ‘less-ambitious’.

My own experience is that a 250cc Vespa scooter is more than enough for commuting to/from work and running errand around town. My scoot will do over 70 MPH, it rarely sees 50. I am not planning on driving across the country or entering a race. Why would I ‘need’ anything more?

Knucklehead even recommends a big bike for city dwellers overlooking the fact that a smaller, more nimble scooter would do better in city traffic, city hazards and parking. Overall, scooters get short shift in the article that is nominally supposed to be about fuel efficiency, but instead points the reader at the ‘bigger is better, more expensive is better’ right wing dream.

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crap, dubious, economy, peakoil, scootering

If you can abide the annoying gratuitous flash interface, there is some interesting stuff you can get a glimpse of on the web site for the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit that recently wrapped up at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Technorati Tags:
creativity, ideas, moma

92 More Must See Creative Photographs

While many of these are digital images (aka Photoslop creations) rather than photographs (actual image captures), there is definitely loads of creative thought going into most of them.

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creativity, digitalimaging, fun, photography

Like you need another reason to buy and consume chocolate — now you can have your photos printed onto M&Ms. Strictly for medicinal purposes, mind you.

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candy, fun, M&M, photography, printers

Or so the famously non-oil and electricity consuming Amish in Ohio are discovering.

It is also notable that they are reluctant to pass the increased costs onto their customers.

“I feel embarrassed to raise prices,” he said.

Bread at his market just went up 25 cents a loaf.

But the price of flour - based on increasingly expensive wheat and raised, harvested and milled by gas-guzzling machines - has nearly doubled.

“I can’t justify raising it more than a quarter,” Miller said. “We’ll just have to get by.”

Getting by goes hand-in-hand with the legendary self-sufficiency of the Amish.

You’re doing a great job, Georgie.

Technorati Tags:
amish, inflation, oil, economy

After talking about it for over a year, I finally bought a scooter to commute to work and run errands around town whilst leaving the car at home. I have never ridden before, so I am in the process of practicing and studying to get my motorcycle endorsement. I am absolutely focused on safety first; hell, I bought my helmet before I bought the scooter. Now that I am studying up on safe driving, it is hard not to cringe watching people on full size motorcycles driving too fast, with no helmet or protective gear weaving in and out of traffic.

With gas prices hovering around $4USD a gallon I am noticing motorcycle ridership going up and have seen probably a dozen or more stories in the national and local press about scooter dealers selling out of their inventory. I think this is going to mean two things: 1) there are unfortunately going to be more accidents with inexperienced riders getting into trouble with less than attentive car drivers and 2) a buyers market for scooters in the autumn when those scooter purchasers realize that they can’t drive down the road with their radio blasting, texting/talking on a cellphone on a scooter (not and live).

If you are considering making the jump to scootering, make sure you read up on the safety and proper handling aspects of motor cycling first. This will help you understand the requirements (maybe even the ‘dedication’) it takes to become a successful rider. If you are the reading sort, I highly recommend David Hough’s book Proficient Motorcycling and the resources at msf-org.

Technorati Tags:
scootering, safety, peakoil

I find the rampant speculation over the presumed announcement of a new iPhone at WWDC tomorrow to be a bit much. Particularly since most of the ‘new’ features have existed in Nokia phones (like the N95) for years. GPS? 3G? HSDPA? Video conferencing? New? No, available on the Nokia N95 for a while now.

I think the iPhone is largely fueled by the ‘me to’ set. The ones who couldn’t understand why I bought one of the first iPods (’why would you need to carry around that much music?’) but slowly succumbed when the iPod became ‘cool’. Brilliant marketing by Apple. Now they have a captive market waiting for the iPhone so that they don’t miss out on ‘the next cool thing’.

Don’t get me wrong, I have been a fan (and user) of Apple products for a long time. It’s just that the iPhone isn’t really compelling for me largely because I got used to the robust features of the Nokia like of smart phones. When my trusty 6620 was stolen, I replaced it with an N75. This was about 6 months before the iPhone launched. I loved to point out that (outside of the gimmicky iPhone interface) my N75 did everything that the iPhone did (and in many ways better). Plus I could download and use a rich set of Symbian and Java based applications. I could pair the N75 with a tiny Bluetooth-based GPS to get better location info in Google and Nokia Maps applications.

After a year I had an opportunity to buy a fully unlocked and warranted N95 8GB on Amazon for a great price. I jumped on it. One of the first comments I got from my iPhone toting friends were ‘I see you got a new phone and why isn’t it an iPhone?’ and ‘you know there is a new iPhone coming out, why didn’t you wait to buy one of those?’ Because I wanted a real smartphone; heck with the N95 its more like a mobile multimedia computer. I could move all the apps over from my N95, download a few that take advantage of the accelerometer in the N95 and upgrade to take advantage of the more powerful capabilities of the N95.

Sorry, Apple. When it comes to mobile computing, I am more about function and flexibility rather than fashion.

Technorati Tags:
apple, cellphones, gadgets, iphone, mobile, n75, n95, nokia, nseries, symbian

Not sure that I understand what is supposed to be so wonderful about flock. To me it seems to be taking users back to the days of the ‘walled garden’ days of the AOL application that lulled/forced users into using it for all of their email, browsing and content instead of just using a browser directly.

I also have a big problem with all of that personal data aggregation being tied to running the flock browser. Why not use one of the many (and growing) number of web-based tools to aggregate your ‘personal infocloud‘ so that it is available everywhere you are (including from mobile devices).

Technorati Tags:
aol, dubious, flock, ideas

Rising transportation costs are making a significant dent into the advantages that low cost suppliers once enjoyed:

Tom Friedman wrote “The World is Flat”, suggesting that globalization had leveled the playing field between industrial and emerging countries. Jeff Rubin of CIBC World Markets suggests that this is perhaps changing because of the cost of fuel.

The cost of shipping a 40 foot container from Shanghai to the east coast of North America has gone from $3,000 in 2000 to $8,000 because of the cost of fuel, and for many products, the Asian cost advantage has virtually disappeared.

Maybe the end result of this will be foreign companies opening up plants in the US (much as the Japanese have done with auto manufacture) to largely escape the sea-based shipping costs altogether.

Technorati Tags:
flatearth, ideas, oil