My Personal Infocloud
So
My recent sniglet creations:
Solutionating: Combination of solution and hallucinating. What vendors and software designers do when they convince themselves that their product (solution) does something that it absolutely does not.
Annausysis: Combination of analysis and nausea. That feeling you get during your analysis that tells you just how screwed up something is. Frequently accompanies solutionating.
So
Finally had a chance to try out the Genius function in iTunes. In a word: unimpressed.
Here is Apple's breathless description of Genius Sidebar:
While you reacquaint yourself with the music you already own, let Genius introduce you to new music you’ll love. As you select songs in your library, the Genius sidebar displays songs from the iTunes Store that go great with it. The Genius sidebar won’t recommend songs already in your library, and you can preview and buy recommended songs directly from the sidebar.
In my experience, not quite. Granted my rather eclectic set of music in iTunes gives a wide berth to what passes for American pop music, it is not like it is all way-out exotic stuff. Genius seems to think so. For I would say better than half of the music tracks that I clicked on, Genius came back with 'I got nothin', but here is the tired old crap that everyone else is listening to...' displaying the top selling tracks and albums in the iTunes store. Great, not interested in being homogenized like the rest of the herd.
It also frequently falls into the trap that Amazon recommendations does, that of assuming that you are a moron. For example, if you buy a CD by, say, David Bowie, Amazon proceeds to recommend every single CD that David Bowie has ever made, whether the style of it is even close to the original CD. It's as if Amazon (and Apple) are saying: 'You found that first CD, but your probably not smart enough to find all the other stuff by the same artist by using our search function, so here they are for you, nitwit'. Not helpful at all.
The Genius Playlist function does a slightly better job than the sidebar, but I still get plenty of “Genius is unavailable for the song “.
I suppose it can only get better as more and more info gets fed into Apple's hungry servers over time. We shall see...
So
Over two years ago, I posted about the idea of marrying an accelerometer and the iPod to be able to shuffle iPod tunes and otherwise control it. I guess Apple thought it was such a good idea that they stole it and implemented it in the new iPods announced today.
So where is my money, Apple? :)
Technorati Tags: apple, ideas, ingenuity, innovation, ipod
So
Haven't been posting much lately because things have been crazy-busy on all fronts. Plus, I have been trying to resist the temptation to blog about all of the political insanity and the ridiculous press coverage (or lack thereof). Leave it to Jon Stewart to knock this out of the park once again. It 'tis a thing of beauty to expose the Republican perfidy and hypocrisy in their own words and actions. Behold:
So
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.
Technorati Tags: browser, chrome, firefox, flock, google, innovation, mozilla, ubiquity
So
There is a great (and free!) Aperture Plugin that allows you to add or update the GPS data in your digital images called Maperture.
Technorati Tags: aperture, apple, google, googlemaps, photography, software
So
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
So
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
So
Here you have it yet another eye candy time waster. I warned you.
So
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.
Technorati Tags: software, svg, sun, technology, webdev