My Personal Infocloud
So
You can just hear it now: Is that a couple of gigabytes in your pocket or are you just happy to see me!?
This is an interesting take on flash drives: the more data that you put on the drive the more it puffs up. Not sure how practical this is, but it is definitely a novel indicator of free space on a storage device.
technorati tags: flashdrive, visualization, fun, humor, ideas
So
I was a little surprised at how little coverage there has been of the RedHat acquisition of JBoss — could it be acquisition fatigue or general disinterest. The latter is a little hard to believe considering that both parties have at some point been the darling (or bane) of the open source community/movement. With the general love/hate relationship with RedHat, I'm not sure that having the bombastic Marc Fleury on the roster is going to be much more than a liability.
This blog post over at zdnet was one of the better I saw on the merger.
technorati tags: redhat, jboss, opensource, merger
So
Earlier in the week, the Guardian had a great article titled Spread the word, and join it up. It covers some of the usual ground about how HTTP was about presentation and the semantic web is about Data and serves as a good introduction to the topic.
What some of the later comments in the article got me thinking about was how the forces behind the growth of the web and the adoption of open source may (finally) be driving factors behind the growth of more semantic content on the web. The web, I think, really changed the thinking in most corporations in that it became 'okay' to share without having to control the sharing.
Open source changed the way that corporations and individuals thought about collaboration and product development. Adopt some time tested code into your own (internal) project and be that much further ahead in the development cycle. Contribute some code or even an entire project to the open source community and (based on the merit of the code or product) see it take on a new life and grow in ways that the originator never imagined.
Stir in the relatively recent development of products and even companies having APIs (web 2.0?) that allow users to combine them in new and creative ways and you have a pretty interesting environment for your data, which, after all, is what the semantic web is all about.
Now, get your data 'out there' in RDF and see what creative linkages and constructions that can be crafted on the web. In some cases, I can see this having a real multiplying effect — as more and more quality data is available in a machineable format the value increases — much like the network effect that was seen with fax machines. While the fax network effect was strictly about point to point communication, the semantic web impact will be in bringing together diverse data sources in new ways and creating new value in the combinations.
technorati tags: semanticweb, rdf, opensource, ideas, guardian
So
Yafla has an interesting and amusing analysis of registered internet domain names and some of the characteristics they exhibit:
If you want one of the 676 possible two-letter sequences, for instance for an acronym or abbreviation, you're out of luck: They're all taken. Even allowing for digits, giving 1296 combinations, again every single variation is taken.
Of course, that's ignoring the fact that .COM registrars now mandate a 3-character minimum length, so it wouldn't be an option anyways.
Of the 17,576 possible three-letter sequences, again every single one is already taken. Adding digits to the mix (note that I'm intentionally ignoring obtuse dashes for such short domain names, though technically they are legal from the second character onwards), giving 46,656 permutations, yields a larger number of garbage domain entries (either REGISTRAR-LOCKED, REDEMPTIONPERIOD, or with no nameservers), giving a false hope of 228 seemingly open domains, yet they aren't actually available.
technorati tags: dns, domainnames, speculation, fun
So
Rather than use the awkwardly warped (and many times unreadable-to-humans) CAPTCHAs there is some work at presenting a matrix of photographic images and asking the (presumed) human viewer to pick out three of a kind. The first place I saw this was KittenAuth on thepcspy.
So
It's that time of year when the clocks leap forward by one hour in North America. I find it amazing that so few companies make it easy for consumer goods to deal with this twice yearly event. Why don't alarm clocks, microwaves, etc just deal with the time change? No, Really.
The irony is that I can go to Target and buy a $12USD digital watch that can automatically adjust to seasonal time changes, but the sorry clock in my $XX,000 car can't make the same adjustment? Seems odd to me; I can't believe that more products can't incorporate that two cent component and a simple way to say what timezone you are in to free consumers from having to manually make these changes.
technorati tags: time, clocks, products, timechange
So
I just stumbled across WW2D, which is a Java-based application that allows you to view and zoom through publicly available map data much like Google Earth does. Granted, it's not as polished as GE, but does provide much of the same functionality. One big plus, is that you can export a give image location once you locate it (you can't do this without handing a wad of cash to Google in GE).
I like that WW2D has quite a few user configurable layers, so that I can overlay the satellite image with the USGS Topo Maps for a given view. In fact, the image accompanying this post is a Topo of my neck of the woods.
Another cool thing is that, since it is a Java app, it can run on multiple platforms (Mac, Linux, Unix, Windows) with the same code base. I'm not sure when other application vendors are going to clue into the power (and portability) of Java for these types of applications. I would even say that if a startup requires a desktop component and it is not written in Java, then they really don't get it.
technorati tags: maps, topo, googleearth, java, satellite
So
I've been thinking about all of the places that 'allow' customers to do the data entry tasks for them with little in the way of reward back to the customer. Think about it, you get to key in all the information for your airline reservation, but what do you get in return (ok, maybe a discount, but hear me out)? What I would like to see happen is that more online companies provide value added information in return.
For example, when I make an airline reservation, why can't the airline shoot me an iCalendar with all of the departure/arrival information that I can drop into my calendar? If I order some merchandise from an online vendor like Apple that requires a signature on arrival, why not provide me (again) with an iCalendar that I can easily add to my calendar so I can make sure someone is available to sign for the delivery? You would think that the delivery companies (UPS/DHL/FedEx) would be all over this as it saves them the time/effort/fuel associated with re-delivery. For that matter, why not give me an Atom/RSS feed that allows me to easily track the package. Once the package is delivered, they can trash the feed URL. Actually, the same would be cool for the airline example as well.
This isn't such a leap — many banks allow you to get your transaction information in a format (QIF) that you can easily import into Quicken; why not for the more mundane stuff as well?
But the thing that would really make this work, is to craft the value added data so that it would work with mobile devices. That way I don't need to be tied to a feedreader or calendar that is on my desktop computer, I can be anywhere. This is obviously important for the air travel scenario. Perhaps part of the problem gets solved by having a feed reader that can send SMS messages based on certain feeds changing (like my flight schedule). You can sort of make that work now with Yahoo alerts, but a more integrated solution would be preferable.
One last thought: perhaps an interim method of bridging the data gap is to provide the scheduling information in a microformat like hCalendar and embed it in the confirmation/receipt screen (HTML) that is typically provided by a web site. It could then be mined out with PiggyBank or some other GRDDL-like scraper. Not perfect, but at least avoids the re-keying that is required now.
technorati tags: rss, atom, icalendar, mobilecomputing, ideas