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Doug 1:08 am on November 25, 2002 | 0 | # |
Tags: computing

Beyond hacking PHP and RSS this weekend, here’s some of the other stuff I’m playing with:

Wacom Graphire2 graphics tablet. The local Apple store was having a sale on some items this weekend, including a small pile of these tablets. Since my old, serial Wacom tablet won’t work with OS X, I’d been coveting one of these. When we saw they were on sale, Terri graciously consented to allow me to add one to my ever-growing stock of peripherals.

Overall, it’s a nice tablet for the price. In the few hours I’ve played with it every thing seems to work well; the pen is what I’d expect and the cordless mouse actually works pretty well once the Wacom drivers are installed. I don’t use a tablet all that much, but they’re nice to have for those occasions I do need one. The Graphire2 is inexpensive enough for a casual user like me, but has enough features that it isn’t frustrating to use like some of the other budget tablets are.

Inkwell. Now that I have the tablet, I had to give Apple’s Inkwell handwriting recognition software a try. On a graphics tablet attached to a notebook, this software isn’t going to give the new tablet PC’s any fits, that’s for sure. After messing with it for about an hour I’d managed to train myself to be fairly accurate with the recognition, but it’s clear this isn’t intended as a means of extended text input.

Having said that, Inkwell’s recognition is actually pretty decent. In situations where you’re already using the tablet and you need to do some quick text input, it could be workable and a potential time-saver. Inkwell’s sketching function strikes me as more useful; the ability to include a quick sketch in an e-mail, note or document could be extremely useful. If your expectation of Inkwell is that it will turn your system into a pen-based computer you’ll be disappointed, but if you see it as a means of easily inserting sketches or short text phrases into documents and notes, it works pretty well.

Mariner Write. AppleWorks is starting to really get on my nerves for the limited amount of word processing I do. The interface is clunky and crufty and still looks like something out of OS 9 rather than Aqua. There’s no way I’m going to shell out $500 for Office, though; I just don’t do enough with office applications to justify the expense, and I don’t want the bloat.

I started looking around at alternatives this weekend, and the sad fact is that there’s very little available. The most promising alternatives are the OpenOffice.org OS X port and the new Nisus Writer for OS X, neither of which are actually available yet. I’ve used OpenOffice on Linux in the past, and it’s a very good alternative to MS Office. Nisus Writer looks like it’ll be a strong contender too, once Nisus finishes integrating the recently purchased Okito Composer into their code and completes the port to Cocoa.

Until then, though, I’m still looking for a word processor for those times when I need to draft some documents. After playing some with Mariner Write this weekend, I’ve decided it seems solid enough to give it a more extended trial back at the office. The interface is nicer than AppleWorks, and it’s certainly faster and lighter. It writes it’s own format, as well as two different flavors of RTF and plain text, so I won’t have any problems exchanging documents with Office users. It also capitalizes on OS X’s ability to write PDF files by making that one of the formats it writes to directly from the “Save” menu, so you don’t have to jump through the hoop of printing the document to PDF to get your file.

I don’t know that Mariner Write will be a long-term solution for me, given the pending release of other software that does more of what I want. Nisus Writer looks like it may end up using DocBook as it’s default file format, which strikes me as a wonderful thing. I hate word processing files that are in some proprietary binary format, and so can’t be easily exchanged with others, or, even worse, can’t have their file contents easily indexed. An XML-based format does away with a lot of that nonsense. Still, at under $80, Mariner Write is cheap enough that I might go ahead and register it when the 30 day trial is up to tide me over until OpenOffice or Nisus Writer becomes available. Who knows? Maybe the next version of Mariner Write will address some of the things I’d like to see, and it will become my word processor of choice. Until then, I can use it to write RTF documents that I can share with my colleagues and that will index nicely on my system.
Doug 5:11 pm on November 24, 2002 | 0 | # |
Tags: site news

In an effort to be a good RSS citizen, I decided last night to take a whack at converting my feed over to a more bandwidth-friendly format. One of the joys of writing and maintaining your own blogging tool is that when a major change is implemented in the other tools out there, you don’t get upgraded for free; you have to dive in, learn what’s going on, and then modify your own code.

I beat my head against a wall trying a brute force solution until the wee hours of this morning with limited success. Finally, at around 3:00 AM, I realized a paradigm shift was in order. Once again, a shortcut I’d taken to get something done quickly had turned around and bit me in the ass. My old feed had always been generated “on the fly” by PHP in response to each request; as a result, there was no way I was going to get the server to return a 304 response to indicate that the feed hadn’t changed. At least no easy way, anyway.

The right approach to this is to have my posting engine generate an XML file every time I post, rather than have the file dynamically generated. THat allows the server to respond with a 304 status code, and keeps aggregators from having to download the feed each and every time. I wrote the code for that this morning.

The new feed is here. I also changed the old feed to perform a redirect to the new one; if your aggregator is Radio Userland or NetNewsWire it should pick up on this. Otherwise, please point your software at the new address.
Doug 2:39 am on November 21, 2002 | 0 | # |
Tags: computing

BoingBoing points to a New Scientist article about a new Microsoft project called MyLifeBits:

It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft’s Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to build multimedia databases that chronicle people’s life events and make them searchable. “Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life,” says Gordon Bell, one of the developers…

…Bell and his colleagues developed MyLifeBits as a surrogate brain to solve what they call the “giant shoebox problem”. “In a giant shoebox full of photos, it’s hard to find what you are looking for,” says Microsoft’s Jim Gemmell. Add to this the reels of home movies, videotapes, bundles of letters and documents we file away, and remembering what we have, let alone finding it, becomes a major headache.

I think this is a natural evolution of software like Tinderbox and devices like PDA’s, which already simple provide a basic form of memory augmentation. The idea is nothing new; MyLifeBits is very much true to Vannevar Bush’s vision of the Memex for the 1930’s:

The memex is “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility” (102). A memex resembled a desk with two pen-ready touch screen monitors and a scanner surface. Within would lie several gigabytes (if not more) of storage space, filled with textual and graphic information, and indexed according to a universal scheme. All of this seems quite visionary for the early 1930s, but Bush himself viewed it as “conventional.”

Augmentation of human intellectual capabilities on a massive, but personal scale is potentially one of the most exciting things that can come out of the information revolution. Combining such capabilities with ubiquitous, high-speed networking presents truly awesome opportunities and challenges. So, while I find the idea of MyLifeBits intriguing, I also find that it’s a Microsoft project cause for concern. I’m not sure I like the idea of the world’s most predatory monopolist being the driving force behind the realization of Bush’s vision.
Doug 1:24 am on November 19, 2002 | 0 | # |
Tags: Personal

Sometimes, you have to draw a line, stand up for what you believe is right, and take a stand, no matter what the personal cost may be. A situation occurred today where I had to do that. It was the only card I had left to play, so I played the hand I was dealt. We’ll see what the fallout ends up being.

I can’t say much more than that right now. Perhaps there’ll be more later, depending on what happens.
Doug 2:22 pm on November 17, 2002 | 0 | # |
Tags: computing

Slashdot is carrying a story this morning on Gillette’s intent to purchase a huge batch of RFID tags from Alien Technology:

The company expects to introduce RFID tags into its pallets and cases, according to the article. Alien Technology was the first company to introduce an RFID tag with price lower than 10 cents, even though some people claimed it could not be done.

RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification, and is a means to place a unique, wireless, addressable tag on an item. I was just reading about RFID and Alien last night in The Strategy Machine, which has this to say about it:

In 1999, MIT joined with Proctor & Gamble, the Gillette Company, and the Uniform Code Council (the people who brought you the now ubiquitous UPC bar code) to form the Auto-ID Center. The Center’s ambitious goal is to develop technology cheap enough to make every one of billions of individual consumer products bought and sold every day into an intelligent device, a “smart product” capable of sending and receiving data. Over 100 companies are already participating in the project, including Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, and IBM.

While it doesn’t appear that Gillette is going to use these tags directly on consumer items just yet, but rather on shipping containers, this seems to me to pretty clearly be a first step in the direction of the Auto-ID Center’s vision. Even this step has some staggering implications - consider the inventory and shipment tracking costs that can be eliminated if Gillette can tell, in real time, exactly what products and how many of them are in every warehouse and store in the world. Consider the manufacturing implications when you have real-time, constantly updating data on what products are being sold and at what rates.

The era of disposable, ubiquitous computing may well have taken a giant leap forward with this purchase. RFID has the potential to be a very disruptive technology, particularly when coupled with other technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth. There are huge implications in this for everyone from corporate strategists, HR professionals, and perhaps most importantly, customers. I’m going to have to do some more reading about this, and consider the implications.
Doug 1:09 am on November 17, 2002 | 0 | # |
Tags: computing

An excellent observation from peterme about the need to keep to keep things simple:

A primary reason for the success of “smart mob” technologies is their abject simplicity, at least on the user’s end. SMS allows for 160-character messages; file-sharing programs require little more than a search query and a submit; Amazon’s various recommendations capitalize on existing behavior.

Like the system I described below, the best solutions for augmenting a user’s intelligence are, and will continue to be, simple to use. This doesn’t mean they aren’t incredibly complex to develop or don’t require some very sophisticated technology; in fact, quite the opposite is true. From the user’s perspective, however, they need to be dead simple to use or people just won’t use them. The technology needs to “get out of the way” and let people get on with what they’re really trying to do.

Note that this has some rather shattering implications for the egos of many of the engineers who work on these sorts of things. Something to keep in mind in future systems design work…
Doug 12:46 am on November 17, 2002 | 0 | # |
Tags: Books

I had a very frustrating experience the other day: While at Barnes & Noble with the family, I was browsing the shelves, looking for a particular book. Unfortunately, while I could remember the book’s title, I couldn’t remember the author’s name to save my life. This was a frustrating problem because books are shelved by author, not title, so in order to find the book without knowing the author’s name, I’d have to physically search through every book in that section, and hope I didn’t overlook it.

Normally, if I were at home, or at the library, or even at B&N’s competitor, Borders, I’d simply turn to some computing device, run a quick search on the title, and know who the author was. This isn’t the case at B&N; there you have to saunter over to the information kiosk, wait until the attendant is available (there’s never more than one staff person there), have her perform the highly technical task of running the search, and then follow her back over to the shelves so she can retrieve it for you.

I have little time for and less interest in these sorts of hijinks. Sure, I understand that a lot of people want and need this sort of personalized service, and would complain if it wasn’t available. Me, I want personal service if I’m having open heart surgery; I can run a search query for a book myself, thanks very much. Borders can provide this continuum of service from personal shopping assistance to computer kiosks scattered liberally throughout the store, why can’t B&N?

Amazon beats Borders, however. Not only can I run my own searches and find my own stuff, but I can use their collaborative filtering system (aka Recommendations and Customer Ratings) to help me decide about a purchase. If I find something I’m interested in but I don’t want to buy right away, with a single mouse click I can annotate the item (aka Wishlist) so I can easily find and remember it for a future purchase. I can’t do that at either Borders or B&N.

I’m finding that I’ll use Amazon these days for most of my book purchases, particularly if I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for, but do have some idea of the general category of book I want. I’ll use Borders if we’re already out shopping and I decide I want some leisure reading, or I’ll use the local library if I don’t want to keep the book, or if the book is rare or out of print. I’ll use B&N if I know exactly what I want and am prepared to buy it right then, since they’re the closest bookstore to the house.

What I find interesting about my buying patterns is not just how they’ve changed, but why they’ve changed. Amazon wins because they embed more intelligence and more knowledge in their system than anyone else. The tools that Amazon makes available and easy to use make me effectively smarter about book purchasing, and no one else does that, at least not as easily or completely. Amazon augments my intelligence. Since I’m “smarter,” I tend to make better decisions about the books I buy, buying fewer that I don’t like and therefore, don’t finish. That’s a win for me. I also tend to buy more books, almost exclusively from Amazon, which is a win for them.

My consumption of e-books has exploded as well, for pretty much the same reasons. I really wasn’t all that sure about e-books at first. I like the feel and heft and portability of dead-tree books way too much. I gave a few e-books a try primarily out of a desire to test their convenience. I thought that perhaps having a few e-books available on my hard drive would be a convenient thing, sort of like having a collection of my favorite music stored as MP3’s is convenient. I didn’t expect to like reading e-books as much as I did a regular book, but at least I’d always have something with me to read as long as I had my iBook with me.

Now, though, I’m starting to find I’m as frustrated with dead-tree books as I am with Barnes & Noble, at least when it comes to reference and business books. It turns out that convenience is more or less a non-issue. The big value of e-books for me is, once again, the ability to embed knowledge in them, and thereby augment my own intelligence.

I can easily annotate, highlight, and search e-books. Sure, I can highlight a regular book and scrawl notes in the margins, but retrieving those annotations in a regular book is about as inefficient as searching the shelves at Barnes & Noble for a particular title when you don’t know the author’s name. With an e-book and good reader software (I tend to use PalmReader), I don’t have to think about it, I can just do it. I can find my notes fast. Because the books live right here on my computer, I can access them at need.

The combination of Amazon, e-books, and a personal content management system like Tinderbox is allowing me to create what I call my “Library of the Future.” I’m using Tinderbox to set up a sort of master “card catalog” of the books I’m reading, have read, or intend on reading. Each book has it’s own note, containing appropriate meta-data for the book, like so:

Note that a key part of the meta-data I’m storing is the URL of the book on Amazon or Palm Digital Media. What you can’t see is that I’ve also linked the cover image of the book to the appropriate web site, allowing me to access the appropriate Amazon or Palm Digital Media page with a single mouse click. The other thing I can do, but you can’t see in this illustration, is establish links between this note and other book notes in Tinderbox, allowing me to form and annotate relationships between books. Using Tinderbox’s agents and views, this allows me to quickly and easily find books in my library of a given subject, author, or any other meta-data I’ve stored, or quickly jump to books related to the one I’m currently viewing.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if the book in question is an e-book, I can also link the note directly to the book. Clicking on the “L” button down there at the bottom of the screen launches the book in the appropriate reader. Once the e-book is launched, I have access to not just the text of the book itself, but all of my additional annotations and highlights.

If the book isn’t an e-book, I can keep the notes right in Tinderbox, generally by creating a sub-note under the main note for the book and recording meta-data on the page and passage I want to annotate, along with my annotations in the body of the note. While this works, it isn’t nearly as easy or efficient as annotating directly in an e-book is. Consequently, I tend to annotate dead-tree books a lot less than I would an e-book.

By using Tinderbox as an application to “glue” different, knowledge-rich information sources together, I’ve created a system that allows me to easily discover, purchase, track, annotate, relate, and search my important books in a “just-in-time” fashion. With the addition of WiFi and/or GPRS access to the ‘net, I can do this just about anywhere, anytime. Without any programming on my part or expensive, proprietary systems, I can cart around a significant chunk of my reference library, along with the equivalent of a reference librarian.

This system isn’t perfect; there are a number of things I still can’t do that I wish I could. For example, without the full version of Acrobat I can’t annotate PDF’s I’ve created from articles I save from the web the same way I can a Palm Reader e-book. I also don’t have a single, integrated search engine for the whole library. Still, it beats the days when I would be in a conversation, or facilitating a training session and would end up saying “I remember reading something about that recently, let me go research that and get back to you.” I can have my Library of the Future right here with me just about all of the time.
Doug 3:20 am on November 12, 2002 | 0 | # |

The estimable Pascale Soleil has moved her blog both2and: Beyond Binary to new digs. Drop by and see her new place!
Doug 3:16 am on November 12, 2002 | 0 | # |
Tags: computing

The OS 10.2.2 update has been released, and is available via Software Update. From reading the release notes, this release looks to be targeted at increasing the stability and performance of the OS. The big news is the inclusion of a “drop-in” journaling file system, a Very Good Thing.

The install here seems to have gone fine; I haven’t noticed any difficulties so far. I’ve turned journaling on, though I thankfully haven’t had any chance to see how well it works. Overall, things do seem a little bit “snappier.”

In a couple of days I should have my new 512Mb SIMM, and the old iBook should really scream…
Doug 12:30 am on November 11, 2002 | 0 | # |
Tags: Personal

Courtesy of a cold front that rolled through this afternoon, we had storm storms and tornadoes again today. This time, the worst damage was north of us, rather than to the south like it was the last time:

The tornado took the roof off the Marsh Supermarket and brought down one of its walls around 2:30 p.m. (3:30 p.m. ET), said Officer Kevin Conley of the Hartford City Police Department.

Three people, all adults, suffered minor injuries and were taken to Blackford County Hospital with minor injuries, said spokeswoman Diane Wilt.

Hartford City is where my in-laws live. Fortunately, they’re safe and their house is fine. It rained to beat hell here, and we had some slight local flooding, but nothing catastrophic.