Paul Kedrosky has a great list of his Firefox extensions. But the most interesting news to me was synching of bookmarks via Foxmarks. I use FolderShare and love it, synching bookmarks will also be useful. Eventually, I assume, we will move it all to the net.
In the meantime, more tweaking to do. Now, where did my time go?
This video from a busy street crossing in India shows what happens when you have truly decentralized coordination – from a distance, it looks like chaos, from the viewpoint of each individual entity, it looks logical, at least based on the limited information they have.
(Via BoingBoing, of course.)
I just had to have a post at this particular point in time, though the time format used here may make the historical significance less obvious.
And while I am at it, thinking about time and place – Steven B Johnson has a post about his new book, The Ghost Map. Which is about place and time, if you think about it. Mostly place, as you will see from Snow’s map.
(Via Wired, amongst others.)
My little math article is being commented by Meredith, who points to one of my favorite essays by Richard Feynman: A different box of tools.
Highly recommended – it shows some of the imagination necessary to turn theoretical constructs into practical applications.
I have previously blogged the furiously addictive word game Weboggle. Babble is another game of the same variety, but with a different twist: Rather than quick keyboarding, the game rewards a large vocabulary. Plus, there is a whole community of people who chat during the game, dropping hints, writing help pages and trying to get to the top score via a crib sheet called Babblers Anonymous.
And, like I said, addictive….
This is great fun. I have downloaded and installed the software for the M4 project – this sort of research is intriguing. And the cost is zero, unless this is a Trojan, in which case my innate trustfulness has received yet another blow.
Update March 3: Had to shut this down – not because it isn’t well behaved (it is), but because the processor load generates heat, which starts the fan in my home workstation, which is irritating in a home office environment. I will install it on a PC I have in my work office, though – that machine has a fan going all the time anyway.
David Weinberger asks for a new tool for taking notes over at Joho. I wrote a lengthy comment, here as a post and a plug for a really useful tool.
I have used the bibliographic database Endnote for 13 years, after starting out with another bibliographic database I no longer remember the name of. I take most of my notes in it. It installs with a link to Word, formats bibliographies, and lets you enter notes, including links to websites and locally stored PDF versions of articles. There are competing products around, but I think Endnote has the biggest market share. There are also open source versions being developed, such as Firefox Scholar.
Endnote is not open source and it is beginning to show some signs of limitations because it is a client-side application only, but I am happy with it. I would have liked to see a more flexible user interface, automatic links to Amazon.com or Google Booksearch, but it does have facilities for importing stuff from online databases, though I for one have never bothered to learn them (I only put in articles and books I read, so entering the bibliographic information is not that onerous.) Endnote is a better reference database than PIM, so a lot of functionality (cross-referencing between notes, for instance) is missing, though intelligent keywording can probably get around that. An excellent feature is the large community of users who have developed many "styles" for academic journals. This means that you can write an article, then format it afterwards into the style the journal wants.
I have more than 2000 books and articles, with notes, in my Endnote database, representing about 18 years of reading and taking notes (such as for this book). This is, to put it mildly, quite a resource for me – and I back it up religiously.
Recommended with the the usual caveats – it is not a web 2.0 product, but it has worked very nicely for me.
<nerd warning = on> Nerd alert! Nerd alert!
Here is the list I chose in ACM‘s voting over favorite computer science classic:
The rules for candidates are pretty peculiar – the book has to be out of print, for example. One book I missed was Winograd, T. and F. Flores (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition, but perhaps it is still in print. I would also have liked to see Eames, C. and R. Eames (1990). A Computer Perspective, though that is more of a computer history book. Not to mention a book I know is out of print, namely Montgomery Phister’s (1979) Data Processing Technology and Economics, a great overview of everything you could wish for of economic and technical data on computers from 1955 to 1978, published by Digital.
It seems I will have to confess to a certain managerial bent, as well as shameless promotion of OO and Norwegians….
</nerd warning=off>
Ahhh, that felt good. My sincere apologies….
PS: Also Sethi, R. (1989). Programming Languages; Concepts and Constructs. The dragon book. Sorry about that.
Predictions is dime-a-dozen these days – Ed Felten offers up a set of predictions I really like. So rather than create my own, I will endorse this list and be done with it….
PS: My favorite: The return of push technology. Just the thing for my cellphone, content someone thinks I might like….
This entry is written from my mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson P910, using a ThinkOutside Stowaway bluetooth keyboard and Opera for mobiles. It is actually pretty simple – the keyboard is not as good as the one I used to have for my PalmPilot, but it is usable for a slow kind of almost-touch writing. Haven’t tried anything fancy such as links or pictures, but you have to crawl before you can leap. Anyway, blogging and surfing is now mobile for me – I can feel freedom from my laptop and 1.5 hour battery life approaching….
Eric Mack is writing about how the term he coined, YABHTU (Yet Another Blissfully Happy Tablet User) becoming a term (a YANTUTAO – Yet Another Nerdy Term Unknown To Any Others – I suppose.) His commenters, and the general market direction, despite the Scobleizer’s hard work, seems to not have taken Tablets to their heart, though.
I for one am a not infrequent Tablet user (not sure if the blissfully happy label would stick, though.) I use my Toshiba tablet both for making quick pen drawings when verbal description doesn’t work and where doing a proper vector drawing just isn’t worth the bother. I use it for presentations, to draw ink circles and lines on Powerpoint slides and to make drawings in lieu of a proper whiteboard. And I use it to take notes in situations when typing wouldn’t be appropriate (as when I was listening to a talk by Elie Wiesel last week). The Tablet feature is a very useful tool, but not something I use every day. It adds a very much appreciated layer of functionality.
For a while I was irritated that tableting didn’t integrate well into many programs, but since I don’t use the text recognition program anyway and I write much slower long-hand than I touch-type, the tablet is the thing. I think Tablet functionality is destined to become a niche functionality, offered on high-end PCs. It might disappear altogether, though, in which case I would have to get a Wacom tablet board, since direct on-screen drawing is hard to retrofit on a laptop.
I do hope Microsoft and the laptop vendors have some staying power on this one. I like this feature, and it would be sad to see such an enabler of effortless expression disappear.
Nick Carr has an interesting post about porn on the web, and the slow change of what we consider normal. Since I have
…I am tentatively beginning to wonder where the end point in this evolution is. The right-wing crazies and naivist doogooders want to shut down the net and/or impose controls, which, of course, is an unworkable solution that is much worse than the problem. But the sort of "this is not a problem and even discussing it is the thin end of the wedge" answer isn’t helping much, either.
Aaahhh, the vagaries of the human existence…
Update: Interesting discussion between Matt Asay and Tim O’Reilly over at Infoworld Open Resource. I agree with the Matt in one thing: It is not the existence, but the intrusion, that is the problem.
Just when I thought I had cracked the keyboard thing by getting a keyboard with blank keys, along comes the Optimus keyboard, which has a changeable display on every key. Certainly a brilliant concept – the problem with programmable keyboards, of course, is always remembering which key you mapt that brilliant macro to.
This offers a genuine innovation. As far as I can see, this is a proof of concept. The challenge will be in the implementation – to what extent will grit and dirt and fiddly software decide whether this will turn out a workable solution or just a cool gadget for keyboard junkies?
(Via Feld Thoughts, which also links to a great article on Tim O’Reilly)
I needed an external keyboard in the office I am borrowing in Boston, and since Norwegian-language keyboards are hard to get in the USA and I didn’t have a spare USB keyboard available in Norway, I went ahead and ordered the secondmost geeky keyboard of them all – Das Keyboard.
This keyboard is kind of old-fashioned, it looks very much like the classical IBM PS/2 101-key keyboard, with one important difference – there are no letters or numbers or anything on the keys. It is quite amazing how much this gets you to focus on the screen rather than sneaking glances down at the keys, and pressuring yourself to write automatically (it is quite amazing how easily your fingers remember where the [angle bracket] keys are, for instance.)
As for how it feels, I think I will like it. It is a classical keyboard, well engineered, and could easily be a winner but for the competition having heated up lately: Some of the new, low, modern oneshave very good key response (such the cordless Logitech keyboard/mouse combo I recently got). Das Keyboard has a certain "buckling spring" feeling to it (the snappy response that every geek loves and recalls with fond memories from early IBM keyboards, particularly (in my case) from the 3174 terminals). It is much more quiet than a true IBM keyboard, though. (And, in case you wondered, the classical IBM buckling spring keyboard, particularly AT style, is the most geeky keyboard you can get. I do a lot of telephone interviews, though, and they are too noisy for that.)
All in all, I think I will keep Das Keyboard, though there is a 30-day money back guarantee. It is geeky enough, and besides, I am a little curious as to whether it really will speed up my writing. Besides, one advantage is that very few people are likely to nick it from the office…..
Via Joho comes the story of the 500-mile email. Great fun.
Reminds me of the story of the terminal that would only allow you to log in sitting down. I’ll tell that one another time.
Ed Felten blogs how learning machines can deduce text by listening to keystrokes. Another reason to get a quiet keyboard….
One interesting point: Somewhat counterintuitively, with this approach a longer password is easier to guess than a short one – though, of course, a non-sensical password will be hard, since the approach relies on character counting.
Reference: Li Zhuang, Feng Zhou, J. D. Tygar (2005), Keyboard Acoustic Emanations Revisited, University of California, Berkeley
I recently bought another Logitech wireless keyboard, this time with a rechargeable mouse. The keyboard is excellent – low, good wristrest, responsive and relatively quiet (which is nice for interviews and teleconferences.) But the mouse has a limited battery life and forces me to take a 15 minute recharge break every 3-4 hours or so.
Hey – wait a minute – is this a feature or a bug?
John Battelle discusses the importance of Google Talk offering interoperability between AOL IM, MSN, and ICQ, among others.
I have had partial interoperability for a long time, using an IM client called Trillian from Cerulean Studios. Trillian offers the ability to run all the instant messaging services through one client, which is important because people tend to be in different networks (my kids in MSN, former colleagues in ICQ or IM, current colleagues mostly in IM.) What Google Talk would offer in addition, I assume, is the ability to have multi-party chats with people in all those other networks, thus obviating the demand side network externalities which work for whoever has the largest market share (in each sub-segment). Given the trouble that Trillian has had keeping up with changes in the IM services, I have a hard time seeing MS opening up MSN to Google, but if enough people sign up for it, things might work out.
Which goes to show that interoperability forces its way through once enough people start using a service that is offered by several companies. Funny that MS hasn’t offered an MSN client that can talk to anyone a long time ago…..
(Incidentally, my Google Talk handle is, I suppose, espenandersen@gmail.com)
The Cucumber Season: Reflections on the Nature of Information when there isn’t any is a little snippet I wrote almost on a dare – after a discussion with John Gehl, he suggested the title almost as a joke, and I responded, almost as a joke.
Still, the concept of the “cucumber season” has hereby been introduced. Come to think of it, Norwegian hasn’t added that much to the English language, at least not since the Vikings (and possible with exceptions for skiing and seafaring terms.) About time “ombudsman” got competition.
Short update: Looks like the story about the absent-minded professor was about Norbert Wiener, not Claude Shannon (as per a number of emails). Nice to see that some people read Ubiquity, though….
Applied Abstractions 