menome

Just finished reading The Big Switch – excellent book. The key to making the firm I work for (Matrix Solutions) successful is to minimize overhead and infrastructure costs as much as possible. While Matrix’ only product is information, as your book points out, we are in the business of collecting, interpreting and managing knowledge for our clients – not building and managing IT infrastructure.

Therefore - I am always looking for ways to reduce costs of IT by leveraging wherever possible the kinds of ‘utility’ services discussed in the book, and have for some time been a believer in SAS.

Matrix right now is still very much in the ‘older’ model of IT services, in which we still own and manage an IT infrastructure based on Microsoft servers and applications which the company owns. (More)

Had a great time, great conversations.

Here are some initial thoughts from one of them:

Meme Emergence:

'meme catcher of future memes' - there is a re-emergence of interest in the school of thought in the evolutionary biology space called 'Evo Devo' (evolutionary developmental biology). This investigates the idea that evolution may alter developmental processes and build new and novel structures from old gene networks based in reaction to environmental pressures.

 (More)

Cross Country Checkup is a CBC radio program I really enjoy, and check out as often as I can. This week's topic was on Gadgets in response to the iPhone phenomenon.

I was accepted as a caller to the program and made a few points regarding technology. CBC releases the programs for free after broadcast so you can download it and check it out HERE (my bit is at 1:01:07 ;-)

As with any call in show, there were a few things I wanted to mention, but due to the usual mimo technobabbling, didn't quite get to - so I will post them here...

I also managed to not directly answer any of the questions: have to work on that one. I seem to get sucked into the back story - and by the time I get around to answering the question, I have either forgotten what it was or managed to generate 5 new questions... Oh well. Hit more to see what I really meant to say ;-)

 (More)

It is always sad to see what starts out to be a promising innovative new technology get corrupted to satisfy the demands of the dollar.

Perfect example of this is the immensely annoying co-branded Dell/Google search Crapware that showed up in my IE (most of the time I use Firefox, but at work - well...there are a number of systems defendant on IE. ) whenever I miss type a URL or enter a URL that doesn't exist.

The 'Crapware Search Assistant' Spams my browser with a whole pile of Crap that I don't want. Fortunately (or so I thought) a set of uninstall instructions were buried on the page that tell you to look for 'GoogleAFE' or Browser Search Assistant.

I could not find an application by either of those names in my Add/Remove programs. I did find one called 'Search Assistant' that I removed.

That didn't do it.

I had to try 5 different methods of getting rid of the Crapware before I finally found one that worked.

Click if you want to read the entire sordid saga...

 (More)

Well the day is fast approaching where there will be no escaping advertising (not that there are many places you can hide from it now..)

But the situation is about to get more..dynamic with the introduction of the first dynamic display fabrics. Lumalive from Philips is about to wrap the world in glowing cloth.

The applications for this are rather staggering - from text message t-shirts, to glowing bras and undergarments to shirts that react to the proximity of friends... Not to mention the brave new world of garment hacking - wow now that will be fun.

Building gizmos to hack other peoples shirts - or even more amusing - the mass hack attack where you wifi blast a message to all the active garments within range... The possibilities are endless.

 (More)

Am working with the new google office apps - very slick stuff. Obviously the functionality is limited - especially with the spreadsheet, but the applications are quite functional.

The only thing really preventing the spreadsheet from being generally useful to 70% of users would be the lack of graphing system, but it wouldn't take much to add one to it. By setting up an xml graph parameter system that would pass the user defined graph types along with the spreadsheet data to a server for processing into an SVG or image file, you would have enough functionality to make most users quite happy....

I am already very happy with the application - it translates all core spreadsheet equations without a problem. I haven't found any spreadsheets I work with so far that wont work in it. Very cool - Microsoft better be worried and Ray Ozzie better get his online office version out pretty fast!

 (More)

From... Microsoft!

While the comments I am getting are already 'Would you want to depend on a Robot running windows??' The development kit looks pretty good - the nice thing is that the components are pretty cheap....

I am interested both in this from a hobbyist standpoint, and potentially for work - we do lots of remote sensing activities, and having a cheap, fast way of building field sensor gizmos would be very cool...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/

http://www.roboticsconnection.com/index.html

 (More)

I have been hearing a lot about this both from Microsoft and from developers/companies I know in town.

Its a Don Box creation, and looks absolutely excellent. I was planning to build up a workflow engine of my own, as I require one for a number of things that I am working on, and have tried Biztalk a few times, only to find that its too complicated and fiddly for most workflow related tasks. I will have a look at the new version of Biztalk that is coming out shortly, but I think this Windows Workflow looks a great deal more applicable for most of the cases I am working on.

 (More)

I have now been developing with the new Developer edition of Vstudio for about a month.

As most of you know, Microsoft have broken the tools up into different roles with the justification that the tools will then be more team focused. So now instead of having one development environment, and using parts of it depending on what you were doing, there are several functionally different Visual Studios, and a server to tie them together.

At first glance, it does look like Microsoft has decided to drop the small developer/consultant off their list of supported people by pricing the Visual Studio 2005 products through the roof.

However, after attending the launch event, and then working with the Developer editoin for a month now, the reality is that the Developer edition looks like the only tool of any of them that is worth getting.

 (More)

Investigating this forms processing engine I am working on has lead me to software factories. I have been reading the Software Factories book - its good.

Here are some additional resources I have found while investigating this.

 (More)

I have been investigating open source GIS type tools recently. As well, been looking into worldwind as a potential platform for viewing and displaying maps...However - along comes google maps and some interesting hacks people are putting together and you start to think - hmm why not just use google maps???  (More)

Man no matter how original I think my wonderful Ideas are, someone has already beaten me to the punch - and not by weeks... I was thinking it would be useful to build a spatial representation of taxonomy relationships rather than the normal heirarchy, and began the process of literature search, and sure enough there are a bunch of sites dedicated to Topic Maps...

http://www.easytopicmaps.com/wakka.php?wakka=HomePage

http://www.topicmap.com/topicmap/tools.html

And they all reference this article on topic maps: http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html

I am thinking that taking this idea and coupling it with a GIS spatial search engine might produce an interesting result. By this I mean setting up a 'map' of topics using the GIS - so that the map is actually displayed as a normal map. Its interesting though to note that there are already things out there like this, but none are in widespread acceptance. I know with my wife even getting her to organize files on a PC using the standard file/folder metaphor is difficult, so some of these other more visual setups may not be much better as yet. They are too complex - people can't think in the multi dimensional sense required to build a proper classification system.

So the trick becomes to get them to build the 'folksonomy' without knowing they are doing it. Alan Kay and the parc team's approach was to build metaphors from the real world into the machine - which was pillaged and perverted into the rather horrible UI abomination we all know and hate today.

How to do this is the question....

I think I will try to build an RSS reader for our band. It will be a system tray application that people can download that will link back to our newfeed. The newsfeed will also broadcast new music that we post on the site. When the newsreader polls the rss feed, if it finds a new song, it can be set up to automatically download the new music to the fan's computer. This will be a great way to promote new tunes to the fan base, and be a super-fun thing to construct!