Category: Computers and Internet

The Language Log today points me towards Amaztype. I think that this cross between Web Services and Typography deserves an entry in my "Slightly Bizarre" list. So it’s got one.

So, Adobe is buying Macromedia for a cool $3.4 billion. While I’ll let the pundits ruminate on whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, there are just two tangentially-related points that I will comment on.

The first is that Macromedia’s Flash technology is, like most technology, capable of being used for good or ill. This was brought home to me yesterday while compiling the list of "Wines I Have Known". I tried, wherever possible, to include a hyperlink to a wine producer’s web site in my entries. A lot of these web sites used Flash on the entry page. And, with very few exceptions, their use of Flash was utter, utter crap. Where was usability? Where was the user experience to entice the user into the site and deliver information? Nowhere. Instead all I got was completely pointless Flash animations, done purely because the web designers thought it was a cool thing to do. Take it from me: it is not cool, it is fucking counter-productive.

So, point one: Flash technology should be used with extreme care, and preferably NOT AT ALL on home pages.

Point two: I really don’t think Adobe know how to program. Yes, their applications may be powerful, but their user interfaces stink like rotting fish, and they blithely ignore any conventions of the underlying platform. I’ve complained before on this blog about Photoshop Elements, but other stuff of theirs is just as bad. They remind me of SAP – you vill learn to do it our way, or else! I remember many years ago pointing out to Dr. Peter Zencke (one of the directors of SAP) that I thought that their user interface in SAP R/3 would be better following the user interface guidelines of the underlying platform, to whit, Windows. I got an earful which told me in no uncertain terms that he just didn’t get it. Well, I don’t think Adobe gets it either.

I found a very useful set of tips and pointers about getting the best out of blogging in an entry on Dave’s Imaginary Sound Space:

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Blog Building Tips For Business And Pleasure

If you’re looking for sound advice on how to build a better blog then read on. Sharing practical tips built from experience is one of the best ways of learning about effective blogging. This handy collection of blogging resources is designed to help beginners and the financially motivated gain control of their blog space. I’ve included some tools that I find useful for blogging along with a few tips of my own.

General blogging tips

This group of links covers essential blogging tips and answers the most frequently asked questions. There’s advice here for both beginners and experienced bloggers to digest.

• Building a Better Blog by Brian Bailey, presents his Top 10 ideas for how to build a better blog. Good back to basics advice and tips dealing with topics like categories and content.
• How to Blog is a piece by Tony Pierce, winner of the Bloggies 2005 category ‘best article or essay about weblogs’. 30 topical tips on style, technology and telling it like it is.
• 47 key tips from the World’s best BLOGGERS serves bite sized chunks of wisdom with links to each guru’s weblog.
• Blog Tips – Central Register has a collection of links to blogging tips covering many important aspects of blog building and maintenance.

Business blogging tips

 

These links focus on commercial blogging interests. If you’re interested in monetizing your blog or blogging professionally you’ll find some helpful info on how to approach it here.

• Pro Blogger has tips and hints on how to market and profit from your blog.
• Blog Business World posts on marketing, public relations and search engine optimization. The blog has a good list of links to other business related websites.
• Winners of the 2005 Business Blogging Awards is a good place to check out some highly rated blogs about business.

Useful blogging tools

A few of the tools I use, how and why I use them. There are lots more tools scattered around the home page that come in handy from time to time.

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There’s lots more stuff in this entry, so check it out.

Another advert about storage. This time from Hitachi, extolling the virtues of a new way to store information on microdrives.

So, I ask myself, why on earth would I ever want to listen to 30,000 songs? Still, the pseudo-70s feel of the soundtrack brings back some nice memories.

Update: Hey, I managed to beat Gizmodo by 3 days!

You may have noticed that the blog looks different today. Microsoft has just introduced a bunch of new background themes, and I thought it was time for a change. I chose this fairly neutral background because I am not a teenager anymore 🙂

Microsoft has also tripled the amount of storage available for photos, so I’ll be able to add some more there as I go along. Apparently there will be some further improvements available over the next few weeks/months, so I await with interest what other features will be turned on.

Bill Hill is a Scotsman who started out life as a newspaperman and became a typographer, but ended up working for Microsoft. He’s a fascinating guy, with a fund of stories that I can listen to for hours.

Channel 9 has just published a second video interview with him – following him around the Microsoft campus as he talks about nature, reading, and why the most important operating system is Homo Sapiens 1.0.

It’s a long interview (almost an hour and a half), but well worth sitting back and listening to Bill. See it here

Lisa Stone over at Surfette burbles: "I’m talking about a conference that enables women bloggers to tesseract to proactive social and intellectual networking with each other".

What on earth does that sentence even mean?

Tesseract ain’t a verb, it’s a noun (at least it was the last time I looked). And as for "to proactive" – I beg your pardon?

English – it’s going to the dogs. Sigh.

Another entry for us computer nuts… Mobile PC Magazine has an interesting article covering the history of mobile computers.

It’s clear from the article that, particularly in the early days, the meanings of the words "mobile" and "portable" were often stretched almost beyond breaking point (as were the arms of the proud owners). I well remember an advert for the Osborne computer, where the smile on the face of the man carrying it looked suspiciously like the rictus grin of someone who has just realised he has a double hernia. 

Although the article mentions the IBM 5100 as the first portable computer, it seems to imply that all the successors to that were based on the PC design. I don’t think that’s right. I remember in 1981 IBM came out with the System/23 – a 45 Kg monster. While not strictly a "portable" (it was classified by IBM as "transportable" – ho, ho, nudge, nudge, know what I mean, squire?), the advertising certainly showed someone holding one. Actually, come to think of it, I believe it was an artist’s impression; perhaps Arnold wasn’t available for a photoshoot. We actually got one in for evaluation. Fortunately, the real IBM PC showed up a few months later, and it rapidly became clear that in the evolutionary stakes, the System/23 was a doomed dinosaur.

Another one for us computer geeks… Channel 9 has just published a video interview with Gordon Bell that is worth watching. Gordon chats informally about his work, and his involvement with the Computer Museum in Boston.

I love the way that in its opening minutes, he casually mentions that Tony Hoare is coming to visit him next week. Ohmigod – this is Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare – another of computing’s gods…

OK, this entry is for the computer geeks amongst us, the rest of you can talk amongst yourselves.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it was buying Groove Networks, the maker of a particularly fine piece of software for supporting team collaboration over peer-to-peer networks. Groove was set up, and continues to be run, by Ray Ozzie, the man who also invented Lotus Notes.

I’ve used Groove for a number of years, and like it a lot. Clearly, Microsoft do too. Yesterday’s announcement represents, for me, the dropping of the other shoe – I’ve been wondering for some time how Microsoft would support peer-to-peer collaboration in Longhorn, and this is very probably the answer.

The title of this entry is also the title of an article written in 1945 by Dr. Vannevar Bush, then director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the US. In this article, Bush envisaged a machine called the Memex, which in many ways has presaged the rise of the combination of the World Wide Web and Personal Computers. Indeed, Internet pioneers such as Ted Nelson took Bush’s idea of "associative links" between pieces of information and developed the idea of Hypertext (the term was coined by Nelson) – a simplification of which forms the basis of the Web today.

I was reminded of all this today when I came across a video published on the Channel 9 web site. The video is an interview with two of Microsoft’s researchers, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmel about the "MyLifebits" project. Gordon Bell is one of my IT heroes – he was the man behind DEC’s original line of mini-computers, the PDPs. Another is Jim Gray, whose groundbreaking work with databases has led him to end up working with Bell on MyLifebits in Microsoft Research.

So what is MyLifebits? In a nutshell, it is the attempt to realise Bush’s Memex – "A 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". The project has extended some of Bush’s original ideas to now include capturing information when on the move. A slide from a PowerPoint presentation on MyLifebits is included below to give some idea of the range of information that is being captured.

The video is interesting, not just for the experience of hearing Bell and Gemmell talk about their work, but also to see the project in action with some demonstrations of how a Memex-like device may not be "As we may Think", but become "How We May Think".

Via the Language Log, I’ve come across the Harvard Sentences – lists of English sentences used to test audio equipment. Reading these lists takes on a surreal, Borgesian quality – I get glimpses of some strange other world…

The effect is subtly heightened by the occasional mis-spelling; sentence 10 in lists 5 and 7, for example.

I spend far too much time in front of my computer at the moment, and I see that Dell is not going to make it any easier with the introduction of a 24" LCD screen at a knockout price.

The Annals of Improbable Research points to this entry from Accenture about the Personal Awareness Assistant as a "wonderful satire". Trouble is, I’m not at all convinced that the good folk at Accenture were, in fact, joking.

It would not surprise me to learn that Accenture are deadly serious.

However, it does remind me about the old joke about the Accenture consultant’s reply to the question of Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?:

"Deregulation of the chicken’s side of the road was threatening its dominant market position. The chicken was faced with significant challenges to create and develop the competencies required for the newly competitive market. Accenture, in a partnering relationship with the client, helped the chicken by rethinking its physical distribution strategy and implementation processes. Using the Poultry Integration Model (PIM) Accenture helped the chicken use its skills, methodologies, knowledge capital and experiences to align the chicken’s people, processes and technology in support of its overall strategy within a Program Management framework. Accenture convened a diverse cross-spectrum of road analysts and best chickens along with Accenture consultants with deep skills in the transportation industry to engage in a two-day itinerary of meetings in order to leverage their personal knowledge capital, both tacit and explicit, and to enable them to synergize with each other in order to achieve the implicit goals of delivering and successfully architecting and implementing an enterprise-wide value framework across the continuum of poultry cross-median processes. The meeting was held in a park like setting enabling and creating an impactful environment which was strategically based, industry-focused, and built upon a consistent, clear, and unified market message and aligned with the chicken’s mission, vision, and core values. This was conducive towards the creation of a total business integration solution. Accenture helped the chicken change to become more successful."

Seven years ago today, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first specifications of XML (eXtensible Markup Language).

Today, XML is everywhere: in applications, databases, operating systems and information objects of all kinds. It’s well on its way to becoming the TCP/IP of the information network.

XML: the DNA of Digital Darwinism.