Yesterday I received a new toy/tool: a 12" G4 Powerbook. I've started calling it LittleFoot since an AIM session with Miss Megan. Sort of flashes me back to an old riddle/joke about how the Queen of England is like the Russians... or sum such. Anyway, at the moment I'm having fun and being challenge converting stuff from WIN to OS X. So far so good. It is a sweet little machine!
Erik and Mark Baard: May 2003 Archives: "Personal Server: Has Intel Built the Handheld Killer?"
The "personal server," which is being developed at Intel Research by ubiquitous computing wizard Roy Want, is the size of a deck of cards, half the weight of an iPaq, and has no i/o, no screen, and no peripherals. The device never leaves its user's pocket or handbag.
Looks like a small deck of cards and uses near by wireless savvy pc's as their user interface. Interesting.
Group for User Interface Research
As should be expected a clean site with links to software, long and short papers on the subject of UI Research. I note there are at least two papers on "views" of information such as fisheye or peephole which are helpful for smaller form factors. And there is link to a tutorial on information visualization.
Here is an interesting web log. Found background on Boing!Boing! Seems this young fellow is riding his bike from upper end of nORway to gibralter. He has two phones and is posting to the blog via telephone and also posting fotos via cell phone. The entries so far are brief and the images are good.
Oh, I almost forgot, one of the phones is GPS enabled, so check this page to find out where he is at the moment.
Internet and Network Solutions: Ariel Design Group
This is a blatant advert and Thank You to Bob McCool of Ariel Design Group who has hosted my Virtual Home in ColORado since 1996 -- that's a lot of dog year and internet years!!
They're really great people there and you all ought to think about using their services as I do.
Amazon.com: Library Wish Lists
Here's a new way to help a library in these tight times. Now more than 299 local libraries have published "wish lists" of books and resources on Amazon.com. I'm planning to let the Mary Riley Styles Library of Falls Church, VA know.
c/o Boing Boing who got it from the Shifted Librarian who got it from the Spinster Librarian who got it from MetaFilter
Thinkbot - Ridiculously Easy Thought Sharing
Thinkbot is an easy way to find other people who are thinking about the same things as you.
With a simple command, you can search Thinkbot's database of users and chat instantly to someone who shares your thoughts.
Here's a new approach to IRC or chat space. Sign up with some keywords for yourself and then search for other folks with similar keywords.
Technology Research News (TRN) is an independent publisher and news service dedicated to covering technology research developments in university, corporate and government labs. Every story published by TRN is the result of direct, original reporting.
This looks worth checking periodically. Two recents stories: 1) Improving mapping interfaces to make small (PDA) screens more usable. 2) Developing communities of interest from web logs.
Ben Hammersley.com: Loose Pieces
Ben's blog is loaded with widgets: For example, although this new design looks quite plain, hitting the Save button will trigger my MT installation to query three RSS feeds, ping four ping-sites, and make around 45 or so web services calls to various sites. It is truly getting out of hand. But nifty none the less. The latest little widget? Mouse over some of the links on this page.
MetaFilter is a community of users that find and discuss things on the web. The topics run the gamut, and tend to run intelligent and civil.
It's a group thing. A couple friends have cited it from time to time.
A WEBLOG-BASED CONTENT ARCHITECTURE FOR BUSINESS
"In a previous post, The Weblog as Filing Cabinet, [the writer] proposed that business weblogs could be used to codify and 'publish', in a completely voluntary and personal manner, the individual worker's entire filing cabinet. The key advantage of providing such a capability is vastly increased access to, and sharing of, a company's knowledge. This post outlines a content architecture that could enable this to occur.
This architecture would have two principal components: The Enterprise Content Architecture and the Desktop Content Architecture..."
In my current work in kinetic sculpture, I am trying to concentrate on the movement, rather than the object. I take it as an article of faith that the air around us moves in ways which are organic, whimsical, and unpredictable. I therefore assume that if I were to abdicate the design to the wind, the work would take on these same qualities.
The engineer in me wants to minimize friction and inertia to make the air visible. The architect studies matters of scale and proportion. The navigator and sailor want to know the strength and direction of the wind. The artist wants to understand its changing shape.
Meanwhile, the child wants to play.
A while ago a friend sent me a video tape featuring Ganson's sculptural machines. Something sparked my memORy of the tape today, so I managed to find his web site today.
Check out the videos on the sculpture page.
LinkedIn is about finding people for projects or collaboration, and helping your connections do the same. LinkedIn makes your network more efficient, letting you keep in touch with the people you know and find the people you don't, but who are only a step away.
Secret copy of fifth Harry Potter book found in field
Two first editions of JK Rowling's The Order of the Phoenix -- not due out until June 21 -- were discovered by a reader in Suffolk.
The magical fifth instalment of the smash-hit series about schoolboy wizard Harry has been dubbed literature's most closely-guarded secret ever.
Only a handful of people have had access to the manuscript.
Yet the 40-year-old dad-of-two stumbled across the copies yesterday morning while walking on common land in the market town of Bungay. He immediately called The Sun and we sent our man Mike Darvill to collect the books from him.
George H Brett II, in interview
The Internet should be simple to use and easily accessible, argues George Brett. Alison Kilgour met him in Bath.
Here's an article from Ariadne #3 written in 1996 about yours truly. Photo was taken with an olde Apple QuickTake camera. Warning some of the 7 year olde links don't work -- surprise.
Amazing how some things remain the same, while others have advanced since then.
Ariadne Issue 35 -- 'Syndicated content: more than just some file formats?'
Paul Miller takes a look at issues arising from the current enthusiasm for syndicating content to portals or other web sites, and offers some guidelines for good practice.
Ariadne a quarterly publication of UKOLN is targeted principally at information science professionals in academia, and also to interested lay people both in and beyond the Higher Education community. Its main geographic focus is the UK, but it is widely read in the US and worldwide.
"The library weblog dedicated to resources for keeping current and professional development."
MeatballWiki aspires to be a community of communities: an intercommunity or metacommunity. It deals with online culture, especially how people online come together naturally in groups. Along with that, some of us also like to talk about building our own communities. That even includes this one, eating [editing?] its own tail. We're really big on BarnRaising here.
Workshop on Data Derivation and Provenance
Provenance and data derivation are important to many aspects of scientific computation. In molecular biology, where data is repeatedly copied, corrected, and transformed as it passes through numerous genomic databases, understanding where data has come from and how it arrived in the user's database is of crucial to the trust a scientist will put in that data, yet this information is seldom captured properly. In astronomy, useful results may have been been obtained by filtering, transforming, and analyzing some base data by a complex assemblage of programs, yet we lack good tools for recording how these programs were connected and the context in which they were run.
The importance of provenance goes well beyond verification; it is closely related to archiving and annotation, also important in the context of scientific data. Moreover it may be used in data discovery. Knowing the provenance of a data item may help the biologist to make connections with other useful data. The astronomer may want to understand a derivation in order to repeat it with modified parameters, and being able to describe a derivation may help a researcher to discover whether a particular kind of analysis has already been performed.