Underway in Ireland
Web intelligence snippets from Ireland with Bernie Goldbach.
        

Underway in Ireland

31 August 2002


It's handy to have a way to sniff around your WiFi network and Airtouch Networks War Driving Kit makes it easy to do by using a laptop for security auditing on wireless LANs. All kits currently include sniffing software, 802.11b radio NIC, and antenna. Airtouch sells different versions of the kit with varying antennas types. The Enthusiast Kit comes with a medium power, car-mountable, omni-directional antenna. Other versions include the Beginner Kit ($299), which comes with a lower power omni- directional antenna, and the Pro Kit ($499), that includes a higher power, car- mountable omni-directional antenna.


  

KILKENNY, Ireland -- Why would so many people want to offer up their thoughts in a randomly wired Internet Commons? In Sebastian Paquet's ongoing quest to understand why personal knowledge publishing is becoming especially popular with certain professions, it occurred "that people in these professions have another thing in common: they generally have little to hide, and sharing improves the quality of their work output." Stephen Downes thinks "educators play the same sort of role in society as journalists. They are aggregators, assimilators, analysts and advisors." They are middle links in an ecosystem, or as John Hiler puts it, parasites on information produced by others. And they are being impacted by alternative forms of learning in much the same way, for much the same reasons. We're all part of an Information Food Chain.


  

30 August 2002


JENETT.RADIO -- Just like Web Rings of the 90s, weblog aggregators have link families too. You can spot several growing versions of Life in the Aggregator at Radio Free Blogistan and gRadio. And here on Topgold too.


  

Spam hits 36 percent of e-mail traffic. This does not surprise me in the least. The amount of junk I receive daily outweighs business and personal e-mails, 10 to 1. Is there any way to combat it? Ralph Averbach mulls over a few spam-blocking tools.


  

Berkshire Hathaway -- "... the marketplace...is competitive and if you don't have an advantage, your returns will eventually be average or worse."


  

DIVE INTO MARK -- Proven true. Michael Barrish: Story. "I’ve long believed that we each have a story, often unknown to us, that we try all our lives to prove true. It can usually be summarized in five words or less." [ed: I am who I am when I was 10.]


  

29 August 2002


Apparatuses, methods, and computer programs for displaying information on signs

Leonid Fridman filed US Patent 20020112026 on 15 August 2002 to claim rights related to the display of information on signs. The number of showings desired for different messages within corresponding remaining time periods is used in selecting which message to show at a given time and/or location. The showings can be on public displays, including vehicle mounted displays. The number of desired exposures remaining for a message can be based on an estimate of the number of people or types of people reached by its prior showings. Such estimates can be based on information derived from sensors near the time and place of the prior showings and/or from less-real-time, previously derived data relating to such times and places. Which message is selected for a given time and/or place can be based on the relative degree to which viewership attributes desired for the showing of different messages match attributes associated with the given time and/or location.

http://www.iol.ie
  


lapdome LAPVANTAGE.com -- These awesome laptop stands are styled after the iMac's base. Get one!


  

Internet appliance for interactive audio/video display using a remote control unit for user input

On 20 June 2002, Imran Sharif filed Patent 20020078445 for a network access device which uses a standard video display to show functional choices and network content received from the Internet to a user. The user directs the functional operation of the network access device with a simple reduced keyset remote control unit having a relatively small number of keys similar to a consumer remote control used for television receivers and video recorders. The control choices are displayed to the user in a unique format with elements associated to characters corresponding to the same characters in the reduced keyset. The display format uses several display areas, some of which can be designated as input focus areas, any one of which can be active at a given time. The device affords low cost ready access to the informational capabilities of the Internet for users at all skill levels by eliminating a full text keyboard and a mouse.


  

ALL NET DEVICES.com -- Toshiba has signed iPass as a hotspot partner in a plan for an American wireless public access network.


  

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association Standards Board has approved IEEE 1484.12.1, Standard for Learning Object Metadata which is the first learning content standard released by an accredited standards organization. The standard makes it easier to find, evaluate and share learning objects (i.e., the content of education and training programs) and ensures that objects in one system are understood readily in other systems.


  

MINOR DAMAGE.com -- The defacement crew used a little humour when replacing the RIAA front page with subtle pieces of commentary.


  

AARDVARK.at -- I think the recording industry is full of muppets. Horst Prillinger thinks so too. Prompted by a story in The Register, which attempts to shed a more realistic light on the record companies' complaints that they've done everything right and it's the evil Internet that is causing their shrinking revenues. In actuality, the RIAA has deliquesced artists' revenues by shortsighted confrontational tactics that constrain the listening habits of music advocates. They deserve to experience a downturn in CD sales, since they have lost touch with their buying public.


  

WASHINGTON POST.com -- A series of setbacks and difficulties have kept for-profit, online higher education spin-offs from realizing success. Ventures at schools including Columbia University and New York University have been scaled back or dropped. UMUC Online, the online project of the University of Maryland University College, was scrapped last fall. But many involved in such initiatives still believe in the potential for online higher education. Gerald A. Heeger, the president of UMUC and champion of UMUC Online, thinks that online learning can actually be better than traditional, residential education. Matthew Pittinsky, chairman of Blackboard, said that for every failed venture there are five that succeed. Adam Newman of Eduventures said that the industry has seen a "retrenchment" that focuses online initiatives where they can succeed, such as in supplements to traditional classes.


  

28 August 2002


Wish List: T-shirt
WarShirt. MUST HAVE. MUST HAVE. MUST HAVE. Warchalking - The T Shirt by John McCartney... [Ben Hammersley.com]
  

BLOGSTREET.com -- Based on their (number of) inward links, the world's top blogs include Dave Winer's Scripting News (972), the geek community's Slash Dot (653), and the community blogMetafilter (648).


  

CNET -- Declan McCullagh interviews Sarah Deutsch and lays down reasons why ISPs should resist enhancements to copyright law.


x: 26121

  

CNET -- Declan McCullagh interviews Susan Deutsch and lays down reasons why ISPs should resist enhancements to copyright law.


  

27 August 2002


WIRED.com -- Developers at Wake Forest University have written software that turns a Compaq iPaq PDA into a mobile, wireless Web server, allowing teachers and students to communicate in new ways in the classroom. While many schools have experimented with PDAs in the classroom -– using them as a substitute for laptop computers, for instance -– PocketClassroom could increase communication between students and teachers during class.

x:153 >> downloadable app


  

Here's an underinformed reporter, who listened to a single account, and wrote a malformed story. The piece conflates many innocuous trends into rampaging, wardriving, warchalking crackers, roaming the streets. Thankfully, Cory Doctorow sets things straight.


x:125


  

After scrambling around copyright and trademark challenges for most of its existence, F***edCompany.com feels the heat from Ford Motor and the Associated Press.
x: 125

  

26 August 2002


FM-TRANSMITTER.com -- Have you seen Google Dance?


x: 143


  

24 August 2002


I couldn't have a job because that would stop my grant.

THURLES, Co Tipperary -- The small town of Thurles is more famous for its hurling team than for its job culture. Yet there are equally famous principles in Thurles that form the basis of 21st century Ireland. Take the concept of residents getting real jobs -- something that local politicians hope would happen to dampen the raging unemployment that typifies this area. After working with dozens of twentysomethings from North Tipperary, I've little success when trying to instill an entrepreurial desire in local people. "Now I couldn't have a job because that would stop my grant," was today's comment. So in one breath, a recent college graduate took up position in the dole queue, right behind another family member who confidently led the way to another generation of State support.

This attitude comes on the heels of figures from the World Economic Forum on Competitiveness that shows Ireland has fallen from 11th place in 2001 to 14th in 2002. EU performance figures reveal Ireland is mediocre. You get more for your international investment in China or India. Low-end ICT jobs will be sucked out of Ireland for other places in the global marketplace. The biggest reason this will happen -- rising wage demands in Ireland. And the only way to stave off this inevitability is for real commitments from employees and company directors.


x:26121

  


CHRONICLE.com -- The Alliance for Lifelong Learning, a nonprofit distance education company run by Stanford University, the University of Oxford, and Yale University, has a new name and is open to the public. Now called AllLearn, the company's courses were formerly only open to alumni of the three supporting universities. The venture, similar to Columbia University's Fathom project, will make about 50 distance courses available. Tuition for each course is $250, and each course will last between five and ten weeks. A spokeswoman from AllLearn said the group always intended to make the program available to the public. Others claim the decision evinced the venture was not as successful as its founders had hoped.
x:109

  


Home Wi-Fi for Entertainment Hub


Most home Wi-Fi items are audio products. One of the earliest was Audiotron from Turtle Beach. You plug it into your stereo system and it lets you play Internet radio or MP3s from PC hard drives. Audiotron has an Ethernet port so you can access networked PCs and share a broadband Internet connection.

RioCentral, a similar device from SonicBlue, can plug into an Ethernet network via a USB-to- Ethernet adapter -- and possibly via a USB-to-Wi-Fi adapter.

Sharp Electronics has LCD TVs that use a video sender system that employs Wi-Fi for the network transport.

A recent in-depth survey of 10,500 Internet households by Parks Associates found that a surprising number had home LANs -- 3,800. Perhaps even more surprising, 10.7 percent of home LAN users in the study have a television set connected to the network and 11.8 percent have a digital audio receiver. Some of these home entertainment systems plug into Motorola'a Broadband Media Center (BMC) 9000.


x:1012

  



SANTRY HOTSPOT -- Everyone loves good content. We should learn how to make our Web sites tell interesting stories.


x:125


  


INFOWORLD -- An IBM eServer pSeries UNIX provides wireless emergency access for public safety. This is a secure wireless communications system that will serve more than 40 police, fire and other emergency services in Washington, D.C. and its Virginia and Maryland suburbs. The project, valued at $20 million and funded by the federal government, involves building a network that will handle 10,000 users and, according to IBM, will surpass security standards set by the FBI. The network will connect local agencies' current communication devices, and enable an officer, for example, to inform all necessary agencies from the scene of a hazardous waste spill on the beltway around the city. According to the Washington Post, Motorola is protesting the award of the contract, saying its proposal was not fairly evaluated.


x: 1014


  

23 August 2002


ALL NET DEVICES.com -- Transat and Intel hope that the smart cards of 3G GSM phones could become the trusted device identifiers in the future of mobile hotspot roaming, leading to one bill for all use.


  

google


  

BLOGSTREET -- Being a voyeur, I enjoy looking at what other people read. The blogstreet reveals the neighbourhood's linked relationships.


  

TEMPLE BAR -- Those active in the blogosphere know a klog is a knowledge-management weblog. For Tom Murphy of Spin Solutions, you could use weblogging tools (like Moveable Type, Blogger, Manila, or Radio) or you could use something more potent, like Index. It would be easy to use Index when writing about your work, what happens, and what you know about. Then you could use RSS to aggregate all the content you track to form your conclusions. Soon, you have the core of a knowledge management system.


  

John Robb -- Several people have noticed The Creative Commons is empty. Not many want to put anything into it. "Or we want to be selective about it," says Dave Winer. "You can read Scripting News and DaveNet for free. You can even use Radio and Frontier for free, for a short period of time while you evaluate the software. But this world, with doctors, hospitals, grocery stores, cars, gas, insurance, medicine, lawyers, etc, requires money. The trick is to have art in your life and make some of it pay. And that in itself is an art." From my vantage point, both schools of thought rotate around the numinous status afforded to copyright.


  

SILICON VALLEY.com -- Former JDS Uniphase chief executive Kevin Kalkhoven says that the overbuilt fiber-optics industry can't rely on long-distance communications to justify its existence but must seek profitability by focusing on the consumer market. "It's the end user, stupid. It's the end user that will determine the growth of industry," he told the attendees at the Opticon 2002 conference. "It's the first mile -- and the first inch -- that will build demand for bandwidth." The new wireless networks for broadband Internet access are brought to homes at lower costs than through traditional cable or DSL lines.


  

Mobile Operators Must Get into WLAN Space

In-STAT/MDR -- If they don't act quickly, mobile operators may miss their chance to get a critical head start in the burgeoning public Wireless LAN market. The high-tech market research firm reports that offering WLAN services today will enable mobile operators to experiment with broadband services, to combine them with their GPRS and CDMA 1x RTT offerings, and migrate users to WCDMA when it becomes available. If they delay in implementing WLAN technology, competitors will get a sole head start over mobile operators, covering all the hotspots and competing head-on with their future services.


  

SLATE -- Mark Jenkins writes about the music industry's self-inflicted wounds.


  

WASHINGTON POST -- Speaking from a front-line vantage point where I watch the download trends of college students, I would concur with the Washington Post that Washington Post"the most downloaded album in Internet history -- the recently released 'The Eminem Show' -- is also the best-selling album of the year, which suggests that at least some fans were spurred to buy the disc even though they already had it stashed on their hard drives."


  

22 August 2002


 
PC

HELP! -- I need to tweak something to get my Buffalo WLI-PCM-L11G PCMCIA Card talking to my Apple AirPort. The WLI-PCM-L11G connects to my laptop's PC card Type II slot. The WLI-PCM-L11G uses the IEEE802.11b standard to communicate over the 2.4 GHz radio frequency at up to 11Mbps. I need to make the card communicate with the AirPort using P2P or ad-hoc mode.


  

John Robb -- If the RIAA has its way, it will start shutting down selected Internet nodes. That a $20b industry can inflict $100b of damage for less than $1b of damages boggles the imagination.


  

NEC.com -- I've presented at several international conferences and when I've offered URLs to my working notes, drafts or presentation materials, my stuff got mentioned more often. That compares to achieving absolutely zip recognition for papers presented in the 70s. Online or Invisible reports that papers published on the web are more often cited than papers not web-ified.


  

STAND.org.uk -- "What will copyright look like in the 21st century? Many people have many different ideas - it's all very much still in flux. The European Union, however, decided exactly how it would be on the 22nd of May, 2001. That was the date the European Directive on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the Information Society was passed. It will become law across Europe by Christmas of this year at the very latest: countries failing to follow the order will be in breach of the Treaty of Rome." The British government's consultation period runs until October.


  

Doc Searls -- Bored with the "male kinda shit that seems to comprise 5/4 of the blog world," Doc led me to the smartest babeblogs on the Web: Dawn (up yours and more helpful tips) and Moxie (HiQ Attitude).


  

WERBACH.com -- Kevin Werbach astutely fingers the conflict between Hollywood and the technology industry. "One sees content as the critical resource, and data networks as simply another mechanism to deliver it. The other sees connectivity as the essential factor, with movies being one of many resources that can travel along those connections. Hollywood sees a moral dimension in protecting its property and the creative works of its artists, as well as a nobility in bringing entertainment to the masses. The tech industry things bits are bits, and the only moral value that really matters is freedom."


  

Lawrence Lessig -- He's fun to hear, good to read and true-to-form in his weblog. Welcome Lawrence Lessig to the blogosphere by paying him a visit in cyberspace. Then mull over Dave Winer's rebuttals before you decide to buy any of Lessig's books.


  

Personal WiFi Hotspots

Nokia
Tim Kirby -- From coffee chats with Tim Kirby, I've learned that most American cell phone operators are now integrating 802.11b service with their networks. This means you could use a mobile network with a card phone (like the Nokia D211) to create a personal hotspot within 300 feet of your cardphone. This could make personal WiFi hotspots as pervasive as mobile phones.


  

NEWS.com -- John Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general, said Americans should realize that swapping illicit copies of music and movies is a criminal offense that can result in lengthy prison terms.

Speaking at the Progress and Freedom Foundations annual technology and politics summit, Malcolm said the Internet has become "the world's largest copy machine" and that criminal prosecutions of copyright offenders are now necessary to preserve the viability of America's content industries.


  

PEW INTERNET.org -- A recent report concludes that students are far more adept than their teachers when it comes to finding creative educational uses for the Internet. "Many schools and teachers have not yet recognized — much less responded to — the new ways students communicate and access information over the Internet."


  

80211b NEWS -- Starbucks's wireless store locator is merely an extension of their current store locator (select wireless from the popup menu), and it doesn't appear to offer a simple way to, for instance, find all activated stores in a geographic area -- only city by city. T-Mobile's location finder is just a modified MobileStar location finder code, except you can select entire categories.


  

21 August 2002


BOARDS.ie -- One of the most rabid sources of information about wireless technologies, including:


  

Dave Winer -- Winer's Blog and Lessig went back and forth with a frank exchange of views over blogs. They got to an interesting place. At the end of the day, they became joint proponents of blogging in the creative commons. It's important that key people do not delegate their blogging. It's also important to listen to the backbench comments in the blogosphere. Personally, I like Lessig's simple suggestion: identify 2 luddite members of Congress -- one Republican and one Democrat. Organize and defeat them in November. If Congress saw bad ideas cost seats, they'd begin to do something about their bad ideas. This concept works in Ireland too.


  

ADOBE.com -- In addition to the superior typographic controls of InDesign 2.0, features like Transparency, Table Creation, support for XML, and a streamlined print interface make InDesign 2.0 the clear choice for professional layout artists who are bound to high design standards and tight editorial deadlines.


  

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER.com -- Analysts suggest wireless Internet access in public places will become an increasing standard for pay news content in America. Papers expect surfers to pay up.


  

Scott Rosenberg wonders, "When all the file traders are in jail, who'll be left to buy music?"


  

SALON.com -- The Internet has become a social commons, rather than an information marketplace, confounding media pros who are used to selling viewer numbers to advertisers.


  

CONTEXT MAG.com -- Today the telegraph is forgotten. What happened to it? And what does its fate say about what lies ahead for the Internet? If you find it hard to believe that the Internet is merely a modern twist on a 19th-century system, consider the many striking parallels.


  

BOXES AND ARROWS -- This book is less focused on the practicalities of business than Cluetrain, and is more a treatise on how the Internet and all massively shared internetworked environments (for the book, conflated to the common term "the Web") are changing us as social beings.


  

NAVARTS.com -- This whitepaper answers the 10 most critical questions. Here's the blurb from the NavigationArts site

With the overwhelming quantity and demand for information, organizations are starting to think about the nature of their business's institutional knowledge, content and information and its increased burden on today's organization to find an effective means of collection and distribution. To best meet this need, information architecture helps to organize, prioritize and manage the generation, capture and distribution of information. This white paper addresses the ten most critical questions about information architecture in respect to its value in today's evolving business environment.


  

Starbucks, HP, and T-Mobile might be announcing strategic links. The additive revenue for Starbucks comes from the "after the morning rush" people who want a WiFi link and a cappuccino.


  

ZDNET.com -- We know there are problems with W2K server. Now there is a new flaw in Apache.


  

OPEN -- A sweet Flash front-end is bolted onto Kartoo, a very slick search engine. Its great use of metadata provides search options and shows the relationships between search results.


  

MAC OSX HINTS.com -- Going wireless without an AirPort card


  

20 August 2002


INFORMATION WORLD.com -- It appears that ISOC will run the .org domain. The Web's governing body has issued a report recommending the Internet Society over 10 other competitors vying to run the .org domain when VeriSign relinquishes it in January.


  

TIPPERARY INSTITUTE -- Just like it says in on the front page of The Irish Times, college students are shunning computer courses.Some say that's because of mounting job losses in the tech sector. Others argue that only computer lovers should take college computing courses or that student expectations have changed.


  

INFORMATION WAVE.net -- Information Wave Technologies is blocking the RIAA from its network. Earlier this year, the RIAA announced its new plan to access computers without owner's consent for the sake of protecting its assets. Information Wave believes this policy puts its customers at risk of unintentional damage, corporate espionage, and invasion of privacy.


  

NYT -- Industry analysts see evidence that Apple is contemplating what inside the company is being called an "iPhone." Among the evidence, they say, is recent behind-the-scenes wrangling between Palm and Apple over linking Palm's own devices to Apple's new operating system — apparently with little cooperation on Apple's part.


  

SLASHDOT.org -- It looks like DVD region encoding is on the verge of collapse. A Slashdot reader writes: "It seems like the infamous Region Encoding system used by DVD manufacturers to prevent us buying disks from overseas is about to collapse - due to widespread flaunting of the system.


  

Edward Felten -- Recently lost his Internet account, claiming that his ISP cancelled it because of a single erroneous complaint filed by SpamCop about a mailing list posting that mentioned his new weblog. Workbench says "SpamCop is just a tool that makes it convenient for people to report and complain about spam. It doesn't force ISPs to be stupid."


  

Gerry McGovern -- Reflecting on dotcon matters, Gerry McGovern told Newscan "I was part of the whole Dot Com rollercoaster. As I watch the wheels come off the stock market, I can't say I'm surprised. Many of us lived an illusion. Everything was about change, speed and innovation. We got lots of change alright. What we didn't bet on was that the change, instead of ushering in a 21st Century economy, actually created a 19th Century robber baron climate."


  

Thomas Jefferson -- "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."


  

EIFEL -- I walked under the Eiffel tower this summer, thinking it looked out of place in Paris. I also learned that nothing like the Eiffel Tower had ever been built. It was twice as high as the dome of St. Peter's in Rome or the Great Pyramid of Giza. It's three times as high as the spire of Dublin, In contrast to such older monuments, Eiffel's tower was raised in a matter of months, with a small labor force, at slight cost.the creation and the creator.

After graduation from the College of Art and Manufacturing in 1855, Eiffel began to specialize in metal construction, especially bridges. He directed the erection of an iron bridge at Bordeaux in 1858, followed by several others. In 1867 he designed the lofty, arched Gallery of Machines for that year's Paris Exhibition, and in 1877 he bridged the Douro River at Oporto, Portugal, with a 525-foot steel arch, which he followed with an even greater arch of the same type, the 540-foot span Garabit viaduct over the Truyère River in southern France, for many years the highest bridge in the world, 400 feet over the stream.

In 1884, Eiffel designed the wrought-iron pylon inside Frederic Bartholdi's Statue Of Liberty in New York Harbor and the next year began work on the cupola of the Nice observatory. He later became interested in aerodynamics and wrote "The Resistance of the Air" (1913).

The Eiffel Tower was an immense tower of exposed latticework supports made of iron built to celebrate the science and engineering achievements of its age. The 984-foot structure consists of two visibly distinct parts, a base composed of a platform resting on four separate supports (called pylons or bents) and, above this, a slender tower created as the bents taper upward, rising above a second platform to merge in a unified column.

The curve of the base pylons was precisely calculated so that the bending and shearing forces of the wind were progressively transformed into forces of compression, which the bents could withstand more effectively. The superskyscrapers erected since 1960 are constructed in much the same way.


[NewsScan to Go]
  

Van Ossenbruggen -- I read a quick overview of state-of-the-art in Semantic Web technology, the key relationships with traditional hypermedia research, and a comprehensive reference list to various sets of literature (hypertext, Web and Semantic Web). Jacco Van Ossenbruggen's research agenda describes open issues in the development of the Semantic Web from the perspective of hypermedia research.


  

19 August 2002


AvantGo.com -- You can get 8MB of channel info by sbscribing to a $19.95 AvantGo plan. The 2MB option remains free.


  

ENN.ie -- Vivendi may sell its 50 percent share in Vizzavi to Vodafone for EUR 150m, bringing the future of the Ireland's e-merge wireless portal into question. The sale would form part of Vivendi's drive to offload more than EUR 10b in assets over the next two years, in order to reduce debt. Vodafone and Vivendi have invested more than EUR 1b in the portal, which aimed to bring multimedia content such as music and video to the users to high-end mobile phones.


  

Stefanie Olsen on CNET -- Major Web portals are starting to separate paid listings from the nonpaid stuff


  

CNET -- I count on my notebook to be my desktop and my entertainment co-ordinator. So it's nice to know that others are also demanding innovation from notebook manufactures. For me, it means getting more performance, better battery life, BIOS-level WiFi, and fast power-off. In 2002, I've moved into multiband wireless communications, where my notebooks drifts from GSM to WiFi to dial-up and back, all without restarting.


  

Lawrence Lessig -- In his address before a packed house at the Open Source Convention, Lawrence Lessig challenged the open source audience to get more involved in the political process. Lawrence, a tireless advocate for open source, is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. He is also the author of the best-selling book Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace. You can get the complete transcript of Lawrence's keynote presentation made on July 24, 2002. You can also download a 20MB MP3 version of the presentation.


  

Applied Digital Solutions -- When looking at the innocent faces of the two 10-yr girls who were abducted and killed in England last week, I started to think that I will compromise the privacy of children in exchange for them wearing the new generation of tracking devices. The devices combine two existing technologies. One is a global-positioning-system (GPS) chip, which uses radio signals from a network of satellites to work out where it is on the earth's surface to within a few metres. The other is a mobile-telephone chip, which broadcasts that location to whoever needs to know it. The result is a pocket-sized, or even wrist-sized, personal locator.

Applied Digital Solutions calls its version of the technology a “digital angel”. The angel comes in two versions. People get a pager-like device that clips on to their clothing. Animals get a collar. The angel is intended to look after old people who have become forgetful and young children who have become too adventurous. The wearer's guardians define a perimeter beyond which they feel their charge should not wander, and receive alerts via mobile phone when he has gone beyond these boundaries.

>>This is non-intrusive gerontechnology. The digital angel can also issue an alert when its wearer has fallen down, or when there has been an unexpected change in local temperature of the sort that might be caused, say, by someone falling into a pond. For that to happen, the wearer needs to sport a specially modified wristwatch which has suitable sensors and a wireless link to the pager.


  

OZZIE.net -- Ray Ozzie loves his Canon PowerShot S40. "Absolutely a wonderful camera, in so many dimensions, and I've used it quite a bit. Bought one for my son, who took it to college and shared all sorts of great photos over the year via Groove." Now he's looking for a camera that "passes the cell phone threshold for me - meaning, small enough that I would carry it continuously, that I'd never have to think about battery life, and that if even if I didn't take many pictures, I'd have had few regrets in carrying it."


  

STEPTWO.com.au -- Why not use klogs to enhance intranets? Klogging could enhance both intranet information and content management.

If you want a logical hierarchical structure, then organic growth is a problem. It's like running water, it flows down along the path of least resistance and doesn't care about the direction. Same with people, they'll squirrel stuff anywhere that makes sense today (have you taken a good look at your my "My Documents" directory lately?) Of course if you're klogging then this organic growth is part of the package.

Klogging helps intranet information exchange. When you have something to publish it's dead easy: click, type, click. You can publish in bite-size chunks. This means that if you have a small but useful piece of information you can just klog it. You don't have to pad it into a long document to make it worthwhile. You also don't have to find "just the right place" for it to go, it just gets klogged. That chunk can exist in it's own right, waiting for the day someone needs it.

As it stands klogging is a decentralizing technology that doesn't encourage a formal hierarchical structure. You klog and, if all goes according to plan, people will subscribe to you and they will link to you.

Some people might argue that a healthy klogging culture coupled with a Google search appliance.

Perhaps you shouldn't scrap the intranet and replace it with klogs, but you should think carefully about what you want your intranet to achieve and whether some of your goals for information publishing and dissemination couldn't be better achieved with a klogging strategy.


  

CDFax

CDFax is a command-line Linux utility for "fax-like transfer of CDs." Two people run the software. The receiver loads a CD blank in his burner, and the sender puts a CD to be sent in her drive. The sender enters a brief command that specifies the receiver's IP address and the disk is imaged, sent, and burned at the remote end. A simple and striking idea. [BoingBoing] [Beltorchicca]


  

KILKENNY, Ireland -- We're lucky to have expert usability consultancy on demand from people who need help seeing Web pages. So after a casual afternoon coffee with our Web developers, we're going to scrub all our stylesheets that restrict font sizes. That would please Jakob Neilsen, who argues we should let users control font size. It actually hurts sight-impaired viewers when Web designers specify the exact size of text down to the pixel.


  

Perth, Australia -- While airborne, they spotted 90 networks. Jason Jordan noted, "We're the first to brag about going War Storming, . . . a combination of war driving and barn storming.


  

18 August 2002


POYNTER.org -- Ways to find info on deadline.


  

ALISTAPART -- Daypop's Dan Chan considers the blogpsphere to be part of The Living Web. It's always changing. Every revision requires new writing. If it uses dull words, nobody will read them, and nobody will come back. If the words are wrong, people will be misled, disappointed, infuriated.

Writing for the Living Web is a tremendous challenge. Here are ten tips that can help.

  1. Write for a reason.
  2. Write often.
  3. Write tight.
  4. Make good friends.
  5. Find good enemies.
  6. Let the story unfold.
  7. Stand up, speak out.
  8. Be sexy.
  9. Use your archives.
  10. Relax!


  

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW.com -- Simson Garfinkel, in Firewall Follies raises a renascent theme: They don't make business systems significantly more secure. And by focusing attention on defending the perimeter, rather than on defending information assets within an organization, firewalls foster lax internal security practices that magnify the damage that insiders can inflict.


  

17 August 2002


Ormonde Hotel, Kilkenny, Ireland -- I was walking around the foyer of the plush Ormonde Hotel, showing people how this WiFi thing works. Most were nonplussed by the technology but quite curious about the content that flowed wirelessly through it from Dave Winer, Ray Ozzie and The New York Times. They're all commenting about on-going actions by record companies that seeks to compel the companies that control the Internet backbone to intervene in pirate sites located in China. The scary thing is that the technology could be used not only to block content coming out of an internet site, but it could also be used to look inside sites.

Ray Ozzie is worried as the symmetry of the Internet at the IP level takes yet another hit.

As a result of things like this, NATs, firewalls, DNS limitations and politics, the core concepts of the original Internet are progressively being pushed to a higher level, e.g. middleware-level or application-level. IP becomes XML packet routing, TCP becomes transaction state management, DNS becomes namespace management, etc. And it's better than the original: the packet routing is secure, the state management is persistent and durable, the namespace management becomes trustworthy. You can see this happening in most of the interesting Internet applications of the past few years, e.g. IM, Napster, Gnutella, Jabber, and Groove, and I expect that it will soon be happening operating systems and key development frameworks.


  

DavidKilkenny, Ireland -- It's a beautiful day, sitting in the lobby of The Ormonde Hotel with David Lennon (left) during the Kilkenny Arts Festival. We posted this to the blog with my Acer webcam, then walked downhill along Ormonde Street while connected over a WLAN. Under a clear blue sky, with U2 playing in my Real Player headset, you couldn't ask for a better Internet experience. Within a year, I plan to have four streets in Kilkenny on the WiFi map.


  

FRONTIER -- Check out the beta of Instant Messaging in Frontier/Radio.


  

IBM -- The Everyplace Wireless Gateway promises seamless roaming across disparate wireless networks including cellular, WLANs, private mobile radio, and satellite. The Toronto Police Service plans to put it into action.


  

16 August 2002


The Intersection of Groove and Office

Ray Ozzie -- Where does Office intersect Groove? Ray Ozzie won't say.


  

Karlin Lillington -- Technoculture is blogging now, with thoughts complementary to the print pieces. Karlin Lillington writes, "In print, a writer is hedged in by time and space -- deadlines and column inches. Also, print tends to be a more formal and structured format. Weblogs are realtime, flexible, unconfined. Here, I can throw out fast bits of commentary on subjects as they are in the news, rather than several days after, link to what I find interesting on the web, and generate some reader discussion.


  

Dave Winer -- "The facts are out. You keep all the money for yourselves. The artists get nothing. You care not one whit about the art, on either side of the equation. That's the insult. That has to be dealt with. How dare you threaten to throw users in jail. You should be in jail if there were any justice." This is a consistent theme at Scripting News.

Declan McCullagh has a more reasoned approach, as he writes about debunking DCMA myths. McCullagh writes, "The DMCA is both an egregious law and a brazen power grab by Hollywood, the music industry and software companies. It is probably unconstitutional. It creates unnecessary federal crimes, cedes too much authority to copyright holders, and should be unceremoniously tossed out by the courts." But on the issue of going to jail because you wrote a paper, "if published research does not include working code--which is a vital part of research--the odds of a successful lawsuit rapidly approach zero."


  

LOCKERGNOME.com -- If you happen to attend GNOMEDEX, you can borrow a free WiFi card for your laptop. Shouldn't we be doing this at Irish technology events too?


  

ONLINE LEARNING MAG.com -- There are three major flaws of online video - talking heads, lack of interactivity and lack of control. Then there's Playback Media whose website talks about overcoming those defects and Xi Blue who can teach you how to produce effective educational videos.


  

ISOC.org -- "The Internet Society strongly opposes attempts to impose governmental technology mandates that are designed to protect only the economic interests of certain owners of intellectual property over the economic interests of much larger portions of society. The current debate in many countries of the world regarding digital rights management (DRM) has illustrated the inevitable conclusion of technology mandates in law: a world where all digital media technology is either forbidden or compulsory. The effect of these mandates is to grant veto power over new technologies to special interest groups who have continually opposed innovation." The ISOC posturing comes on the heels of Richard Stallman, the controversial President of the Free Software Foundation, who called on the July 2002 OSCON audience to stop conceding that copying or sharing is an infringement of copyright.


  

15 August 2002


Joel Kotkin -- If the author is correct, then Enterprise Ireland's cluster concept is fatally flawed.

Both Enterprise Ireland and Shannon Development try to build up enterprise centres by attracting a cluster dynamic. That's often useful, but it can also miss the point of how effectively people at the periphery of a company can communicate directly to collaborators without being in the same geographic area.

In The Declustering of America, Kotkin says it's now "increasingly easy for a firm to operate in a dispersed manner". Kotkin limits his scope to geographic issues. It's a good read, because we're well into the phase of "the next company" described by Peter Drucker, who points to the "Internet and e-mail (that) have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications. This has meant that the most productive and most profitable way to organise is to disintegrate."


  

WASHINGTON POST -- A study funded by the Pew Internet and American Life Projects has found that students are increasingly comfortable with the World Wide Web, and frustrated that more of their classroom work isn't built around it. The project's director says: "Even though we spend all this money to wire the schools, we're not all that well prepared to use it. The kids really do know how to use the Internet and they want it to be exploited in the ways they know it can be exploited. Outside the classroom and outside of any formal instruction, the Internet is a key part of their educational instruction."


  

WSJ.com -- Since mobile users just keep paying up their bills every month, Web site operators have discovered they can turn to wireless to boost their revenues. The three biggest Chinese portals, Sina, Sohu and Netease, reported SMS boosts revenues.


  

Mike Cannon-Brookes -- If you have Java Web Start, you'll love Thin RSS.


  

Sighting: PC Wave USB WLAN Adapter

Cheapest or Smallest or Both?. PC Wave's new USB WLAN adapter may not be the smallest out there, but it might have cornered the market on affordability. [allNetDevices Wireless News]


  

CRAZY APPLE RUMORS.com -- What if Microsoft was exposed for accounting irregularities and Apple actually had 95% market share?


  

Joyce Cohen -- Going off to college? Meet your flatmate over e-mail first


  

14 August 2002


LATIMES -- A Forrester Research report released Tuesday says that the true threat to record labels' profits is the sagging economy, and that downloadable music could actually prove to be the industry's salvation rather than its scourge. According to the report's findings, people who download music from the Internet more than nine times a month -- a relatively small percentage of the overall market -- say they'll decrease their album purchases by 2%. At the same time, 39% of downloading enthusiasts said they bought more CDs, because they found new music that they wanted to purchase through their file-swapping activities. Meanwhile, it turns out that consumers who rarely or never download music account for more than two-thirds of CD sales in the U.S. With music sales slumping nearly 10% this year so far, report author Josh Bernoff says the true culprits are limited radio playlists, high-priced CDs and a general economic recession. The Forrester report suggests that record labels should offer more flexible pricing and online access to their entire music back-catalogues in order to make online music-buying more consumer-friendly. The predicted payoff (which some view as excessively optimistic) could amount to a boost of $937 million in album downloads, $805 million in singles downloads and $313 million in subscription fees by 2007.


  

WASHINGTON POST -- The Washington Post looks at the 15th anniversary of Business Ethics, one of the world's thinnest magazines.


  

CHRONICLE of Higher Ed -- New fees force college radio to shut webcasts.
  


SALON -- Scott Rosenberg explains why the media titan just don't get it. According to "Bamboozled at the Revolution," a new book chronicling "how big media lost billions in the battle for the Internet," it is. After 300 grueling pages recording stunningly stupid corporate boardroom struggles, author John Motavalli concludes that "Web content is dead," "digital dreams have been deferred for 'broadband,'" and "AOL Time Warner will dominate."


  

80211 PLANET -- The latest report out of In-Stat/MDR (entitled "Chips Ahoy: Home Networking Chipsets Set Sail for a Prosperous Future") says that home networks are on the upswing after years of equipment and chip vendors pushing for their adoption by consumers. WLAN popularity is cited as one of the factors, as vendors continue to make the market more competitive as they design products to win over consumers. Overall worldwide home networks numbered 10.5 million at the end of 2001, and are expected to be at 16.6 million by the end of this year.


  

Email turns twenty today!. Twenty years ago today, the IETF approved RFC 822, standardizing ARPANet email.
This standard specifies a syntax for text messages that are sent among computer users, within the framework of "electronic mail". The standard supersedes the one specified in ARPANET Request for Comments #733, "Standard for the Format of ARPA Net- work Text Messages".

In this context, messages are viewed as having an envelope and contents. The envelope contains whatever information is needed to accomplish transmission and delivery. The contents compose the object to be delivered to the recipient. This stan- dard applies only to the format and some of the semantics of mes- sage contents. It contains no specification of the information in the envelope.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Richard!) [Boing Boing Blog]
  

WIRED -- There is the Ellen Feiss fan site and the Ellen Fan Club: beep beep beep, which has set up a Cafépress Web store to sell T- shirts, coffee mugs and flying discs adorned with her image. Even if you don't Switch, you have to check out Feiss.

"...and it was like, beep beep beep beep beep beep beep..."
- Ellen Feiss, Student


  

Undervaluing IT

SLASHDOT.org -- Is today's IT an undervalued asset?. Slashdot readers discuss the possibility of the IT profession diminishing in importance over the next several years.


  

REUTERS -- "Serious flaw" found in Internet Explorer. The Internet Explorer (IE) problem has been around for at least five years and could allow an attacker to intercept personal data when a user is making a purchase or providing information for e-commerce purposes. This severe vulnerability destroys the whole purpose of SSL certificates.


  

13 August 2002


Ray Ozzie -- Catalysed by the public nature of the 1:1 discussion between Steve and himself, Ray posted some observations on blogging architecture, and how it is potentially transformational for public discussions. This revelation is news to Ray Ozzie!


  

BUSINESS WEEK -- BusinessWeek: "When Macromedia puchased Allaire, the Web software outfit gambled that two negatives would make a plus. Well, 17 months later, they haven't."


  

KILKENNY -- We're installing an Intellisign WLAN and now need to make sure all the WiFi works. That's Metrowerks message, one we've taken on board.


  

OZZIE.net -- Ray Ozzie's sudden and dramatic appearance in blogspace means the Open World has hit the desktop. Yet, I wonder -- could Windows take away what Groove gives?


  

Negroponte on WiFi

MLE -- Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab fired a warning flare at leading telecommunications providers, telling them they should not underestimate WiFi. The low-cost 802.11b Wireless LAN used by the Media Lab Europe pushed its signal nearly 800m down the street when it was first installed in Dublin. It allowed people in several pubs a way to access MLE's high speed Internet line. Today, many more WiFi nodes are appearing in Dublin. Intel plans to build the capability into chips made in County Kildare. DSL and cable providers are beginning to write service agreements that prohibit using their services as connection points for Wi-Fi networks. But mobile phone companies may be facing another kind of dilemma. Negroponte thinks that the telecommunications industry may not bounce back from its current slump, because with technologies like Wi-Fi entering the mix, "we're going to use telecommunications very differently."

From my ground floor vantage point as we deploy our first Intellisign to Kilkenny, I would have to agree with Negroponte's analysis.


  

12 August 2002


80211b -- It's important to develop an Open Source WiFi Timeline. That's about the only way we can avoid creative revisionism.


  

11 August 2002


ZDNET -- Mr Muris from the FTC said, "We believe that Microsoft made a number of misrepresentations, dealing with, one, the overall security of the Passport system and personal information stored on it; two, the security of online purchases made with Passport Wallet; three, the kinds of personal information Microsoft collects of users of the Passport service; and four, how much control parents have over the information collected by Web sites participating in the Kids Passport program."


  

STEPTWO.com -- Check out this book on topic maps from Addison-Wesley Professional called XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web

» Read about knowledge bases, XTM Technology, Global Federated Knowledge Interchange.


  

10 August 2002


Mike Maron -- Infomaniacs need NewsViews because it allows the news aggregator to display more than a single page. But it doesn't feed news into blogs.


  

TIG's Corner -- Dave Rahul points to another effect of blogging: effective tracking. He explains how tracking is simple and efficient.

Use the GUID attribute Dave introduced into RSS. Let it be the URL of the post or something else unique. Now say I pick Dave in my aggregator, and I make a comment on his post. Then say John Robb picks me up and makes a comment on mine. Let's assume these comments are published as items to our respective blogs, with own GUID. Now let Dave search your neighbourhood, which is a combination of your bookmarks, blogroll, and subscribtions. Even if he doesn't find me, he will find John (Robb), and by using the GIUD's, he can reconstruct the conversation and show it on the blog item, changing every hour, reflecting the neighbourhood's thoughts on it, and expanding beyond the neighbourhood in a controlled fashion through overlapping conversations.

Now think about doing it recursively, by referring conversations on neighbourhood blogs. Curtail it at some reasonable radius.


  

NEW SCIENTIST -- Ears creep towards the Dumbo end of the aural spectrum as the years pass. Scientists have even calculated the average annual increase in ear circumference.


  

APPLE -- The new iPod update includes improved calendar integration, support for equalisation in iTunes, and lots of UI tweaks. This is one flexible piece of hardware.


  

free the mouse
BumperActive is giving away free "Free the Mouse" bumper stickers to help the world show its support for the Eldred case, where Larry Lessig is fighting to repeal the repeated extension of copyright every time Mickey Mouse's earliest films are in danger of entering the public domain.


  

09 August 2002


Quote of the Day: Mariah Carey on Hunger

Mariah Carey -- "Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff."


  

SANTRY, Ireland -- We're deploying a temporary wireless hotspot network during the Kilkenny Arts Festival and are exploring innovative wireless antenna ideas, including baby milk cantennas When everything is installed, we want to produce documentation useful for community purposes, written in a way that doesn't require the use of an exegete to understand.


  

RADIO -- Start here for Radio FAQs.


  

PLAYBOY.com -- Want a pin-up on your phone?. You can read Playboy, play the games and see the coverage on a range of mobile devices, after their content is post-produced by Legend Mobile for PDAs. Legend Mobile (as PTN Media) have done this kind of content before.


  

Phillip Pearson -- There are now 4545 weblogs in Phillip Pearson's weblog ecosystem.


  

KILKENNY, Ireland -- I have bought and used Palm products since 1999. It bothers me that Gartner expects changes: market leadership will gradually shift away from current market leader Palm and towards Microsoft.


  

80211b NEWS -- Check out the Open source Wi-Fi timeline.It purports to define the dates and events along the history of 802.11b and related wireless specifications to the present.


  

08 August 2002


PANASONIC -- Panasonic's new MDWD (for Mobile Data Wireless Display) eliminates the cable that connects the screen to the computer. The result is a thin, flat, self- contained touch screen that communicates with the guts of the computer wirelessly, from up to 150 feet away. The MDWD runs 800 by 600 pixels on a 8.4-inch viewing area. The compact dimensions of the screen ensure ease of carrying, handling and even wearing: thanks to the black strap on the back, you can wear it on your hand like a very expensive football glove. The MDWDisplay and its companion Panasonic Toughbook 07 Mini-PC will incorporate the Intersil PRISM WLAN chip set. The two units are ruggedized for use in harsh environments like factory floors or police patrol cars. Toughbooks are available for purchse in B2B channels by contacting sales support.


  

McGEE's MUSINGS -- Jim McGee writes, "The sharing of knowledge, and the cooperative application of new technologies are part of the responsibility of belonging to a community of practice." This has always been an underlying philosophy of the Irish Open Mailing List. On that list, the notion of knowledge sharing is articulated as a responsibility of community membership.


  

RADIO FREE BLOGISTAN -- David Watson, David Copeland, and Dave Winer write that a reporter in Texas has been told to shut down his personal weblog by his employer, the Houston Chronicle. The reporter was later fired.


  

JON's RADIO -- The blogosphere gives substance to discussions by converging on truth. An acquaintance of [Jon Udell, Bruce Epstein, has for some years been evangelizing OpenData which envisions a world of user-contributed self-correcting databases.


  

EFF -- Representative Howard Berman has introduced legislation that would grant copyright holders near-immunity from the law while attacking a citizen's computer. The bill protects copyright holders from legal action stemming from denial-of-service attacks on people whom they suspect of using material in an unauthorized way on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Exempting a single industry from civil and criminal penalties is unprecedented. This kind of vigilantism is explicitly prohibited by law; Rep. Berman wants to make sure that the law doesn't apply to copyright holders. Make your voice heard and object to this legislation.


  

W3C -- The XHTML Working Draft specifies the XHTML 2.0 Markup Language and a variety of XHTML- conforming modules that support that language. Mark Pilgrim summarises the changes.


  

07 August 2002


Jon Udell -- There is a great deal of personal empowerment with Radio. Udell thinks Radio, like Groove, "offers us a glimpse at a new model of interaction that may indeed make it more natural to post into a public space. Or maybe post into semi- public spaces, more naturally." Expect to see Jon's Radio explore the juncture between the eMail model, the Groove model, and the blog model.


  

Janis Ian -- A revenant from my teenage years, Janis Ian has received more than 2200 emails from unique senders in the past 20 days following her comments about the insensate tactics used by the recording industry. She has answered every one, "getting an education I never intended to get in the process. I've corresponded with lawyers, high schoolers, state representatives, executives, and hackers. And I've felt out of my depth for a good portion of it." The fallout continues.


  

Dave Winer -- Ever wonder how to start a weblog for professional journalists?. Start by reading Dave Winer's explanation. He explains that Jon Udell, the world's best tech blogger, has just started blogging with Infoworld.


  

DUBLIN, Ireland -- Slattery PR sent me info about Nokia's multimedia application developer kit. We're discussing multimedia services on mobile phones with both Nokia and Motorola this week.


  

BAR CODES INC.com -- Turn your name into a bar code with the Online Bar Code Generator.


  

CANARIAS WIRELESS.net -- 1 Dell and 1 Asus computer laptop both with D-Link wireless cards and two 24db grid antennas connect Tenerife and Gran Canary, located over 70 km apart.Alejandro Camara Acevedo says this beat the previous record in Spain of 54 km. The event was marked with a video conference using a 1 Mbps streaming connection.


  

DWTEAM.com -- Useful tips for speeding up Dreamweaver MX.


  

06 August 2002


MOBILITY NETWORKS.com -- The Rogers AT&T Wireless unit of Rogers Communications was able to integrate IEEE 802.11b wireless LANs into a GPRS network using software from Mobility Network Systems.


  

OTC WIRELESS FRIDAY -- OTC Wireless announced it is currently beta testing hardware that will let users use an 802.11b solution to connect any two RS-232 devices together, eliminating the physical serial cable that connects them. The company says the new WiSER is a plug and play device operating in the 2.4GHz frequency range, with a data transfer rate of 11 Mbps, and is totally compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux. Tthe RS-232 solution allows any existing Whiteboard or Serial based device to be fitted for wireless connectivity by simply plugging in the transceiver, thereby providing a major solution for schools and businesses that already own a whiteboard or RS-232 device.


  

NOKIA -- Nokia Symbian OS Communicators Get Acrobat Reader. Nokia's 9210 and 9290 handsets, based on the Symbian OS, get ability to read PDF files.


  

05 August 2002


NASA -- When flying over dark places at night, the cities below below seemed like mere bagatelles on the landscape. NASA's image of the earth looks just as surreal.


  

PEERCAST -- Now has playlist and user configurable info that streams with the audio. Peercast uses the GNUtella network to distribute streaming audio without central servers or need for more bandwidth as your audience grows. Each peer becomes a relay for the stream.


  

04 August 2002


StreamRipper X. Copyright infringement hell here children: StreamRipper X listens to MP3 streaming radio stations and rips the MP3s right down onto... [Ben Hammersley.com]


  

DAYPOP.com -- German blogs must be hitting mainstream because Daypop Top fingered a Spiegel Story about meta tags as one of the Top 40 linked-to blog entries.


  

KILKENNY, Ireland -- I always knew my dog knew when he was being short-changed. The New Scientist claims that dogs also know when they are being short- changed on treats because they have a basic mathematical ability which enables them to tell when one pile of objects is bigger than another.

To count, an animal has to recognize that each object in a set corresponds to a single number and that the last number in a sequence represents the total number of objects.
Robert Young of Brazil's Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, tested the theory on 11 mongrels using dog treats.


  

meme
meme: (pron. 'meem') A contagious idea that replicates like a virus, passed on from mind to mind. Memes function the same way genes and viruses do, propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact between people. The root of the word "memetics," a field of study which postulates that the meme is the basic unit of cultural evolution. Examples of memes include melodies, icons, fashion statements and phrases. [dws.]
  

[RadioFAQs]
Question: More ... I need more help. Where else should I look for Radio docs, tips, wishes and FAQs? Answer:  [dws.us] [dws.]
  

FUCK? -- I'm still a little surprised to hear the word FUCK in casual conversation in Ireland. I heard several pre-teens using it when leaving Men in Black II yesterday in Kilkenny. If you examine "fuck" as a lexical unit, it appeals for its sturdy, versatile and descriptive nature. Now if polite society decided sex is a legitimate part of human existence, we might be able to use "fuck" in polite conversation.


  

DONTLINK.com -- Links to sites that don't want links.


  

BLOGTREE.com -- You register your blogs and record which blogs inspired their creation. You can also search for existing blogs and view which blogs they in turn inspired. It's Blog Genealogy. [Scripting News: Great idea! ]


  

03 August 2002


KILKENNY, Ireland -- I think we need to explore the idea of a WiFi community aboard Irish Rail. I thought about this idea while talking to a blind passenger on the train from Kilkenny to Dublin. It wouldn't be difficult to create a hands-free client with voice recognition that connected to an Irish mobile phone system. It's possible to arrange the software now with Open Source speech programs such as Sphinx II for voice recognition and Festival for text to speech output. Tie them together with POE and Perl.


>>Read Building Wireless Community Networks online with Safari.


  

CNET -- Stung by tepid market reception to its online music subscription service, Pressplay plans to offer listeners access to an unlimited supply of songs for a set period for a single fee. Under one section of the new plan, subscribers will be able to download or stream an unlimited number of songs to their computer for a single annual fee of $179.40.


  

OREILLY.net -- Four guys. Two cars. A mobile phone. Some laptops. And Wi-Fi. En route to a conference, these four gentleman used a combination of off-the-shelf, easy-to-configure hardware and a variety of relatively straightforward software to create a two-car mobile Wi-Fi network with a GSM uplink.


  

02 August 2002


Keep Java on Deep Pages

WORKBENCH.com -- Sun's Java Web site, which was redesigned recently, no longer uses applets on any of its well-trafficked pages. The last design featured applets that scrolled Java-related news and presented a directory of user groups, but Sun appears to have come to the same realization as most of the Web: The concomitantload time required for the Java virtual machine makes applets a poor choice for popular pages. Sites that use applets today employ them for games, chat, the visual depiction of information, and the like. The best way to use them is to put applets on a page that can be requested by the user, rather than integrating them into the main parts of a site.


  

DOC SEARLS -- Go immediately to Doc's comprehensive analysis of anti-consumer legislation currently being proposed in the US Congress. Doc also explains the destructive CARP ruling about webcasting fees. [ref : Hollywood Steps Up Its Assault on the Net While Webcasting Death March Claims KPIG.]


  

JAGUAR -- It's coming and if you want to help Apple promote the release of Jaguar, then paste this code into your web site to display a quicktime movie of the countdown. Want to see it in action? Visit www.347.com.


  

Dave Winer -- On this day in 1999, the NY Times ran its first piece on weblogs. Some have claimed that weblogs didn't get started until late 1999, a few months after Blogger was first deployed. This is contradicted by the Times article and an earlier one by Scott Rosenberg at Salon, in May 1999. Both pieces reported on a weblog world that was already established and growing. The first note of Blogger on Scripting News was 8/23/99. It's possible that was not its release date, but I think it was close. BTW, it's really cool that the Times and Salon both keep archives back that far. Most pubs don't. [Scripting News]


  

WIRED -- Opponents of copyright protection have considered how to make a unified cry: Let the market decide, not the entertainment companies.


  

eXtreme KM?. It's a combination of extreme programming, early learning, project management and knowledge management. XKM could be applied to any project. It's all about building rapid learning into the project.


  

Supermodel Veronica Webb's eco-friendly electric car turned into a fire-spewing death machine the other night, burning down her Key West house and killing her beloved dog, Hercules. Apparently this happens all too often with electronic vehicles! [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
  

Camera Phones Set to Explode

STRATEGY ANALYTICS -- Would you believe that consumers will purchase 16m camera phones worldwide in 2002? And that number will grow strongly to 147m in 2007? By comparison, although 22m digital still cameras will be sold worldwide in 2002, their slower growth rate of 34% will result in only 95m sales in 2007. Other key findings from the report include: one in five cellular phones sold in 2007 will contain an embedded camera; expansion camera modules are short-term solutions for current limited, niche demand; and camera PDAs, accounting for 6% of global PDA sales in 2007, will be less prominent than camera phones.


  

SANTRY, Ireland -- We're talking with musicians and it's easy to get them aboard the Intellisign Content Channel when they know how they're going to be paid. They're often worried about digital delivery of their songs. They think it will kill their CD sales. They want revenue stasis. Many believe digital delivery makes that impossible.


  

Online Publishers Association -- In 2001, consumers spent nearly double in online purchases what they had spent the year earlier. Not surprisingly, people are most willing to pay money for business and financial information, because that kind of information influences their livelihood -- but beyond that there is a more general trend toward increased consumer willingness to pay for online content. One example: there are now more than a million subscribers to the online greeting card company American Greetings.com, which charges $11.95 a year for virtual cards. Its chief executive says: "In the past five years, we trained customers that content was free -- that was our fault." And now? "Slowly but surely, people are paying for content." [ref: NYT Technology]


  

SWITCH? -- It's rather amazing when you consider the number of Irish developers who are making the switch to the G4 Powerbook. As Don Lindich shows in the Post-Gazette, the Mac poses fewer problems than Windows.


  

NYTimes.com -- Have a look at Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers, cutting-edge interactive features, audio, video and slide shows.


  

KILKENNY, Ireland -- While playing with Replay TV, I noticed how it's easy to skip through advertisements during playback. It seems that Replay knows it's seeing a block of ads when it senses the moments of blackness before and after. Then it factors in 30 second increments. So if broadcasters changed advertisement lengths, they could fool Replay TV. That's something Xi Creative should remember, when pushing television advertisements.


  

NYT -- The New York Times covers royalty-free fame in the form of clip-art celebrities, people who show up again and again because they were included in a royalty-free image collection popular with advertisers. The Street runs photos of George Chen, who was dubbed "The Internet Guy" because his youth, spiky hair, and thick-rimmed glasses make banner ad designers swoon. [ref: Workbench]
  


01 August 2002


KILDARE, Ireland -- I'm headed to Dublin with a train-full of American tourists while reading Andrew Lovatt explain how Ireland is "Rhode Island big" in terms of its Internet market. And he makes another point that's very relevant in today's torpid e-commerce environment -- it will be more of a challenge to co-ordinate the timely delivery of goods ordered online.


  

ATHY, Ireland -- Good points raised by University Business about the reach of distance education. Venerable Irish organisations, like the Institute of Public Administration are starting to see themselves in a new light. They still believe in their old goals of increasing access and helping students to break free of the bonds of place and time, but it's clear that many of them now want more. They've begun to see a way to become not just an add-on to traditional higher education, but as an integral part of their strategic goals.[x: Stephen Downes]


  

CARLOW, Ireland -- While on board Irish Rail, I clicked into Phil Wolff's blog where he worte a content categoriser Roundup.. Wolffs analyses 14 categorization tools that help you create an information architecture, assign each record to a branch on the tree, then surf to the most relevant information. He also provides pointers to articles and industry coverage, and three technology standards.


  

KILKENNY, IRELAND -- While discussing how to install a WiFi node around Ormonde Street, we noticed that Microsoft and AT&T Wireless are forming a corporate alliance to provide wireless business services to corporate customers. The new offerings will focus on enabling business users to access their corporate e-mail, calendars, data and other business applications via wireless devices. When our Kilkenny node is running, visitors will be able to use WiFi laptops to use Internet services while on the street.


  



© Copyright 2003 Bernie Goldbach, Tech Journo, Irish Examiner. Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.
More about Bernie Goldbach
Last update: 03/06/03; 16:03:34.