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Forrest Duncan's Radio Weblog
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14 December 2002
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More new stuff from Google. Froogle. Not sure about this...
2:01:32 PM 
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13 December 2002
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Joel is such an intelligent guy. I love what he writes. This latest piece so hits the spot, its spooky...
December 11, 2002. Lord Palmerston: "The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it." Programming has gotten too hard.
[Joel on Software]
9:59:02 PM
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Want, want, want ...
Making Your Own Music, Even if You Can't Play a Note. If you like music and want to make your own even if you can't play an instrument, get Mad - a MadPlayer, that is. The new MadPlayer by MadWaves is an addictive, pocket-size recording studio, MP3 player and FM radio that packs a library of 600 musical instruments and sounds into a device slightly larger than a Game Boy video game player. It can instantly create and spin out original songs in a variety of musical styles including rhythm and blues, hip-hop, New Age, techno and reggae. By J.d. Biersdorfer. [New York Times: Technology]
Boy, I wish we had had these available when we were creating Madasafish.
9:36:40 PM
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11 December 2002
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Google continues to be one of my favourite companies. Their labs have some really great toys.
5:47:44 PM
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Seems like an opportunity wasted to me to convert these users into subscribers rather than treating them as criminals ..
Denmark Bills Users for Downloads. A Danish anti-piracy group has begun charging individuals for illegal copies of music, film and software. Could this be the shape of things to come in the United States? By Peter Rojas. [Wired News]
2:23:15 PM
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I have been asked to supply a bit more information about the MMAPPs project that I mentioned earlier that we are involved in. MMAPPS stands for Market Management of Peer-to-Peer Services. I am under NDA for some of the details, but as the aims of the project can be seen on the original (but out of date) website I will try not to give any secrets away.
This is an EU part-funded project and HP were originally leading the project. After the merger with Compaq however, they withdrew and so we have been asked to join, along with the University of Lancaster. The new project leader is now BT Laboratories. Other participants include Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich ; Research Centre of the Athens University of Economics and Business ; Darmstadt University of Technology and Telekom Austria .
Our job in Mysterian is to ensure that the project has a market and application focus and there are some interesting scenarios being considered. Our experience as Groove developers has given us some good experience with real-world usage.
One of the issues being analysed is the basic economic theory behind p2p. The guys from Athens have done some good work in boiling what is happening down to some equations that can be used to model how we might be able to balance out the use of network resources and content amongst the members of the network.
The assumption so far is that most of the development will be done with JXTA but this is still to be finally decided. There are some very neat features about JXTA, but there are some holes in there too for what we want to do. They guys who are deep into that part of the project are understandably a bit cautious as to whether they really want to get in and change core JXTA code. We shall see what the final decision is.
10:07:50 AM
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This is a scary story from NY Times.
Internet Filters Block Many Useful Sites, Study Finds. Teenagers who look to the Internet for health information as part of their "wired generation" birthright are blocked from many useful sites by antipornography filters. By John Schwartz. [New York Times: Technology]
I wish I had an answer to this problem.
Last night, I was looking on Google for some information about a medical condition that a close realtive has. This involved looking for the word 'girl' (amongst others) in the search. The pages of references to lesbian sex sites was overwhelming. Thankfully, I was looking on my own and didn't have my kids with me at the time.
9:24:24 AM
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10 December 2002
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from Jeroen:
disconnected. Grrrr, still no broadband in the new house so i guess weblog updates wil be a bit irregular the coming period. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]
Hang on in there Jeroen!!
4:37:05 PM
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Good piece from Neil about what Mysterian is up to...
What we've done - we've built (IMHO) a really nice Groove tool called Radiology Manager. It allows a hospital at site A to use radiological expertise at site B. Its simple but effective. Here's what the key form looks like:
[Neil Finlayson's Radio Weblog]
3:04:54 PM
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The BBC ran a story recently about a particle that was so dense that it passed right through the earth in 1993. This reminded of the story on John Walker's website about the Oh-my-God particle.
Incidentally, for anyone in the software business, John's history of AutoCad makes great reading. I guess that in some ways, John was one of the world's first bloggers
1:30:27 PM
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Hurrah. Our new look web site has gone up. You can find it at Mysterian
Why is it that we can build websites if asked for others, yet when it comes to our own it seems to take forever? Am I alone in this thought? Cobbler's children I suppose.
1:21:30 PM
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I have an admission to make. Much as I think Groove is one of the best new applications out there, I do not like their '10 x better than e-mail' advertising tag. Why don't I like it? Because it is made up.
Who did the tests to say 10x? Why not 100x, 1000x 2x? For me, it can be all of these - depending on what I am trying to do. To say 10x better than e-mail puts Groove squarely up against e-mail. Whilst it certainly has a function against e-mail, I think that this misses a big part of their story.
Here's what I think. I think that Groove is doomed to success.
I think it is doomed to success because it represents a step forward in communication and anything that represents a step forward in communications is doomed to success. History tells us this. There are plenty of examples of new technologies that have had this status. Printing press, radio, books, telephone, fax, e-mail. Even telex is still used in certain circumstances. None of them completely replace what has gone before them and yet all represented a new way for humans to communicate easily and inexpensively. Because of this 'easily and less expensively' factor, they were all doomed to success.
To test this, we can even hold up new communications technologies that haven't taken off as some predicted. Video conferencing. Not easy, not inexpensive. Until these issues taken care of, video conferencing will continue to struggle for the mainstream.
So, should we all buy shares in Groove (if we could)? Well, I would personally, because I think that they are a well run company with an early lead. But, whilst I firmly believe that what Groove represents is doomed to success, history also tells us that it is noit always the inventor that reaps the rewards. So, Groove still have challenges ahead to win, but we can be sure that what they represent will succeed.
1:19:49 PM
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09 December 2002
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Had a great meeting last week with all the contributors to the MMAPPs European project that we are involved in. Some very bright people. More to follow in due course, but interesting views and hurdles we will need to clear if we are to succeed in bringing market rules to peer-to-peer.
7:43:44 PM
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Finally getting down to blogging ... been a long time coming
7:40:43 PM
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We continue to get a great response from our Radiology Manager Groove tool when we show it as a beta to selected folks. What can be frustrating though is that some of the practices in the NHS - especially when it comes to Internet access are just sooo stoopid.
7:40:00 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Forrest Duncan.
Last update: 14/12/2002; 14:01:52.
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