test comment on my first blog post here.
I finally got around to sorting out my new Alex Barnett blog on alexbarnett.net!...
OK, so I moved my new Alex Barnett blog to here for a number of reason, explained here at my, er, new...
PingBack from http://blog.labnotes.org/2006/09/03/rounded-corners-12/
When I first saw that Alex was moving his blog off of blogs.msdn.com, I was thinking of posting my own...
from the editor occasional messages that don't fit anywhere else Apologies for not reminding everyone
Well at least your blog allows comments! (^_^)
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Congrats on the domain name move Alex, I like the new one a lot better ;) Also wanted to say thanks for the comments, you have some really great insights about it. I'm looking forward to your thoughts on the Internet as a distributed database.
Alex
Nice post, I've got quite a bit of stuff on the idea of turning the web into a giant relational database. Here:
http://www.base4.net/blog.aspx?Tag=Data2.0
Jason - me too! ;-)
Alex - I've been follwing your blog for a while (your ADO.NET vNext and Data 2.0 posts got on my radar). Good stuff...
I like it! How about an attribute or something in the code, sort of like an optional breakpoint, so that when that path is hit during execution the user can (if they have so chosen) be handed a URL that will point them to anything of interest about that particular path. It might not be the dev who wants to post content; it might be product support or a forum or a patch download or whatever. If the URL is 404, then the app just keeps chugging along like nothing happened.
My first time walking around downtown Brooklyn today (here for VSLive! ). Actually, it's not as bad
You're in New York? Come to Queens and say hi!
Get some good pizza while you are there. Visit Juniors some night (they used to be open pretty late). Juniors is a short walk from Brooklyn Tech - an engineering magnet high school - were I went to high school. The whole area is much nicer now than it was 35 years ago when I was in high school. Or so I am told. It's been a while since I was back.
Nathan - would love to but no time...heading back Tuesday. Why not come to the VSLive!, meet for coffee there? mail me...
Alfred - thanks, will look out for it.
That's not Web2.0, it should be using BlueTooth or WiMax!!
VERY interesting.
This shows that there is a long tail of interest in every particular item. Most are interested in the Wired Long Tail article for "business" and "collaboration" but there is also a long tail of interest, that even stretches to collaboration.
How should that effect marketing of products? A horror movie is typically marketed fans of the genre, actors, and director, but what about the long tail of people interested in the movie because of the location, the supporting actors, the extras, down to the costume designer, and best boy grip.
This isn't theroy. I once saw a movie a had little interest in (that is, no interest in the genre, actors, or director) because my girlfriend was the assistant costume designer. Any recommendation system that is aware of the long tail of interests should tell me about all the other movies that she works on. There are only a dozen people who would see the movie for that reason, but it is enough to make it appear in the long tail.
All creators need to make as much information about their products available as possible so that a long tail of interests aggregator can make it available to the right audience.
Thanks so much for this analysis. My mind is brimming with ideas about this right now.
This is a pretty interesting observation on your part Alex. Thanks for taking the time to explain it to us.
In his recent post, The Long Tail of Tags, my compadre Alex Barnett contends that, "Looking...
Talking of wifi on the move , I decided to replace my aging Negear WGR614 with something providing more
ZDNet ain't exactly indie...
financially, it is...
Riffin' away: http://davemscom.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!217A4DFE679DE9D4!253.entry
and don't forget the new guy! ;-)
Hi Brian...!
Cool, Alex. Thanks for the plug!
Hi Alex,
Thanks for the kind words. At this point I don't know if I will be able to allow actual interaction with the underlying web site -- there are all sorts of very interesting session and state tracking issues to contend with, not to mention the fact that it would be really slow.
I will say that interacting with sites and services inside of Second Life is definitely a reality already. The Jnana Island allows an in-world Avatar to interact with an outside expert system.
As far as co-blogging, there is already at least one in-world blogging tool, a so-called HUD or heads-up-display.
Existing Second Life applications can make HTTP requests to outside servers and can process the results, although there's no XML parser.
There aren't any APIs that go the other way (outside apps calling into the Second Life world) but the folks at http://www.libsecondlife.org/ are reverse engineering the client to server protocol and I believe that it is just a matter of time before they can control the world from outside. This is being done with the knowledge and cooperation of Linden Lab, developers of Second Life.
PingBack from http://pigpen.info/2006/09/25/alex-barnett-podcasts/
Yes, we at libsecondlife are working very hard to make the most of what Linden Lab makes available(wittingly or not) to create a richer Second Life enviroment.
We are aiming towards a totally independant and open source client.
From Alex Barnett via Scott Guthrie... Dynamic languages such as Ruby and Python have had a lot of buzz...
I'm not sure that adding more layers of complexity works, true collaberation exists best when both people share the same environment; however having said that i'd easily imagine amazon producing a space with assistants that could help u choose (real or AI who cares)....
Hi Stewart, if you are in Second Life find the Jnana island and take a look at their shopping tools. They use expert systems to help you find the most appropriate product. This would be a "virtual assistant."
Thanks Jeff I'll have a look
thanks for the pointers Jeff.
Yeah, another Tech'er, Class of '83 (I skipped 8th at JHS 51 in Park Slope)
Nice post Alex. I started on this a few months ago but never got as far as you did, I need to get back to this... very nice!
Hi,
Did you use the CD or did you use the wizard that is in the router itself.
I always don't know whether to run the CD.
Thanks.
Marty,
For the D-Link I followed the intructions / wizard using the CD provided.
I think you mean cores, not flops. flops is the number of <b>fl</b>oating point <b>op</b>erations per second, which would be about a 1 trillion per second with 80 cores.
Its funny that the US because of its size will need this kind of functionality but smaller countries that will have pervasive wimax/4g or whatever won't :)
...which would be a lot of flops.
Stewart...
Belgium is a small country. When do you think they will have 'total', always on connectivity. And will they need to remove large slabs of concrete to get everywhere humans do?
Nother thought...most of top 20 countries in terms of population fall into the 'large country' category in terms of sq foot...these countries hold 70% (4.5bn) of the total world population (6.5bn):
People's Republic of China (Mainland)
India
United States of America
Indonesia
Brazil
Pakistan
Bangladesh
Russia
Nigeria
Japan
Mexico
Philippines
Vietnam
Germany
Ethiopia
Egypt
Turkey
Iran
Thailand
France
Well i was thinking of the UK of course as thats where i'm based my 3g card works everywhere i've needed it so far...
http://www.three.co.uk/three/coverage/coverageChecker.do
Here's a coverage map for the UK the yellow is for GSM/GPRS access only, the red covers something like 95% of the population areas
http://www.mobilecomms-technology.com/projects/mobistar/
Above is an article on Belgium, they expect 99% coverage with 3g
Stew
You should check out http://www.allwaysync.com. It has the best options for automatic or scheduled syncing I have seen.
HTH
Molly
Hi Alex, I agree that the conversation is long overcooked. That's why APML, for us, is the result of implementation, not academic discussion.
We have been generating and using APML type data for months now, however in the spirit of open standards we decided to offer the spec for discussion.
So in a way you could say we started with action and moved on to talking.
As it says on the site, you can find out more about our technology (the first of many we hope) for writing and consuming APML here:
http://www.touchstonelive.com/technology/
Chris,
Thanks for stopping by. I appreciate the fact that you are moving this concept along and doing so from an implementation perspective. That's valuable, no doubt.
One thought I have on this is that I'm not sure what level of agreement you'll want to achieve with the standard *without* getting to the point of having at least two apps that talk APML.
As you know, you need to get to that point as quickly as possible.
Users need to experience the benefits of a shared / networked APML file and the other app devs need to see it *in action* before they really grokk it. A lot will roll from there.
I'm sorry my first blogged response to the APML news sounded negative. In retrospect, I really should have let you know that I think the idea in principle has my full support and am excited with its potential. I just want to see this come to fruition, so my impatience shone through :-)
Regards,
Alex.
I'm right there with you! :)
Consider the site and great posts like yours a call-to-action to any developers out there to join in with the fun. We have already had a few in the space latch on. Maybe they will produce something soon.
In the mean time we have done our bit to get the convo started for this particular part of the puzzle - it will probably be smarter people than me (like the guys from AT) who will help finish it.
Hey Alex,
Thanks for the mention but just a few points.
First I said that I was "very excited" which is genuinely reflects how I feel about this.
Second, I'm building a business around microformats so I'm well aware of the situation with how they are published, I was explaining to my readers about the mechanics of it. Not all my readers are as deeply in the know as yourself.
Third, whilst you may know that rel-tag is a microformat, many of the people in a room at BarCamp Ireland on Saturday to whom I gave a talk on microformats, did not. That is my target audience, not you. I also brought up rel-tag because in the previous version of Live Writer they were only supported via Tim Heuer's plug-in.
I'm sorry I missed Peter's post, I have a Technorati search feed for "microformats" not "live writer" and he did not tag his post with microformats. The reason I missed it on Dan's is that he mentioned Eventful integration (which is nice) rather than microformat publishing and Live Clipboard (which is huge).
Conor O'Neill
This is getting very interesting. LiveWriter that is. Now if they give me a way to make trackbacks easily, I'll be in heaven.
Conor,
>"Not all my readers are as deeply in the know as yourself."
nor mine, that's why I pointed it out :-)
re: rel-tag - it is amazing how popular it has become...again, I'm just pointing out its popularity to my readers for same reason as above :-)
-
I've got to do some work on my tone it seems: I didn't mean to 'have a go' at all, just wanted an excuse to blog about microformats again...
Keep up the evangelism!
--
Dennis (orcmid):
I'm not sure Live Writer could ever make trackbacks easier for you: it's a server side thing...oh - hold on...I think I know what you mean: some sort of third party webservice that crawls the web, that is called and dynamically publishes inbound links on the published post. Is that what you mean? Cool idea...
Oh it started badly when you spelled my name incorrectly :-)
I'm looking forward to you writing more about mRc now that some of the tools to support it are starting to appear. I read your original article back in May and loved it.
Conor
On RSS subsription - both of us eventually subscribed to each other feeds, but we couldn't reliably reconstruct the moments of doing so... And, even if I could - there are feeds I'm subscribed to I haven't read for a year :)
Conor - mispelling names is a speciality of mine. Will correct, thanks.
I've used a different method to do the same thing: I wrote a quick javascript function to turn delicious hrefs into an in-place list, using the delicious API.
In one sense this is wasteful because it's runtime execution, so cost (to delicious) increases per view. But that can also be an advantage, as it continues to stay up to date as I add to the tag after the posting.
You don't get the ability to check-check-skip-check items from the list, but that would be pretty easily done by just requiring two tags: subject + "blog". Other major weakness is that the links probably won't appear in RSS.
Anyway, in case you're curious here's the source:
http://www.ihol.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/delinks/delinks.js
I wrote it as a wordpress plugin but the JS by itself should work fine. Except that the APIs changed since I wrote it and I haven't fixed it yet ;)
thanks Steve, will take a look.
Gee thanks for your 2 cents worth! (^_^)
Too cool! Thanks, just dl'd it.
I remember seeing this chart from days in PSS several years ago (and I might be returning to PSS soon, albeit in a much different role...currently screening for a PFE position), brings back a lot of memories.
<nameDropping>
I saw John Connors give a speech here in Charlotte, very charismatic guy, and that year MS revenue was through the roof.
I met Lori Moore at an MS event in New Orleans and actually have a hilarious story about my direct meeting her, but definitely not appropriate to repeat ;-).
< /names>
It's been 5+ years in the making, so hopefully I'll score an FTE this go round of interviews.
Jayson - good luck!!
...have been following your blog for a while, would be great to have you on board (again).
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Awesome!
At first glance, I thought this was about your *biological* particulars and the opening sentence of the mail: "I have seen your biological particulars..." took on an entirely different meaning.
Umm.... I do watch TV and I live in the United States but I still have no idea what this post is about.
Was there supposed to be an embedded picture or video or something?
hey Tommy - no but here's a clue...
thats what will happen in next 10 yrs.. :)
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great, thanks. Now I have the world's most annoying commercial stuck in my head again. My wife and I can't stand that thing when it airs - though given the fact we're discussing it here, that probably means its more effective than the usual ad junk. Just please...no one else use this ad concept! Please?
Whatever you class them as (I suppose they are part of the microformats stable) I think Microsummaries are extremely useful, Which is why I implemented them into http://Tooum.com and also wrote a generator for Google Reader. They are such an easy way oif seeing what is new on a site, without actually having to visit it.
alex, thanks for the good words!
Alex Barnett picks up on an idea from Chris Carfi, which Alex is calling support tags: [from alexbarnett.net blog : Support tagging] By providing a support tag [in a blog post, like "office2007question"], it could allow for further structuring around
I'm not seeing the evidence for IE7 to be the true beginning of Web 2.0, from Chris'e paragraph. Missed any points?
Hu, I guess you'll have to read the whole post :-)
The fact that Web 2.0 to date is still very much a "niche-thing" that only 100K people seem tuned in to (given TechCrunch's feed stats -- so maybe double that for good measure) means that IE7 will be a radical awakening for a lot of folks who have, to date, simple "put up with" the Blue E.
Whatever remnant issues IE still has are minor compared with the vast *overall* improvements in security, speed and tabbed browsing... *and* in that it will introduce the concept of "feeds" as a little orange button that you can click on get updates out of... something that wasn't nearly as discoverable before is now front and center and made very obvious.
We've been drinking the koolaid for some time -- now is when Web 2.0 will become not just a household idea -- but something that can't be solely directed by a few scrappy startups in Silicon Valley. It's something that will touch a whole lot more people, all at once.
Cool idea. Something we'll have to think about integrating with TekTag. Need to chew on it a bit more.
Why tags? Doesn't simply linking to a product page enable the same aggregation, with the added benefit of simple, quick discovery via referrers or even trackbacks?
bling h2o is fantastic! i'm hooked! do you bling?
If you are living in your own little world it's easy to convince yourself that something you suddenly became aware of is new and amazing and very special, and that you discovered it and no one else gets it. And you feel proud and smug and happy, and then you wake up and realize that a whole lot of people already knew about it, and don't think it is that great, and really have moved on because they live a full rich life. In the beginning God made the heaven's and the earth, and then there were modems, and the modems begat bulletin boards, and the bulletin boards begat Usenet, and Usenet begat flamers, and then there was html, and the text had colors and was bold and italicized and underline. And man was amazed. But soon man discovered online porn, and it was good. And some men tried chat rooms, and online dating, and some found it interesting, but most people found it just like bulletin boards and newsgroups, mostly full of boring, whining, flamers. So man tried blogs and RRS, and text messaging and man discovered that even though they called it Web 2.0, it was just still just the whiners and flamers, so man turned off his computer and went out a got a life.
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I imagine only a few of us American's know the tune, let alone the lyrics to "My old man's a dustman, he wears a dustmans cap...". Alas, I can remember my old man sipping a wee dram of Scotch wiskey and listening to the Irish Rovers a bit too much when I was a lad. That's an ear worm for ya.
Alex, enjoy that last song while it last as in about 3 months it will be out of date!
Have you seen the Boony and Beefy dolls (video available here: http://www.mollyzine.com/2006/10/11/boony-and-beefy-make-their-video-debut/)? There are some new comments the dolls say this week that have a nice little go at the POMS (including comments about there bathing habits).
Look forward to the Ashes starting and us giving you a nice ass whooping!
Phillip, thanks for the pointer...Interesting that fully grown men in Australia are going out buying dolls...
Btw, stop trying to think about those English asses, it'll harm the macho reputation you have all spent so long building. ;-P
Looking forward the series...
Hmm...
I love the fact this is a free country and you can hold whatever opinion you wish; but at the same time I'm ashamed that one of my colleagues decides to publish a post suggesting that it's O.K. to bash people of faith. Shame on you Alex. Shame on you.
Scott - I'm sorry you feel this way.
Thanks, Alex. This is brilliant- I don't know why it never occurred to me that the Prof might have a blog!
Opensourcing opensource: I haven't digested both sides of the story yet (see Oracle PDF FAQ, Red Hat FAQ), but here's how BusinessWeek puts it: "Oracle announced today that it will take Red Hat's version of Linux, strip off all of Red Hat's trademarks,
Is anyone really surprised that this is happening? Frankly I am surprised that it has taken this long. This highlights the single biggest flaw in the Open Source business model (if open source can be said to have a business model). Once you have done the work and given the software away without strings there is nothing to stop someone else from undercutting your rates. In fact since the other organization doesn't have the overhead of doing the work that you have already done (and one assumes paid for) their costs are already lower so they would almost be foolish not to take advantage of this to lower prices.
At BoingBoing, someone had posted the letters as:
"I see, starting top left going cw, 'S E S / A T / (D:N:B) (U:V:A) / T N' I"
So if it's an anagram, it could be "AND VISTA BE NUTS".
Second video is up and you got love the comment about the POMS and Baths (or lack there of):
<a>http://boony.mollyzine.com/2006/10/26/boony-and-beefy-week-2-video/</a>
GO AUSSIES
PS. Who won the Champions Trophy match between the POMS and Aussies? ;-)
I hope it helps evangelize OPML. It's quite elementary, concentrating on the range of...
New HTML group: A significant post from Tim Berners-Lee. I think these are the key quotes: "The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group... There will also be work on forms." There's also mention of validators which give stronger guidance. Alex
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Pity the Youtube video is gone. But you can find videos here as well:
http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_colbert_report/videos/celebrity_interviews/index.jhtml
Not heard of Skype then??
SyncToy v1.4 for Vista Released
SyncToy v1.4 shipped today and you can download the new bits at the link below:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e0fc1154-c975-4814-9649-cce41af06eb7&displaylang=en
In addition to some minor bug fixes, we focused on the following tasks for this release:
· Vista Compatibility
· .NET Framework 2.0 Compatibility
Sounds like there will be "Hell Toupee" (^_^)
:-)
Thanks for joining the dots! (and the link-love ;-)
As a coder, the things I'd find most useful for building 'social' apps around SL are JSON and XML tools... eg. so I can consume RSS and FOAF docs, or SPARQL responses from database queries...
i've been wondering for quite awhile when they were going to have an actual beta/preview of this thing. long enough that i had actually forgotten about it.
It is funny. Too bad I can't see it or any YouTube videos in IE 6 or 7. All I ever get is:
"Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Macromedia's Flash Player. Get the latest flash player."
I DO get the latest Flash player and have javascript turned on, but it makes no difference. So what is the secret to watching YouTube with IE? Works great with Mozilla Firefox...
Software is a tool but culture change is a myth. Winer's right on this at least: never bet on knowing what motivates people (unless you're talking very very broad groups and willing to live with statistical variances). Behavioural change for organizations is actually straightforward. Just make the goals crystal clear at every level and then reward contribution. Think about knowledge tagging like source code control systems. 20 years ago, they were a novelty that were so hard to use that only the most diligent and self-examining engineers bothered to set up and use. Now in nearly every IT environment they're ubiquitous.
Alex, I think Samuel's point needs to be taken to heart. More than that, when reasoning from ones own experience, it is valuable to locate yourself in McAfee's graph. Unless you are in the empty quarter yourself (highly unlikely), any anecdotal experience of yours is irrelevant to what would have the empty quarter adopt something.
Also, assuming that McAfee has empirical evidence for the phenomenon (as opposed to it simply making sense), speculative remedies need to be empirically testable. (I assume we are doing science here, not theology.) And it may well be the case that it is a matter of outliving the empty quarter. (I mean that in a nice way.)
One thought: I notice that I am in the empty quarter around some things and not others. For example, although I have a bit of a geek cellphone, basically all I care about is cheap calling and basic telephony service. I also still have film in my camera, and I drive a 1989-model automobile (though I bought it in the first year Ford Probes were produced). To the degree that I am relatively far out on the lower right of the graph in regard to computing, it is because I started out when I was 19, nearly 50 years ago. Hmm ... so I really am an old fogey.
I was discussing this with Vicki, and she points out that I am fairly technophobic about changes and upgrades. There is something about marginal utility of change over time. You know, why learn one more #$%^& programming language, one more HTML format, a different keyboard layout, a new version of Windows etc., etc. Although I'd been programming for almost 20 years when I built my first microcomputer system from a kit (after teaching myself enough electronics to do it), that was as much out of concern for being able to repair and keep it running. But after the first 3 systems I build that way, I stopped soldering and bought retail PCs. I am still running machines that I bought in 1998 and 1999, and the three newest machines (purchased in the past 15 months or so) were acquired because other systems failed or become too unreliable and limited to keep running.
So I think I have a fair amount of technophobia, coupled with personal factors around the marginal utility of change.
Now, I also own a Roomba, but it has a jammed drive wheel and I'm too occupied with other things to deal with it. (The vacuum cleaner still works just fine.)
While we were considering move to Bozeman, Montana I saw a spud gun about 6 or 8 feet long - I'm told for greater distance. ;)
Oh, I want to find out what happened at BlueDot's session. Any contact info you can share with me (email fine if you don't want to post emails.)
I wonder how this knits in with your recent post on 2.0 adoption patterns, something I've also been pondering on my blog.
So sorry I had to miss mind camp. :-(
BTW, I tried to register on CS so I could get an email if you replied, but I got an error. Tell Dave Burke to make his system work (Grin - Dave is a friend. I'm just being silly)
If you missed the five-minute presentations or the balloon sculptures, there are excerpts on my vlog. Come see!
Heather, you imposter!!! Great video...thanks for sharing!
By the way, Joe Goldberg (http://bostonsteamer.livejournal.com/) and I co-presented the ruby on rails session. I meant to go to the lucid dreaming one, but got sucked into werewolf. How was it?
Aaron and I went to the Lucid Dreaming talk and got super tired because of all the talk about sleep. That's when we got the sleeping bags. They talked for 3 hours so I guess it was good.
Loved the Singularity session. Would be great to find out what you think once you are done with the book.
Sounds like fun -- I'll check out the video.
You have a typo: It is "Kurzweil" with a 'Z'.
thanks Robert, corrected now.
If your interested in the Singularity and Kurzweil, you need to talk to Cameron Reilly (<a>http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com</a>). He interviewed him and is an absolute nut about the topic!
GO AUSSIES!
Thanks for aggregating all these!
I've been reading all morning! ;-)
Just peeked at my referrers for my 2007 predictions post and amazed to see the amount of traffic the
What? You don't like the Greyhound Protection League? (^_^)
http://www.greyhounds.org/
Whoo hoo! Thanks Alex.
Forget the warning signs, you need to watch out for the "Warnie Signs": http://boony.mollyzine.com/2006/11/17/ashes-ads-pure-gold/
;-)
Very insightful article - and way ahead of its time. All my recent web applications do exactly that - they initially send a lot of Javascript (and CSS, which is another language...) and then use the rest of the HTML - which is just a set of DIVs - as a series of templates to be manipulated via the DOM.
One problem with this method is that you have to work harder to make things accessible. But I'm not particularly worried about non-Javascript browsers, to be honest. Just screen readers etc.
Greg Travis: "I told you so".
Thanks for the link Alex.
Alex, I found this post to me quite timely. I had a similar conversation with a client recently and noted the security and risk issues associated with use of public services for tagging and RSS feeds. The client was rightly concerned about information residing on public sites that could be used for intrusion purposes as well as for a source of competitive intelligence. Organizations need to ensure that their Internet Usage Policies include how these services should be used (or not) and monitor how these sites are used.
http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2006/11/use_of_online_r.html
thanks for the pointer Mike, good post. A whole can of worms, maybe...
The other way to handle public tagging is to apply policies similarto coporate blogging. Where by you just keep it very simple by assuming everything you tag is public. Thus one should not tag items (with the public tag) that one would not talk about in public, or that directly relate to projects considered confidential. Secret tags could occur 'in secret' of course but there are still risks even with those as it relies on security by obscurity whcih obviously fails critically.
Often some of the benefits from public tagging are from what others tag that related to it (directly or indirectly) i.e. Mass social tagging provided by contributors outside of the organisation. What is also not indicated in the article is whether or not the outside contributions are being leveraged, indeed the only discrete tag mentioned is the single coporate/public tag (as utilised on the home page).
If there is no outside benefit being leveraged then they really should use an internal tagging system as they gain no other benefits. I would imagine they are gaining something else from the public tagging and we are just not privy to it at this point.
regards
Al
So I just give my items (links, fotos, etc) their tag and it appears on their intranet? It's the new spam.
It's a 1000 person company, and only 177 links in delicious? They are pretty picky, or don't like to share. I hope their integration of delicious is secure, because with delicious json api you can submit some nasty javascript into their intranet.
that new sound sucked harder than boiled eggs.
>=(
As you point out Alex, we've definitely thought about this ahead of time. To be clear that this is for bookmarking sites only! Our tagging algorithm used on the wiki content is completely behind our firewall. It may be interesting for people to see what sites we've bookmarked, but these are public sites. Yes, I've bookmarked Second Life myself, but I am not going to tell you why:).
Spam is definitely a concern, but at this point it hasn't been an issue. Sounds like a new product idea to me, building spam filters for social bookmarking tags.
From a tech perspective we avoided using the json api.
Alex - this is absolutely right, but there are plenty of open source and hosted options (including our own) that solve this problem.
Unfortunately people seem to get a bit carried away with all the attention being given to del.icio.us and start using it for purposes it isn't designed for. I'm not even sure your "don't share" option works, as then it becomes completely private to the user and cannot be shared with colleagues.
I encourage people interesting in tagging behind the firewall to check out some of the solutions available that permit exactly that.
Alex Barnett describes his move from blogs.msdn.com to alexbarnett.com in an enjoyable read.
A) Tony Gregg is no Aussie!!!! You can have him (i.e. England) as he played for you! In fact, the feeling in Australia is he supports who ever is playing Australia
B) There is a long way to go, a good start by the boys, but a long way to go
http://boony.mollyzine.com
A job for life for Channel Nine, that counts as an aussie ;-)
Hmmmm.... Life you say? Tony Gregg or Jail? hmmmmmm....
Its a tough choice. Will get back to you tomorrow.
Sorry to say it Alex, but with the departure (rightly for his reasons) of Trescothick and current form on tour (you've lost almost every practice game) I am fairly confident that the Ashes will return here to Australia, their true and rightful home.
Hello host, I hope you won't mind if I take issue with one of your respondents. Hello Steve - by what stretch of the imagination and in what terms can Australia be considered the "true and rightful home" of The Ashes? If you answer that this is so because Australia ae forever winning the damned urn then, well, I may just break down and cry. I am fragile and emotional having just watched England being taken methodically apart, so try to be kind.
Really. I've never heard such nonsense. Okay, I have. But still. And your claim may have some credit. Hang on. This isn't going well for me. I'm off to phone my mum for comfort.
Despondently yours......
Steve, agreed that without Stresco (and Vaughan), our batting looks sub-optimal. That said, if do win, it'll make our win that much sweeter.
Alex,
I think a number of the "Web 2.0" tools can be incorporated into the enterprise. I've previously <a href="http://www.robfay.com/2006/06/22/web-20-the-enterprise/">blogged about</a> how Digg could be used to encourage innovation by literally promoting bottom-up idea generation.
I think adoption will happen when enterprise CMSs begin to adopt plugins that can be used for open AND secure knowledge management practices that we're seeing in the public sphere.
does anyone know how to play multiplayer mode with more than just 2 people??? it only lets two people play when it says 2-4 people multiplayer. help please. thanks.
Mawlayeek: Are you sure you are referring to Rainbow Six Vegas? If you press Multiplayer on the game slection screen it provides you with lots of choices...
I saved this when you first posted it and am just now getting back to the pencil story, nice analogy he had there.
I had planned on using it but I think my 5am brain isn't awake yet. Guess I need to file it away for now.
ok i got the demo, what is the bestest gun for multiplayer demo?
Andre - I'm using MP7, but there doesn't seem to be a 'best gun' out there...the guns are faily well balanced, so it depends on what you like.
Alex sourced this gem . I'm so jealous... As I sit here and wade through an email distribution alias
You haven't posted much about the cricket lately? What gives?
Very interesting stuff Alex. Its thst time of year again and a year since we last downed a few and put the world to rights. Its been a very big twelve months and I would love to be able to sit down with you and chew the twelve month cud that was and look at the twelve months ahead. I've been bad at getting this down for a variety of reasons but trust me when I say that the grey matter has been at work. Maybe let me know when you are in town over Christmas and hopefully we can get together for a few seasonal ales and a good chat. All the best to you and yours.
Hey Aaron, will be in touch!
Molly...stop sounding so smug :-P
Sorry Mate. I have been listening to a lot of the Ashes Podcasts and they are mostly being done by Poms and they were so hard to put up with for the first 4 days, it was just magic the last day.
Yo Alex, how do explain this. I'm sneaking up on some fool with his back to me, I'm using the ump 45 and I proceed to unload my clip into to him. to my surprise, the guy turns around and starts to spray my ass with his mp7, I actually have to reload a second clip n spray again, sometimes i gets them and sometimes not. but its frustrating when i know i have them dead to rights and that happens. I just feel that the gameplay while hella fun still needs to work out the kinks. thats my opinion.
I really dig the app. I was getting out of a movie last week. We were supposed to meet some friends at the pub. I wasn't sure were the pub was. I plugged the name into Windows Live mobile search. It found it and gave me directions from where I was. I'm sold.
Justin - what splendid use - pub finding!!
I wouldn't be willing to give up gray matter space for more teeth, would you? :)
Absolutely.
Best title ever!
> If wisdom teeth are the product of an 'intelligent
> designer', I have to ask - what the hell was he (or
> she) smoking when they were at the drawing board?
I wonder the same thing about the Platypus. Must've been smoking some good stuff when the "intelligent designer" came up with that.
Ditto Alex - I spent the day just staring into the middle-distance mumbling 9..60.. 9..60.
I can take the losing (well, um, ok...) but to go down *like that*...
You can imagine what 90% of London Bar Staff were like the next day too. Gooday indeed mate...
Wisdom teeth are intended to come in late in life to push-forward/close-up to replace teeth that have been lost by use... if you didn't have a nice dentist filling your teeth, some of them surely would have fallen out before your wisdom teeth have come it. It's all very sharkish.
As for cavities, start eating raw veggies, grains and fruit instead of those fru-fru candies and you'll see a marked decrease in that problem too.
For someone that seems to think evolution is a reasonable explaination of how we got to where we are, you are giving very little credit to the evironment that our VERY RECENT past was like.
thanks for dropping by Marc.
I'll eat more raw vegatables, as you suggest. How many would you recommend?
Oh, however many it takes... feel like a snickers? Try a carrot... still hungry, I recommend a raw yam/sweet potato... both will scrape your teeth clean in no time.
p.s. In case it wasn't obvious, I was trying to be a little sarcastic... no offense intended :)
Somehow, I think your article is gonna get read more than my http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm snippet, but that's OK, at least you had verbage lol.
I had the same double take reaction -- big score for Redmond.
Likewise. Quite the coup. I am a huge fan of Jon Udell. Does this mean that screencasting is going to become the staple at Redmond?
Sorry about that, lets try that again...
http://billy-girlardo.com/all-over-IT/2006/12/08/udell-takes-over-scobles-job-helping-mainstream-users/
As I said in my congrats to Jon, "It’s by luring folks of your stature that Microsoft succeeds."
--rj
Awesome! Might just have to call in and harass you guys!
hey jason, do it!
Lasse was awesome IMO.
Speaking of YouTube, I saved SceneMaker an hour ago:
http://www.gotuit.com/scenemaker/index.html
Happy Holidays.
I can't agree more. Ajaz is a great guy and his company is great to work for, producing some truely wonderful work. Oh this sounds like such a suck up, but its not. It really is a great place and Ajaz has made it what it is today.
Thanks for joining me last night. I enjoyed our conversation.
Let's stay in touch.
Alan
PingBack from http://www.blogs.dhenderson.com/David_Henderson/?p=219
I don't have any answers here either, but there's another thing to think about: how does StumbleUpon make money?
Right now they use the old "linkexchange" model, where most of the stumbles are user-generated but once in a while they serve a paid placement. It'll be interesting to see how they do this with video. Presumably the paid placements still get hosted on YouTube,Google,etc. in which case they're muscling in on the deals that those sites are trying to strike with content providers. They'll need a lot more viewers before they nullify the benefits of hosting on YouTube, but they could probably already swamp some of the smaller video sites with hits that generate no revenue. It also increases the likelihood that providers could choose to self-host their paid placements. So the added dimension is that this model is sort of an attack on hosts, where the webpage stumbling model never was...
This reminds me of my post last year on this topic:
http://haacked.com/archive/2005/03/13/Blogging-About-Blogging-AboutBlogging.aspx
Phil - I think comments about not blogging about blogging may be a little too much.
Ah, but would blogging about a COMMENT about a post about blogging about blogging bother the same people??
No comment.
PingBack from http://news.architel.com/2006/12/14/microsoft-demographic-prediction-tool/
Stack Overflow!
Yea but...
How many blogs could a blogger blog if a blogger could blog blogs.
Your the man, Alex.
Hey alex ... Im a flickr lover too and have been for a few years , I started off several yrs ago with a Point and Shoot and now own a DSLR .
I find Photography is a great way to relax and appreciate the world around us
Ive come to meet some people in my own home town
through organizing Flickr Meetups
Meetups are a greatway to share some tips and ideas on Photography with others
The Flickr Blog
http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2006/03/flickrmeet_baby.html
Lets you know where meetups are happening in your area
Lots of great Flickr tools out there as well
this one is my Favourite
http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/
Looks like you picked one of the more popular cameras on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/cameras/nikon/d70s/
Anyways ,, have a great holiday season
JP
thanks John, cool links...am checking them out now.
does it require gold to play
i mean the demo
That's the part about a lot of these services, many of which are incredibly useful, that I can't quite put my finger on. In this day and age, the old model of exclusivity and content protection will probably not hold muster (and it probably shouldn't), but then where do the revenues come from? The old "page view" model is also not going to work with all these mashups and APIs around. It's going to be very interesting how in a world full of StumbleVideo's, Widgets and RSS (hopefully with content filtering), people can make reasonable amounts of money. Or am I missing something?
When I wrote on Thursday night that there was storm raging, I wasn't joking. Here's a pic courtesy
But what about comments about comments about not blogging about blogging?
Apollo commentary: There's a whole bunch of TechMeme attention to Apollo today, as Michael Arrington interviews Kevin Lynch (audio, 37 minutes). I haven't listened to it and can't yet summarize, but see Alex Barnett for a solid synopsis. There are new
PingBack from http://mndoci.com/blog/2006/12/16/quality-control/
I know what you mean, I didn't really understand the power of social on flickr until I connected with a group, and that group -- http://flickr.com/groups/utata -- changed how I use flickr.
(I'm glad you kept poast. It's amusing to think of blog bits as warm, tasty little pieces of toast.)
No comment
30 more minutes to enjoy holding the Ashes before you have to hand them back. Better luck next time.
The old Urn is in the country at the moment, I say we should get Little Johny (Howard aka PM) to pass a law saying they can't leave Australia until you guys win them back again. Might improve the standard of English Cricket.
Hey Molly - something needs too!
It's only mid November and I've found plenty of opinions already predicting 2007 trends for the
Richard MacManus et al have published their web predictions for 2007 (prompting me to update the list
PingBack from http://redmonk.com/anne/2006/12/20/links-for-2006-12-20/
the full game owns evenn if you just use it for multi :p
Couldn't agree with you more about DIY! The way I see it, if something doesn't have an "undo" feature, then I don't want to mess with it :)
So you bowled out Shane Warne. Should have you in Oz last week.... ;-)
Its the floor you have to worry about mate :)
Some of us remember the cricket all too well. Some of us can also remember talking to a member of said Middlesex committee and saying something along the lines of 'Tufnell is overrated - Barnett will be the better bowler in the long run'. And they agreed.
Have a good Christmas, Alex.
Hey Brian - those were the days! thanks for stopping by.
Nick - 'redo' would be handy too...
Stewart - wasn't it Woody Allen that said somthing like "I'm not afraid of dying, I just don't want to be there when it happens".
Unfortunately synctoy 1.4 does not seem to work on Vista x64 - the problem ends immediately..
how do you play multiplayer with more than 2 people
As a person who has been to the Empty Quarter I can tell you it is like no place you have ever been. Changing the EQ is a herculean task.
You should never underestimate the lengths that people go to undermine your efforts. Ignore the resistance at your own peril.
How do you play multiplayer with more than 2 people? It wont let us if we click on either the system link or the split screen.
Welcome to my new blog! I have been blogging on Microsoft sites now for three years but in the last year
I love Flickr groups, too. Anyone can start one for any reason, and see if they can attract others. Some focus on a particular subject matter or place, while others are organized around a more general theme or technique. Some are really discussion or ratings oriented, while others serve mostly just to collect a pool of photographs with something in common. Some tend to develop a real sense of community, while others tend to be more "hit and run" -- people join mainly to add a particular photograph, and don't visit again until they have another photograph that fits the group.
A year ago, I noticed that there were a lot of photographs of a sculpture in Reykjavik called Sólfar, so I started a group and posted a few comments on other people's photos asking them to join and add their pictures. It's now a really interesting collection of over 100 photographs by over 60 photographers...I love seeing so many different angles and approaches to photographing the same object! I see so many different photographic possibilities there that I never would have seen otherwise!
I have also started groups for particular places: the town and region where I live, and for Route 1, the old Maine-to-Florida highway with its disappearing roadside attractions. And some others-- I have eight in all, and they took me about two minutes each to launch and minimal effort to maintain.
My favorite group, though, isn't one I started but one I just sort of stumbled into: Tenuous Links. It's a sort of free association group...each picture must connect in some way with the previous one. The connections can be visual or verbal puns, opposites or pretty much anything. I can't explain why I enjoy this group so much, but I check it several times a day and feel like I know all the most active players just through looking at such a random assortment of their photographs!
Solfar: The Sun Voyager
US Highway 1: Maine to Florida
Tenuous Links
Thanks jspad and Elizabeth - will check these out too.
I tried everything and it still won't let us play more than 2 people. is there any one who can help us figure this out?
I got double-memed by The British...."5 things you don't know about me" Alex Barnett Eileen Brown This
I enjoy poast, too. It IS cute. One of the moast cute things I've seen.
I need some help to fancy up my blog, like from a blogging specialist technical consultant or a blog
I've been tagged by Tristan via Coatsy via Darren via Keyvan via Jayson Alex, and the tag seems to go...
I say, 'excuse me'...
reminds me of growing up in NYC in the 70's, maybe 35 years from now, London will be on track
at least it was a safe trip, welcome back
So, what about Antwerp then?
(I'm originally from Antwerp, living in Sydney now)
Paige - we should have bumped into each other!
halans - Antwerp was good...when you've got more bars per capita than any other European city, you're bound to have a good time :-)
alex its now 4 pounds on the tube without an oyster card. it was increased jan 2nd.
Jamie - wow!
Sheesh, relax the slacks people! You are sooo easily stressed. Much like the Swedish methinks. When I was taken away from London for two and a half years i missed it sorely (and time passing didn't help) despite the downsides you mention, for more resaons than i can possibly list... so yeah, I'm a masochist ;-)
if you used an oyster like a real londoner it wouldnt cost you that much. they only charge that amount to tourists. consider yourself lost
Have you been trying to find some cool internet video only to waste a lot of time to find little or nothing? You are not alone. Nonetheless the huge amount of video content now accessible online, finding the quality part...
Blah! Rubbish. I'm with Glazman on this. Especially as MS still haven't proved themselves with regards to standards. In fact, their stance is totally the opposite. MS employees can wax lyrical over the wonders of interoperation, but let's not forget, MS is bigger than any employee, and their produces woefully fall behind the mark.
I cite IE7 (the most appalling upgrade; 4th in place behind WebCore, Opera and NGLayout)
You must still be on a vacation high!
Microsoft has no regard for standards whatsoever. They do what they want, and with all these years to make it right, they still screwed up with the IE release not playing ball.
If they want to pretend to give a hoot about standards, they can do it from the sidelines and learn a thing or two from those that play by the rules. I didn't hear about the lead role either, and now that I have, I think it sucks!
But the USD is very weak, which makes things seem much worse than you remember as you come back from the US with your dollrs to spend.
Chris Wilson has been involved in W3C working groups since the birth of W3C, you'll find his name is on many of the HTML and related "recommendations". That he's stuck with this technology space, ridden the IE roller coaster, and stayed involved with the W3C through its rise and fall, is testament to how deeply he cares about the web and the browsing experience we all have. Making Chris the chair of this WG is the first smart things I've seen from W3C in about 10 years.
64bit Vista SyncToy fix:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/99609816/m/220001112831
(Via Slashdot) .NET Developer’s Journal reports Microsoft Snags Don Ferguson, Former IBM Chief Architect – “Father of WebSphere”: Don Ferguson, who guided IBM’s strategy and architecture for SOA and Web services, and co-authored...
Alex Barnett tagged me with the " 5 things meme " some weeks back. Here we go: I spent several weeks
Wouldn't VideoLAN Player work with any region?
http://www.videolan.org/
thanks for the pointer Blake - will look into it (for my 'home machine' of course ;-)
I use a little program called Remote Selector. It's a tiny executable (a single 287 KB file) that you start, use it to launch your software DVD player, and you're region free.
Just grab the binary and run it (no installer), select your software DVD player from the dropdown list, go to the "Control" tab, check "Region Free" and click "Start Player. It's three clicks once you've done it once, and you won't get any more region complaints.
http://www.remoteselector.com/download.htm
There's another option:
Buy the same DVD's again when moving to another country. I suppose that's the scenario the film companies like best.
100% with you
I live in france and i buy DVD's from Amazon USA all the time and luckly i have a multizone DVD player but when i try to see on my laptop its "No Way Josée"...
even if i truly paid for the original Copyrighted version of the damn thing ....
Only one option ...
The DVD region encoding scheme has been nothing more than an annoying joke for years. It was designed so that the same title could be released in different markets at different times, even if the content of the discs were effectively the same.
It's not difficult to find a multi-region standalone DVD player these days, and a TV that will take both NTSC and PAL video signals. However, the same cannot be said with computers.
All current computer DVD drives are manufactured as RPC2 compliant, which means that they must have a fixed region code set. You have a limited number of times that you can change the region, and after that the drive is locked.
There are ways to get around this. For some drives, hacked firmware is available that puts a drive in RPC1 (region-free) mode. Alternatively, you can install software which makes the drives appear as region-free. A Google search for "dvd region free software" will find several examples.
Sadly, however, there are some drives which do not work with this software. The Matsushita laptop drives fall into this category. There's no way to get around the problem, so unless you want to eat up precious region changes, you're stuck for now.
Alex Barnett points out that the regional encoding on DVDs encourages consumers to break the law. I ran into this problem when I bought a DVD here in the US of a Laibach. The DVD was encrypted for Europe only,...
Try the following softwares. These software can make you dvd rom drive region free. They are
SlySOft:- www.slysoft.com
DVDIdle:- www.dvdidle.com
re: LOL
ok clever clogs. y dnt u tell us how to do this? or did mummy hav 2 tell u?
This is the fix:
Download this newer version of custsat.dll and replace it with the one in your SyncToy directory.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/d1kg3w
Works on Vista 64-bit and XP Pro x64.
Joe your a genius, thanks i was having the same problem and that little download worked perfectly....
This morning I linked to starbuckseverywhere.net, a guy who is trying to visit all the Starbucks everywhere.
Alex thanks for the link, and that is a nice interesting post. I like posts that bring a whole load of things together like this, gives me a few things to think about ;)
cheers
Well now we know why they're calling it Windows "vista"...
If someone wears a Muslim veil because of religious reasons can they hide their face?
I am also confused as to why I need a ID when I have a passport that has my picture, birthday and my nationality (which would determine my right to work).
Why can't I just show that IF I have to carry any ID.
PingBack from http://blog.labnotes.org/2007/01/26/rounded-corners-98/
I gotta agree with LOL here. It's wasn't the console noobs that made RS What it is. It was all us gamers with RSI (geddit) that bought, played and made it popular. And they can't even be bothered to bring out a PC demo. WTF is that all about! Basically, they're saying "F*** loyalty".
I love how Gates bolted before Stewart could even go to commercial...poor Bill, wildly out of his element ;-).
Jon Stewart should win a award for this.
Joe you are awesome... thanks so much
Channel 9 keeps pumping out good stuff. Here is my pick of recent interviews: Charles Torre discusses
I would say 'haven't we seen that before' after noticing the IIS uptick from '01 (maybe when it came out?), but that Apache downturn is eye-popping - especially as it appears to be at IIS's proof-in-the-pudding.
Nice find.
Didn't Microsoft make a deal with some number of Domain Registrars and had them switch their 'parked domain' service from Apache to IIS... Hence all the reported gains are a result of IIS serving useless, non-existent, spam type of mass domains?
Uh yeah I have two systems and a buncha guys waiting and cant get the stupid thing to let more than 2 play. Surely you can do 4 player with 2 consoles?
Apache vs. IIS - nope... the data I quoted refers to 'active sites'. What are 'active sites'? From Netcraft's January 2007 survey release: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/01/05/january_2007_web_server_survey.html
"Microsoft's gains were more pronounced in active sites (hostnames that contain content and likely to represent developed web sites)"
Nice try though.
It would be nice to know the exact definition for an "active site"...
Here is something...
http://survey.netcraft.com/index-200007.html#active
The methodology actually looks good. Dumps the majority of sites hosted on the same IP, and compares uniqueness via an md5 sum of the html tag structure of a page.
Though I'm sure if there is a way to manipulate those numbers, its being done.
Two things of major relevance to each other happened like 10 minutes from each other. First, my AllTunes credit ran out. I’ve been using them for the past year for purchasing music. Their service, unlike iTunes, was available to me,...
Ha. Here's a few more:
X: "I'm confused"
Me: "It's okay, I'll walk you through it slowly. Pants first, then shoes."
Me: "We all are. You have Katherine Harris to thank for that."
Me: "See, the little turtle goes forward 50, right 90, forward 25... There you go!"
I could not disagree with you more. In the search for knowledge, I sometimes become confused. If done with sincerity, admitting confusion in the hopes of obtaining clarification is smart. The only dumb question, is the question unasked.
Rich, I disagree with you in that I think we could disagree more. We agree that I can be sometimes confused too. I agree that asking for clarification is a smart thing to do. What I'm trying to get at here though is *the way* the clarification is asked for and the context in which this phrase used.
Seriously? You'd really respond so snidely to someone genuinely asking for clarification?
I mean, it seems like context and non-verbal cues would differentiate between those who mean the phrase in the way you describe it (and there are many of those, I agree) and those who use it to describe, well, a state of confusion?
I'm one of the latter, for what it's worth; sometimes prefacing my request for real clarification with the phrase "I'm confused" is the single best way of describing my mental state. You're saying *I* shouldn't use that phrase because someone in *your* past has misused it? Wow.
Cori and Rich (and anyone else that happens to be reading),
I realise my post omits a key bit of information regarding the use of the phrase. Another chap (Curtis) also commented on this post here: http://www2.millarian.com:8037/2007/02/11/confusion/
You guys are right. People do get confused from time to time and to say so is, of course, not a 'bad' thing to do.
What I didn't explain in my post is the point made by you: that if one is sincere, then there is nothing wrong at all with explaining that one is confused...
But...that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about when the phrase is used when someone isn't actually confused but they are saying it in substitution for "I disagree", or "I think you are wrong". You can hear this in the tone and gather it from context.
Example: If you are arguing different point of view to mine, and you make a point and then I came back with "I'm confused", then I'd say that is not what I meant. What I might have meant is: "I can't think of an argument against the point you just made, so I'll buy my self some thinking time and force you to explain yourself again by telling you "I'm confused", and in the meantime try to make you look dumb". Which is very different to using the phase sincerely.
Hope this helps clarify what I meant :-)
Dear Sir,
I am using synctoy 1.4 for backing up my network drives, I found it very powerful but there is a problem arrived when I scheduled it. After scheduled task run, at close time it is generate an error and send it to microsoft. Please tell me why it is generated and how to resolve it. My email address is moin-khusroo@meritpack.com. I will be thankful to you if reply me.
Moin - your best bet is to post your question at this newsgroup: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/newsgroups/reader.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.windowsxp.photos
Hi, alex
Many thanks for linking to my post. But I have to say the text is written in Portuguese and not in Italian. Yes, that's right. I'm from that tiny little country located in South Europe, near Spain. Also, this is the second part of an article. The first part is here.
Miguel,
thanks for dropping by and pointing out my error - more embarrasing as I was born in Spain (close enough to know better!).
Congratulations to Michael Gartenberg who's moving from an analyst role at Jupiter to an evangelist
How about this:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/reaction/
Computerworld’s Michael Gartenberg asks, “Want to see what the future of personal computing looks like? Don’t wait for Microsoft to show you; go out and get yourself a copy of Apple’s latest operating system release, OS X Tiger. It’s that good.“
B.C.D.E.H.I.K.O.X ?
but only i.m.o.u.v.x. (or thereabouts...)
Assaf and Danny...nope!
actually Assaf is right if you reflect apon it from another angle.
JSF, of course!
My apologies Assaf...nice one!
I grabbed this comment feed when you posted 'cause I'm just groking this one lol.
The suspense is killin me...
BillyG - here's a clue: it's not a numerical pattern...
I have been trying to come to terms with the amateur poetic tendency to believe that words can be stolen.
I believe this is false, and have put my works under creative commons for distribution. I think that maybe explaining this to my friends in verse would get the message to them.
Does anyone else think that idea theft can be countered with openness?
PingBack from http://www.articlefeed.net/online-video-based-technical-support-networks-on-youtube/
He gave me a smart-ass answer to an email I sent him awhile back (asking about the header in his blog), so I've never paid any attention to anything involving his name since.
Sorta like a first impression thing, you know?
I wanted to thank you for putting up this post. I recently (legally!) acquired a Region 4 DVD, and was horribly dismayed when my laptop outright rejected it. I Googled in my complaint and found this post, and reading the suggestions some people left is hopeful. Hoping at least one of these options work!
Since most all Web activity is based on REST web services, then most all of the respondents are either not using the Web or don't know what REST is. Getting this webpage involved a REST HTTP GET web service request. Getting your RSS feed was a REST HTTP GET web service request. Every website on this planet is using REST.
Randy,
I think it would be interesting to see how the survey defined REST.
That said, I think your understanding of REST and my understnading of REST are not the same. In fact this is a discussion (and a forthcoming book) all of its own. See http://www.alexbarnett.net/blog/archive/2006/11/04/REST-Web-Services-and-ROA.aspx
Yeah, I actually give smart-ass answers a lot. :) Depends on my mood. Then again, I get a lot of questions via email.
Can't be serious all the time. Then again, I would never have named my kid "abc123."
just goes to show you weren't worth my time anyway
after a year of giving out my real info, SPAM is no longer my friend
it would be great to be invited to MIX. RedMonk is very interested in Microsoft's story in this area. we would like to be on the relevant AR radar screens. can you help alex? thanks.
Alex Barnett has a post pointing to Chris Prillo's video tech support experiment and wonders if this
I know I hope it makes me more organized, but I suspect it just makes me busier.
its crap how can three people play multi player???? its doing my head in....help please
Actually, Danny is also right. For an interesting distinction.
In the same vein, and even smaller,
xco !
Last week I quoted a footnote to this post trying to convey the size of an exabyte: " an exabyte
I loves me some REST just like the rest of the people out there, but I like it for its informality and hackability. If I want strong contracts and a layer of abstraction on top of Web services, I'll stick with WSDL and WS-*.
Both approaches have their place. Why muddy the waters and dilute one of the biggest benefits of REST -- its simplicity and low barrier to entry?
Manual trackback to AWDL - Another Web Descrption Language
Following yesterday's confirmation that TellMe Networks will be acquired by Microsoft, this morning
Is English your first language? It damn sure doesn't read like it.
Fair enough 'fred' - have fixed the typos I found.
Hey, I'm totally serious!
JSON should be in every governance policy as a way to bring ESB into the SOA fold, and help you realize a better ROI on your MDA composite apps, by delivering agile RIA through enterprise mashups.
I think It's the problem with the DNS server configuration at your ISP. I have also tried OpenDns. its good, its best thing is its suggestion when it doesnt find our requested domain, it suggests with a search page. The only thing which bothers me is it centralizes DNS. What happens if everybody in the whole world started pointing to OpenDns.
And Pakistan (minus a small miracle) have been knocked out of the World Cup by Ireland on St Patties Day!
http://www.digg.com/other_sports/Ireland_beats_Pakistan_in_Cricket
I must admit as a kiwi I'm still enjoying this...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_One-day_International_cricket_records#Largest_successful_run_chases
Nigel - I heard the news of Ireland's win earlier today, and am delighted that I'll be able to remind one of my best friends (of Pakistani origin and with whom I happen to be spending a whole 10 days with in West Indies) of this fact. Repeadtly, I might add. Thank you for the reminder :-)
As a Pakistani fan, this is sad news.
Bob Woolmer was a great coach, with many pioneering ideas. Not just that, but a nice person. That was the main thing about him. I was just listening to a story on one of the Pakistani news channels, and one of the commentators said that whenever any Pakistani player would go to South Africa, he would invite them to his home. He even invited the Pakistani team for dinner during the SA tour.
He was willing to adapt to any culture. The main thing I liked about him was his relationship with the Pakistani players, you can tell through their coaching sessions, and photos what a relationship they had. It was a relationship of friendship.
He kept his own website and always tried to answer cricket fans questions.
He kept his own blog on cricinfo to keep fans updated, and about his ideas of the game of cricket.
He kept himself dignified throughout the various controversies in Pakistani cricket.
From what I saw, he was a true Gentleman.
Bob Woolmer Condolence book:
http://www.pakpassion.net/ppforum/showthread.php?t=38024
We got some good feedback from my AjaxWorld keynote ... If you were there, I'd love to hear your feedback,
Thanks Brad- unfortunately I couldn't make it (I was planning on being there but timing didn't work out for me).
I've been following some of the stories surrounding Bob Woolmer's death the last few days, hoping
My pleasure. I look forward to hearing your take on the great Cricket Crisis of 2007. I'm sure you've followed it much more closely than I.
Congratulations to Herschelle Gibbs and the people of Ireland.
Very interesting post by Andrew Shebanow (senior computer scientist at Adobe), reflecting on some of
The comment about Dekoh is completely incorrect. I have clarified/responded on Andrew's blog. Please read the thread: http://blogs.adobe.com/shebanation/2007/03/apollo_competition_and_opennes.html
Vijay
Dekoh
Thanks for dropping by Vijay - am following the thread.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the
Congratulations on the move! Bungee is doing some really good work and I'm sure with you on board things will get even better. Say hello to the gang down in Provo for me.
Jeff - thank you sir. I'll pass on the message :-)
Utah is an amazing State, many years ago I hiked all around Arches National Park, it was like being on Mars.
Last year I spent three days at Zion National Park;
http://www.bubbleshare.com/myalbum/34553.79c06d7c409/
Too many people I know have left Microsoft in the past year...
Keep blogging your adventure, hope to catch-up with you sometime, somewhere....
Thanks for your contribution to the New Microsoft and good luck at Bungee Labs!
Congrats, Alex. Bungee looks very promising with a bright future, and while Microsoft will clearly miss you, it sounds like a great opportunity.
Congrats. I'm guessing from their Web site you'll be Service Orientated Alex from now on?
I always think of "oriented" the same way I think of a word like "infested". You can have an *infestation*, but you would *never* say "infestated".
There's a whole bunch of words just like this - where the extra "a" is only ever used to tack "tion" on the end.
Oh, well, Provo. Interesting. Hmph.
This old place is beginning to not be the same any more. I guess change is growth, huh?
Good luck, God speed, and teach those folk all about cricket, ok?
You'll be missed.
- Dennis
please get me on the private beta. i dont know what bungee is but it must be bloody good if it is cool enough to get you on board.
All the best Alex!
It's always goodness to have Microsofties at other companies. That's right good friends everywhere. Good luck to you Alex!
Good luck Alex! Keep us posted on any cool stuff you're allowed to talk about ;)
Good luck mate and let us know on Vecosys about Bungee Labs and we'll spread the word over here ...
Hi! a find you site in google, it's nice! I have no own homepage... somestrangetextvista <a href=http://borisoffauto.ru>anal</a>
Good luck Alex, you'll be missed at the big Softie. I have to say I'm jealous of the job title "VP of Community". Got to find me a startup that puts that much emphasis on community. :)
Congrats, Alex! I hope your new gig treats you like you deserve, and that you enjoy Salt Lake. I recommend watching SLC Punk to prepare :-)
Microsoft is truly the worse not having you.
http://kbcafe.com/iblogthere4im/?guid=20070327181002
Alex, congratulations on the new job. I'm sure you'll do great things at Bungee labs.
As VP of Community at Bungee, I assume you'll be blogging there too?
It has been a pleasure getting to know you through this blog and I look forward to hearing about your new adventures.
http://virtual-generations.com/2007/03/27/alex-barnett-leaving-microsoft/
Thanks to everyone for the very kind comments :-)
Best of luck Alex. Look forward to hearing about it over a few beers.
Thanks for the link.
RE: Dojo - your wish is my command! See the updated comments at:
http://blogs.adobe.com/shebanation/2007/03/apollo_competition_and_opennes.html
As for Vijay's contention that I am "completely incorrect" - all I can say is I don't think he proved that at all, but read the thread and judge for yourself.
http://networkworld.com/community/?q=node/13038
Thanks Andrew, will check out.
PingBack from http://www.tomorrow2web2null.de/?p=71
Thanks Alex! I'm glad to see someone gets it all. ;)
Ryan Kennedy
Yahoo! Mail Web Service Engineer
Ryan - thanks for poppping by. I feel bad for not calling you out by name in my post given your role in all this. Great work man.
No doubt we'll be hearing more of you soon.
Hey Alex! All the best with the new venture. Sounds exciting!
Congratulations on the new role, another big chapter starts although outside the 7 year cycle I see.
Interesting.
I and all at MajorPlayers... wish you every success for the future.
harry
Alex, Bungee are a lucky company to have you on board! Looking forward to see what they have hidden up their sleeves.
Say hi next time your cricket team tours sydney ;)
Well done Bungi,
I am so happy for you buddy. We are all very excited about seeing you in a couple of weeks in WI for WC....even though my boys are out and have bumped off poor old bob!!
Once again mate, well done and Tor, Zak and I wish you and the family all the best!!
Cheers
Tabs
Congratulations and best of luck to you friend!
Congrats with the move Alex.
Microsoft's loss I think.
Good luck to you - and welcome back to 'new venture' land - it's the place to be ;-)
PingBack from http://informativeposts.info/the-amazing-autocar-woman-she-really-is-amazing/
I only know you from the start up days and you were in your element then. Good luck.
Today's my last day at Microsoft , ending with an exit interview. That should be fun... Last night
Have fun in your new job! Sounds like an exciting opportunity.
With a farewell quote from the greatest American writer of all time, my friend, neighbor, and idea-mate,
hey man, you will be missed. In bocca al lupo!!! ;-)
Please, keep on blogging. Perhaps you can enrich your point of view if blogging outside Microsoft, isn't it? Anyway, enjoy your new job!
Greetings from Europe.
Alex - thanks for this. Just listened to the podcast and it is very interesting. Love to discuss more.
-a
Good luck with the new gig Alex. I'm sure you'll be up to all sorts of good in it! The Chinwag posse will be keeping an eye on Bungee Labs :-)
Alex, I recently wrote about Amazon and scalability - covering how you can integrate S3 into your site/service, and not only scale, but also gain redundancy.
Here's the URL: http://www.gideonmarken.com/index.cfm/blog/1456/
Included with the post is a diagram which illustrates how the general idea I've been working on with S3.
S3 and services like it are changing the landscape - anyone looking to scale on budget, or no budget, should consider it.
BTW - good luck w/ the new job :)
- Gideon Marken
thanks for the pointer Gideon. I've not heard of ArtistServer btw, will try out some of the stations you have listed there.
Congratulations on the new gig Alex, from the little I've managed to pick up on the web about Bungee, it sounds like an amazing venture. Good luck on the rollercoaster ride of the startup!
Amazon has taken a lead in developing a SOA Platform. Werner Vogels, CTO shares his learnings in this podcast. - SOA Network Architect - SOA in a Connected World
re: Utah. Moab! Beautiful little town. Lots of great hiking and mountain biking. Not to mention you'll be close enough to NM and the Grand Canyon that you'll HAVE to go if you haven't been before.
I just rented Rainbow six Vegas and have played a little, but i when i go to multiplayer, the options are live, link, and split screen. i go to split screen and only 2 people can play, wheer im trying to play 4. can somebody help me?
Congrats! I knew it wouldn't be too long before a start-up lured you away.
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2007/04/whole-lotta-movin-on.html
It may be belated, but congratulations! Was just closing tabs (I have 120+ open at any time) and saw this one. By know you have started and I can read more about it, but I am very happy you have found a new home and something to be excited and passionate about...
Hi Alex, do you happen to know of any half-decent definition of "the cloud"?
how do 4 players play in multiplayer only 2 players are allowed to play ata time can somebody please tell me what to do before i go crazy.
John Musser over at ProgrammableWeb.com has summarized the various ways (he's outlined 12) API providers
I'll be there - let's get together!
Oren Michels
CEO
Mashery
This is a terrific post, Alex. It does a great job of setting out the wheres and whys of API management, and of providing an excellent explanation of why we do what we do at http://www.mashery.com
I dissected it and commented on it a bit here http://oren.blogs.com/praxis/2007/04/alex_barnett_ex.html on my blog.
I didn't have the heart to go read this post for a while after the goodbye drinkfest. :(
Hope all went well in the move and of course, you'd better keep in touch, you loon. :)
My best to the missus!
Betsy
Oren, look forward to meeting. I was a fan of Feedster for a while so looking forward to hear about your next venture!
damn it.. Alex you saw straight through that one, I hope others aren't as smart as you.. i'll chalk that up to a loss for the Microsoft FUD campaign.
Seriously
What's so "FUD" about it?
Scott Barnes
FUD Evangelist
Microsoft.
thanks for dropping by Scott. I guess my question is: does the following quote from your post sound like FUD:
"I've seen the vision for the future, I was pulled aside and shown where the direction for some of our products are going and how we will get there. I see how Adobe are going to debunk some of these as best they can, but in the end this isn't really about Microsoft vs Adobe, it's much bigger - sadly, time will show all this in the end."
'FUD' from wikipedia:
"Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) is a sales or marketing strategy of disseminating negative (and vague) information on a competitor's product. The term originated to describe disinformation tactics in the computer hardware industry and has since been used more broadly. FUD is a manifestation of the appeal to fear."
I realize that your post, or those that you pointed to were not disseminating 'negative' comments about a competitor's (Adobe) product, however...
In this case, the 'FUDness' comes from you remaining vague about your (Microsoft's) product that you've 'heard about, but can't talk about' in the context of talking / comparing about a competitor's product.
That said, I appreciate that there is a notion of transparency which, in this example, might be construed as a flavor of FUDness, if you see what I mean.
I think I'm asking a genuine question of you (the balance between FUD and tranparency"), and not looking for a fight :-)
In light of the vagueness about the product in question, I would call it vaporware (in respect to the overall goal) instead of FUD: neither post contain fear or doubt and induce only a certain uncertainty (due to the vagueness) in the reader, not the writer.
5 miles! You don't seriously go all that way for a coffee do you?!?!
xx
Bjorn - I think you're right, FUD is the wrong word perhaps.
I would like to meet you and find out more about Bungee Labs. From your web site and blog it looks like a very interesting concept. I work with the Office Live team and would like to see if there are any synergies after you launch.
-Don
Just discovering the news of your arrival @ Bungee, Alex! Congratulations! Having some experience with what you folks are up to (I've gotten to know Brad fairly well, and Lyle even more so), and understanding how good you are at what you do, I can only imagine where Bungee is headed.
Oh, and being a Seattle export to Salt Lake City myself: I feel your Starbucks pain ;-) We'll have to meet up at some point such that I can get you hooked up with more of the local scene.
Best of luck, Alex! No doubt we will be running into one another before too much time has passes. :)
So in preparation for this, which is also in preparation for the launch of something even bigger, I've been pretty much heads down in both code and some other things of which I can't really speak about at the moment,...
Thanks for the report. Ruby and Python are up, Java and Perl are down. Hmm...
The real challenge is to see API throttling step-up from app-level homebaked hacks into appliance-based service-level enforcement just as we've seen in other areas of the networking stack.
At this point - it is often true that the cost of throttling is higher than the cost of the DoS :-)
Ah, sometimes I just loooove being a microcog in the corporate wheel. Thanks for the props, Alex. In watching these videos, I resolved that my next "baby", or immortality project as I like to call them, will be a placeless Web service that enables people to gain recognition for the things they wish (and deserve) to be recognized for. Stake your claim!
MSDNWiki trivia... When I was shopping this idea around in 2003, long before it was an official and funded project, I dubbed it DocWiki.
Credit where credit is due...Molly Bostic was one of my first and most passionate, visionary, and dedicated collaborators on the DocWiki, er MSDNWiki, project. Other early and notable contributors included Laura John and Tommy Williams, both of whom have, like me, moved on to pursue other adventures.
Whereas MSDNWiki is a far cry from the open and ambitious, customer-collaborative documentation system I envisaged, I have been pleasantly surprised by its contribution to the MSDN user experience, nonetheless. I view MSDNWiki as a proof of concept, as design validation. I am sanguine that it might someday blossom into the real WikiWiki our customers want and deserve. Perhaps SharePoint 14's wiki will pave the way? :-)
WRT "Risks", here's a little gotcha that I identified in one of my earliest specs: The German Law. I don't know if this risk is a real one or if it has been evaluated/mitigated. Back in 2001, I contributed to Visual SourceSafe 6.0x. The singular purpose of this point release was to fix a broken index in the DE (German) version of the product. Why would Microsoft expend thousands of human hours to resolve such a [seemingly] trivial issue? From what I understand, by German law, anyone who purchases a product whose documentation is incomplete or incorrect is entitled to recompensation in the amount of (?) several times the price they paid for the product. So what happens when a German citizen purchases Visual Studio (for 3000+ euros) calls up a help topic inside Visual Studio, gets an MSDN help topic which has been supplemented by a customer using MSDNWiki, and the content provided leads them astray? Is Microsoft liable? If a German court deems Microsoft to be liable, Microsoft is liable and Microsoft and its valued shareholders will be forced to pay millions and millions of Euros, as redress.
I'll go out on a limb and state that the existence of this kind of business risk, one of many that MSDNWiki faces (or faced?), can be generalized to explain the slow adoption and reluctance of many commercial software vendors and indeed, other types of companies, to truly embrace and promote social software applications, on the Web.
Look forward to synching on post MSFT life.
I'm shipping a lot earlier, a lot more often. How bout you?
Andy - yeah, I forgot what it was like! ;-)
See you there...
Korby, thanks for dropping by. I didn't know about the German Law - interesting heads up. Scary though. My read? Better get the lawyers involved before heading down roads like this...what a shame. I suppose lawyers really are the new priests...
thanks.
Allow me to retort ;)
I wanted to say what i've seen, but obviously can't because my butt would get hauled before the MSFT firing squad for leaking stuff I can't talk about that kind of thing.
Yet, I wanted to express the notion that although all the kids are picking a fight with Microsoft and swearing on their bibles that we are done, the old days are gone blah blah, the parts I was shown in terms of how all these moving parts all connect together, it hit me "damn, these guys are smart, would never of thought of that" notion.
I kind of wanted to express this but of course because I can't give the details away, the best i can do is tell you 've seen the promise land and try and describe it. If i'm wrong, well where's the harm? if i'm right? well you can say "thanks Scott for giving me the early heads up".
Oh darn those competitors if they weren't around i could give you the secret keys to the wonker factory we call Redmond ;) hehe.
Developer Evangelist
Microsoft - No umpa lumpas were killed in the making of Blend, just some were lost is all.
"it just works in these three browsers"
There are more browsers out there... Especially the deployed product should be usable in all modern browsers. If you need contact with developers at Opera, I can put you in contact. You don't want to lose the Wii market of course :)
Wow - that's actually a cool idea.
Go on then, was Bungee Connect written in Bungee Connect or not? ;-)
Also (this is rhetorical as I imagine you have to keep stum on details) is it more a Yahoo Pipes integration/mashup thing or do you get a full app language to code in? Just Jscript in the client, with just a lot of data-binders for state things on the server-side? What's the SLA? How about the isolation model between apps? Any relational datastores on the backend? Hot roll-out deployment? Data migration steps? User authenication provides? Are you going to do a 'Digg.com' user app example?
:-) Anyway - cool idea, good luck guys!
Rijk - agreed - it's just a question of when. Thanks for the offer of putting us in touch with the Opera developers, we'll take you up on that.
David -
Re: "was Bungee Connect written in Bungee Connect or not?" ...ahh, self-referentialism - I love it too :-) Let's put it this way. You can build the Bungee Builder using Bungee Builder (that's the name of the dev environment inside Bungee Connect). It's crazy to watch it happen and hope to have a screencast showing this.
Re: "do you get a full app language to code in" - Yes. More details soon.
Re: "Just Jscript in the client, with just a lot of data-binders for state things on the server-side?" - Bungee Pulse is the coordination system a combination of a very thin client-side Ajax implementation, a comprehensive server-side sub-system within Bungee Grid runtime servers, and an intelligent interaction protocol that enables continuous application state management. Pulse optimizes both client interaction requests and server responses.
Re: "What's the SLA?" - Bungee Connect is designed for 24/7/365 availability as a top priority and business imperative. For now we'll be providing a "Beta" level service environment :-) So far, we have experienced very high availability of our services; >99%. Currently, Bungee Labs does not provide a specifically quantified Service Level Agreement.
Re: "How about the isolation model between apps?" - Yup, got that. More details soon.
Re: "Any relational datastores on the backend?" - We provide the data store required to run apps. For filestorage and relational data (e.g. customer records, product information, transactions, etc), you can specify your own store as long as that data store is sitting on the cloud. More on this later.
Re: "Hot roll-out deployment?" - We've got a whole bunch of stuff to say on this, details to come. But byou should like it :-)
Re: "Data migration steps?" - Application data stored via Bungee Connect is and remains the property of the application publisher and you'll be able to get it out when you want.
Re: "User authenication provides?" - I think you mean "can the app provide authenticated access and different experiences to different users accroding to profiles / authorization?". Yes and Yes. Again, more details to come here.
Re: "Are you going to do a 'Digg.com' user app example?" - We'll have lots of examples to show, some along the Diggg.com lines...
I am at the Web 2.0 expo. I hope to run into you. Taylor Parsons - Tagspace PM
Quick post following our first day at Web 2.0 Expo. Went very well I thought. The team got everything
Holy $&!#. Guys, look it up more? Maybe their isnt any f$%&ing 4 player split screen. You type like retarded baboons on cocaine, just SHUT THE F#$% UP.
Congrats on your latest good fortune Alex!
(somehow I lost your feed on your last day in the rainy NW, but fortunately [for me] I'm back)
Sounds like sunny days ahead...
hey i dont think the mp7 is the best gun in my opinon the best guns are M8,Mtar,Famas,552Commando,and the Scar those r my fav. weapons!!!!!
They have formalized an interesting idiom called a cord...
Alex: I guess, the question to ask is, why would you leave MS while it's so profitable (at least for now)? :)
Isaac - Microsoft's financial success and my bank account balance were not directly correlated. I didn't join MSFT to get rich... :-)
OMG - Silverlight hosted in a Mac with the .NET Common Language Runtime, remote debugging of .NET applications hosted on a Mac...wow, wow, and wow.
Microsoft has taken a page from the people saying "ths operating system isn't important, let's move everything onto the Web" and has built the ability to leverage a zillion VS developers in whichever platform your customers are using.
That's cool.
Interesting way to think of it.
Hi Alex
Also at Mix - perhaps we can grab a beer at some stage
Some Irish/UK folks meeting up at Grand Lux Cafe at 7pm
Best Regards
Fergus
Mix07 Reactions (#3)
I caught up with Pablo Castro, who announced Codename Astoria - Data Services for the Web earlier today
Microsoft Astoria for Web Data Services
I've been puzzling about web data services for a few days...
Man, I dunno what he gets paid, but he needs a raise. Pablo rocks. Give him one of those Blue Monster t-shirts too.
This is very good but it is the same as Google GData nd why don't Microsoft mention that it is basically Atom Publishing Protocol to SQLServer.
Both companies are going the same way with RESTful cloud stores accessible via HTTP verbs.
The only difference is Microsoft are using Silverlight to make .NET cross platform XAML APPS instead of trying to make IE cross platform. Google is relying on Mozilla to make FF 3.0 a cross platform RIA platform with XUL.
Let the fun and games begin.
RESTful Data Services
Sam - thanks for popping by. I have to disagree with your assertion that GData and Astoria are the same thing. I've got time to explain why I disagree right now, but will address this in a post soon.
Microsoft’s REST Moves: Project “Astoria”
Thanks for the quote!
You might be interested, I've now done a bit of a deep dive on Astoria, with some thoughts: www.base4.net/blog.aspx
BTW I second that Blue Monster t-shirt idea, Pablo, Carl and the guys are all doing cool stuff...
thanks Alex J, have del.icio.us'd.
REST2SQL in a Jiffy, with Tagspace for Spice
Here's a link to the video of Pablo's MIX07 session oakleafblog.blogspot.com/.../mix07-session-videos-with-linq-ef-or.html
and to a synopsis of the "Astoria Project": oakleafblog.blogspot.com/.../enables-restful-data-services.html
+1 for a Blue Monster Tshirt for Pablo.
Thanks for the link. The tribute was quite eloquent.
oakleafblog.blogspot.com/.../us-coast-guard-searching-for-jim-gray.html
oakleafblog.blogspot.com/.../of-jim-halt-volunteer-search-for-jim.html
thanks Roger!
Goosebump city man and great reading. Thanks for sharing!
Lors du Mix de las Vegas, Microsoft a annoncé de très nombreux projet, je me suis récemment interessé
What does microformat-aware Web browser look like? Richard MacManus has some of the answers , summarizing
My favorite thing about this is that the term DRM was an industry-created euphemism for "restrictions on how you use content."
Now that people have figured out their first euphemism, they're on to number two.
Interesto resorce seniore peppi...
http://greenteaicecream.co.uk/2007/05/17/revenue-stream-model-for-public-sector-providers/
You might have noticed I have little confidence in the ability of governments to successfully execute
Just a heads up: you won't go far in the corporate mainframe batch world without JCL, but who's trying to get a seat in a 5x5 cell anymore
Of course, I loathed COBOL for its verbosity while in schoool, and still wound up taking the easy money route back in the 90's for 9 yrs.
Never say never...
http://salesforcewatch.com/2007/05/salesforcegoogl.html
http://ericd.net/staging/2007/05/bungee-labs-getting-traction.html
Most choice cut is actually the BBC article about Yak Skiing.
--T
Self-service SOA, the Salesforce way
<warning: the following post meanders , is unstrucutured and doesn't arrive at any conclusion>
The Daily Grind 1148
Though they're being used in the same sentence, I see no comparison between Apollo and Silverlight; he's not referring to them as similar products.
In that sentence, he's comparing Apollo to .NET, and Silverlight to Flash, which is indeed a more fitting comparison (than Apollo to Silverlight).
-ekz
MS Contradiction On Apollo vs. Silverlight
Nice overview - I've just started using this del.icio.us feature myself a lot. What's also interesting is that del.icio.us has actually started sending traffic to my blog since I started using it more heavily - an unexpected side-effect but a pelasant one...
A couple of observations from some big Government projects I have worked on. Firstly most government IT projects are huge, with huge outcomes and millions if not billions riding on them. This seems to paralyse decision makers - afraid to make any kind of decision for fear it may be the wrong one.
Secondly there is a cultural desire to want to centralise control, rather than delegate to those in a better position to make decisions. I wrote some more about that here:
blogs.msdn.com/.../i-don-t-want-my-people-to-think.aspx
(BTW I think I may have run into you once when i was interviewed for a job at BlueWave)
much as I find DO's rhetoric over the top at times, he's contrasting in that sentence, not comparing -- so it seems like his reasoning holds up to me.
Jon Udell, rightly so, is getting excited about the new book RESTful Web Services , by Leonard Richardson
recursive logic is be default false... even if its also confusing. the two above replies demonstrate both points... and sadly the show why ms products, fud, &bs are all like even still being believed. its just like seriously, OMG!
> I don't know if Jon, Leonard or Sam have spent any
> time to look at the Astoria project
I've seen Pablo's presentation, I think Astoria is very cool, and I would like to interview him about it.
I just finished the book, reading it cover-to-cover within 36 hours. It's excellent - concise, clear, comprehensive, with a great mix of practical information and theory, and an impressively even depth. I've been developing RESTful APIs for over 18 months, and I see the release of this book as a major milestone in the raucous development of RESTful service design.
I'm also interested in Astoria. This is the first I've heard of it - I'm not a .Net user. But we do have a growing contingent of proponents at my company. Thing is, we've preferred to design our service APIs RESTfully, but the .Net guys haven't seemed comfortable with it; they've tended to be more comfortable with SOAP. So Astoria looks like it might be helpful in getting those .Net devs to develop RESTful APIs.
MS Dots
"they showed how are mashup can built created that consumes a feed from an external source" == 'huh'
BillyG - thanks for pointing out the screwed up english in that paragraph - have fixed.
Nice writeup Alex - but the Google Mashup Editor doesn't look anywhere near as nice as the Bungee environment;)
I'm at the show - I'll look for you here.
http://crummy.com/2007/06/01/1
Here is some free consulting for Microsoft, based entirely on my readings of white papers ("overview" and "using")...
Congratulations to Alex (Barnett), Ted (Haeger), Lyle (Ball), Brad (Hintze), and *ALL* the folks who brought together the official launch of the Bungee Connect beta yesterday! Bungee Connect - Beta Opening Day - Alex Barnett blog Last night the Bungee
http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=853
I just caught that Bungee Labs is starting to let developers into their Bungee Connect product...
It looks like the Google / Salesforce.com partnership rumours are stirring up again this week, with a
Skype's extras are just the plug-ins packaged for distribution through the Skype client's "extras manager". Extras are no more capable than other plug-ins; they use the same Skype APIs.
thanks for the clarification Phil.
In the UK the mobile operators are starting their own payment services 'pay-for-it' which effectively makes them banks...
2006年3月，我开始寻找符合中国特色的meme engine之路，很快发现只有文本挖掘算法才能做这件事情。 博客内容的文本挖掘，在中国还有一个大问题要解决。博客比新闻要复杂得多得多。2006年9月，我和中科院软件所的张俊林张博士等一起创建了玩聚网，瞄准信息过滤器和人过滤器的未来大方向。
2006年3月，我开始寻找符合中国特色的meme engine之路，很快发现只有文本挖掘算法才能做这件事情。
Marvin Walberg is a job search coach and resume-writer. Recently, he wrote an article that was picked
Sorry for my recent silence on the blog - a combination of lots of travel (tomorrow will be my second
Being from the U.S. and an avid Chenny supporter, I think I'm the outsider here. ;)
Over the past 30 years we've seen erosion in Executive authority – consider Nixon-era fallout, and more recently the utter abuse of the Clinton administration by Congress (i.e. impeachment proceedings). This, combined with increased scrutiny of the Executive branch, and an activist judiciary attempting to legislate, has left the American people with a more impotent and increasingly irrelevant Executive branch (not to mention a less effective Government). American Citizens have been the real looser in this arrangement.
Chenny’s apparent expansion of Vice Presidential authority – the so-called (quasi) fourth branch - couldn’t come at a better time. What’s more, I think Chenny has been uniquely positioned to accomplish this. Consider his personal health situation makes him an unlikely future candidate (i.e. there’s no path-to-the-Presidency for him), and the need created by the 9-11 attacks for an agile executive branch. Because of this, he has readily become the “trusted advisor” of the President, and is not a power-threat in a material sense (no Clinton-Gore distrust).
Without getting caught-up on dictatorial or imperial allusion, Chenny is not unlike Agrippa… someone content to play “second-fiddle” to the Executive, act as the Executive in good-faith, and with the legal status to exist outside of the limitations recently being imposed on the Executive branch. Indeed, I’m excited to see the Vice Presidency becoming relevant, and hope that this role is carried on by the next Vice President – be-it a Democrat or Republican. Hopefully the result will be that the Executive branch – be it the President or Vice President – regains some of the authority that previously was inherent in our Executive branch.
only in America. totally bonkers.
Kinda sad what the current administration has done to make the US the laughing stock of the world. But then you have to wonder about 'everyone' who voted twice for this administration. It just boggles the mind.
Just lately I've been doing a bit of searching around to see what data-centric offerings, other than
Here's something I've been looking forward to for a while - Jon Udell interviewing Pablo Castro on the
I think the thing that's really killing us is the partisanship. I was a pretty hardcore Democratic partisan myself and I was in favor of Clinton getting away with lying. Now I see Bush doing the same thing and most conservatives seem to be happy about it. The last 6 years under Bush has just been total crap and arrogance. I think American politics really has degraded to just total partisan Dems vs Reps garbage. It's the people in the center, the most reasonable ones, who lose.
No.
And you will not get $600 for forwarding this message.
For all the information you want about Microsoft CRM APIs, try looking a the MSCRM SDK
www.microsoft.com/.../01_intro.mspx
http://computerworld.com/blogs/node/5813
In March, this article article by Bryan Richard discussed the the implications of Software as a Service
http://reverendted.wordpress.com/2007/06/29/i-shall-podcast-once-again/
That's absolutely gorgeous Alex, congratulations. We haven't had a single day without rain here since Jun 8th back in the good old British Isles so that cloudless blue sky is something to marvel at!
thanks James. You know, coming over from the Seattle area and London before that, I'm actually missing the rain! Not a lot though :-)
Another dream realized. I love to hear about people succeeding in whatever they chose to do. For me it's music and CRM.
Is Utah becoming the next Colorado for retirement populations? The place is still mostly unspoiled by human endeavors.
Cheers.
and i bet it cost less than my 2 box i mean bedroom apartment in the UK...
Josuha Porter shared the news yesterday that he has started his own consultancy providing "Interface
Well, G/L to him, but he'll be better off getting rid of those 14 errors he has on that simple website of his.
Thanks for the link, Alex. I appreciate it! :)
I'm very excited about the response so far...lots of folks are looking to do social design work!
abc...well noted...methinks that's another bout of the wordpress bug exploit. Ugh...thanks for pointing it out.
http://hatch.org/blog/2007/07/13/links_for_20070713.php
In May 2007 I attended Salesforce.com developer conference where Salesforce SOA was announced as an add
http://philiprichardson.org/blog/post.aspx?id=290 (my trackbacks work :-P )
Shutup! I am first, original, real Fake Steve Jobs, you liar!
It really is crazy, isn't it? Such a silly idea. I can't imaging anyone wanting to be Fake Steve right now, with all this ridicule.
But Nathan, I *really* am the real Fake Steve Jobs! Why doesn't anybody believe me!!!!??
ok, granted - Good to meet you FSJ :)
http://spietrek.blogspot.com/2007/07/links-7222007.html
It takes about 5-10 minutes to set up a Mac from opening the box through the registration process, depending on wether your a newbie or pro. Apple doesn't install crapware.
I am setting up a new Mac right now. Wireless and Ethernet discovery is flawless (every time). Not so with Windows, in my experience, and it is much harder than it needs to be. The OEMs need to do a better job of putting themselves in the customers shoes. But they still can't control the experience like Apple does because they don't control both the hardware and the software like Apple does.
Apple does have bloatware. It's less obtrusive, but it's there.
There's demo-only software in your Applications folder like iWork. (Doesn't do anything without being launched by the user and easy to uninstall though). Then there are fully functional apps like GarageBand where one doesn't realize they are taking up several gigs of space (with hidden files) and that just deleting the 90 Megabyte application (because, say, you don't compose music) will leave more than 2 Gigabytes of material on your drive doing nothing but bloating up the disk, all just because Apple didn't give a hint about how to properly uninstall this pre-installed package or even that it was there.
More annoying is Quicktime Pro. Want to see something full screen on your new Mac? pay an extra $30 fee to Apple or find a third party tool to work around the problem (greed?).
Of course, I haven't even gotten into bloatware like Dot Mac internet account which is advertised in the Mac OS X installation process as well as in several apps when trying to use internet functionality. Most people have been underwhelmed by Dot Mac's lack of any compelling feature (e.g. only 100Mb of online storage) so its sales success is pretty much only attributable to that moment of opportune confusion during installation and starting new software that might cause some issues.
I love Apple's recent products, and I barely notice the ways bloatware is put on its machines. But even though it's better that the competition, it's not fair to say Apple is squeaky clean when it comes to this practice.
William - thanks for detail. I think the key point of your comment is:
"I barely notice the ways bloatware is put on its machines."
It is the perception that counts, no?
Back in April, the Data Programmability team at Microsoft announced "Astoria": Data Services for the
Clucking bell, Molly Holzshlag really has kicked the web standards beehive with a blog post expressing
I'm going to have to read your blog now to see who you are...you share my name.
Hey Alex - that's weird! I've been trying to get a hold of the .com name for years -- well done for getting it!
Am sub'd to you too now :-)
http://duckdown.blogspot.com/2007/08/more-links-for-2007-07-19.html
http://tempolibero.blogosfere.it/2007/08/google-conquista-lo-spazio-niente-shuttle-basta-un-software.html
Gawd this is beautiful. There is so much to do and so little time. Thanks for sharing!
At one point in the video, the narrator says "We define and <i>importance</i> or energy function."
And it's true - they remove the pixels with the least amount of importance to the picture. Fascinating that they can do this with such a simple algorithm.
Yeah, so where's yours?
Tommy - it's there somewhere...
Thanks so much Alex! I appreciate the kind words. :)
Best,
Brian
The many paths to portable social networks Nivarna
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback Alex; I'll keep that in mind for next time... :-)
I would venture that the collapse of the Claimspace social software project is as much an indicator of Microsoft's waning focus on community as it was a contributor to Korby's departure.
The other departures you that you cite, as well Robert Scoble's and your own, further indicate that the sun may be setting on Microsoft's era of investing effort into transparency.
--Ted
Ted - nice of you to drop by. I can't agree with the last part of your conclusion (that Scoble's and others' leaving "indicate that the sun may be setting on Microsoft's era of investing effort into transparency").
Why? There are 80,000-odd employees at Microsoft worldwide, many of them blog and have high profiles in the technical community. Good people leave good companies, but more recently the news of their leaving travels faster and wider than it did in pre-blog days. I can tell you that many great community-oriented are joining Microsoft to replace those leaving - at a fairly normal turnover rate I think - and there are many others emerging from within the ranks. The challenge for Microsoft and any other company that has (and grows) high profile and high impact employees that are engaged in the community is to keep them since companies who need to hire these kinds of people are finding it easier to find and contact them in order to make attractive offers.
To clarify on my personal reasons for leaving - I left because of a unique start-up opportunity that Microsoft couldn't offer me (or counter-offer). At the time I left did not feel I was being constrained by Microsoft in my efforts to enable transparency into my old product team. On the contrary - my management team were very supportive and have continued a great level of customer connectivity / feedback. And, from what I've seen this year so far, I think transparency is still on the increase across MS.
Another departure.
blogs.msdn.com/.../for-what-it-s-worth-it-was-worth-all-the-while.aspx
That's exactly my point, though.
Ted, what you meant to say was "that's exactly the point I meant to make but didn't".
Precisely. Only, you were right and I wasn't.
http://archinect.com/news/index.php?id=p63758
Was it because of payment or was it another grund them have gone?
Thanks man. Things are going well and I see some really great things for CS in 2008 and a couple of the other platforms we are working on. Hope things are going well with you as well.
I read Chris Messina's post this morning, "A Bill of Righteous Intent" where he discussed the draft manifesto
Real Lawyers Have Blogs
Thanks Alex--I'll definitely miss those kind-of-once-monthly drinking events with the Microsoft community crowd, yourself included.
Keep in touch--my new blog is at the link above. :)
Very true, I often wonder how productive social networking is, as it sometimes only seem to take my attention away from my daily work without really adding much important information to my daily life. At the same time though, if you keep it in boundaries, a bit of a fun social break in between your working hours can give you a boost of moral that will enable you to work more efficiently later on.
The true difficulty is getting the balance right...
Stephen Downes on Learning 2.0 I've been working the learning problem lately. Stephen has been on
Stephen Downes on Learning 2.0 I've been working the learning problem lately. Stephen has been on it
Hey Alex -- thanks to you and Ted for the invitation, that was a fun conversation! Covered a lot of ground indeed. Looking forward to hearing more of the series.
Cheers,
John
thanks John...more to come!
Hey, congratulations and yes, welcome to the United States.
thanks Dennis.
Congrats Alex! Have you posted pictures of the new house yet?
Brain - thanks. yes I did...you can check them out here...this is what it looked like before we bought it: www.flickr.com/.../72157600809203371
Alex:
We dont have any Web API available currently. But the plan is to provide it.
Raju
thanks Raju...looking forward to see what you guys come up with. Lots of potential.
Excellent podcast. I learned as much about Yahoo! from your interview with Jeremy as I have over the last two months. :-) I love the format of Bungee Line. Keep up the great work.
Zimbra: collaboration software as a web service... Occasions and interesting question: are services that expose HTTP WebDAV methods inherently unRESTful?
thanks Korby...hope to have you on one day once you've got your feet under the table etc.
RE: WebDAV unRESTful..see:
rest.blueoxen.net/.../wiki.pl
and
www.mail-archive.com/.../msg02214.html
First, allow me to comment about how this analysis has all the markings of someone who went into hyper-focus after intaking too much of a stimulant substance.
Second, I must ask whether you have factored in the away-from-home-espresso-machine kamikaze runs to Starbucks or the local Border's cafe. Are these outside of the calculation?
Third, perhaps in the spirit of full disclosure, you should mention where you bought the espresso machine. After all, the OMG factor is not measured in Latte proceeds alone.
Fourth and finally, I must state that perhaps it is time for us to investigate getting one for the office...albeit, perhaps a less costly model.
Mr Haeger,
On point 1. Your perceptive skills have not failed you.
On 2. These are outside of the calculation since this a highly variable constant.
On 3. I bought the machine at Starbuck, discounted fro $835 to $450, not including paraphernalia.
On the fourth point, I like it...
You want to save some *more* money, and have some fun at the same time?
Try a home coffee roaster! My wife gave me one for Christmas a year and a half ago, and I've never looked back. Premium beans are $5 a pound. The roaster is a piece of cake to use: fill it with beans, press one button, and wait 25 minutes. I roast about once a week.
(FYI, the roaster I use is by Nesco: www.sweetmarias.com/prod.NescoCoffeeRoaster.html)
Happy caffeining!
thanks Dan...am checking it out.
We've had our Saeco super-automatic gratification machine for 3 years (built in grinder knocks 30s off of latency in the morning) As of this morning it had spewed forth 5,172 shots of espresso.
Consistent crema *every morning* - Priceless (well at $4,000 profit and climbing...)
I have an espresso machine... I quit starbucks when I got it. I dry for almost a month. Then I found out that Barnes and Noble cards work in their cafes... oh well.
Thanks Alex!
Check this:
www.metacafe.com/.../the_empire_strikes_back_in_5_seconds
Gets the point across.
Way back in July my friend and former Microsoft employee Alex Barnett posted a question on his widely read blog about the support for our APIs in Live. Since we were under NDA...
Alex Barnett has done The ROI Analysis: Starbucks vs. Espresso Machine at Home I like Starbucks coffee. A lot. But after doing some math (encouraged to do so by Kate), we realized I was spending a ridiculous amount of money on...
Alex Barnett Podcasts
Hey Alex. I just posted this on Techcrunch as well. WTF is right, but this very unfortunate glitch has been fixed. Here's what happened: After valleywag, techmeme, digg, etc. all picked it up, the server got overwhelmed and we had around 25 dumps that were in queue. FB times out after a few minutes, so to speed up with the dump, we added some threading to the libraries, which pushed the exports through in an instant, but also misplaced some of the data in what we now know to be at least four separate csv dumps. When we were alerted to this, we removed the threading and all was right again; however, the error did occur and it was our fault. We'll continue to test the app during the night just to make sure this doesn't happen again.
Deepest apologies that this happened.
Alex. Thanks for the thoughtful response here. We were thinking about many of the same questions and issues here, and even though it was a big glitch that brought some of them to the forefront, Im interested to see how the discussion develops re: your question of the extent to which a user (or the developers building apps for that user) actually owns the "social graph" and data tied to it. When we started building this little exporting graph, we knew that we would be pushing against the walls of what people felt was comfortable; however, it was just a guns-blazing version of what other apps have been doing for quite some time.
As you'll see in some of my other comments on the TC thread, what will be interesting, I believe, if what people actually DO with these data after they suck them out.
For instance, why did you decide to do the data dump, and what use does it provide you? I personally did it so that I could more easily sort by various items and then decide whom I needed to contact/invite for specific things. It also allowed me to sort for multiple column variables.
Figures. Hope you pinged the facebook team. :o(
I tried the friendscsv app and it does appear to be all better now.
The more interesting question you raise is about the private information in my data.
I think you solve that by treating your social graph, bloglist, etc as a list of pointers.
My APML, OPML, etc should contain URLS that _don't_ contain my authentication info. That way I can publicly expose anything I subscribe to, but you can only dig into those details if you have authorization to do so.
In facebook, the things you should be able to expose responsibly are the facebook profile ID's and the limited data (picture, etc) that by default one can see without being a friend. From there on out, people with the appropriate permissions should be able to spider through to whoever they have perms for.
In friendcsv, the author is not exposing the data, rather he is letting you retrieve the data people have exposed to you. You losing the data is your irresponsible ass. Do it and risk the shame and censure of your friends.
OAuth use case - "Here’s an actual use case for the problem and why OAuth solves it..."
very intersting coffe machine analysis-did you know there are only three kinds of people who can count.Those who can and those who can't.Anyway see you xmas.
OAuth on ma.gnolia
Well, thanks goodness for that. Synctoy 2.0 beta has been released, so I can at last start re-using this
Hi Alex, hope all is well with you! Good to see that the blog is progressing well (and has a good size Feedburner readership!)
I've got my own little blog now: beatthecasinos.blogspot.com - I've always believed you should blog about topics you're passionate about - and this is one for me. :-)
If you'd like to feature in my blogroll, let me know, I'm happy to add you.
David Pomeroy
davewestlondon@yahoo.co.uk
Very well said. There's a lot of "bad love" piled on social networks, but being able to connect with so many people that I knew in High School/College is awesome.
=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com
Its quite amazing. Im just 24 but have reconnected with people I went to kindergarten with. 20 years of nothing and then all of this. It has changed many lives
DfgUrE 3v3445vtt075nvn0g8d0nb
I want to let you know this made my day. To know that something you create affects people's lives in this way is what makes working here so rewarding.
Happy Thanksgiving.
- Ben
Facebook Designer
In this season of giving thanks, Netizens feel grateful for the sense of connectedness and reconnectedness brought by online social networks. The big news, after all...
I echo Ben's comments. Thanks for the nice note, Alex!
- Matt
Facebook Bus Dev
Jay Bazuzi, once Development Lead for the C# Editor, is leaving Microsoft, and he wrote some surprisingly...
Hi Alex!
I agree, Facebook is a blast. It's a great way to keep in touch with people (including Nat) assuming you can put up with the large amount of "spam" it puts your way... not email spam, more of the "you have an aquarium, john wants to buy you a drink" type variety. To Facebook's credit however they offer probably the very best personalisation functionality I've seen on a social networking site - and the ability therefore to turn off these messages.
I can highly recommend LinkedIn.com for business networking. I've been on that a few years now and it's excellent. And no "spam" really either. And free for all the basic features.
In little New Zealand, oldfriends.co.nz is quite novel: allows you to track down old friends from school / work networks of long ago. It's a fun trip down memory lane.
Anyway, we must connect on Facebook - given that we're both on there and all. Love to yourself and Kate - hoping we can catch up soon in US, UK, or NZ. And if you ever need a bed in NZ, you know there's more than one always available for yourself and family!
David P
JayBazuzi曾任C#编辑器的开发主管，现正离开微软。他在离开之前令人惊讶地给旧日伙伴留下了一些尖锐的临别赠言：
Cam greu m-am adunat sa scriu si despre ele dar backlogu.... si o sa incerc sa splitui pe evnts ca sa
600 web APIs. That’s how many different open web service APIs are now listed in the ProgrammableWeb directory. Given that it’s the new year and...
Alex Barnett of Bungee Labs took a look at 8 Trends in Software as a Service Platform which highlights some of the movement toward web services...
PipeBytes "PipeBytes is a simple service which allows you to send a file to a friend." (tags: Email sharing free P2P internet storage Service) 11 Ways to Optimize your Internal Site Search "Google has raised the bar. If you...
The dude will be missed. But this video really cracks me up. The company sure does have a good sense of humor about themselves. :o)
One of the fun parts of my job at Bungee Labs is to partner up with Ted and interview some smart people
SaaS / DaaS / WaaS (Whatever As a Service) and Mashups Nick Carr quotes Henry Adams in Among the dynamos
This Week's Semantic Web by Danny Ayers...
2008 may see many trends in software as a service platforms, at least...
For those of you who listen to podcasts and are interested in social design, here’s an option: Alex Barnett and Ted Haeger (the Bungee Connect folks) recently interviewed me...
Joshua Porter is a usability consultant, web designer, researcher and blogger specializing in the art of social design for the web whose experience includes...
Windows Live Writer is arguably one of the coolest apps that Microsoft has...
Hey, I just noticed this. Let me know if you have any suggestions for the live writer plug-in. I'm planning on doing another round of spare time coding on this next week.
Hi Josh - thanks for stopping by. a couple of things perhaps:
1. Bug - In the case of pulling down the del.icio.us links there seems to be some inconsistency in the way it pulls down the notes - sometimes is has the first couple of words, sometimes all the words. No discernable pattern here I can see.
2. Feature - as a config setting, allow user to set number or items pulled down (from 1 to all)
I'll yank every single one of my photos from Flickr if this goes through. They've worked consistently for a very long time to earn my hatred of them.
I'm looking for a replacement in a Post-Flickr world.
Mike - there were a number of Flickr users who felt the same way when Yahoo! acquired Flickr. What Yahoo! did very well is to leave Flickr alone allowing the Flickr team to continue their innovation / great service. I speak as Flickr user / customer myself pre- and post- the Yahoo! acquisition and I didn't feel any negative effects throughout that process (although there was bump with the who Yahoo! ID thing). 3 years on I'm still a Flickr fan.
I'm interested in this Mike: if Flickr didn't change AT ALL post Microsoft acquisition would that change your mind in the slighest about moving away from Flickr? If not, why not?
thanks for popping by.
I'd be willing to give Microsoft a chance... but they've got a history of criminal behavior to weigh against them.
I'm going to start shopping around for a new model of social networking. Something decentralized and federated. Think Usenet with a better signal/noise ratio.
We need to move away from being forced to depend on corporations to hold our stuff.
@Mike, try Zooomr.com
That speech of Senator Obama's is the one that made his appeal concrete to me. Before that, I had been drawn to him for his qualities as a statesman and orator. But to see this nuanced view and a willingness not only to try to express complicated ideas but to succeed at doing so made it certain.
Alex Barnett is someone who writes...
You won't get flamed by me, Alex - this was an excellent post.
From the perspective of a kiwi living in the US (I married a US citizen two years ago) I couldn't agree more!
Religion does seem to play a much larger part in government here than I realised before moving here, but I can't help and wonder whether it is just a very vocal minority who are driving the policy.
I just can't believe that the majority of Americans don't care about issues like heathcare for the poor. I mean geeze, I thought one of the major pillars of religion was compassion!! But then the issue gets warped by a few vocal political "authorities" and the next thing you know you aren't a true Christian if you are voting for something like universal health care!
I find politics here to be so.... unique. Everyone seems to blame the media, yet a large percentage of the general population continues to lap up "media" like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News as if it is an absolute authority.
One way to look at is that only half of eligible voters vote, and around half of them voted for Bush - so at the absolute most, only 1/4 of the country agrees with him!
Ps - A good example - water boarding!
This should be an absolute no brainer for anyone who is remotely religious, but you are anti-American if you don't believe torture can be used to protect the country....
MB,
re: media - just to put rating numbers on the shows / channels you mentioned.
Fox News - 3 million daily (see en.wikipedia.org/.../Fox_News_Channel ) - around 1.8% of total adult population
Rush Limbaugh - 13 million weekly (see en.wikipedia.org/.../Rush_Limbaugh ) around 7.8% of total adult population
One of my remaining wisdom teeth has decided to cause me trouble and I've been in agony for the past 48 hours...
Before joining Bungee Labs last year, I knew they were on to something big. I mean, really big. A big
That's just one sensation you can experience from an earthquake...I call it the "ocean affect," where it feels as though you're floating on ocean waves. The second type is the "rattle," where everything - including you - rattles and shakes with the earthquake itself. Glad to hear you enjoyed it. Some folks (like myself) become very disoriented and nauseous from the feeling.
Seeing Google’s recent release of Google Calendar Sync, Alex Barnett has created a short screencast of how this is available as a browser-based utility through the WideLens reference application on....
Things sure seem to be heating up lately in calendar land.
Alex Barnett writes...
Man, I really WANT this
The "platform-as-a-service", or PaaS meme is getting more air play the last 24 hours as news of Google
PaaS sounds an awful lot like the WebOS idea that was floated a while back, only more useful.
I suppose http://www.widgetplus.com would fit that description.
Great podcast! Although it looks like you have to clean up some spam here. Does Community Server use Akismet?
My BIG question: Now that Google has thrown in their hand, what is the future for Bungee Labs?
Hi Ric...usually me spam is under control here....but from time to time it gets the better of me. cleaned up now.
RE: Google + Bungee. The future's bright Ric...validation of our business model by the big players is a good thing. the fact is Bungee is much more than a runtime for a language...see the "Definition of PaaS" link to see the end-to-end nature what we're doing...think about how this compares to other offerings in this space.
the abovementioned WebOS have since evolved into <a href= http://www.hyperoffice.com> HyperOffice </a> - and they're firmly entrenched in the SAAS market now.
which brings me to my point? are paas or saas even in competition? the primary market of saas providers is small to mid sized businesses. the reason why saas offering suit these companies is - no implementation cycles, no hassle of developing or configuring solutions, no dirty underbelly of using software. isn't paas taking away these very things?
Panjak - thanks for passing by. SaaS and PaaS have a number of things in common, but to boil it down - both are about delivering software and services over the web.
But there is a clear difference:
SaaS provides applications as service...think horizontal apps such as CRM or HR (and many more) - usually customizable and available via APIs and UIs, data services (via mapping / geo data service APIs, or Zip code lookups, etc).
PaaS (or *true* PaaS) is a much more generalized service - it provides (over the web) the ability to develop apps (usually themselves delivered as SaaS) - any app. Think of it this way - you can build SaaS apps using PaaS.
So to answer your specific question: are SaaS and PaaS competative? I don't think so: SaaS is a subset of PaaS - you can build and deliver a SaaS app using PaaS, but not the other way around.
Whats a deliminator anyway ? Is that like a delimiter ? :)
Angus:
I think that was the ZZ-Top album that included the song "She's Got Legs."
what exactly in American English does
'As I've come learn while living in the US'
mean?
Rob :)
Just remember, we Americans do it the correct way. It wasn't until the 18th and 19th century that the British decided to "Frenchify" their language with the extra letters (colour instead of color, for instance).
Eventually you will get it right again. :)
tj
Rob - thanks for the observation, and nicely done :-) Have corrected.
Travis - au contraire! The Frenchification of the word from "program" to "programme" was in fact the greekification - "programma" an effort to go back to the roots of the word... see: www.etymonline.com/index.php (and before you point it out, this is utter nonsense)
"Spelling programme, sometimes preferred in Britain, is from French and began to be used early 19c." ;)
ah...Travis...so you missed out the "(and before you point it out, this is utter nonsense)" bit in my prior comment... :-)
So what about:
lorry - truck (2 syllables vs. one)
petrol - gas
bloke - dude/guy
Maybe it's just because us Americans are lazy :)
"I use less words than you." Ick, eeuwww, ouch, no, no, noooooo! If this is "better," I'm emigrating tomorrow! Incorrect grammar, even if more "efficient," is still incorrect.
BTW, to be correct AND efficient, according to my 7th grade Study Skills teacher, your title "The Efficiency of (the) American English Language" should be "Efficiency of American English."
cheers, mate (or, to be more efficient, "Ta!")
Counter-examples? :
tap - faucet
car - auto(mobile)
car park - parking lot
nappy - diaper
flat - condominium
estate - station wagon
caravan - recreational vehicle :-)
I like (to) table, as used in meetings etc. Seems to have the opposite meaning either side of t'Atlantic.
ass/arse...brings to mind Fawlty's Waldorf Salad.
Ah, well, thanks for the correction. But I quote the Russian poet Xlebnikov: "The typographical error is often a first-rate artist."
Michael - thanks for dropping by :-)
Indeed, this example got me thinking about how new ideas can be spawned through fidelity errors...I wonder how many new theories or unintended trains of thought have led to new insights caused via "Chinese Whispers" !
...A topic for a blog post all of its own!
Centre - Center
Lift - Elevator
Trousers - Pants
About a year ago, I took part in a meeting where the question: "What does open source "mean" in a SaaS
I've posted a better video of the OSCON talk (which includes the actual slides).
In the case of open sourcing a platform for building applications such as BungeeLabs', you mind find yourself dealing with issue which is a transition in mindset, from a product focus to a service focus.
This is often particular difficult as many people are wedded to the idea that competitive advantage is in the product or technology, whereas in a service world competitive advantage for the provider is in the operations and hence the service itself.
This service world will ultimately lead to marketplaces, and portability will become key. Some companies will make the shift towards service providers, some IT product companies will find niche product roles and some will ask "What happened?" as the administrators turn up.
As for the chess game, you are absolutely right there is no one single solution and it all depends upon what you are trying to create. If you're going for the marketplace then GPLv3 & Trademarks & Partner Program is an ideal approach, however you may have other plans.
Simon, thanks for the links. Video with slides is better :-)
The points you're making re: competitive advantage existing at the operations level (and hence the QoS itself) and portability are very interesting.
Re: portability and the issue of lock-in -
Last month we announced Bungee Application Server + source code access (see the proposed licences here - Commercial and R&D) in response to customer feedback, plus another announcement providing the option for customers to to run the Bungee Grid on EC2. Do these solve the all portability questions? No, we do think it addresses some of the questions raised in your post though, but not all. Still more to think about and do.
The repuation & trademarks, Partner Program / market place approach is another good set of ideas we can think through (and one that may be entirely interoperable with the Affero v3 license).
Thanks for taking the time to interact with us.
CNET: Today's must reads: Novell's lead pony, Microsoft on open source, and more
The service war begins ...
Couchcast podcast - Bungee Labs — Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Jul 18,2008
Two new interview podcasts to share (recorded by me and Ted ) for the Bungee Line: Nate Bowler, CTO of
Hey Alex, thanks for the pointer. My org just got @task after the non-dev team bailed on Jira and the dev team bailed on central desktop :)
We switched from @task to Wrike.com. The reason is lack of flexibility and email integration.
Another great project management app is Intervals:
http://www.myintervals.com/
It excels in time tracking and task management.
Project Management Software Digest - two new podcasts...
微软开发主管临别诤言 作者NiclasNilsson译者郭晓刚发布于2007年11月28日下午6时54分...
Hej Alex, I found your own msn.blog and came along to see the outcomes of your moving. Very well then! There is so much to learn from your posts, that is just great. Where do you work, since you left Microsoft? The podcasts seem to be cool, too. I´ll check them out.
Classmates.com is fascinating. New people, new problems to solve, and a opportunity so big it -- well,
It's a wild ride, but also a very sad one. How objective can you be about your theories when falsifying them means your wife is eternally dead?
Matt - haven't got there yet (am on page 110)...sounds heavy though.
LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 8/20/2008+
Well, the great Bungee Jump has come. Martin Plaehn, CEO of Bungee Labs has shared the news of the company
Hi Mate,
Just saw your blog! Hope all is ok. Let me know if there is anything I can do. What are your plans?
Thanks for all that you did at Bungee Labs, and for the level of integrity and professionalism in this departure. I had a great experience working with you, and whatever the future may hold for Bungee, I and many others will miss your presence among us.
We may no longer be colleagues, but we will always be good friends.
Tabs - thanks...I don't know what my plans are yet but getting some interesting emails in!
Ted - indeed. Catch up soon :-)
It was a pleasure working with you as well. I learned a lot from you through my observations and interactions with the community side of Bungee. You are a true professional and I wish you the best in whatever you do next.
Corey
I've been sitting here at Seatac for an hour (missed my flight;), writing and re-writing and re-re-writing this darned comment.
Alex--Martin Plaehn was wise to recruit you, fortunate to retain you, and I am certain that he's sad to see you go.
If and when Bungee Labs IPOs, I will invest*, knowing that your DNA is in its DNA. For as any serious investor knows, the potential of a company is disproportionately influenced by its first few employees and executives. In your case, I trust that the influence has been disproportionately positive and profound.
I suspect that your inbox will continue to increase in interestingness over the next few weeks and months, as those of us who are not as tapped (or tagged) in as you are play catch up.
I'll call you when I land in SJO and I'll drop in on you and Kate for dinner and drinks, soon. The next time you land up in SEA, you're now duty bound to do likewise.
Parting words: by my rough calculations, we've got 42 years to 10B and roughly 50 years to not only change world bug perhaps even save it. Opportunity abounds.
*unless you advise me otherwise
I am very sorry to hear the news. You were a fantastic resource for bungee and I am not sure how they will get by without you.
As for the path forward, I have a few ideas. Rest assured, when I become famous and wealthy, you are on the short list for people I would love to work with.
I enjoyed every minute of working with you. Good luck to you and everything you do in the future.
Good luck and best wishes on your next endeavor.
Could always try knocking on Skonnard's door, hear he's still livin' large in Provo.
maybe time to come back to blighty and watch Flitnoff hit 31 off 12 balls to beat the South Africans...
Rob -
We were shocked to hear about what transpired...
Wherever you land, we're sure the new company/opportunity will benefit from your presence
Regards!
Rob & Laura
A tremendous loss for Bungie if you ask me, but finding something exciting and rewarding should be little trouble for someone like you.
Let's catch up sometime very soon!
Best wishes and many happy regards.
Dion
I believe that there'll be lots of opportunities opening up for you, Alex as well as the 14 other people that bid Bungee Labs farewell.
Keep on with the posts and good luck on your new ventures.
Best.
alain
What you don’t know can hurt you. Sometimes the world can change under your feet and you never
Congrats. Sounds very exciting indeed. Sorry that we didn't get a chance to meetup at Web 2.0 Expo NYC!
Say hi to the Quicken for OS X development team. I hear he's very lonely down there in the basement, all by himself.
Dear Disgruntled Quicken for Mac user - I looked around to understand a little more about Quicken for Mac...I don't know if this will cheer you up: proadvisor.intuit.com/.../byproduct.jsp (built for Leopard...makes full use of Spotlight)
Congrats on your new position Alex!
I hope you enjoy your adventure to Boston. I've never been there, but there is something alluring about it and is one of the places I could be persuaded to live in. Onward and upward!
Congrats Alex! Let me know if you move to Boston - I grew up round there and can give insights.
Cheers!
Congrats. Glad to see you landed on your feet so quickly! Boston might be my favorite city and Intuit makes some really great products, so I see great things ahead for you. Good luck!
SANDY
Congrats Alex! I've worked in Boston a bit with my last company - it's a lovely city, one I could definitely spend a lot more time in, am sure you'll love it.
well done mate! Great news, hope it all goes well for you.
tabsy
Great news to hear that you so quickly found a new gig.
For the record, I'm NOT pleased with the idea of you moving away. :) Until you do, the Happy Sumo awaits.
Glad to hear it!
I moved to California less than a week ago, and I'm loving it. Best of luck in Boston.
Firstly - thanks to everyone who has reached out to me in the last three weeks via email, phone calls
Awesome! Be thee Alex of Alston or Alex of Arlington I wish you great happiness and success.
Beware bellicose Bostonians, particularly the little Bill Bellicieks clad in gray. They're taciturn trolls, I tell you. And frowning is contagious.
Keep in touch!
Korby
Recently I went on record as saying: everything that travels on the internet is data in one shape or
Outstanding post Alex! This stuff is gold.
Interesting post Alex. In particularly am well aware of the dangers of groupthink that large organisations can suffer. If it's possible, it's worth trying to keep teams fresh by sporadically bringing in new people to assess what's going on. Potentially difficult to arrange, but slightly cheaper than employing new people all the time!
Out of interest, did Microsoft have a google powered intranet?!
(oh and good luck to your new colleague!)
I hope your boss got you a buddy, because he should have in addition to a mentor
@Sally - yeah, the buddy system for newbs is a good one.
@Mike - er...I'll let you guess ;-)
@Jim - thanks :-)
great post, I have copied it to a text file and saved it so when I do move from the current job I will have the file to read and refer to.
Great post and thanks for this Alex! Lucky for me, I got over the imposter syndrome as soon as I started the speaking circuit (had to for survival - the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy was a big win for me), but the asking, the mentorship and the not trying to do it all myself are really key points for me. Luckily, I have a great team that has been welcoming and supportive and I am a natural fumbler (really good at asking the stupid questions). :)
Great post Alex - tons of useful stuff here. Glad to see you blogging too! You're an asset to the blogosphere.
I've been following this idea on the web for a bit. I like how people are trying to take the hack that "level-grinding" exploits ( I'll do repetitive tasks forever for a little dopamine reward every few minutes) and use it to craft better lives for themselves.
If you haven't read Jane McGonigal's "SuperBetter" you're going to love it: blog.avantgame.com/.../super-better-or-how-to-turn-recovery.html
This post was mentioned on Twitter by assaf: Apparently, taking the dog for a walk is worth about 200 Achievement Points. http://bit.ly/alXkbe
Earlier this week I was in the MIX10 crowd as Douglas Purdy announced the Open Data Protocol (it was
Interesting read, I've just come to the point you were at 12 months ago and now need to move on to Me 2.0 as well.... tomorrow I'm helping out a friend with his race and as I'm so out of shape I've been asked to be the tail of the race marshall and wear the appropriate "wally bib".... anyway tomorrow is the first step on the journey
See you in december for a glass or two of wine or a few gin's (not beer)
Unfortunately, I have reached the 5000 limit sometime ago. If not, I would add you to my circles.
Luciano Evaristo Guerche (Gorše)
A fellow blog subscriber from Brazil
plus.google.com/107478984279763629199
thx Luciano- have added you anyways :-)
8 Trends in Software as a Service Platforms - Alex Barnett blog
Software Design Patterns - Alex Barnett blog
Techcrunch - Alex Barnett blog
And of Dynamics Live CRM SaaS APIs? - Alex Barnett blog
LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 8/20/2008+ - Alex Barnett blog
Live Search OPML Generator - Alex Barnett blog
Microsoft Codename "Astoria": Data Services for the Web - Alex Barnett blog
Enterprise 2.0 and Culture Change - Alex Barnett blog
You can start with the Customer Experience, but you need to stay there. - Alex Barnett blog
Interview with Pablo Castro on Astoria - Data Services for the Web - Alex Barnett blog
Why OData Matters (IMHO) - Alex Barnett blog
emedia.blogspot.com/.../alexbarnettnet-blog-16092006-long-tail.html - Alex Barnett blog
OAuth use case - Alex Barnett blog
The Web Standards Fluster Cuck - Alex Barnett blog
A.H.I.M.O.T.U.V.W.X.Y - Alex Barnett blog
Apparently, taking the dog for a walk is worth about 200 Achievement Points. - Alex Barnett blog
Astoria: Data Services for the Web - Part 2 - Alex Barnett blog
Alex Barnett Podcasts - Alex Barnett blog