The Spigot

Decided to blog about my boatbuilding

2008-12-13T21:16:00.000-08:00

I'm taking the Saturday boatbuilding class at the Arques school, if you are interested you can read my blog posts about it at aqua hill

Mercurial

2008-08-02T19:06:00.000-07:00

Fantastic!

Python.

Interesting reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revision_control_software

Praise 4 Silverlight - step I. surreptitious dependency injection

2008-06-11T08:10:00.001-07:00

RIA Rich Internet Application Wars

2008-06-10T12:23:00.001-07:00

browser wars continue, interesting no mention of Silverlight, but pretty down on MS

Silverlight 2 adoption?

2008-06-10T11:10:00.001-07:00

Mmmmm, shall i use silverlight ALONE for some new usage reporting at SmartOrg. According to Gartner

Most enterprise developers still lack the best-practice know-how and process methodology to deliver an effective user experience, regardless of technology. Therefore, Silverlight alone will not do much to improve the usability of corporate applications.

but!!

Gartner expects Microsoft-centric organizations to take up Silverlight quickly.

That is good coz that is what SmartOrg is doing ...

read the report

rose mathematics

2008-06-07T17:19:00.001-07:00

Interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_(mathematics)

E15 - Multi grid layouts at MIT

2008-06-06T19:18:00.001-07:00

http://e15.media.mit.edu/blog/ vary interesting link from Will

OneNote Powershell provider

2008-05-06T18:42:00.000-07:00

Doug was right!

Here is a time saver:

OneNote Powershell provider

... off to the beach with the dog ...

Spreading the knowledge of Innovators - MakerFaire 2008

2008-05-04T10:42:00.001-07:00

Rode the Dakar down yesterday, was a fun event, would have take a friend, but it was interesting, met some cool guys in the Maker SHED who jailbroke my iPhone ( fun for a few hours, but caused all sorts of issues in iTunes so had to forgo the cool skins and apps, to work with Apple Proprietary for now :( ) I posted some pics up on Flikr for now, but will scan in the black and whites and other highlights, i consumed, like sushi knitting kits, robots that follow lights and a Make magazine on how to build blimps see FLIKR photos here Fun!!! It's not bm ethos tho, very commercial, and barriers and def no serious mind altering stuff

Maker Faire

2008-04-27T10:54:00.001-07:00

It's next weekend,

and promises to be fun!

Maker Faire

O'Reilly folk :)

TheBrain.com

2008-04-22T09:01:00.000-07:00

Marina Del Rey startup, offers up a thought mapping tool ($249 for Pro version, free trial ) "PersonalBrain is to your brain what OneNote is to a notepad. "

It is client side tho, but has import export features, looks like Java, pretty slick interfa feature. Its nice how one can import a folder hierarchy and then one can browse the files, and then manage and annotate them too!

"... Imagine having the freedom to organize information the way you think. ..."
PersonalBrain helps you organize all your Web pages, contacts, documents, emails and files in one place so that you can always find them - just like you think of them. This saves you time and makes your life easier! With PersonalBrain you can even find related items that you worked on, but forgot existed.

Skull Trail

2008-04-22T06:06:00.000-07:00

Intel's Skull Trail vs G5 mac?

looking for some new iron, my dual core intel is just not cutting it anymore, what with all the virtualization machines that we run to make our geeky lives better

Why I use Microsoft OneNote

2008-04-18T19:34:00.001-07:00

pros:

quick way to do screen grabs ( windows + S key )
great way to mashup information

good way to collect thoughts and organize stuff in hierarchical folders and sections

automation ( hopefully have a powershell solution soon that will export oneNote to agentstory!

cons:
sharing unintuitive and requires firewall setting adjustments
268Mb download footprint

http://blogs.msdn.com/dolange/

Feltron Eight

2008-04-18T17:50:00.001-07:00

Interesting view on detailed lifelogging, from Gordon Bell

Feltron Eight

iPhone revolution

2008-04-10T08:46:00.001-07:00

You got to love this device:

85 percent of iPhone users browse the mobile Web; iPhone is top device for news and information accessed on mobile browser

read article ...

iPhone watch out Nokia Urbanistas are coming

2008-04-08T05:13:00.001-07:00

Nokia has created a very cool tablet phone, that has an Opensource Android/Linux OS, 4G, WiFi and GPS enabled

Cool promo campaign, see the Urbanistadiaries story telling project

Net Poetics: layeringFollow by Jason Nelson

2008-04-07T09:40:00.001-07:00

layeringFollow is another interesting text AND image overlay tool, uses flash, hmm wonder if this can be done in DHTML? text rotation? Silverlight?

Net Poetics: Layeringfollow by Jason Nelson

TextArc - Alice in Wonderland

2008-04-06T16:18:00.001-07:00

Brad Paley's TextArc tool as applied to alice in wonderland.

This was one of many neat data visualizations at a fantastic and futurist MOMA exhibit - The Elastic Mind

"... Visualization design uses clarity end elegance as analysis tools. Brad Paley is one of the foremost experts In theconirmunicatlon of great amounts or data, and hisrenowned tool TextArc Is used to conduct structuralistanalyses of text. Every line of text from a book (in thiscase, Alice in wonderland) is plotted in a circle. TextArc'sfunction Is to provide an analysis of the text unencumbered by its interpretation. As Paley explains. It is a tool designed to help people discover patterns andconcepts In any text by leveraging a powerful, underusedresource: human visual processing. TextArc 1's intoour pre-attentive ability to scan for bnghter (here, morefrequent) words, compare them, and let the eye read those words. The eye and mind scan for Ideas. thenfollow the Ideas down to where and how they appear Inthe text... " From Moma Flash explanation via MS OneNote image to text translator.

Hosting PowerShell in ASP.NET

2008-04-05T10:14:00.001-07:00

Hmmm, getting closer here - calls from an ASPX page.

I want a good pipeline from C# to PoSh

that way Doug's example will provide a nice degree of abstration and dynamism to this prime example of parsing a csv file and loading it into objects via the PSObject::Add-Member

Get-Content people.txt
ForEach {
$f, $l, $a = $_.split()
New-Object PSObject
Add-Member -Pass NoteProperty FirstName $f
Add-Member -Pass NoteProperty LastName $l
Add-Member -Pass NoteProperty Age ([int]$a)
} Where {$_.Lastname -eq "Finke"}

IIS.net : Learn IIS7: Writing PowerShell Commandlets for IIS 7.0: Using Scripts to Automate Management: Managing and Maintaining IIS 7.0

2008-04-05T09:33:00.001-07:00

The IIS team plans to add full scale support of PowerShell into IIS 7.0.

This includes implementing a navigation provider, a property provider and all the other pieces of functionality required to work with all aspects of administration

read here for more details

agentsnapboard - Google Code

2008-03-07T06:30:00.001-08:00

decided to Open Source the Story software ...

agentsnapboard - Google Code

makerfaire.com: Maker Faire

2008-02-21T04:24:00.001-08:00

looks very cool, heard about this the other night down at Cafe Devino, from Louise who works for O'reilly, Sausalito it turns out is a haven for interesting people, definately interesting event to check out

makerfaire.com: Maker Faire

Google ventures into health records biz - CNN.com

2008-02-21T04:21:00.001-08:00

interesting, so not only Microsoft's HealthValut and AOL's Revolution Health will take health records and store them for us online. Of course this raises valid privacy concerns. will it maybe improve our lives?

Google ventures into health records biz - CNN.com

( April 2nd: Doug emails: http://www.medicalert.org/home/Homegradient.aspx Microsoft, Biztalk partner with Amber Point for SOA governance )

more coolness from Google

2008-02-06T01:30:00.001-08:00

Doug found Trendalzyer http://www.gapminder.org/world/

Official Google Blog: A world in motion

Mr DuBois my woodwork teacher showed me sketchup

http://sketchup.google.com/

sugar gliders

2008-02-04T21:09:00.001-08:00

animal	flight?
bat	yes
squirrel	yes
parrot	yes
dog	no
cat	no
rabbit	no
man	no

sugar glider

squirrel

capable of flight?

Windows Live Writer

2008-02-04T20:47:00.001-08:00

nice tool from Microsoft - and it's free! Thanks Doug for the suggestion to use this!

recording recording recording ...

Recommendations from Doug - JAN 2008

2008-01-17T06:38:00.000-08:00

books:
* Programming Collective Intelligence - Python approach
* ChaChing - Gitomer - NCR story about the importance of 'the receipt'
* SmartWorld - Apollo 13 story about slide rules and in space reprogramming feats

blogs:
*
Hansel Minutes
- cool tools & utils listed here and info about F#

source control dashboards debut
* Fisheye

eg:
CastleProject

Neo1973 vs iPhone

2008-01-15T11:24:00.000-08:00

alternative to my 'closed' OS X iPhone

has the following specs:

WiFi: 802.11 b/g
Graphics: SMedia Glamo3362 Graphics Accelerator 2 3D Accelerometers
RAM: 256MB Flash
Battery: 1700mAh Battery
CPU: S3C2442 at 400MHz
Samsung S3C2442 SoC

GPS: u-blox/Atmel ATR0635
OS: OpenMoko ( Linux ) - presumably android / 'GPhone'
JVM built in. Flash?
Webtoolkit - browser?
Camera: None
Input: USB

vs my iPhone specs:

WiFi 802.11 b/g
Edge Network ( high speed? )
BlueTooth
Camera: 2.0 megapixels
8 Gb flash drive
3.5" touch screen 480x320 163 dpi
OS: Apple OS X
GPS: None
Input: Apple Dock cable.
JVM and Flash support: none currently

Hypertargeting

2008-01-14T10:58:00.000-08:00

Behavioural Targeting Space
through social networks, finely targeted ads will seem possible

Tacoda ( AOL marketing )
BlueLithium ( Yahoo paid 300 million )

article

hmmm wonder if Mesh could have targeted LonelyGirl15 fans ? They did some placement ads but really did not work with the fan base ( of course it was an art project, not a commercial venture, so maybe that is why it was (is) so great1

Hadoop vs MapReduce

2008-01-11T14:14:00.000-08:00

open source vs Googles distributed cloud architecture

interesting article here

Going to the big apple!!

2008-01-11T13:30:00.000-08:00

besides all the cool nyc stuff, the witney, the odeon, the stock exchange, I'll be working on new media aspects and leads:

OgilvyOne Media Summit: March 12-13

iPhone Developer conference: March 19-20

data portability

2008-01-11T13:17:00.001-08:00

Very interesting:

data portability standard
adopted by Google, Facebook, FLIKR, LinkedIn, Plaxo

AgentIdea Consultancy

2008-01-10T08:10:00.001-08:00

it's official! AgentIdea has filed for LLC status and will be focusing on consulting services. Very exciting!

New Languages?

2007-12-28T05:31:00.000-08:00

think it has to be F# and Japanese this year!
Tho i'd also like to write to the iPhone - ugh Objective C ... and Latvian

PowerShell and Silverlight are hot too I hear from Douglas Finke
http://dougfinke.com/blog/

New ventures

2007-12-28T05:25:00.000-08:00

So now that I've resigned people are asking me what I will do next ... software consulting , open a new physiotherapy practice for weekends ( need to certify for CA - painful! ) and keep AgentIdea moving along with new Social Media systems

Posting again, the Semantic Web

2007-12-14T16:29:00.000-08:00

Inspired by a talk at the SDForum SIG in San Francisco. Twine from Radar Networks was very interesting and a lot of synergies with the AI framework we have.

Yahoo showed ZoneTag and Zurfer. ZoneTag allows one to geomap and organize photographs, and display them say by 'makes me sad' or 'dad' Zurfer is the mobile interface, very neat.