Roland's blog

Very cool. In the future you will be able to blog from every app that you use whether it's your development environment (like Visual Studio or Eclispe) or your Wordprocessor or your spreadsheet or...

From Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger:

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Robert McLaws is working on Visual Blogger 2004. This is going to be an awesome way to edit a weblog. McLaws was telling me about the Visual Studio integration. Here's how it'll work. Highlight a few lines of code in Visual Studio that you want to blog about and right click. Choose "blog this" and Visual Blogger 2004 will open up, with the lines of code already in the editor, and will let you publish those lines of code to your blog with comments.

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Cool, now all we need to do is to make this an iPhoto plugin and automate the grungy manual labour required. Lazyweb ?
From AIRTIGHT - SimpleViewer Download:

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SimpleViewer is a free, customizable Flash image viewing application.

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This looks to be the most comprehensive coverage out there. Thanks!

From Liloia.com: Blogging BloggerCon:

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I'll try not to use the word "blog" too frequently, but we all know it's going to be every other word.

Here's the deal:
INSOMNIA + CONFERENCE = AN INDEX OF POSTS ABOUT BLOGGERCON

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Ernie nails it. Need more examples like this for other domains.

From Ernie The Attorney: Get your legal news quickly & easily with a news reader:

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Have you heard the term XML and RSS but not known what people are talking about? Have you heard of 'News Readers' or 'News Aggregators' but not really understood why people were so excited about them? Well, rather than just point you to an article on the topic, I'm going to show you how you can discover the power of News Readers for yourself.

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I do this with my Canon S400 digital camera all the time and once I get a camera phone (July for my birthday hopefully ), I definitely will do it with my camera phone.

From Reiter's Camera Phone Report: Detroit Free Press computer columnist discusses camera phone apps, moblogs:

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One of the executives showed me his camera phone photos of computer printers. He was in the market for a new printer and took photos of printers -- with the price displayed -- as a way to jog his memory.

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Prompted by a comment from Richard on my last post, I revisited his digital photography sharing and printing guide and come to think of it, I was wrong, I couldn't find anything in his guide specifically that's out of date with respect to Panther! My apologies to Richard! The only thing you might want to add is a mention of EasyBatchPhoto for Mac OS X which does lossless JPEG rotation.

A wee bit out of date (not updated for Panther for instance) but useful nonetheless.

From Digital Photography, Sharing, and Printing via Darren Barefoot:

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This site gathers together all the knowledge I have accumulated about digital photography. I see the same questions showing up in discussions again and again (the FAQ phenomenon) so I have created this page to provide a useful reference point, particularly for Canadians.

Keep in mind that when I started writing this, 3 Megapixels and 256 Megabytes of storage was state-of-the-art.

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Hmmm. Google remains a company to watch and monitor.

From EDventure :: Google locle:

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But second, consider Google’s AdWords system a subtle mechanism for metadata collection. Right now, you can specify geographic targeting. Someday soon, perhaps, you’ll be able to specify targeting by opening hours, or by language spoken, or by other criteria. For now, that information is used only for targeting rather than displayed…

But just as Google is implicitly  if transparently planning to collect huge amounts of e-mail, it’s also beginning to collect metadata about businesses. And it has the market pprsence to make such a collection interesting. For now, the information provided by AdWords advertisers is an interesting database; someday, perhaps it could support a variety of open APIs. (Take a look at SMB meta, courtesy of Dan Bricklin.)

The best analogy, perhaps, is to Wal-Mart’s efforts to get its suppliers to use RF-ID, faltering though they may be. In the long run, suppliers will adopt Wal-Mart’s standards, and other large customers will likely start to use those standards too. Here are some scenarios: Currently, most “commerce” searches are for products and the establishments that sell them. But unless you’re ordering online, those two searches are generally separate. There are few listings for what’s on sale at an individual store. But soon, it could make sense for a store to make limited access to its inventories available online, so that people could know exactly where to buy things.

And, of course, Google could sell anonymous data about those queries to merchants who wanted to stay in stock or pre-order based on what looks hot, or to manufacturers, fashion mavens and so on.  .

While right now Google is collecting information through AdWords for targeting, there’s no reason it couldn’t start using advertiser-entered data for display as well, as it already does with data feeds in Froogle. Some companies may start sending these new kinds of feeds expressly, while others might fill out a slightly more complex , domain-specific form when they advertise. Then hotels could start to compete on the basis of their swimming pool hours.

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Downloading music and TV programs 'illegally' is very similar to the illegal drug scene of the 60s. Everybody does it but nobody admits it. Yes, I have had a brief flirtation with downloading music and video, but as I have stated many times before on this blog, I no longer download 'illegal' music or video. In fact I don't even bother to buy CDs or DVDs except directly from artists at their gigs. After reading about how badly artists are treated and buying over 600 CDs in my life, I really don't miss it!

Life is too short to worry about the fat-cat and self serving MPAA and RIAA. And there is plenty of other stuff to do (like raise my beautiful son, eat great food and take advantage of legal downloads)!

From Jeffrey Veen: How I stopped buying CDs and started loving music:

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So is this bad? Am I hurting the artists by "stealing" their music? I was talking to Jenny Conlee, accordion player for the Decemberists, at their last San Francisco show about this. She said she would much prefer to sell stuff at the gigs, rather than through stores -- though it doesn't scale as well. She told me that if you bought their album at the mall, they might see about $.80. Amazon nets them just over a buck. But at the gigs, where they sell CDs for just $10, the band keeps half. Not to mention the percentage of the door take.

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(Via email from Brian Fisher) - Very cool! Need more innovation like this!

From MacWarriors TrailBlazer:

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TrailBlazer solves the problem of getting back to a web page you've been to before, but didn't have the forethought to bookmark. The current solutions provided by most web browsers, their history menu, is just a list of titles and web addresses which aren't memorable enough to be useful.

The actual solution used by most people, is to retrace their own steps through different links until they find they page they are looking for. Our software solution provides the user with a graphical representation of the steps they took from page to page, such that they can simply click to their final destination page.

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Very cool hack!
From XML.com: An Atom-Powered Wiki:

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Using Python and the XPath facilities of libxml2, it was straightforward to build an AtomAPI implementation for a wiki. There isn't even very much code: atom.cgi is just 146 lines of code, while atomfeed.cgi is just 122 lines.

This is just a basic client that does the minimum to support the AtomAPI. In a future article the way the server handles HTTP can be enhanced to provide significant performance boosts by using the full capabilities of HTTP. In addition, the SOAP enabling of the server will require some changes. After that we can add the ability to edit the wiki's templates.

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Is A9's toolbar diary feature a stealth blogging system or merely a del.icio.us killer?

From A9.com > Company > What's New & Cool:

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Web Search: Search the web and Amazon.com's Search Inside the Book™ results. You can also do searches on Amazon.com, the Internet Movie Database, Google, and look up words in a dictionary and thesaurus.

Search Highlighter: The toolbar will automatically highlight your search terms in a light yellow. By using the highlighter menu, you can see how many times your search terms appear on the page, and jump to each occurrence of a specific word. Hint: You don't have to do a search to use the highlighter. Just type one or more words in the search box and click the highlight button.

Your History: Keep track of your last sites visited (on any computer) and your most recent searches. It will keep track of the Web pages you recently visited--even if you switch computers.

Diary: This is the newest and (we think) coolest feature of the toolbar. You can take notes on any web page, and reference them whenever you visit that page, on any computer that you use. Your entries are automatically saved whenever you stop typing or when you go to another page.

Site Info: See information about the website you are visiting, including related links, site statistics (including traffic rank), sites linking to this site, and user ranking. Select from the menu to go to the site's page on Amazon.com where you can get more information and write a review about the site.

Pop-up Blocker: Stop those annoying pop-up ads.

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I appear to have caught a cold and will try to get some sleep today instead of working. Hopefully things will be back to normal tomorrow!

Very cool. The following link is to try to establish a conversation thread around a topic using a common URN:http://psi.pubsub.com/20040413:linkranks:1
From PubSub: About Link Ranks:

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Link ranks are our way of measuring the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in weblogs. When PubSub reads a new weblog entry, we pull out any URIs we find and attach them to the entry in a separate field. This allows our users to include domain names or linked file types when creating subscriptions.

From this set of URIs, it's easy to find the most popular domains. Link ranks take one more step and calculate scores for each linking site; domains are then scored based on the values of the sites that link to them. The theory is basically that these are the links you're most likely to click on, if you read a weblog at random.

Unlike Google's PageRank system, link ranks are not iterative. Rather, we base link ranks on a simple formula that only looks at local links - links which are within one or two steps of any target site. Also, it's important to note that we only look at links which are in weblog entries - we don't read any of the other links on the page, like the side bars or blogrolls.

The intent of this system is not to measure the strength of any particular domain, but rather the relative likelihood that you'd find and follow a link to that domain. As such, the links are what's really important, not the pages themselves.

To calculate link ranks, we generate a link score for each domain. Link scores are calculated in three steps: first, we find a point value for every site that links to other sites. Second, we use the point values to generate link scores for each domain. Finally, we weight the daily scores over a fixed period to arrive at an aggregate score for the site - this ensures that more recent links are given more value than links from several days ago.

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The outage was caused by a dodgy ethernet cable!

This makes perfect sense to me. I say go for it Google! Can a Google hegemony be any worse than the current Microsoft one?

FromGooOS, the Google Operating System (kottke.org):

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Google isn't worried about Yahoo! or Microsoft's search efforts...although the media's focus on that is probably to their advantage. Their real target is Windows. Who needs Windows when anyone can have free unlimited access to the world's fastest computer running the smartest operating system? Mobile devices don't need big, bloated OSes...they'll be perfect platforms for accessing the GooOS. Using Gnome and Linux as a starting point, Google should design an OS for desktop computers that's modified to use the GooOS and sell it right alongside Windows ($200) at CompUSA for $10/apiece (available free online of course). Google Office (Goffice?) will be built in, with all your data stored locally, backed up remotely, and available to whomever it needs to be (SubEthaEdit-style collaboration on Word/Excel/PowerPoint-esque documents is only the beginning). Email, shopping, games, music, news, personal publishing, etc.; all the stuff that people use their computers for, it's all there.

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homogenized smegma that the RIAA pawns off on the public as music has got to be phrase of the week! Go Terry!

Yet another reason not to buy music from the music business whether it's through RIAA sanctioned downloads or through CD shops. I say don't bother! Buy it direct from the artist!

From Terry Heaton's Pomo blog:

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All five of the major music companies are discussing ways to boost the price of single-song downloads on hot releases -- to anywhere from $1.25 to as much as $2.49.
This has rankled even Jupiter Research's David Card, normally a defender of the recording industry. "Enough is enough," Card says on his Weblog. "This is plain dumb."

It's both dumb and predictable, and it will further the split between the RIAA and its customers. Ironically, the Wall St. Journal article comes one day after another study was released that undercuts the RIAA's central theme — that file-sharing (illegal) downloads have cut CD sales by 10%. An AFP report on the study says it just ain't so.

"Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates," authors Felix Oberholtzer of the Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill wrote Tuesday.

Oberholtzer and Strumpf added that their conclusions "are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales."

The real issue is the homogenized smegma that the RIAA pawns off on the public as music. I follow this on-going story closely, because it's a classic example of Postmodern economics. Disruptive innovations have undercut the foundation of the recording industry's Modernist institution. While it may take years to fully play out, every day it fights the inevitable, the RIAA loses ground in the bottom-up world wherein Pomos live. The whole thing is a pathetic illustration of "what goes around, comes around," and corporate greed — thankfully — will be the ultimate loser.

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Excellent. Go Skype go! Next we need Linux, Mac OS X and Palm devices! VoIP Now Available on Pocket PCs For Free:

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Thanks to a beta release of their Windows Mobile software, Skype Technologies is letting PPC users place phone calls using voice over IP (VoIP) for free. The only requirements are a Windows Mobile 2003 device with a 400MHz processor and headset, along with an internet connection and friends who also have the application installed. The PDA version of this software, PocketSkype, is based on the desktop version Skype Technologies has been distributing for some time. Users of the desktop version can even use their same account information to use PocketSkype, although contact lists have to be manually added.

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Again, Laszlo was there first! But this is cool nonetheless.

From Dylan Greene dot com - Blog Reader done in Flex:

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Thanks to Foo for find this simple Blog Reader created using Flex.

Flex is Macromedia's XML-based UI API, which I talk more about here.

This is the first almost-real-world Flex example I've seen. I've played with XAML a small bit, but haven't seen any real-world examples like this.

What I want to see now: A MXML (Flex) to XAML (Avalon) translator done in XSL.

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Look ma, no procedural code! Laszlo was there first but it's good to have competition in this area.

From joemarini.com .::. Tutorials:

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The next version of the Microsoft Windows® operating system, code named "Longhorn", contains an exciting new technology called XAML, which is an acronym for the "eXtensible Application Markup Language". XAML (pronounced zam-el) allows you to specify the user interface portion of your Windows® applications using markup to represent the usual items in an application, such as controls, text, hyperlinks, images, etc. XAML itself is built on top of a technology named Avalon, which brings a compositing, vector-based rendering engine to the Windows desktop.

The implications of this are pretty profound. This type of approach makes it much easier to separate the business logic of an application from the user interface right from the beginning. It also provides a much more modular method for building applications, allowing, for example, a designer to work on the UI portion of an application while a developer creates the back-end code. That is, of course, assuming that the application even has any back-end code — there's a lot you can do in pure XAML without having to write any logic in a code-behind file. You can connect to data sources such as Web Services and XML feeds, tie UI elements directly to the data, and have them respond automatically to changes in the data and the selected element in a control.

In this example, I'm going to build a XAML-based blog reader that does exactly that, with no coding required other than the markup to create the user interface. MSDN subscribers who have Longhorn installed on their machines can download the code for this article and try it out. Here's what the application, which I've named Bloghorn, looks like when it is running under Longhorn:

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