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May 30, 2003
Q&A: SCO's Chris Sontag on Linux, Unix and brewing legal fights
This is kind of getting scary. Obviously SCO are very serious about their claims, althouhg they have yet to present evidence.
"In two weeks, The SCO Group Inc. intends to begin showing analysts where the Unix code it owns has been illegally copied into the Linux kernel. The source code will be made available to parties who agree not to disclose the Unix source code, but they will be able to share publicly their assessments of SCO's claim. SCO has filed a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM alleging misappropriation of trade secrets and other claims and has warned some 1,500 businesses that they may be using Linux at their legal peril."
Q&A: SCO's Chris Sontag on Linux, Unix and brewing legal fights - Computerworld
May 28, 2003
HBR: IT Doesn't Matter
An article about IT and how it should be seen as a commodity (gas, electricity, railroads) has stirred the IT professional community. Fortune calls the author's views stupid and dangerous.
Buy the report or read an excerpt:
A response has been made in Fortune:
"There's nothing like a punchy headline (see above, for instance) to get an article some attention. A recent long piece in the Harvard Business Review shockingly labeled "IT Doesn't Matter" has garnered the magazine more buzz than at any time since the Jack Welch affair. The article has been approvingly cited in the New York Times, analyzed in Wall Street reports, and e-mailed around the world. But without such a dramatic and reckless title I doubt the article would have been much noticed. It's a sloppy mix of ersatz history, conventional wisdom, moderate insight, and unsupportable assertion. And it is dangerously wrong."
May 26, 2003
CMSWatch: Migrating Legacy Content
This article about migrating content from an old site to a new one where a pretty CMS is implemented to get rid of the problems with the old site can be readworthy... Practical tips and advice.
"I’m here to tell you two simple things: first, when it comes to content management, I strongly believe that it is almost always better to start fresh, to wipe the slate clean, to (and here is the real blasphemy) completely avoid legacy integration. However, in an imperfect world, integrating legacy content is sometimes a must.
So I’m going to spend the bulk of this article on a second, simple point: there are actually good reasons to attempt to integrate legacy content, and good methods that can be employed in service of a very difficult task."
Building a Metadata-Based Website
An article about meta-data absed websites and a "traditional CMS". Must read this later.
"The intent of using a centralized metadata repository as the basis of navigation for a website is to separate business concepts from the content or functionality about those concepts."
Laptops $450 a pop by HP
Now we are talking. Really cheap laptops, cheap WiFi, hotspots popping up in various places (go DefaultCity!)... Online tribes of kids will be forming.
InfoWorld: HP Thailand launches Linux laptop for $450: May 23, 2003: By : End-user Hardware
Shirky: Customer-owned Networks and ZapMail
I have read this before. It is worth reading again. What happens when the necessary hard- and software for building networks and accessing services are cheap and understandable to all and everyone? Customer-owned networks.
"To understand what's going to happen to the telephone companies this year thanks to WiFi (otherwise known as 802.11b) and Voice over IP (VoIP) you only need to know one story: ZapMail. The story goes like this. In 1984, flush from the success of their overnight delivery business, Federal Express announced a new service called ZapMail, which guaranteed document delivery in 2 hours. They built this service not by replacing their planes with rockets, but with fax machines."
Wired 10.10: Unplugged U
What happens when we are covered with radio all the time? When we can be constantly online at no extra cost?
Several of my acquaintances in Sweden are starting to shut off cell phones, disconnect computers and redirect landlines after office hours. Even during office hours to get more amount of time to think and do focused work (should read: "Tio tankar om tid").
"Remote bell-tower hacking is just one of the ways the wireless network is changing life at Dartmouth. The network is subtly but profoundly altering teaching techniques, social interaction, study habits, and personal security. In spite of its remoteness, the college has long been one of the most wired places on earth, fashioning its campus into the prototype of the fully wireless, always-connected community: a microcosm that provides a peek at what our residential neighborhoods and office spaces may look like in a few years."
Hush Technologies ultra slim PC
Got to have one of these and a flat screen.
Add wi-fi and a fat server in the closet with huge pipe to the Internet and we are rocking.
Hush Technologies: bespoke manufacturer of precision engineered PCs
May 22, 2003
Discover: S B Johnson on text pattern analysis
Found this linked from his blog. Text pattern analysis to grade essays? Come on. ;)
"The idea of a computer doing more sophisticated evaluations than tallying up multiple-choice answers has alarmed parents and teachers. If computers still can't figure out that those penis enlargement e-mails in their inboxes are spam, how can they possibly assess the merits of a book report on The Sun Also Rises? As it turns out, the process of training a machine to grade essays is similar to the process of training human graders. "
BBC: Water flowinf uphill
As in a painting by Escher, this fountain defies logic. Water actually flows upphill!
"Mr Dyson says his inspiration was a drawing by the Dutch artist MC Escher (he of Gothic palaces where soldiers are eternally walking upstairs, and of patterns where birds turn into fish)."
May 20, 2003
Perl.com: POOL, article by Simon Cozens
An article by Simon Cozens who wrote "Beginning Perl" which I just read. This is about making it easier to create Perl modules.
"In this article, we're going to look at POOL, a handy "little language" I recently created for templating object-oriented modules. Now you may not write many object-oriented modules, so this may not sound too interesting to you. Don't worry; I also plan to discuss, among other things, Ruby, how to use the Template Toolkit, profiling, computational linguistic trie structures, Ruby again, and the oil paintings of the Great Masters. Hopefully, something in here will be enough to keep your interest."
Sounds interesting enough to read this weekend. ;)
Fast Pot Nation? Eric Schlosser follow up
Eric Schlosser wrote the well known "Fast Food Nation", which I haven't read. ;) Now he publishes the follow up: "Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market". Time to read both of them I think. See Salon review.
"How come porn is legal but dealing pot can get you a life sentence? Because the free market is a myth, says author Eric Schlosser." Salon.com Technology | Notes from the underground
May 19, 2003
WIRED: Mind Share, Blog Space
By Steven Johnson: Public Storage For Wisdom, Ignorance, and Everything in Between. Interesting read.
"We've lived so long under the notion of the Web as a space of connected documents, it seems almost unthinkable that it could be organized any other way. But it could just as easily be assembled around a different axis: not pages but minds. "
Microsoft licenses UNIX code from SCO
Scary stuff. MS licenses UNIX code from SCO who are currently in a lawsuit with IBM over IP rights concerning use of SCO code in Linux.
What does this mean? What will MS do with its license? Help SCO fight for the IP claims SCO makes on Linux?
"Microsoft will license the rights to Unix technology from SCO Group, a move that could impact the battle between Windows and Linux in the market for computer operating systems."
CGI::Kwiki
Maybe this new Perl module is what I want for Wiki purposes. I found TWiki too troublesome and bloated, perhaps this is more interesting for small purposes.
"This article is about a new Perl module called CGI::Kwiki. With this module you can create a Wiki Web site in less than a minute. Now that's quick. Or more appropriately, 'That's Kwik!'"
Advogato: Getting Projects To Work Together
"Last year we wrote a piece here questioning whether open source projects were motivated to work with each other. This article was in the context of our work with OSCOM and its attempts to bring together open source content management projects and developers."
"The article stimulated some interesting questions. Now that we've had some time to take some steps and try some ideas, we thought it appropriate to report back."
Company blogging a way to build dialogs?
Bloomba, developers of a new email tool, run a company blog on their site. Worth checking out: How many companies run blogs where their staff posts articles and entries?
How does this relate to building relations and dialogs with clients? Cluetrain Manifesto must be somewhere in the background... ;)
SAproxy.bloomba.com
More spam software. Recently sent my K9 praise to a mailing list, and tips on related software started showing up. Here is another Spam Assassin proxy to take a look at.
"Powerful: Using SpamAssassinTM, SAproxy has the leading spam protection behind it. Using an exhaustive series of heuristic tests on the headers and body of an email, SAproxy is able to recognize most of the spam sent to you.
Integrated with Bloomba: SAproxy works with any Windows email client, but is tightly integrated with Bloomba, the next-generation email client for ‘power-emailers’ "
Spam Assassin PHP POP3 Proxy
I recently started using K9 (works great, check it out at keir.net/k9.html) for slicing and dicing spam instead of SpamNet (CloudMark). Here is another solution worth checking out, based on SpamAssassin.
"If you hate spam and are looking for a Free reliable way to tag it as it comes into your mailbox - then try this pop3 proxy written in PHP it has been especially written to work with the world trusted spam testing PERL software Spam Assassin. You will then easily be able to set a mail client rule that deletes or quarantines spam. " jvmultimedia: Spam Assassin PHP POP3 Proxy
Joi Ito: Our Investment process
Joi Ito has written a piece on thoughts around their investment process. Interesting perspectives from someone with a more entrepreneurial background?
"I thought it might be useful to describe the venture investing process in the context of the recent discussion about transparency. Firms have their own processes and some of the details may vary, but generally speaking, most VC's probably have a similar process. Also, I've only been doing this for three years. I've been an entrepreneur for about 10. I've learned a lot over the last three years and think I've become much better at venture investing, but still have a lot to learn..."
