Posts
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New Value Sets for Blogging
There’s a post over at Jeremy Zawodny’s blog titled TrackBack and Corporate Secrets. It gives one example where traditionally convenient blogging features can be a pain for businesses. Blogs are moving into areas where the culture is significantly different than where they came from. Requirements of a business user can be radically different than those of the public blogger. Features which were convenient turn into security risks quite easily, as Jeremy points out. It can be painful, it can be dangerous, but that’s really what makes it interesting. I think blogs will play a big part in corporate infrastructure in the coming years. They fulfill the requirements of fluid communication in a way that no mix of technologies has been able to before. However, the reason they fulfill the requirements is because they grew up without many borders or limits, and that runs counter to the current corporate culture. So what happens when a new technology comes along that does a great job of solving a fundamental problem while also bringing along contradictory culture? I admit, I have no idea. But whatever it ends up being, I’m hoping it’s not “business as usual”.
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PalmHTTP 2.0
I’ve posted the 2.0 version of PalmHTTP on the Bitsplitter site, and reformated that page while I was at it. The interface to the library itself is now quite different, with covers for dealing with the URL struct, a POST struct and covers to deal with it, settings for the content type, and two example programs now. There’s still quite a bit to do, but the lib works for what I do, so the other stuff will probably just creep in over time. I’m accepting patches for it, of course. So shoot me an email if you have some.
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Starting up a Business
I ran across this article at seattlepi.com, and I was kind of surprized by the tone. Take this quote for example:
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Interview with Marc Andreessen
There’s an interview with Marc Andreessen over at SFGate.com, and it touches on lots of issues I figured would be near and dear to those still in the Bay Area. I share Marc’s sentiments on just about every issue. In particular the bursting of the bubble and the effect it’s had on the valley. I moved out here relatively recently. I already knew the bubble was burst before I made the move. I viewed it as a tremendous opportunity. There are all these high tech mavens out here, and lots of tech companies, and thousands of tallented programmers. But when you have that critical mass, once an area starts to draw people, it undergoes a process of swelling and restriction. The same thing happens at large companies.
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Palm Development Platforms
During a conversation on the OnBoardC list, someone posted a link to a page full of Palm Pilot development platforms. It seems like a great list, although some of the info is a bit dated. I’ve been working with OnBoardC some, but have started to try to get more familiar with LispMe so that I can use that instead. There are at least a half dozen implementations on that list that I’ve never heard of. Guess it’s time to do some more evaluation :-)
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Discussion of Open Source Communities
There’s an older post in Tim O’Reilly’s weblog regarding open source and the forming of community. The discussion is great, and I think very informative. I would make the further point that the openness of the projects doesn’t only encourage participation in the form of feeding back fixes and features into the tree, it allows for users and potential developers to “play”. They can experiment with new ideas, try out fixes and features, and learn about the system. Even if they never feed back these changes to the core of the project, the community can be strengthened because of it. If that programmer shares just their ideas or insights without any new code, the project as a whole still gains. A minor point, but since I’m going to be comparing open source culture to prototyping culture (as described by Michael Schrage in Serious Play) it’s pretty important.
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Articles by Michael Schrage
I’ve been reading Serious Play by Michael Schrage, and have found it extremely stimulating thus far. The book explores the basic “what role does the prototype play in innovation” type questions and the harder questions of how to manage a prototyping portfolio and how the various tradeoffs in prototyping can affect the shape of innovation as a whole. I wanted to read more, and I happened across this great site with links to lots of his articles. ManyWorlds seems like a great site in general, but I’ve only looked at the Schrage stuff so far. I would highly recommend checking out the articles, and picking up the book (I borrowed it from our local library actually) if you like what you see. The articles and the book are both insightful and thought provoking.
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Open Source Expo
For those of you in the Bay Area, there’s an Open Source Expo at the San Francisco Airport Marriott this Thursday (that’s Dec 11, 2003). It’s pretty cheap considering the speakers they have lined up. And I’m very happy to see that they have both technical and business tracks. I’m definitely interested in the business track, so that’s where I’ll probably be. Topics include “New Business Models” and “Marketing and Selling OSS Effectively”, two topics that sound great now that Bitsplitter is really starting to ramp up. Speakers from IBM, RedHat, MySQL, Sleepycat, HP, and elsewhere. Looks like it could be an excellent event.
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Maintenance Mode for Linux 2.4
There’s an article over at kerneltrap.org about the note that Marcelo sent to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Seeing as 2.6 is starting to get pretty stable, after the next point release 2.4 will go into maintenance mode. That really just means that 2.4 will only get fixed if there are major bugs, that it won’t be getting any new features. So for those of you who like to dabble in the bleeding edge it’s a good time to start fooling around with the 2.6 test releases.
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Image Recognition to Get URL into Cameraphones
There’s an interesting article over at Picturephoning about using 2D barcodes and image recognition to get URLs into cameraphones. I’ve heard of projects something like this before, but most were companies looking to use their patented technology to make hordes of cash. I’m very happy to see that the project page for Sem@code describes the technology, but without tying it directly to a company. Which makes me think that the tech savy among us can just print out images of these encoded URLs to try out. It does say that the recognition is proprietary, but that doesn’t keep others from making a different version of the recognition piece. I’m hoping that the technology itself is open, I think it would drastically change the adoption of the technique.
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