Posts
-
Content Management System Issues
There’s an article at the Sydney Morning Herald explaining some of the issues with current content mangement systems. It caught my attention cause I’ve seen much the same thing. I’ve actually been working with a guy who implements websites as part of his consulting gigs, and we’ve been trying to come up with a simple system for managing sites. Most systems are either very complex or very simple, and just haven’t been fulfilling his needs. He wanted to have a system that he could use to create the site, and that he could partially deploy to the client. He wanted to have the option of allowing his clients to update their own sites. So we’ve been working on a system around that, something to do some simple site management and templating. Everything is done through a browser, against PHP scripts on the server. This means we can’t have nice integrated WYSIWYG HTML editing, but for his purposes that should be OK for now. And maybe by the time we get to the point where that may be an issue someone will have come up with a decent way to do that in the browser.
-
Lessig Response to SCO Letter
This entry in the lessig blog presents an analysis of the open letter from Darl McBride, CEO of SCO. SCO has been slogging it’s way through an inane lawsuit claiming that Linux is based off stolen code that SCO owns the rights to. Like most news, it’s kinda funny, mostly sad, and best taken in small doses. Lessig does a great job of making those small doses easy to swallow.
-
Intellectual Property and Open Source
This article at the Christian Science Monitor provides an excellent summary of the open source movement and potential ramifications with regard to intellectual property rights. I think the article does a great job of calling out the underlying issues, such as:
-
Zoomable User Interface
There’s an article over at TheFeature about zoomable user interfaces, or ZUI for short. Some of the concepts given there are interesting, such as the calendar view that leaves the context of the month view around the edges of the screen when zoomed in to day view. Some of the others it’s kinda hard to see how they’re much different than hierarchal organization. In particular, the image view app seems to be nothing more than thumbnailing. I can see the benefit of maintaining visual context when navigating. But it really is a tricky human mind issue that creates a significant difference between disjoint screens and the ZUI. There could be some great applications for the technology, on PDAs as well as cell phones.
-
Cell Phone Spycam
There’s a post at picturephoning about a Symbian app that allows for remote commands to request an image from the handset. One possible app is finding your phone if you’re lost, but there are lots of others. The page for the app mentions using it to check the weather at a weekend cottage or checking up on the kids. Most people can’t imagine leaving their cell somewhere just so they can get pictures from it. Not yet at least. But Nokia has actually been looking in this direction for a while, and has out a product specifically aimed at these kinds of apps. It’s still a very pricey product unless you have some special needs. But these kinds of things have a way of coming down over time. And I could see many parents easily forking over a few hundred plus the price of an extra SIM attached to their account in order to have a video baby monitor they can access from anywhere.
-
Printing Camphone Pictures
There’s a post at picturephoning.com about the Kodak kiosks in CVS stores offering printing from cell phone images. I’m not sure about market numbers, and I have no clue about the actual implementation of the system, but taken in the abstract I think this sounds like a great idea. Everyone has clearly accepted digital photography, but there is a possible issue with getting good hardcopy. Not everyone has a high quality printer, but sometimes you do want to send a print to grandma for xmas. Nice position.
-
Sensor Networks Article
There’s an article in Wired about Intel’s play to get wireless sensors shrunk down over coming years. I’ve been working with some people looking to make products using existing sensor networks technologies. I’ve gone to a couple of sensor network specific workshops and forums in the area, including the Hitachi/Stanford Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks. It’s very interesting technology, and I can definitely see where systems of this sort would have great applications. But the hardware that’s available now for sensor networks is pretty expensive still. The systems aren’t that small. They do provide wireless networking capability, which is definitely a differentiator in a device of that size and cost. Even the researchers seem to think that the technology is still in the formative stage. It’s definite that the mesh networking still needs to be worked through to a great degree. But even leaving that aside I have some concerns.
-
Opte Internet Maps
There’s an article at NewScientist.com about a new network mapping project called Opte. I had heard about it before, but hadn’t seen any images yet. I’m really into mapping projects like this. They’re interesting both for the theory and implementation detail that goes into the mapping software, and because they make pretty pictures. I have the Peacock Maps up on the walls of my home office, and my coffee book table is the Atlas of Cyberspace.
-
Amazing Info About Text Messaging
There’s a release by TXT4info about the use of text messaging as a marketing tool. Apparently it great that the firm did the research, because no one was really sure if customers liked being charged a lot of money. And they were a bit sketchy on if the customers liked being spamed. From the report:
-
Palm Web Services
I recently went to listen to the VP of Product Marketing from PalmSource, Charlie Tritschler, speak at a SDForum Web Services Special Interest Group. The presentation itself was very informative. It sounded like Palm was really taking a great approach to Web Services. Charlie spoke about how PalmSource had a package available for writing SOAP clients for the Palm, and how they were planning to push support for web services down into the operating system in future versions. I think this stuff is a great idea, and have had some thoughts about making the palm more network-centric online for a while myself. So I have no problem at all marching to the beat of that drum, it matches up perfect with the pace I was keeping anyway. So I went to download the toolkit from Palm, and had to eat my enthusiasm.
subscribe via RSS