Start-up launches low-cost Linux PCs

CNET News.com: "

Comment: One guy in San-Diego must be hitting the roof right now, Robertson or Mr.PR wizard, why isn't Lindows mentionned anywhere in this article...weird..."

Work

Wow...Work is keeping me too busy to even take a look at the feeds these days. I feel out of the loop. My in-box is out of control. I'm back on the saddle with a contract, I haven't contracted in over 3 years, it feels weird. So I'm back with two jobs with all the draw backs and kewl challenges that come with it, for example two in-box, two networks, but one machine and stay on top of everything. I'm trying to keep my priorities straight, something has gotta give...so lately the blogging and research/technology exploring has given way to let's pay the bills man! See ya soon!

MSNBot

Anonymous Source on MSNBot

Comment: All right nothing new here, MS wants to kill another competitor. As far as I understand they're cockier than ever. Yeah we had one of our student develop a bot as a pet project and now we're going to take over Google!!!

On the longhorn front, wasn't this part of Bill Gates' speech 6 months back, when he was saying computers need better query capabilities because they're now for several of us our main source of information, books, articles, pictures, music....

Which brings me to another side effect of this PC being the databank of our lives, when do you think backup services for our personal digital memory are going to hit it big? and who is going to make it happen, MS, Insurance CO, banks? My bet is on MS, this will be a nice .Net service.

Smarttags introduction

Welcome to the MSDN Library

Comment: I know I know Smarttags are evil. I want to know more about them to see how they can be useful. I see the productivity gain when reading information, but I have difficulty understanding their usefulness at writing time, maybe this is not a solution for info producing but info consuming. In any case right now I just think it's awefully complicated for the benefits and productivity gains...

Google it...

Finally got around to get the html right now... google is hooked I can search my blog finally...this will increase my productivity by leaps and bounds.... Still a few things to get going but getting there...

Semantic Web: More links

The Semantic Web: 1-2-3

Comment: like it says 1-2-3, but with good links to more information.

The Semantic Web: An Introduction

Comment: Good piece to get an idea if what the semantic web is made of. More details than the SA article.

Scientific American: The Semantic Web

-- A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities

Extracts from the article: -- The challenge of the Semantic Web, therefore, is to provide a language that expresses both data and rules for reasoning about the data and that allows rules from any existing knowledge-representation system to be exported onto the Web.-- Two important technologies for developing the Semantic Web are already in place: eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). --- XML = create your own language, RDF = encode meaning, triples made of (subject, verb and object of an elementary sentence) --- Subject, objects and verbs are URI --- because two databases may use different identifiers for what is in fact the same concept, such as zip code.--- A solution to this problem is provided by the third basic component of the Semantic Web, collections of information called ontologies.--- ontology is a document or file that formally defines the relations among terms ---The most typical kind of ontology for the Web has a taxonomy and a set of inference rules. --- The taxonomy defines classes of objects and relations among them. For example, an address may be defined as a type of location, and city codes may be defined to apply only to locations, and so on --- An example of a page marked up for such use is online at http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler. If you send your Web browser to that page, you will see the normal Web page entitled "Dr. James A. Hendler." As a human, you can readily find the link to a short biographical note and read there that Hendler received his Ph.D. from Brown University. A computer program trying to find such information, however, would have to be very complex to guess that this information might be in a biography and to understand the English language used there.--- Human endeavor is caught in an eternal tension between the effectiveness of small groups acting independently and the need to mesh with the wider community.---

webservices.xml.com

webservices.xml.com: Structured Writing, Structured Search [Jun. 10, 2003] Of course rich content is the standard in blogspace, and yet here we are in 2003 hammering raw HTML into our grandmother's TEXTAREA widget. It seems crazy to do things this way, but the popularity of blogging proves that the effort-to-reward ratio is greater than one.

Comment: Way to go...I ask myself this question at least once per post...Yeah I could use IE, but I don't. I like the effort to reward ratio, if it wasn't worth it I wouldn't do it, so true. I just need to find why it's worth something now? much simpler question right...NOOOT!

Marketing is not a post-processing Step

Comment: The title says it all... Too often we think of Marketing as an after the fact, once the product is developed or well underway...I've been in this situation too many times myself. Market validation must be higher in our priorities...but has Erik here says our background doesn't make this an easy thing to do... Anyway Have a read at the following...The beginning is what hooked me up, also for marketing tidbits take a look at The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing also. Erik Sink's In many small ISVs, including SourceGear, the founder has a technical background with little or no marketing experience. This kind of company tends to become very programmer-centric. We coders think of ourselves as the center of the universe. Everything else is secondary to the code. The code is king. The code is the only thing we actually sell. If we had to get rid of everything else, the code would be enough. If we are honest enough to admit it, even true developers have these evil thoughts from time to time. That's okay. Most lies have a tiny grain of truth buried inside anyway. :-) Our code-centric perspective makes it is easier to believe the common misconception that marketing begins when coding ends. Good marketing just doesn't work this way. Marketing is not a post-processing step.

Blogger is at it again...

Sorry for the rant here again, but here we go again…

Blogger blogthis today is not showing the title field. A post doesn't get included in the rss feed unless it has a title field. There is no way at this point to fudge the title field. For example from NewsGator the post functionality is next to useless to me, because Blogger doesn't let one manually or programmatically set the title field… Blogger is not as reliable as it should for a service so widely available.

Now blogging with the blogger e-mail address is not working either....come on. Blogging is nice and useful, it's also time consuming, anyway the reading part taking most of this time. Now when it's blogging time for a piece of information one doesn't want to have to waste time for posting the info, this is the whole point of blogging, easy publishing...

Jon's Radio That extra touch is called finishing work, and it's the kind of thing that, too often, we in open source don't do well. I'm not sure why, but my guess is that in the hierarchy of needs, finishing work provides little positive reinforcement to open source developers. [Zope Dispatches]

Comment: This article all started so well, and ends in like so many trial runs of OSS out there...This might be why there is good business in the touch ups...

Dave @ Harvard Weblogs

Harvard Weblogs: What makes a weblog a weblog?

Comment: A definition of weblog? or a list of weblog related jargon defined? Anyhow useful.

Java.net

Java.net: the JCP alternative? - Computerworld When Java.net goes live on Tuesday, it will host open-source implementations of a number of Java application programming interfaces (API), including the Java API for XML-Based Remote Procedure Calls (JAX-RPC), the NetBeans Java integrated development environment project, and parts of the Swing graphical user interface libraries.

Comment: I didn't know about this site, apparently it's the new new thing for the java community. It looks like as project mature on this site they will make it into the JCP.

BioInformatics

Vision Series: Computers replace petri dishes - Tech News - CNET.com

Comment: Nothing really new, some good numbers. Still is a very big player kind of world. Speciality is key in this domains to make serious headways.

Mitch Kapor's Weblog: Switching to Mozilla

Mitch Kapor's Weblog: Switching to Mozilla

Comment: Woah! one down, come on let me hear some Mozilla support...I've been a big Firebird fan since the early phoenix days...I want more fans...One problem form auto-suggestion is buggy and make the browser crash if one uses the keyboard to select instead of the mouse.

Dexterity Software

Overcoming Procrastination by Steve Pavlina

Comment: Got this from the latest Joel on Software sometimes I'm the biggest involuntary adept fan of procrastination.... It's all about not knowing where to spend my time...maybe this is a priority issue, or maybe goals, wow. You know when you just don't feel you're in the groove, it's grind and grind and grind...and at the end of the day, you just can't put your finger on one thing that was really worth your time, you just can't close anything on that to-do of yours because each item has a dependency on something you don't control...All right enough already.

Blogroots, We Blog Book

Blogroots | Home

Comment: Since I'm just too lazy to hook Googles to my Blog just yet, I'll blog this one again...There is an extract about blogging in Business...Since this is close to home I want to keep it handy...

The Trip-Packing Dilemma

http://www.toolshed.com/blog/News/TripPacking.html,v

The March edition of our Construction Column in IEEE Software magazine, entitled The Trip-Packing Dilemma is now online for your reading pleasure. This time out, we look at how you might balance coding for flexibility against the danger of overbuilding for a future that never arrives.
Comment:  I like it... especially the bolded section...we tend to not balance our decisions against a proper context, putting things in perspective helps. This is why McGuire in Debugging the Software Development Process says we should have a project goals and a coding priority list for each projects... It can help put things in perspective. Here the pragmatic programmers are using Extreme Programming as the project goals. In the end though, it's common sense and experience, I guess by experience talking your design over with several fellows help but add the $$ aspect to the discussion.

EWeek

Salesforce.com to Offer Hosted Development Tools Enterprises that use Salesforce.com now will be able to use sforce to build tighter connections to other applications in their environment via Web services like XML, WSDL and SOAP. But Salesforce.com is also positioning sforce as a way for enterprises as well as software vendors to build their own applications as services.

Comment: This makes so much sense for Salesforce. For an IT dep, sales force was no maintenance, but was also an island. One couldn't integrate it's systems with it, now they can. It makes great sense.

MS IE and RSS and International?

The XML parser in IE is less than impressive when dealing with characters with an accent. It came to my attention recently that my feed wasn't not working. After looking into the error, it so happens I had written the word "cliche" the proper way, ie with an accent on the e. The XML parser in IE was barking on it, and saying it's an illegal character... It's not. FireBird on the other end is working just fine. BTW my feed, since I've changed a few times in the last few weeks is xml feed