Bingme

How to use type to make a point.

Chip Vanek — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 01:47:17 +0000

Kendra's Skills Video

Chip Vanek — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 10:12:33 +0000

My Daughter’s Softball skills video is now available. It is being sent to college softball coaches now.

OK, Now finally an Apple iPhone

Chip Vanek — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 11:50:00 +0000

Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device include a 3.5-inch 480 x 320 touchscreen display with multi-touch support and a proximity sensor to turn off the sensor when it's close to your face, 2 megapixel cam, 4GB or 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth with EDR and A2DP, WiFi that automatically engages when in range, and quadband GSM radio with EDGE. Perhaps most amazingly, though, it somehow runs OS X with support for Widgets, Google Maps, and Safari, and iTunes (of course) with CoverFlow out of the gate. A partnership with Yahoo will allow all iPhone customers to hook up with free push IMAP email. Apple quotes 5 hours of battery life for talk or video, with a full 16 hours in music mode -- no word on standby time yet. In a twisted way, this is one rumor mill we're almost sad to see grind to a halt; after all, when is the next time we're going to have an opportunity to run this picture? The 4GB iPhone will go out the door in the US as a Cingular exclusive for $499 on a two-year contract, 8GB for $599. Ships Stateside in June, Europe in fourth quarter, Asia in 2008. Engadget

Also see the full Macworld Keynote 2007

Full Mac OS X in the palm of your hand!! Seamless WiFi with full Safari and quick access widgets. This is a game changer and the best next target for innovation. Music, TV, Movies, Email, RSS, Google, Maps, Yahoo, Amazon all in my pocket.

Amazon.mil?

Chip Vanek — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 22:12:08 +0000

Amazon.mil?: "In an interesting short piece at Federal Computing Week, reporter Bob Brewin looks at Amazon.mil? and how the Department of Defense might utilize web service APIs like those from Amazon, Google and others.

In a recent test, the Defense Information Systems Agency [DISA] compared the cost of developing a simple application called the Tech Early Bird on $30,000 worth of in-house servers and software with the costs of developing the same application using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud from Amazon.com’s Web Services. Amazon charged 10 cents a minute for the service, and DISA paid a total of $5 to develop an application that matched the performance of the in-house application.

The test is an example of how DISA has been borrowing ideas from Amazon and other Web-based companies and sites, including Yahoo, Google and Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. ‘There may well be a commercial analog for everything we want to do,’ said Dave Mihelcic, DISA’s chief technology officer.
<p>Easier said than done of course given the DOD&rsquo;s need for security and renowned bureaucratic, waterfall model for acquiring and developing software. And it isn&rsquo;t that those agencies are not aware of the issues. In a speech last month at the U.S. DISA Industry Day, the agency&rsquo;s Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Croom advocated a web service approach noting that &lsquo;Information is America&rsquo;s greatest weapons system, but processes we have created are holding us back.&rsquo; (See also the recent New York Times Magazine story by Clive Thompson <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin">&lsquo;Open-Source Spying&rsquo;</a>.)</p>

Of the 1325 mashups listed here, none end in .mil. Yet.

(Via Programmable Web.)

Peter Norvig forecasts the future

Chip Vanek — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 07:40:47 +0000

In 50 years the scene will be transformed. Instead of typing a few words into a search engine, people will discuss their needs with a digital intermediary, which will offer suggestions and refinements. The result will not be a list of links, but an annotated report (or a simple conversation) that synthesises the important points, with references to the original literature. People won't think of "search" as a separate category - it will all be part of living. Peter Norvig

Investment criteria for software startups

Chip Vanek — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 21:59:00 +0000

I just ran across an old post on Jeff Clavier's site on some guidelines for getting funded. The ideas are a rework of Ray Lane's original ideas and even more true today. The key idea is that the ideal buyers in the enterprise act just like consumers. They want an instant solution to an immediate problem. Keep it simple, clear, well designed and easy to sell to your neighbor.

7 rules that enterprise software startups must meet in order to be considered for an investment: bac5a56b4c3c0d81768ad99185700b8e Friend Jeff Nolan reminded me that these rules were actually introduced by Ray Lane, a Kleiner Perkins Partner, during his keynote of MR Rangaswami's conference, Software 2006. I actually recommend listening to the podcast and reading through the presentation. What is interesting is that these rules seemed to be focusing on enterprise software companies, and upon reading them they were really fitting consumer-facing services. Yet another data point showing that Consumer and Enterprise 2.0 are getting closer and closer in the way they are built and marketed. Ben Barren from down under had a similar thought. By Jeff Clavier

Amazon powered Ruby on Rails

Chip Vanek — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 15:13:07 +0000

I was at StartupCamp talking with Jeff Barr of Amazon and Tim Bray of Sun and it was clear to me that there are some big things coming. Rails is the darling of the web construction world right now and getting incredible mind share. The basic components of what makes a web service are also now becoming standardized and solidified. Amazon S3, EC2, SQS, and the other Amazon Web Services are the perfect platform for cost effective scaling. Rails is the perfect construction set to build that killer application. I predict an avalanche of innovation when this pair gets linked. I am working on some useful pieces for this but expect others to announce things soon. I just saw this great post that does a great job linking Amazon to 37signals.

Are 37signals and Amazon.com building the ultimate Ruby on Rails hosting solution? Imagine a reliable host that could provide effortless scalability combined with a killer application deployment solution. What if there was an “official” Ruby on Rails host from the creators of the framework itself?
...
Think about it this way - as development with Ruby and Rails becomes more and more popular, there’s an opportunity here for a major player to step in and build a deployment platform that makes it easier and cheaper to scale. Something like Amazon’s s3 would work for the small guys, but the large guys (read enterprise) might be able to trust it, too.

Apple planning to dominate a new category

Chip Vanek — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 16:10:26 +0000

Apple's missing "Home on iPod" feature resurfaces in filing Dubbed "Home on iPod," the technology was once destined for Apple's Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, before it was abruptly yanked from pre-release builds of the operating system back in Oct. of 2003. "Ever thought you could carry your home in the palm of your hands or in your pocket? You can. Panther's Home on iPod feature lets you store your home directory - files, folders, apps - on your iPod (or any FireWire hard drive) and take it with you wherever you go," Apple had written in a blurb on its Panther preview website that was eventually removed. "When you find yourself near a Panther-equipped Mac, just plug in the iPod, log in, and you're 'home,' no matter where you happen to be," the description continued. "And when you return to your home computer, you can synchronize any changes you've made to your files by using File Sync, which automatically updates offline changes to your home directory." Apple never offered an explanation for the feature retraction and popular speculation was that it would eventually resurface in a later iteration of the Mac OS X operating system. It never did.

Brilliant! Wait until you have been awarded patent until you release the next category killer. How many iPods have been sold, how many cell phone? Many more then the classic PC sales. PDA sales are still a blip. This simple idea will define a whole new way of thinking about computing. Yes, Apple will introduce it as iTunes in you pocket and deliver it via video/TV on the go. That is just the start. Storage capacities are increasing and getting cheaper. WiFi coverage is becoming more complete. That G7 iPod in your pocket will be collecting your email, vmail, document updates, vcasts, and vendor offers as you walk by network proxy nodes. Google and others will soon interconnect enough regions to make electronic billboards possible. Billboards that can recognize your bluetooth or WiFi signal and present a message just for you or deliver email++ to your G7 iPod. The timing is right for this old idea and now one of the basic concepts is owned by Apple.

Finally an Apple iPhone?

Chip Vanek — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 08:57:13 +0000

Apple cell phone is real and ready for production - analyst "Apple chief executive Steve Jobs "is finally satisfied with the end product Apple engineers have produced in terms of quality and the right blend of cell phone and portable media player."

Given Jobs' previous track record, the analyst said he has the utmost confidence the Apple branded cell phone, which he says will conform to a sleek candy bar form factor, will meet the highest of standards with "no exception."

"Clearly, we would like to share more detail as we have conducted extensive work on the product pipeline, but for now, here is what we will convey," Wu wrote. "The design will be an iPod nano-like candy bar form factor and come in three colors (we are not certain of the exact colors but we suspect black, white and platinum, similar to Apple's current color scheme of iPods and Macs)."

Getting High Performance out of High Potential People @ FooCamp

Chip Vanek — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 08:10:52 +0000

Caterina Fake had a great post from her time at FooCamp

Notes from FOO Camp: Getting High Performance out of High Potential People Great weekend at FOO Camp, which is the annual O'Reilly campout, and the original "unconference". I took a lot of notes while I was there, and will post them in batches. The first talk I went to was Getting High Performance out of High Potential People by Keoki Andrus of Intuit. Since I work with a posse of supersmarties this was quite relevant. First we talked a little bit about the characteristics of High Potential People. They tend to be smart, sure, but they also tend to be the kind of people that are incredibly curious, motivated and passionate, who have their own personal projects going, are always thinking and learning -- a lot of FOO Camp attendees, truth be told. I didn't take notes during this part, so don't want to attribute anything to Keoki that he didn't say. But I think you get who these people are. Design and deliver RFMB solutions. RFMB means "Right For My Business" -- obviously in a work situation, you need to figure out what the job at hand is, otherwise everyone will be unhappy. Figure out what work activities turn them on and off. Then for their job, downplay the stuff they hate, or that are their weaknesses, and figure out what they love doing. Make their job mostly about the things they love doing. And figure out what they are solving for not only in their jobs but in their personal lives as well. Listen and Care. Get to know them deeply. Follow them around. Walk them through journey line analysis. Look for activities that "light them up". (There are also many tools to discover this stuff, Keoki says, like Meyer-Briggs, Strengthfinder.com, but nothing can replace gtting to know them. What you're looking for is deeply embedded life interests.

Picasso, Paula Scher, and the lifetime behind every second

Chip Vanek — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 06:34:59 +0000

Picasso, Paula Scher, and the lifetime behind every second: "A story from Charging By the Project or the Hour:

Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him.

‘It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.’

So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.

‘It’s perfect!’ she gushed. ‘You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?’

‘Five thousand dollars,’ the artist replied.

‘B-b-but, what?’ the woman sputtered. ‘How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!’

To which Picasso responded, ‘Madame, it took me my entire life.’

Charging hourly vs. charging per project is always an interesting dilemma for designers/programmers who do client work. If you charge hourly and you solve problems quickly, you wind up being punished for your efficiency. But if you charge per project, you often face scope issues (i.e. endless revisions or changes in direction seem to become the norm).

[Fwiw, the article linked above offers this advice: ‘Charging by the hour is a good option for short-term projects with specific goals…When you’re offered a long-term project with clearly defined goals, you should charge by the project.’]

The designer version of the Picasso story usually involves a designer sketching out a brilliant logo on a napkin during a lunch meeting. If you’re looking for a real-life example, that’s pretty much what happened to Paula Scher; She walked into a meeting and, a few seconds later, sketched the new logo for Citibank.

No lengthy process, just the right solution. In this Adobe video profile of Scher, she offers an explanation similar to the one in the Picasso tale:

How can it be that you talk to someone and it’s done in a second? But it is done in a second. it’s done in a second and in 34 years, and every experience and every movie and every thing of my life that’s in my head.

The video’s worth a look. She talks about other work she’s done (including her incredibly detailed and very cool map paintings) and also offers her first reaction, after years of working solely with her hands, to designing on a computer:

The computer made me feel like my hands were cut off…You don’t type a design…The idea of doing this…[She taps in the air as if typing]…That’s not the right mode and it doesn’t smell right. It doesn’t smell like an art supply store. It smells like a car.

(Via Signal vs. Noise.)

Startup focus quote

Chip Vanek — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 01:04:11 +0000

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive."

-Harold Whitman

Only 88% of the world to go

Chip Vanek — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 23:05:15 +0000

create your own visited countries map or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Are you bored?

Chip Vanek — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 12:24:39 +0000

A real executive dashboard needs realtime and trends

Chip Vanek — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 11:50:16 +0000

What if you could see all your company activities in realtime? This has been the goal of many technology companies over the years. No single solution stands out as being great but, new approaches based on metadata mashups might make this a reality soon.

The first generation of mashups have focused on maps to highlight the relationships between location based metadata. The new mashup dashboards can show your companies sales based on location, buyer profile, total sale across time. Your marketing team can know who just experienced their key product message along with the effectiveness of the delivery channel over time. Collecting the stream of attention metadata as your target customers listen to your product message on their iPod and presenting it in a dashboard puts the CMO back in the driver seat.

Data flows of the remix culture

Chip Vanek — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 11:23:11 +0000

This is great overview of participant segmentation and the data flows that are driving the new web. Media metadata is the key element of many of the new viral participation sites and can be applied to old problems. Segmenting the participants and tuning the metadata using the model below will enable the addition of web2.0 elements into the enterprise. Any enterprise is made up of a collection of roles and technology adoption profiles. Yes these are people but from the enterprise point of view their employees are personas performing processes. Executive can now imprint and influence the performance of their company at less cost and higher fidelity then ever before.

The diagram below illustrates how we see media and metadata flowing to and from different activities around media on the web. The corners of the matrix are meant to represent activities, not kinds of people. So, for example, a Flickr user might fluidly switch between creating and uploading her original photos, to enthusiastically tagging and commenting on others’ photos, to passively watching syndicated photos appear on her desktop or phone, to Photoshopping a Creative Commons-licensed photo that catches her eye and re-uploading it… The point of the diagram is simply to emhasize that each of these activities generates different kinds of metadata that potentially can be used to support the other activities. MSMDX (Media Streams Metadata Exchange) project’s

Capture the map google game

Chip Vanek — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 05:37:09 +0000

A creative mashup presented as a game. A bit like Risk with the randomness of Google search results.

a cool online strategy game that exploits Google's search engine in an original way. the search results are localized using the Netgeo database (www.caida.org) & "captured" on a world map by virtual pins. by choosing well chosen search queries, players can occupy specific places on the world map. the 2nd player (or the computer) then tries to "hit" those exact places, or to explore alternative cities or countries to occupy, until all pins are used. Information Aesthetics

Gartner has discovered Web2.0

Chip Vanek — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 08:46:15 +0000

The new web properties have certainly started to get mainstream attention. Businessweek and other magazines are dissecting the main components of Web2.0. Now even the guardian of the mainstream is including (and defining?) the elements of the new web.
2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle

Web 2.0 represents a broad collection of recent trends in Internet technologies and business models. Particular focus has been given to user-created content, lightweight technology, service-based access and shared revenue models. Technologies rated by Gartner as having transformational, high or moderate impact include: Social Network Analysis (SNA) is rated as high impact (definition: enables new ways of performing vertical applications that will result in significantly increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise) and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years. SNA is the use of information and knowledge from many people and their personal networks. It involves collecting massive amounts of data from multiple sources, analyzing the data to identify relationships and mining it for new information. Gartner said that SNA can successfully impact a business by being used to identify target markets, create successful project teams and serendipitously identify unvoiced conclusions. Ajax is also rated as high impact and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years. Ajax is a collection of techniques that Web developers use to deliver an enhanced, more-responsive user experience in the confines of a modern browser (for example, recent version of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari or Opera). A narrow-scope use of Ajax can have a limited impact in terms of making a difficult-to-use Web application somewhat less difficult. However, Gartner said, even this limited impact is worth it, and users will appreciate incremental improvements in the usability of applications. High levels of impact and business value can only be achieved when the development process encompasses innovations in usability and reliance on complementary server-side processing (as is done in Google Maps). Collective intelligence, rated as transformational (definition: enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry dynamics) is expected to reach mainstream adoption in five to ten years. Collective intelligence is an approach to producing intellectual content (such as code, documents, indexing and decisions) that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority. This is seen as a more cost-efficient way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services. Mashup is rated as moderate on the Hype Cycle (definition: provides incremental improvements to established processes that will result in increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise), but is expected to hit mainstream adoption in less than two years. A "mashup" is a lightweight tactical integration of multi-sourced applications or content into a single offering. Because mashups leverage data and services from public Web sites and Web applications, they’re lightweight in implementation and built with a minimal amount of code. Their primary business benefit is that they can quickly meet tactical needs with reduced development costs and improved user satisfaction. Gartner warns that because they combine data and logic from multiple sources, they’re vulnerable to failures in any one of those sources.

GeoRuby can do cool things

Chip Vanek — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 09:39:15 +0000

GeoRuby A few days ago, IvyGIS was released by Robert Thau. It is a Rails engine which connects to MapServer and PostGIS databases and can display Google Maps-style views. Here is a demo and it is quite impressive. It uses the SVG display feature of Firefox (since version 1.5) to overlay geometries obtained from the PostGIS server on top of MapServer image tiles. This is the first time I have seen this functionality actually put to use and it looks absolutely great. It also works on IE6 using VML (but I haven’t tested yet). There is some functionality overlap with my own project, GeoRuby and the PostGIS Spatial Adapter, regarding PostGIS data access. A difference is that, in the case of IvyGIS, the use of geometric columns must be declared in the model whereas for GeoRuby, it is transparent, but that is a functionality not difficult at all to add.

How do you find your Documents?

Chip Vanek — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 09:37:44 +0000

Now that we are collaborating on documents and ideas using services like Writley, how do we find the documents we are working? This a a many to many problem that needs a live tagging or clustering solution. Ajax spreadsheets are not a real solution but some of the attributes built into a spreadsheet like solution do help this problem.

The concept of individuals owning documents is broken. The network of documents, clustered by type and usage, are owned by the group. Permissions may create an ownership hierarchy but, input is allowed by all. Wikis are certainly one solution to this problem but not a complete solution. Ajax editors and document viewers are needed to provide a richer interaction with these new documents. You need awareness of who is editing a section of a document as it happens. Certain section get locked dynamically as users need to post an edit. All edits are version controlled and different version clusters can be shared as almost new documents. The idea of what is a document is based on the set of editors over stream of time. The classic version control problems come to the forefront. Branching, merging, conflicts need to be supported in these new ajax document editors.

Identity management options

Chip Vanek — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 09:32:25 +0000

Who owns your identity? The ideal world would be where you owned your identity. The reality is that any number of competing web entities own pieces of you. Yahoo has their identity network, Google has theirs, Microsoft, AOL, and other have identity networks that barely connect. Segmentation of what is you is needed. Talk seemed to move around the services that are provided by People aggregator.

SaaS and web2.0 for business automation

Chip Vanek — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 04:54:43 +0000

Using SaaS and Web 2.0 for business automation This area is of importance because good, effective Business Process Management has been one of the holy grails of enterprise software for years now. Traditional software development has repeatedly yielded BPM results that are too heavyweight, brittle, hard-to-change, and not responsive to the business. And like with so many aspects of Web 2.0, looking at the successful models in the highly Darwinian Petri dish of the Web gives us many suggestions on how to do it better: Dynamic languages that make mashing together functionality both inexpensive and easy, low-impedence and highly scalable integration models such as JSON and REST instead of SOAP or WS-*, peer production techniques that harness the users as the users operate the system, self-service IT and the list goes on.

Harnessing Web 2.0 techniques for business process integration, automation, and management, particularly around highly-repetitive, transactionalprocesses will allow more time for tacit interactions, the high value knowledge work that many workers can't spend time doing because of the overhead of tedious, low-value transactional work. Tacit interactions are perceived as one of the biggest remaining avenuesfor achieving higher worker productivity.

Why am I down again?

Chip Vanek — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 22:35:14 +0000

This is getting tiring. thr site just decided to shut down without any changes. Hosting service changes, sun spots, ...?

HHS Assists States With Antiviral Drug Purchases

Chip Vanek — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 22:03:04 +0000

HHS Assists States With Antiviral Drug Purchases: "HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt today announced a contract award with Roche Laboratories, Inc. to provide oseltamivir phosphate (Tamiflu®) to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, five U.S. territories and the three Freely Associated States of the Pacific at a federally subsidized price. The contract will run for a period of two years with a total contract award amount of $149,110,000."

(Via PandemicFlu.gov RSS Feed for News Releases.)

My present relaxation is

Chip Vanek — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 20:04:59 +0000

Cryptonomicon is great fun. I could not put it down

Screencast via Screen Mimic

Chip Vanek — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 13:54:27 +0000

Screen Mimic 1.2 allows you to record your Mac OS X desktop and then encode that recording to a Macromedia Flash (SWF) file. SWF files can be easily uploaded to a website, used in a kiosk system, and many other applications. Screen Mimic is a great tool for creating screen recordings, flash demos, software training videos, application demos, and more.

MusicHawk - Find great music!

Chip Vanek — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 14:23:16 +0000

Do you love music? Find more just like your favorites at MusicHawk

MusicHawk Music Community. As the community host, we are fans of all of the people that make music such a huge part of our lives at every step of the journey. MusicHawk unites all lovers of music, whether they thrive on the notes themselves, or the business behind the notes.

A stand alone Invoicing service?

Chip Vanek — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 20:41:22 +0000

Blinksale is perfect for anyone who needs to invoice customers and clients for services or products sold. As a design company, we created Blinksale with professional service industries in mind. Additionally, with time-billing invoices and product invoices, Blinksale is an excellent choice for attorneys, accountants, IT professionals, software developers, journalists, contractors, engineers, architects, videographers, and more. Basically, if you need to send invoices, Blinksale can work for you.

Browsershots - How does my site look in other browsers now

Chip Vanek — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 02:25:14 +0000

Browsershots.org This project is concerned with a favorite problem of web designers: websites look different in other browsers. Testing a new site in many browsers can be quite time-consuming. Not everybody has a farm of legacy machines with older OSes and browsers. There are online services that offer screenshots of websites in different browsers for considerable fees. For the hobbyist and for open source projects, these fees may be prohibitive.

Fish - A Friendly shell

Chip Vanek — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 02:13:59 +0000

fish is a user friendly command line shell for UNIX-like operating systems such as Linux.

Fish fixes many of the usage issues of bash and makes the terminal a more productive place.

Cabspotting - Were are cabs going in San Francisco

Chip Vanek — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 01:42:48 +0000

Capspotting The core of this project is the Cab Tracker. The Tracker averages the last four hours of cab routes into a ghostly image, and then draws the routes of ten in-progress cab rides over it. The Time Lapse area of the project reveals time-varying patterns such as rush hour, traffic jams, holidays and unusual events. New projects are produced by the Exploratorium's visiting artists and also created by the larger Cabspotting community.

VisualComplexity - How can you see the right pattern?

Chip Vanek — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 12:36:12 +0000

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

Tracking the Threat - Visualize Al Qaeda

Chip Vanek — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 12:25:55 +0000

TrackingTheThreat.com is database of open source information about the Al Qaeda terrorist network, developed as a research project of the FMS Advanced Systems Group. Our goal is to apply new technologies and software engineering approaches to open source intelligence while providing researchers and analysts with information about Al Qaeda. TrackingTheThreat.com

Online Color tools

Chip Vanek — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 12:02:17 +0000

All of these tools work slightly differently, but are based on the same principle: fiddle around until you find an attractive group of colors. I use all of them at various times, and if I’m not having luck with one tool, I move on to the next. I can never remember which one does what from my bookmarks, so I have posted them here with screenshots and notes on all 11 color helpers: Color Palette Tools

Whatsup is great on that second screen

Chip Vanek — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 17:25:12 +0000

I have another computer in my home office that plays music and podcasts. It always has a browser open to research some problem I am working with. Today I just had What's Up running. And for over 20 minutes all that kept popping up was "Burden to big to bear". Is the world trying to say something?

Human Development Trends 2005

Chip Vanek — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 22:32:24 +0000

http://www.gapminder.org/
Gapminder is a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development. This is done in collaboration with universities, UN organisations, public agencies and non-governmental organisations

It all started in 1998 from an idea to enhance the understanding of world health. We developed prototype software showing time series of health statistics as moving graphics and varying life conditions as 360° photo panoramas from homes, schools and health facilities. From the prototype emerged the Dollar Street project with Save the Children Fund in Sweden and the World Health Chart project with WHO. Within the later project Gapminder developed the free software Trendalyzer that turns boring time series of development statistics into attractive moving graphics. The software import data from excel and showing moving graphics on the screen, as exported Flash files or as images in PowerPoint and in other formats. Collaboration with United Nations Division of Statistic and UNDP, started in 2003 with the aim to visualize the fulfillment of millennium development goals with a World Development Chart 2003 powered by a Trendalyzer version that written in Director and required download and instalartion. In the last two years Trendelyzer has been rewritten in Flash to enable the use of moving graphics ´directly on WebPages. The main project during the coming three years is a coolaboration with UN Statistic Division with the aim to visualize UN common database with Trendalyzer on a testsite and hence to improve the software for wider use

The perfect elevatorpitch

Chip Vanek — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 22:14:24 +0000

The primary goal of an elevator pitch is to intrigue someone to learn more. Like that novel you buy on impulse at the airport, the first sentence has to grab you. One way to do that is to highlight the enormity of the problem you are tackling…. With healthcare costs rising 24% per year, fewer and fewer US employers offer comprehensive health benefits… In the last 18 months, the internet grew by over 100 million consumers in China who have no credit mechanism for buying online… Used to be If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It, but worms and other hacks have raised the dreadful prospect that every important computer system in the world needs to be fixed on a weekly basis… Thanks in large part to Tivo, the $70 billion market for TV commercials is about to implode… 21% of the patients who take prescription medicine for the first time are genetically pre-disposed to have no benefit from that molecule, but still suffer the side effects… If you get stuck on this step because the problem you’re tackling isn’t impressively large and obvious, you have a more severe issue to worry about than your elevator pitch.

David Cowan

The Web 2.0 Trinity: People, Data, and Great Software

Chip Vanek — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 22:44:56 +0000

The Web 2.0 Trinity: People, Data, and Great Software: "I've still been absorbing all the terrific brainstorming that came out of SPARK last weekend. One of the key bits that was agreed upon by all almost immediately was the utter centrality of the user. I've been a big believer of this since early in my software career and I've made this point on my own numerous times, probably most famously in my widely read and subsequently slashdotted Five Reasons Why Web 2.0 Matters. Every time that software creators get far from this mark, they lose the software ingredient that matters the most: us. Now, at SPARK we framed it in slightly stronger terms, specifically that the user is the center of the universe.

This highlights an interesting trend, still somewhat obscured, that is taking place with the adoption of a lot of the new types of online software, which many of us call Web 2.0. Specifically, that software itself is now becoming a distinctly third tier citizen to the software experience. And unfortunately, a lot of very competent code slingers have been and will remain distinctly uncomfortable with this. After all, isn't it software that makes all this Web stuff possible? Yes, and software is still critically important. I'm just saying that there are two even more important things to the software experience. One of them has always been the case, that the user is the center and most valuable part of the 'construct', this thing we call the Web. And network effects are only magnifying this exponentially, making something too frequently ignored into something almost completely unescapable. I'm fonding of citing the fact that there are now 1 billion users of the Web, and combined with Metcalfe's Law, it's putting the value of the user so much farther ahead of everything else in the equation.

The second element of that equation is data. It's often been more important than software for many applications, but with the Web aggregating volumes and volumes of new and useful data each and every second, software is now getting eclipsed by this phenomenon on the Web as well. We are the source of all attention, data, traffic, customers, associations, relationships, etc. And now that so many of us are connected together on the Web, we not only become the most important ingredient but increasingly, the most important source of the second ingredient as well.

Thus, the data we want becomes the second fundamental element of interest over software, because it is information that more directly drives what we do and the decisions that we make. O'Reilly has made this point repeatedly with what he calls 'data as the next Intel Inside', a slightly unfortunate turn of phrase that means that data is close to becoming the center stage in computing. And becoming the most important part of the majority of applications today. A small example: Google's search database is probably one of the most valuable data sources on the planet, and it's we what we want from it by using Google's primitive 'command-line' search interface. Google makes little bones about advanced software feature; you get a text field and a button.

Update: The Newsweek article has apparently caused a real stir. The Web 2.0 renaissance continues:

ComputerWorld: Web 2.0: At the tipping point.
BBC: Learning to Love Web 2.0
C|Net:Mainstream media's bumpy road to Web 2.0

What do you think? Is putting software in the back seat behind users and data completely wrong-headed?
"
(Via Dion Hinchcliffe.)
The Web 2.0 Trinity: People, Data, and Great Software

Embracing and Extending Microsoft: JotSpot's Joe Kraus on the Web Office

Chip Vanek — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 15:45:51 +0000

Embracing and Extending Microsoft: JotSpot's Joe Kraus on the Web Office: "In this exclusive interview with ex-Excite founder and current JotSpot CEO Joe Kraus, I discuss with Joe the Web Office and his 'Embrace and Extend' theory.
'Our goal wasn't just to build Excel online. In fact I believe that Excel will be 'Excel Online'. Microsoft isn't dumb and they get this revolution about 'software as a service' much more than they got the Internet revolution. They're getting it much more quickly. So we believe where Tracker is headed is not only to embrace the capabilities of Excel - you've got to do that. But you've also got to extend it beyond what Excel is currently envisioned as today, in order to provide lasting value. Because otherwise I think you're going to get your lunch eaten, over time as Microsoft rolls in.'
[Full story on ZDNet...]
(Via Read/WriteWeb.)
Embracing and Extending Microsoft: JotSpot's Joe Kraus on the Web Office

Using the HTTP Accept header for Ajax

Chip Vanek — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 15:31:18 +0000

Using the HTTP Accept header for Ajax: "From one assessibility post to another. David Heinemeier Hansson has posted on Discovering HTTP #1: The Accept header.
Rails 1.1 is going to have a new feature that uses the HTTP Accept header to allow nice degradation from Ajax enabled browsers down the stack.
The code example is:
class CommentController <ActionController::Base
def create
@comment = Comment.create(params[:comment])

respond_to do |type|
type.html { redirect_to :action => 'index' }
type.js
type.xml do
headers['Location'] =
url_for(:action => 'show', :id => @comment.id)
render(:nothing, :status => '201 Created')
end
end
end
end

If an old browser submits this form, we'll have it done through a plain old POST, which the browser sends along with a header like 'Accept: */*'. That means 'I don't care what kind of response you give me, just give me something'. Since the browser doesn't care, we'll decide what to do on the order of the type declarations. The first is type.html, so that's what we'll perform, which in this case simply instructs the browser to go back to the index.
If an Ajax-capable browser submits this form, Prototype will intercept the submission and turn it into an Ajax call. This call will be send along with 'Accept: text/javascript, text/html, application/xml, text/xml */*', which specifies a preference order where Javascript is first, if not available, then HTML, if not, then XML, and finally it'll accept whatever if none of the preferred forms are available.
Notice how the Prototype preference order doesn't match the order of declarations in the respond_to call. That order was significant when */* was used as the Accept header, but when preferences are available, we';; do multiple passes through the declaration in search of a match. The order of declarations won't matter unless neither Javascript, HTML, nor XML is found.
Very nice. Seeing the magic '201' status code also shows how you can fake our old browser (so they can hit the backend without rerendering anything).
(Via Ajaxian.)
Using the HTTP Accept header for Ajax