the.Inevitable.Org/anism

How to create pop-up windows in HTML with no menus or toolbars …
My co-worker Scott Villinski found this after we had talked about it the other day. I have wanted to create some pop-up browser windows, but not have any menus or toolbars in them. Here it is!

Interesting read … all sorts of perspective on changes to the human brain in recent years … myopia caused by reading more and more?
http://www.mailgate.org/sci/sci.psychology.journals.psycoloquy/msg00021.html

ABSTRACT: Storfer’s (2000) argument that there was a parallel
increase in myopia, brain size, and intelligence due to
urbanization (complex visual inputs) during the last century is
analyzed in this commentary. Sex differences, sex hormones, and
human handedness also need to be considered. In his excellent
monograph, Storfer (1999) argues that human brains gradually
increased in size during the past century along with a dramatic
upsurge of myopia, which is highly correlated with human
intelligence. Storfer also argues that these adaptive changes
following urbanization may occur by adaptive epigenetic inheritance
without violating the basic concepts of Darwin’s theory.

With wireless wearable computers, this will get even more impressive …
With our wearable computer research, and digital identity project, we are also looking to add a lot of geospacial applications … this is nothing! There are going to be so many virtual object servers out there in a world, they’ll be fighting for your attention. A virtual object server might contain all sorts of objects, which will appear to you in your VR (virtual reality) or AR (augmented reality) goggles as you wander around in the physical universe … this stuff is coming quickly.

Handhelds: Tagger’s Best Friend?. Call it digital graffiti: a fledgling wireless application that allows users to leave floating messages wherever they go. Sounds spacey — and prone to abuse, observers say. By Aparna Kumar. [Wired News]

Yeah sure … his company is hurting now, just wait for wearables …
This guy is jumping to all kinds of conclusions … just to defend his current market?

Yeah … he’s really looking to promote his lagging sales. These limited capability little toys are only going to last a few years. You’ll be buying them for children to play with …

CEO: Users Dislike PC-Like Appliances. Claims Cidco, RIM prove users just want e-mail [allNetDevices Wireless News]

Importance of Intrusion Detection UI …
So it’s one thing to have a Intrusion Detection logger on your PC, but it’s nice to be able to view the logs in a useful way …

RazorBack 0.2 (regular). SNORT Intrusion Detection System log analysis GUI [freshmeat.net]

An awesome Flash site … based on the work of a visionary …
I have to say that I am beyond impressed with the incredible vision and foresight of Ray Kurzweil … and this is a cool site based of this incredible book. If you have not yet read this book, it is a must read! His upcoming book on the Singularity is also bound to be awesome. I am now working on my first paper on my theories of memetics … we’ll see how it goes …

Alternative rock album based on “Spiritual Machines” [Nanodot: News and Discussion of Coming Technologies]

Oh my God this animation rules!
Like they say … this puts StickDeath to shame! Starting a whole new meme about stick animation …

The death of StickDeath. If you watch many Jackie Chan movies, your dreams may appear thus. [kuro5hin.org]

YES! I agree completely! And I’m building one now …
I just bought a new LCD monitor for the car … it’ll run on 12vdc, and I’m looking to test it out this weekend on our trip to Goblin Valley! We’ll be hiking Little Wild Horse Canyon, and then wandering around the goblins … this is going to be a wild trip! This will be the first testing of my “in car” computer (which I intend to permanently mount in the car), but also using wearable computers in the wildernes … full GPS tracking, and using the USGS DEMS maps …

Smart Cars Net Wireless Users. Forget trying to look for directions or shop on a handheld, auto-loving Americans will prefer dashboard delivery of information. Elisa Batista reports from the Mobile Commerce conference in San Jose, California. [Wired News]

Yes Adam, you are on exactly the right track!
This is the exact area that we are exploring with our 802.11b project at Novell … this is right on track!

Is the Payphone Dead? [via Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters] Why not let local citizens (who live near a booth) pay a minimum monthly fee to receive a 802.11b wireless card for their PC, place a base station in the phone cell…..last mile problem solved [Adam Curry: CurryDotCom]

Digital Identity: Close, but not quite far enough …
This is very good to see that a government is getting so involved in digital identity management. What they might consider is that this will end up being a voluntary process, and that many other identity storage and exchange locations are going to arise. The nice thing here is that the government is going to be verifying your identity, and will end up being the “verified identity provider” for their citizens. This is a big step in creating the true digital identity for commerce …

Dutch Propose Digital Information Safes [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

I always like an awesome looking web site … this thing is intense!
Wild web site … very cool look …

What is K10K.Net? [Scripting News]

The next steps … MP3’s ain’t nothing compared to this …
So I’ve been down the MP3 and WinAMP route for years … but now I’m into digital video. And these guys are building the future! This is the most incredible vision that I have seen in a long time … it’s the ultimate Internet video/content distribution system to date, IMHO. And their web site visuals are awesome!

Go check out KGBE and Jamby!

Integrate speakers into my clothes and jacket?
I’m always looking for new additions to my wearable computers … and now I might be able to get some speakers that I could integrate into a backpack or my jacket … maybe?

See-Through, Paper-Thin Speakers [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

More press about wearable computers … the meme is spreading …
This article in USA Today about Xybernaut is just more evidence of the coming wave …

Geographic Traceroute … and more GeoSpacial applications …
As I continue to think about the various applications that I want for my wearable computing, and navigating in physical space, I like it when I find more and more geographic location services. I saw this post yesterday:

Geographical Traceroute 0.0.4 (Default). A geographical traceroute utility for X. [freshmeat.net]

What’s really nice about this is that they are drawing from a netgeo database maintained by CAIDA. This application starts to explore the concept of distributed location servers, and the ability to query them for different types of resources. In this case, the netgeo servers are oriented towards the location of routers, and internet infrastructure. I can see where in the near future there will be more and more of these servers popping up around the Internet that will provide look-ups of almost any type of physical world resouce and it’s longitude and latitude.

An Open Source search engine … for my FlowMining project …
I have been looking around for a while for an Open Source search engine that can be used for my FlowMining project … I’m thinking of giving this one a try.

ASPSeek 1.1.4 (Development). An Internet search engine. [freshmeat.net]

About three or four years ago, I was doing a lot of research into Proxy/Cache engines and the various applications that can be developed on top of them. Here at Novell we developed one of the most scalable Proxy/Cache engines available on Intel hardware - BorderManager - and then created an appliance version called ICS that has been licensed to a range of hardware vendors. Since then, we have spun off that division of the company as a company called Volera. Although many people had a focus on the ‘bandwidth savings’ that a Proxy/Cache might deliver, I really saw two core capabilites that excited me - content distribution networks and community services. I’ll comment on content distribution networks laster … this search engine relates to community services …

One of my interests is in the areas of community, and leveraging the power of the humans operating in teams. All of this contributes to efficient and productive operation of communities and other organizations. When a Proxy/Cache is shared by numerous people in any particular organization or community, the Proxy/Cache could be enhanced with additional services that would provide value for the community. For myself, I would often find that as I cruised the net, I would later want to find the web page where I had seen a particular comment or statement made. This caused me to look for a solution where I had my own personal search engine … something that would index the content that I was reading as I read it. I would then be able to go back and search through the pages that I had read … not the entire Internet.

My leap to the concepts of FlowMining was when I realized that if a group of user were using a Proxy/Cache, we could have the content of that cache indexed automatically. So that as a team, we would now be populating the search engine with the web pages that our team had found and read. Doing this, we could leverage some our ‘human web crawling’ capabilites. If I implemented this in a Proxy/Cache engine, then we would actually be ‘Mining’ the ‘Flow’ of content through the Proxy … FlowMining.

Articles like this one in KMWorld outline the issues related to the current trends and techniques for creating taxonomies of information. I’m thinking that a community of people might benefit from a taxonomy that they built. And so I now have found the search engine … and am going to give it a try to hook it up to our Proxy/Cache engine and see what I can create … this will be fun …

A re-encoding MP3 streamer …
I was just talking with Doc Hodges about this for his web site. He has recently been publishing his MP3 collection (securely for himself and his family) so that they can listen from anywhere in the world. We talked about the fact that his current web interface has the ability to cue up songs for streaming, but at the default encoded rate. This tool could be used to create a lower bit-rate encoding on the fly so that when bandwidth is tight …

Icicle 0.9 (Default). A reencoding streamer for Icecast. [freshmeat.net]

Bluetooth for security …
This is actually a pretty cool application for Bluetooth wireless. They talk about a watch which has Bluetooth, and it communicates with the Bluetooth in your laptop. If you move too far away, then your laptop locks up! Of couse, what do you do if you loose or forget your watch?

reports. Electronic Business reports on Bluetooth security solutions. [The Bluetooth Weblog]

Palm integration for Linux?
This is a valuable cause … Open Source Palm Sync for Linux, etc. … which opens up a whole new line of potential applications for integrating the Palm world and the Open Source world of Linux, etc. I have to say that as I eye the Linux marketplace in corporations, there are a number of software capabilites that I see as really required. Palm support is a good one to have!

ColdSync 2.1.0-20010415 (Development). PalmPilot synchronization tool [freshmeat.net]

Radio posts and browser windows …
I have started to create a target window for all of the links in my posts … and I’m going to experiment with this for a while. This creates a new browser window which I reuse for all links that a reader selects. I tend to like this operation a little better, and am going to see what I can do to make this work the best. We’ll see how it goes.

Another BASIC for Linux …
Wow … it’s coming quickly … so who will make the Glade integration, or the first Visual Basic work-alike on Linux?

FBASIC 2.1.3 (Default). A Microsoft MBASIC-compatible interpreter. [freshmeat.net]

A very good analysis and proposal for presence and IM support …
As usual, this is a very good discussion and arguement for why Jabber makes sense!

An Invitation to Opera. There is a movement to encourage Opera to include Jabber support in their web browser. [JabberCentral]

Another form of wired connectivity …
As I have been studying the ways that I believe I will want to connect to the Internet with my wearable computers, I have broken the connectivity into four core segments … or now maybe five. I can see where my wearable is going to have a number of connectivity options always available … both wired, for higher speed transfers, and wireless, for mobilty and ease of access. These segments are:

• Wired Power-line (2Mbps+)
• Wired Ethernet (10/100Mbps -> 1/10Gps)
• Wireless 802.11b (11Mbps -> 802.11a @ 54Mbps)
• Wireless Cellular (19.2Kbps -> 3G @ 2.4Mbps???)
• Wireless Satellite (4.8Kbps -> 19.2Kbps)

I originally did not have the ‘Wired Power-line’, but have recently been talking with a local company called Inari who are sending me some of their products to test. I can see where I might want to network while I’m recharging my batteries …

This article reinforces the discussion about Power-line networking:

Net Access: Socket to Me. The day may come when all you have to do to get online is plug your computer into a regular wall socket. Don’t hold your breath, not in America anyway. At least, anytime soon. By Julia Scheeres. [Wired News]

Ok … who’s going to compete?
Anyone else want to join in and have some fun?

In Search of the Sexiest Geek. Technology companies might be tanking, but that hasn’t dulled the spirit of the people who are building the new economy. Geeks from around the country are signing up to compete for the title of Sexiest Geek Alive. By Brad King. [Wired News]

So when a laptop becomes a handheld … what then?
I like reading these articles and seeing the conclusions that they make. I agree that the size and convenience are a huge factor … but what happens when a laptop becomes a handheld? Or a wearable computer appears? The PC vendors, and Intel, are not sitting still …

Handhelds gaining the upper hand. Laptop use drops after workers are given BlackBerry e-mail pagers [CNET Tech News]

Very cool … ScriptBasic for Linux …
I have always believed that BASIC is the language for the rest of the people. I learned it at a young age, and still use Microsoft’s Visual Basic to develop quick apps and prototypes … it is a very powerful scripting language … and complies well also. One of the Linux resources that I have wanted for a while is a good BASIC for Linux. If I were able to combine this with Glade … then I’d really be happy!

ScriptBasic 1.0b23 (Default). Linux/Win32 BASIC scripting language. [freshmeat.net]

It was only a matter of time … Metricom just won’t scale …
I have been following Metricom for quite some time, and have kept thinking about how I see things panning out for them. And I have kept going back to the fact that they are building a proprietary network, on proprietary hardware solutions. I just don’t see this combination as ever being successful. On top of this, they have to carry the entire financial burden of deploying their wireless network. It’s a cool idea, but I just don’t see where it fits into the future. The cell service providers are going to try to address the “mid-speed” data market, and I still think that widely deployed 802.11b networks are going to catch everyone off guard!

eWEEK: Compaq banks on rickety Ricochet for mobile. Compaq Computer Corp.’s decision to extend mobile Internet services on foundering Metricom Inc.’s Ricochet wireless network is raising questions about the offering and fueling speculation that Metricom may be ripe for a takeover. [Tomalak’s Realm]

The brain is forming …
This post got me thinking once again about my mission to explore the formation of the ‘brain’ of the human organism. What’s facinating is that I truly believe that Dave, and Radio, are good examples of the first massively distributed neural networks of memetic transfer and replication. Using Radio, you are able to publish a stream of memes, created by the streams of memes that you are receiving on a moment by moment basis. So you can subscribe to meme steams, just as a neuron receives signals from numerous other neurons. And you can create a meme stream which effects other neurons … wow … is the brain of the human organism forming?

DaveNet: The Web is a Writing Environment. [Scripting News]

It’s really not about Instant Messaging …
I just wanted to rant a little here about the big talk about Instant Messaging … it’s not about Instant Messaging! IMHO, it’s about communications, and people wanting to communicate effectivly and efficiently. Remember folks … this is all about meme transfers and replication! All of this relates to our personal identity, and the fact that our identity is created by the conversations that we are a part of. If we evaluate the roots of personal identity, identity becomes the attributes of ourselves that we accumulate to describe ourselves, to ourselves and others. So there are several steps in personal identity which layer on top of each other.

The first of these is the accumulation of our personal identity. This accumulation then includes the people that we have in our lives … our families, friends, co-workers, and other ‘buddies’. This list of ‘contacts’ or ‘buddies’ then becomes our ‘address book’ … the list of people that we converse with. What’s powerful about AIM and ICQ is that we have this list, and also have their ‘presence’ information … or their availability. This presence and availability is what really drives Instant Messaging. I could be launching e-mail, video conferencing, or any form of communication once I have located the ‘presence’ of the other person … Instant Messaging is just one of these forms of communciations. Heck, Instant Messaging isn’t much different from what SMTP mail protocols used to be!

I am a huge fan of Jabber … it is a leading contenter in my mind, and provides a very flexible architecture for presence and communciations … including Instant Messaging. This is a good article and Jabber continues to gain ground …

Jabber As The Coming IM Standard? [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

The BabySmasher meme …
Ok … some people might think this is a sick idea, but it is a powerful meme! These guys are putting out a sticker that can be placed on the “baby changing stations” that are seen in airports and various public places. They’ve created a potentially funny web site, and they are even offering rewards for photos being sent to them of where these are stickers are placed. Some might think this is sick, but I suspect that we’ll see these popping up elsewhere. I wonder what other common and well known signs will be “hacked” like this?

BabySmasher.com tells you the truth about baby changing stations. [Memepool]

Cool DVD links …
I finally decided that I would see about playing DVDs on my Dell Laptop. Of course, I had to go and do some research about the status of DVDs, ripping, encoding, etc. I have to say that the DVD/CD drive power draw on the Dell is what makes me want to play movies off of my hard disk. I’ve got dual 18GB drives in the Dell for DV Video editing, so storage is not a problem. (Plus, I’m not going to have a permanent DVD drive on my wearable!) In looking around, I found two very cool sites:

VideoLAN is a project of students from the École Centrale Paris. They are developing some very cool Open Source tools …

InfoMatrix, or InMatrix, has a lot of information and tools for examining your DVD drive, setting Region Codes, and even new firmware that will add new functionality to your DVD drive!

Good review/analysis of UDDI …
I just finished reading this analysis of UDDI and I have to say that it is a very good description of what UDDI is, and what can be done with it. For those of you wanting to learn more about UDDI …

Very good post on privacy and identity in the digital world …
In our work on digitalme, we have done considerable research into digital identity, centralized storage, and various tracking techniques. This is a really good article which discusses some cool points. Mr. Smith has got it right … must making people aware of the possibilities …

digitalMASS: Preserving privacy. Data privacy has always been a topic that left me completely cold. Honestly, I just couldn’t get my bile riled over the notion that someone was tracking what I do online, where I buy gas with my Mobil Speedpass, or what I listen to with my RealNetworks software. Then I met Richard M. Smith. [Tomalak’s Realm]

Two XDrive articles in one week …

Windows XP is going to use XDrive …
It appears from this ZDNet article that Windows XP is going to be offering XDrive on the desktop … or advertising a partnership on the desktop. I’m wondering if this is being done with closed, proprietary protocols, or with any WebDAV (or other?) standard protocol and solution.

Another failure being designed before our eyes?
I am always amazed when these types of adventures begin. IMHO, I believe that they are doomed to fail.

First, their storage costs are *so* expensive … why would I pay ~$70/GB/Month for storage, when I can buy a 30GB harddrive at Costco for ~$140?

Second, their main costs are not involved in the storage … it’s the backbone network costs. They are having to pay for the bandwidth for user to send and retrieve data across the backbone of the Internet … to their centralized location.

The way that I believe that this is going to be solved is when every ISP get’s into the storage and caching market … they’ll realize that they can offer their users storage and backup services for very agressive prices … and they already own the bandwidth of the last mile to their users.

Xdrive Sees Outage, Shelves Free Storage for Fee System. The Santa Monica, Calif. provider of storage for end users experiences a brief outage and gives up on giving out free storage for a subscription-driven model geared toward businesses. [internetnews.com: Product News]

Who is going to pay these centralized guys these rates? If people do, I don’t think it will last … I think they are dead already. I’m looking at how this will relate to, and effect, our Novell iFolder solution? We are putting any corproation or ISP into this business. So if an ISP installs iFolder for their customers, they could be getting a chunk of this revenue …

Putting WYSIWYG into your web page …
There were a whole string of very useful HTML editing tools that were presented this day … and this is a very good article showing some cool stuff that can be done for editing and rendering HTML in a web page editor … check it out.

Need to add a WYSIWYG HTML editor to your Web-page? Try this “InsideDHTML” article out. Or use this product from Ektron. Or this Java applet from RealObjects. [scobleizer]

Way cool … an “XML Cooktop” for FREE!
This was a really good post that I found which points to a powerful tool for XML hackers. Our DirXML technology uses a variety of XML and XSLT related technologies, and this appears to be a really cool tool for editing these files. And as he says … best of all it’s free!

Are you building XML-centric sites? Check out the XML Cooktop which is a development environment for writing and testing XSLT style sheets, XML documents, DTDs, and XPATHs. Best of all it’s free! [scobleizer]

GeoLocation service … maybe a good fit for our 802.11b project …
It seems that an important aspect of the mobile Internet, and wearable computers, is relating physical world resources to our current location, or desired locations. There are a number of projects that I have found that provide, what I call, GeoLocation or GeoSpatial applications. This is a very impressive solution to address the location of physical world resources … and one that I might want to use!

Let’s say a user visits your product-centric Web site and then she wants to visit the store closest to her to buy it. How can you tell her where to go? You visit Know-Where.com and use their service. [scobleizer]

Very cool interactive web page color picker …
This was a very cool site and can be really valuable in creating color schemes for web pages and style sheets.

I’ve learned more this week about different color sites than I ever wanted to know. Here’s another cool site that lets you play interactively with color layouts to find just that right combination. [scobleizer]

A very cool article about teaching ‘ethics’ in school …
I really liked this CNN article about teaching ethics in schools. What is impressive to me is that people are starting to truly examine the role of teaching the ability to “distinguish” in schools. What I mean by this is that we could potentially teach children to really distinguish who they are being, and distinguish their behavior. Where I believe that the article, and the educators get sidetracked is when they attempt to define absolute right and wrong. Instead, IMHO, if they were to focus on distinguishing, and then consequences of actions, the rest would simply occur …

The growing number of public hot spots for 802.11b …
MobileStar is one of the more agressive commercial entities expanding the penetration of 802.11b wireless around the country. They have recently partnered with IBM to assist in the deployment. I am still questioning the business model, and think that our team is going to really have an impact on their efforts … keep your eyes open here for more news on our 802.11b project!

More detail on MobileStar’s national deployment plans from EE Times: this article explains in greater detail how MobileStar will proceed.

[80211b News]

Clothing as Solar Cells? Yep …
A friend of mine here at Novell, Jesse Pretorius, sent me this link that is an article about some research where fibers are being made which could be woven into fabric … allowing the fabric to generate power! This could be used for clothing, sails on boats, or almost anything cloth. This is a great breakthrough for the wearable computer fashion industry!

Great Interview with Dave Winer … and great philosophy …
I am thoroughly impressed by this interview, and the philosophy presented within. Dave always seems to have a great grasp of the possibility that conversations and communication are the root of all creation. He also understands the differences between centralized systems, and the distributed nature of the net. He has some good, IMHO, observations of the recent Microsoft announcements, and many of the new and developing standards. A good read!

Cool little administration and management tool …
This is a very cool architecture for a management and administration tool. It is a script based agent that can be easily configured to monitor a variety of sources, generate ‘alarms’, which can trigger a variety of scripted actions. Simple, yet elegant …

PIKT 1.13.0pre8 (Default). An innovative new systems administration paradigm. [freshmeat.net]

Very cool little Flash Design site …
I found this cool Flash site, ScreamDesign, through a Utah Business magazine. They have created a very cool browser based service called FlashBlaster to create and edit Flash animations and files. It’s a very cool idea, and I have created my first Flash animation for my web site!

All of the design and editing is done through the web, and you then download the finished product. I used one of the three ‘free’ templates, but they have a large number of additional templates. You can edit, experiment, and create all you want for free … and only have to pay when you go to download the finished product. I think it’s a very cool concept … creating a new market for artists to submit templates, and a simple interface for web designers to get Flash creations …