the.Inevitable.Org/anism

Tim writes about the “undercurrents” of innovation …
We all hear about Open Source and it’s implications, however Tim is really doing something about it. It is great that he and his organization are taking on the role of assisting in the communication of new and innovative ideas coming from the “trenches” … these are the ideas that are the real “undercurrents” that will emerge as the next big thing.

In this article, he does a great job of outline many of the new innovations are are coming …

O’Reilly Network: Inventing the Future. Tim O’Reilly. But the most interesting part of the story is still untold, in the work of hundreds or thousands of independent projects that, like a progressively rendered image, will suddenly snap into focus. That’s why I like to use the word “emergent.” There’s a story here that is emerging with increasing clarity. [Tomalak’s Realm]

The quest for lower power, heat, and noise!
This is some very useful material that outlines how to reduce the noise of your computer system … and I found a lot of the information useful to reduce the power, heat, and noise for my wearable computers. I’m going to check into some of these parts …

Building a mini- ‘quieter-than-a-whisper’ linux pc. After building a quiet, but by no means super quiet computer i still wanted to get to the point of ‘quieter-than-a-whisper’. Not wanting to go the route of water cooling or putting the computer in the basement and running the cables through the floor,the next best solution is to try for a cooler running processor, which will not require as many fans. [kuro5hin.org]

A wireless, remote monitor for my wearable computer?
This looks very interesting … a wireless LCD monitor that I might be able to use with my wearable computer! It’s still slightly pricely … but this is going down a very cool path. I could even maybe use VNC to connect to my wearable and simply remote display the machine.

This really starts to get wild … this is the first time that I have thought that I might one day carry multiple wearable computers with me … maybe one Windows and one Linux … and remote display into both of them … very cool!

Wireless Monitors? [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

SOAP Service Directories … appearing on the net …
The appearance of more SOAP Service “registries” or “directories” reminds me of watching the early Internet as the first web sites appeared that listed other web sites on the net … the beginnings of Yahoo!, Excite and Lycos … and many that are no longer around. What we are now seeing is the “web services” version of this … the beginnings of sites where software can look for software … the beginnings of something Kurzeilian …

http://www.mysantra.com has a good Web Services search engine, which does include all services found in UDDI, SalCentral, and XMethods. You can even compare the services against each other for properties such as Uptime availability (reliability), operations, etc.

[Robert Scoble: Scobleizer Weblog]

Good e-mail client enhancements …
A list of some very good ideas for e-mail improvements …

The CNET staff dreams of a perfect email client.  [Scripting News]

Group Outlines … an interesting idea …
This is a cool variation of Esthers article about the conference blogging. The idea that a group of people would build an over all conference outline in real-time … multiple people contributing to the construction of an outline of notes … is very cool. I like this idea of a new form of potential collaboration …

Masukomi sees a connection between instant outlines and conferences.  [Scripting News]

Human forms of real-time telemetry …
This is an excellent article with a prime example of the future implications of mobile/wireless networking and various applications. Esther is writing about what occurred at one of her conferences when some of the attendees were blogging in real time during the conference … providing real-time “telemetry” about the conference proceedings.

We started to do this type of things years ago at Novell when we would use Instant Messaging and Chat during internal road-map review meetings. A large group of us were able to multiplex between the presentations and our group anaylsis without generating verbal side conversations. This also allowed us to ask questions and opinions between the members of our team to minimize the need to interupt the speaker.

All of this culminated with an application that I wrote called LiVote … for Live-Vote … that was an experiment in allowing a group of people to see a group of questions about a presenter or their presentation. Under each issue is a slider that allows each person to “vote” on that issue and rate it between 0 and 10. Below each slider is a bar graph that shows the “average” rating of all of the voters. So I can now be giving real-time feedback on my opinions … to my team … and potentially to the speaker!

I have thought about completing this application in a way that could be utilized at future conferences. Maybe I’ll have to bring it back to life and touch base with Dan Gilmore about it …

Esther Dyson on the connection between blogging and face to face conferences.  [Scripting News]

Faking videos … the future of “proof” and “evidence” …
I was recently at the Foresight Institute conference and saw a presentation by David Friedman. He was talking about the issues of technology and the justice system … and joked about the use of technology to create pictures and videos. (Visit this link and search for “Say It Ain’t So” …) As the technology evolves forward, it will be harder and harder to determine a “real” video from one that has been “created” … and this work is providing that we are already there. It is only a matter of time till we are going to be questioning more and more what we “see” with our own eyes!

*************************
At MIT, they can put words in our
mouths
May 15, 2002
*************************
MIT scientists have created the
first realistic videos of people
saying things they never said,
raising serious questions about
falsifying video and film images.
The MIT technology is the first that
is “video-realistic”: volunteers in
a laboratory test could not
distinguish between real and…

Growing interest in REAL digital identity …
After my experiences at Novell with digital identity, I quickly realized that it’s a tough vision to communicate without having the whole subject tainted with corporate profit making mentalities. What’s funny, is that those exact mentalities are what will prevent their architectures from ever being successful!

This is a very cool effort that I am going to be following, and that I am going to get involved in. Once digital identity moves outside of Novell, Microsoft, Sun, AOL, etc. it will be able to evolve in a more natural framework that mirrors reality.

RFC: Sponsored Feature Section on Digital Identity. I have a proposal for the site, that I’d like your comments and thoughts on. Jabber.com founder Andre Durand and ISPCON founder Phil Becker recently started a new website called DigitalIDWorld.com. K5er Adam Theo is also working with them, and thought that the subject of digital identity would be something other K5ers might have some interest in, and perhaps we could arrange some kind of syndication agreement. I talked to Andre and Phil a few times, and below is what we came up with. We all think it has a lot of potential, but as always, you make the final call as to what’s good for K5. So read on for the idea, and let us know what you think of it. [kuro5hin.org]

Still tough Wearable Computer marketplace …
I have been working with the new MA V form Xybernaut for a while now, and although I am impressed with the machine, I can see why Xybernaut is still experiencing problems. I know that ViA is supposed to be back in some form also … but it’s tough times for wearable computer vendors.

Xybernaut Slashes Workforce. Wearable device vendor Still expects growth [allNetDevices Wireless News]

And more on wireless networks …

Internetnews.com covers the public launches of Joltage and Sputnik: These companies are all about footprint. A thousand disparate hot spots are worth as much as a hotel chain? We’ll see.

[80211b News]

Looks like the WiFi networks are really a growing business interest …
I love seeing these articles … we’re still playing with our network project … just yesterday we got our LDAP, Authentication, and Gateway servers up and running in Salt Lake City! We’ll see how our ideas roll …

Several folks tried to sell me as news Joltage’s plan for announcing their software rollout. I’m confused about this. The rollout may be news, but without a footprint and with two competitors (SOHO Wireless and Sputnik), I’m not sure if this isn’t marketing by press release. Eleven days ago, I wrote about all three companies.

[80211b News]

More GPS and mapping software in Open Source …
There is more Open Source software appearing continuously that is experimenting with mapping and geographic visualization. This looks like one that has some nice features and capabilities. It is addressing 3D displays, and also the capabilites to access map data from sources that are being constantly updated. This last feature is one that I have been looking at for a while with some friends. It seems to me that I would want to be downloading and caching map data all the time as I travel and always be fetching the most up to date data … maybe even data that was created by friends or family!

gps3d 1.18. A GPS 3D visualization utility. [freshmeat.net]

Browsers still working on compatibility …
Lately I have been working with some very smart people working on browser user interface technologies. They have been teaching me huge amounts about the DOM standard, and the lack of browser compliance … or the differences in implementations. This is a good overview of some of the know issues …

Waiting for the DOM. Though great strides have been made towards the ultimate goal of a single DOM for all browsers, some implementation differences still remain. Guest author Kenneth Tibbetts provides some browser-specific scripting gotchas to watch out for. From the WebReference Update. 0315 [WebReference News]

Next generation cell phones …
This is a the coolest new cell phone that I have heard of! Wrist-watch cell phone, and it transmits the sound through the bones in your hand to your finger tip … so that you listen to the person you are talking to by putting your finger into your ear! Too cool …

Let Your Fingers Do The Talking [Nooface: In Search of the Post-PC Interface]

Peer to peer secure connections …
It is great to see more and more work on VPN solutions being developed in the public domain. I truly believe that these are the technologies that are going to provide a freedom in communications between communities and their members, communities and other communities, and between individuals.

LinVPN 2.4 (Stable). Allows you to create a VPN (Virtual Private Network) from Linux to Linux. [freshmeat.net]

Visualization of the collective brain …
I have always been a visual thinker … and so I always like to find solutions for producing visual representations of what is going on in the net. I worked for years in network management and still have ideas for solutions that would display the real activity going on in the infrastructure.

The more that I have been working on memetics and Web Services, the more I have started to look at how the real-time activities of “humans on the net” can be represented in a graphical manner.

This is a very cool article and web site that provides a very cool way to render the traffic of visitors at a web site.

Visualizing Crowds At Web Sites [Nooface: In Search of the Post-PC Interface]

Time between posting …
I am starting to learn that my weblog provides a good display of time for me. I can’t believe that it has been almost a month since I caught up on my back-log of reading, and made my last posts.

I have been having a lot of fun though … and am about to venture out and make some more changes to my blog page. I have been in contact with a few open source projects … working on some digital identity work, and getting NoCat working for our http://80211.net project. I also was able to buy and install a new keyboard on my laptop which is making typing a lot easier! I had started to learn whole new ways of typing when my left-hand CTRL and Shift keys started to fail.

Overall the last month has been a blast … I had a few trips on the road - New York to Chase Manhatten for work on a disaster recovery solution - Silicon Valley for the Foresight Institute Senior Associates Gathering and a series of analyst and partner meetings with Vultus. The more I have been working with Vultus the more I am learning about the implications of the Web Services revolution … giving me lots of ideas about the future.

I also ended up doing a couple of presentations on Wearable Computers … one for the State of Utah School systems “Test-out” Challenge talking to a lot of high school students from across the state … another for the Utah Computer Society. I’m also meeting with a variety of companies on my “mesh network” ideas … one that is implementing a last mile solution - UINetworks - and another making some inexpensive radios that will provide me with some peer-to-peer wireless that I have been looking for.

Lastly … I’m completing some work on my video/photo kiosk ideas, my wearables, and my location-based services applictions. Oh yeah … and I have a baby coming in September, so I have been learning a lot about what to expect with fatherhood!

It’s been a fun month … and it’s going to be a fun summer …