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!

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.