Monthly Archives: June 2005

Skype … ready for prime-time

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Years ago (wow … almost 10 years ago!) I was experimenting with voice and video over IP using products like WebPhone, CU-SeeMe, and NetMeeting. 
It was a blast … and all using 14.4kbps dial-up modems!  This is
what really drove me to upgrade modems through the 28.8kbps, and then
to the 56kbps modems.  All of these products seemed to fizzle
during the Tech Boom, and also went away during the Tech Crash.

Sometime during the last year I installed an early copy of Skype
and was impressed … it was pretty raw, IMHO, but it was on the right
track.  Well … as of a couple of months ago I upgraded and have
been continuing to track the progress.  Skype is now looking
really good … I am thoroughly impressed.

What really got me over the edge was using Skype with work.  At
Agilix Labs we are dealing with Universities that are all over the planet,
and I found that many of the schools from Asia are requesting all
“conference calls” to be done using Skype.  I had a call last week
that was over one hour and forty-five minutes long … with two people
in Singapore, one in California, and two of us in Utah.  It was
clear, and free.  I have now added Skype as a permanent service on
my desktop!

Next-gen Augmented Reality

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This is something that Ray Kurzweil can only love to see. This is
a facinating article that talks about a patent that Sony filed … but
the coolest thing is that it is all about neural stimulation from
outside of the skull. If you can cause neural stimulation, then
you can cause neural activity … which a human can now “experience” as
though it were a real experience. This is a huge step forward in
the next generation of augmented reality. Don’t try to stimulate
the senses … just go directly to the brain!

Sony patent takes first step towards real-life Matrix.
Sony has patented a device that fires pulses of ultrasound at the head
to modify firing patterns in targeted parts of the brain, creating
“sensory experiences” ranging from moving images to tastes and sounds.

It could allow for movies and compute… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

What? I own my identity? You’re kidding …

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I’m way behind on reading and posting, and now I’m playing
catch-up. I have been so busy with my new “full time” job, along
with working on three different start-ups. Oh yeah … and with a
family. 🙂

So this post caught my eye, just because Jim Kobielus would say
something so outrageous in my opinion. Anyone who has readm my
First Axiom or Second Axiom will immediately know that there is no
way that I could ever agree with this kind of statement:

Each person is the only legitimate owner of their
identity, all manifestations of that identity, and all associated
identity attributes.

What? Are you kidding? What a self-centered perspective of the world! Your identity is completely given
to you. It was created and attributed to you by someone else, or
some other organization. There is always someone else who knows
this information about you, since they are the one(s) who gave it to
you! Our identity is an aggregation of perspectives of us, given
to us by the communities that we belong to. We can een have
different and conflicting identity attributes at the same time …
because we can be members of different communities simultaneously and
each of them can offer differing perspectives.

I believe that one of the biggest hurdles that is impacting the
successful creation and deployment of Identity Management Solutions is
this complete misunderstanding of the origins of our identity. I
can understand the “feel good” nature of a comment like this, but as I
disassemble the statement it all collapses around one core point …
that a “person is the only legitimate owner of their identity.”
If my identity is given to me by some community, how I can I be the
owner of it? I am the recipient of it … I have a community
pointing their finger at me saying that it is true and accurate … I
even have to refer anyone asking for verification back to that
community to have it proven.

It might be true that I would like
to have as much control as possible, but there are other people who
already know this information. In fact, there is a whole load of
identity information that I give away simply by being available for
public observation. Any of the other attributes are all ones that
I get from elsewhere … I am told what my identity is by someone else
… and that person or community is the owner of that observation.

I’ll even go further … since I’ve been wanting to write about this:
No person has a reputation as
an absolute. All reputation is generated as an observation by
another. All reputation is relative to some other person or
community. A reputation is something that is said about you …
you don’t have it.

Anyhow … Jim … we disagree on this note. I get that you might
like this, or want it, as you feel that this would give you some level
of security … but you don’t own any of your identity.

Who owns the attributes?. Jim Kobielus has jumped fearlessly into the fray of trying to define the normative principles of identity,
by synthesizing the proposals of some others in this space. It’s a well
thought out piece, with some excellent ideas and only one major flaw.
Unfortunately, that flaw comes at the very top of the stack when Jim
states:

Each person is the only legitimate owner of their
identity, all manifestations of that identity, and all associated
identity attributes.

…

But read the rest of Kobielus’ note for some interesting ideas. [The Virtual Quill]

Agilix GoBinder and plug-ins

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At Agilix Labs where I am working, we are about to introduce the second
generation of our GoBinder product.  GoBinder is a “digital
notebook” or “digital planner”.  It provides a variety of contact
management and binder/organizer functionality.  Our second
generation is a major rewrite of the product as we are moving
completely to a “plug-in” architecture.  With these changes we
will open up GoBinder to unlimited extensions and possibilities.

Now Agilix, and any developer, can create new tabs (or pages) within
GoBinder that will provide new functionality.  In fact, all of the
existing GoBinder functionality has been rewritten as plug-ins … so
GoBinder itself is truly becoming like an empty binder, providing the
basic structure to load and run plug-ins which provide all of the
end-user value.  I am really looking forward to the completion of
this version as it will open GoBinder as a true platform for
educational, business, and entertainment plug-ins.

While reading on-line I came across this great article by one of the
members of the Eclipse project.  It is about plug-in
architectures and many of the issues that have to be dealt with. 
It’s a great primer for anyone wanting to learn more about software
plug-ins and plug-in architectures.

On Plug-ins and Extensible Architectures [Slashdot:]

Tablet PC Choices

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Well … I held off my purchasing choices until the new HP Tablet PC
shipped.  It’s now shipping and two of the folks here at Agilix Labs
have bought them … and really like them.  If course now
IBM/Lenovo is about to ship one also …

I’m thinking that I still like the HP … but then I haven’t done my
homework on the IGM/Lenovo unit yet.  The one thing that might
sway my choice is screen resolution.  I’ve found that I have grown
to really enjoy the higher resolution of my Dell latop.

I know this … if I choose the HP on Monday I’ll have it in my hands before the week end!

Updated RadioAtomBridge v3.1

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There have been a number of reported bugs in the Radio-Atom Bridge Tool
that I have fixed as of last night … and so I have posted the RadioAtomBridge Tool v3.1
which fixes two core bugs.

  1. There was a dependency on another tool which I have removed for
    now. This call simply added some enhanced formatting of posts,
    and I can probably reincorporate this in the future if you have that
    tool installed, but for now I simply removed the call to that function.
  2. There also was a bug in the editing of a post. This has
    also been fixed … with one caveat. In the original
    ManilaBloggerBridge Tool there is a limit that you can only edit your
    post on the day that you created it. I’m not sure why this is,
    but I did not want to make too many changes at once … so this limit
    is still in place.

There are still a couple of issues that I want to resolve, however I am
sticking to testing the core functionality for right now!

Configuring Radio Userland to mirror posts to Blogger.com

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The Radio Userland Atom Bridge Tool is designed to allow anyone using Radio
Userland an easy way to mirror posts to any Blogger.com or Blogspot.com
blog, using the Atom API. This tool is based on prior work from
other developers – Dave Winer and Steve Hooker – who wrote the
ManilaBloggerBridge and xManilaBloggerBridge respectively.

The installation is straight forward and should require very little
effort overall. There are a few key points to understand about
how this tool operates:

  • Once it is installed, you will configure the tool using the Radio Userland Tools link on the Home Page.
  • The tool will not mirror posts
    from your blog home page to Blogger … only posts to categories are
    mirrored. This is on purpose so that you can selectively post to
    your Blogger blog by using categories. If you want a post to go
    to your home page, and to a Blogger blog, then simply create a category
    and always check both your home page and that category when posting.
  • This tool ought to work with any other Atom API compliant
    server. Give it a try, if it fails then come back here and
    comment or complain. If you provide enough information I’ll see
    if I can take a look at it and get it working.
  • NOTE:
    There is still one dependency on another tool from Steve Hooker – the
    backLogAllRSS Tool. You will have to go to his backLogAllRSS web page and download a copy
    of this tool, and install it in Radio.

Ok … so how to get started. First, go and download the RadioAtomBridge Tool.
Once you have it downloaded, copy it into the Radio UserlandTools
folder on your computer. On Windows systems, this is usually the
Program FilesRadio UserlandTools. I’m not real sure where this
folder is on a Mac. When you copy the tool into this directory,
give it a minute or so and the tool will be installed.

Next, you’ll want to go to the Radio Userland Home Page, and then click the Tools
menu. You ought to see a new tool called the
RadioAtomBridge. Make sure that the checkbox to the left of the
name is checked. If it is not, then check the box to enable the
tool and Submit the page. If the tool is enabled then the name
RadioAtomBridge will be a highlighted link … click it.

You will now be presented with the configuration page. You will
see each category and a checkbox where you can enable that category to
be mirrored. The first three configuration fields are already
configured for Blogger.com, so you only need to update the Blog ID,
your Blogger username, and password.

To get your Blogger Blog ID, go to Blogger.com and log in. On the
Dashboard, click on the name of the blog that you want to configure in
Radio. If you now look at the URL in the address bar of your
browser you will see a URL like:
http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=99999999

… your Blog ID
is the number at the end . Your Blogger username and password ought to be
obvious.

Lastly … do not check the box about Manila sites. I’m probably
going to remove this option as it is an older feature of the
ManilaBloggerBridge.

Once you have entered all of these settings, Submit the page and your
changes will be recorded … and you’ll be ready to start
posting. Go back to your home page … write a post … check the
category that you configured. After you have posted, go to the
Radio Userland Events page and look for the indication that the post to Blogger occurred. You can also go back to the RadioAtomBridge
page and scroll down to your category. There should now be some
statistics about the post, and possibly an error message if there are
problems.

So far it works for me … I’m going to keep testing and might have
some updates. Good luck and I hope that someone finds this
valuable!

Testing my RadioAtomBridge Tool

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This is simply a test post from Radio Userland
… to see how my fixes work …

It’s the Eric Rice show on Engadget.

Eric Rice has too much fun with Flickr. Is this why Yahoo bought Flickr? Heh.

Eric is doing the new Engadget podcast.
(Lenn and Phil have moved over to Make). I see people are giving him
heck because he isn’t as big a geek as Phillip Torrone is. Well, duh.
Eric has his own style, though, that’ll be endearing to lots of people.

Just talk smack about gadgets and it’ll be fine.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Adam Curry … the Father of Podcasting!

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I know that this is somewhat old news … almost two months … but I
am now catching up on my blogging after completing the first cut of my
new tool. (Yeah … I know … I’m talking so much about a stinkin’
tool for posting to Blogger and Blogspot from Radio Userland
!)

I thought this was a great post for Tablet PC vendors when you get a guy like Adam Curry
to start using Windows on a Tablet PC.  For those who don’t know,
Adam has been hanging out with the Father of Blogging – Dave Winer –
for a long time, and can be considered – IMHO – the Father of
Podcasting.  I’m glad to see him using a Tablet PC and look
forward to more of his writing about it!

If you can’t join them….
Just so you know, I’ve been assimilated. I’ve been learning how to use
my new tablet PC for the past two days. I have to admit, pretty spiffy!
Not only that, but this windows stuff runs some pretty interesting
software. I’m digging the intricacy of sparks. [Adam Curry’s Weblog]