Monthly Archives: July 2005

Phil’s CTO Roundtable Breakfast

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OOPS!  I forgot to complete editing this before posting …  🙂
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It’s that time again … and I got here on time. This morning was
again Phil Windley’s CTO Roundtable. There is a good group of
people here, and as usual the conversation went from topic to topic.

  • Cogito – we talked about a local company here (since some ex-Cogito people are present)
    and what is going on. There has been a huge management shift at
    Cogito, and a lot of people left. This lead to a discussion about
    the confusion of the thinking behind the investors choices.
  • Google
    – we spent some time talking about Google, and where they are
    lately.  I think Phil brought up that they recently added RSS
    Feeds to their Google Personal Hompages.
  • WiFi – We then took a turn into the discussion of whether
    long-term WiFi will be free or not.  Or, maybe we’ll see that both
    will exist?  I think that overall, it was agreed that both are
    going to be around … there will be some folks who want to offer free,
    and others where you get what you pay for.

I had to step out and take a phone call with some researchers at
CMU. At Agilix we are now working with a large number of
researchers in eLearning and Tablet PCs in education. CMU is
doing some amazing work in eTextBooks, etc.

  • Anti-Spam and e-mail addresses – we talked about the various
    services that people are using to create unique e-mail addresses for
    everyone that they give their e-mail address to. Some folks are
    using PostFix, I use Qmail, someone brought up PookMail.
  • We ventured into storage issues … terabyte hard disks, SanDisk’s new products, and how to backup all of this data.
  • Wireless
    in the home – there was talk about whether fiber in the home, or CAT-5e
    in the home, is still going to be big … or can we go all wireless
    within the home?  I really think that all of the interference
    issues will be solved … wireless rocks.
  • Jumping
    on Open WiFi – I brought up the 2600 article, that I read, about all of
    the data and identity information that was gathered from someone on an
    open AP.  It’s amazing in this day and age how little people
    understand about security and encryption.  This led to the next
    topic …
  • Using clear protocols – we talked about
    how little SSL is being used, and how many people and company still use
    “open” SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 for e-mail!  Crazy!
  • Phil brought up Make magazine – mini Linux server … very cool stuff!

That was about it … I did bring up that I am looking for some
PHP5/MySQL talent, and also that Agilix Labs is looking for some C# .NET
developers who want to make some side money creating plug-ins for our
new GoBinder SDK.

Overall … a great meeting as usual!

New Agilix Support Forums

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As we continue to accelerate towards our new release of GoBinder 2006,
and the GoBinder SDK, there are numerous new things happening around
here at Agilix.  First … I’m about to get my new Tablet PC …
the HP tc4200. 
One of the other people working here got one and loves it … he said
it was worth the wait.  I’m hoping that I’ll have it soon …

The other thing is the “birth” of the Forums @ Agilix Labs
… the new support forums for GoBinder, InfiNotes, and everything
Agilix.  I’ve been working on the installation and experimenting
with the various forums software, and we finally just got going with
something.  If you happen to visit and register, please get me
some feedback … I’m working to make this a useful place for the
exchange of information and ideas!

P.S. We’re cranking out another build of GoBinder 2006 today … it’s amazing to see the product really coming together!

Entering a dark age of innovation?

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My friend Dave Cline sent me this link to a New Scientist article titled Entering a dark age of innovation.
As I have been following this space of accelerating change for some
time now, I have to say that I am not in agreement with much of the
analysis presented by Jonathan Huebner. The best comment that I
saw was by Ray Kurzweil who stated:

But artificial intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil – who formulated the
aforementioned law – thinks Huebner has got it all wrong. “He uses an arbitrary
list of about 7000 events that have no basis as a measure of innovation. If one
uses arbitrary measures, the results will not be meaningful.”

I believe that it goes even beyond this … his measurements using
population make a gross assumption about segmentations in
population. He seems to feel that raw numbers on global
population growth should somehow be mirrored by innovation. This,
IMHO, confuses the genetic basis of equality in human design, with the
environment and community within which to create what would be
recognized as “modern innovation”. With so much third world
population growth, I do not believe that you can expect to see a
proportional amount of “modern” innovation.

I am constantly reminded by this when I watch Link TV and see programs like this one about Peanuts … and the fact that in this country a simple peanut sheller can make a huge difference in their life. Likewise in this program, River of Sand,
I was amazing to be reminded of the daily life of these people … and
is Huebner trying to say that they are expected to create their
proportional amount of measureable innovation??

I believe that what we are seeing is more of what is called the “great
divide” … the “haves and have nots” … the continuing division of
those who are leveraging the tools of the modern world, and those who
have little immediate requirement or ability to access them.

As I was reminded this last weekend, all people are “created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” For a
huge portion of the worlds population this has nothing to do with
modern innovation.