Blogs

R.I.P. -- Doug Fieger (The Knack)

It's been awhile since I posted my last blog entry. You might say I took a sabbatical from it during this past year in light of all the flux with the economy and several other challenges. But I've got my...

Mounting compressed folders / Looping back zip files

Big file systems make computers run more slowly.  This problem is most noticeable for laptops. On a project that I am currently working on, I am using multiple versions of three frameworks: The Flex SDK (source and asdoc), the MicroStrategy...

Search is the Web's fun and wicked problem

We may think of search as static and mature, but it's a tool in flux. Developments in mobile, augmented reality, and social graphs signal big changes ahead. In this Q&A;, "Search Patterns" author Peter Morville shows how experiments at the periphery and weird ideas will shape search's future. He also reveals the one semi-recent innovation that unlocked a watershed moment for search (it's not what you'd expect).

TOC Preview: The Future of Digital Textbooks

Technology is driving change in the way people teach, learn, and create. The impact of technology on teaching and learning in K-12, higher education, and professional learning has been profound,...

Four short links: 19 February 2010

How to Seasonally Adjust Data -- Most statisticians, economists and government agencies that report data use a method called the X12 procedure to adjust data for seasonal patterns. The X12 procedure and its predecessor X11, which is still widely used, were developed by the U.S. Census Bureau. When applied to a data series, the X12 process first estimates effects...

Photoshop Turns 20: Contemplating the Future with Adobe Project Managers

Photoshop Project Managers John Nack and Bryan O'Neil Hughes join O'Reilly author Deke McClelland and I for a discussion about the future of Photoshop on the 20th Anniversary of the application's release.

Boycott HTML5? - HTML5 and H.264: Video wants to be free

It looks to me that HTML5 needs to have a better story on allowing adequate plurality for <video> that does not marginalize FOSS (and boutique) developers, especially smaller poorer ones, sole players and hobbyists.

Living Stories can reinvent the article

Article-based content is limiting. It's static and can't capture the energy surrounding newsworthy events or interesting topics. That's why Google's Living Stories format -- released this week as an open source project -- holds so much promise. It can reinvent the form in a way that works with the web, not against it.

Got Tips for TOC Newbies?

This week I'll be posting some preview highlights about next week's (nearly sold out) TOC Conference in New York. While there's plenty of familiar faces on the attendee list for...

The Watering Hole - The Newest Addition to Our Cast

In case you were wondering, equines take 340 days...

Four short links: 18 February 2010

David Cameron, The Next Age of Government (TED Talk) -- Cameron's argument is that with open data and behavioural economics, we can offer policy preferences but let people make informed choices. Interesting that transparency and open data can be a bipartisan issue. Finding Ada -- pledge to blog about an inspirational woman in technology or science on March 24....

Microsoft's OOXML Extensions for Office 2010

Microsoft has pages out now which detail the extensions to OOXML they are using in Office 2010.

Hot and Cold in Tajikistan

Tajikistan has been rated the country least likely (of the former Iron Curtain or Eurasian countries) to be able to adapt to climate change. But, superficially, when you look at the annual mean temperatures, there seems to have only been very little change in the recorded 65 years: at most just over 1 degree in a couple places. Yet Tajikistan may be a good example that what is on average global warming may in fact have very different local effects. The point isn't the warming, the point is the change and how people can adapt.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas' TED Talk on Augmented Maps

Blaise Aguera y Arcas (creator of PhotoSynth, founder of Seadragon and now Architect of Bing Maps) gave a talk at TED last week. In it he showed off some of the latest Bing Maps has to offer. He demoed the fluid zooming capabilities based on Blaise's own Seadragon technology and the 3D capabilities provided by Silverlight. He also demoed...

A Live Edition for Learning Rails

One of the best things about Rails is that it's under constant development. With the Live Edition of Learning Rails, the book will be able to track that progress and give beginners better access to the latest and greatest Rails has to offer.

Understanding nonfunctional requirements

Understanding what non-functional requirements are, how they work, how to write them, and how to use them in real-life projects I recently posted a Q&A; about non-functional requirements on our Building Better Software blog. It's a follow-up to a popular...

TOC Preview: Ebooks Are Here (But Print Still is Too)

This week I'll be posting some preview highlights about next week's (nearly sold out) TOC Conference in New York. Much of the conversation in publishing today revolves around ebooks, digital...

Augmented reality and the ultimate user manual

The ARMAR augmented reality project out of Columbia University offers an intriguing glimpse into how AR and education may soon intersect. Instead of rifling through a manual or looking up information, an AR layer could guide you through a task. The creators of ARMAR talk about their work and its implications in this Q&A.;

The Watering Hole - Friendly Takeover Bid

Google: High Tech's version of a benevolent dictatorship....

Four short links: 17 February 2010

Off-the-shelf camera hacked to grab high-speed video (New Scientist) -- scientists used a chip from a home cinema projector to record 400fps on consumer video hardware. They put the chip, which has tiny moving mirrors, in front of the digital camera and it directs the incoming light sequentially over a grid of pixels in the digital camera, meaning that...

How I use Social Media: Part 3--Blogging

Recently, I've been writing about how I use Social Media. In Part 1, I talked about how I use Twitter. In Part 2, I talked about how I use Facebook and potential I see in Facebook for all of us...

TOC Preview: Getting the Reader's Perspective

This week I'll be posting some preview highlights about next week's (nearly sold out) TOC Conference in New York. One of the concerns we heard loud and clear from last...

170 years of tech book publishing, demonstrated

Some of the most fascinating technical writing I've encountered recently was written 170 years ago. How is that possible? And just how different was it?

The Convergence of Advertising and E-commerce

With hundreds of millions of users paying to download music, applications and ebooks on mobile phones, with reports of Zynga generating hundreds of millions of dollars from selling virtual goods in social games, with startups like Square making mobile payment systems the hot new startup category, it's clear that e-commerce is poised to supplant advertising as the business model of...

Fourt short links: 16 Feb 2010

Of Tandoori and Epicuration (JP Rangaswami) -- Curation is the process by which aggregate data is imbued with personalised trust. Siri -- a personal assistant iPhone app, like IWantSandy but with voice recognition. Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Institutional Repository -- great lessons for all open data projects. The reward structure established by each discipline largely...

Where 2.0 Mapping : Mobile : Local

The Where 2.0 conference program is almost complete. The focus is on the tech industry's advances in Mapping, Mobile and Local. Each of these areas are being treated equally and each will have its own afternoon track. Coming back this year we have great speakers such as John Hanke (Google), Jack Dangermond (ESRI), Ryan Sarver (Twitter), Danny Sullivan (Search...

Towards Event-Driven Cloud APIs

The traditional request/response API model that exists for nearly every single cloud provider API is a very wasteful model that eats up computing resources both with the cloud provider and with systems interested in monitoring for changes in the cloud infrastructure. Instead, cloud providers should move to an event-driven API model.

QOW: What is your definition of RIA?

Just over 2 years ago when we starting this project known as InsideRIA, I posed the question "What is RIA?" to a select group of InsideRIA contributors. Please revisit the original post at What is RIA? to see the responses....

Windows Phone 7 Preview Makes Waves

Microsoft provided an extensive preview of its upcoming replacement for the aging Windows Mobile platform at the Mobile World Congress convention in Barcelona, Spain today--and by most accounts, they've come up with a big winner.

Flash Player Mobile and Adobe AIR Mobile

In case you missed the announcement early this morning, Adobe has outlined their time line for getting Flash Player mobile and Adobe AIR mobile rolled out. Here are a few excerpts; "Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE - News) today announced advancements...

The Widening HTML5 Chasm

Recent claims that Adobe is blocking HTML5 are glaringly wrong, reflecting mostly the incompatibilities between the two organizations,the W3C and WHATWG, sharing the process.

RIA Radio - Episode 8: Jesse Warden

Jesse Warden, A Flash/Flex Consultant and active community member, joins us to talk about his experience and outlook on consulting. RIA Experts Leif Wells and Elad Elrom also joined us. Follow RIARadio on Twitter to find out who will...

IntelliJ Idea9 ActionScript 3/Flex Workflow Part 1

IntelliJ Idea9 ActionScript 3/Flex Workflow As far as ActionScript 3/Flex IDEs go, IntelliJ is the new kid on the block. It is cross platform, is not built on Eclipse, and has some of the best code writing/refactoring features I have...

Four short links: 15 February 2010

Tale of Android Phone in Earthquake in Haiti -- guy in Haiti with working unlocked Android phone and Internet connection used it to channel Facebook "save me" requests to rescuers. (via Andy Linton) Microsoft Operating Income by Division -- the title says "income", the graph says "profit", but either way the online division of Microsoft isn't healthy. (Love the...

Architectural Patterns

Uwe Zdun and Paris Avgeriou's paper "Architectural Patterns Revisited - A Pattern Language"

Software patterns as a symptom of failure? - If you have to use them, maybe your programming language is just not powerful enough?

The most interesting comment I have read recently about the pattern language movement is the comment that Gang of Four style software patterns are only necessary when the programming system does not have adequate power or capabilities to directly state the pattern.

Innovation Lessons in "Start-Up Nation"

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle investigates the social, historical, and psychological traits that produce extraordinarily creative people--and significantly, creative people who can translate their cranial light-bulbs into technologies with the potential to change the world.

A Dream About Augmented Reality Fiction

Last night I dreamed that one of my authors (no name or face that I can recall - one of the phantasms created by the half-waking imagination) had sold me rights to a novel he'd written, and was eager for me to publish it as an ebook. It turned out that the "ebook" we were developing was actually a movie...

For Valentine's Day think Intangible

Broken Hearts: How Valentine's Day causes global warming View more presentations from Raffi Krikorian. On Valentine's day millions are spent on cards and candies. Last year Twitter engineer Raffi Krikorian gave an Ignite talk on where all of these goods (cards, chocolate, jewelry) come from and this day's impact on the Earth. It has a simple message: Give something...

Goldilocks and the iPad

Despite what people seem to be saying, I'm really not hating on the iPad. I'm just disappointed that it's not the breakthrough device it could have and should have been. So here's a little fable inspired by Grimm's Fairy Tales about why a compromise in between "too big" and "too small" isn't always "just right."

Lightning Demos and Ignite!: Micropresentations at TOC 2010

At the first three TOC Conferences, we held evening "Lightning Demo" sessions for brief product pitches and short-form presentations. The constraints of a brief time slot often spur impressive creativity...

The Watering Hole: All the Cops in the Donut Shop Say Ay Oh Whey Oh

So far, most of the interesting mashups have been between government provided data. But when you start mashing government data with other sources, I bet some interesting correlations might emerge.

Flex 4 Quick Tip - View States Rock

I've been involved with several Flex 4 projects recently, and I wanted to share some thoughts and a quick tip when using Flex 4 view states. First off, they rock. They are much easier to use than previous iterations of Flex.

Cyber warfare: don't inflate it, don't underestimate it

Jeffrey Carr, author of "Inside Cyber Warfare," discusses the current state of cyber attacks -- the major players, the hot spots, the huge problems, and the realistic solutions. He also reveals the one target that keeps him up at night.

Data not drugs

We have access to more health information now than any time in history, yet this deluge of medical data may sometimes make health decisions more difficult. The Internet has opened a Pandora’s Box of data that can easily overwhelm us. We need a way to process all this information to assist us in making better healthcare decisions. Sifting through...

What Does Publishing 2.0 Look Like? Richard Nash Knows

Traditionally, writers wrote, editors edited, publishers published, retailers sold, and reader read. But in the age of the Kindle, e-books, author web sites and comment boards, all the roles are becoming fuzzy. Richard Nash has started a company called Cursor, which is trying to pioneer the idea of social publishing, specifically to try and address some of the changes that technology is bringing to the industry. He'll be speaking about Cursor at O'Reilly's Tools of Change in Publishing conference later this month.

The Most Efficient iPhone Developers

Last week marked the first time the U.S. iTunes store had over 150,000 apps available. Close to 31,000 different developers (or "sellers") were responsible for those apps, with many offering one to five apps, while a few offered over a hundred different apps. Which developers consistently produce top-selling apps? I examined the percentage of apps produced by a developer that...

Four short links: 11 February 2010

Mimo Monitors -- USB-powered external monitors for your laptop or desktop, and you can daisy-chain them for multiple external monitors. Opens the possibility of task-specific monitors (one for chat, one for email, one for shell, one for code, ...). Monitors are 7" (800x480) and there's even a touchscreen option. (via James Duncan) The Secrets of Malcolm Gladwell -- how...

International Amateur Scanning League

The International Amateur Scanning League is an experiment in crowd-sourced digitization with a goal of making more broadly available 1,500 DVDs from the National Archives and Records Administration.

Using ColdFusion 9 ORM in Flex 4

In the construction of this article I utilized ColdFusion Server 9 as the application server and the database was created using MySQL. The development tools used were Flash Builder 4 with ColdFusion Builder plugin and Bolt CFC Generator plugin. A...