Racklabs TechTalk: CouchDB featuring Jan Lehnardt Part 1

Most data is not inherently relational. CouchDB takes this idea and provides a data storage model that easily accommodates modern applications’ needs. Instead of doing the equivalent of manual memory management in a database, splitting all data up...

Racklabs TechTalk: CouchDB featuring Jan Lehnardt Part 1 @ Yahoo! Video

KEATING ECONOMICS: John McCain & The Making of a Financial Crisis

Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web

Blogged and edited using Chrome. It's great! -- MG

Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web
Why is Google building a browser? A better question is, why did it take so long for Google to build a browser? After all, as Pichai says, "our entire business is people using a browser to access us and the Web."
"The browser matters," CEO Eric Schmidt says. He should know, because he was CTO of Sun Microsystems during the great browser wars of the 1990s. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know it, too. "When I joined Google in 2001, Larry and Sergey immediately said, 'We should build our own browser,'" Schmidt says. "And I said no."
It wasn't the right time, Schmidt told them. "I did not believe that the company was strong enough to withstand a browser war," he says. "It was important that our strategic aspirations be relatively under the radar." Nonetheless, the idea persisted — and rumors percolated. After a 2004 New York Times article quoted "a person who has detailed knowledge of the company's business" saying a browser was in the works, Schmidt had to publicly deny it.
But behind the scenes, the subject remained a running argument between Schmidt and the founders. As a kind of compromise, Google assembled a team to work on improvements for the open source browser Firefox, spearheaded by browser wizards Ben Goodger and Fisher. (Both had worked with Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind Firefox.) Another hiring coup came when Linus Upson, a 37-year-old engineer whose pedigree includes a stint at NeXT, signed up as a director of engineering. "This was very clever on Larry and Sergey's part," Schmidt says, "because, of course, these people doing Firefox extensions are perfectly capable of doing a great browser."
Sure enough, in the spring of 2006, the Firefox group began talking among themselves about designing a new app. They loved Firefox — but they recognized a flaw in all current browsers.

Google browser takes advantage of Apple Software

Google browser takes advantage of Apple Software

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (Reuters) - Google Inc's new browser software is designed to work "invisibly" and will run any application that runs on Apple Inc's Safari Web browser, company officials said on Tuesday.

The company said the new Web browser, dubbed Google Chrome -- a long-anticipated move to compete with Microsoft Corp, Mozilla Firefox and other browsers -- would be available for users to download on Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. EDT.

The public trial of the Google browser will be available in 43 languages in 100 countries, Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product management said at a news conference at the company's Mountain View, California headquarters.

"If you are Webmaster, and your site works in Apple Safari then it will work very well in Google Chrome," Pichai said.

Google Chrome relies on Apple's WebKit software for rendering Web pages, he said. It also has taken advantage of features of community developed browser Firefox from Mozilla Corp. Google is a primary financial backer of Mozilla. Google officials said Chrome's code would be fully available for other developers to enhance.

Why Amazon’s EBS Should Worry Data Centers

Why Amazon’s EBS Should Worry Data Centers
Om Malik, Thursday, August 21, 2008 at 5:30 AM PT Comments (7)
Related Stories

* Persistent Storage Boosts Amazon Web Services; Enterprise Ambitions
* Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO
* The Cloud Grows Up

Powered by Sphere

Amazon has announced Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), a persistent storage offering that can be used in tandem with applications using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With this move, it is turning up the heat on everyone from storage area network vendors, server companies and of course data center operators. Don’t be surprised if the company starts attracting corporations using its suite of web services.

With EBS, developers can deploy scalable solutions including relational databases, distributed file systems and Hadoop processing clusters. EBS is more adept for working with databases, as well apps that require a file system. You can now start and stop just like you would on a traditional physical server. This is a play for larger, corporate customers, a move that is long time coming.

First, some facts about the service:

* EBS volumes can be anwhere from 1 GB up to 1 TB.
* As a beta customer, you can create 20 EBS volumes with a total of 20 Terabytes.
* EBS costs storage plus I/O requests: $0.10 per GB per month & $0.10 per million I/O requests.
* EBS functionality is available via EC2 API using any number of tools, including command line and Elasticfox.

A great addition to Amazon EC2.

Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - Bring Us Your Data

A few months ago I talked about our plans to offer a persistent storage feature for Amazon EC2. At that time I indicated that the service was in a limited alpha release with a small number of customers. Since then the alpha testers have been putting the service to good use and have provided us with a lot of very helpful feedback.

As of today, the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is now open and available to all EC2 users.
EBS gives you persistent, high-performance, high-availability block-level storage which you can attach to a running instance of EC2. You can format it and mount it as a file system, or you can access the raw storage directly. You can, of course, host a database on an EBS volume. In fact, Eric Hammond has already written an article, Running MySQL on Amazon EC2 with Elastic Block Store.

Welcome! - TinEye

Welcome! - TinEye: "TinEye is an image search engine built by Id�e currently in beta. Give it an image and it will tell you where the image appears on the web."

tap tap tap ~ (Semi)Final numbers for July

We’ve finally received our financial reports for the month. At this time, we’re still missing some territories, such as Canada, but overall the US overwhelmingly makes up the bulk of the sales (>90%) so the final-final numbers won’t vary by much.

Where To?

• what it is: makes your iPhone behave more like a real GPS device by helping you find points of interest around you
• price: $2.99
• number sold: 24,094
• gross sales: $72,041.06
• net sales: $50,597.40
• more info: at the App Store

Tipulator

• what it is: the tip calculator that’s actually fun to use
• price: 99¢
• number sold: 3,168
• gross sales: $3,136.32
• net sales: $2,217.60
• more info: at the App Store

So the total sales for the month was $75,177.38 and after Apple’s cut, we ended up with a grand total of $52,815.

The sales are reported for the period of June 29th to August 2nd. But because the App Store opened July 10th, the period is actually 24 days. So over the course of those days we took in an average of around $2,200 per day.

Six Reasons iPhone Delivers Where Android Won t - Webmonkey

Six Reasons iPhone Delivers Where Android Won t - Webmonkey

While we wait, the question remains: is the operating system any good? You can bet Google’s existing mobile applications, like Maps, will work in parity with iPhone, Blackberry and Symbian equivalents (Even better, in some instances; The SDK includes a version of Google’s streetview feature unavailable in current software versions on other platforms). We’re pretty sure the thing will make a decent phone call. The browser looks to work just like a desktop browser, with all the typical mobile Safari-like zooms and taps. But can it compete with other current mobile software?

We’ve talked before about what Android might have that the iPhone won’t. Since Android has become a (semi) reality, let’s flip the script for a moment and take a look at what the iPhone has now which Android may be missing.

Apple: A better stock than Google? � mathewingram.com/work |

Apple: A better stock than Google? � mathewingram.com/work |

It’s become so commonplace now to think of Apple as a consumer products star — given the success of the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone — that I think we sometimes forget how far this company has come in just the past four or five years. Google has grown a phenomenal amount in that same span of time, with a share price that has increased five-fold, going from $100 to the current $500 level, and revenues that are now at $20-billion. Apple, however, makes Google’s growth look almost anemic by comparison: its shares have grown 10-fold, from about $16 to more than $170 at their current level, and revenue is at $30-billion.

ongoing � REST Questions

ongoing � REST Questions: "My goodness, there’s certainly a lot of REST talk these days. I’m partly responsible; Paul Krill and I had a long talk at OSCON and he chose to pull out my dissing WS-* for his title: Sun technologist: SOAP stack a ‘failure’. This led to an incredibly long discussion thread on Yahoo Groups’ (irritatingly-named) “service-orientated-architecture” forum. Damien Katz was another provocateur, firing off REST, I just don't get it and “The web is built on REST. Therefore REST is good” Bullshit. This provoked Dare Obsanjo to a burst of restrained pedagogy in Explaining REST to Damien Katz. Let me stir this pot with a few questions, some vaguely heretical in flavor."

Better than Photoshop & GIMP

Better than Photoshop & GIMP: "The new art program from microsoft brings revolutionary innovation and ease of use absolutely free!"

Robot Exclusion Protocol (Ftrain.com)

Robot Exclusion Protocol (Ftrain.com)

This is quite old (circa 2002) but astonishingly prescient.

I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower to find another one sitting near the drain. It was about 2 feet tall and made of metal, with bright camera-lens eyes and a few dozen gripping arms. Worse than the Jehovah's Witnesses.

“Hi! I'm from Google. I'm a Googlebot! I will not kill you.”

Information and energy at John Quiggin

Information vs Energy: "According to the US Internet Industry Association, the volume of information transmitted over the Internet backbone rose from 1.5 million GB (petabytes) in 1995 to 700 petabytes in 2006, or roughly a factor of 500 in 10 years. In comments, Ikonoklast reports a five-fold increase in global energy use over 50 years. Over the same period, Brad Delong estimates a tenfold increase in global output. That is, the rate of growth of information greatly exceeds (and leads) the rate of economic growth, while energy use has declined relative to output. This is unsurprising, given that no fundamentally new energy technology (except for the so-far unsuccessful nuclear power industry) has emerged in this time, while information technology has been repeatedly revolutionised."

Steve Jobs Admits MobileMe Launch Was A Failure : iSmashPhone

Steve Jobs Admits MobileMe Launch Was A Failure : iSmashPhone: "'It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,' he says. 'We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.'

'The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services,' Jobs says. 'And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.'"

tap tap tap ~ Donkeys and Pickaxes

tap tap tap ~ Donkeys and Pickaxes: "We’ve gotten our sales reports from Apple for the iPhone App Store. And we’re going to take a fairly bold step and share our numbers with you.

But first I want to give you a little background about me and why I decided to do this…"

Paris Hilton responds to McCain's Obama "Celebrity" ad

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Drizzle plans to wash away DBMS past | The Register

Drizzle plans to wash away DBMS past | The Register: "A new database management system (DBMS) designed for web applications and cloud computing could be the start of a new direction in DBMS development and, indeed, in software as a whole."

Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage

Excellent paper by Jeremy Elson and Jon Howell
of Microsoft Research

Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage: "The garage innovator creates new web applications which may rocket to popular success - or sink when the flash crowd that arrives melts the web server. In the web context, utility computing provides a path by which the innovator can, with minimal capital, prepare for overwhelming popularity. Many components required for web computing have recently become available as utilities.

We analyze the design space of building a load-balanced system in the context of garage innovation. We present six experiments that inform this analysis by highlighting limitations of each approach. We report our experience with three services we deployed in ``garage'' style, and with the flash crowds that each drew."

RConversation: Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorship

great article this:

RConversation: Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorship: "The guys running Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many other companies represented at the Fortune Brainstorm are the benevolent dictators of the global information and communications system. But can we assume they will always be benevolent?"

Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger � Blog Archive The Silicon Valley VC Disease �

Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger � Blog Archive The Silicon Valley VC Disease �: "First, our society’s most valuable audiences are getting iPhones. Last week when I was in Los Angeles, both of the famous architects I interviewed already had 3G iPhones.

Those two guys are HUGELY valuable for advertisers. They are representative. They aren’t the only ones.

But even better than the demographics that the iPhone is getting is the usage patterns.

See, I have two Nokia phones and a Microsoft Windows Mobile phone too. They all suck for using the Web. Fine for email and for texting, but really suck for using the Web.

Go see Google’s Vic Gundotra (he’s Vice President and runs a bunch of the teams that build things for mobile phones). He told me that usage on the iPhone is “off the scale” when compared to other phones.

Simply translated: people who have non-iPhone phones simply aren’t using them for anything other than email. This is easily verified. Sit next to a Blackberry user and watch what they do. I do that all the time. All you see them doing is email and light Web use. Now sit next to an iPhone user and watch what they do. Much more heavily used on photos, maps, Web, and video."

Here's a podcast that explains why, if I were David Hornik, I'd invest in iPhone apps and wouldn't worry about other platforms right now. (Later, yes,

Here's a podcast that explains why, if I were David Hornik, I'd invest in iPhone apps and wouldn't worry about other platforms right now. (Later, yes, but not now.) - FriendFeed: "“Here's a podcast that explains why, if I were David Hornik, I'd invest in iPhone apps and wouldn't worry about other platforms right now. (Later, yes, but not now.)”"

Talking Business - Apple’s Culture of Secrecy - NYTimes.com

Talking Business - Apple’s Culture of Secrecy - NYTimes.com
"But if ever there was a chief executive who ought to feel some responsibility to tell shareholders about his health, it is Steve Jobs. First of all, he is not like other chief executives — he is, instead, the single most indispensable chief executive on the planet. As Mr. Wolf nicely put it, “Apple is Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs is Apple.” He added, “I think the stock would drop 25 percent or more if he were to leave the company unexpectedly.” When investors whisper about Mr. Jobs’s health, it’s not just gossip they are indulging in — his health really matters to Apple’s future."

Anarchogeek: The ascendancy of Hacker News & the gentrification of geek news communities

Anarchogeek: The ascendancy of Hacker News & the gentrification of geek news communities

ongoing � Mobility Blues

ongoing � Mobility Blues: "These days, I’m gloomier and gloomier about the prospects for the mobile Internet; you know, the one you access through the sexy gizmo in your pocket, not the klunky old general-purpose computer on your desk."

Protocol buffers: the early reviews are in [dive into mark]

Protocol buffers: the early reviews are in [dive into mark]

Google (my current employer) has finally open sourced protocol buffers, the data interchange format we use for internal server-to-server communication. The blogosphere’s response? “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

Aaaaanyway…

Protocol buffers are “just” cross-platform data structures. All you have to write is the schema (a .proto file), then generate bindings in C++, Java, or Python. (Or Haskell. Or Perl.) The .proto file is just a schema; it doesn’t contain any data except default values. All getting and setting is done in code. The serialized over-the-wire format is designed to minimize network traffic, and deserialization (especially in C++) is designed to maximize performance. I can’t begin to describe how much effort Google spends maximizing performance at every level. We would tear down our data centers and rewire them with $500 ethernet cables if you could prove that it would reduce latency by 1%.

Besides being blindingly fast, protocol buffers have lots of neat features. A zero-size PB returns default values. You can nest PBs inside each other. And most importantly, PBs are both backward and forward compatible, which means you can upgrade servers gradually and they can still talk to each other in the interim. (When you have as many machines as Google has, it’s always the interim somewhere.)

Comparisons to other data formats was, I suppose, inevitable. Old-timers may remember ASN.1 or IIOP. Kids these days seem to compare everything to XML or JSON. They’re actually closer to Facebook’s Thrift (written by ex-Googlers) or SQL Server’s TDS. Protocol buffers won’t kill XML (no matter how much you wish they would), nor will they replace JSON, ASN.1, or carrier pigeon. But they’re simple and they’re fast and they scale like crazy, and that’s the way Google likes it.

BetaNews | Google releases its data encoding format to compete with XML

BetaNews | Google releases its data encoding format to compete with XML: "In an effort to solve the bulk and time-consumption problem when encoding large databases, Google developed its own alternative to XML. Yesterday, the company began evangelizing others to use it as an alternative to the industry standard.

There's an argument that open standards are only truly useful when one standard applies to any given category of service -- an argument that was raised in the matter of application formats. Now the broader category of data encoding -- handled nowadays by XML -- is about to receive a big challenge, ironically from the group perceived as the champion of open standards in Internet communication: Google.

Yesterday afternoon, Google publicly released documentation for a system it has been using internally, called Protocol Buffers, inviting others to use it as well. And in a surprising blog post, one of its own software engineers argued that its system was preferable to XML because it's less expensive to deploy, and can more easily scale up to very large databases."

Bit.ly: Please Use This TinyURL of the Future - ReadWriteWeb

Bit.ly: Please Use This TinyURL of the Future - ReadWriteWeb: "URL shorteners like TinyURL are a wildly popular way to share long links over email, IM, microblogging and other contexts. The millions of shortcuts that have been created through such services represent a huge opportunity to capture interesting data - but to date those opportunities have all just gone down the drain.

Bit.ly, a new URL shortening service from the innovation network Betaworks, is launching today with a staggering feature set for both end users and forward-looking developers."

APOD: 2008 July 5 - Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning

APOD: 2008 July 5 - Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning

Click image for the high resolution version

Explanation: Sometimes the sky itself is the best show in town. In January 2007, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught. The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes. Comet McNaught has now returned to the outer Solar System and is now only visible with a large telescope. The above image is actually a three photograph panorama digitally processed to reduce red reflections from the exploding firework.

Case-Hardened Web Badges: the Live Version - kentbrewster.com

Case-Hardened Web Badges: the Live Version - kentbrewster.com

Here's my presentation from the 2008 edition of Web 2.0, originally given at the crack of dawn, 8:30am, Wednesday, 23 April 2008.

Quite a bit more on the subject is available here:

TechCrunchIT � Blog Archive � A Million Businesses on Office Live While Generic Hosting Slides

A Million Businesses on Office Live While Generic Hosting Slides

At the same time today over at Pingdom they noticed that the search mind-share for ‘web hosting’ is continuing its downward trend. Generic hosting seems to be on it’s way out - the type of hosting that can be purchased from GoDaddy, 1&1 and many others where the basic plan offers a control panel, a shared host and some bandwidth.

Generic hosting is not only being replaced by services such as Office Live and Google Apps, but for personal user networks such as Wordpress.com and Blogger. For an SMB, there are a number of easy options available that require little development work and setup time with integration into other applications such as document management. The downward trend in generic hosting in favor of more specialized and integrated platforms will also definitely cut into the SMB web development market, as each of these solutions provide default templates that are easily branded and customized with a corporate identity.

Identi.ca: May A Million Twitters Bloom - ReadWriteWeb

Identi.ca: May A Million Twitters Bloom - ReadWriteWeb: "Identi.ca is a new microblogging service that launched today - but it's not just another also-ran. The service is an Open Source, CreativeCommons framework for a distributed network of federated microblogging services.

If you've become interested in the paradigm changing model of communication popularized by Twitter but have been frustrated by Twitter's frequent down time or other shortcomings - then Identi.ca could be for you."

YouTube - Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question

YouTube - Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question

Downgraded to Firefox 2.0

Well I gave Firefox 3.0 a good run but decided to stay with Firefox 2.o for now. Some of the reasons for this include:

1. Stability FF3.0 is the first browser since Netscape Communicator to crash on my machine daily.
2. Compatibility FF3.0 just doesn't log into GMail as easily or remember my password for as long. Inevitable a god number of add-in broke. GMail kept having AJAX issues which went away when I downgraded.

I still prefer FF over other browsers and will check on 3.0 from time to time but basically for my purposes I think 3.0 aint quite done yet.

Tagneto: Mobile Development

Tagneto: Mobile Development

I was recently asked about my experiences making TinyBuddy IM. Here are my very biased thoughts about it and mobile development in general.

Server-side JavaScript on the Java Virtual Machine (Google I/O Session Videos and Slides)

Server-side JavaScript on the Java Virtual Machine (Google I/O Session Videos and Slides): "Server-side JavaScript on the Java Virtual Machine
Steve Yegge (Google)

After over a decade in the browser space, JavaScript is making a surprise move into the server programming space. Mozilla Rhino is turning JavaScript into a compelling option for Java programmers. Will JavaScript be the next server-side programming language? In this talk I will do a deep dive into Rhino's technology, and I'll demonstrate some of its many uses in server-side computing."

YouTube - Google I/O 2008 - Underneath the Covers at Google

YouTube - Google I/O 2008 - Underneath the Covers at Google: "Underneath the Cov I/ers at Google: Current Systems and Future Directions
Jeff Dean (Google)"

Powering a clean energy revolution

Powering a clean energy revolution: "RE<C (Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal)

Clean and affordable energy is a growing need for our company, so we’re excited about launching RE<C, a strategic initiative whose mission is to develop electricity from renewable sources cheaper than electricity produced from coal. Initially, this project to create renewable energy cheaper than coal will focus on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, and enhanced geothermal systems – but we’ll explore other potential breakthrough technologies too.

We’re busy assembling our own internal research and development group and hiring a team of engineers and energy experts tasked with building 1 gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. (That’s enough electricity to power a city the size of San Francisco.) Google’s R&D effort will begin with a significant effort on solar thermal technology, and will also investigate enhanced geothermal systems and other areas."

Google IO 2008 Conference Videos

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.: "Playlist: Google I/O 2008
Description: Videos of sessions from Google I/O 2008."

Gears API Blog: Appcelerator gives you Gears functionality out of the box

Gears API Blog: Appcelerator gives you Gears functionality out of the box: "First, for those that haven't heard of Appcelerator, it is an open source 'RIA' development toolkit that focuses on rich clients talking to services on the backend. You can think of it somewhat as a Flex-like framework built with Open Web technology.

We are seeing an interesting trend. At first, frameworks would wrap Gears semantics in something that makes sense for their audience of developers, which is great.

Appcelerator though does something a little different. It uses Gears under the hood to make your existing Appcelerator based application a better user experience."

New World Notes: Metaverse Milestone: Interoperability Between Second Life And Open Sim Virtual Worlds

Today at around 11:00am, according to Zha Ewry, a long hoped for landmark was reached: a couple Linden Lab staffers teleported with Zha from the Second Life grid... into Open Sim, the open source spinoff of SL. They came only as avatars, without inventory or attributes, and therefore, appeared as "Ruth", SL's default bug avatar. Even so, it was still the first instance of interoperability between one virtual world and another. "Next steps," writes Zha, who runs the Architecture Working Group, "will include better syncing with the OpenSim environment, handling teleport in and our requests, and then starting in on how to fetch assets from the test grid." It's a small step, but it opens up worlds of possibility.New World Notes: Metaverse Milestone: Interoperability Between Second Life And Open Sim Virtual Worlds

Webtop Watch: Adobe Launches Acrobat.com and Releases Acrobat 9 (With Flash).

Webtop Watch: Adobe Launches Acrobat.com and Releases Acrobat 9 (With Flash).

Continuing its push to become a major provider of Webtop software, Adobe is releasing two new products on Monday: Acrobat.com and Acrobat 9. Adobe’s Webtop arsenal already includes the recently launched online version of PhotoShop and its online media player, Adobe TV. Acrobat.com is another big step towards bringing more desktop-like experiences to the Web. “It is our intent to blur a lot of the lines of the past,” says product manager Erik Larson.

Acrobat.com—Online Word Processing, Meetings, and File Sharing

Acrobat.com is a combination of three recently launched online services: Adobe Brio (online meetings), Adobe Buzzword (online word processor), and Adobe Share (online file sharing). Thus with the public beta launch of Acrobat.com, Adobe is taking on Google Docs, Microsoft Office Live Workspace, WebEx, and GoTo Meeting—all at the same time.

Buzzword is now integrated into Acrobat.com as the default word processor. (I reviewed Buzzword and Share when they first launched last March). Multiple people can edit a document and leave comments. Tabs along the bottom representing different people show you who has accessed the document most recently and their status (author, reviewer, etc.). It paginates documents, supports all kinds of fonts, and lets you create the closest equivalent to a PDF that is possible online.

All the documents on Acrobat.com are organized in what up until now has been Adobe Share. The document and file-sharing service now offers five gigabytes of free storage, and lets you embed documents in a widget on other sites across the Web. (I’ve put an Adobe PDF widget at the bottom of this post). This last feature should worry startups like Scribd and DocStoc, which are based entirely on the ability to upload and share documents in a similar fashion.

Finally, my favorite part, Acrobat.com includes Brio, which is a light version of Adobe Acrobat Connect. It lets up to three people have online meetings for free, with screen sharing, desktop video, voice conferencing, chat, white-boarding. You can add in a regular toll line for a fee. Anyone with a Mac is going to love this. Whenever I get a virtual demo, I prefer to do it through Adobe Connect because WebEx and GoTo Meeting sometimes don’t work with my Mac. And Adobe’s Flash viewer simply looks better.

Adobe Launches Online Office Suite and New Flash-Enabled Acrobat 9 - ReadWriteWeb

Adobe Launches Online Office Suite and New Flash-Enabled Acrobat 9 - ReadWriteWeb: "Back in March, we said Adobe was slowly building an online empire. Today, that news turns out to be true. Adobe is has just launched their version of an online office suite available at Acrobat.com, complete with word processor (Buzzword), web conferencing/whiteboard app (ConnectNow), online file sharing (Share), file storage, (My Files), and PDF converter. To complement this launch, Adobe has also announced a brand-new version of Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat 9, the biggest release since the initial one that introduced Acrobat to the world. The remarkable change in this new version is that Adobe is now incorporating Flash into the PDF experience."

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Note to Web 2.0 Companies: Early Adopters are not the Mass Market

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Note to Web 2.0 Companies: Early Adopters are not the Mass Market:

If you work in the technology industry it pays to be familiar with the ideas from Geoffrey Moore's insightful book Crossing the Chasm. In the book he takes a look at the classic marketing bell curve that segments customers into Early Adopters, Pragmatists, Conservatives and Laggards then points out that there is a large chasm to cross when it comes to becoming popular beyond an initial set of early adopters. There is a good review of his ideas in Eric Sink's blog post entitled Act Your Age which is excerpted below

The people in your market segment are divided into four groups:

Early Adopters are risk takers who actually like to try new things.

Pragmatists might be willing to use new technology, if it's the only way to get their problem solved.

Conservatives dislike new technology and try to avoid it.

Laggards pride themselves on the fact that they are the last to try anything new.

Blueprint, Process Mapping | Lombardi Software

Blueprint, Process Mapping | Lombardi Software: "The simplest way to document your processes.

It’s 2008. Why are we creating workflow diagrams the same way we did in 1988? Most tools haven’t changed in over 20 years – still drawing lines and boxes, without a way to simplify a diagram, or reuse a common process! Blueprint is the next evolution of process documentation and workflow diagramming tools. Inline editing, collapsible sub-processes, and linked common processes all make diagramming simple, reusable, and time saving. Start using the only tool designed for today’s process documentation and diagramming challenges – plus it's free to get started!"
Watch the video
[Interesting application built with Google Web Toolkit mentioned at Google IO -- sc]

TweetWheel - Find out which of your Twitter friends know each other!

TweetWheel - Find out which of your Twitter friends know each other!: "Find out which of your Twitter friends know each other!"
[Interesting application built with Google App Engine mentioned at Google IO -- sc]

LaterLoop: Read Webpages Later on Your Phone or Anywhere

LaterLoop: Read Webpages Later on Your Phone or Anywhere:
Interesting application built with Google App Engine mentioned at Google IO -- sc
"You may not have tried it but reading webpages on your phone can work surprisingly well.

Whether you’re on the couch at home, taking the morning commute or waiting at the airport, you can catch up on your reading list whenever you have a minute or more.

LaterLoop is a free service that’s optimized for iPhones, Blackberries, Nokias and similar smartphones. LaterLoop also has a clean web interface for your regular browser."

Google Code University - Google Code

Google Code University - Google Code: "This website provides tutorials and sample course content so CS students and educators can learn more about current computing technologies and paradigms. In particular, this content is Creative Commons licensed which makes it easy for CS educators to use in their own classes.

The Courses section contains tutorials, lecture slides, and problem sets for a variety of topic areas:

* AJAX Programming
* Distributed Systems
* Web Security
* Languages

In the Tools 101 section, you will find a set of introductions to some common tools used in Computer Science such as version control systems and databases."

What is BlogThis! ?

What is BlogThis! ?: "What is BlogThis! ?

BlogThis! is an easy way to make a blog post without visiting blogger.com. Once you add the BlogThis! link to your browser's toolbar, blogging will be a snap. Or rather, a click. Clicking BlogThis! creates a mini-interface to Blogger prepopulated with a link to the web page you are visiting, as well as any text you have highlighted on that page. Add additional text if you wish and then publish or post from within BlogThis!"

Javascript Book

Pro JavaScript Techniques

Dive Into Python

Dive Into Python: "Dive Into Python is a Python book for experienced programmers. You can buy a printed copy, read it online, or download it in a variety of formats. It is also available in multiple languages."

Google Hosts Popular JavaScript Libraries

Google Hosts Popular JavaScript Libraries: "If you've ever wanted to use a JavaScript library like script.aculo.us, Prototype, jQuery or Dojo, but you couldn't upload its files to a site or you found it difficult to manage all the different versions, Google hosts them for you.

'The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular open source JavaScript libraries. By using the Google AJAX API Loader's google.load() method, your application has high speed, globally available access to a growing list of the most popular JavaScript open source libraries. (...) The AJAX Libraries API takes the pain out of developing mashups in JavaScript while using a collection of libraries. We take the pain out of hosting the libraries, correctly setting cache headers, staying up to date with the most recent bug fixes'."

Official Google Website Optimizer Blog

Official Google Website Optimizer Blog

"Now let's look at how we do website redesigns today. We typically invite local agencies to razzle and dazzle us with their portfolios. We choose things that look nice and make us feel good about spending tens of thousands of dollars (if not more) on a redesign. We get enchanted by talk of Web 2.0, widgets, gadgets, video, surveys and interactive movies. If we're using a really good agency, they'll ask for or already know our current web-analytics metrics so there's a baseline against which to measure. And after months of brainstorming and discussions, we see initial concept mocks, and the new site is unveiled—perhaps a press release is issued.

The irony is, that launch day should really be the first day of a test, to see if the new site really does perform better than the old one. Sure, you think it looks better and your gut tells you it must perform better (especially since you've become emotionally invested in it). But the reality is you don't know. Even if you compare baseline web stats, you won't know if improvements are seasonal (almost any redesign in the fall outperforms a summer predecessor) or due to another external factor (like a new ad campaign)."

On the bleeding edge of videoconferencing at John Quiggin

On the bleeding edge of videoconferencing at John Quiggin
Yesterday, I appeared on video a National Symposium to be held by the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society in Adelaide (details here and program (PDF) here).

Unlike previous videoconferences I’ve done for smaller seminars (audience up to 30 who can fit into a dedicated venue) presenting to a big event like this posed lots of difficulties, though most were satisfactorily resolved at the end. After initially giving assurances that they could handle a videoconference, the venue advised that they didn’t have an ISDN line, or any adequate alternative, and that installing a line would cost thousands of dollars. We looked at various computer-based options, but eventually decided that we would be unlikely to get sufficient reliability and video quality that way, so I stepped back from the frontier and made a DVD of my presentation which I mailed to Adelaide. Even that fairly low-tech approach created some problems, as playback of computer-burned DVDs turns out not to be 100 per cent reliable. There was a scramble to find a setup that would play the DVD, but it all went well in the end.

The plan was to take questions by audioconference, and this was incorporated in a panel discussion where questions were addressed to several speakers. The organisation on this point was a bit ad hoc, and the sound quality was very poor. Fortunately, perhaps, the format only allowed for one or two questions per speaker.

A benefit of going this way is that it’s reasonably easy to make a podcast. Unfortunately, my slide design, which works fine on standard projection equipment, and seems to have gone OK in the DVD, is very hard to read in a small movie format. Even with this poky format, 30 minutes of video turns out to be too big to upload. I’ll have to split it into parts. I’ve attached the presentation for the moment, but even that is 8.3MB..

Overall, my experience here is an indication of some of the kinds of adjustments that need to be made if videopresence is going to replace air travel on a large scale. None of them are huge in themselves, but they reflect the marginal status of this option When the problems are overcome, the advantages, such as the permanent availability and reusability of the video and podcast will be substantial, but at the moment, it’s still on the bleeding edge.

YouTomb Lists YouTube Removals

YouTomb Lists YouTube Removals: "YouTomb is a research project by the MIT “that tracks videos taken down from [Google-owned] YouTube for alleged copyright violation,” as the site explains. [Via Google Operating System.]"

What is Evernote? | Evernote Corporation

What is Evernote? | Evernote Corporation: "Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at anytime, from anywhere."

YouTube - MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU

YouTube - MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU

Simple astonishing new short film by Blu: an ambiguous animation painted on public walls.

Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche)

http://www.blublu.org/

NBC.com > Saturday Night Live - Update: Sen. McCain

NBC.com > Saturday Night Live - Update: Sen. McCain

2008 JavaOne Conference

2008 JavaOne Conference

"In a general session with James Gosling at JavaOne last week, Tor “NetBeans Guy” Norbye demoed the really nice JavaScript support that was just added to NetBeans (code completion, browser-compatibility warnings, syntax highlighting, refactoring, etc). He did so using YUI, and NetBeans did a very nice job with the code complete, etc. Really slick demo…"

skip over the first 8.5 minutes to get to the YUI/Netbeans demo

Kyle Hayes: YUI Makes Animating the DOM Easy

Kyle Hayes: YUI Makes Animating the DOM Easy: "Despite being an Adobe fanboy, I never cared much for how the Spry framework handles things like animations. Seemed complex at the time for basic operations. At work, they have standardized on using the YUI framework. This has been great for me because I have always wanted to dive deeper into it and learn about its ins and outs. With that, I needed to do some basic fade animations for a User Interface I am working on."

YouTube - Campfire One: Google Friend Connect (pt. 3)

YouTube - Campfire One: Google Friend Connect (pt. 3): "Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. For more info, visit http://www.google.com/friendconnect"

note: video shows adding FriendConnect to Ingrid Michaelson's web site -- sc

YouTube - Le Nozze di Figaro by Harnoncourt Trailer

A very interesting production of a funny Mozart opera with Anna Nekreboko -- sc
YouTube - Le Nozze di Figaro by Harnoncourt Trailer: "Le Nozze di Figaro - Harnoncourt D'Arcangelo, Anna Netrebko"

IBM Press room - 2007-11-15 IBM Introduces Ready-to-Use Cloud Computing - United States

IBM Press room - 2007-11-15 IBM Introduces Ready-to-Use Cloud Computing - United States: "Armonk, N.Y. and Shanghai, China - 15 Nov 2007: In Shanghai today, IBM unveiled plans for “Blue Cloud,” a series of cloud computing offerings that will allow corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms."

IBM developerWorks : High Performance On Demand Solutions

IBM developerWorks : High Performance On Demand Solutions: "Welcome! This page provides resources to help you plan, design, and build real-world on demand solutions. The HiPODS team is a group of specialists within IBM's Software Strategy group, with seven locations around the world. Our skills represent a cross-section of IBM from the Software, Research, Global Services, and System and Technology divisions. We work to solve customer problems by innovating and collaborating with leading edge IBM customers.

The HiPODS team delivers first-of-a-kind, end-to-end integrated solutions that span IBM software and hardware brands to deliver a unified solution for our customers. HiPODS has worked with a wide range of businesses, such as eBay�, Google™, New York Stock Exchange, China Telecom, Sprint�, the Vietnam Ministry of Science and Technology, and more.

Some of our current project areas include:

• Cloud Computing

  Develop and deliver process-driven virtualized infrastructure solutions. Values to customers include:

  • Reducing IT management complexity and skill requirements
  • Sharing resources among multiple applications
  • Accelerating application launches
  • Supporting both existing and emerging, data-intensive workloads

"

Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Use Amazon SQS to Build Self-Healing Applications

Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Use Amazon SQS to Build Self-Healing Applications: "A short five minute video that describes how to use Amazon SQS to build self-healing applications by taking advantage of a unique feature of that service."

Once an application is in production, the real issues begin. This video shows you how to build a self-tending, self-healing application architecture. And as any operations person can attest, Murphy's Law dictates that it's almost always the middle of the night when things fail. By using a unique feature found in Amazon Simple Queue Service, your application can auto-restart failed components in a workflow and take up where it left off. And best of all, with some forethought this technique is easy to build into your architecture.

Tech Trader Daily - Barron’s Online : Update: Icahn To Decide Tomorrow On YHOO Proxy Fight

Tech Trader Daily - Barron’s Online : Update: Icahn To Decide Tomorrow On YHOO Proxy Fight: "Carl Icahn has acquired about a 50 million share stake in Yahoo (YHOO) and is leaning toward launching a proxy contest to unseat at least part of the company’s board, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing “one person familiar with the situation.”

A stake of 50 million shares would be less than 4% of the company’s shares. The story says Icahn will decide Wednesday whether to seek seats on the Yahoo board. The deadline for board nominations for Yahoo’s upcoming annual meeting is Thursday at the close of business. The story adds that Scott Galloway, founder of investment firm Firebrand Partners, also may get involved, “according to people close to the matter.”"

YouTube - Anna Netrebko - Puccini -Quando Me'n Vo

How about a little opera for a change of pace. My favorite opera singer. YouTube - Anna Netrebko - Puccini -Quando Me'n Vo: "Puccini rules!!"

YouTube - Amazon EC2 Tutorial

YouTube - Amazon EC2 Tutorial: "Amazon EC2: Launching a linux based web server on EC2 via the FireFox EC UI plugin and connecting via SSH."

Download YouTube Videos as MP4 Files

Download YouTube Videos as MP4 Files: "An interesting side-effect of YouTube's recent push for higher quality videos is that most videos can be downloaded as MP4 files directly from YouTube. Until now, you could only get FLV files from your browser's cache or using one of the many websites that let you download YouTube videos. In fact, to download the MP4 files, you need to use the same URL like for FLV files and append '&fmt=18':

http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=ID&t=SIGNATURE&fmt=18

ID is the video's identification value, SIGNATURE is a value that prevents you from downloading the file just by knowing the ID. You could create this URL by looking at the source code of a YouTube page, but it's much easier to automatically generate it.

One way is to save the following link as a bookmarklet by dragging it to your Links bar (in Firefox, Safari) or right-clicking and adding it to your favorites (in Internet Explorer, Opera):"

YouTube - The Chevy Volt

YouTube - The Chevy Volt: "Hybrid cars use a combination of electric and gasoline engine power to get you where you're going. The Chevy Volt uses only electricity. The companion gasoline engine is to dynamically recharge the lithium-ion batteries as the vehicle is in use."

YouTube - Eric Schmidt at IBM Business Partners Leadership Conference

YouTube - Eric Schmidt at IBM Business Partners Leadership Conference

Here's a video of Google CEO Eric Schmidt's presentation at the event in which he spoke about cloud computing. "We're on the edge of a truly great breakthrough," said Schmidt. "It's the story of our lifetime." The video runs about 49 minutes.

Twitter: Worst Downtime for Social Networks - Data Center Knowledge

Twitter: Worst Downtime for Social Networks - Data Center Knowledge: "Pingdom has a report looking at the uptime performance of major social media sites. The worst performer, not surprisingly, was Twitter. The microblogging service, whose reliability problems have been a hot topic in the blogosphere, has been offline for more than 37 hours this year - twice as long as the outage total for the next-worst site. Twitter was the only service with uptime below 99 percent."

RechargeIT.org

RechargeIT.org: "RechargeIT is a Google.org initiative that aims to reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid technology.

By demonstrating the technology using our own fleet and supporting others through grants and investments, together we will drive toward a plug-in revolution. See for yourself how our plug-in hybrids are performing in real world conditions."

YouTube - Plug-in Hybrids Power the Grid

YouTube - Plug-in Hybrids Power the Grid: "Peak Moment 107: Professor Andy Frank, Director of the UC Davis Hybrid Vehicle Research Center has a plan to power more than just our cars. In his vision, plug-in hybrid vehicles can be used as mobile batteries, contributing solar power to the grid, and helping to 'load balance' the demand. Roofs built over our parking lots contain solar panels that charge the cars' batteries in daytime. At home, the same batteries can help power a house, or feed energy back to the grid. The result: fewer power plants. [www.team-fate.net]"

YouTube - Grace Jones - I'm Not Perfect (1986)

YouTube - Grace Jones - I'm Not Perfect (1986)

YouTube - Adding Google Friend Connect To Your Website

YouTube - Adding Google Friend Connect To Your Website

Students show power of Google’s Android - Gadgets- msnbc.com

Students show power of Google’s Android - Gadgets- msnbc.com: "One project named GeoLife gives users a way to set to-do lists and get reminders on their phones. Walk by the market, and the device might buzz with a message that you're supposed to pick up milk. Another effort, named Flare, was designed to help small businesses like pizza shops cheaply track their drivers."

Spreading OpenSocial Across the Web

Spreading OpenSocial Across the Web: "Any web site can be a container for OpenSocial, any web site can add social features even if it's not a social network - that seems to be the idea behind Friend Connect, a new piece from Google's social puzzle. Friend Connect will allow the users of a site to add profiles, to import their friends from other social networks, to use social applications in the context of a site.

Paul Buchheit wrote last year that 'there's no such thing as a social network'. The social aspect of a site is just one of its many features. 'Real products need more functionality in order to somehow deliver value to their users. It is this other functionality that defines the real purpose of a product, not the social network, which exists only to enable or enhance the core purpose.'"

YouTube - INGRID MICHAELSON - "The Way I Am" - (official music video)

YouTube - INGRID MICHAELSON - "The Way I Am" - (official music video)

test blog

blogging via my gtalk client via ping.fm

ping.fm

blogging using ping.fm via a gtalk client. you can get your own account by signing up with the beta code "pingsauce"

YouTube - Alicia Keys ~ If I was your woman (unplugged version)

YouTube - Alicia Keys ~ If I was your woman (unplugged version)

YouTube - Ingrid Michaelson - Breakable

YouTube - Ingrid Michaelson - Breakable

Stevey's Blog Rants: Dynamic Languages Strike Back

Stevey's Blog Rants: Dynamic Languages Strike Back

TBO.com - News From AP

TBO.com - News From AP: "Jon Edwards often manages what appears impossible. He has recovered precious data from computers wrecked in floods and fires and dumped in lakes. Now Edwards may have set a new standard: He found information on a melted disk drive that fell from the sky when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003.

'When we got it, it was two hunks of metal stuck together. We couldn't even tell it was a hard drive. It was burned and the edges were melted,' said Edwards, an engineer at Kroll Ontrack Inc., outside Minneapolis. 'It looked pretty bad at first glance, but we always give it a shot.'"

Slashdong: 3Feel Released in Korea

Slashdong: 3Feel Released in Korea

"3 Feel will make money in three ways: subscription fee, item selling and lovemaking fee which will be calculated from the caressing period."

Newt Gingrich gives some advice to Obama

Dear Senator Obama … | Print Article | Newsweek.com
President Carter never understood this. When his vague campaign of "trust me" and "a government as good as the American people" came to Washington, it ran into a Democratic Congress that didn't trust him and that wanted a government that was good for the Congress. Carter, like many outsiders who become president (including the current White House resident), greatly underestimated the institutional strengths of the Congress. Many state legislatures meet very rarely. Georgia was like that when Carter was governor, and the Texas legislature only meets every other year. This gave Governor Bush a considerable misunderstanding of the depth of institutional trouble he would face in Washington.

By contrast, Congress is a permanent institution with a 225-year history of challenging the president. Carter learned even before his Inauguration that Speaker Tip O'Neill was happy to stand up to a newly elected president. President George H. W. Bush painfully learned that his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge was a target for the Democrats rather than a problem for them. Hillary Clinton learned as First Lady that she could cut a healthcare deal with Republicans Bob Dole and John Chaffee, but she could not get several key Democrats to go along. Her plans foundered on the unwillingness of House Democrats to give up their core values for a presidential "win."

YouTube to MP3 Online Converter - Convert YouTube's videos to MP3 fast and free

YouTube to MP3 Online Converter - Convert YouTube's videos to MP3 fast and free

IDT Labs - Free Software Tools � // Internet Duct Tape

IDT Labs - Free Software Tools � // Internet Duct Tape: "Internet Duct Tape is my personal blog. I enjoy programming as a hobby, and creating software to automate simple tasks. The software is organized by the websites they interact with. You can find the latest updates about my software projects on it’s own blog called IDT Labs."

Google Confirms Plans To Put Display Ads On Google.com - Silicon Alley Insider

Google Confirms Plans To Put Display Ads On Google.com - Silicon Alley Insider

The most pressing question for Google (GOOG) shareholders is what product will drive the company's next growth boom as the search product cycle ends. Most likely candidate? Not sexy mobile or video. Just boring old display ads.

Google has been serving display ads on other sites for years, and the DoubleClick acquisition will accelerate that effort. Third-party display ads will only make a small contribution to the bottom line, however (10-20 cents on the dollar). So the key question here has been whether Google would deign to put display ads on its own sites.

We've argued that a full load of display ads on Google.com could add $3-$4 billion in annual revenue. Many SAI readers considered this estimate too optimistic, and it might be, at least over the next couple of years. But $1-$2 billion seems easily achievable.

Amazon Web Services Blog: Taking Massive Distributed Computing to the Common Man - Hadoop on Amazon EC2/S3

Amazon Web Services Blog: Taking Massive Distributed Computing to the Common Man - Hadoop on Amazon EC2/S3: "Everyday, I hear new stories about running Hadoop on EC2. For example, The New York Times used 100 Amazon EC2 instances and a Hadoop application to process 4TB of raw image TIFF data (stored in S3) into 1.1 million finished PDFs in the space of 24 hours at a computation cost of just $240. It not only makes massive distributed processing easy but also makes it headache-free.

Whether it is Startup companies or University Classrooms in UCSB, BYU, Stanford or even enterprise companies, its just amazing to see every new story that is utilizing Hadoop on Amazon EC2/S3 in innovative ways.

That’s what I love about Amazon Web Services - a common man with just a credit card can afford to think about massive distributed computing and compete with the rest and emerge to the top."

Defining cloud computing | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com

Defining cloud computing | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com: "Ask a dozen people what 'cloud computing' means and you'll get a dozen different answers, all pointing to the network. Rob Boothby of Joyent interviewed more than a dozen technology wonks, including Steve Gillmor, Matt Mullenweg, Tim O'Reilly, Kevin Marks, Rafe Needleman, Stowe Boyd, Brian Solis and myself, at the Web 2.0 Expo, to answer the question, 'What is Cloud Computing ?'

Check out the responses in this video:"

Has Microsoft really closed on the door on Microhoo? | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com

Has Microsoft really closed on the door on Microhoo? | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com: "Based on comments by Chairman Bill Gates and CTO Craig Mundie in the last few days, you might think Microsoft has not lost its lust for Yahoo. With no alternatives in sight, Yahoo may be rethinking its terms and conditions for becoming part of Microsoft. In this video, I outline the latest moves and nuances of the Microhoo affair."

Google Reader (1000 )

Google Reader (1000 ): "The #2 book on Amazon’s JavaScript shelf this morning is Douglas Crockford’s forthcoming Javascript: The Good Parts (currently available for preorder and due for release later this month). In this volume, Douglas articulates a philosophy of coding in JavaScript that builds up on and extends the content of his popular video series and articles. The premise, as Douglas puts it: 'Most programming languages contain good parts and bad parts. I discovered that I could be a better programmer by using only the good parts and avoiding the bad parts.'"

Bloomberg.com: Exclusive

Bloomberg.com: Exclusive: "Microsoft Corp.'s decision to drop its pursuit of Yahoo! Inc. increases the pressure on Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer to make his money-losing Internet business succeed against Google Inc.

Ballmer's bid for Yahoo, the most-visited Web site, signaled that Microsoft was making little progress against Google in Internet search advertising, said Charles Di Bona, a Sanford C. Bernstein analyst. Ballmer withdrew his bid over the weekend after Yahoo refused a sweetened offer of almost $50 billion, leaving investors asking what his online strategy will be.

``They've got to come out sooner rather than later with a pretty well articulated vision,'' said New York-based Di Bona."

Sun xVM VirtualBox

Sun xVM VirtualBox: "Sun xVM VirtualBox software is the world's most popular open source virtualization platform because of its fast performance, ease of use, rich functionality, and modular design."

OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2

OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2: "Sun and Amazon Web Services are opening a private beta program starting on May 5, 2008. Approved beta users get access to OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2.

In addition, Sun is now offering 24x7 technical support for its MySQL database running on EC2 and Linux."

Note: I blogged this as it provides a link to the Sun Microsystems site -- SC

Joining Dots: Blog: Rethinking Office

Joining Dots: Blog: Rethinking Office: "ou may or may not have noticed, Google has been rolling out some online services that challenge one of Microsoft's key territories - Office. Google's online version is Google Docs. You can use it to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations using nothing more than a web browser with an Internet connection.

Currently, Microsoft doesn't appear to have an online version of Office available. If there is one, I haven't found it. But searching for variations on 'Office' gets all sorts of junk. Tip for Microsoft. When it comes to having a version of Office available online, consider using the following URLs - http://www.microsoft.com/docs and http://docs.microsoft.com/ ;-)

Here's the interesting part. I've been playing with spreadsheets for a couple of ideas and one feature required me to delve into Google Docs for the first time. Whilst Excel 2007 was best for one solution, Google Docs was best for the other. That, I didn't expect to happen."

TED | Talks | Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world (video)

TED | Talks | Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world (video): "Talks Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world"

UPDATE: I got this to embed by adding an to close it off -- MG.

Direct link to TED talk if it doesn't display above

JavaOne: Sun rolls out JavaFX

OutsidetheLineshe Lines - CNET News.com: "As part of Sun's effort to enable consumers to innovate, Green introduced JavaFX, a rich Internet application environment set to compete with Adobe Systems' AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight. He showed a JavaFX application with Flickr and Twitter feeds running in Facebook within the browser, and then he dragged it out of the browser--to the desktop. The same application also was shown running on a Java-enabled phone via JavaFX Mobile.

The IBM-Google connection | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com

The IBM-Google connection | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com: "LOS ANGELES--Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt gave a speech and chatted with IBM's CEO Sam Palmisano onstage Thursday at IBM's Business Partner Leadership Conference here. The two talked up their relationship, which primarily involves a joint research project. In October, Google and IBM announced a cloud computing initiative, based on Google's expertise in distributed, parallel computing and IBM's industrial enterprise management technologies, for public use by universities.

IBM is taking some of the learnings from the project and plans to operate a cloud that will allow partners to house their Web-based applications and sell them to customers, Palmisano said. 'It is the first time we have taken something from the consumer arena and applied it to the enterprise,' he said."

Zoho Blogs � IBM, Microsoft & Google Eras of Computing

Zoho Blogs � IBM, Microsoft & Google Eras of Computing: "By now it is conventional wisdom to say that there was an IBM Era of computing, then a Microsoft Era, and now we are in the Google Era. In this post, I will explain why Microsoft was not the “next IBM” and why Google is not the “next Microsoft” - there are significant qualitative differences among them, quite apart from their status as the dominant, era-defining players. Understanding that qualitative difference is crucial for third party vendors like Zoho to thrive. I was reminded of this because of the IBM/Google partnership unveiled today (via Dan Farber & see also Nick Carr). As an aside, I have coined a kind of Moore’s Law on these computing eras:"

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Is Office the new Netscape?

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Is Office the new Netscape?: "As Microsoft and Yahoo continue with their interminable modern-dress staging of Hamlet - it's longer than Branagh's version! - the transformation of the software business goes on. We have new players with new strategies, or at least interesting new takes on old strategies.

One of the cornerstones of Microsoft's competitive strategy over the years has been to redefine competitors' products as features of its own products. Whenever some upstart PC software company started to get traction with a new application - the Netscape browser is the most famous example - Microsoft would incorporate a version of the application into its Office suite or Windows operating system, eroding the market for the application as a standalone product and starving its rival of economic oxygen (ie, cash). It was an effective strategy as well as a controversial one.

Now, though, the tables may be turning. Google is trying to pull a Microsoft on Microsoft by redefining core personal-productivity applications - calendars. word processing, spreadsheets, etc. - as features embedded in other products. There's a twist, though. Rather than just incorporating the applications as features in its own products, Google is offering them up to other companies, particularly big IT vendors, to incorporate as features in their products."

Share and Annotate Web Pages in Google Reader

Share and Annotate Web Pages in Google Reader: "Google Reader's sharing feature was barely noticed when it was added, then it got more exposure when the shared items started to be broadcasted to Google Talk contacts and some sites aggregated shared posts. As Google Reader became more social, people discovered that it has some important limitations. 'Have you ever wanted to share something that you were reading, but you didn't want to go through the hassle of subscribing to a whole feed for a single interesting article? And what about sharing content from sites with no feeds?, ' asks Google Reader Blog.

Google Reader finally added an option to share any web page and to add notes for each shared item. Next to each post, there's a new action: share with note that can be used to explain why you found the post interesting or to add your comments. You can also go to the new Notes section to add a note or drag a bookmarklet to your browser's link bar so you can share any web pages, even if it doesn't have feeds.

Another improvement is that Google Reader shows small avatars next to each shared item and you can customize your public page by selecting a theme. But don't get to excited as the three themes that are available (ice cream, ninjas, sea) fail to impress and look terrible in Internet Explorer 7."

YouTube - Thirsty Merc - 20 good reasons

YouTube - Thirsty Merc - 20 good reasons

YouTube - Light Surrounding You

YouTube - Light Surrounding You

YouTube - Colbie Caillat - Bubbly

YouTube - Colbie Caillat - Bubbly

Post to Google Reader

Post to Google Reader: "You can now add your messages to Google Reader to be seen by your Google friends. To post a note, log-in to Reader and click Your stuff -> Notes to the left. This will open a box where you can type in a note with any thought, Friendfeed/ Twitter-style. To find out who exactly your friends are, check the Friends tab at the Settings page for an overview (or click the Manage Friends links).

Next to the notes box, there’s also a new bookmarklet to share items you find on the web. Just drag and drop the link to your bookmarks and you can activate it when you stumble upon something; you can also add a custom note to items, Google explains in a blog post.

Another new feature is that the layout of your Shared Items page can now be customized to *drumroll* display one of three graphics on top (titled ice cream, ninjas and sea)."

Amazon Now Serving OpenSolaris on EC2 - GigaOM

Amazon Now Serving OpenSolaris on EC2 - GigaOM: "During our on-stage chat at Startup Camp, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz hinted at some big news involving Amazon and its web services. Today, the company officially announced:

* Sun’s OpenSolaris OS will be available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) customers for free. It is in beta for now.
* Sun will provide premium technical support for MySQL database running on Linux and Amazon EC2.

These developments are meant to address the needs and complaints of the developer community. OpenSolaris, which comes with tools such as ZFS and Dynamic Tracing (D-Trace), will be offered for free, in contrast to some Linux offerings that cost money. For instance, if you sign up for EC2 and pick RedHat, it costs $19. ZFS allows instant rollback and continual check-summing capabilities, something developers have found lacking in the EC2 platform. This OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 beta is currently available by invitation only."

Running Django on Google App Engine - Google App Engine - Google Code

Running Django on Google App Engine - Google App Engine - Google Code: "Google App Engine and Django both have the ability to use the WSGI standard to run applications. As a result, it is possible to use nearly the entire Django stack on Google App Engine, including middleware. As a developer, the only necessary adjustment is modifying your Django data models to make use of the Google App Engine Datastore API to interface with the fast, scalable Google App Engine datastore. Since both Django and Google App Engine have a similar concept of models, as a Django developer, you can quickly adjust your application to use our datastore."

Applications Gallery - Google App Engine - Google Code

Applications Gallery - Google App Engine - Google Code: "Featured Applications Gallery"

Google and Dojo, sitting in a tree

Google and Dojo, sitting in a tree: "A bunch of new tools have been added to the Dojo Ajax Toolkit that make it amazingly simple to search all of Googles services from your own site, and display the results however you want. Examples show how to integrate Google with the Dojo Grid, and with the Django templating language. And all with zero server side dependancies!"

Iron Man: Steve Jobs is even tougher than you think.

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Iron Man | PBS: "Iron Man: Steve Jobs is even tougher than you think."

The major point here is that Adobe is in play, or at least Apple thinks so. The company has plenty of cash and stock to do the deal and plenty of incentive, too. Apple's goal in acquiring Adobe would be to control first Flash and second Adobe's emerging Air application platform. Adobe announced this week a broad industry initiative to extend Flash to mobile devices, but Apple wasn't a participant. Why bother if you intend to shortly own Flash outright?

BREAKING: Microsoft Walking Away From Yahoo Deal, No Hostile - Silicon Alley Insider

BREAKING: Microsoft Walking Away From Yahoo Deal, No Hostile - Silicon Alley Insider: "Microsoft (MSFT) is withdrawing its bid for Yahoo (YHOO), people familiar with the matter say. Microsoft will not pursue a hostile proxy battle.

Microsoft raised its bid to $33. Yahoo's board wanted $37 (Jerry Yang and David Filo reportedly wanted $38.)

A letter from Steve Ballmer should be released momentarily."

IBM cooks up internal virtual world for confidentiality, security | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

IBM cooks up internal virtual world for confidentiality, security | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com: "IBM has created its own internal virtual world called Metaverse for corporate meetings and collaboration. Why not use Second Life? “If you really want to make most of these (virtual world) meetings it has to be confidential,” said IBM CIO Mark Hennessey.

Those comments could indicate the beginning of a trend: Corporate specific virtual worlds designed to bridge geographies. The message: Confidentiality is everything whether your world is virtual or not."

Michael Ackerbacker, innovation manager of IQ collaboration development at IBM, said Metaverse has been in development for about a year. For 2007, IBM’s big goal was to prove the concept. Ackerbacker’s comments came in a series of presentations in New York.

“We did learn a lot in Second Life, but wanted to do a world here internally where we could talk about IBM types of things securely,” said Ackerbacker.

So what did Ackerbacker and IBM learn about corporate virtual worlds? Here are a few key takeaways:

Remember the users when building a virtual world. The goal is to enable collaboration not make things complicated. Ackerbacker said IBM is still noodling over how to bring the emotional connection into virtual space and get employees there easily. “Can we create a learning environment that doesn’t get in the way?” asked Ackerbacker.

Cater to your culture. The avatar options in Metaverse–built on the Torque gaming engine–were distinctly IBM. For instance, ties are an option. So is gray hair is an option. And no one is some hybrid animal thingy.

Don’t be exclusive. If you want collaboration you have to make virtual worlds simple. Ackerbacker said IBM stripped down its user interface “quite a bit.” “We only have a dozen controls,” said Ackerbacker. “Click on an icon and it’ll do something–fly, teleport and dress. We’re having an ongoing discussion on how to make it easier.”

Don’t be surprised if IBM takes these learnings an turns them into a service for verticals like retailing and hospitality.