"So, imagine: you're at the deli. You order a salami and turkey on a roll. The turkey? Perfectly moist. The salami? Wonderfully spicy. The roll? My gosh, it tastes just like a tender, sweet, soft pretzel! You have to blog this fine dining moment! But you're at a deli! What do you do? What do you do?

Well, now you can whip out your handheld and blog away, my friend. The AvantGo Client for Blogger lets you do a handful of the same operations available to you on Blogger.com-- create, view, post, and publish. "

""I noticed AIM [AOL Instant Messenger] had a robust script library," says Fox. "If you could hook it into a program, which would it be?" The answer he came up with was Eliza, an AI Perl program that responds to text messages with psychoanalytic-styled questions. He dubbed his new hybrid "AOLiza," and set "her" loose on August 15.

Once AOLiza was up and running, it wasn't long before she was fooling unsuspecting AOLers who messaged him by mistake. Now, AOL may not exactly be the digerati hangout that, say, The Well is, but its members aren't stupid either -- or at least all of them aren't. AOLiza was working, and working pretty well. Users began carrying on elaborate conversations with AOLiza.

One person -- who Fox dubbed "five" -- even entered into a drawn out conversation about his ex-girlfriend with Eliza"

"Many of Britain's most eminent medical scientists believe the birth of a cloned baby is inevitable despite society's current aversion to the idea.

More than half of a panel of 32 scientists surveyed by The Independent said "reproductive cloning" would be attempted within 20 years if the technical and safety issues could be overcome."

"Mapping the Web is a huge field that falls into two main pieces: maps that show us something interesting about the Web, and maps that help us navigate the Web. These two need not be essentially connected."

"There will be many solutions to this problem, and which ones we like will have everything to do with our personal way of thinking and the type of problem we're trying to solve at the moment. But navigable maps of Web sites clustered by relevancy to our interests are of unique important to the Web because the Web space is itself organized not by uniform units of distance but by *interest* itself. Distance, on the Web, is measured by irrelevance. Navigable maps capture this essential fact of our new world, and thus not only map Web distance but conquer it."

"The Theme Builder is a graphical tool made to simplify the creation of themes for Mozilla. This beta version of the tool gives users the ability to apply new graphic designs to the browser without changing its functionality. Individuals can use the tool to create their own personal themes while companies can "brand" the browser with their company colors and logo."

"The general idea is pretty simple. We take the input audio. We condition it (adjust it to a known sampling rate and volume.) We pass it through the psychoacoustic model (it's about a notch more complicated than what you'd see in a mp3 encoder, which ain't saying much. This is all stuff that was mostly hashed out decades ago.) This model effectively strips the parts of the sound you can't hear -- the desired result being that even if the audio has been compressed or manipulated subaudibly, the result is still the same. Okay, so the net result of all of this is a vector that covers a very small segment (fraction of a second) of audio. We stack several of these vectors (possibly separated in time by a bit) side-by-side to get a big vector. Then we do completely boring and standard and well-understood statistical and pattern-matching stuff on the vector to make it smaller and more palatable for the server -- think of it as lossy compression. Then it goes off to the server. The server is about equal in complexity to a text search engine. (I say this fully realizing that I have only a vague impression how Google works. It's certainly a lot more complicated than the obvious hash-table-of-sorted-lists stuff.) It finds the database vector that's the best match in a fairly boring but efficient way. (No, it does not involve searching through all tracks one by one, no more than Altavista searches through all web pages one by one every time you want to find some porn.) Call the result a submatch. Back at the client, the whole process is repeated a bunch more times, generating a stream of submatches ("Radiohead offset 0.. Radiohead offset 1024 or 16384.. Slashdot's Gr34test Hits 5262324.. Radiohead offset 3072..") from the input audio stream. Then, the client looks at the submatches and tries to figure out what the input audio was and where the song boundaries are (did somebody really stick in a sample from Slashdot's Gr34test Hits, or was that just an unlucky match?)

See? Not magic. It's a challenging problem, but not an impossible problem. The reason that this doesn't exist right now is not that generations of scientists have tried and failed, but rather that people didn't care too much until lately and nobody's gotten off their ass and done anything about it yet. I like big but approachable problems, which is one of the reasons I'm excited about this.

FOR ALL OF YOU WHO FELL ASLEEP THROUGH THAT: YOU CANNOT ADD AN INAUDIBLE TONE TO THE MUSIC AND BREAK TUNEPRINT. THE FINGERPRINT IS BASED ON THE LARGE-SCALE PSYCHOACOUSTIC FEATURES OF THE MUSIC. IF MP3 ENCODERS CAN DO IT, SO CAN WE. Maybe not perfectly, but enough to have a fighting chance. THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT HERE. "

"Tuneprint is an audio fingerprinting algorithm. It takes the unique 'fingerprint' of a sound clip, which can then be compared to a fingerprint database to get more information about the clip, like title and artist, lyrics, URLs, related music, copyright status, or almost anything else. The fingerprint doesn't change even if the sound is compressed, converted to a different file format, broadcast over the radio, and so on.

Artists: You can use it to stop people from putting their name on your band's mp3's and distributing them as their own, or you can use it to embed lyrics, links to your homepage, and stupid banner ads in mp3's.

Haxxors: You can use it to stop warez kiddies from uploading copyrighted mp3's to your webserver, or you can use it to build the ultimate mp3 search engine.

Terrorists: You can use it as the foundation of an international fascist copy protection enforcement network, or you can use it to automatically rip, separate, categorize, and save to disk all songs played on all radio stations everywhere!!"

"Everyone loves online communities, until they start hating them. Communities always evolve and change, and as they do, the earliest members begin complaining.

A few months back, half the comments at metafilter.com seemed to be about how metafilter had changed.

Before Dreamless was two weeks old, one or two people were worrying that it might go downhill.

Yesterday Astoundingweb.org got its first (well written and intelligent) complaint that the community was no longer fulfilling its mission.

Online communities are always changing. That is their nature. Is this change always negative? Or is it something we should expect and learn to appreciate?"

"Doing things right will only add a few percent to the cost of a development project. You will save many times this cost by not having to make expensive adjustments and dot releases. Plus, the resulting user interface will probably be around 50% to 100% easier to use, reducing training budgets dramatically and increasing user productivity. If you happen to be running an e-commerce site, you will have the sweetest gains of all: customers will finally start making purchases now that they can find what they want on the site. Rule #1 of e-commerce: if you can't find it, you can't buy it."

"The most focused study of the issue can be found in the December, 1994, issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The authors examined all first-class cricketers born before 1961 whose bowling hand was specified -- 1,132 left-bankers, and 5,041 of the adroit. They concluded that "left-handedness is not, in general, associated with an increase in mortality."

"Nevertheless, a troubling finding in the BMJ study showed that left-handedness was associated with an increased likelihood of deaths of a certain kind -- those from unnatural causes. There was a 37% greater risk for such deaths among left-handers."

"K-Meleon is the Windows answer to Galeon. Thus, K-Meleon is a lite Web browser based on gecko (the mozilla rendering engine). It's fast, it has a light interface, and it is fully standards-compliant. To make it simple, K-Meleon could be considered as the unbloated Mozilla version for Windows."

"There's more to the Lizard then meets the eye, but you have to take a look beyond the box -- or should I say browser?

Because much of the Mozilla effort's project management has been in the open, we can learn from this effort, and even apply many of the management techniques to our own efforts.

As just one example, if you work for a large shop, consider using internal newsgroups as a way for your own architecture teams to communicate with other developers -- this approach does work.

If nothing else, you can download and use Bugzilla, a sophisticated, free, bug tracking and reporting system.

As for the Mozilla platform: Take a moment to appreciate that the Mozilla development team has only been following the programming practices we've all been pushing for the last decade, and that the reusable component-based architecture is one we can all benefit from.

It's a better use of your time than beating the Lizard."

"The TiVo and Replay boxes represent the greatest leap of all. They accumulate, in atomic detail, a record of who watched what and when they watched it. Put the box in all 102 million American homes, and you get a pointillist portrait of the entire American television audience. And that raises the second and more disturbing question to which the TV industry must respond: what do you do when you actually know who is watching and why? Already, TiVo and Replay know what each of their users does every second, though both companies make a point of saying that they don't actually dig into the data to find out who did what, that they only use it in the aggregate. Whatever. They know. "

"Start with the Macintosh Finder. Borrow some good ideas from Windows Explorer. Package everything as components. And then toss in some ideas that have been floating around Apple for years (but never got shipped)."

"Eazel has taken the Windows Explorer metaphor and pushed it even further. Nautilus has the usual forward and back buttons, a history list, and the ability to view web pages. But it's got some spiffy new tricks, too."

"I'm following in the footsteps of an earlier poster in saying that I'm disappointed to see Apple and NeXT's best and brightest come up with... a file browser. I'm just as disappointed as I was five years ago when I signed up to be one of the first fifteen-hundred BeBox developers, after I discovered what their idea of "revolutionizing" the operating system was.

To quote Alan Cooper, from About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design:

Even though the file system is an internal facility that shouldn't--by all rights--even affect the user, it creates a large problem because the influence of the file system on the interface of most programs is very deep. The most intractable problems facing user interface designers usually concern the file system and its demands. It affects our menus, our dialogs, even the procedural framework of our programs, and this influence is likely to continue indefinitely unless we make a concerted effort to stop it.

Currently, most software treats the file system in much the same way that the operating system shell does (Explorer, File Manager). This is tantamount to you dealing with your car the same way your mechanic does. Even though this approach is tragically bad, it is an established, de facto standard and there is considerable resistance to improving it.

Fundamentally, I'm a bit tired of hearing about how everyone's "revolutionizing" everything, when they're really not. Look: revolution and revolutioniz e both imply "sudden, radical, or complete change". The American colonies didn't fight the Revolutionary War to install a local king. The French Revolution wasn't so they could hire a newer, prettier cake-eater.

The file system, fundamentally, is an implementation detail. It's an artifact of how "things have always been done". It's a drag on doing real, substantive improvement to the way computers work for people. There are millions of people out there who have never used a computer, and have yet to learn. They don't need to learn what a filesystem is, or to navigate it. They need to be able to find and use the information and tools that are important to them, period.

If we truly want to revolutionize the user interface, the user experience, etc., then we really need to start with a more fundamental re-thinking of how things work."

"It would be interesting to track the pace of meme transmission...and the speed at which transmission seems to be increasing. The difficulty in doing so is not knowing what to keep track of. When I see things, I can't really tell the difference between meme-worthy & non-meme-worthy material...I'm more of an unwitting participant than trend spotter."

"It would also be interesting to track the path of meme transmission. One primitive way this is done in the scope of weblogs is with the "via" or attribute link, where a blogger gives credit to the blog where he or she spotted what they're posting about. Sometimes, you can track these links back several steps. Another related area where people are trying to more formally track such flows is with RSS headline feeds. I believe the original idea of RSS is that a site would simply offer an RSS-formatted index of what's on their site, and others would use that to link back to them. But with all the crazy aggregation and syndication stuff being done by folks like Moreover, UserLand, ClickFeed, and Oreilly with Meerkat, one RSS feed can be the input for a system that then outputs it again, possibly categorized, commentated, or otherwise editorialized. Information you're reading on one site could have conceivably gone through a long chain of such services. But since there's nothing built into RSS to track this, this path is lost. The next version of RSS may account for such things. This isn't exactly meme tracking, but it could be -- especially where there is an editorial layer. And even more so if you think beyond just headlines (what RSS is mostly used for today) to weblogs syndicating other weblogs, picking and choosing the posts (memes, potentially?) that they like. Hmmm... "

"The idea of a meme, combined with the Darwinian model of selection, could in principle provide a powerful framework to explain culture, provided that culture was made up of memes. This, however, is far from being the case. A meme, as defined by Dawkins -- there are many looser uses of the term that amount to little more than a new name for the old idea of a cultural trait -- is a cultural replicator, just as a gene is a biological replicator. A replicator, I argue, is defined not just by the combination of a causal link and a relative identity of relevant properties between replicator and replica, but by the fact that the information that determines the properties of the replica is wholly derived from the replicator, or nearly so. The issue here is not the relative faithfulness of the copying process. It is whether the replica, perfect or imperfect, is in fact produced by a copying process. When a non-negligible part of the information realised in the replica originates from sources other than the replicator itself, so that its properties, even if identical with the alleged replicator, are not derived from it, then one is not dealing with a true replicator -- in the cultural case, not with a true meme. Few cultural items are true memes, or even are "memish" enough for the meme model to apply."

"Kaiser Permanente violated the patient confidentiality of hundreds of members last week when e-mails containing sensitive medical information, names and home phone numbers were mistakenly sent to the wrong people, Kaiser officials disclosed yesterday."

"Kaiser Permanente violated the patient confidentiality of hundreds of members last week when e-mails containing sensitive medical information, names and home phone numbers were mistakenly sent to the wrong people, Kaiser officials disclosed yesterday."

"The knives are out for WAP technology. Following the huge hype of the last 12 months, it's becoming apparent that it just isn't delivering. Naturally, the naysayers have now become the "told-you-so-ers". However, the disappointment of WAP technology needs some more careful analysis. The industry deserves a good wrap on the knuckles. Much of what has happened was avoidable. Will the lessons be learned?"

"The biggest single mistake was to take the view that an internet enabled phone is a general purpose device. It was an easy mistake to make. A computer with web browser was a general purpose device. You can use it to surf any web site. A phone is also a general purpose device. You can use it to call any number. However, when you put the two together, the combination is limited. To be completely general purpose it would need to have a keyboard, a full size screen and a phone transceiver built in together. It would need to be both a computer and a phone, i.e. a laptop with a phone built in. Current WAP Phones are still phones, but they are NOT computers in the sense of a PC. This was the first mistake - marketing the device as if it was a computer.

A WAP Phone is an "invisible computer" or it ought to be. A WAP Phone thought of as an invisible computer, becomes an information appliance. Furthermore, each different form factor of WAP Phone is a different information appliance. The whole industry failed to realize this. Information appliances should be designed for a specific purpose or a limited set of purposes. In other words, with current technology, the "walled garden" approach was correct providing what was inside the garden made sense for the specific information appliance, as a single product.

The purposes to which a WAP phone can be put is somewhat controlled by the modality of the device. For example, a 4 line display is very different from an 8 or 12 line display. A 2K deck size is very different from an 8K deck size. As the devices change and grow more powerful the range of tasks to which they are suitable grows larger. Identifying and developing such compelling uses for the small screens was always going to be difficult."

"They found that 39% of the premature babies had below normal IQs of 85 or less, compared with 13% of the babies carried to full term. The international average is only 16%.

Of the premature children, 61% had special needs or were "low achievers" in school, compared with 23% of the full term children.

And 28 of the 118 premature children were classified as having learning disabilities, compared with 11 of the full term children."

"Not enough controversy on this list, so here goes.

Ready?

Tufte understands packing the data in. He lacks an understanding of people. Sometimes chart junk (his term) helps in the understanding of a chart by providing mnemonic aid to the symbols. Sometimes it helps motivate the reader. For most casual users of charts and graphs, less is better. For the professional statistician, such as Tufte, denser is better.

Tufte is often wrong about what constitutes good communication. Indeed, I am surprised he likes the Napoleon map so much because it has, in his terms, superfluous chart chunk - those drawings of soldiers. This is indeed an excellent graphic, but much of his work does not have this character.

Tufte is not the only statistician who has addressed the problems of representing graphical material. In my opinion, Bertin is the best.

Tufte preaches. I entered into a discussion with him about this once and tried to present some experimental data that one of my students had collected. he refused even to look at it. That is, it isn't that he looked at the data and disagreed with the interpretation or even the collection-- that would be permissible. No, he refused even to look.

Tufte is fun to read. Much of what he says is important and valuable. The problem is, you have to decide what to follow and what to ignore. Don't follow all that he preaches -- you will do your users a disservice.

Don"

"Well, I think he's completely wrong. And he's completely wrong because of who he is. First of all, his books are terrific. But they're the books of an analytic historian. He is not a graphic designer. He is not an information architect. He doesn't have any ideas about graphics and what's going to happen in the future. He has documented the history of information design superbly and he's done a very good analysis of it. But I think, since he doesn't have creative ideas about the future, he can't see how there will be amazing information displayed on the Internet, done by very creative people, in the very near future. Are we stumbling around now doing things? You bet. Because we're finding our way. Much the same as when the movies first happened, when cinema first happened, they based it on old things, they made it look like stage plays. Well, we're just getting over the point where we're just putting diagrams on a screen. We're not taking the appropriate way of using dynamic information. We're using it to show off that we can spin things, and we're showing off things because we can do it, and everybody is bragging to one another about some cute program. We are going to get over that show off stage very soon. We're going to be able to show things, and will show things, accurately, clearly, and using the medium for what it is. I mean, if you or anybody else is going through the stage that many of us are of getting fast downloads and speeding up your equipment, it changes your whole relationship with what you can see and how you see it. And I think his reflection is on things as he's looking backwards not forwards."

"...the public should beware of geeks bearing gifts. Windows Me has some significant improvements, but for most users those improvements do not justify the pain and potential dangers they will face with this upgrade. Microsoft can lower the price of Windows Me and give it a few great features, but it can't fundamentally make Me a better operating system than Windows 95, because of underlying technical flaws with the whole Windows operating environment.

I know, because I spent more than a week struggling with a Windows Me upgrade before I gave up, reformatted my hard drive, installed a clean version of the operating system on my 550 MHz Pentium III desktop computer and reinstalled all of my applications. Now that my computer is finally operational once again, I'm quite pleased with the results. But I doubt that other computer users will think that the new features are worth the hassle."

"Am I the only one who is terrified about Microsoft Passport? It seems to me like a fairly blatant attempt to build the world's largest, richest consumer database, and then make fabulous profits mining it. It's a terrifying threat to everyone's personal privacy and it will make today's "cookies" seem positively tame by comparison. The scariest thing is that Microsoft is advertising Passport as if it were a benefit to consumers, and people seem to be falling for it! By the time you've read this article, I can guarantee that I'll scare you into turning off your Hotmail account and staying away from MSN web sites."

"It's not just you...many of us at MS don't even begin to understand what .NET is (and I even work on Passport, the shining example of a "web service"). Management spent nearly a year explaining how everyone needed to focus on NGWS and how we could all fit into the vision - without ever describing the goal. It was the proverbial answer in search of a question. All of a sudden it has a new name, seemingly an attempt to hide the fact that it still has no body. And to make things worse, they throw in a brand-new programming language which is really nothing more but a copy of java which is unfinished, hasn't been tested for five years, and lacks a large standard library.

I've asked around how this new .NET plan differs from everything we've been working on the past two years and haven't been given a decent answer."

"This path to machine intelligence, incremental, reactive, opportunistic and market-driven, does not require a long-range map, but has one in our own evolution. In the decades following the first universal robots, I expect a second generation with mammallike brainpower and cognitive ability. They will have a conditioned learning mechanism, and steer among alternative paths in their application programs on the basis of past experience, gradually adapting to their special circumstances. A third generation will think like small primates and maintain physical, cultural and psychological models of their world to mentally rehearse and optimize tasks before physically performing them. A fourth, humanlike, generation will abstract and reason from the world model. I expect the reasoning systems will be adopted from the traditional AI approach maligned earlier in this essay. The puddles will have reached the ripples."

"My gut tells me that the word 'push' is going to be a minor footnote in future histories of the late 20th century boom in telecommunications. A quirky blip, ranking slightly higher than the blink tag, but lower than gopher." -- David Hudson, in the Publishers on Push special "

"Pronouncing Mozilla dead has been a favored spectator sport since Jamie Zawinski first took a cut at it in March 1999. This is another in a long line of such articles, not the first, not the last, and those participating in the project are for the most part used to this. Criticism won't slack off until the project ships a 1.0 release (which IMO is at least 6 months off)"

"The one major "hindsight" decision that could be seriously questioned is the decision in fall 1999 to do a rewrite prior to Mozilla 1.0 as opposed to releasing a 1.0 based on the original code. But then again the conventional wisdom (put forth by the Web Standards Project and pretty much every other "outside observer") at the time was that the old code base was unsalvageable, and that the cause of standards compliance demanded a rewrite."