Reading and writing Excel files with Perl:

"If you are using a Windows machine, stick with the Win32::OLE modules unless you don't have Excel at all on your machine. Win32::OLE is the easiest way to get Excel data right now, although the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel modules are catching up.

On UNIX, especially Linux, go with the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel modules for programmatic access to Excel data. But be forewarned that these are fairly young modules, and they may not be perfect for you if you need stability."

Spreadsheet::WriteExcel:

"This article describes Spreadsheet::WriteExcel, a cross-platform Perl module designed to write data in the Microsoft Excel binary format. It highlights the fact that although Perl is most often associated with text files, it can readily handle binary files as well. This article also looks at alternative methods for producing Excel files and suggests some methods for reading them."

Integrating Perl into Microsoft Office Innards:

"This article is describes a scenario in which a complete Perl solution (using an external Perl script to automate Office) wasn't appropriate, but a hybrid Perl/non-Perl approach was, and how PerlCOM made that hybrid solution almost trivially simple."

[ via aaron ]

nooface is in search of the post-pc interface. who knows if they'll find it, but along the way they point to great projects like geotools:

"GeoTools is a free Java-based mapping toolkit that allows maps to be viewed interactively on web browsers without the need for dedicated server-side support.

The project is open source and is covered by the GPL."

looks like it has potential for producing dynamic nodemaps. [ nooface via blackbeltjones ]

what more could use you ask for? gagpipe aggregates satire from all over the world. don't miss that wacky canadian satire - LAST PERSON LEAVING SASK FORGETS TO TURN OUT LIGHTS.

peter has started an interesting discussion on faceted classification:

"Faceted classification, on the other hand, is a bottom-up scheme. Here, each object is tagged with a certain set of attributes and values (these are the facets), and the organization of these objects emerges from this classification, and how a user chooses to access them."

"Now, faceted classification isn't inherently innovative. In fact, objects tend to have a fixed set of facets by which they are organized. Where innovation comes is through user research that listens to how the users/customers/audience think about and approach a task, and providing tools to allow them to approach it meaningfully."

Dynamic Web-based data access using JSP and JDBC technologies:

"This article discusses using the JSP and JDBC technologies to integrate static, dynamic, and database content in Web sites. For the purposes of simplicity and illustration, the JSP pages here use short scriptlets to expose the JSP developer to the underlying JDBC concepts instead of hiding them in custom tags. The author introduces a key design approach that integrates JavaBeans components with JDBC, similar to the way that JavaServer Pages technology already uses beans with HTTP. He also provides code for implementing this integration."

Small Business and Web Sites:

"Many people have been asserting that all small businesses should, and will, become eBusinesses, doing most of their selling and communicating using the Internet. Others think there is no money to be made there, and that small businesses won't produce more than "free" web sites. I believe that both of these views are mistaken. A large percentage of small businesses are clearly willing and able to spend large sums of money to use the Internet as part of their relationships with customers (and will benefit from such use), but only for appropriate purposes, such as a basic web site. For most, "being like Amazon", selling online and keeping vast interactive databases, is not that purpose."

Writing SAX Drivers for Non-XML Data:

"In a previous column, we covered the basics of the Simple API for XML (SAX) and the modules that implement that interface in Perl. Over the course of the next two months we will move beyond these basic topics to look at two slightly more advanced ones: creating drivers that generate SAX events from non-XML sources and writing custom SAX filters. If you are not familiar with the way SAX works, please read High-Performance XML Parsing With SAX before proceeding."

Woohoo! On the plane. No worries. No lines. No pushy crowds.

i got conferencing and a rosterbot running on the jabber server.

if you have a jabber account, you can add pixie@snowdeal.org to your roster. say, "hello" or "help" after she accepts your subscription. she doesn't know much right now, but she hopefully will soon.

but, right now, i'm already running late. i'm flying to austin today. and i'm not the least bit worried. no, sirreee, bob. not me. not in the least bit. hasn't really crossed my mind. not a bit. not. at. all. nope.

rafe points to a transcript from today's meet the press in which colin powell makes some very intelligent comments that i hope will get picked-up by the wider press tommorrow:

"SEC'Y POWELL: Well, let's not assume there will be a large-scale war. I don't know that we should even consider a large-scale war of the conventional type. But it's more interesting to note that Egypt and Saudi Arabia and most of the countries in that part of the world have come to our support. They have recognized that terrorism is a threat, not only against the United States, against them. They have suffered from terrorism, as well. And they recognize that this is not consistent with Islamic teachings. It is absolutely inconsistent with Islamic teachings. And so I think they understand the domestic pressures they are under, and they understand what they have committed themselves to. And when you even have countries such as Syria and, to some extent even Iran, indicating that they sense the problem associated with this kind of attack, it gives us something to explore, something to work with. And what we should be looking at, really, is the solid support we have received from Arab nations.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you what the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, had to say and give you a chance to talk about it a little bit: "'If you launch an attack against Afghanistan or another country on your list of rogue states, you will kill many innocent people, just as the terrorists killed many of your people,' he [Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak] said in the interview. 'Don't play the game of your enemy. They want your reprisals to bring forth, from the blood and ruins or your bombing, a new generation of militants who will cry for revenge against the United States.'"

SEC'Y POWELL: We're very sensitive to that. One has to be careful that in your reaction, you don't give the enemy exactly what the enemy would like to have, a new cause celebre. And so we will be very sensitive to that, and I know that my colleagues in the Pentagon are sensitive to that, as they consider the various options that are available to them."

i finally flipped the switch on a snowdeal jabber server last night. it's absolutely astounding how easy it is to set-up a personalized IM service.

i'm not sure why more isp's don't start to provide it. why have one of those oh-so-common IM accounts at aol.com and msn.com, when everyone can have an account @yourdomain.com or whatever strikes your fancy.

since i'm adding conferencing and various sundry services the server is down more than its up, so i've disabled the ability to register new users - not that i can imagine that there's going to be a mad rush to snatch-up snowdeal.org jabber IDs.

Pork Barrel Protocols:

"The way we see it, the web service idea is like an emergency relief bill passing through Congress or Parliament. After a natural disaster strikes, the government typically passes a bill authorizing measures to help the damaged community recover. The last ten years of fighting about operating systems, programming languages, distributed object technologies, and application server platforms have been, metaphorically, of course, like a natural disaster. Collectively, the developers of multi-vendor, multi-platform distributed systems certainly constitute a kind of conceptually damaged community in need of assistance. The web service idea, as we define it above, is a relief bill intended to help."

Enterprise Application Integration:

"The basic ideas described below on this page are:

- Low coupling - use services instead of objects. Allow parts of the system to evolve independently. Avoid high level of coupling between parts of the system. Instead of using distributed objects (which usually requires re-compilation and testing of both sides of communicating systems) - use distributed services. That is, make small independent services which can be developed and tested independently. And define how you can request and receive these services (communication).

- Low-coupling - use multiple transport mechanisms, but avoid transport-protocol-specific formats and binary formats. Instead use some simple common format (for example, XML and SOAP). Also use messaging middleware such as MQSeries (further decoupling, to assist with distributed transactions, etc.).

- Why you should avoid using EJBs. - instead you can use servlets-daemons in commercial application server - or write your own servers.

- Use XML/SOAP."

[ Enterprise Application Integration via jy ]

people who know me, know that i am an npr junkie. i really can't get enough of it. my car has three public radio stations preset. yes - three. if there were more stations in the chicagoland area, i'd probably have them all preset. so it wasn't without a little trepidation that i followed the metafilter thread that promised to reveal what the "personalities" looked like. these are people that i've listened to for over 10 years. i've got a pretty concrete mental image of what they all look like and it's not just like you can go destroying mental constructions willy-nilly. and yet, despite my better judgement, i peeked. some, like sylvia poggioli are close [ although, to be honest, i expected any picture of her to show an unfiltered, roll-your-own cigarette somewhere in the frame ]. others, like linda werthheimer couldn't be more different than i had expected.

o.k. maybe i'm a little more dedicated to public radio than most people, but i'm certainly not quite as bad as this person:

"And, as is perhaps inevitable with virtual families, I've assigned all sorts of personal qualities to all my NPR friends and lovers. Given them hairstyles and tics and birthmarks. I've ascribed ethnicities and magazine subscriptions and favorite foods to them. (I feel quite strongly that Steve Inskeep is a chili dog guy, for instance, and know beyond a shadow of a doubt where Ann Taylor shops for her blouses.)"

google's purchase of outride sounds interesting, but the report is a bit skimpy on the technical details:

""Outride has made significant advances in the field of relevance technology and we believe Google provides the ideal vehicle to continue the development of these technologies," said Larry Page, one of Google's co-founders."

"Outride, based in Redwood City, Calif., was founded in May 2000 to develop "model-based relevance" technology designed to simplify information searches."

if you want more information and attemt to visit the outride webpage, you're out of luck sinse it already redirects to google's page. ironically, the page is still in google's cache, although it's equally skimpy on details. tomalak points to an older article that gives a little more information [ when outride was called groupfire], but i'm not sure how up-to-date it still is:

"Called GroupFire, the service lets users access, search and share their favorite Web resources from any computer over the Internet. GroupFire has a surf-along user interface that automatically records an end user's favorite URLs. The list of URLs is regularly updated to reflect changes in a user's surfing habits. The list can be kept private or posted to a group."

hmmm. i wonder how you get from sharing urls to "model-based relevance technology". maybe it gives you recommendations of urls based on sites you visit? i wonder how this relates to opencola's folders project?

nice. blogdex is getting the opensource treatment and an rss feed.

it's all morbus all the time. well, not quite, but i did want to post a superb rant that he posted awhile back that's just been collecting dust in my bookmarks - XML-RPC and the Need to Cash In:

"One of my problem is this (and I know this is an age-old complaint that has not aged well): All of these technologies are for geeks. Geeks, geeks, geeks. Repeat ad infinitum. Sharpie "I AM NOT A REAL PERSON" on the top frame of your computer monitor. It's important. Mayer-Briggs says we think we're smarter than everyone else, and goddamit, we're proving the damn pigeon-hole test right."

Where are the end users? How can my dog get in on this crap?"

as he mentions, it's an age-old complaint, but one that's worth repeating ad infinitum.

coincidently, morbus sent me a link today that i thought i'd pass on regarding Search Engine Friendly SSI Image Gallery that looks like it's on par, effort wise, with mod_rewrite schemes for producing url-rewrites.

crap. it doesn't look like i'm going to sleep tonight. this is not a good thing, because i have a very, very long day tommorrow which requires me to be at least somewhat coherent. crap.

so the real question is - do i start drinking coffee now, at 4a.m. central time? or do i wait until i really, really, really need it?

my rate of silly perl syntax errors is in the hockeystick part of the growth curve. i'm too old for this. crap.

adam. i haven't heard from you since the bombing. you worked for merrill lynch in the wtc and therefore can understand my growing sense of unease. cleverly, i deleted my mozilla profile recently and have lost your e.mail address. please write.

please.

in classic form, richard dawkins stirs the pot, although i'm guessing he's not going to convince anyone who doesn't already think along these lines:

"I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite - or too devout - to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life. I don't mean devaluing the life of others (though it can do that too), but devaluing one's own life. Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end."

"Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. "Mindless" may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from.

It came from religion."

i think there are many points that richard is glossing over, including the simple fact that it is not religion per se, but religion doctrine manipulated in the hands of a powerful rhetorician that is the issue. however, i think the point is still important to keep in mind, especially when you listen to george bush proclaiming that the u.s. is on a crusade to rid the world of evil doers:

""We've never seen this kind of evil before," the president said.

"But the evildoers have never seen the United States in action before either, and they're about to find out."

He vowed to "rid the world of evil-doers," delivering a fresh round of warnings against Osama bin Laden."

Introduction to Jakarta Struts Framework:

" This article focuses on one aspect of that development process: how to use the Struts framework to assist in front end integration. Struts is an open source framework developed for encouraging an application architecture based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design paradigm, useful in building Web applications with Java servlet and Java Server Pages (JSP) technology."

!=

nobody would argue that because timothy mcveigh bombed the oklahoma federal building, then all whites are guilty of terrorism. we shouldn't paint other ethnic groups with the same broad brush. don't spread unjust hatred. [ poster via scripting news ]

i just hear bob schieffer on face the nation comment that the wtc casualty figures represent the single largest loss of life in us history - even greater than the battle of antietam. without wanting to trivialize the loss of life at the wtc, this is simply not true. according to the national park service site, the current estimates of losses are slightly less that the antietam losses in the "morning battle". for the union. the total losses for the daylong battle were 12,400 union dead and 10,300 confederate dead.

again, by bringing up this fact, i am not trying to trivialize or diminish the staggering loss of innocent life at the pentagon and wtc. i'm only highlighting something that i didn't know, which is that a lot of people died on one day during the civil war and i had no idea.

something i heard on npr this morning has me chewing on a large mental nugget.

what's the difference between liberty and privilege?

is getting on a plane without having to wait in line for two hours a liberty or a privilege? i think this is something that we will all have to demarcate clearly and in a public way in the coming months.

lest you take me for a raving libertarian, i'll be the first to admit that i don't know the answer. what is the proper balance between personal freedom and collective security? are our liberties those protected by the bill of rights and everything else is privilege?

i was going to try to avoid commenting on how despicable jerry falwell and pat robertson have been lately, but i can't stop myself.

why on earth is cnn carrying the headline that Falwell apologizes to gays, feminists, lesbians? although it's hard to tell for certain because the article is poorly written, it appears that even though falwell "apologizes" for implying that anyone besides the terrorists were responsible for the attack, he then hedges by stating:

"Falwell said he believes the ACLU and other organizations "which have attempted to secularize America, have removed our nation from its relationship with Christ on which it was founded."

"I therefore believe that that created an environment which possibly has caused God to lift the veil of protection which has allowed no one to attack America on our soil since 1812." he said.""

must be some kind of new definition of apology. i'd go on, but i'm guessing that i'm preaching to the converted.

i woke up this morning and decided that it was time to set myself up with a wireless lan.

forgoing the bargain hunting on the web, i headed for my nearest big-box electronics stores and ended my search at best buy, where i found a linksys etherFast wireless ap + cable/dsl router for $199. yup, that's right, it's a router/firewall, access point and four port switch. for under $200. amazing, since it gets pretty good reviews. add the facts that you can upgrade the firmware for ethernet bridging capabilities >and< replace the antennas so you can get more range and i'm a happy guy. i also snagged a dlink pcmcia card, which performs admirably for $100. i'm getting solid coverage and throughput anywhere i might choose to roam in my two story house, including my front porch, which is where i am right now.

i can't believe i took so long to untether myself from my desktop. i'm downright giddy and i think it's freaking my wife out. i asked her if the neighbors would think it was strange if i ran outside and wandered in the street to see how far i could go. you can probably guess here answer. hi. ho.

i noticed on mozilla.org that the 0.94 branch has been officially released. nice stuff, including the ability to disable pop-up/pop-under ads:

"I have just checked in a little hack that disables the window.open call during onLoad and onUnload events, top-level scripts, and timeouts. This should block 99% of pop-up or pop-under ads out there on the Web while still allowing a page to open a window in response to a mouse click. It'll be in today's trunk builds and on the 0.9.4 branch. To turn on this feature, add this line to your prefs.js file (be sure to exit Mozilla before editing prefs.js or your changes will be overwritten):

user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);"

it's amazing how much more pleasant it makes your browsing experiences. it looks like slashdot is discussing [sic] the merits of the release.

john comments on the uptick in security measures at his work and makes a good point today regarding the potential loss of personal freedom that could result if we're not careful:

"[The security guard] didn't make me feel better. He made me feel annoyed. Annoyed that I was being scrutinized, examined, because I went to my workplace. Annoyed and angry that I was being made to display a small piece of plastic with a bad picture of myself on it, in order to get access to a place that I've been walking into freely for over a year. Annoyed and angry and sad that because of the events of yesterday, my personal freedoms were reduced just that little bit more, another tiny sliver, whittled away...Annoyed and angry and sad and dejected and bitter because the reduction in my freedom doesn't, the reduction in your freedom doesn't, the reduction in everybody's freedom doesn't make a damn bit of difference if somebody, anybody, the shadowy "they", decide to attack us again."

i had the same conversation with co-workers today and i think a little bit of wisdom from ben franklin on liberty is appropriate:

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, 1759

i guess it's really not surprising that ebay had to ban sales of World Trade Centre and Pentagon memorabilia:

"The company says it has taken the step as a mark of respect for victims, family members and survivors of Tuesday's terrorist attacks.

According to reports, one of the sales removed by eBay staff offered debris from the Trade Centre complex."

pathetic.

interesting analysis by structural engineers as to why the towers collapsed, although it's really just a detailed explanation of the obvious:

""Only the containment building at a nuclear powerplant" is designed to withstand such an impact and explosion, says Robert S. Vecchio, principal of metallurgical engineer Lucius Pitkin Inc., referring to the hijacked Boeing 767 airplanes, heavy with fuel, that slammed into each WTC tower."

perhaps the most ill-timed album cover, which was released two weeks ago. no sign on ebay. yet.

poynter is publishing an extensive list of extra! newspaper covers.

more evidence of the power of a weblog and a digital comera.

it really is staggering to see the list of companies that operated in the wtc - a building filled with innocent people trying to make a living.

and maybe there are still heroes in the world. then again, the nyc public safety personnel already proved that.

this is a day that demarcates "before" and "after".

this is the day that will cause people will ask, "what were you doing when..."

i'm going to try to try to summarize some of my thoughts purely for my own future reference. i'm writing this to try to capture how i remember my stream of thoughts through the day. it likely won't be of interest to anyone else.

this is how i remember tuesday, september 11. 2001.

on the internet this morning. listening to npr. hear the report of the first crash. sounds like a commuter flight. do a couple of internet searches and don't find anything. i decide i don't want to watch t.v.

report of second plane hitting tower. another quick search on moreover. 1 story. i decide i can't resist. i watch t.v. for 30 seconds. i can't take bryant gumbel saying the same thing over. and over.

i debate going to work. decide that maybe it's best to try to occupy my mind with other things and get in car. increasingly unsettled feeling. twenty minutes in my drive i get a 2-way alert from a co-worker. he's at home watching t.v. watched the second plane crash into the tower with his son. first tower has collapsed. on npr, bob edwards seems out-of- sorts. more 2-way radio conversations from co-worker. reports of white house on fire. plane crashes in pentagon.

i work 20 minutes from o'hare airport. i hear report that all air traffic is halted, which explains the nightmare traffic back-up. i get a page from my wife. they are evacuating downtown chicago. traffic is crawling. i'm not sure what to think. things starting to blur together. reports of other plane crashes...reported car bombs...evacuation of whitehouse and other government buildings. i realize that i'm not prepared to digest all this sensory input.

i finally get into motorola parking lot. eery silence due to lack of planes on their glide path to o'hare. recreation room on first floor filled with people watching t.v. stunned looks on their faces. lots of people walking around with cell phones trying to contact family.

my wife calls and tells me that her co-worker's husband was going to a meeting at the towers today. he was in the building during the last bombing. no word if he's safe.

messages from upper management of motorola. upper management seems to be trying to encourage everyone to work as normal. message doesn't seem to get through, since they decide to deliver a live cnn web feed behind the corporate firewall.

wife calls. her co-worker's husband is safe. according to his wife, he was walking into the first tower when the plane hit. he dropped his luggage and crawled under a bench. debris rained down. he waited until things calmed down and contemplated getting his luggage. as he was about to get out from under, the bench the second tower was hit. potentially deadly amount of debris falls where his luggage is located. he's saved by being under bench and begins long treck to queens on foot.

i try to avoid live footage. i'm amazed at the blogging coverage as evidenced by dave and the blogger community.

people start to wonder why their are no initial casualty estimates. the mayor of new york will only say that it will likely be more than new york can bear. trying to avoid seeing the images that co-workers are commenting on of people jumping out of windows.

i lose my willpower and decide to click on a quicktime movie of the planes crashing into the towers. i feel something that i've never felt before. something akin to sadness mixed with shock.

the rest of the day is a mix of bundled attempts to take my mind off things by actually working.

i drive home. hear somebody at state department speak on npr. i hear something that sounds close to, "we aren't going wait until we find who really did this. we know about lots of terrorists. we know countries that support those terrorists." vauge allusions to bombing whomever we think are terrorists.

i decide that it might be best to get a few beers. woman behind the counter at store looks at me and says simply, "i'll tell you what. george is right. we better get those people." i'm not sure who she thinks "those people" are, but i'm not getting the impression that she's going to put much thought into it. the juxtaposition of her comments with the fact that i can see the middle-eastern owners of the store in the back makes me feel something. i can't tell if it's positive or not. i decide sometimes there's no deciphering irony.

i get home. kris comments that our neighbor called. she's advocating that we bomb whoever did this. the sooner the better. kris asked politely if that wasn't the type of thinking that got us into this in the first place. stammering. phone call ends.

on re-reading what i wrote, i want to make clear that i'm not trying to make a statement, i'm only putting down how i filtered the day. we should respond, but i'm not smart enought to begin to contemplate what an "appropriate" response to this type of terrorist activity means. all i know is that hatred, contempt and the ability to create caricatures of "those people" are what got us into this mess and it's certainly not going to get us out of it.

p.s. i am not a superstitious person. i don't believe i have any psychic ability. nonetheless, i wanted to capture something that i can only bin in the "not-sure-where-to-place-this" category.

one week ago kris woke up and said she had a disturbing dream. she was in a plane crash in the water. she thought the plane crashed near boston, but wasn't sure - she just remembered the water. after she awoke, we realized that the power went out in our house, but nowhere else in our neighborhood, which didn't help the freaky feeling. since she was leaving the following day for boston, we tried to determine when her abnormal fear of flying developed. we made nervous, spooky jokes and tried to drop the issue to ward off bad mojo [we're not superstitious. honest. o.k. maybe just a little. ].

the next night - 6 days ago - i dreamt that i was on board a plane. flying through the streets of a city. my dream wasn't as clear. why was i standing in the cockpit watching through the front window? why were we flying through the city? why am i on a plane. what city is this? why are we so close to the buildings? we're not supposed to be that close to the buildings.

a surreal red light is cast on all the buildings.

...

i had a whole bunch of 802.11 links that i was going to post, but i happened to look over at the 802.11b networking news and every single one is linked to on friday and today, so you might as well go there instead. besides, glenn's commentary is better than mine would have been anyway.

a good friend [ a good friend despite his known tendency to play with fire ] intoduced me to the n_gen design machine this weekend. i may never be the same:

"Design Modules are the heart of the n_Gen Design Machine. They supply the 'Recipes and Ingredients' for the designs you create - graphics, images and text content as well as layout and image generative algorithms. When it's released, the full n_Gen application will allow users to create their own Design Modules. Designers or other individuals with a particular aesthetic or approach to share will be able to create modules for distribution that get installed and interpreted by the n_Gen application, similar to the way typographic fonts and plug-ins are now developed for use in standard graphics applications like Adobe Photoshop® or Illustrator®."

i put up a smattering of the results. amazing.

cafepress here i come.

i'm probably the last to know about it, but daypop looks like a nice complement to blogdex [ which is where i discovered it ]:

"Daypop is a current events search engine. Daypop crawls the living web at least once a day to bring you the latest information relevant to your searches."

"The living web is composed of sites that update on a daily basis: newspapers, online magazines, and weblogs. Weblogs are a new form of personal journalism. Think of them as opinion columns or slices of life. Newspapers give you the international headlines and weblogs give you both a subjective view of current events and a personal view of the author's life."

i like how it allows you to filter all feeds, newsfeeds only or weblogs only which can make it slightly more useful than google in certain situations. now that google indexes frequently updated sites more often, i guess this would make daypop the second just-in-time search engine.

i don't know how far i'd run with the analogy, but Putting people together to create new products makes some good points that an amazing number of people in technology-driven companies don't seem to understand.

"Many companies give their marketing group responsibility for determining what people will like, but marketing must focus on customers and their purchase decisions. This differs subtly from design's concern with users and their satisfaction. To succeed with a spaghetti sauce for children, you need marketing that will motivate adults to buy it, but designers need to give it a flavor that appeals to children. Marketing and design apply different skills to different problems."

interesting. techdirt is trying a variant the weblogs for lighweight knowledge management scheme by putting together techdirt corporate intelligence:

"The company provides hosted, branded, private "Techdirts" for our clients. We've built (with quite a lot of help) a set of tools that helps us to very efficiently find/filter/summarize/analyze news for companies. We have a great content management system (built from the ground up) that helps us to post the stories to the corporate sites quickly (the corporate sites are completely separate from the main Techdirt.com and use a totally different system for content management). We do thorough, but quick, analysis for each news story, and we make sure that our clients are as informed as they can be about whatever news they want to know about. Companies like our analysis because we don't shy away from telling them what we think. We keep our analysis short and to the point, so there's no way to beat around the bush - and companies find that sort of direct honesty refreshing and extremely valuable."

this is something that i've considered doing for awhile and things like the blogger api and amphetadesk bring the startup infrastructure cost down to close to nothing. best of luck to the folks at techdirt.

he speaketh the truth in An Engineer's View of Venture Capitalists:

"The VC's version of a pet is the "executive in residence." Many venture firms keep a cache of start-up executives on staff at $10 000 to $20 000 per month (a princely sum to an engineer, but just enough to keep people in these circles out of the soup kitchens). Start-up executives, loitering for an opportunity, may collect these fees from more than one venture firm, since the position entails no more than casual advising. These executives have "experience" in start-ups. When you show your start-up to the VCs, they will grill you about the "experience" of your executive team. It won't be good enough, but not to worry, the VC supplies the necessary talent. You get a CEO. The CEO replaces your friends with cronies.

The VCs' pets are like Hollywood's superstars. Just like Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise, the superstar CEOs command big bucks and big percentages (of equity)--driving up the cost of the start-up--but are "worth it" because they give investors and VCs a sense of security."

[ via dave ]

Do You Haiku?

""[W]e've created tools for users to define information hierarchies based on geography, we also hope that users will, to a degree, use the system in ways we're not anticipating. We'll adapt the system to the needs of the users and their mobile environments." Imagine tens of thousands of people writing little bits about their life to mark up the physical landscape, and then imagine collaborative filtering, friendship priority, or posts attached to certain categories."

[ via ev ]

It's The Business Model, Not The Product:

"If you think everyone does this and I'm being cranky, join me on my analyst rounds. Just in the last week I spoke (so far and it's only Tuesday) to five firms (two of which aren't really companies yet). Only one of them could be said to have a proper business model and they came to it after five or six years doing something else (related) which they could see wasn't going to be very interesting (read: profitable). The two groups I spoke with who aren't firms yet, just ideas (but talking seriously about funding) have all the usual problems: can't figure out who their "real" customer is; don't understand how buying decisions are made or funded in the relevant markets; think there's no competition because they believe something would have to be identical to their idea to be competitive."

I'm not sure how this phone tries to guess which word you are trying to type so that it can complete it. It is so absolute in its nonhelpfullness that it's humorous to try to imagine the sequence of events that led to its approval in a shipping product.

We're driving back from the upper peninsula of michigan right now. Nothing like a few days filled with friends, family and finnish saunas to wear a guy out.