blog the organization sounds interesting:

"My BlogBook project has taken a major turn. It's no longer about weblogs in the sense of diaries and journals. Instead, I've decided to focus on the use of weblogs and similar tools within organizations. More later on why I've made this change. For now, please bear with me while I update the Web site to align with my new plans."

How a Librarian Can Live Nine Lives in a Knowledge-Based Economy:

"Over the centuries, the librarian and teaching professions have become elite groups that are currently losing their exclusive privileges in the access to knowledge. We see the emergence of figures that reinvent the old role of "guide to the sources" and come from the most varied fields. Consider the human guides of "About.com": What are they? Reference librarians? Journalists? Teachers? Engineers? Psychologists?

Creating, acquiring, and managing information have emerged as the central focus of the digital economy. Now we are all knowledge workers: We create and use information using Web sites, e-mail, databases, forums, etc. Creating and sharing information are the basis of social relationships within specific virtual communities. This sets up an enormous long-term challenge for every library or information center as well as for every professional involved in publishing and education. We need a new mind-set and we're all learning as we go. Like cats moving through their fabled nine lives, I think that teachers and librarians should redefine their own roles beyond the confines of their respective traditions. In my opinion the most promising road today is that of helping people develop their own cognitive abilities, understand their own needs, and learn how to express them correctly."

i hope it's just a case of drawing too many conclusions from too few data, but doc's latest bit of evangelism for jabber.com entitled "jabber asks the tough question" starts ringing warning bells for me. why? because when i read things like following, i hear trouble:

"How do you make money with something that becomes ubiquitous internet infrastructure? It's a question Jabber is asking about instant messaging and presence.

Jabber is hot, but it's still not quite setting the world on fire. When will it happen? And how will open source developers make it happen?"

"This morning I pondered why so many inferior products, services and technologies end up suceeding [sic] and why so many other clearly superior products, services and technologies ultimately fail."

"The company received a Nasdaq staff determination last week, saying that Webb Interactive "fails to comply with the net tangible assets requirement for continued listing.""

having spent my high school years just a stones throw from flint, michigan during the time when michael moore's roger & me was released in theatres, i used to hear this sort of reasoning all the time:

"Le says he doesn't see many Chinese, Indian and Vietnamese clients engaging in cosmic questions about their lives in the technology industry. Perhaps that's because these workers often come from hard-core tech backgrounds such as engineering. Many of them also have a lot riding, culturally, on an industry that was milk and honey for generations of immigrants here, Le says.

``Our parents 20 years ago worked on the assembly line at Apple when the first computer came out,'' says Le, who moved from Vietnam when he was 10. Younger generations may find it hard to question or reject what their parents still see as opportunity."

wierd. so, i'm reading an article from the relatively new o'reilly bioinformatics center and i see that nat was nice enough to give the vast wasteland a plug.

strange, but true. maybe i'll have two regular readers now.

i forgot to mention that for thanksgiving dinner this year, kris and i "brined" the turkey and it's well worth the extra effort [ at least for me, since she doesn't eat meat :-) ]. it's funny because i hadn't heard of the technique, but apparently it was part of one of the subplots of "west wing" this week and it looks like meg brined her turkey this year. mmmmm. mmmmm. the turkey is still good for snacking and sandwiches.

spinsanity:

"Robust political debate is essential to democracy. Our national political discourse is an important part of the democratic process and serves as a critical check on those in power. We are therefore deeply concerned that our public political dialogue, largely expressed through the channels of the mass media, is becoming systematically dominated by sophisticated tactics of manipulation rather than norms of public reason. Despite widespread complaints about spin, no one is adequately documenting the full ramifications of this development to our satisfaction.

Thus, our goal at Spinsanity is to use rigorous, non-partisan analysis to expose the use and intent of the simulated reason and public relations techniques that dominate political discourse, and to document how they are disseminated through the media."

i saw this tutorial on functional specifications linked around a few places [ none of which i can remember right now ]. as an overview of the traditional functional spec it's the second best overview i've seen [ incidently, the article links to the best overview i've seen, painless functional specifications , which comes from joel ]:

"When the Functional Spec is completed, anyone who reads it should have a very clear idea about what the application is going to do and what it is going to look like. It should read very much like an instruction manual or cook book, with step-by-step descriptions of what happens and how the individual elements of the application work together.

Another key benefit of writing up a Functional Spec is in streamlining the development process. The developer working from the spec has, ideally, all of their questions answered about the application and can start building it. And since this is a spec that was approved by the client, they are building nothing less than what the client is expecting. There should be nothing left to guess or interpret when the spec is completed...and this, in a nut, explains my love affair with the Functional Spec."

"The primary vehicle for requirements elicitation in XP is adding a member of the customer’s organization to the team. This customer representative works full time with the team, writing stories – similar to Universal Markup Language (UML) Use Cases – developing system acceptance tests, and prioritizing requirements [4]. The specification is not a single monolithic document; instead, it is a collection of user stories, the acceptance tests written by the customer, and the unit tests written for each module. Since the customer is present throughout the development, that customer can be considered part of the specification since he or she is available to answer questions and clear up ambiguity. "ing from the spec has, ideally, all of their questions answered about the application and can start building it. And since this is a spec that was approved by the client, they are building nothing less than what the client is expecting. There should be nothing left to guess or interpret when the spec is completed...and this, in a nut, explains my love affair with the Functional Spec."

Lincoln's 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation :

"The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle, or the ship; the axe had enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

Abraham Lincoln"

too..much..turkey..so..sleepy...

will and vision will hopefully [but not probably] put the last nail on the coffin of that myth-of-myths - "the first mover advantage":

"Everybody thinks that it’s the market pioneers who have the best name recognition, the highest market share, and the most enduring market leadership....Right? In order to test the truth of this conventional wisdom, Gerard Tellis and Peter Golder carried out a decade-long historical analysis of 66 markets, as they evolved over the decades. Their discoveries, as reported for the first time in this book, will shock the business community. After exposing the limitations of prior studies that extolled the success of pioneers, the authors find that pioneers mostly fail, have low market share, and are rarely enduring market leaders. In addition, they found that the current trend of staking everything on getting there first all-too-often leads companies to embrace a disastrous strategy of rushing to market with incomplete, inferior, and flawed products."

wow, i have no idea what i would do with it, but the flightGear flight simulator project seems like a wonderful way to suck up all that free time i don't have:

"The FlightGear Flight Simulator project is a free, open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight sim development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

The FlightGear project is working to create a sophisticated flight simulator framework for the development and pursuit of interesting flight simulator ideas. We are developing a solid, basic sim that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing."

An Introduction to Components:

"One of the primary methods of extending the Jabber platform is through components that add functionality to the system. Components generally use the same protocol as all other Jabber pieces (clients, server to server, etc), but they do have a few subtle differences that can be confusing at first. This introduction will serve as a starting point to understanding Jabber component development."

it has been blogged to death, but i'll throw in a shout for mozilla's custom keywords. they are superfine. i'm not sure it's widely known that you can also set up alets and notifications for when a bookmarked page changes by editing the bookmark properties.

Basic XML and RDF techniques for knowledge management :

"This column, the third in a series, shows how to add semantic knowledge to an RDF application by incorporating WordNet synonym sets. With the added knowledge of the WordNet lexical database, you can search a set of RDF data for related concepts, not just one keyword at a time. As the demonstration issue-tracker application shows, that means searching once for instances that fit within the concept of "selection" rather than searching individually on "vote," "choice," "ballot," and 86 other related terms. Columnist Uche Ogbuji's sample code in Python illustrates the techniques."

in a bit of intertwingled recursiveness, i'll link to victor's linking to my link which chronicles my ongoing experience with micro ads and note that he also links to blogsnob which looks like a promising way to continue my anthropological study. i wonder if i can get a grant.

houston, we have a new favicon, which is much better than that retro piece of crap i threw together. much thanks to matt for putting it together - when he's not trying to slash and burn my backyard, he can be pretty handy friend.

via paracelsus rambles i found a great writeup of memento , which is saw awhile ago. when i originally saw the movie i thought it was better than average, but it appears that i missed much of the complexity:

"Unlike "The Sixth Sense" and "The Usual Suspects" -- indeed, unlike almost every other celebrated "puzzle film" in cinematic history -- "Memento's" puzzle can't be undone with a simple declarative explanatory sentence. Its riddles are tangled up in a dizzying series of ways: by an elegant but brain-knotting structure; by an exceedingly unreliable narrator through part of the film; by a postmodern self-referentiality that, unlike most empty examples of the form, thoroughly underscores the film's sobering thematic meditations on memory, knowledge and grief; and by a number of red herrings and misleading clues that seem designed either to distract the audience or to hint at a deeper, second layer of puzzle at work -- or that may, on the other the other hand, simply suggest that, in some respects, the director bit off more than he could chew."

so i had 20 bucks burning a hole in my paypal account and decided to do a little test. which is more effective - pyrads or metafilter's textads ?

while certainly unscientific, i purchased 10 dollars worth of impressions from each adserver, ran the same "copy" on each [i went with the phrase - "snowdeal.org. all intertwingled. all the time." [no, it's not going to win any awards, but once it popped into my head, i couldn't get it out, which i figured meant something]] and started to watch the click-throughs roll in. it should be duly noted that from a rigid ROI analysis pyrads are already fighting an uphill battle against metafilter's textads since your 10 bucks only purchases 3,333 impressions versus 5,000.

the very preliminary results, based on less than 500 impressions served, are starting to come in and it's looking like the mefi textads are a better value - returning a click-through-rate [ctr] of 3% versus pyrads paltry 0.4%. it'll be interesting to see if the the mefi textads continue to deliver 10 times the click-through rate of pyrads and what, if any, conclusions can be drawn from the results.

of course there are confounding factors galore, but one effect could perhaps be derived from using the word intertwingled in the "copy". perhaps the not-so-obscure reference to ted nelson hints at an important demographic difference between the average metafilter and blogger visitor. or maybe victor has intuited a more general theory with the observation that "[textads] are probably more effective on a site with a more cohesive community, like Metafilter...". or maybe i'm drawing too many conclusions from too few data.

i haven't made up my mind whether or not the ads are "worth it" from a rigorous ROI perspective - or even it that kind of analysis makes sense in this situation.

personally, i view the ads as being closer to getting your name mentioned on the air during a public radio fund-drive than a mechanism for driving traffic to your site. i'll probably buy a few more impressions, if for no other reason than to support services that i find valuable. i guess this puts me squarely in the "donation advertiser" demographic.

there has been one unexpected result - monitoring the ad results could become very, very addictive. not from a "funneling eyeballs to the site" perspective, but rather from the opportunities that arise from the "democritization" of running micro-ad campaigns with subtle variations. it'd be interesting to run competing $2 campaings with a "rival" blogger to see who gets the best click-through-rates. then again, maybe just coming up with that idea is adequate proof that i really need to find more constructive things to do with my time and money.

in honor of the new favicon support in the 0.96 branch of mozilla , i've gone and whipped together an icon. yes, i know the exclamation point is so 1999, but it was the best i could do on short notice.

it should work in explorer and konqueror . for bonus points, i should have fewer 404s in the referrer logs.

and check out that nifty tabbed interface! superfine.

sweet lord. i just sat through an entire barbara walters special. jesus.

ev births pyrads which follows metafilter's textad lead:

"pyRads™ is a service for purchasing, managing, and serving micro advertising on web sites. Micro advertising is different than most banners and other forms of advertising you see on the web in that: 1) It's quick, easy, and low-cost for advertisers (and usually more effective). 2) To the audience, it's unobtrusive and can actual add value to a site, rather than annoyance. 3) It's usually text, rather than graphics (because that's what people read)."

cool. the leonid flux estimator predicts that, if i'm able to stay awake until 4 a.m. on sunday morning, i will see a peak hourly count of about 3,500 meteors. i live in the far, far northwest reaches of the greater chicagoland area - downtown will see a paltry peak rate of 600 meteors per hour. so take that, you city dwellers.

there used to be a post here about favicon support in the 0.96 branch of mozilla . cleverly, i deleted the post several days after making it [don't ask] and now can't remember exactly how i worded things. you get the point though - just think favicon support.

NoCatAuth: Authentication for Wireless Networks provides some useful food for thought regarding security and authentication in community wireless networks:

"To provide responsible wireless access, we need to securely identify users when they connect, and then only allocate resources that the node owner is willing to contribute. The built-in security features of 802.11b are designed to create a private network full of trusted clients; they aren't well suited to managing public-access networks. Fortunately, with the proper application of open source software, a secure and easy-to-use security framework can be created."

"Building Wireless Community Networks offers a compelling case for building wireless networks on a local level: They are inexpensive, and they can be implemented and managed by the community using them, whether it's a school, a neighborhood, or a small business. This book also provides all the necessary information for planning a network, getting the necessary components, and understanding protocols that you need to design and implement your network."

"Mobile operators should certainly be worried. The combination of no licence fees - because they operate in the unlicenced 2.4 ghz band - relatively cheap and easy installation, a wide and growing potential customer base and high-speed connectivity - offering data rates of up to 11 mbps to wireless-enabled laptops or handhelds within 50 metres of any access point - means that these wireless hotspots will spread ever faster across the world."

"Helsinki Finland-based Nokia stepped up their efforts to enter the home networking market with the announcement today of an agreement with KPN to provide them with Nokia Home Gateway products. These products are based on the IEEE 802.11b standard and enable data transfer at 11 Mbps."

Subscribe now for rapid prototyping:

"One of the most difficult software design challenges is designing a system that supports a changing set of requirements. Developers often find themselves reengineering an API to meet the demand of evolving requirements. By providing a framework for a more flexible system, the Publisher-Subscriber pattern can help you overcome some problems associated with object dependencies."

the term "requirements engineering" always reminded me of an oxymoron in the same class as "strategic planning", but that doesn't stop the WebWord's Requirements Engineering Portal from being filled with linky goodness:

"WebWord's Requirements Engineering Portal is a collection of links about requirements engineering, requirements management, systems science, use-case scenarios, requirements engineering software, and methods and tools related to requirements engineering."

whoohoo! ev unwittingly expands my christmas list by pointing to a couple removeable storage options fit for a keyring - the ibm 8mb memory key and the slightly cooler disk on key device which comes in 8, 16 and 32 mb flavors [ it looks like 64 and 128 mb offerings are coming soon ].

and no, i have no idea what i'd do with the device when i had it, but that's really beside the point.

Building Perl projects with MakeMaker:

"If you've used UNIX or Linux for some period of time, you've probably written a few Perl programs to automate simple tasks. Each of these programs does something basic and simple that might otherwise take you 10 or 20 minutes to do by hand. In this article, Sean will show you how to convert just such a Perl program into a far more robust programming project, one that will be generic enough to be widely distributed across many disparate platforms."

rss monkey :

"RSS Monkey is a simple, stand-alone script that allows you to add RSS feeds from other sites to your personal site, or for you to maintain several versions of your own RSS feed. It utilizes the bbTemplate and bbXML technologies to give you a completely customizable system.

Features include:

* Multiple sets of customizable templates
* Configurable channel cache saves bandwidth
* Automagic channel updates -- your display will always be up to date without ever having to worry about downloading XML files.
* JavaScript feeds allow other sites to syndicate your content without even installing RSS Monkey!"

fast becomes the latest to upgrade the web :

"FAST SEARCH & Transfer ASA will launch an upgraded version of its Alltheweb.com search engine on Monday that offers near real time searches in over 3,000 online news sources.

Entering "Anthrax," for example, can bring up news stories that were updated less than an hour ago from both national and local news organizations from various countries, and in a multitude of languages."

Building an XML-based message server :

"This article shows how to code a lightweight, transport-protocol-agnostic, XML-based message server that not only allows clients to place and pick up messages on queues, but also transform messages using XSL. Written in the Java language, eight code listings take you from opening a client connection to invoking XSL transformations on messages."

when, my friend, was the last time you put some serious thought into that most neglected of components - your power supply:

"It's now time to turn our attention to one of the most neglected components in a computer system: the power supply. Think very hard and see if you can name the manufacturer and model number of your motherboard, video card, or even your NIC. Easy? Now name the manufacturer and the model number of the component that all of your other pricey components rely on for a clean, constant source of power. Stumped, huh? Well you're not alone. Most people couldn't care less about what 200W-300W power supply that either came with their $50 case or that they spent $25 on at the corner PC shop. Why the neglect on a component that could possibly make a killer system unstable or even destroy all of your components in one pop of a capacitor? Peaked your interest? Let's take a look now at what the numbers on the spec sheet mean, how much power you really need, and what a bit more money will buy you when it comes to top-notch power."

well - 68 out of 100 seems sort-of like a healthy balance, although my wife might disagree with the interpretation:

"You are a dedicated weblogger. You post frequently because you enjoy weblogging a lot, yet you still manage to have a social life. You're the best kind of weblogger. Way to go!"

groove's ray ozzie responds to craig burton's characterization of groove as a "closed" environment. it's an amazingly cogent response that includes a line that i'd really like to try to incorporate into daily conversations:

"Groove is not an RPC-based system; it's fundamentally based upon asynchronous xml message queuing as its underlying mechanism, rather than procedure call. Essentially, it's an open component-based application platform built upon a masterless distributed transaction system built upon a Jabber-esque (compressed, encrypted) XML asynchronous message transport."

"How to make money with the GPL. How to promote and spread free software. How open source's experience advantage with developers gives companies a competitive edge. Sleepycat President and CEO Michael Olson shows us what happens when free software meets intelligent business strategy."

"The orientation manual claimed that Maria would "lay out the rules that we need to live by to have an incredible sexual relationship with others and with ourselves." I am eager to see if anyone indeed feels an "incredible" sexual utopia has opened up before them after such tastelessness and revulsion. And her moaning still echoes in my mind."