Feed the Models

Since the Ka2 is proving SO popular, here some more from Chiseen | where cultural traditions and urban insanity collide

Feed the Models (cause if you don't feed them, they would feed them selves...

and Wok Boarding An ancient sport once favored by chinese chefs lost over time is rediscovered by Team Chiseen.

but Late 4 Work is the best

Other uses for the Google Operating System, or the Google Space

Via kottke.org: GooOS, the Google Operating System has a commentary on topix.net : The Secret Source of Google's Power

from Kottke:

He argues that Google is building a huge computer with a custom operating system that everyone on earth can have an account on. His last few paragraphs are so much more perceptive than anything that's been written about Google by anyone; Skrenta nails the company exactly: Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer....

and Topix.net

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application

So how would I like to use the coming Google Space Operating System and take advantage of that secret sauce :

A Google IM (instant Messaging ), would seems to be a simple extension of Gmail.

A secure Google Id. something beyond a user name and password for my precious data. and make transmitting that password very secure. Maybe Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) based?

A Google file system, I want to see my Google space as a drive mapping on my Win, Mac, Linux, or Palm computing box. like how USB dries just show up. The mapping should be secure as well. maybe make the whole thing a zero install vpn (virtual private network) ?

Killer applications (services) for this kind of infrastructure are :

A Google backup for my data files, always in sync or dependent on the current bandwidth. Even better : mark which directories are to be kept incremental in sync with my Google space file system.

A Google web photo album, with restricted sharing, so I can share some albums (sub directories) with Family only, some with Friends. (allow the option of using Google's IM to tell me when something changes)

Put a intranet.com like interface on it and you have corporate Google space for company or project sharing of documents and calendar events (plus blogs or wikki's ?)

Offer the infrastrutcture for free (or almost) and change for the services (on a yearly/monthly scale)

All of these blur the boundary between my physical present OS (the one in front of me) and the Virtual Google OS. At minimum it would act as an extension of the local OS. Although (as Kottke argues), once the Google space is in place it would make that local OS less important (one of Microsoft biggest fears in it's battle against Netscape and Java). Access to the Google Space would be dependent on available bandwidth, storage, and local situation. (more of a issue on wireless and smart phone or PDA like devices)

If I have lower bandwidth it would make sense to locally cashe my directory listings and my most fequently (or last) used files; How many get locally cashed would depend on storage as well as bandwidth (full cimputer vs hand held vs broadband vs wireless); At work or at an Inernet cafe I what only a secure web interface with no local copies)

all of these does not even touch on Ftrain's : August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web which I have noted on Monday, February 02, 2004 and Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Toronto's High Park Ski Club's FITS (Fun in the Sun) Night is April 22 (2004)

HPSC's Annual Fun in the Summer ("FITS") Night, is being held on Thursday, April 22, 2004, at the Lithuanian Hall, 1573 Bloor St. West (2 blocks east of Keele St.; between Keele and Dundas Street West subway stations. Doors open at 7:00 pm and close at approximately 11:00 pm.

During those hours you will be exposed to a wide variety of summer activity clubs, associations and retailers in the Greater Toronto area. These organizations have been invited to exhibit and promote their summer activities and services to you and your friends. Last year this event was sold out with over 25 exhibitors.


http://www.highparkskiclub.on.ca

Robert Scoble is in in Kunal's World now, (Now I know why we called them K-Logs) or How to build push button blogging.

Robert Scoble (Microsoft blogger at Large) discovers a new piece of the puzzle :

You know, Kunal's OutlookMT feature is, for me, a killer feature. One of those that'll change -- dramatically -- my life forever.

The Outlook team and Sharepoint team should hire Kunal to implement this feature ASAP. It is THAT IMPORTANT.

What does it do?

It adds a new folder to Outlook. OK, let's say Bill Gates emailed me right now. Let's say I wanted to post that email out to the world? In the old world I'd need to open up Radio UserLand, copy the email, clean up the HTML, then click post.

New "Kunal's" world? Copy the email over to the folder. It's posted. Done. No more work.

Do you have any idea how this is going to change knowledge management? You just watch!

Now, keep in mind, this isn't commercial quality. Lots of work to do. But he's responsive. I bet that by the end of the week he has it working well enough for almost everyone. The quality difference between yesterday and today is huge.

[Via Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

More info here http://www.kunal.org/

Hmm... I wonder how hard it would be to add the sort of drag to folder to publish functionality to a Lotus Notes mail template or a Notes RSS news reader?

After thinking about this some more It occurs to me it would be trivial (SMoP, "simplify a matter of programming") to writer a Lotus Mail to Domino Blog add-on : a Shared action button "Blog this " (appearing on the Mail form and various views ) , a profile form to capture which domino blog I'm using (need to know the Form name, and some default behaviour , and the path to it), and a small amount of LotusScript. The drag to publish functionality could then be added if desired. All this could also be added to any Lotus Notes RSS news reader in 3 shakes of a lambs tail.

As an additional comment : The are 2 reasons that Mr Scoble is raving about this (I think , and maybe he should be clearer about) :

1. He is using a outlook based RSS news reader, so such a tool makes it much easier to turn a Feed item or a mail item into a blog item, without going all cut and paste.


2. in a corporate intranet blog (intra-blog.. i-blog ? hmmm), escalating a person to person (or small group) email into a corporate Knowledge log item, preserved for all time, has high value

Okay he's made explicate about how he see it being used here http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/04/04.html#a7159

Third, the real innovation here isn't for public blogs. It's for corporate knowledge management. When I left NEC I took one gig of email with me -- none of that is available to any of my former coworkers. All that knowledge is simply GONE. After 11 months at Microsoft I have hundreds of megabytes of stuff in my "resources" folder. This is a folder where I store anything interesting to me as a Microsoft employee. For instance, the internal link to get the latest Longhorn builds from. Now, if you're a new Microsoft employee, finding stuff like that is hard. It took me 11 months to build up a store of useful stuff. Why shouldn't I share that with my coworkers?
...
This is such an important feature to corporate knowledge management sharing that I can't sit still tonight. I'm serious. This feature has me tingling. It's what I've wanted for so long.

Kikkoman, from the planet Soy

I kid you not!

Kikkoman (Flash)

I've seen this before but that was pre-blog. This is a real company, with a real and very good product. The flash is based on a real (HILARIOUS) Japanese commercial.

and if you think that was weird, then you haven't see nothing yet : Miki Miko Nurse : There is no Escape, give us your brains! dear god.....

Complication in Daylight Saving Time

Via Nelson's Weblog, Daylight savings complications:

Twice a year as I set my clocks for daylight savings I wonder 'isn't it the future yet? Can't computers do this for me?' Then I remember the complexity that is the unix timezone database. 444k of datafiles (260k without comments) containing facts like 'Louisville, KY didn't observe daylight savings time in 1974.'
This spring, daylight savings time changes at 45 different times around the world. No wonder it's so hard to know what time it is. "

I've blogged and struggled with this beast before.

Oh and it's " Daylight Saving Time", no "s" as in " "Daylight Savings Time"

Nelson points to a couple of new to me useful Links :

• the unix timezone database, public-domain time zone database contains code and data that represent the history of local time for many representative locations around the globe and has links to other resources.
• The Time and Date , with various bits for clock and calendar information

also be very care Monday Morning as per: Springing ahead has its drawbacks:

In 1996 Prof. Coren did a study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine that looked at car-crash data from Statistics Canada. He found there is about a 7 per cent increase in accidents the day after most of the country moves to daylight time.

Which also mentions another complication I hadn't really thought about :

The official changeover happens at different times across the country: midnight in Newfoundland and New Brunswick, 3 a.m. in Manitoba and 2 a.m. everywhere else.

and Wired has Technology Resets the Clock with this gem at the end :

Ignoring daylight-saving time brings its own complications, though. In Indiana, 77 of the state's 92 counties are in the Eastern time zone but do not change to daylight-saving time in April, except for two Indiana counties located near Cincinnati, Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky, which observe it.

Counties in the northwest corner of Indiana (near Chicago) and the southwestern section (near Evansville) are in the Central time zone and also will be springing forward this Sunday with the rest of the nation.

"It's kind of crazy. I work in one county and live in another so I spring forward and fall back on an almost daily basis," said Jeff Cunner, a software programmer who lives near Indianapolis.

"My watch and cell phone reset themselves automatically, thankfully. Otherwise, I'd never know what time it is."

and you think you have problems!