Ka's lesser evil twin

Update : Looks like the site (http://www.mplayer74.com/) is down and out.

ka1.mpg (~1 Mb)
almost as evil as Ka's evil twin : Astonishingly fucked-up car commercial:

link - o- rama

• I'm starting to see billboard advertising for RedTO. It looks like a Toronto focused Directory Listings and search engine will a Dead tree based Business Catalog Book, coming out in June 2004. Or is it a Toronto based Business Catalog Book with a Website? The people behind it are called Red Media Corporation at http://www.theredpages.com/, so a guess the have ambitions beyond Toronto. Are there any Colors left?


• As reported in the Globe and Mail > On-line sales in Canada surged 40 per cent last year, fuelled by the increasing prevalence of high-speed Internet access, Statistics Canada said Friday.


• IBM developer has a article on Object-relation mapping without the container, Develop a transactional persistence layer using Hibernate and Spring
  exploring 2 hot framework tools that let you do strong db intergrate without ugly EJB's.


• Via Boing Boing comes HowToons, comics and video how-to projects for kids, with a good mix of mischief, smartassery, and science. I'm thinking of building the marshmellow gun for my summer get together with my brothers kids!


• Google is going after local Ads now: : Via TechDirt it seems Google AdSense is allowing businesses to specify that they only want the ads to show up for people in a certain location. Previously, businesses could specify only what country they wish to target, making the program prohibitively expensive for smaller merchants. The article talks about issues in display the results.
  
  This is in addition to the Local searching that Google is (quietly) testing here http://local.google.com/lochp (USA only right now)



• Came across a Blog of a guy (fairly) new to Japan called Japan Window, sub titled " life in Japan and my ongoing attempt to figure out what is going on here.." nice mix of text and images. The white text on Black back ground is very hard to read.
  
  

PostgreSQL vs. MySQL vs. Commercial Databases: It's All About What You Need

PostgreSQL vs. MySQL vs. Commercial Databases: It's All About What You Need looks like a useful summary of History, Licensing, Feature Sets, Training and Support, a very brief list of who uses them. Worth passing on to your friendly neighborhood CTO or CIO.

MIT's OpenCourseWare populated

Via Brian McCallister : "Brian's Waste of Time", MIT's OpenCourseWare is now nicely populated. Problem sets, exams, readings, Lecture Notes. 700 courses, materials from 33 academic disciplines and all five of MIT's schools. Look's like it's time to do some brain expanding.....

In one case a course has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese.

I wonder when the first story reference to OpenCourseWare going to appear? Maybe Cory or Charlie or Bill have already? Cory's "Down and Out includes a post-university / educational society that implies a OCW ( OpenCourseWare) like curriculum.

Also, given what has happen to books published under the CreativeCommons license, like Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom or Free Culture, what are the possibilities for OCW material?

Real world Knowledge management

The Globe and Mail : Knowledge management crucial tool for law firms is a nice example / case study of how a large law firm is using Knowledge management (really mostly Document Management ). selective quotes :

"When you're a small group, you know, it's the water-cooler thing,"

Part of McMillan Binch's knowledge management program is to discuss major projects when they conclude and record key lessons learned..The information is put into a project summary

"It's about improving client service"

software usually accounts for about 20 per cent of the total knowledge management costs. Planning and consulting accounts for about another 40 per cent, he says, and the balance goes in internal personnel time, training and maintenance.

To make knowledge management work, a law firm must adapt its structure. Mr. Pery recommends organizing the firm into practice areas, within which most knowledge sharing will take place. For each area, Mr. Pery advises, a major firm should take a qualified lawyer away from billable practice to spend his or her full time as "in a sense, the librarian" for that practice area, overseeing collection and organization of knowledge.

Practising lawyers sit down with members of the knowledge management team at the end of each major project to discuss what information to retain, Mr. Fireman says. This takes 25 to 50 hours of the average lawyer's time a year, he says.

At McCarthy, there was "a period of about 18 months that I would sort of call the period of faith," Mr. Peters says. During that time, adding documents and other information to the firm's new knowledge management system took up lawyers' time, but the knowledge base was not yet large enough to give them much in return. "That's probably the most difficult period."

Now, lawyers are seeing how knowledge management can help them serve clients better. "It's going to be the distinguishing factor between firms," he predicts.