So, I just finished my first cut at my slides for my OpenWorld Unconference session, which I’m tentatively calling, “Are you insulting me? Essential geek-speak, FTW!”. If you’re interested, check them out and give me feedback, comments, keeping in mind my goal is to educate by example, not give a comprehensive history. And to have… Read More
Rise of the Machines?
Ironically, the same day as my tongue-in-cheek post about Chrome and HAL, news that United Airlines’ stock was pummeled thanks to algorithms broke. After trying to write a short version of the story, I’m realizing it’s too complex. Here are the events in the sequence they’ve been reported by the Wall Street Journal: Late on… Read More
Separated at Birth?
While answering comments today, a separated at birth popped into my head for Google Chrome, the HAL 9000. The Chrome logo is also very reminiscent of eyes the CG Transformers have in last year’s live-action movie. I don’t recall that Skynet had a logo, but I’m sure it would be the type of shiny eye… Read More
Thoughts on Chrome
So, I decided to read the Chrome comic book, which was sent out to a select few influencers prior to the launch last week. I wanted to see what all the fuss is about, and a couple things intrigued me. First, since Chrome is Windows only, it must be pretty good to stay relevant in… Read More
Back to Work
So, I’ve returned from my staycation officially, and thanks to scheduled posts, it was almost like I never left. Everyone wins. I’ve made it through several hundred emails; incidentally, would you take a job that had in its description of responsibilities: To send and receive thousands of emails each month. Just wondering, since we all… Read More
The Wordle According to AppsLab
Earlier this year, a friend of the ‘Lab, let’s call him Jim, asked me to open up email subscriptions for this little blog so he could consume his AppsLab goodness by email. Through Jim’s crusading, we now have 17 subscribers by email. I think each of you should thank Jim with flowers or chocolates. Anyway,… Read More
OpenSocial Update
I haven’t blogged about our OpenSocial progress since Rich finished up his last mockup revisions a few weeks ago. Not a whole lot to report, Rich got pulled away to work on a Mix hardware upgrade for a week, then he took a well-deserved break. My guess is he’s refreshed and back cranking out the… Read More
Jumping into the Unconference
The Unconference at OpenWorld continues to fill up; Tuesdays advance slot are all full, and Wednesday is quickly filling up too. I noticed Raimonds added a session last week called “Using Ruby on Rails with legacy Oracle databases” on Thursday at 10 AM. If you’re still at the conference on Thursday, I highly recommend checking… Read More
What’s Left to Murder-Death-Kill?
You know it’s a good day when you can drop a Demolition Man reference. It’s a weird time right now. Intertubes-based communication is crowding older, established methods, and as digital natives (i.e. Millenials) enter the workforce, their preferred means for communicating are at odds with what we’re all used to using to, you know, do… Read More
Why Flickr Rules Even if You Don’t Share Photos
I love Flickr. It’s one of the original Web 2.0 poster-children for good reason. Beyond the API and the tagging and the sharing of images, Flickr has become my go-to resource for awesome pictures. Everyone knows that images make boring, more interesting. You know, that whole picture is worth a 1,000 word aphorism? When you… Read More
Taking a Staycation
I’m off on a staycation for a while. Since I’ll be at home, there’s a good chance it may turn into a workcation. I know it sounds weird, but the temptation to work is always there when you work from home. Sounds even crazier out loud. I’m sure the wife will box my ears if… Read More
The Art of Estimation
If you’ve worked in product management or consulting for any amount of time, you’re familiar with the estimation gremlin. I’ve always hated managing projects. For me, it’s too much whip-cracking and tattletaling, but it’s an unfortunate chore that I’ve been unable to avoid. If you worked on a project I managed, I’m really sorry. I… Read More
Geeking out with Ubiquity
Big news today was the very-early (0.1!) release of Mozilla Labs’ Ubiquity. What is it? That’s a really good question. It took me several passes to fix on the awesomesauce that is Ubiquity. I scanned the Techmeme coverage, thinking it was some translation tool, then speed read Scoble’s post on it. Sounded more interesting, but… Read More
Something Cool
I wanted to share some eyecandy from my Ubuntu box. I found this phenomenal desktop image (hat tip Lifehacker), and when combined with the terminal app’s transparency setting, it creates a pretty cool effect, especially when you drag the terminal window around the desktop and the background changes. Another cool effect is opening the terminal… Read More
Social Observations, OraTweet Edition
I’ve spent a bit of quality time with Noel’s OraTweet this week, mostly because of Ed’s OpenSocial app development adventures. Noel really has done a lot with OraTweet since June, when he first showed it to me. It’s got all the Twitter features you’d expect, and it has “groups”. Don’t get too excited, it’s more… Read More
Deploy OpenSocial Locally with a Sample Network
Browsing through Rich’s Google Reader Shared Items, I found we had both shared this post from the OpenSocial API Blog: Let’s get this Partuza started! Recently, as people have started to realize the utility of Connect as an OpenSocial container, we’ve been getting more requests for access to our development sandboxes. Developer rockstars inside the… Read More
Unconference is for You
I took a look at the Unconference schedule yesterday, apropos of Ontario Emperor’s post on his own foray into Unconference territory. Have you looked lately? There are a lot of interesting sessions. These stuck out for me: Monday at 1 PM: Enterprise 2.0: What is is, and how you’ll fail. (by Brian “Bex” Huff) Tuesday… Read More
Copy and Paste for the iPhone? Sort of . . .
This feed item on Techmeme got me all excited earlier in the week. Copy and Paste for iPhone Digging more deeply, it turns out not to be copy and paste, but rather an open source solution called OpenClip that iPhone app developers can use to accomplish copy and paste. Because Apple forbids third party apps… Read More
Want to Help Socialize OpenWorld?
OpenWorld is quickly approaching; it’s September 21-25, in case you don’t already know that. You’ll recall that last year, we used Twitter quite a lot to socialize, meetup and broadcast the sessions. We used Craig Cmehil‘s eventtrack side project to consolidate the tweets and other social clutter (videos, photos, etc.) into a single stream of… Read More
Mix Gets a Makeover
If you use Mix, you probably noticed something new today. Lost weight? Tan? Haircut? Yes to all of the above, applied to a web app. Mix got a branding makeover last night, among other things, to reflect more closely its siblings in the *.oracle.com family. You may have noticed less chatter on this channel about… Read More