Erehwon Notebook

2:21:00 PM The Chattanooga Daily Bulletin is a bit of a clone of The Onion, but with a Southern flair. I particularly enjoyed the article on "Is George W. Bush Dumber Than a Beagle in Heat?"
permanent link

1:53:20 PM Vicky Phillips has written a great article on Salon about how net-based classrooms embody the classical ideal of learning. I couldn't agree with Ms. Phillip's observation more. It's good to see that higher education and corporate training are finally starting to absorb some of the possibilities inherent in net-based education, primarily becuse economics are driving the to it. Unfortunately, primary and secondary educators have an entrenched interest in not making effective use of these technologies, and an interest in maintaining the traditional "butts in seats" approach to education.

Aside from the fact that alternative approaches like net-based learning and experiential learning are proving to be far more effective than the traditional "factory model" of education, there's another major drawback to primary and secondary education maintaining this approach. Adult learners have to be re-trained on how to learn when they're exposed to alternate approaches, because they've never seen anything else. That makes adoption of new approaches more difficult with adults, because educators and trainers have to overcome the resistance of learners that just want to "jump through the hoops" as they've been taught all their lives.
permanent link

1:04:57 PM From my friend Andrew - Speaking of really stupid patents. It scares me that someone bothered to invent and patent this. It scares me more that there are people who conceivably want it.
permanent link

10:16:50 AM Freshmeat has an interesting editorial this morning on using linux in education. OSS is clearly an excellent choice for schools, if for no other reason than the obvious financial benefits. The article covers more than just the use of Linux servers, and gives some good pointers to other software that would be of use to educators.
permanent link

5:54:43 PM I got a mailing (as in dead tree sort of thing) from an outfit called Telocity today, informing me that "High-Velocity DSL Internet is now available in your area." That's a bit of a surprise, since Ameritech claims it won't be available here until Fall at the earliest. Of course, it's a bit of a moot point for me right now, since I don't even know if I'll be living here in a month.
permanent link

5:50:54 PM It's odd, but when I had this huge, garish graphic of a sticky note with my e-mail address on it on the page, people used to mail me. Since I removed it, hardly anyone has. Either I've sunk to new levels of boring posts, or people don't see that my e-mail address is right over there in the sidebar. Yes, this is a pathetic plea for you to e-mail me if you read and like this blog!
permanent link

2:54:57 PM Uhhh, whups. Data on 485,000 credit cards stolen from an e-commerce site, and the banks don't even bother to notify the card holders. There's some genius at work.

It wasn't all that long ago that banks and merchants were screaming that online commerce just wasn't feasible without encryption. Note to financial types: good network security and a modicum of customer service are probably just as important.
permanent link

2:24:23 PM You can find tons of information on doing an i-opener conversion here. This is quickly becoming the ultimate in geek chic, it appears. The amusing bit about this is that the company that makes these, Netappliance, had no clue that this was going to happen, and their IPO wasn't viewed as anything spectacular. Now that their system has be hacked by the geek community into something completely different than what they intended (they're loss-leading the hardware at $99 in order to sell their $21.95/month Internet service), interest in the IPO is way up in the investment community. Sales have taken off, so people are seeing this as a huge thing to buy into. The problem is that their business model has all the profitability wrapped up in the Internet service, which of course most of the people who are buying these things in car-load lots aren't going to use, or pay for. NetApplicaes IPO is today, by the way. I imagine their management are running around screaming, trying to figure out what to do.

If Netappliance can come up with a different business model fast, they might just make a ton of money out of this. If not, it could be really, really ugly in a few months. However, the entire thing really highlights the need for small, cheap Internet appliances. People really, really want these things, and if the price point is right, will obviously buy them in bunches.
permanent link

2:06:47 PM Everyone's a-buzz about the i-opener now that someone's figured out how to add a hard drive to it and areselling conversion kits for it. A low-profile, linux-running web-surfing system for under $200 sounds pretty cool, I gotta admit. Personally, I'd rather have something wireless and about the size of a magazine, more like the WebPad.
permanent link

1:45:22 PM Looks like Blogger had a bit of a hissy fit this morning, so I couldn't post. Looks to be cleared up, now.
permanent link

10:01:06 AM I joined Bonsai Web this morning. This is a personalized portal for people interested in bonsai, Japanese gardens, Suiseki, Ikebana, and the like. I really had no idea such a site existed, particularly not at this level of sophistication.
permanent link

9:50:04 AM What the hell do all these telemarketers do when no one is normally home here to answer the phone? I swear, based on the number of stupid calls I've received in the past week, there must be an entire battalion of these people gainfully employed just to call me and try and sell me stuff.
permanent link

12:10:02 AM I guess they learned that AOL can't "bring you good things." Now, repeat after me: Steve Case is the Anti-Christ, Steve Case is the Anti-Christ...
permanent link

10:29:41 PM So, after one of my meetings today, I'm talking with this guy who's a manager at a place I used to work. He's about 2/3 of the way through his MBA. He says to me "Hey, one of my classes this semester was on Knowledge Management! Now I can see how all that stuff you were trying to do when you were with us was so important! It kinda made sense, but I was still resistant. But this knowledge stuff is everything to us! It's absolutely critical! I wish we'd had more time to do it..."

I think I'm a pretty articulate person, I really do. I'm told I'm really successful as a guy who can bridge the gap between business and technology. I really bust my ass on helping people understand, ya know? I guess because I'm not a professor and charging huge tuition every year I just can't get moderately complex stuff to sink in, though. I was happy he'd finally managed to get a clue, but I had an almost uncontrollable urge to cut my wrists, I swear. Particularly becuse this is the second time I've heard this in a month. Sigh.
permanent link

10:10:09 PM There's an interesting discussion starting about the future of privacy on the 'net over in the Erehwon Notebook Forums. Please jump in and contribute if this is a topic of interest to you!
permanent link

9:41:47 PM This site carries a great selection of all things Japanese. I'm particularly interested in their Japanese garden materials; they have a great selection of water basins, bamboo fountains, lanterns, and other stuff. They seem to carry everything from sushi making and serving supplies to clothing to home decor as well. I haven't actually purchased anything from them yet, but plan to in the near future. Now that the weather's seemingly broken, it's time to start working on my (small) garden again. If anyone reading this has had any experience with these folks, mail me or post something on the discussion boards. I'd be interested in your thoughts!
permanent link

4:11:55 PM Most of my morning and early afternoon was spent on job-search tasks, so I haven't had much time in front of the computer today. Things continue to go well, but it's becoming more and more evident that Indianapolis sucks as an IT marketplace. I suspect I'm going to have to move; all of my out-of-state opportunities are better than just about anything here. I'm not wild about that, but on reflection there are some definite advantages to it beyond just the job stuff. We need a new house anyway...
permanent link

4:07:52 PM Peacock Maps has an incredibly cool map of "The Whole Internet." I bought one of these a few months ago when Slashdot posted about them, and have kept it on my office wall as something appropriate for an IT Director to have. It never fails to draw comments, that's for sure. They have two versions; the one on a black background is more visually exciting, but the one with the white background actually let's you see all the node names (I bought the white one).
permanent link

9:26:54 PM Shad of Moonfarmer dropped me a note to let me know that the Notebook has been spitting error messages. I think it was the remote editing code from Blogger, which I don't appear to have worked out yet. I've pulled the code, so hopefully there won't be any more error messages.
permanent link

5:49:59 PM I should mention that in my post last night about e-books I was a dolt and mentioned "Penguin Press" when I actually meant "Peanut Press." Apologies to anyone who followed the link and wondered WTF I was talking about. Teach me to post when I'm dead tired. The link has been corrected.
permanent link

5:45:40 PM I would mention Stephen King's new book, available as an e-book only, but if you haven't already heard about this from virtually every online news source, you must be living in a cave, sans T-1.
permanent link

4:52:06 PM I can't even begin to display my total disbelief over this article from Forbes about the suppossed "battle" between the developers of GNOME and KDE over the future of the Linux desktop, and how Eazel's participation may tip the scales in favor of GNOME as the "standard desktop" for Linux.

The author, an inaptly named Mr. Einstein, is so completely clueless about how Linux and OSS work that the article would be comical if not so infuriating. This genius clearly misses the point that the *nix "market," unlike Windows or the Mac, can and will successfully support more than a single desktop. Further, he's deliberately inflamatory by tossing around words and phrases like "nasty struggle," "battle," and "holy war."

Do some research, Einstein. Try and understand that the 19th century scarcity model of markets you so obviously blindly believe in may just not be at work in some of this stuff. "Digital version of Woodstock" my ass...
permanent link

4:28:17 PM It's a slow blogging day for me today, I'm afraid. Too much else competing for my attention. I had a great phone interview this afternoon, spent the morning shuttling resumes back and forth to recruiters, and had some networking time with a friend this afternoon. The job search is going well, but I'm ready to be done.

The big debate for me the past few days is whether to go back to freelancing or try and land something with a company again. Freelancing is terribly attractive to me, and I love it, but doing it here in the Midwest just isn't as easy as it is in other places. Having two young kids makes it tougher, too. Fortunately, there are some really great prospects lining up with some neat companies, doing the sorts of things I really want to do. All-in-all, it's a pretty good time to be alive, ya know?
permanent link

8:45:56 AM Once I finally do land a job again somewhere, I think I'll investigate the idea of using weblogging as a tool for Knowledge Management. One of the things I've seen at virtually every company I've worked with is poor decision-making and crisis-management due to the right people not having the right information at the right time. Being an IT professional, this bugs me no end, and I've implemented all sorts of tools to try and help organizations reduce this problem.

It seems to me that the idea of "personal pages" on Intranets has pretty much failed. I think this is due to the problems with keeping them updated, and the lack of relevant content on most of them. People just don't have the time, and they don't know what to put there. Strangely enough, in the engineering shops I've worked in, however, just about everyone has carried around a notebook that they keep their working notes in for critical projects their working on. These "Engineer's Notebooks" have always driven me nuts, because I know that if I can extract what people have written in these, and then serve it up to the rest of the staff in some sort of indexed, easy-to-use fashion, then our efficiency would increase and our communications would get better. Don't even get me started on sticky notes!

Now, what I see is using an easy-to-use web logging tool like the ones many web loggers use every day, on the internal network. We'd then create an electronic equivalent of those "engineer's notebooks" with this tool, and encourage people to post to it after every critical project-related event, etc.; the same sort of stuff they normally write in those notebooks (or on sticky notes). Heck, they can even keep using those notebooks; they just need to transcribe what they've written in them at the end of each day. Whatever they've written gets posted to their personal web page on the company Intranet.

Now, index the pages every night and create a decent search interface. People can then retrieve information by passively browsing pages, by going directly to the log of someone they know is working on the project they have a question about, or by searching the content index. Unlike typical personal pages and Intranets filled with a lot of generic corporate information, or project pages crammed full of all the explicit knowledge around the project, people can now get at least a glimpse of the tacit knowledge their co-workers are carrying around in their heads and their notebooks.

Now, a big problem is actually getting people to post, particularly at first. After all, this is a behavioral change, and unless people see some benefit from it pretty quickly, they won't do it. You've got to change the culture. Here are a couple of ways I can see doing that:

11:27:33 PM Someone has started a book club for e-books. Even though I love my regular, made-of-dead-trees books more than I can say, I think this is a great idea and will probably try it out. For the past couple of months I've been buying books from Peanut Press and reading them on my Palm VII. Their reader is great; I love to be able to do annotations, etc., and I can easily have access to a book or two wherever I am. More importantly, my wife loves it, because when I read in bed she doesn't hear me turning pages, and I can do it with the lights off and just the backlight on. Law of Unitended Consequences - e-books promote domestic tranquility? Will we see the divorce rate drop when e-books become common?
permanent link

11:00:47 PM Turns out it's "Severe Weather Awareness Week" here in Indiana. Of course, this didn't get posted to the 'net news sources I troll until after the two test tornado drills we had today, so I about soiled myself when the sirens started going off and the TV started blaring warning tones. Gotta love Indiana, where the media is right out there on the cutting edge...
permanent link

5:01:32 PM Oh yeah, he also read Stephenson's Snow Crash and made part of that real, too.
permanent link

4:57:50 PM You know, if you really want to get blown away by where all this technology stuff is going, and get a glimpse into the mind of one of the most creative, provocative people currently alive, you should really check out Mark Pesce * Outside the Light-Cone. Mark is just way too cool. I had the opportunity to meet him at the Virtual Reality World conference in San Jose in 1997, and it's still a really significant event in my life. I'd love to be able to work with this guy full time...though I'm not sure it'd ever be "work" in the traditional sense. Hint - think "co-creator of VRML." Mark read Neuromancer, and decided to make it real.
permanent link

2:13:46 PM I had a nice e-mail chat with Jackie of apropos of nothing this morning. What a cool person! She's realized my life-long dream of living in the UK. She also has a cool site!
permanent link

2:11:21 PM Thanks to Moonfarmer for directing me to the link for Brainbench. If you're interested in certification for yourself or your employees in areas not covered by the big name certifications, this might be worth a look. I took one of the tests to check it out, and while not exhaustive, it seemed like a decent skills assessment process.
permanent link

5:33:10 PM Is this the month of post-humanism? Seems like every pundit and new-new-wave SF author is beating the drums about the end of humanity as we know it. Vernor Vinge predicted this years ago. In fact, he predicted more people would start to talk about it as the reality approached...hmmm...
permanent link

1:07:11 PM Machinima.com - Real time 3D film making for the next millenium. People are actually using the Quake and Unreal 3D engines to make short films? Not being a big first-person shooter sort of guy, I totally missed the development of this idea until now. There's even a group doing "performance theater" using the Quake II Deathmatch server, using a minimal script and then improvising from there. I'm not sure if this is amazingly creative, or just plain odd.
permanent link

12:51:18 PM An interesting article on Linux as a content creation platform. Some interesting, if brief history of content creation OS's, and the progress (or lack thereof) that Linux is making on this front. Interesting how the author doesn't even discuss BeOS, which I take to be a sign of how little impact Be ended up having on content creation. No wonder they're making a play for the Internet appliance market.

Content creation is one of my primary interests in Linux's future. I have to wonder, however, how Apples OS X will impact this. A lot of content creation professionals are Mac fans, and it seems to me that the move to OS X would be easier for them than the move to Linux.
permanent link

12:28:50 PM I suppose there's some positive benefits from this, but I think this guy is nuts.
permanent link

GeoURL

Saturday, March 18, 2000

Friday, March 17, 2000

Thursday, March 16, 2000

Wednesday, March 15, 2000

Tuesday, March 14, 2000

Monday, March 13, 2000

Sunday, March 12, 2000