Monthly Archives: February 2006

The rediscovery of function in product design

By Oliver Wrede | Published: February 28, 2006
The ACM IT magazine publishes an article written by Andreas Pfeiffer titled »Why features don’t matter anymore: The new laws of digital technology«. He lists ten fundamental rules for the age of user experience technology. The article begins with this: The iPod was never sold on the grounds of its technical merits: Apple hit a [...]
Posted in Design | Leave a comment

Visual explanations

By Oliver Wrede | Published: February 28, 2006
A very nice example of visual explanations: the wave vs. matter paradox of quantum physics.
Posted in Design | Leave a comment

Media war

By Oliver Wrede | Published: February 20, 2006
BBC reports that US secretary of offense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledges that the “war on terror” is primarily a struggle of ideas. He proposes the US propaganda machinery must be capable of fighting down the unfavourable news from offensive media with a “more effective 24-hour propaganda machine”. Hm. I was thinking free press and freedom of [...]
Posted in Politics | Leave a comment

Web 3.0?

By Oliver Wrede | Published: February 20, 2006
While everyone is talking about AJAX and JavaScript there is a very old technology taking up steam that could replace the DOM+JavaScript approach: XUL. Look for example at this application called »Songbird«. The problem with XUL has always been a lack of development tools. XULrunner seems to fill a huge gap here. Anyway it seems [...]
Posted in Disruptive | Leave a comment

3D face recognition from a single video frame

By Oliver Wrede | Published: February 20, 2006
I have a constantly updated presentation about »The future of computing«. One chapter of it is about security and surveillance technology – the face recognition approach in particular. Two computer science students in Haifa, Israel, have invented a face recognition method with a 3D scan. It can radically improve the success rate and it was [...]
Posted in Disruptive | Leave a comment

Anthracite Web Mining Desktop

By Oliver Wrede | Published: February 6, 2006
This tool is used to enable some kind of visual programming with apple script components Metafy’s Anthracite Web Mining Desktop toolkit gives you the tools you need to build powerful data processing systems with an easy-to-use visual interface that makes complex manipulations quickly possible. Anthracite is built for people who need to transform internet sources [...]
Posted in Tools | Leave a comment

Webmontag in Frankfurt

By Oliver Wrede | Published: February 5, 2006
Only a couple of hours left fo everyone to decide wether or not he/she should go the the Webmontag event in Frankfurt today. There are around 60 people that have announced to attend this meetup. There are also a number of presentators. So it seems to become a very informative and lively evening.
Posted in Business | Leave a comment

The Secrets of Ruby on Rails

By Oliver Wrede | Published: February 5, 2006
Tobias (flying sparks) points to a audio recording of David Heinemeier Hansson with a keynote at OSCON ’05. He talks about the basic ideas behind Ruby on Rails. Update: There are also slides available as PDF from the Ruby on Rails website.
Posted in Programming | Leave a comment

iTunes U – Apple employs iTunes store for electronic education

By Oliver Wrede | Published: February 5, 2006
I have written about this before. Now Apple translates the iTunes Music Store model to educational content. Students listen to lectures, download subscribed video feeds or podcasts. Apple acts as a service provider hoping it would broaden the footprint of educational technology.
Posted in Education | Leave a comment

Performancing Blog Editor for Firefox

By Oliver Wrede | Published: February 5, 2006
There is a new Blog Editor called Performancing available as Firefox Extension. Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right in your Firefox browse and lets you post to your blog easiy. You can drag and drop formatted text from the page you happen to be browsing, and take notes as [...]
Posted in Tools | Leave a comment
Get Adobe Flash playerPlugin by wpburn.com wordpress themes