details of a global brain
Which country to invade next?
Like Michael Moore once said: »If you want to bomb a country you should at least be able to point it on a map!«. I would add you should at least be able to name some kind of reason. Just watch this video: It’s a little bit hard to see in the video: These people…
The rediscovery of function in product design
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…
Visual explanations
A very nice example of visual explanations: the wave vs. matter paradox of quantum physics.
Media war
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…
Web 3.0?
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…
3D face recognition from a single video frame
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…
Anthracite Web Mining Desktop
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…
Webmontag in Frankfurt
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.
The Secrets of Ruby on Rails
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.
iTunes U – Apple employs iTunes store for electronic education
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.
Performancing Blog Editor for Firefox
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…
New Webmondays ahead! (Webmontag)
There are new webmondays ahead in different cities in Germany (with dates & attendees as of the time of this post): Cologne (30th January; 13 attendees) Frankfurt (6th February; 41 attendees) Munich (06. oder 13. February; 1 attendee) Berlin (20th February; 7 attendees) Hamburg (no date yet; 6 attendees) Leipzig (no date yet; 2 attendees)…
Zope & Twisted
I was discussing to implement some web projects based on either Zope or the Twisted framework. The latest version of Zope 3 now replaces the internal ZServer with the Twisted framework. Maybe this distinction becomes more or less obsolete: The ZServer has been replaced with the Twisted server. The Twisted server supports all that the…
BlogLag
Ok. I am way behind schedule. Posting to this weblog has become a rare activity lately. There are a couple of reaons for that. It is a matter of priorities. I am pretty confident, that I’ll get “back to normal” soon.
Featured blog
Yesterday this weblog (»details of a global brain«) was featured on »The Main Quad« – a private blog that is “promoting viewpoints and topics that are international, multicultural, multi and interdisciplinary, and all over the political spectrum” (with a focus on academic blogs). I am pleased that I appear to be the first non-native English…
Mobile photo blogging
I recently switched to a new mobile phone with SymbianOS. Nothing spectacular. It was cheap as I was extending my contract. It is a Nokia 3230. The user interface really has serious issues (which I think is amazing for a multi-million dollar company like Nokia that does not sell phones only by their external look).…
Mighty Mouse not so mighty
Tim Bruysten forgot his »Apple Mighty Mouse« after his presentation on Web Monday meet-up. I took it with me to hand it back to him later. I am using it now. And I have to say: I don’t like it. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but generally the absence of physical…
Web 2.0 or not
If you still feel the term »Web 2.0« is not yet well defined you may help out by doing this collaborative definition: Web 2.0 or Not
Web 2.0 @ WebMontag (webmonday)
Yesterday there was a meetup of web people at Hallmackenreuther café in Cologne. The topic was »Web 2.0« (among others). Now I read through the comments and I found people complaining about the spontanous informal character and the absence of something what they call »web 2.0« in the few presentations given. Here is my take…
First impressions on Ajax frameworks…
I had a (very) brief look into some Ajax/DHTML JavaScript frameworks flying around. There are so many and to really compare them in detail would require time that I don’t have right now. So I can only come up with some first impressions: Backbase appears to be a commercial but extremely clean and well designed…
Got any book recommendations?