Jon Udell blogs about some of his investigation into translucent databases. In talking about databases, “translucent” metaphorically describes the ability of the database to obscure relationships between data. This is a key design approach for privacy, and as Udell finds, the theories are all there — it’s just that most companies are unwilling to put [...]
Through the Wire
"Hey, I'm just happy to be here…"
May 27th, 2003
Everest Panorama
Joe in Uncategorized
Since it’s at the top of the Blogdex charts, you may have already seen the panorama from the summit of Mount Everest. If you haven’t, it’s worth a look. While we’re on the subject, I was surprisingly absorbed by the Everest coverage in the May 2003 National Geographic Magazine. Now that I look, it seems [...]
May 27th, 2003
Java Community Process
TheServerSide.com reports on Sun’s recent announcement of the beginning of plans for version 2.6 of the Java Community Process (JCP). As noted in their headline, the most notable aspect of this announcement is a direction towards replacing the members-only “Community Review Draft” with an “Early Draft Review,” open to the public, and a public vote [...]
May 27th, 2003
DRM Hysteria/Apple iTunes Update
A current SlashDot posting, Apple Updates, Cripples iTunes shows just how hysterical some people can get when they get an ideological burr under their saddles. So now the update prevents sharing between iTunes installations that aren’t on the same physical network. Apparently, this is how Apple presented it all along, but there was no technical [...]
May 27th, 2003
So much for “Total Information Awareness”
Joe in politricks
First, an anecdote: last Thanksgiving we at my wife’s parents in Baton Rouge. We were trying to call my sister-in-law who was in Barcelona. Through a dialing mishap, my mother-in-law accidentally ended up with a recording saying something like “phone calls to Afghanistan are not permitted.” (The country code for Afghanistan and the internal city [...]
May 26th, 2003
Presence as the Killer App
Coincidentally (considering my last post), I’ve just found this reference to a paper on “presence as the next killer app.” Here’s one of the more interesting ideas: Places – In the corporate setting, it certainly would be beneficial to associate the status of physical locations – such as meeting rooms – with presence information. But [...]
May 26th, 2003
Gadget Watch
Joe in Uncategorized
Joi Ito reports on spotme, a system for facilitating interaction between attendees at a conference. The part you see is a little wireless linux device that can tell you who you’re sitting near, or notify you when someone you’ve been looking for comes into range. There’s a base station which bridges the wireless network to [...]
May 18th, 2003
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
This has been around for about four years, but it’s really pretty amusing. Share and Enjoy:
May 18th, 2003
What I Hate About Your Programming Language
chromatic, editor of OnJava.com, has published a nice short piece reminding everyone not to be too dogmatic about languages. Share and Enjoy: