Dancing About Architecture

So what's the difference between an "Enterprise Weblog" and an "Enterprise Portal"? You got me ... I'm guessing it's the ease of being able to publish new information in pursuit of the Holy Grail of Effective Knowledge Management within the Enterprise.

Several years back, we were all with a company called "DKA" (Digital Knowledge Assets), and we tried to tackle the problem of KM in much the same way: by making it really easy to share and publish information into an "ecosystem" of information. When we realized that selling KM into enterprises was a long haul, the app morphed into a personal publishing tool called "SceneServer", which would look awful familiar to most bloggers today.

But as it turns out, Blogger added a word to the common vernacular and was bought by Google (I'm still so psyched for Evan), while the URL for DKA points to an X-Box cheats site. Ah well, no regrets. But Traction, you've got quite a load to tow ... good luck.

Traction

Posted by Eric at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Three things I like about this article:

1. Hey, Red Herring's back!
2. Hey, haven't heard from Jerry Michalski in a while!
3. Hey, I think these companies trying to codify social networks are a waste of time too!

Trying to somehow make organic social networks explicits is fraught with peril, and often one's own social network is way to valuable an asset to share with some third-party. Thanks for expressing a lot of these problems so clearly, Jerry! Great sub-head too: "Social networking systems promise ease and deliver irritability."

Dysfunctional relationships

Posted by Eric at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A good movie with a great cast ... a nice mix of psychological thriller and who-done-it, with a few classic horror elements thrown in for good measure. Only unfortunate thing was that I figured out one of the main twists a little too early in the film, but there was still enough going on to keep me intrigued. Might be worth watching again with the director's commentary.

Identity (***)

Posted by Eric at 08:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, I went to a charity auction last night expecting to get, you know, a weekend getaway in Galena or maybe a Ravinia "wine and dine" package or something. Instead, I ended up with a brand new Golden Tee machine. Yes, that golf game that you see in the bars that has the four obnoxious guys huddled around it. Well, it was just too good of a deal to pass up, and now it's got a home in our basement.

What's interesting about the game is not that it's got amazing graphics (no better than Links in 1998) or sophisticated gameplay (well, it's one of those "minute to learn, lifetime to master" things). It's that the developers (Incredible Technologies, based right here in Arlington Heights IL) figured out how to network all the machines in the country together. Just that, and it's the most popular bar game in the country, with leagues sprouting up and nationwide tournaments being held (with real cash prizes). Since I'm now an "operator", I can see how the revenue split works between Incredible Technolgies and the machine operator. No wonder these are popular in bars ... you could realistically make back what you paid for the machine in a matter of weeks!

Well anyway, another example of "the network's the thing". I think I'll go downstairs and play a round now, because I really suck and I don't want to be embarrassed in my own house if someone comes over.

Posted by Eric at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Don Delillo

This book was deceiving. I picked it up, it looked like a quick read, only a couple of hundred pages. Well, it turns out that Delillo packed the same amount of stuff in Cosmopolis as he did is his longer novels. This is an Underworld demi glace ... a stock reduction of White Noise.

The premise was exciting to me, and his treatment of the main character seemed entirely appropriate. It's the excesses of the dot-com bubble taken to excess. It's about a guy that lives (debatable point) just out of sync with reality, and his journey to deal with this civilization when he really belongs in the next one. There's a lot to chew on and quite a bit of humor, and on the whole I really liked it.

Posted by Eric at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've always found Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) facinating from a sociological perspective: how the economic system develops over time, for instance, or how "real-life" social groups and relationships get expressed in virtual worlds.

Second Life is a relatively new entry that borrows from the old MUD model: it allows the inhabitants to create new objects and structures with associated behaviors. Cool -- let your user base keep things fresh.

Well, back to the point, in order to combat the hyperinflation that has occurred in other MM games, the developers decided to institute a graduated tax. The article "On the Second Life Tax Revolt" looks at how the players in this world revolted against this tax within the constraints of the world itself. Neat stuff.

Posted by Eric at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you've ever talked to me for more than, oh, 5 minutes, you probably know that I love my TiVo. Actually, I love my three DirecTV DVRs (with TiVo) as they're now called. I've jacked them up and hacked them so that a couple of them have 200 hours of recording a piece and one of them has a net connection with video extraction and DVD burning. The hacking community for TiVo is most impressive and helpful (just check out the TiVo Community Forum or, more dangerously, the DealDatabase Forum) -- I am but a grateful beneficiary of all of their hard work.

So while doing all that hacking is fun, there's a bit too much reverse engineering for my taste. Enter MythTV: a homebrew Linux-based PVR project. I've got a few too many things going on right now to tackle setting this up, but from the buzz and the screenshots, this looks to be a lot of fun!

Posted by Eric at 08:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We usually associate RSS with blogs and news sites, which is fine, but it's also a narrow way to look at things. It might be more helpful to think of RSS as a description of a "channel of information", where each piece of information ("item") has a title, URL, and a short description. There's a little more to it, but that's pretty much it. You can see how it lends itself to news-like text-based items, but that's not a built-in constraint of the format.

One guy who's almost always thinking about things in the right way is Micheal Sippey, and in his blog he mentions the ability in Feed Demon to represent some kind of filtered aggregation as its own discrete RSS feed. You can do a similar kind of thing with Feedster searches, where the results of an RSS search can themselves be expressed as an RSS feed.

Once you've agreed upon the relatively simple structure for information exchange, it opens up the whole food chain to innovation: producers (sources of RSS), consumers (RSS clients), and, perhaps most interesting, the middleware (aggregators and filters like Feedster, BlogStreet, and many others).

When we developed Spyonit, we had a number of ways to be notified when your "spies" fired: you could get an email, an SMS, an instant message, or it could be reported on your "My Spy Reports" web page. If I were to build that today, I would most certainly add "as an RSS feed" as a notification option (not too mention the ability to monitor RSS feeds for alerting purposes ... but that's obvious [smile]), so that your spies could report to you through your favorite RSS client or aggregator.

Stay tuned to this channel ... I think the RSS world is going to get more and more interesting.

Posted by Eric at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For a flash mob of a different color, there's "dogging": large, anonymous orgies organized via Internet and SMS. Seems to be most prevalent in the U.K., but if it follows the "rave lifecycle", I figure it should hit the states in a year or two.

You gotta wonder what the audience is like ... could be frightening if the "mix" isn't quite what you expected.

BBC NEWS | Health | 'Dogging' craze sex disease risk

Posted by Eric at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought this was a fabulous movie! Jennifer Aniston should have gotten a nomination, in my opinion, for her work here. She had me convinced 5 minutes into the movie that her character was authentic, and from that point on never thought of Rachel from Friends. Okay, maybe it was a little bit "Need more flair" waitress from Office Space meets Donnie Darko, but a totally engaging movie that successfully walked the line between depressing small town drama and dark comedy.

The Good Girl (***1/2)

Posted by Eric at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been almost 5 years since we all played Half-Life, which remains the finest single-player game I have ever experienced. For the past couple of years, I've kind of been focussed on playing games on the PS2 and (more recently) the GameCube, and I've pretty much ignored games on the PC except for an occasional game of Links with my brother online. So the buzz for Half-Life 2 has gotten pretty buzzy lately, so I thought I check out what's what.

Oh. My. God. So I just watched the demo that the Valve guys (the developers) gave at E3, and it is without a doubt the most impressive display of interactive graphics and gameplay I have ever seen. I don't toss compliments like that around like chicken feed ... I mean it's jaw-dropping unbelievable. The file itself is a 610MB (!) Quicktime movie, but I can't recommend it enough: it's worth the wait and registering for fileplanet. Go to Planet Half-Life and download the first video on the page (the "Download GameSpy's Exclusive Half-Life 2 Gameplay Video" one), wait a few hours, and then watch. It's about 22 minutes long, and it's just incredible. If you want me to put it on a CD for you (and I, like, interact with you in meatspace) just let me know. Oh, the "Source DirectX 9.0 Trailer" further down the page is a good movie too.

They're still saying that the game will be released on Sep 30 for PC and XBox, but don't count on it. I'd be happy if it was out by Christmas. It's time to give the underused Radeon 9700 in my machine something to live for!

Posted by Eric at 03:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We've come to expect innovative things from Google, and here's another great example. Hold a contest with cash prizes to find the best coders out there, then offer them jobs! Plus they'll probably get some cool IP out of it. Keep ahead of the curve, Google ... we're cheering for you!

Google Code Jam 2003

Posted by Eric at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I watched this movie in two sittings, both times in the wee hours in the morning when I couldn't sleep. Kind of ironic for a movie that examines the dream-state and its relationship to reality.

This was a facinating movie on many levels. First off, it's animated, but done in such a creative way -- basically, it's like someone filmed a movie with a handheld camera and then "painted over" the movie with Photoshop or something. I saw in the credits that someone was listed for "animation software", so maybe it was homegrown. Anyway, it was a really cool way to do it, and it allowed for some embellishments to series of conversations that the main character has. Which is all this movie is, really: a series of conversations, so you probably want to be in the right mood for it (mind-altering chemicals might be helpful here).

One more thing: I bet this movie is filled with subliminal images and messages. Just about every time I pause the movie, I saw something interesting in the animation foreground or background. Might be cool to own the DVD of this one.

Waking Life: the closest thing to experiencing a dream while you're awake ... or are you?

Waking Life (***1/2)

Posted by Eric at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Alright, let's start this blog for real now! I've been away for a while ... first on vacation (spent most of August in Big Sky Montana) and then getting our new company off the ground (Burning Door, if you haven't guessed).

So, to kick things off again, I've done a redesign here. I've added some sections that no one really cares about (but are almost requirements these days for personal blogs) like "Movies" and "Books", but we'll try to keep things focussed on technology trends, software architecture, and gadgets.

With that, it's time to get started!

Posted by Eric at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

First off, kudos to Robin Williams for really being able to pull off the role of a lonely, creepy, aging guy. Very convincing, even when the plot twists start to pull at the credibility of the whole story. I liked the look of the movie, even if it was a bit too self-conscious at times (the monotones and "sav-mart" genericness). The movie left me with a little bit of a hollow feeling, like all the pieces didn't connect quite right, but still I have to say it was a good movie. Gotta love the Gary Cole boss character!

One Hour Photo (***)

Posted by Eric at 08:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A very powerful movie about a young girl growing up in a very traditional (read: sexist) culture. The movie was facinating, and the performances I thought were quite strong ... the lead actress playing Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes) was exceptional. The fact that this movie was rated PG-13 blows me away ... there is absolutely nothing in this movie that would prevent me from recommending this to a 10 year-old (except it might be a little slow for them).

Whale Rider (***1/2)

Posted by Eric at 08:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)