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PicoLED

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Kyoto-based electronic component creator, Rohm, announced today that the world’s smallest LED, the PicoLED will go into mass production in April.

[Via FujiSankei Business if you can read Japanese]

I am now rather keen on the word “pico” meaning 1. one trillionth, part of 2. very small.  I wonder if it’s smaller than “micro” which is also defined as “very small.”

Spam

Friday, February 02, 2007

From “glob” with the subject line: “congested deception. “

If one of the largest retailers in the world is facing its demise from a failure to differentiate what chance do you think your small business stands doing the same. Even in the event of a power play, Edmonton could have a hard time beating Luongo to buy C-17 military cargo planes, CBC News has learned.

Those spambots are getting stranger every day.

guimp

Saturday, February 25, 2006

This reminds me of the artweb projects that I first fell in love with in the late 90s and the pixel art sites that followed.  Check out guimp, the world’s smallest website.

Mobisodes

Sunday, October 23, 2005

In “Pocket-size screen’s new rules”, Laura M. Holson writes:

Mobisodes are more popular among teenagers in Europe and Asia, largely because the advanced technology in use there makes it easier for them to be viewed. And much of the original video programming now being produced is short and derived from youth-oriented television properties.

It seems only natural that youth culture would adapt first (and be targeted by marketers) with mobisodes, or mobile episodes.  With the advent of Apple’s video iPod, I’m sure there will be an even greater rush to produce short video series for mobile devices with adults in mind.  While the TV serials don’t hold as much interest for me personally, I hope some of the more creative independent networks (online and alternative media) produce content-focused or more artistic mobisodes. 

Via Mobisodes: microcontent mobile at SmartMobs by Bryan Alexander.

Kevin Kelly - Out of Control

Friday, October 07, 2005

Though it was written more than ten years ago, this caught my attention and seemed particularly relevant again.  From Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. 

• As we make our machines and institutions more complex, we have to make them more biological in order to manage them.
• The most potent force in technology will be artificial evolution. We are already evolving software and drugs instead of engineering them.
• Organic life is the ultimate technology, and all technology will improve towards biology.
• The main thing computers are good for is creating little worlds so that we can try out the Great Questions. Online communities let us ask the question “what is a democracy; what do you need for it?” by trying to wire a democracy up, and re-wire it if it doesn’t work. Virtual reality lets us ask “what is reality?” by trying to synthesize it. And computers give us room to ask “what is life?” by providing a universe in which to create computer viruses and artificial creatures of increasing complexity. Philosophers sitting in academies used to ask the Great Questions; now they are asked by experimentalists creating worlds.
• As we shape technology, it shapes us. We are connecting everything to everything, and so our entire culture is migrating to a “network culture” and a new network economics.
• In order to harvest the power of organic machines, we have to instill in them guidelines and self-governance, and relinquish some of our total control.

Google Wants to Provide Free Wi-Fi for San Francisco

Saturday, October 01, 2005

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom made it a goal to provide a free or inexpensive citywide network last year and bids were submitted by competing firms this Friday, mostly by ISP companies.  The big news is Google’s bid to install a free Wi-Fi network.

As part of its 100-page bid, Google said it could install a Wi-Fi network without cost to the city. Users with Wi-Fi-enabled computers could then log on to basic service, without paying, no matter where they are within the city limits.

The speed of basic service would be 300 kilobits per second, which is much faster than dial-up Internet service but slower than some broadband.

Read more in the SF Gate article.

iPod nano

Monday, September 12, 2005

For a real-world and hilarious account of Apple’s big pitch for the nano and the iTunes phone at the Moscone here in SF last week, read Nicole Lee‘s post at Metroblogging SF, Report from Apple Media Event, Moscone West.

[Technorati tags: apple, metroblogging]

Besuku ajax flickr gallery

Sunday, August 28, 2005

It’s late Saturday night (okay, it’s Sunday morning… I’m in denial) and I’ve been experimenting with various image galleries.

Tonight’s new find is the Besuku ajax flickr gallery, a very elegant image gallery by Ben Sekulowicz.  The gallery is powered by flickr and the flickrArray (which Ben released in July). Configuration of the gallery couldn’t be made more simple - open a config page, add your flickr username and upload the pages to a FTP directory. 

I like both the layout and the functionality of Ben’s gallery.  Now, both my visitors and I can view my photos by specific or shared tags without the flickr interface.  Since photos are pulled directly from flickr live, I’ll be interested to see whether the speed varies with traffic.  Look forward to seeing what develops from this.

See it in action: the Beseku ajax image gallery pulling in some my flickr photos.

[Technorati tags: flickr, besuku, open source, ajax]

Jalenack's Ajax Periodic Table of Elements

Saturday, August 27, 2005

I’ve been wanting a new way to have a grid of thumbnails that pop-up larger images.  While I like the functionality of my blog photo gallery in city bits, it’s not as seamless to click to each photo and to the next page or all the way back to the thumbnail page.  Once you’ve experienced inline loading or toggles, it’s hard to go back to clicking and waiting as a designer and a viewer.

When I saw Jalenack’s (Andrew Sutherland) Ajax Periodic Table of Elements (screenshot popup) last night I was inspired!  With the periodic table, details and relevant links simply pop-up over the chart and vanish when you’re don’t need them anymore, which allows you to stay in context.  One of the things I like about asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest is that I’m no longer experiencing short term memory loss each time a web page refreshes.

Andrew’s been kind enough to send me the code (licensed under CC GPL 2.0) and Max and I are going to try and make a gallery with it that imports blog entries of photos from a MySQL database using this same idea.

[Technorati tags: ajax, jalenack, artcodes]

Adaptive Path's Measure Map already in use?

Friday, August 26, 2005

After just blogging about Measure Map and Adaptive Path a few hours ago, I’m reading O’Reilly’s radar blog this evening and at some point as I’m reading, I notice the call to a script in the lower left corner of Firefox..."Transferring data from tracker.measuremap.com”.  I had to screenshot it and post.  O’Reilly’s blog would be a great beta-test for their new product.

A quick search in Flickr revealed Esther Dyson’s photo of a Measure Map demo by candlelight posted on Aug 22.  Through the bluish laptop fuzz, the page looks a bit like Blogger (the four key task icons pulled up top) meets Flickr (black text and blue links below).  Whatever the final product looks like, I suspect that Jeff Veen is currently stewing in it all.

[Technorati tags: measure map, adaptive path, jeff veen, oreilly radar]

Wiki from Adaptive Path's Ajax User Experience Week

If you’re interested in gaining further insight into the many facets of Ajax (see my post about Ajax from Feb 05), there’s a wiki with conference notes and perspective from Adaptive Path‘s User Experience Conference held last week in Washington D.C.

To understand the primary differentiators of Ajax, see the notes and examples (at the bottom of the page) from Jesse James Garrett‘s Introduction to Ajax/New Web Technology.  Having already seen the openrico and protopage samples previously, I particularly like Andrew Sullivan’s periodic table example and can’t wait to try JohnVey.com’s del.icio.us direc.tor.  Of course there’s a good deal of buzz about Adaptive Path’s own product called Measure Map, which is designed by Jeff Veen and purported to be a hosted “tool for bloggers to better track traffic to their site.” I heard about this last week and plan to write a post about what I would like to see in a tool to help measure traffic, given that I’m currently using two stat programs, a gVisit map, four blog readers (online and installed), pinging ten blog hosts, tagging for technorati, checking views at flickr, and the list goes on.  A consolidated measure tool that would allow me to track my outgoing activity (tagging and cross-linking) and my incoming traffic (RSS readers, inbound links, google searches, technorati, bloglines and other readers, and so on) would be both a welcome time-saver, and as important, it would hopefully give me a more holistic view of “myself” (my content) and its “life” on the web.

I’m also wondering how long it will take for someone to to make a Flickr-compatible Ajax gallery for your blog.  There are already a mix of tools to manage photos between your desktop and your blog or Flickr.  I just came across the FlickrExport which will export from iPhoto to Flickr and there’s Photon (enables automatic creation and upload of images and thumbnails, plus configurable export of all photo data directly to a Movable Type blog) which Doug Bowman used for his Movable Type photo templates.  It would be ideal to have one management layer that would allow me to push selected content from iPhoto to both my blog and flickr at the same time, with the ability to sort, tag, organize, edit, share, publish, or archive.  The other key factor for me is where the physical photos are stored.  Ideally, there would only be one copy of each photo on one server, rather than at my photo blog, at flickr, and my other blogs. 

For me, the promise of a “new” web technology is the ability to 1) simplify my life as a blogger/web publisher/content producer and 2) to enable my site visitors to have greater control over the manner in which they view both my site content and the means by which the content comes to them (via my site, RSS, email newsletter, etc).

When I see current Ajax samples, I am both reminded of how far we have come from simple HTML hypertext pages to today’s possibilities, and it’s also an awareness of how young the internet really is.  While the terms have changed, the goal remains the same:  on the one hand, to deliver vast amounts of information efficiently, and on the other, to manage our ever-expanding network of information sources and relationships.

[Technorati tags: ajax, adaptive path, flickr, jesse james garrett, flickr, jeff veen, movable type, flickrexport, openrico, protopage, emily chang]

Virtual plazes become real

The web has always attracted me because of the play between what’s real, virtual, and how one can become the other fairly easily.  While others have framed this much more eloquently than I (eg. Tim Berners Lee on the semantic web), it’s the asynchronous and networked nature of the web that feels the most like our own brains - capable of multiple paths and interlinking, fluid at each moment of our consciousness, and with the potential to make live connections and topical relationships.

Just the other day, I blogged about Plazes, the new location-mapping site.  I had originally found the site through Joi Ito‘s blog, which I’ve been reading for a number of years now. 

Today, I’m logged into my plazes page while consulting at Six Apart, and I notice that Joi Ito is showing in my 2km range at the Technorati office on 3rd street, just one block away.  I close plazes to check email and not more than ten minutes later, Joi Ito walks by my desk. 

I get home around 6:30, flip open my laptop and my plazes icon is showing I have a message.  I log onto my plazes page again to find a message from Peter, the first person who had commented on my plazes post the other day and who had also blogrolled both Max and I that same day.  We click to see who’s in the 2 km range, and sure enough, Peter is no longer in Canada but at his newly-claimed location, “Hotel Diva” just a few blocks from here, where we’ve also stayed!

[Technorati tags: plazes, location mapping, joi ito, artcodes]

Movable Type 3.2 released and better than ever

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Movable Type 3.2 was released this morning by the team at Six Apart.  The new release has a wealth of features designed to make blogging even easier and smarter.

Max and I are running Movable Type on BeingEDU and plan to upgrade as soon as we have a few minutes of free time.  I’m looking forward to trying out the context-aware search interface, flltering spam into a junk folder, and having a centralized overview for all my blogs.

Make sure you also take a look at the new smart CSS design templates and libraries of new styles.  I’m pleased to say I had a tiny hand in creating three of the color variations used for the new Vicksburg theme, although the true credit for the design and CSS magic goes to Vicksburg’s creator, Walt.  View the new templates and others at the Style Library Remixer.

For the last month, I’ve had the rare opportunity to sit in the MT area at Six Apart next to some of the people that have built Movable Type, including Jay, Anil, Ezra, Brad.  Aside from the fanfare over the actual product, it’s the dedication and teamwork of the people behind the product that have really impressed me. 

(News story at my company site from Aug 5, 2005: Ideacodes to Create Wireframes and Visual Designs for Six Apart).

Wikipedia for all

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

One of my all-time favorite websites is the wikipedia - partly because I’ve used it for many years to look up terms, concepts, historical facts; also because I like to link to its pages for terms where I want to provide context; but mostly because of its altruistic and utopian perspective.

Imagine a world in which every person has free access
to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.
- from wikipedia

There aren’t many things in this world that focus on access to knowledge and being free.  These two goals are counter to any major corporation and their quest for global monetary domination.  That’s one of the reasons why I’ve always had respect for academia and nonprofits.  Their mission is distinctly different. 

To me, that difference also plays out distinctly in our experiences of the site itself.  Just as a purely commercially-driven entity like TVGuide.com has blinking banners, four frames of moving flash ads threatening the squeezed content area, the Wikipedia, a nonprofit, completely publically-supported free “encyclopedia” provides clear, readable navigation, helpful indicators, and an endless wealth of content and interaction for the individual and the communities. 

Global knowledge communication?  Seems like a much better concept of the world to me.

Go to the Wikipedia site:  Wikimedia needs your help in its 21-day fund drive. See the fundraising page.

[Technorati tags: wikipedia, nonprofit, open source]

gVisit visitor maps

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Continuing my search for new mapping technologies, I came across gVisit, another project developed using the Google map API.  gVisit allows you to track visitors to your website using Google Maps.  I’ve signed up and am waiting for it to log my site sometime in the next hour.  When it’s generated, I should be able to see visitor locations on a Google map (the sample shown above is the visitor log for gVisit).  The actual map is a bit slow from what I can tell, and I’m wondering if all the map images are generated off the same Google server and it’s slowing to a crawl? 

UPDATE: gVisit has me hooked!  I saw my first visitor traffic (screenshot pop-up) come in from Buenos Aires at 5:11 pm.  Now it will be interesting to see how these match up with my other site traffic statistics program.  Upon a quick glance, it looks like gVisit is already filtering out the bots.  I’ve added side link to view my visitor map.

[Technorati tags: gvisit, google maps, mapping, locationmapping, sitetraffic, artcodes]

Design something original

Saturday, August 20, 2005

Princeton Technology has created a hard drive that’s “inspired by” the Mac Mini, so much so that it really looks just like it other than the logo etched on the top and side.. not the kind of font that Steve Jobs would approve.  Frankly, I like the silver-white-milky aesthetic of the Mini’s design and Apple’s glossy white image, but then I confess to loving most things sleek, silver, and minimal. 

» More...

Plazes location mapping

Twenty-four hours ago, I was playing with IndyJunior and wishing I could add more real-time data to the map or share the data with someone in more ways than just a hover with text information (date, name, note).  Ask the Internet and you shall receive.  Visit plazes, “a grassroot approach to location-aware interaction, using the local network you are connected to as location reference. Plazes allows you to share you location with the people you know and to discover people and plazes around you. It’s the navigation system for your social life and it’s absolutely free.”

It seems like the site has a mostly European audience at this time.  Once you signup, you can start discovering and claiming different locations, customize your profile page, invite friends to join, view other members, search by surrounding distance to see who’s online, and you can even tag your photos in Flickr and pull them into Plazes.  There are also a number of ways to display your data including an IndyJunior map showing the last 30 days, 60 days, and so on.  I love it when web apps evolve based on previous favorites.

What I liked about this idea is that it’s location-awareness based on physical places.  You can’t add a new plaze unless you are at a new location and “the launcher” detects that your router’s address has changed.  Having only discovered one plaze, I can already see the potential of this type of interaction.  The virtual environment is now encouraging me to engage in real interaction - both to venture out into the city and world to find new places that have not yet been discovered and to create a historical record of the places I frequent for others to share, interact, or communicate. 

Plazes and social software
We like to consider Plazes next generation social software. Obviously, any kind of interaction system involving people is social software. Lately the term has been coined towards ‘six-degrees-of-separation’ software like friendster or orkut. Plazes takes it to the next level regarding location-awareness and impliciteness. The Plazes you are frequenting are actually a much better filtering system and common denominator than explicit connections like “he is my friend”. By being virtually present at certain Plazes like a record label or a certain restaurant and having conversations via comments at that Plaze, the system is much closer to how we actually interact in the real world. By being able to annotate real world locations virtually, Plazes augments, enhances and encourages real-world communication rather than simulating it. Nevertheless, Plazes does allows you to declare other users as friends. This simply means that you trust the person in regard of your personal information. Plazes allows you to specify for every bit of profile information wether it’s visible only to your friends or to everybody. Unlike with friendster and the likes, you cannot see who your friend’s friends are.

I’ve signed up and you can now see where I am.

» More...

Web mapping technology

Friday, August 19, 2005

I was searching to see if anyone had released some Ajax-driven maps and came across “Build AJAX-Based Web Maps Using ka-Map" by Tyler Mitchell which led me to an open source map tool called ka-Map.  I’ve downloaded it and plan to try it out this weekend.

Also, if you have seen these already, some other mapping projects worth checking out:

iPod Subway Maps
Flash Earth
CNET story about a9 street maps

[Technorati tags: mapping, ajax, ipodsubwaymaps]

AJAX and Max

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

I made the mistake of telling my boyfriend, Max Kiesler, about the cool Ajax samples at openrico.org and before I had a chance to do it, he made a new site, bypassing the openrico samples all together.  You can see what he’s done with the Yellow Fade Technique (YTF) made infamous by Basecamp and then further tweaked by Adam Michela into the Fade Anything Technique (FAT).  Max has taken that and adapted it into his blog.  Read more about it in his post Designing With AJAX: CSS and AJAX Web page Transition.  (Oh, and by the way, he’s at Technorati reloading the page to see if anyone is linking to him, so, go link to him! ;)

Open source

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

MIT Technology Review has a story, The Tech Boom 2.0, that covers a point of view that I couldn’t agree with more.  I often use open-source software to develop high-end, robust, and full-featured websites and web systems for clients and our own projects.  Open-source software isn’t just for geeks anymore, but a viable basis for eBusiness development, services, education, and every other industry.

» More...

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