Category: Uncategorized

Summer’s here, and there are quite a few interesting movies on the way. Here’s what I’m planning to go see
The Stepford Wives. A group of nerdy gentlemen build their perfect wives from electronics parts. Could be fun. Out 30 Jul.
I, Robot. I have yet to be disappointed by a Will Smith movie, although I have low standards and did avoid MiB2 on advice from friends.: Out 6 Aug.
The Bourne Supremacy. Matt Damon inadvertantly ends up in a load more trouble. Got to love the car chases. Out 13 Aug.
The Terminal. Tom Hanks as a foreigner trapped in an airport terminal in the States after his country ceases to exist during a war, and his passport becomes invalid. Could be very good. Out 3 Sep.

The number of advertising calls we’ve been getting at home have jumped recently. Still nowhere near the number American households apparantly get, but the spike has been noticeable here.

First of all, quite a few ‘silent’ callers. We get a phone call and after a few seconds of silence the caller hangs up. This happens once every few days, and immediately raises thoughts of burglers checking to see if the house is empty.,,, although I’m probably being paranoid – a friend gets similar calls and BT apparantly discovered they were international, so unless the burglers were planning to fly over…..

Secondly, we have started to get those dire automated calls. You pick up the phone and the machine starts its pitch “Hi there, you’ve won a holiday. All you have to do is call our £50/minute premiu…..”. I usually hang up about there.

Finally, we’ve just gotten a call which triggered my alarm bells more than usual. An Irish caller, speaking very fast with a noisy background. Couldn’t hear a word he said. Eventually, after I got him to repeat his little intro speech about five times, I discovered it was about a ‘holiday we entered about 18 months ago’. Still couldn’t make out the company name. All I had to do was confirm my details. Having had a recent dose of Kevin Mitnick’s book about social engineering I immediately developed a bout of paranoia about this. “This is some random guy, quite unclear about his company, asking me to confirm details…” I asked him for more information about the company and the competition. The intro speech was repeated (I think…), so I said, with a vocal scepticism, ‘go on then…’ – at that point the bastard hung up.

I know it’s supposedly quite easy to wean useful information from people. If the last guy’s questions included asking for my date of birth and mother’s maiden name, he has two bits of information regularly used elsewhere in security forms. Under the guise of a competition, I reckon those details and more can be quite easily had. Perhaps I’m being too reluctant, but I suspect that one can never be too cautious!

Blog people, keep your eyes on this page. The script that creates this will be running for the next few days building up a database of inter-blog links. Unlike quite a few other ‘popular blogs’ pages, this one is particularly incestuous, only listing sites that have already been approved by the Blogwise editors.

This week has been a mixed bag of stuff. Here’s a summary for your general perusal:

Plus: Went to Blogtalk conference at the beginning of this week. Was good and v. interesting.
Minus: Everybody already knew each other. It was difficult to get into existing social circles.
Plus: It was the first time I’d been abroad.
Minus: It cost a small fortune.
Plus: I had my hair cut this time last week (quite long to very short). Feel very much refreshed.
Minus: Have lots of hair products I no longer have a use for.
Plus: Went to a very good meeting in London Friday for ICRA which is looking very promising.
Minus: Ever tried getting to London at 9am on a weekday? Costs a bundle and is very tiring.
Plus: Have made many progresses with Blogwise, including finally fixing the Top 50 pages.
Minus: Accidentally deleted the keywords database, and am relying on Google cache to pick up half the data.
Plus: I wrote a very quick, but fully working PHP to rip data from Google.
Minus: I think they just noticed.
Plus: I’m starting work full time tomorrow.
Minus: I’m starting work full time tomorrow.

More soon!

Sorry, no more Vienna posts. Got tired very quickly of trying to work with an utterly flaky wifi connection and a dodgy keyboard tht keps mssing kys. Besides, if you want a good commentary look here.

Turns out I was probably wrong about my recognition skills. The first speaker, Mark Bernstein mentioned that he wished Ben & Mena were here…d’oh.

Some highlights so far:
Mark Bernstein talked about the cost of running weblogs: at least €1000/year he reckons. Some could be as much as €50,000. He also talked about the risks of flame wars starting on weblog comments and trackbacks, and asked whether, since both Slashdot and USENET had been ‘lost’ to flamers, would weblogs be next? Mark also talked about the differences between weblogs and mainstream journalism. In the latter environment “today’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish”, whereas in weblogs the archives are cherished, and there is an apparant trend towards categorising old posts.

Stephan Schmidt of SnipSnap tells us that knowledge management does not work and why. In most KM situations the tools, processes and organisation is specified at the management level, which leads to over-complicated and unpopular systems that the users will most likely shun. In his talk Stephan suggested that weblogs and wikis be used as the foundation for a bottom-up approach. Each team member is encouraged to start their own blog, with the tools of their own choice. These blogs are then combined, by overlapping communities, to form meta-communities. At the same time wikis can also be used to retain structured information. Fascinating stuff, and of course SnipSnap is an ideal platform for this – but let’s not be cynical. I think he has a very good point!

Daniel Doegl showed us a fascinating demonstration of Zoomblox, a website designed for young children and teenagers with lots of nice colours and Flash animations. Keep an eye out for Zoomblox.at in Autumn 2004 if you’re interested.

05/07/2004 07:44 — I think I’ve ended up in a conference room with a load of press. At least I have coffee… I also recognise a few people; think I walked in the building with Ben & Mena Trott, the proprietors of the fine establishment Six Apart (Typepad, Moveable Type). Took about five minutes’ walk through the city centre to get here. What a lovely walk that was. I’m looking forward to exploring more of the city later this afternoon.

Still no wifi in sight, so I’m writing this with the hope I’ll find a net connection later this afternoon.

Footnote:  The fact this now exists on the web means I found a wifi connection 😀

05/07/2004 00:00 — Well, I’m here. First time in a foreign country and I have to say “I like it here”. The language barrier is a slight problem – I gave up trying to get on the underground when I couldn’t figure out where to buy a ticket. But I am the foreigner and it’s my responsibility to learn German. Unfortunately I’m not learning as well or as quickly as I’d like. Communications with the taxi driver was quite difficult. “Der Hotel Karntnerhof bitte” got a bemused look and an ‘eh’? Fortunately we both spoke a little French, so the trip wasn’t completely silent. It was also 5€ …. try getting that sort of price in central London!

Congratulations to Greece (Griechenland here) by the way. The pilot of the plane kept us up-to-date on the score. Amazing stuff.

Right more tomorrow – it’s time for bed! Up at 6am and hopefully I can find an open wifi connection to post this stuff.

Thanks to all the work put into Blogwise, I’m proud to announce it can now pre-empt blog updates, making this the first blog directory with psychic powers. Sweet huh? 🙂

http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/archives/whats_the_big_deal_with_gmail.php

D. Keith Robinson asks what the fuss is about GMail anyway. Some
interesting points, and some very interesting responses.

Made me think for a bit. Why was I interested in GMail? Why did I try and
get an invite? Well, I’m quite keen to see what Google has to offer beyond
their searching business. There are many occassions where I think ‘I wish
I had a good, fast search engine’. Email is one such place, and the other
is the desktop – if the articles I’ve seen are true (sorry, no references)
Google are/might be working on file searching and getting themselves into
the desktop application market.

Why have I been prompted to think about email searching? I have a lot of
email; sometimes I need to delve into my archives to pick up email; I run
webmail (portability reasons); most webmail clients that just work off
IMAP are crap at searching.

A Google-like interface might create a fast-access database of my email,
ready for queries such as ‘to:myboss@bigcompany.com pay rise’. If Google’s
speed could be ported over to a single program and database, that’d
outstrip my current search by a factor of at least 20.

GMail offers this, with colourful forms to boot, but it’s run on their
server which has its limitations. Here’s why I’m not using GMail all the
time:

* Google could delete my account or bar my entry at any point. That has
obvious implications about my data on their server. Google Adsense forums
are full of people who’ve had their accounts unexpectedly (and often
without clear justification) terminated.

* i can’t easily transfer my existing mail over to GMail. Best thing I can
do is forward my email from here to there.

* The whole ‘privacy’ thing.. (ads, retaining emails after account
termination, etc.) – although this doesn’t bother me as much as it does
quite a lot of people.

* I don’t want to be svenlatham@gmail.com – I am sven@svenlatham.com!

The first point worries me quite a bit. It might also be true of other
webmail services, although – until now – I haven’t been particularly won
over by other mail services because running my own copy of Squirrelmail at
home seems to have many more benefits. Only when a service with superior
functionality has come along does this become an issue.

I really do hope Google offer a version that offers more options to
resolve the above – probably in exchange for money; I think they’ll get
quite a few customers! I also hope Google push themselves towards the
desktop market. There’s only so much of that irritating XP dog I can take.
It’s smily face holds up for only so long when you’re doing searches on
your own hard disk.