Month: October 2002

Getting paid to explore

i’m ecstatic about a possibility that i might get paid to write about emerging technologies (which i enjoy to check out anyway). a friend at CNET hooked me up with the right person to talk to, i’m curious where this will lead to 🙂

Removing bottlenecks

RSVP is a well-known method of reading. It allows for very fast reading. Using RSVP some people can read 2000 words per minute, compared with most people’s reading rate that averages 300 words per minute.

i totally need that. absorbing information is my main bottleneck these days. any increase would have enormous consequences. if i could speed up my reading 5 times.. jeez!

the wall street journal is picking up on one of my favorite programs, mindmanager. i still hope that someone like microsoft picks up on that and finally gives us tools to think, not just dumb office suites to process finished concepts.

Walmart

it will be all over when walmart starts spreading like a cancer in europe. by buying their useless crap, gullible consumers will be assimilated. mark my words 🙂 i’m now a sucker for foosball tables.

Rich languages

i got interested in the question which language was generally considered to be the richest in the world.

maybe it is sanskrit:

Sanskrit is the richest language in the world. There are often double or triple meanings in 1 word, so it is a very difficult language to learn, but a very expressive one.

or maybe it is english:

The Oxford English Dictionary has 615K words. 200k are in common use. Compare this to German, which has a total vocabulary of 185K words, and French, with fewer than 100K. There is no doubt that English has the most varied vocabulary in the world, but most use a very small portion of it to express themselves.

i have found myself in trouble discussing some concepts in my native language when i could explain them much better in english 🙂

Webtop revitalized?

i found jon udell on zoe to be an inspiration for my thinking of what a web gui can do.

“Services could flow in the other direction, too. For example, ZOE spends a lot of time doing textual analysis of email. Most of the correlations I perform manually, using Outlook folders, could be inferred by a hypothetical version of ZOE that would group messages based on matching content in their bodies as well as in their headers, then generate titles for these groups by summarizing them. There should be no need for Outlook to duplicate these structures. ZOE could simply offer them as a metadata feed, just as it currently offers an RSS feed that
summarizes the current day’s messages.”

hmm.. xaraya running on localhost on users home computers with their idle 2 ghz cpus and connected 24 / 7 to the net. if i think about it, i am already trying to export a better view of my thoughts / files / email / contacts / calls to the web, accessible from everywhere (with the proper credentials).

  • thoughts -> blog
  • email -> imap web gui
  • contacts -> web gui to ldap
  • calls -> web gui for answering machine
  • files -> webDaV

unfortunately those apps are all separate at this point. there is no framework yet to embed them all.

Pagerank and trust metrics

semantic web, next micro-step: pagerank meets web of trust explains the potential:

We wondered if there was any cross-pollination between the Usenet trust metrics and the Web algorithms. Would a high score for Kibo, the humorist who made his reputation on net news, feed into Kibo’s web ranking?
Cutz said it was an interesting idea.
“If you were searching for information on an intricate part of the Linux kernel you’d love to see a post by Linus on the term come up first. We’re always looking to find a better trust metric.”

such a trust metric could maybe be provided by affero (a company i consult with)

the shit hits the fan

first, my publisher starts breathing down my neck about my deadline, then my employer involves me in a complex social engineering operation, then my fucking moron provider screws up the gallery of a friend. in other news, the pm and a board member fought it out on irc, and my roommate tracked the fugitive down.