Steve's Seaside Life

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RSS and the benefits of a standard format

I have evalgalised for a while the innovation that is unleashed in clients and servers when a standard format exists for passing information beteen them.  RSS is a great example of this, and Dare makes the point strongly in this article, a snipit from which reads:

RSS is a wonderful example of the higher level of interoperability that can be built upon XML formats. Instead of information sources using various incompatible mechanisms for providing information to end users such as NOAA’s SOAP web service and the Microsoft.com web services which each require a separate custom application to consume them, sites can all standardize on RSS. This standardization creates an ecosystem of applications that produce and consume RSS feeds which is a lot larger than what would exist for each site specific web services or market specific XML syndication formats.  Specifically, it allows for the evolution of the digital information hub where users can view data from the various information sources they care about (blogs, news, weather reports, etc) in their choice of applications

He goes on to point out that RSS goes one better by allowing domain specific extensibility whilist still allowing standards based readers to consume feeds:

Additionally, RSS is extensible. This means …

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

I suffer from mild Asbergers Syndrome so I approached this book with unusual interest.  I learnt two things, first how mild my Asbergers is by contrast with the main characters and second how shockingly brilliant the book was in the way it allowed us to get inside the head of a person with this condition. 

I would recommend everyone to read this book, not only will it delight on many levels, but you will never look at a shy and retiring person the same way ever again!

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Crow Lake

A lovingly crafted book, that on one level deals with obvious tragedy of loss but in the end shows that the real tragidy lay in misunderstandings and negative attitudes.  I really enjoyed the book, a slow read but one to be savoured and remembered.  I read the Da Vinci code immediately after this one as was shocked at its poor quality of writing compared to Crow Lake, but equally suprised at how it made up for it in pace.  Two very contrasting books equally enjoyable in their own way.

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Angels and Demons

Not quite as good as the Da Vinci Code, bit still a good read.  Took me about 4 days to get through.  Many of the same themes as his other books and the writing is just as bad, but the facinating story line makes up for it.  I think its worth reading but only if the Da Vinci code appealed to you.

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The Da Vinci Code

Not very well written, but a great thriller none the less.  facinating subject matter – early Christianity and the catholic Church – and many plot twists.  I read it in two days, my eldest Daughter is reading it now.  Highly recommended provided you are not too much of a fan of elegant prose.  Oh and bear in mind that having read it you are almost certainly going to want to do some further research into the subject!!

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Maxthon/MyEI2 Groups

I have mentioned the topic of groups a few times,  let me elaborate.  Maxthon (used to be called MyIE2) is a shell around IE.  You can open a whole load of web pages as tabs (no suprises there).  As I go through my RSS feeds I click away on links of interest and probably end up with 20-30 articles I want to read, I then Click GROUPS – SAVE AS GROUP, and it generates a file of links. 

I then either wait for a robocopy autosync to my tablet or click a shortcut and the group file gets copied to my Tablet within seconds.  I Open the group on the tablet (two clicks) and all the files are downloaded and ready to browse offline (one tab each). 

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Home office ideas

If you read my blog then you know I am pretty passionate about office design in general and have a category devoted to related issues.  So I was interested to see dave’s ideas for creating an office for writing, where in particular he describes the benefits of consolidating all of his computing needs onto a single device.  Bryan responds that he is struggling to cope with 3 computers. 

I found both interesting perspectives, especially since I have quite a number of computers, and largely find the experience quite rewarding.  Here is a snapshot of how I work.

I have a main machine, its powerful, and drives three 19″ monitors, and a great wireless keyboard and mouse.  When I sit at this workstation its optimised for writing, analysing and information gathering.  I have everything to hand and hopefully will soon be getting a optimised chair so I can work for more than half an hour without too much pain.  My main PC is a Windows 2003 Server which allows me to work without admin priv, and always have an admin RDP session open for when I need it.

I have a lab server because my main machine needs …

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If you only read one blog, make it this one …

I continue to be amazed by Dave Pollard and how he manages to provide us with such thought provoking insights into How To Save The World on a daily basis.  To give you a glimpse of his motivation look at the following snip, and then read his bio.

Five years ago, at the age of 48, I decided it was time to stop complaining and being depressed about the state of the world, and start doing something about it. I began to read voraciously, an average of two books a week, and gradually put together a picture in my own mind of the current state of the world, how we got here, and what we needed to do about it. In February of last year I started a weblog, in part because I wanted to share what I had learned, and in part to discuss it with others and find out if they felt the same way that I did

 

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Way to go Adobe!

Adobe Acrobat v7 release is really quite astounding, with most if not all of the key infrastructure functionality from the full V6 product now bundled into the new version of the FREE Reader.  It’s a perfect split of the features needed by content creators and content consumers/reviewers.  Microsoft look VERY VERY hard at this and learn the lesson that Adobe is teaching you here and OpenOffice.org will teach you when they build X/Forms support into OOo, and make OOo an essential part of everyones desktop Infrastructure and destroy the market for InfoPath and possibly MS Office XML documents in general.

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Way too many portals

Its seems that everyone has a solution on the way for inter-enterprise collaboration.  Use their portal and only their portal or application!  The problem is that OpenText, Microsoft, IBM, Groove etc all want you to use their solutions, for example:

Workplace creates a unified front end for technologies facing suppliers, customers, and employees, according to Larry Bowden, vice president of the Workplace division at IBM. Each of those users has different roles, but they are tapping the same back-end information sources through Workplace, he added. ?Collaboration among peers within an organization is moving toward organizational productivity, which shifts toward [collaboration] between organizations,? he said.

Well that’s not my vision of collaboration!  I want something more along the lines of POP3, RSS and Trillian (a bit of a mix of standards and products I know but hopefully you get the idea).  All you enterprises out there can use whatever collaboration solution you want, but when I connect to you and integrate all your portals into my Personal Knowledge Management environment I want to aggregate you using bog standard protocols and the clients of my choice.  Of course these enterprise portal applications could be aggregated by portlets as well for people who don’t have the …