June 26, 2004

Tim Orielly on the OS Paradigm Shift

Tim O'Rielly has posted an excellent essay in which he examines the open source phenomenon using Thomas Kuhn's "paradigm shift" mental model. With excellent references (not to mention links to related O'Rielly books), Paradigm Shift covers the commoditization of software, internet collaboration, and the software as an evolving service concept.

In short, if it is sufficiently robust an innovation to qualify as a new paradigm, the open source story is far from over, and its lessons far from completely understood. Rather than thinking of open source only as a set of software licenses and associated software development practices, we do better to think of it as a field of scientific and economic inquiry, one with many historical precedents, and part of a broader social and economic story. Source

June 21, 2004

New Job

Wednesday was my last day at the Hollywood Stock Exchange. Overall, it was a positive experience, but I had to move on. How could I resist working on perl applications at a startup... again?

Tomorrow, I will be starting my first day at Boingo Wireless.

June 18, 2004

OpenReader

Andy Oram has posted an ONLamp article about OpenReader, a project directed at developing a page-based text reader for books, periodicals, and research papers. According to the features table, OpenReader will handle the major ebook standards such as OEBPS, PDF, DocBook, and (of course) XHTML/CSS.

I am looking forward to following the interesting bookmarking, referencing, and annotation techniques which Jan Noring intends to incorporate into OpenReader. An example is the booklet concept, allowing related notes and images to be presented in a separate pane from the main text.

June 15, 2004

Dozomo: Sold!

Dozomo.com, produced by 24 Hour Dotcom, has sold for US$2,026.00.

Dozomo, The 24 Hour Dotcom

The dotcom silliness is back.

Celebrating, I couldn't resist submitting a bid for Dozomo.com. Having been in existence only 24 hours, Dozomo is being auctioned on eBay. This utility provides a convenient CLI to the largest search engines and web apps.

Some commands I tried:
imdb startup.com
dic silliness
amazon valuation

I bid on this service because 1. Dozomo is a great idea with some interesting and talented people behind it, and 2. I believe that the domain name and service are worth more in future advertising revenue than the current bid of US$1,750.00. The former represents the opportunity, the latter mitigates the investment risk.

The service, which acts as a meta-search engine, has ambitious plans to take on the incumbent google.com and believes its innovative technology will help it become the market leader within the coming year. Source

June 8, 2004

Converting ISBNs into LC Call Numbers

Kendall Grant Clark has been getting into the nitty-gritty of doing a librarian's work with xml and rdf. His latest article is part of his Hacking the Library series at XML.com.

Our isbn2lccn tool will read its command line arguments, one of which will be a required ISBN. It will then make some REST web service calls to either the Library of Congress or the British Library; in some cases it may also make calls to Amazon or to xISBN. Source.

June 7, 2004

Life Hacks

Cory Doctorow has posted some great notes from Danny O'Brien's Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geek. These were taken from Mr. O'Brien's presentation at NotCom '04.

I emailed and contacted 70 technologists, asked 100 questions and got 14 replies back

I got a bunch of screenshots, habits, code, anaecdotes

* JWZ -- Netscape hacker, sells beer, hangs out with goth chicks
* Gnat Torkington -- Perl hacker
* Brad Templeton -- Chairman of EFF
* Guido van Rossom -- Invented Python
* ESR -- Gun toting nice man, author of Cathedral and Bazaar
* Ann Mitchell -- Antispam lawyer
* Morbus Iff -- Amphetadesk, prefers dialup to broadband
* Paul Ford -- ftrain.com
* Dan Egnor -- Sweetcode.org
* Edd Dumbill -- XML.com
* Cory Doctorow -- Writer
* Simon Cozens -- Perl Hacker
* Tim Bray -- W3C
* Piers Beckley -- LA Scriptwriter (meant to get a perl scriptwriter,
got an LA scriptwriter -- we'll call him "the control") Source