I remember back in the dot-com boom days one of the new-new things were ASPs, application service providers, who provide hosted applications to replace enterprise and desktop applications. In fact I was one of the team on such a venture developing a collaboration tool for small businesses.
When brainstorming over what applications were good candidates for web hosting, I remember we explicitly rejected word processing as not being suitable. But that was before AJAX.
Now, I am posting this entry using a service called Writely, which is a web-hosted word processor that allows multiple people to collaborate on writing a document. I can do all the usual styling like bold, italic, underline, different fonts, and different sizes. It is a well executed application, though still missing a lot of features like, as far as I can tell, spell checking and hyperlinks.
I first saw Donald Brown's list of human universals as an appendix to Pinker's “Blank Slate”. It is quite a stunning list of things that seem to be common to all humanity, including things you might have thought were unique to your particular culture. Thanks to Jack Fenner for putting up this slightly modified version of Brown's list.
date: '2005-08-06 18:34:00'
layout: post
slug: engineers-need-to-understand-how-the-mind-works
status: publish
ref: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge3.html
title: Engineers need to understand how the mind works
wordpress_id: '80'
categories: Science
I like this point of view of Pinker (From Edge 3):
Computer technology will never change the world as long as it ignores how the mind works. Why did people instantly start to use fax machines, and continue to use them even though electronic mail makes much more sense? There are millions of people who print out text from their computer onto a piece of paper, feed the paper into a fax machine, forcing the guy at the other end to take the paper out, read it, and crumples it up—or worse, scan it into his computer so that it becomes a file of bytes all over again. This is utterly ridiculous from a technological point of view, but people do it. They do it because the mind evolved to deal with physical objects, and it still likes to conceptualize entities that are owned and transferred among people as physical objects that you can lift and store in a box. Until computer systems, email, video cameras, VCR's and so on are designed to take advantage of the way the mind conceptualizes reality, namely as physical objects existing at a location and impinged upon by forces, people are going to be baffled by their machines, and the promise of the computer revolution will not be fulfilled.
[...] [The problem is that the] machines were designed by engineers that aren't used to thinking about how the human mind works. They're used to designing machinery that is elegant by their own standards, and they don't think about how the user is going to conceptualize the machine as another object in the world and deal with it as we've been dealing with objects for hundreds of thousands of years.
date: '2005-07-29 17:46:00'
layout: post
slug: maybe-available-to-help-your-project
status: publish
ref: http://eamonn.obrien-strain.com/bio/
title: Maybe available to help your project
wordpress_id: '79'
categories: Personal
You might want to have a look at my resume if you are in the San Francisco area and looking for a senior technologist with a lot of programming and research experience.
Here are some hints as to why I might be available:
date: '2005-07-08 11:17:24'
layout: post
slug: how-to-capture-video
status: publish
ref: http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/capture/start.html
title: How to capture video
wordpress_id: '78'
categories: Product
It looks like Capture Guide will be a good resource for me as I try to figure out the best way to capture broadcast video to disk.
date: '2005-06-15 15:34:07'
layout: post
slug: free-background-music-loops
status: publish
ref: http://www.flashkit.com/loops/
title: Free background music loops.
wordpress_id: '72'
categories: Product
Great. I just found this source for music loops that I can use as background for my synthesized video.
date: '2005-06-09 11:09:28'
layout: post
slug: comparison-of-different-sql-implementations
status: publish
ref: http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/
title: Comparison of different SQL implementations
wordpress_id: '71'
categories: Programming
I am writing some SQL that I would like to work with Sqlite, Derby, and MS Access. It turns out there is more variablility than I thought. Most annoying is that autoincrment is handled differently by each.