IT Conversations | O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference | Alex Russell

IT Conversations | O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference | Alex Russell:

"Alex Russel, creator of the Dojo web toolkit, discusses the future of mobile phone development based on his experience in the mobile, security, and web development industries. He claims that although smart phones are increasing in power, they will not be a suitable platform for open source development. That, and restrictions by handset makers and network operators, mean that the web is the only viable platform for developing mobile phone applications in the future."

I'm pretty sure Alex refers to the lack of "thingification" as one of the the problem with the mobile network. Does that bascially mean the ability to attach a url to something and pass it around? I also missed other, possibly important terms. It's worth listening to again.

I think this a different sense of thingification that commonly used.

Critiquing Hugo

I'm saddened and sometimes amazed of the vehemence and pervasiveness of critiques of Hugo Chavez and the socio-political experiment going on in the relatively democratic Venezuela as compared with governments with whom the United States is, if not friendly, at least tightly allied, say Saudi Arabia or say, Nigeria. Avowedly unbiased NPR is not exempt. A case in point: the interview a few months ago with Joe Kennedy and his work with the Venezuelan government to bring less expensive fuel oil to low income people in the northeastern United States. Joe would point out the relative levels of democracy between Venezuela and most other major oil producing states, but the interviewer wouldn't hear it and kept insisting, well, I ought really go find the interview and reference it.

In any case, again, what's the real issue? Actually using Venezuela's oil wealth to benefit poor people?

Self critique: Is this really the same as the failure of American leftist to give up on Stalin as the reality of his rule became known? I hope not. I don't think so. I think the Venezuelan rich have not been had their wealth stripped or been imprisoned simply because of their wealth.

Red vs. Underlieing (sp?) Culture

The current state of Russia illustrates my long time assertion, which I think predated the fall of the wall, that what we claimed to object to in the Soviet Union were at least as much Russian characteristics as Communist characteristics. This leads me to the conclusion that what they (? - conservatives? Protestants?) was the government helping out either poor people or just people different than the speaker. They tended not to object to the government helping them out, be they defense contractors or farmers or their particular flavor of worship.

(That's underlieing not underlining

Lists vs. Prose

5/11/08 Update: Wikipedia:Embedded list

Recently I came across a Wikipedia article in which there was a style notice suggesting that the page ought to be rewritten as prose as opposed to the list that it was. I've not been able to re-find it, but I'd like to see their reasoning on the issue since I'm much inclined to make lists and outlines of my ideas instead of prose and don't particularly see why it ought to be prose. On the other hand, I admire well written non-fiction prose, say John McPhee or Richard.

Rules for a Dictionary Catalog By Charles Ammi Cutter, Worthington Chauncey Ford, Philip Lee Phillips, Oscar George Theodore Sonneck

Rules for a Dictionary Catalog By Charles Ammi Cutter, Worthington Chauncey Ford, Philip Lee Phillips, Oscar George Theodore Sonneck: ""

What I Like About Marc

• It's the earliest rich data format that I know of.
• It demonstrates lots of the data encoding techniques of its day. It may have invented some of them
• I see a forerunner in the card examples in Scientific Amerrican.
• It and the metadata it embodies is going forward into the future as part of the semantic web.

This is a test of blogging from Opera Mini.

And now I edit.

Rules for a Dictionary Catalog By Charles Ammi Cutter, Worthington Chauncey Ford, Philip Lee Phillips, Oscar George Theodore Sonneck

Rules for a Dictionary Catalog By Charles Ammi Cutter, Worthington Chauncey Ford, Philip Lee Phillips, Oscar George Theodore Sonneck: "1 To enable a person to find a book of which either A the author B the title V is known c the subject J 2 To show what the library has D by a given author E on a given subject F in a given kind of literature 3 To assist in the choice of a book G as to its edition bibliographically H as to its character literary or topical"

Things Joseph has figured out

• "Moma car": Amy's van
  
• "Nana car": the Maxima
  
• "Bop car": the Taurus
  

Evidenced during a surprise visit today.

iPhone not having copy & paste is bad

According to Jakob Nielson the iPhone doesn't have copy & paste. This is bad. For me, at least, copy and paste is a major mechanism for exploring the internet.

• copy a word or phrase and paste it into Google - does the iPhone have a "highlight and search" mechanism?
• copy a url and then paste it into the browser address bar and hack it
• copy a snippet from a page I'm tagging and paste it into the comment
  

By not having this mechanism my universe is made much smaller to no benefit for me that I can think of.