You are narrow, different, casual, picky, self and user centered, greedy and tiny, but agile and balanced! I'm wary.

Ten Rules for Web Startups

Use a prep card to remeber the important points at an informal meeting

Your Prep Card: Don’t Leave Home Without It at LifeClever ;-) Tips for Design and Life

Make writing out a Prep Card an integral part of your preparation for every meeting. It’s a great habit to get into so never walk leave home without a Prep Card:


Take a 3” x 5” index card and write down 3 key points you want to mention in simple clear language, nouns and verbs.
At the bottom, give yourself 2 reminders to avoid your bad habits.



Here's an example:

• Bill got a raise in half the time, with an inferior track record.
  
• We will match our competitor’s best bid.
  
• You’d agreed to a 10% discount over the phone.

—

• Sit up straight.
  
• Talk slowly and take a full breath after every sentence.
  
  

That’s it. In any discussion, you’re almost certainly not going to have time to process and deliver more than 3 important points. In The Elements of Style, E.B. White writes, “The act of
composition, or creation, disciplines the mind; writing is one way to
go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain
the mind but supply it, too.”

Technorati Tags: lifehack notes

Bringing magazines into the digital age.

Exact Editions

Exact Editions makes magazines, books and other printed documents accessible,
searchable and usable on the web. The Exact Editions system processes PDF files
supplied by the publisher and stores images and text in a database. The goal of
this content management process is that the web version of the printed title should
look exactly the same as the printed version. The Exact Editions system also
offers publishers a variety of distribution options: titles can be freely sampled
by any web user, or individual subscription can be sold, or 'controlled'
circulation accounts provided to registered individuals. Exact Editions also now
supports institutional access through IP-address-based accounts sold on subscription.

Within the Exact Editions system each print page becomes a web page, so printed
pages can be bookmarked, cited and referenced by other users or web applications.
The platform also delivers a range of useful enhancements to the printed page:
email addresses and urls are rendered as clickable links, ISBNs and
telephone numbers (provided that they are in international format) are rendered clickable,
and Tables of Contents and Indices are also enriched with live links.

Technorati Tags: epublish magazine

one GREAT presentation

TED | Talks | Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law (video)

Wow - take 20 minutes now and watch this presentation by Larry Lessig. He 'pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you've ever seen.'

Great intro to the free culture, creative commons arena as well as a superb demonstration of masterful presentation -no animated powerpoint bulleting here.

A great Quote from a good article by Christian Rasmussen...

FedTech: Government Social Networking: The Next E-Chapter

It will help to keep this quote from Henry Ford in the back of your mind while moving forward with all of this:

If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse.

Take it to the next level.

WHOA! Microsoft offers $44.6B for Yahoo

An ambitious move to breathe down Google's neck, this would certainly have been disallowed if Google was doing the buying.
My bet - Microsoft will take a long time to capitalize, if ever.

In the meantime, this could be the best day in over the last half-year to buy GOOG, while the corresponding day for YHOO was I guess yesterday ;-)


Technorati Tags: microsoft, yahoo, google

Blogging from JAOO

Sitting in on Alef's admittedly biased review of web frameworks
No silver bullets here (surprise), the answer is, "It depends" on:

• Size of Community / Support
  
• Migration Paths / Backward Compatibility record
• Documentation quality

After applying these filters we end up with Spring MVC, Spring WebFlow, GWT, JSF & ...yes Struts
and the way they handle:

• State Management - is HTTP Session an oxymoron?
  
• Navigation Handling
• Event Handling
• Templates and UI building

Results are summarized here:

Biased Opinions Here!!	Spring MVC, Struts	Spring WebFlow	GWT	JSF
State Management	None beside HTTP Session, best for almost stateless app.	Server based, can be in db	State is ALL client-side, RPC-style async service calls. State dependency mgmt. is hard	HTTP Session-based
Navigation Handling	limited, low-level req-resp	Excellent	?	Integrates well with Spring WebFlow
Event Handling	Req.-Resp. oriented, low-level	Excellent, requires session state	Elegant, all in Java	Very Good

UI Comments

• GWT: Little HTML left, not Dreamweavable. 100% AJAX-based
  
• JSP: HTML based, may be ugly. Good taglibs,
  
• Freemarker/Velocity: Good to build on Struts/JSP apps
  
• JSF: Higher-level than JSP. Good components available. AJAX with extension (Spring Faces, ICEFaces, MyFaces, Seam). Should use w/Facelets.
  
• Flex/OpenLaszlo/JavaFX: Interesting but very diffferent techniques
  

Recommendations

Stateless: Struts/SpringMVC with a templating engine
Stateful: GWT or JSF with Spring WebFlow

Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World = Power 2 the People, again :-)

Excellent article in WIRED mag.



Talks about the origins of Google Earth/Maps, the data, the mashups, future tech and at the end a long tail reference to how all of this is democratizing the power once wielded by the map makers of the world.

Smartpox and Semapedia are worth a look as well as metalayers of data on the world.

13 Photographs That Changed the World.

A nice collection of classics of modern photojournalism.

Both powerful, some disturbing photos, but also short discussion on their and their subjects effect on our world.

What a country!

www.speedbandits.dk displays a fantastic carrot alternative to the traditional whip of law enforcement.

See for yourself:

http://5x5m.com/files/speedbandits/

This is a writely doc.

From Google's re-opened-after-acquisition web wordprocessor Writely . It's going to be a blog post too.

I'm missspelling now.

and here in bolde, there.

• one
• 2

• tree

Funny, Writely marks writely as being misspelled. :-)

IBM: The 'next big thing' no longer exists | CNET News.com

I am unbelievably unthinkably embarassed to work at IBM right now.

IBM: The 'next big thing' no longer exists | CNET News.com: Nicholas "stop looking. There's no such thing as the next big thing" Donofrio has a job title that reads: Executive Vice President of Innovation and Technology.

Out of context? Misinterpretation? I'm gonna ask around.

You are KK Dreger's newest contact!

You are KK Dreger's newest contact!

Yay! caitlinmarydreger has marked you as a contact too.
caitlinmarydreger counts you as family.
It's nice to be family :-)

What the Flock

OK - so it's been seeping into my consciousness for so long that we reached a tipping point -- I downloaded and am exploring Flock.

Executive summary: It's fun, powerful and feels real intuitive. Swiss-army knife built-in features like del.icio.us, Flickr integration, even this post is being written in Flock hooked up to Blogger. They even work together, like letting me drag the Flickr Flock Fhoto above directly into the post. Very Nice stuff.

The future is here, get distributed - download and get started!

technorati tags: flock

Mini Snowmen Rule!

They come to life in seconds -- make an army of 'em.

The Face of Anger

jyllands_posten_mohammeds_ansigt
Originally uploaded by ganeshpuri89.

I saw the cartoons and read the article when they were published - in my opinion this has blown way out of proportion. I know Denmark to be a very open society and most Danes are more than tolerant and respectful of others in every way, religion included.

Through the media, I see exaggeration, outright lies and misunderstandings communicated en masse to largely uneducated masses. Some of whom are seeking an outlet for and some of whom are being used as a vehicle to transmit desperate rage and oppression. This incident is increasingly being manipulated into an outside threat to rally around. A politic of fear with government officials, militia and police looking the other way.

Poor little Denmark is in shock, they don't know what to think seeing their flag and embassies in flames.

Now I absolutely believe in freedom of speech, but it is relative to your perspective. An illustrative point was brought home when I saw a high-ranking Saudi government official state in a televised interview that he knows that the newspapers are licensed by the government and so the government can and should punish and stop them. The implication being that if not - then the government must be behind this, approving the defamation of the prophet. While that is certainly the state of media in many Middle Eastern countries and as certainly not here in Denmark, you can't blame the masses for assuming that is the reality everywhere.

An additional problem clouding the issue is that there are apparently copies of all sorts of cartoons being circulated -which are far more inappropriate- that were never and would never be published in any newspaper in Denmark, but are being attributed as such. Gas to the fire. It is for this reason I choose to show here the original article with drawings (thanks to ganeshpuri89). Get the truth out.

A closer look at a couple of cartoons can be found here:

• Most infamous and most inappropriate is the turban as bomb drawing. There is no need to perpetuate the Muslim as terrorist stereotype
  

• An otherwise representative drawing which, beside picturing Mohammed which is forbidden, otherwise seems harmless
  

• Hard to see the problem here as this is just bringing the prophet into today, into the classroom. A teacher, a boy. I'm missing the insult here?

Comments are welcome. Dialog, tolerance and respect are the goals.

Technorati:mohammed cartoon

HappyHolidays

HappyHolidays
Originally uploaded by kvan1.

Holiday Fireworks
From the streets outside, here in Denmark the tradition is to bring in the new year with a bang -- here a little closer and s l o w e r

HappyHolidays

HappyHolidays
Originally uploaded by kvan1.

Holiday Fireworks

...from the Christmas tree inside here in Denmark

Some years a tree has its own magic

HappyHolidays

HappyHolidays
Originally uploaded by kvan1.

Holiday Fireworks

might have affected a couple of contortionist melting mini-snowmen on our front step :-)

HappyHolidays

HappyHolidays
Originally uploaded by kvan1.

Holiday Fireworks
From the streets outside, here in Denmark the tradition is to bring in the new year with a bang