USGS pictures – nice. thanks to steve for the pointer.

I’ve wondered a little bit about what the browser should become – arguing for a more task/scenario-centric design. Rich has done some interesting thinking too – Tong Family Blog: What is Personal Productivity – a slightly more expansive view on what the personal productivity suite today should look like (since office doesn’t really address the common tasks of today). Good stuff rich.

OK I love the fact that there are a gazillion extensions available. But my gosh this is confusing. There is a huge need for an authoritative editorial voice and packager – someone who pulls together the bundle of extensions needed for normal browsing, for a web developer, for an RSS junkie, for image-centric browsing, etc etc.

Like Rich, I am pretty enamored of Firefox right now. The community of addon developers, the ease of installing addons, tabbed browsing – great stuff.

It is interesting that browser innovation has been so slow over the last 3-4 years. Given that we spend so much time staring at this app, you’d have thought there would have been a lot more going on. Glad to see the pace picking up.

One thing I wonder about is the “One Size Fits All” design of the browser. We spend all day in this app, but we are actually doing very different things at different times. But the app provides a single set of fairly generic features, controls, menu items – a set that is constant across all our usage.

I think we are doing very different tasks during the day tho. I can think of at least 4 classes of distinct usage – and I think we might want different features in our supporting app for each usage scenario.

# “Intranet” apps. Outlook Web Access, MT/blogging, Wikis/Collab apps, etc. Usually behind a tighter security wall, a lot of data input compared to other usages. I use these apps continually, I want very quick access to them, I want high security but I don’t want to have to fight thru all the trust/security config in the browser to make these sites work (remember passwords, permit popups, allow scripting, allow java, allow activex, permit cookies, etc etc etc), i want much better in-browser editing tools, i want easy file upload/download, etc. # Commerce/shopping. I want great automatic search for competitive prices and offers, I want easy autofill of forms, I want to easily go back and check past transactions and their status including shipping, I want to easily save all the “transaction completed” pages, I want to see relevant ads from competitive vendors, I want to see user reviews, etc etc. # Search (not commerce oriented). I want much better navigation of search results – easy ability to drill down on found pages but then easy to pop back up to the root, i want to save search results (the exact pages i find ala furl), i want meta search, i could go on for a while here. # Reading. There are a set of sites I hit every day that sadly don’t have RSS feeds – mostly commercial sports sites. I want to easily hit these pages every day, navigate thru new articles – I kind of want the same behaviour for these sites that I get for RSS-enabled sites thru my aggregator.

Seems to me there is room to innovate in the browser to make it more task/usage specific.

Needed some space in my office this weekend so I dared to empty out my cable drawer and throw out the cruft that has aggregated over 5 years. Serial cables – db9, db25, every gendered alternative of these, serial switchers, gender converters – all gone, hopefully I will never need one of these again. Parallel cables – cables, gender converters, switchboxes – again i hope all gone for good. Wall warts – a huge variety of amperages and voltages – I’ll cannibalize some for halloween projects but most are gone. Midi cables and midi interface boxes for old pcs. All kinds of goofy crappy quality audio cables – rca jack, mini jack, some with video too, all kinds of converters – i could still justify keeping some of these, tho most of them came bundled with some device and are of crappy quality. Enough rj-11 cabling to circle the globe – cables, gender converters, splitters – all gone. Coax gear – cables, splitters, switchboxes – most of it 900Mhz gear and thus incompatible with HDTV – all gone. Some old ps2 port mouse and keyboard cables/converters/extenders – gone.

I ended up with a much smaller pile – cat5 cabling, usb cables and converters, high quality audio cables, and some truly oddball a/v cables that probably are required for the various cameras I own but I can’t remember what goes with what – I’ll keep them so that I won’t have a disaster some day when I really need them.

I wish I could say that I’ll never have to do this again, but with HDMI, optical and copper spdif, higher speed evolutions of usb and firewire, cat5e, and gosh knows what else – I’ll probably have to do this again in 5 years.

Painful Saturday night in Evanston. Buckeye defense looked confused and stuck in treacle – did the late start hurt? Tressel got outcoached, Northwestern picked their spots and hammered home on them. As Chuck on Buckeye Planet says: Northwestern, armed only with mostly MAC-level players who were passed over by the likes of OSU, Michigan, even Illinois, a slower and smaller Northwestern team stunned the highly-touted group from Ohio - Beat ‘em fair and square in 4+ quarters in Evanston, Illinois. They did so in a fashion that makes me think if these two teams were to play 10 times, NU would win 5 or 6 of them.

With 27 points, the team had enough points to win the game. The offense wasn’t impressive – but was as productive as every other game over the last couple years. Special teams were generally good, with a TD on a punt return. But as the Dispatch ($ sub required) says: If losses are learning tools, as Ohio State coach Jim Tressel said Saturday night, the Buckeyes defense now owns an armload of hammers with which to beat themselves over the head.

Wisconsin this weekend – it doesn’t get any easier.

Declared victory this weekend after making a half dozen new tombstones and finishing my window boards project. My favorite new tombstone – “Donna D. Dead” – from the master list of groaners.

Found via The J Curve: Quote of the Day:

“Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s good that we have museums to document them.”- Bill Gates, today at the Computer History Museum (former SGI HQ)

Over at A VC: The Seven Digital Disruptions:

* MPEG/MP3 - Disrupts the music and movie business * PVRs - Disrupts the TV ad business * Broadband Entertainment - Disrupts the TV business * Digital Cameras and JPEGS - Disrupts the film business * Linux - Disrupts the operating system business * Network Computers - disrupts the PC hardware/software business * Wireless Networks - disrupts the wire line phone business * VOIP - disrupts the entire phone business

Jon’s experience mirrors mine – Jon Udell: Windows Update confusion – the 3rd party GDI Scanner listed is helpful.

I’ve neglected this friendship for a while, but started to make amends tonite by having beers with Eric Engstrom of Wildseed. There is nothing like an evening with Eric, I highly recommend it to anyone – investors, entrepreneurs, people who just want an interesting conversation, anyone.

Latest Ignition investment – Former BEA Execs Launch New Open-Source Venture – and one blogger’s view

Nice summary of the places to look for malware on your system, found via Scripting News. i didn’t know about the c:\explorer.exe trick.

Trojan JPEGs hit the net. The Microsoft tools for alerting and fixing this problem seem poorly implemented.

Found via Winds of Change, 411blog.net seems like an interesting way to help the rest of the world find quality blog content.

Newsgator keeps pushing ahead with new partnerships, these guys seem serious about finding a business.

From Life of a one-man IT department, a pointer to RSS Digest, a nice way to integrate xml feeds on your page.

One man’s password algorithm – I use a variant of this and it seems to work pretty well.

Flexwiki open sourced – I like Flexwiki, using it for some private Wikis, a lot nicer visual look than some of the other wiki tools I played with.

From Geekman, the List of Lists – nice guide to utilities.

Rich likes Maxthon, I suppose I should try tho I am getting software install fatigue – too many machines on which I have to manage the software footprint.