Shuttle. Rich found a cool PC – Shuttle Barebone System Configuration

PocketPC vs Blackberry. I’m carrying around a Toshiba e740 pocketpc now with built-in WIFI, as well as my blackberry. Some really blatant differences.

The blackberry has basically 2 control buttons – Affirmative, Cancel, and the affirmative button is also a scroll wheel. In addition there is a reset button hidden on the back and of course the keyboard. The PocketPC has 8 control buttons, one big switch, two recessed switches, a reset button, an eject button. I can’t tell you what all these buttons do. I know I couldn’t turn on the Toshiba for part of the day because the big switch was in the wrong position.

The blackberry has very limited software that does 2 things well – email and calendar, fully synched with my desktop. The keystrokes to do common operations in these apps are pretty optimized (tho could be even better). The pocketpc software is much richer but a lot more confusing.

The web just doesn’t work well on the pocketpc. It is great that I can even get to it, but no page i have gone to wraps correctly and so reading any content is painful. And javascript is not supported. The web is so clearly a PC phenomena.

Digital Cameras. Ray Ozzie likes the Canon Ex-S1. Not sure i can deal with 1.3Mpixels tho. I like the 4Mpixel images i get from my Kodak DX4900, which also has the nice dock and battery charger like the canon. a little bigger tho.

Music Gear. Looks like a good site – Harmony Central

Wildseed. Latest story in Inc magazine. If you eve rhave a chance to see a demo of the Wildseed product at a trade show, it will be well worth your time.

Jungle Robot. This looks like fun – I can certainly use this at Halloween as a bat or ghost or something overhead.

Air Transportation Stabilization Board. As I read this, about $1.5B has been guaranteed in loans to airlines so far, and there are several major applications outstanding. Most of this money goes to the bankers if the airlines fail as I read it. The damage from September 11 though is at a very individual level – families who lost members, and individuals who have lost or will lose employment as a result of the resultant economic upheaval. Seems like we ought to be directly helping these individual citizens rather than the corporate entities and the banks.

Signs. A fun movie but come on (don’t read further if you haven’t seen yet). The aliens have the technology to travel interstellar space but have no weaponry, body armor, and can’t identify beforehand that an incredibly common earthly substance will put their invasion at risk? And humanity has a problem fighting off aliens who have no weaponry, body armor, or hand to hand combat ability? Ok I am overanalyzing. My kids liked it. I had fun too.

Wine Fun. As someone who spent his early adult years in Ohio drinking Bud and fine Ohio wines, I really related with this article in The New Yorker

SSL Not So Secure After All. From The Register, – Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and KDE’s Konqueror are both guilty of not following proper procedures when using sites that employ Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections. Any site that has a valid VeriSign SSL site certificate can pretend to be an entirely different site, even going as far as impersonating another site and intercepting supposed- secure information.

Serial ATA Arrives. Article from Tom’s Hardware Guide. Anyone who has ever tried to add an IDE device will be happy about this. I will certainly demand serial ATA on my next PC. Not sure it is worth retrofitting existing boxes but I will consider.

PC Graphics Evolution. Longish article on PC Graphics Evolution. Fun to read. Will be lots of reasons to keep on buying new PCs.

It is interesting that we have these hugely capable graphics coprocessors in our PCs now. Why don’t we have similar network coprocessors? With all the demand for wirespeed packet analysis/transformation (secure vpns, personal firewalls for instance) at higher and higher wirespeeds, seems to me like we will need more compute power dedicated to network traffic. I haven’t done the math tho to convince myself of the need.

Copyrights. Good article from Dan Gillmor. We all need to get more educated and help our government engage correctly in this debate.

Permalinks Redux. Despite some misgivings I have added permalinks to my site. Convinced by email from Olivier Travers. I am very doubtful about my ability to maintain the permanency of these links over the lifetime of my blog, as I expect my blog to operate for the remainder of my natural life and I expect to change the underlying implementation many times. The blog community is young and the technology is young, I think we are all kidding ourselves about the durability of the chosen design point and syntax. Only time will tell.