2004 - Page 12 of 39 - McGee's Musings

Todd Carter’s Microsoft OneNote 2003 for Windows – 50 Book Challenge

Microsoft OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Carter, Todd W.
A useful quickstart to using OneNote, particularly given that you’re likely to get OneNote without a manual. Like most of these “manual replacement” books, the emphasis is on walking you through all the menus and options. What it doesn’t provide is much in the way of guidance about how you might want to use OneNote as a component of your day-to-day work. While there appear to be books coming out now that address that issue, I would suggest you start with Chris Pratley’s WebLog as a source of real insight into OneNote

Dvorak and Pirillo’s Online! The Book – 50 Book Challenge

Online! The Book
Dvorak, John C. and Chris Pirillo.
OK for relative beginners, which is its target audience. On the other hand, not really up to the quality I would expect from Dvorak and Pirillo based on their other work.

Onion Routing

Looks like another potential tool for the bag of tricks.

Onion Routing. Ever wanted, or needed, to surf the Web anonymously? Intelligence officers have this need, but so do others. Anonymizing proxies can make it so that the site you visit doesn’t know who you are, but they don’t protect you from instream eavesdroppers or your own company or ISP. Now there’s an open source project you can use to protect your communications called Tor. [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Radio gets a product manager

This is great news for “Radio” users. Whether it will turn out to be enough help in enough time remains to be seen. I’ve been blogging with “Radio” from day one, courtesy of Scoble’s convincing me to join the beta program before it launched. It has served me well, despite its warts.

Recently, I’ve been giving serious thought to switching to a new blogging platform. In particular, I’ve been looking at WordPress and ExpressionEngine. Now, I’ll have to also give some thought to whether “Userland” can make enough progress with Radio to let it stay in the mix.

A Letter To Radio Users.

A Letter to Radio Users

My name is Steve Kirks, a Radio user since 2002. I have a Radio weblog and I’ve written some scripts using Radio’s native lanuage, UserTalk. Radio is a great piece of software that’s about to get better. UserLand has put me in the position of helping guide Radio’s future. That future includes you.

Why me?

I developed a relationship with Scott Shuda about six months ago after I posted an open letter on my weblog, wishing that UserLand was more active with developing Radio. Scott asked me a question in a private email: “What if you could talk to those guys directly?” Intrigued, I replied back with a link to my Radio wish list and a cell phone number.

Over the next six months, we spent time in email and on the phone, working together to determine a future for Radio. He was specific about UserLand’s resources and company direction. I was specific about the good and bad things with Radio. Combined, we came to an agreement: something had to change if Radio was going to move forward. I suggested that Radio needed a product manager, someone to promote and develop the product to a rapidly maturing market. He agreed.

Part of those first steps involved spending some extra time in the Radio discussion group listening to users and helping where I could. A frequent refrain: what’s going on with Radio? Most comments were polite and others were not, but they all carried a similar sentiment. The users were unhappy with the lack of changes, updates or bug fixes to Radio. The last major feature change was in 2003 with the addition of trackback–a common feature on other weblogging products. Upstreaming frequently has issues and few of those are recorded in Radio’s event log, leaving a user to wonder what did or didn’t happen.

What’s going on with Radio?

Radio is going to grow and improve. Later this week, we will release a Radio Roadmap showing the intended development milestones for the rest of the calendar year. We will modernize the HTML generated by Radio, improve the comment system, improve upstreaming and release new themes. These are fundamental changes that are required to make the Radio environment work better for users and be more attractive to third-party developers. If your subscription isn’t current, now is the time to renew.

The roadmap only goes to the end of the year for a reason: it’s not done yet. We need imput from you, the Radio user base. What do you like? What do you hate? What features are missing from Radio? Use the power of your weblog to your advantage: write your comments in a weblog post and link to this letter. We’ll comb through the responses and post some answers to the common questions in another letter later this week.

What’s next?

The main Radio website will undergo minor changes over time also. We’ll work hard to enhance the content there with more help, more examples and more success stories from users. We’ll beef up the developer documentation and consolidate older documents to prevent conflicting answers. Finally, we’ll incorporate some of the feedback we’ve received from you–in fact, we’ve already added the XML icon link to the RSS feed and added a shortcut at the top of the page to edit a new post.

I’ve started to publish my Radio-related posts in a category at steve.userland.com. I’ll post development notes there, but big news and milestone annoucements will always be in the Radio discussion group or via the Radio product RSS feed.

Steve Kirks

[Radio UserLand Messages]

SMC Bests Airport Express: SMCWRK-G

I suspect one of these is going to find a home in my backpack fairly soon.

SMC Bests Airport Express: SMCWRK-G.

SMC has announced a new portable wireless access point a la the Airport Express. They’re calling it the “EZ Connect g 2.4GHz 802.11g Wireless Traveler s Kit SMCWTK-G,” but we’ll probably just call it the SMCWRK-G or Dance Panda Mandy, as it suits us. For what it lacks in good looks it makes up in features, as the SMCWRK-G can do everything the Airport Express can do and more (save the iTunes streaming), including act as an Ethernet bridge. It might not be attractive, but it’s $30 cheaper, ringing in at just $100.

Perennial Wi-Fi smart guy Glenn Fleishmann weighs in with a little more detail at Wi-Fi Networking News.

Read – SMC Offers Multifunction Traveling Gateway [WiFiNetNews]
Read – Press Release [SMC]

Related
AirPort Express Reviewed [Gizmodo]
Why Apple’s Airport Express May Unofficially Extend Non-Airport Networks [Gizmodo]

[Gizmodo]

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!.

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google (or Technorati) for all blogs that participate in this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).

REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

* (1) I found this experiment at URL: http://www.zylstra.org/blog/archives/001379.html
* (2) I found it via Newsreader Software or Browsing the Web or Searching the Web or An E-Mail Message”: Newsreader Software
* (3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://www.mcgeesmusings.net
* (4) I posted this on date (day, month, year): 03/08/04
* (5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 11:10:00
* (6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Chicago, Illinois, USA

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

* (7) My blog is hosted by: olm.net
* (8) My age is: 51
* (9) My gender is: Male
* (10) My occupation is: management consultant
* (11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Radio Userland
* (12) I use the following software to post to my blog: Radio Userland
* (13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 22/10/01
* (14) My web browser is: MyIE2
* (15) My operating system is: Windows XP Pro

[Ton’s Interdependent Thoughts]

Strange Attractor

More good insights to follow.

Strange Attractor.

Suw Charman joins Corante blog family with Strange Attractor (RSS feed) exploring patterns in the blogoshpere:

If you could visually represent the ebb and flow of my thoughts, you’d find a lot of swirly folded patterns emerging. The cause? Blogs – my very own strange attractors.

But blogs have a far wider effect than just making me think in swirly folded patterns, they are perturbing the business world as well. A disruptive technology that is more often than not smuggled in through the back door by evangelist employees, blogs are helping to unite previously scattered communities of interest.

Like instant messaging, blogging is gaining such a strong foothold amongst business users that by the time the management realises they have been infiltrated, they no longer have the power to switch it off. The corporate cat has to sit back and watch as the Trojan Mouse struts its stuff.

Loved the title: although there are not many formulas left in my head from my first degree in mathematical modelling, I still think about the world in terms of strange attractors and bifurcation points 🙂

[Mathemagenic]

The Definition of a Great Blog, Example #1

Kudos to Jack for this endorsement from Dennis Kennedy. Jack used to post great comments on my blog and drop me an email from time to time. I kept twisting his arm to start his own blog, which he finally did about a year ago. Now we all benefit from his insights.

The Definition of a Great Blog, Example #1

I am such a fan of Jack Vinson’s blog, Knowledge Jolt with Jack, which covers knowledge management and work practices.

Here’s how good it is.

Jack writes a post called Annual Ammonia Symposium. Not only do I look at it, but I read it, think about how it might have application to me, and now I am blogging about it.

For me, Knowledge Jolt with Jack is a blog that matters. Jack has earned my confidence and trust with his consistently excellent posts and now I’m ready to follow his interests wherever they lead. That’s a pretty damn good blog.

Today’s example: The Information Snowflake and Snowballs.