Aehso’s Output

If anyone ever sees one of these in a shop, let me know.

When the alarm chimes in the morning, you must reach up and tap the Sfera to silence it. Which triggers the snooze function and makes the alarm rise higher. As it slowly rises away from your reach, you must stretch higher each time to gain another ten minutes of snooze.

What a cool idea…

Does anyone else think the W3C have lost control of their own standards process? The WS-* specification collection seems to get bigger and bigger. Not surprisingly there are now calls for a WS-Architecture to try define how all these WS-* specifications fit together.

Nobody seems to be stepping up to the plate though, possibly because it would be an impossible task without dropping or heavily revising some of the specifications that have been poorly written or developed in splendid isolation. Not surprisingly, nobody wants to do that as it would cost commercial software companies money to change their products.

Some claimed that CORBA ‘failed’ because is was complex to use but the WS-* collection of specifications is surely surpassing CORBA in terms of complexity - does that mean WS-* is facing failure?

Back in the real world, I’ve noticed references to some commercial online services are up and running on the alternative REST architecture style - for example Amazon. This seems to be causing some friction between the two camps and the good news is we all get to watch the fight/debate in public. The w3c’s architecture mailing list archive is a good place to start and then there are blog discussions like this one

There’s a bloke in Seattle who is already queuing for the last Star Wars film, not due to open until May 19th. Oh, and he’s got a blog.

Now that there is no election to be won in the US, that trivial charade of looking for WMDs in Iraq can be quietly stopped

Obolab PLink looks like a very cool Carbon OS X application that acts as a telephone call “processer” (for want of a better word!) for your home. It acts as an answering machine, call logger, DTMF based call router (think ‘press 1 for …, press 2 for …”, voice-mail to email bridge, all very customizable via AppleScript.

Nice, but people use mobile phones so much these days, would it be useful in the home? I think not. However, my guess is SOHO type professionals would love this.

Playing “My Fantasy Living Room A/V setup(TM)” in my head, my hardware list is now running at:

• Sony 42″ Plasma WEGA TV
• Sony VAIO Room
  Line Network Media Receiver
• Elgato Eye TV 610 DVR
• Elgato EyeConnect
• G5 PowerMac

The missing link, until today, was Elgato’s new EyeConnect, which it turns out is a UPnP media streamer. I like the sound of this - UPnP seems to be where home networks are converging and it sounds very interesting. I must read specifications when I get a chance (a BIG chance - there are a lot of specs there!)

I’m a little bit surprised that this whole architecture popped into existance over two years ago and I’ve only noticed it now - it would seem there is no reuse of subsets of distributed server architectures in common use in large enterprises (CORBA/J2EE/.NET/WS-*). OK, they use XML, HTTP and URIs but thats about as close as they get. I should be surprised but then again…

Please don’t tell me how much that would cost, let me dream…

At CES 2005 Motorola’s president of the personal devices business gave a very interesting speech. This guy (or his speech writers) gets it alright - people want their new phone to have all the new features but they won’t use them. 99.5% of the day where is (a normal person’s) phone? Somewhere within reach, but discretely inactive. .4% of the time, you’re using it for a voice call or messaging. The other .1% of the time is the stuff the phone networks keep trying to ram down our throats - picture messaging, games, cameras. Useless crap. What’s most important in most consumers mind? Style first, usability second, useless crap a distant third. (Unfortunately for Nokia, they occasionally go a bit too far with the styling.

Maybe that’s why I like Apple’s stuff so much - simple interfaces to very capable and reliable ‘things’ that perform a specific function. I can’t wait for the Motorola “iPhone” but I really hope the Apple UI designers teach the Motorola phone engineers how to write a minimal interface first. My guess is the first stab will be a disaster to use but the second generation might be worth a look.

Apple have quietly launched their Irish iTMS - wohoo!

For bulk purchases it is very hard to resist the pricing at AllOfMP3 though…

It looks like LokiTorrent are taking the brave (or foolish?) decision to stand up to the MPAA and are looking for funds to pay for a legal defence. Bittorrent in the past should think of donating (using PayPal) to their cause.

This will be a real bell weather case so it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out. Otherwise, I think we’ll see the return of the sneaker-net. There’s nothing like progress, eh?