The image below captures my amazement.  A few days ago, I installed Virtualbox on my Vista machine and installed Ubuntu.  After a bit of tweaking I now have Vista and Ubuntu seamlessly working together on the same desktop!  Check it out! The installation of Virtualbox was easy and it seamlessly connected to the local...
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I love RPN calculators.  My favorite is Hypatia which I use regularly for calculations.  I love being able to order my calculation to avoid brackets and being able to enter a list of numbers and add them up with a single command: hy 12 23.4 43 94 3 d SUMNow I am wondering about a...
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Kim Cameron posted a busy person’s summary of the Laws of Identity and invited comments. Here is my version. The Laws of Identity are fulfilled when … Individuals using computers can be in control of the information they give out about themselves. Individuals can give out just the information needed for the purpose at hand, and...
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I am studying at the moment and would like to see an increase in the consistent engagement level demanded of me during the 14 or so weeks of the semester. At the same time, I would like to see this done in a way that doesn’t impact on the instructor’s time. Here is...
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Good to be blogging again after a three month hiatus. The Work Breakdown Structure has caught my attention. The work breakdown structure is foundational to project management. My insight today is that the WBS could also be foundation to a task management tool. The beauty of the WBS is the way...
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When I was at university getting from class to class between buildings meant fighting your way along a footpath against a flow of students coming the opposite direction. Solutions? You could widen the path (more concrete) or redesign the pathway using a similar width of concrete split into two paths, one for each direction. Here...
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If all our building’s internal walls, signage as well as dynamic displays where flat panel displays what would happen? I was walking through a mall a few days ago and realised that pretty much all that I could see around me could be displayed on flat panels like those in Minority Report. There are...
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“STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming” has a great piece about the promise of a uniform model of computation based on arbitrary decomposition to the internet. On p32 they say: Part of the solution to “an Internet all the way down” has interesting conflicts with today’s hardware and we are curious to see just how...
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The time for personal universal controllers to make their debut is fast approaching. Research at CMU shows that control panels on PDAs can be both faster and less error prone than the hardwired interface provided by manufacturers. At least since 2003 far sighted people have been imagining a future where each person...
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‘‘we are known by the issues we are associated with, and by what happens to those issues when they are decided.’’ Pfeffer, J.: 1994, Managing With Power: Politics and Influence in Organizations (Harvard Business School Press, Boston)
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Here is an example of the kind of information space that I have proposed in my previous post. The Australian Constitution is sufficiently long to have sections that need to be read together although they may be widely separated in the text. Use the prototype workspace below to explore the constitution via related...
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I am imaging a workspace where texts, notes or paragraphs are organised on a work surface based on their self-similarity. More similar texts cluster together. When a text is open for editing, the workspace provides one-click links to the closest texts in the workspace. If anyone is aware of such a workspace, please leave...
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Developments in microprocessor technology have seen address buses increase in width from 8 to 16, 24, 32, to 64 bits. IPv6 uses 128 bits to address network nodes – but how many bits does it take to address the universe? To address the universe, we need to be able to specify four dimensions 1)...
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In this post I argue that the current convergence of Desktop and / Web Apps (RIAs) suggests a convergence of Server and Clients and that this opens up some interesting possibilities. I have been following an interesting series of posts by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz on the web/desktop convergence trend (all four posts are worth reading!). As...
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The purpose of this post is to illustrate the possibility for autonomic computing inherent in Request Based Distributed Computing (RBDC). This is how I summarised RBDC in a recent post: Request Based Distributed Computing is a small extension of the http protocol and notion of server, proxy and client. Rich Internet Applications, SOA architected...
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As a learner who uses the web regularly for research – I could really use a web-scale related-words tag cloud service. If you know of such a service, please leave a comment below! If there is no such service, i am going to go out on a limb and predict that it...
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Tier-Agnostic requests are being used by the Wadi project in Java Server Farms. This Java-specific implementation lends support to the general applicability of Request Based Distributed Computing (RBDC) for client centric distributed computing. WADI is an acronym of ‘WADI Application Distribution Infrastructure’. WADI started life as a solution to the problems surrounding the distribution of...
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Recently my attention has been directed to Microsoft’s Volta split-tier technology. Volta is addressing the same set of issues as Request Based Distributed Computing (RBDC). Key issues directly addressed by both Volta and RBDC include: Drivers Build Distributed Applications Provide programmers with a unified programming model (i.e. not deal with a separate programming model on the...
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