Month: May 2003

the map of banishment

One of the professors I work with has a game she plays as an anger management strategy, and it’s called “The Map of Banishment.” It works like this: you take a map of the world, any projection, and some colored pushpins or labelled straight pins. Then, as your colleagues or co-workers make themselves deserving of it, you “banish” them by assigning them a pushpin and placing it in some desolate or inhospitable region of the map.

Cheap, educational, and effective. And no one need know that, in your mind, they’re freezing their &%^$$ in Tierra del Feugo or roasting in the sands of the Sahara.

random walk down weblog street

BlogShares – quotidian

I’m still trying to figure out blogshares works: this, of course, is further evidence that I am a dunce as a stock picker, bu I figure this is a less harmful way to learn than with Real Money.

I can’t figure why my work weblog, which is all but dead (I don’t update it, but haven’t taken it down) has attracted buyers. The one you’re reading now is not valued all that much higher, hence my bafflement.

is music software?

CNN.com – Apple’s online music coup ignites a budding industry – May. 11, 2003

Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a Grammy Hall of Fame inductee and vocal critic of her industry’s anti-piracy tactics, is thrilled by Apple’s offering.

“You can’t call it visionary because they should have come up with this five years ago,” she said. “It’s ironic that a computer manufacturer is teaching the record industry the next step, and so far, that’s what’s happening.”

Is this innovation overdue? Of course. Does it follow that a software and hardware company would be best suited to lead the music giants to this next step?

links

Ben Hammersley.com: Blogging Hacks is available for pre-order.

Ben Hammersley sez:
My next book, Blogging Hacks is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com and .co.uk Amazon are giving 30% off right now. This book rocks very hard indeed – with contributions from Brad Choate, Tim Appnel, the Waypath guys, Tom Coates, Cal Henderson and many more. It’s been inspiring for me to read their stuff. Mine’s not bad either – go and preorder! now!

Hey, I know the Waypath guys: I might have to get this one.

reality distortion, reversed

iTunes Music Store Sells Over One Million Songs in First Week

“In less than one week we’ve broken every record and become the largest online music company in the world,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Apple has created the first complete solution for the digital music age—you can purchase your favorite music online at the iTunes Music Store, mix your favorite tracks into playlists with iTunes, and take your entire music collection with you everywhere with the super-slim new iPods.”

“Hitting one million songs in less than a week was totally unexpected,” said Roger Ames, Warner Music Group’s chairman and CEO. “Apple has shown music fans, artists and the music industry as a whole that there really is a successful and easy way of legally distributing music over the Internet.”

“Our internal measure of success was having the iTunes Music Store sell one million songs in the first month. To do this in one week is an over-the-top success,” said Doug Morris, Universal Music Group’s CEO. “Apple definitely got it right with the iTunes Music Store.”

So Steve Jobs has negated the record industry’s reality distortion field: perhaps they’ll start to realize their customers aren’t criminals.

it’s a camera, it’s a webserver, it’s both

Axis Communications – Axis 2100 technical overview

The Axis 2100 is based on the Linux operating system. This in order to ensure maximum reliability and ease of use. Some of the benefits are:

* Well-known and well-documented OS
* Small footprint system, it does not take a lot of flash or ram memory.
* Longer term decentralized development.
* Much, much functionality available for “free”.
* The source code for Linux is freely available to everyone.
* Developed under the GNU General Public License. This means we publish our contribution to the Linux community on our website developer.axis.com
* And much more….

Interesting that these guys say Linux is well known and well documented (hmm, I guess that’s true if you’re conversant in C), while the CIOs in the grocery business (see a couple of entries back) think it’s too “bleeding edge.”

This camera looks interesting: if I had a use for it, I’d get one. I’m working on finding a use for one . ..

Moore’s law vs Metcalfe’s

Chad Dickerson

The first-ever grocery store transaction using a Linux-based point-of-sale (POS) system occurred on February 4, 2003 at a Hannaford supermarket in Standish, Maine. Unfortunately, the piece at Chain Store Age that turned me on to all of this is only available in the for-pay archives . . . .

Chad mentions this story about a Linux-based point of sale solution being used as a competitive advantage by a large grocery chain.

I noted the other thread in the story. on how networking and bandwidth improvements were making these changes possible. The lower total cost of ownership numbers at the terminal level are impressive over competitive systems, I assume, but they claim to be saving on other infrastructure like servers at the store locations.

In other words, multiple servers were the only way to run a chain store several years ago, but advances in the world of telecommunications have changed the paradigm.

“You tended to put lots of servers and lots of technology at the store level to compensate for limitations in the network,” says Homa. “Nowadays, you have high-speed networks that are fast and reliable and inexpensive. You don’t need a bunch of servers in every store, because that’s an expensive way to go. You can pull technology back centrally and go with a thin presence in the store.” full text here.

Another tidbit was how they went with USB peripherals, emulating a ZeroConf methodology where anyone can replace a printer or other component.

Time will tell if this makes a difference, but as the article notes, stores don’t like to change their POS systems more frequently than once a decade.

weather stops play

We had some heavy rains and actual thunder and lightning (just one of each: this is Seattle, after all) this evening, and the power went off for a minute or two. Zap, there went about 130 days of uptime, starting sometime in December 2002. Oh, well, it seems 100 days is about the longest I can go: I figured this outage was overdue about 2 weeks ago.