Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

SICP lectures available on-line.

Not only Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is available on-line but now you can also watch the original lectures (available in AVI and MPEG formats).

Old ArsDigita content

Philip Greenspun made a page with his old writings and Eve also has a page with documents related to ArsDigita (check out the mission statement, it’s as interesting and inspiring as it ever was).

Christopher Alexander’s talk.

Mitch Kapor’s talk is not yet available. While you wait, you can just as well watch Christopher Alexander’s talk. His was the guy whose usage of the word “patterns” was so widely adopted in the software world. And check out his book (it took me few months to read it but it was worth it).

Kapor talks about Chandler.

Today Mitch Kapor will talk about Chandler. This is interesting for two reasons:

• Chandler project is interesting
• the talk will (hopefully) be available on-line as video web-cast

In the past I watched quite a few talks from that series and they were great. Can’t wait to see this one.

Automated Alexa. There is this web service called
Alexa that allows you to see popularity of
your web site. It would be nice to be able to monitor changes in popularity of a
web site. Alexa itself doesn’t provide that information but a third-party app
could. It would query Alexa from time to time to get the current rank and e-mail
the user changes (I assume the rank doesn’t change a lot so low-frequency
communication (e.g. every week) makes sense here). This is one example of a
meta-idea: notification services. Of course the idea of notifications services
isn’t new but we don’t seem to have a lot of them. But we will because it’s the
next logical step. The pull model is more efficient (technologically) and saves
time (for humans). It has happened in the past when interrupts replaced polling
in computer hardware, it’ll happen for the web.
Googlert is an example and more will come.

Successful upselling.
Successful upselling - an article.

Convergence is the future.

I just read
this review of DP-450, a DVD player that can also play DivX videos, show
pictures stored on a CD-ROM and play MP3 files. Two things came into my mind
when I finished.

Bad marketing. I wanted to find out more about this
device (especially how much does it cost) but neither of
two
sites is well designed nor provides a lot
of useful information nor tells where one can buy this thing (probably because
you just can’t). Aren’t those guys just wasting their buzz by having reviews
show up when the device itself cannot be bought?

Convergence is the future. In retrospect the idea of extending
capabilities of home entertainment devices is brilliantly obvious. There really
is no reason for having a separate MP3 player and separate DVD player. What we
should (and hopefully will) end up is Tivo that also has DVD drive, can play
DVDs, MP3, DiVX, can stream the music wirelessly etc. All in one. One device to
rule them all.

Cheap and good Pocket PC.
You can buy refurbished Pocket PC Toshiba e740 for $348 at
PCNation or
for $369 at
pcRUSH.
It’s a great deal - e740 is the only Pocket PC with integrated wi-fi (otherwise
expect to spend $100+ for a wi-fi CF card) and the rest of the specs doesn’t
look bad either (64 MB of RAM and 400 MHz).

Browsing Newton.

I was browsing various Newton
sites and it’s funny to see that (judging by screenshots) Newton, despite
being long dead, was much powerful and better design OS than Palm OS and Pocket
PC are today.

Website marketing.
Today found two sites that can be helpful when doing website marketing:
Search Engine World and
Webmaster World. The only problem
with sites like this is that they have way too much information (which, on the
other hand, makes them useful).