b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Vanquish the #prefs.txt demon
It's Too Much For A Single Week!
"#prefs.txt not found" error
IBM Hard Drive Failures
Digital Dashboard Prototype
Another Hard Drive Failure
Glory Be! Jenny The Power Librarian Returns
Harvard Frontline Strategy Conference
Web Builder Conference and Web Builder Tools
Learning to Make Better Decisions
Thursday, September 19, 2002
Patenting a Handheld e-Mail Device
The other day I saw an item (can't find it now) about a judge ordering the CEOs of Intel and Intergraph to show up at the mediation hearings. If the CEOs were forced to sit through all this and waste their own time (instead of shareholder's money) I bet there'd be fewer frivolous patents and far fewer frivolous infringement suits. There has to be some way to get the lawyers out of this.
RIM granted handheld email patent - clobbers Handspring. (SOURCE:Radio News Aggie)-Sad. RIM needs to innovate NOT litigate!Patents were originally designed to protect small inventors, but as with copyright law, the system has been abused to create private monopolies. Now RIM seems to be determined to compete not with its engineering or marketing skills, but with its lawyers. [The Register] via [
Source: Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
Vanquish the #prefs.txt demon
Is the #prefs.txt demon vanquished? We'll see.Later: Ok. So I put this googleTitleSearch macro, that I got from Phil Windley, into my Home page template. When I republish the page I get a bunch of listings for this error (of course, they all start off with Macro error: so I think the damn thing isn't working). As I scroll over the list I see a couple of references that look promising. One leads to this DG thread on the #prefs.txt thing from back in May.
Hmm. Says my problem is my own stupidity. Not very flattering, but pretty likely given my track record. Says I have too many double-quotes somewhere. I don't know where. I just go back over all the posts I did when I got the error and take out any quotes I see.
Then I post this to all my Categories.
Works.
Done.
(Funny, I did a search for googleTitleSearch in the DG and got zero results. Didn't see it in the docs, either. Anyone know where it came from?)
It's Too Much For A Single Week!
First Jenny Levine at TSL returns, then liveTopics actually gets released. I'm retiring. My life is complete.
liveTopics finally released.Kind of a double celebration:
- Today, and with great relief, I formally announce the release of liveTopics (v1.0.3) which is now available for download.
- You can read more about it at my company's website which I am also launching today.
It's been hard work putting together even the little currently on the website, but I hope to improve it significantly in the days and weeks ahead. Any feedback would be very welcome. [
"#prefs.txt not found" error
This is getting tiresome. There is obviously something wacky going on with the way Radio is reading the category files, but I don't have any idea if it's a buggered table in weblogData.root or something else entirely.IBM Hard Drive Failures
Stop buying IBM drives. That's what Brett MorganZilla suggests via e-mail. I'm afraid he's right. This is now the third IBM drive to go tits-up on me in a year. What's worse, IBM can't even find the purchase records for the drives to send me an RMA. They want me to fax them the drive label and purchase receipt.But see, I bought the drives -- all three -- from IBMDirect Online. I did that for the sole purpose of making it easier to deal with warranty issues. Turns out, it's harder because IBM apparently doesn't consider IBM a channel, and therefore doesn't record its own sales.
Stupid.
I haven't had really good luck with WD drives, either. I guess I'm left with using the Maxtor drives I can get at OfficeDepot and Staples.
Have we gotten to the point that we just throw them away when they go bad because it's less hassle and $$$ than trying to get a warranty?
Wednesday, September 18, 2002
Digital Dashboard Prototype
Digital Dashboard prototype is a nice starting point for those looking to empower operational management systems with KM services.
Rajesh has a mock-up of a digital dashboard available. You can see where this is going. A portal of one. All data on the desktop. Simple, easy to customize, and powerful. [
Another Hard Drive Failure
Damn it! Yet another hard drive went south on me last night. Thank the Almighty I took the time to setup these mirrored drives.I don't get it. I bought two identical IBM 30GB drives just over a year ago. They've both gone belly up within two weeks of each other. They sit in a Micron tower PC under the desk in my home office. It's about four inches off the floor, connected to a well-conditioned power line, with plenty of open air around it.
I have one of those little temp alarms from PC Power & Cooling that's supposed to let me know if it gets too hot. The darn thing has never beeped once.
This is not funny. I don't have time for this. Worse, I don't know where to look for the source of the problem.
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
Glory Be! Jenny The Power Librarian Returns
I've read the tales of woe, cried the tears of the downtrodden, felt the fears of the huddled masses. But it's over now. The blogoshpere's prodigal InfoMaven has returned. Welcome back, Jenny.
A Very Shifted Library. Thanks to Lori Bell, I've been scanning the Memorial Hall Library's web site (they're located in Andover, Massachusetts). They do a great job of providing remote access to their databases, live online chat with a librarian, a browsable catalog (instead of just a searchable one), and they're even circulating Gemster ebooks . Lori led me there, though, because the MHL is yet another library circulating Audible MP3 audiobooks . What I found interesting, though, was that... [
Harvard Frontline Strategy Conference
Another interesting conference to add to the futures list. Let's see what JR has to say after it's done.
I am going to be blogging the Harvard Frontline Strategy Conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston on the 17th. Bennis, Davenport, and Siebel will be speaking. Should be fun and there are seats still available. If you are interested in attending, let me know. [
Web Builder Conference and Web Builder Tools
Personal note: catalog Scoble's Web Builder Conference for future reference. I'm looking to change the focus of shows I attend -- go more toward genuine conference/seminars (sort of like my very first Seybold Seminars in Boston around 1989 or so) vs trade show/expos where the conference is often an afterthought. The Web Builder Conference sounds like it fits.Personal note Numero Dos: I didn't realize Scoble was with Thunder Lizard (or may be is Thunder Lizard.) I used to know some guys there years ago when they first started out doing QuarkXpress seminars -- at least I think it's the same company. The world keeps getting smaller.
Scoble's endorsement may convince me to buy TopStyle. I've used HomeSite for several years and it ships with TopStyle Lite. I got to messing with CSS a couple of weeks ago with some new templates, realized how woefully inadequate my CSS knowledge was, and nearly bought TSPro on the Spot. (No, I can't bring myself to use Dreamweaver or any other snazzy editor that costs $350-$400 to do the simple, basic, occasional HTML pages I do.) I'm really teetering now. One positive comment from the peanut gallery will put me over the edge.
Getting back into Weblogging. Thanks to Chris Pirillo for snapping me out of my blog-free rut that I've been in.I had dinner with Chris and Gretchen on Saturday night and Chris showed me some stuff that just got me fired up about this industry again.
[...]
What did he show me? Moveable Type for one. I'm pretty impressed. Although I didn't see enough to make me move off of Radio.
And a tool called Top Style which lets you build standards-based Web sites. I've been playing with it the past few days and it's awesome for building CSS and XHTML-based Web sites and templates.
Which brings me to standards and Web sites.
You all might know that I planned the Web Builder conference that happened last week in Las Vegas. What fun. I got to hang out with Jeffrey Zeldman, Molly Holzschlag, Jason Kottke, Meg Hourihan, Dori Smith, Scott Johnson, Marc Canter, and many other geeky Web types. [...more] [
Learning to Make Better Decisions
James Vornov is a director of clinical research for a pharmaco, and part-time faculty member in the Neuroscience department at Johns Hopkins. He's launched a project weblog, On Deciding...Better, dedicated to his learning about Decision Theory and the practice of Deciding. Here is just one excerpt from some of his introductory pages:I intend this website to be a tool to help myself and others learn how to make better decisions. There's a philosophy behind the site that I began to document in The Project, but its an unfinished work.About a year ago, through some contacts at my work, I started exploring Decision Theory.
By the way, I tend to talk about Decision Theory, the abstract concepts of deciding rather than Decision Analysis, which generally refers to a more applied field of analyzing situations.
To start, I recommend two books which were my start, Making Hard Decisions by Clemens and Thinking and Deciding by Baron. Both are very readable college/graduate level textbooks that will take you through the field.
After that, the kind of problems you face will dictate what kind of tools you need.
James showed up in my referrer logs, but let's not confuse this with one of those "you link to me, I link to you" return-the-favor things. Far from it. Where am I ever going to cross paths with a Baltimore-based clinical research director, or hobnob with faculty at Johns Hopkins? I'm not. Not through any normal channels.
This is one more example of the weblog phenomenon blasting away the barriers to discourse and knowledge sharing. Already in my brief blogging career I have shared conversations with men and women of exceptional intellect and accomplishment, people whose understanding and knowledge far outstrip my own. If I can give back but a tenth of what I gain, this weblog will be a success.
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