Graffiti, chorded keyboards, T9, finally something very promising. Download the free MessageEase software from ExIdeas and try it for yourself. It is very clever. It uses a 3x3 entry area giving 9 most frequently used keys direct access. However, to type the less frequently used characters, you would drag the figure from the center of the key to one of eight direction (up,down,diagonal etc). I tried it for a few minutes and it seems to work very well.
Rhapsody -- listen.com
I just signed up for the Rhapsody music streaming service. This is adictive. The collection of music is adaquate. The more esoteric stuff is not on there. I hope they will add more artists soon. However it is great for browsing and trying out new CD's. For $10 a month or $25 for three months, seems like a fun thing to try.
Misc Finds
A few misc finds on the web:
- Scott eVest -- a jacket with 40+ pockets and wire network for your headphones
- Visionaire publishing -- limited edition designer books
- Architectural Patterns re Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building.
- Mirra personal/home file server. I do this myself, but for the less technically inclined, is this the solution? Imagine hacking into these machines...
- Mobile Phone Games available in Japanese. Make the American mobile phones look acient.
New Cool Boutique Hotel in Toronto
Try the SoHo Metropolitan Hotel in Toronto. It is brand new, first guest arrived April 1st 2003.
Outsourcing Inventory Management to the Max
Today's (2003.09.11) Wall Street Journal front page has an article describing how J.C. Penny in the U.S. has outsourced the inventory management, including sales forcasting, of some of their men's shirts product to a company in Hong Kong called TAL group (company website). This Hong Kong based company pull sales data directly from each JC Penny's store and forcast inventory needs for them, manage the manufacturer in Taiwan and ships the shirts directly to each branch.
dynamic IP address
I need to get to my home network from the outside. The home network is connected to the world via a cable modem service by RCN. Yes it is firewalled. To get to some of my services I use dyndns.org's free dynamic DNS service. You sign up and give it your cable modem's external IP address, and create a DNS name like myname.dyndns.org. The service will point that name to the IP address that you entered. There are two catches -- your cable service may change the IP address of your modem (dynamic IP, get it ?) on you periodically. The dyndns.org service also will delete your account (after all, it is free) after two weeks of no updates. The solution ? You need some client software on your system to periodically update the IP address entry at dyndns.org. I run ipcheck.py on Linux via a cron job.
Technology that should have happenned by now but never would...
Does your TV talk to your DVD player, and your audio video receiver talk to your TV, and one remote control talks to all of them reliably? Of course not. Everyone has their own connection bus (Sony has s-link, for example). There have always been talk about some universal standard communication interface. The latest one is HAVi. Do you think this time it will happen? I have been waiting for 20 years...
Moving hosting company
Well, I have been hosting my main website (this one) with primus (formally shore.net) for many years. But after they were bought out by Primus, their service keeps going down hill. Over the long weekend they just lost days of my emails, not to mention that they cannot keep up with the recent flood of viruses. So I am moving this to Dreamhost, where I host all my other websites. Once DNS is transfered and updated, I think all will be well in web and email land! Of course, Dreamhost responded to my change and everything is up and running in 3 hours (minus DNS propogation delay) including adding a customize DNS entry for the web server pointing to one of my own boxes. Meanwhile a day and a half later Primus still has not removed the DNS from their name servers nor responded to my request to cancel that service. That, is the reason I need to switch vendor!