JefTel is a free secure peer-to-peer email system designed to make email itself a more trusted mechanism for exchanging messages.
Jon Udell's recent article in InfoWorld InfoWorld: Under Gmail's hood: October 22, 2004: By Jon Udell : APPLICATION_DEVELOPMENT : APPLICATIONS : WEB_SERVICES describes how Gmail has succeeded in producing a very smart User Interface whilst still being limited to a browser as a front end.
I hardly beleive it: .eu Domain Name Contract Signed: Registration Could Begin in Six to Nine Months. I have been hearing that this was about to happen for nearly 3 years now. Well now it has, and we may be able to use the domain with a year.
This is a test entry from Sony Ericsson P910i on Waterford to Dublin train. Getting the hang of handwriting input.
Sean McGrath has written the first installment of a planned 5 part tutorial on Jython Webapplication programming: Jython Webapp Tutorial
I am very interested by those who argue that the WS-I* standards are too complex, and that we should refocus on simple XML server-side processing and simple clients. This lays out this stall nicely.
In this thoughtful article Practical RDF » Web 2.0 just like Web 1.0 before we got clever Shelly Powers critiques how the light-weight distributed computing bandwagon is setting itself up to make the same mistake it did years ago. There's a lot of talk around this theme, especially at the Web 2.0 Conference (San Francisco, CA, 5th-7th Oct 2004), which is just finished. However I see in the writings of Jon Udell, John Battelle and others that there is a more positive spin can be put on the reemergence of light-weight architectures to challenge the heavy applications server industry. Remember, there's a new platform out there: the mobile connected device (smart PDA, smart phone, smart iPod, or whatever) just waiting for inventive new applications and services that can be programmed using light-weight techniques. Start hacking.....
On Phil Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog he has a positing talking about Walled Gardens vs. Networked Effects
. This neatly summarises the problems relating to trying to limit your customers on a network to the services that you have direct control over (wall garden); telecommunications services are usually seen as being in the category. This is contrasted with open networks where it is easy for anyone to offer services over the network; the Internet and the Web are usually seen as being like this. He concludes that many broadband networks are actually inbetween, where it is easy to consume services, but not easy to create them yourself.
InfoWorld reports that: InfoWorld: Siemens launches new unit to focus on end-to-end systems : October 01, 2004: By : NETWORKING : TELECOM. They had previously split these divisions up in order to allow for focus, now they've decided there's more milage in combining them. This is a good metaphor for the so-called "convergence" that we've been promised where traditional telecommunications and Internet technologies merge, enabling a the mobile phone as one of the new platforms for this convergence. The new unit is called "Siemens Communications Group" and it merges the previous: "Information and Communication Networks (ICN)" and "Information and Communication Mobile (ICM)" units.
Siemens are now one of the largest software companies in Europe, despite traditionally having had a very hardware/engineering focused reputation. They started as a telegraph company in the 19th century, and built the world's first electric railway. They are proud of their long history of excellence in engineering, and rightly so, see their corporate website Siemens' history for full details with images.
Siemens have had a huge influence in Ireland because they won the contract to construct the Shannon hydroelectric power plant, the first major project in the independent Irish Free State.
Siemens are very active in research networks, including telecommunications, and the TSSG work with them on a number of EU funded projects.
People are defintely starting to realise that the mobile phone is a new technology platform that will be able to access many types of services over multiple types of wireless networks InfoWorld: Mobility's Mayflower sets sail: October 01, 2004: By Tom Yager : NETWORKING : TELECOM : WIRELESS.
Phil Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog: PODCasting takes up the debate on syndication of audio using RSS type tools that I alluded to in a previous posintg.
Good to see people are trying out Parrot and posting about it: Sam Ruby: make Parrot
John Battelle's Searchblog: Put On Yer Search Hat explains how Don Park has some search ideas: that it would be useful if you could tell the search engine what your priority for the search was (e.g. you're a developer, or you're a home PC user) and that you might have more than one profile and switch between them.
This is actually closely linked to work the TSSG has done on distributed Resource Discovery Systems in the EU-funded Gestalt and Guardians projects.
In these projects the primary focus was on discovering re-usable on-line e-Learning content modules , and various types of XML metadata were used to describe these modules (IEEE LOM and others), and to describe the users, and to describe the devices. The architecture, however, is applicable to pretty much any form on-line content. The public results of the Guardians project can be downloaded from Guardians Public Downloads
The problem with the type of approach suggested by Guardians is the large overhead in the creation of the metadata in the first place. Whilst I am also a big fan of Cory Doctorow's polemic metacrap document warning of the simplistic assumptions about metadata, I also beleive that more sophisticated auto-generated profiles and resource decriptors will help refine the very rough search strategies used by search engines currently. Roll on the semantic web....
Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - iPodding, and Why it Matters describes how broadcasting mp3 and other audio formats on the web targetting portable digital players is going to create a new structure for audio.... Food for thought.