Dylan Greene dot com

Here are a few of the people I met at Gnomedex:

Companies (large and small):

• Matt Mullenweg - creator of WordPress, senior product manager at CNET
• Greg Stein - tech lead at Google of Blogger, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation
• Nick Bradbury - architect of client products for NewsGator, creator of FeedDemon, TopStyle, and HomeSite
• Tantek Celik - senior technologist for Technorati, co-founder of Microformats.org, and inventor of the "box model hack"
• Mark Fletcher - creator of Bloglines and ONElist (now known as Yahoo! Groups)
• Salim Ismail - CEO of PubSub
• Bob Wyman - CTO of PubSub
• Richard Treadway - chief marketing officer at PubSub
• Dave McClure - director of marketing at SimplyHired
• Roland Tanglao - Bryght
• Kris Krug - Bryght
• John Goodall - LiteFeeds
• Darren Inouya - LiteFeeds
• Michael Buckbee - FeedMail
• Gerry Caballero - strategic alliances for AAA California
• phillip m. torrone (pt) - assocate editor of Make Magazine, internet strategy analyst for creative firm Fallon Worldwide
• Tris Hussey - Qumana Software
• Ianiv Schweber - Qumana Software and Blogaholics Consulting
• Arieanna Foley - Blogaholics Consulting
• Dan Gillmor - Founder of Bayosphere, and much more
• Matt Westervelt - founder of Metrix, and Seattle Wireless, the first free community-run wireless networks
• Derek Miller - senior program manger for Navarik
• Steve Rubel - vice president client services at CooperKatz
• Brian Edwards - account director at McKenzie Worldwide
• Kevin Goldsmith - Adobe
• Christy Andrade - video and webcast producer for CNet
• David Henderson - vice president of sales for Vistrio
• Rakesh Agrawal - President and CEO of SnapStream Media
• David Robertson - Covenant Technology Services
• Jeremy Hubert - director of operations at Illanti Industries
• Philip DesAutels - WuhWuhWuh.com (doesn't work at time of press)

Bloggers:

• Dave Winer - Creator of the RSS format, and many other blogging-releated concepts
• Marc Canter - Founder of Macromedia, co-founder of ourmedia.org
• Jason Laskodi - JasonsPage.net
• Steve Duncan - Lornitropia.net
• Lee LeFever - Founder of CommonCraft
• Tom Sayles - TomS Words of Wisdom
• Robert Scoble - the geek aggrigator
• Chris Pirillo - the lockergnome

Podcasters:

• Greg Narain - co-founder of Sparkcasting and SparkID
• Robert Walch - founder of podCast411

Vloggers (Video Blogs):

• Clint Sharp - Clint Sharps Blog an Vlog
• Bre Pettis - I Make Things
• Sean Gilligan - vBlog Central
• Peter Grondal - Peter's Gnomedex 2005 videos

Education:

• Kathy Gill - senior lecturer at University of Washington

I know I've missed people - I didn't mean to, this list is from the business cards I collected. Since many people blog, podcast, vlog, and program as a hobbie (like myself until a month ago), they don't have business cards for their venture.

For a full list of Gnomdex 2005 attendees, check out the Gnomedex Wiki.

Gnomedex is now over, but the coverage and content exchange has only just started. I'm still in the Seattle-area, visiting friends, so I'm not as up-to-date with my coverage as others that attended.

Scoble: "Google News is reporting 243 news articles about Microsoft's RSS announcements on Friday"

I'm at Microsoft, using a PC at their museum to add captions to the Gnomedex pictures. I'm 200 emails 2500 blog posts behind, but already a couple people have asked who's who in the photos, and I better do it now before I forget who's who.

This morning I visited Larry Hryb, aka Major Nelson, or officially Director of Programming for XBOX Live. He presented me with an awesome Major Nelson XBOX Live headset, and showed me the original XBOX working prototype. He didn't have an XBOX 360 to show off, but we did have a good chat about Gnomedex, which he wasn't able to attend, and upcoming features for the next XBOX.

Microsoft is giving a demo of Longhorn and showing off, for the first time in public, the new Internet Explorer 7.0. Of course, it has an RSS reader/aggrigator built in - but that's not the cool part. The cool part is that the RSS system is part of Longhorn, so any Windows application has access to the data. This means that you don't even need to use IE to use the feeds and you can use 3rd party programs that can take advantage of the feeds. Why is that cool? Keep reading...

The first real IE 7 screenshot? It's showing an RSS feed. Where's the tabs?

The first demo they subscribed to a calendar of events, and if the times, dates, or locations change, your calendar is automatically updated.

The next demo is a screensaver that uses a photoblog RSS feed for the photos and captions.

The final demo showed off "lists" - and the example they used involved subscribing to friends' Amazon wishlists, and showed how you can sort and view the data using a sample DHTML-built application.

Finally they announced that their new standards would be released through Creative Commons, to which Larry Lessig had a video announcment saying how pleased he was with Microsoft in doin this.

The new standard - Windows RSS Platform Architecural Overview - Simple List Extensions specification - will be published on the IE Blog soon and Scoble uploaded an hour long (!) video to Channel 9.

The Internet connection is flooded with 300 people all trying to update their blogs at once so I don't have the photos just yet, but they are uploading.

Scoble is live-blogging Gnomedex too.

I'm leaving in a few minutes for Seattle for Gnomedex.

Today I picked up business cards, as you can see in the photo. What is DABU? Meet me at the conference and I'll give you a demo. You might be pleasantly surprised.

There's a Gnomedex Wiki - a web site about Gnomedex that anybody can edit. I added my hotel information, created the Ride Share page, and a topic on Post-Gnomedex Weekend Plans.

I'm also beta testing RSS and Podcasting inventor Dave Winer's new OPML Editor - a group outline program which he will probably announce at Gnomedex and has great potential.

I listen to a few podcast, and since I'm going to Gnomedex in a couple days, I figure I should load up a bunch on my cell phone (which doubles as a kick-ass mp3 player) to listen to on the plane ride. The trouble is that I haven't found a software package for downloading the mp3 files that works the want I want it to.

First I tried the Smartphone program Skookum, formally known as iPodderSP. It got good reviews and people seemed to like it. There was no demo but it only cost $9.99 so I bought it. I hate it! It's useless to me!

Problems with Skookum/iPodderSP:

• There's no way to set it to download just the newest files. I don't want the last six months of podcasts on my phone, just today's and maybe yesterday's.
• There's no desktop component - I really thought it would download the files on my desktop and then transfer them to my phone via ActiveSync. Instead it uses the internet connection on the phone, which is about modem speed and I can't wait 30 minutes for each podcast to download.
• It uses Windows Media Player to play the files, which is okay, but I prefer BetaPlayer, which saves your spot when you exit or turn the phone off so you can continue from where you left off, and is much easier to use. BetaPlayer is a better media player for the Smartphone than Windows Media Player and it's free, there's no reason not to use it.
• You can't see the titles or descriptions of the podcasts, just the filename. Maybe this is deficicy in the technology/standard?
• It crashed. A lot. It's 2005. Programs shouldn't crash anymore. Catch those errors and return some kind of error message. This is unacceptable.

Next I tried Doppler, a Windows program. I should have been warned when I noticed that they sell t-shirts for their software, but they don't even have screenshots or their documentation online. Doppler downloaded most of the files I wanted, but it has no feature for syncing them with my cell phone. Well, drag-and-drop works fine, and Windows Media Player can be used to sync files too, but what files to sync? Again, I only want the latest and greatest broadcasts, but there's no way to sort by "air" date. There's no searching of the content within the files (I want all of the podcasts that mention Gnomedex!), or even to see who the guest speakers are without going to the web site, but there's no link to the web site.

Bah.... So there's some issues with podcasting still.. I'm not totally turned off by the concept, but it's a rough start, even for someone who's very tech-savvy.

This reminds me of another blog entry I wrote about 17 months ago - 10 Reasons why RSS is not Ready for Prime Time. Like RSS, I believe it's just matter of the tools becoming more mature, and a few kinks get worked out.

In the meantime, I'll be listening to some great audiobooks.

This weekend I celebrated Father's Day with my dad in a bike ride from BWI to Annapolis and back.

We started in Thomas A. "Tom" Dixon Jr. Aircraft Observation Area, as airplanes were landing right beside us. There were a lot of people there watching the planes land and was an amazing sight each time the enormous plans passed by.

From there we took the new BWI Trail, which goes around the BWI airport

The BWI Trail connects to the Baltimore-Annapolis Trail. We took that all the way to end of the B-A Trail in Annapolis and then back.

The trails are paved, have few non-busy intersections, and are mostly in the shade and mostly flat.

It was just under 35 miles and took about 3 and a half hours.

Just two weeks until Gnomedex, the annual meeting of geeks lead by the lockergnome himself, Chris Pirillo. The subject matter is blogging and everything that revolves around it.

Some cool things:

• It's sold out!
• Over half the audience blogs (the list)
• Presenters include Dave Winer, Steve Gilmore, Steve Rubel, Phillip Torrone, Robert Scoble, Marc Canter, John Battelle, Dan Gilmor, and may other A-list bloggers, editors, writers, and inventors. It's like the superbowl of blogging.

For people going:

• The .NET Guy is getting people together for dinner on Thursday. Contact him if you are interested.
• Robert Scoble may be hosting a camping trip after Gnomedex.
• I'll be staying at the Sixth Avenue Inn.
• I'll be in Seattle June 22 till Tuesday, June 28.
• On Monday and/or Tuesday, I'll be visiting friends at Microsoft. Major Nelson, John Porcaro, Dennis, Dave, etc - I expect cool demos that I can't talk about here! <g>

Image is from the great Podbat Blog.

In the early 1990s, Carlos Armando Amado, a grad student from Stanford, created an Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that could import data from a Microsoft Access database. Mr. Amando approached Microsoft to license his spreadsheet.

Microsoft had already been working on such a feature, so they turned him down.

Amando applied for a patent in 1990, and eventually got it. More than decade later, he took Microsoft to court for violating his patent. The US District Court of Central California agreed and ordered Microsoft to pay Amando $8.96 million.

So the moral of the story is - patent everything you create, no matter how trite you think it might be - and then offer to license it to Microsoft. If they ever build something like it - easy money, right?

A friend from college and Microsoft is working for Microsoft Research at their Beijing Research facility.

He posted this the other day:

Things I should mention

In my neck of the woods...

- Taxi to work (25 min) $3
- Metro $0.60
- Meal for 2, mid-low restaurant: $4
- DVD $0.75
- Drink at nice lounge/bar/club: $3.75
- Local paper ~$0.06

Since my only source of income right now is about $15/day from the Google text ads, it makes me think....

Sorry, no link to his site - his blog isn't public.

Update:

Maybe this is why his blog is private (from Slashdot):

The Inquirer has the story that individual owners of websites and blogs must register with the government or face a shut-down. Apparently they will begin monitoring of all sites, both commercial and personal, beginning this month. Site owners have until the end of the month to register. The BBC has the story as well."

My guess is that eventually users will choose Microsoft's or Apple's operating system just like we choose Coke or Pepsi in any restaurant today.

Restaurants today offer Coke or Pepsi, but never both. Deals and/or discounts insure that. The same thing will happen with operating systems.

When you buy a Gateway, it might come with Windows.

When you buy a Dell, it might come with OSX.

It's that simple, and it's something you don't really even give much thought to anymore.

And if you're in a bind, the "other" OS will be offered as "add-on" - installed to run in a virtual machine, but you won't care, because thanks to abstraction layer frameworks, most programs will be available for both systems, and will look and act nearly the same in both.

One of my friends, Steve, a regular die-hard Mac user, told me he will never buy a Intel-based Mac.

Why? He dislikes Intel that much?

Nope, he says his next machine will be a Dell.

Steve said he's lost faith in Apple. He said the 10.4 Tiger release of OS/X has been the worst Apple experience for him since the buggy days of MacOS 9. After repeated crashes, reboots, and terrible networking compatibility issues, he was finally forced to downgrade to 10.3 just to have a stable operating system on his 17" Powerbook again.

He doesn't blog, so I have nothing to link to. He said he's not alone with this experience, but it's not something I've read before. I know there's a few Mac users reading this site. What's your feeling?

For my Mac friends, The Five Stages of Intel Macs. Click for the rest of the stages.

There's probably tools there you didn't know existed. The author seems to have a Yahoo bias, and MSN probably should have been included in the mix as well, but this is a good start.

Link: Lots of Google vs Yahoo feature comparisons.

Why don't control panel programs and property sheets show up in the taskbar?

The answer.

This one of my many Windows peeves.

In my brain, if it gets a Window, it should be on the taskbar. I don't care how it was coded.

Bugboard.com's latest entry is another classic: "I hate computer abuse!"

This video card from ASUS includes a wireless video connection for your TV.

My personal prediction is that wireless video connections will become more popular, if not expected in the next few years.

This might mean you could have your computer in your home office, but still be able to use the media center functionality from the TV room without any long cables.

Source: bit-tech.net

NEW YORK - CitiFinancial, the consumer finance division of Citigroup Inc., said Monday it has begun notifying some 3.9 million U.S. customers that computer tapes containing information about their accounts including Social Security numbers and payment histories have been lost.

Citigroup, which is based in New York, said the tapes were lost by the courier UPS Inc. in transit to a credit bureau.

Why were they shipping tapes instead of just having their computers talk to each other?

They should give my former employer, webMethods, a call.

Article source: MSNBC

Steve Jobs announced today that future Apple machines would use Intel's chips instead of the Apple/IBM designed PowerPC chips.

While I always like to see big changes, I'm surprised Apple went with the x86 architecture DOS and Windows users have been using for 20+ years instead of a whole new technology such as Sony's Cell or something new from Intel not tied to the x86 architecture.

It's also interesting that Microsoft's next XBOX is going to be using a specially designed derivation of a triple-core PowerPC chip, a decision that made many Apple fans very excited. Maybe Microsoft foresaw this and is getting the PowerPC chips on clearance.

And where's AMD? Even their popular 64-bit chips weren't enough for Apple?

Scoble: Skeptics can't believe Apple is giving IBM the boot.

Jerome on Technology: Apple is shooting themselves in the foot.