Author: admin

Notes from the the Web

As per yesterday’s post, I am attempting to live outside desktop applications.

Notes

  • Signed up for Google Apps for Your Domain. As I am entering a “micro-business”, I really don’t want to set up all the infrastructure. I hope Documents, Spreadsheets and soon GoogleSharepoint (formerly known as JotSpot) will flow into these custom apps soon.
  • VoIP. Interesting thing to research: SIP etc. It’s all too hard. I’d like to have a business phone number, voicemail, mobile phone redirection etc – without adding a new Telstra phoneline. Seems more difficult than it should at the moment.
  • Wireless 802.11n: these virtual machine virtual drives are huge, and 802.11g isn’t fast enough to exchange them to/from the server.
  • A Google Contact List. I’d like my contacts somewhere safe in Google. Maybe even a small business CRM, too. Maybe Google should just buy Stikkit
  • Google Calendar on mobile. At the moment, mobile access is via SMS only (if you are in the US). Just like the excellent Gmail mobile interface, I should be able to see my calendar online.

Now ABC News is reporting that Doctors use Google to diagnose patients. Every time I go to the doctor, he tells me not to consult the internet for medical advice.

First Writely Blog Post

Having recently used Google Spreadsheets , and the better featured EditGrid : I thought it best to give Google’s Writely a spin.
As a sidenote, I am continually impressed with EditGrid. The external Web data tool permits automated foreign exchange rate and stock market updating. Every minute or so, there is a flashing in your spreadsheet as the data; including Australian Stocks, are updated. Excellent for managing a portfolio online.
Back to Writely: this post is written in Writely: normally I use Mars as my blog editor; and this whole “do it in the cloud” is all pretty new to me.
The data from each of these applications: EditGrid, Writely, Google Spreadsheets: all live in their own clouds, and interchanging data is copy and paste from window to window. I also have to restart Firefox every couple of days as the memory use grows to 1.5Gb. And no, I have disabled all Firefox 2.0 extensions.
My wish is that data lived in the cloud, too. Applications could push/pull data in a standard way from the cloud. We are heading in that direction. Flickr is the almost the universal static image storer; Youtube the video storage “place”. Will an online virutal-file manager that references all these formats, no matter the source, be the next ultra-cool Web 2.0 application?
It looks like Google is starting to grok: integration is key.

The HTML from Writely is bad. Lots of br’s; certainly not XHTML compliant.

Geotagging: Three Dimensions off our Virtual Future

Nick Hodge, Flickr.com, Geotagged: spent the greater part of today geotagging my images stored in Flickr. Geotagging is the addition of spacial or geographical metadata (that is: latitude and longitude) to my uploaded images. The four cameras I’ve used do not have GPS, so this geotagging caper is a manual post-processing effort.

The resolution of the Yahoo! Map Images for Sydney and London are excellent, the maps suck (unless you are in the US!). Even Tokyo’s map was strangely low resolution. At the time of writing, 600,000 images have a geotag according to Flickr. Microsoft’s Local Live and Google’s Google Maps are way better.

Why invest the time?

Somewhere, someday, someone is going to use this data to find out where someone was on a certain day. Or, some smart software is going to create an interesting view of our world.
Time has been a part of the EXIF camera data for many years. These two dimensions are excellent for locating on a simple 2D map, but do not give enough “resolution” to be for our Virtual Future. Apart from the height, the target, tilt and heading would provide more data: Imagine a Second Life in a fully imaged, geotagged, Microsoft PhotoSynth’d world. With the data out there in the cloud, we can live out our life in the virtualized clouds.
A most pleasant reason is to revisit your travels. Re-orienting yourself, remembering the streets of London without the 28+ hour flight. Fun. Reliving the past, virtually. The future will be more out there and immersive.

Nick Hodge in Meego

Nick Hodge as rendered by Meego, a service I don’t quite get – but it is all the rage with the Tech.Ed AU crowd… and for some strange reason, it doesn’t like Firefox on my Mac. Booted up Parallels, ran WindowsXP and used the command-shift-4 to get MacOS X TO capture this off the WindowsXP session. Clean up in Photoshop CS2, save as a nice small compact PNG with transparency.