Boris Akunin from Wikipedia. Just read the first one and it’s very good. So why did they translate the first and then the third of his books and not the second yet?
Archive for July, 2004
Loads of great stuff about the visual representation of project tasks in Tufte’s forum. There are also some very useful project management tools and downloads available from Phil Wolff, and a PM class from Columbia university.
Carrier pigeons tend to use man-made structures to navigate. Must have been much easier with Roman roads, no?
Throwing Tables Out the Window shows that Microsoft could reduce its bandwidth costs by 329 Terabytes per year by using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)-based layout. Amazing.
It’s bad news for component and chip manufacturers because convergence is happening around cell phones, and they’re mostly given away. This isn’t the case for the iPod, for example, but must be true for simple digital cameras and mp3 players.
Amazing picture of the Northern Lights. I need to go see these one day.
Good Experience looks a the end of mainstream advertising for certain companies. As an example, Amazon does very little advertising, but spends the amount it might have to on advertising on continually extending the customer experience and value they deliver. As the article says: why spend millions drumming up traffic for your website and then produce a woeful customer experience?
Time looks at companies using internal markets to generate forecasts. The title is a bit misleading - by no means is it the end of management or hierarchies. It’s along the same lines as the Pentagon’s proposed trading market in terrorism. I like the idea a lot. You need quite a few people to make it work effectively, so not much use for me.
Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales has some BHAGs for Wikipedia:
It is my intention to get a copy of Wikipedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. It is my intention that free textbooks from our wikibooks project will be used to revolutionize education in developing countries by radically cutting the cost of content.
Registered Call is an interesting idea. Simple recording of any telephone call you make with web retrieval of the call. One to help deal with the occasional call centre uppitiness.
SkypeOut Global Rate allows you to Skype to a landline in a wide range of countries. Bye bye POTS.
Reviews of Books - UK. Thanks to Jonza for the link to this nice review site. I hate the layout but love the functionality. So ner.
Confluence project is trying to visit and photograph all of the map gridline nexi in the world. The linked page is for the UK. It would be interesting to stitch these together in a scrollable globe.
More good news. Apparently Archway (currently a hole, but our nearest hole) is being regenerated. And coincidentally, St Modwen’s Chairman is the father of one of Caroline’s school friends.
Apparently there are dolphins in the Thames. Who’d have thought it.
Picasa is now free, since it is part of Google. I’ll take it at its word for now. I’ve heard good things about it, and certainly need help with pictures.
[Update: it's great!]
The IDEA 2004 Gallery has a pile of nicely designed items from vertical scanners to medical equipment to brands. Well worth a look to grab some ideas.
A Solar Filament big enough to engulf the earth and a huge hole in the sun’s surface.
It’s taken half-an-hour this morning to Google for the nice Thai lettuce leaf wraps we do which have lime, ginger, sauce, peanuts and other goodies wrapped in a lettuce leaf and eaten as one mouthful. However, we got there. The dish is called Miang Kam. I’ll put some recipes up on the Wiki when I’ve done them.
Now that Microsoft is to deploy SPF for Hotmail users it looks like there is some sort of standard for checking authenticity of mail senders around.
More information is available
Nice thing about this standard - it uses the DNS system which has a concept of authority in terms of a final arbiter as to which Domain Name links up to which IP address. The same system already says which server accepts mail for which domain name, so this is completing the loop to say this server can send mail for this domain (why isn’t there an XM DNS type?).
