I replaced my Sony Reader with a hipper new Amazon Kindle, and I’m totally disappointed. The Kindle has a few good ideas, but it is terribly executed. I’m returning it today (something Amazon is making pleasant enough) and buying another Reader.
Read on for more detail…

Catching up on email this Saturday, I got the opportunity to take a survey about my experience evaluating Bungee Connect. Evaluating bungee connect has been something that has popped onto my radar several times. They purport to be an application platform for web applications. They have their own language, their own ui toolkit, their [...]

The opening keynote for this year’s VLDB was a great presentation by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, describing their data management challenges. I particularly appreciated it because it echoed something I’ve been saying for a few years now: Web-scale companies have problems which cannot be managed with standard RDBMS, or with any common research systems, [...]

A few weeks ago Bruce Schneier discovered a classic economics paper, “The Market for Lemons”. The paper describes the behavior of markets where sellers have detailed information about the products, particularly the quality of the products, that buyers do not have. It uses the example of used cars.
In these markets, the price buyers are willing [...]

I was chatting last night with a Web 2.0-oriented friend of mine, and applications that support disconnected operation and synchronization came up. These have been in the noos a bit lately, with the release of the Ruby on Rails based Joyent Slingshot and talk of the Flash based Adobe Apollo.
The cliche that those who [...]

Two weeks ago I got a new laptop from work. After extensive hemming and hawing, I went with an Apple MacBook (the black one, cause it looks hotter^Wmore professional). Previous to this I had been running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad T40 bought around the founding of StreamBase. My goal for the change was to [...]

I got invited into the Beta at Me.dium, a new collaborative/social browsing system. It’s no dis-similar from the third-party-comments system I was pondering back in the spring, if anyone remembers that. However, rather than being focussed on comments, it is also focussed on real-time browsing. You get a side-bar that shows you what people are [...]

Went to a talk at MIT tonight, by Stephen C Johnson, a researcher at The Mathworks. The talk was sponsored by the Greater Boston ACM. The paper, Algorithms for the 21st Century, was presented at Usenix 2006. The general thrust was how computer architecture has drifted from the idealized model used in most algorithms classes, [...]

I just happened to catch a Google ad for propsmart, and I’m glad that I did. I enjoy regularly browsing real estate listings in both Michigan and Massachusetts. The web-based browsing systems have been gradually improving, but none of them have yet got it right. propsmart is a big step in the right direction. For [...]

I love offlineimap. I even love the quirky way it is hosted on a gopher site. The functionality is awesome. For those of you who don’t know, offlineimap syncronizes a remote IMAP mailbox heirarchy with a local Maildir folder heirarchy. This means you get disconnected IMAP operation with all your favorite Maildir clients (like mutt), [...]