Cut The Strings

What do you get when you cross one of my favorite bands, They Might Be Giants with a heavy metal protest song, with quantum theory? A cool little music video called "Cut the Strings".

Christmas Wishlist

Just in case you are wondering what to get me for Christmas, here are a few ideas.

The Crab

The Crab
by Annie (age 8)

The crab is sad because he has no brain.
The crab is sad no matter what.
I have a crab that is sad no matter what.
No tears, no fears,
Just a sad face on the crab face.

The End

Who Needs Katie Couric

Some grad students at Northwestern University have put together this great web site where by a program scans news sites and blogs for text, images, and videos all having a common topic. Then they run the text thru a text-to-speech engine and have an machinima news anchor read it off, while the images and videos play over her shoulder. Way cool. Link

I wish I would have thought of that

This guy has a much more entertaining way to document his travel photos. He superimposes souveniers over the actual attraction for a nice kitchy effect.
Link to Flickr Slide show

Of Course There Are Highways

In response to the reader comment from anonymous, of course there are highways there(as demonstrated by this out of focus terrible picture). I got caught in some pretty heavy duty traffic jams around Amsterdam. But one good thing is you can go 70 in a construction zone!

Bike Lanes

Bikes are first class vehicles on the roads in the Netherlands, and not just in the city. Compare this bike lane in the extremely busy Dam Square area of downtown Amsterdam to this quiet suburban bike lane in a small town nearby.

Wagon Bike

Amsterdam has every kind of bike you can imagine. This is my favorite model. Very popular with the families. I saw many of these "station wagon" style bikes tooling down the road loaded up with kids and packages.

What I like about this photo is the way the wheels on the bike seem to be glowing with some sort of nuclear energy.

See what I mean about the URLs?

Mac House

Another thing I noticed is that the Dutch love to give their buildings names, and if they are stuck for a name, they just call it "[something] House", or "[something] Huis" (in Dutch). Here is an Apple store aptly named: "MacHouse".

The other thing about this picture which is hard to tell, is that the pedestrian crossing signals had this great user interface feature whereby when the red signal was on, the lower signal had a count down timer displaying how many seconds remained until the light turned green. It worked on me. Anytime I was at one of those cross walks I didn't feel the usual urge to dart across the street. I just sat and watched the countdown timer....3....2....1....go!

Nobody home at the palace

My hotel was across from the royal palace, which actually the former royal palace and is now only used for decoration, or state functions or something. Anyway, I couldn't go inside, but was greeted by this very informative sign letting me know the palace was "Closed due to circumstances".

Oh yeah, the other thing this picture reminds me of is apparently there must be some rule that every single sign in the Netherlands should have a web site URL on it.

Tolland To Holland

I made it across the big pond to Amsterdam. Not a bad trip really. Here are a few things I noticed along the way.

I never was at the international terminal at Philadelphia airport, but of course I was there this time. It was very strange. You walk around the rest of the airport and the C and B concourses look the same. Then you turn down the A terminal and it is a whole different airport. First of all it was dark. In fact I could sum it up by saying it was a dark concrete tunnel, with florescent lighting and bus station style black seats. Very strange. There were also these kiosk machines there that foreigners leaving the U.S. had to line up to use. At the machine, they had to give their left and right fingerprints and smile for a nice digital photo. Uncle Sam is watching you people. I wonder why they do it on the way out though?

Here's another thing. Flying business class is sweet. Big reclining seats. Food and drinks. Even your own personal television. There were a few movies on. I watched most of The Da Vinci Code, but it was a dumb movie and I turned it off towards the end so I could get some sleep.

I got here around 9a.m Amsterdam time. Not much happens in this town on a Sunday morning, but now it is hopping. I spent the day walking around the center of town here and doing some souvenier shopping. Although, it was a little strange seeing the head shops, "coffee" shops, and sex shops at first, the novelty wears off fast and becomes pretty boring. Now my legs are tired so I'm glad to be in this internet cafe sitting down for a change.

Send me the link

I saw a presentation this week by Gartner's Nick Gall in which he talks about the core to emergent architecture being identifiers, format and protocol. It kind of made sense, but today the light bulb finally went off in my head when I overheard someone say "Send me the link". I've heard that and said that hundreds of times before, but now I see what Nick was talking about in regards to identifiers.

The reason why data is so locked up in our IT systems today is you can't just "send me the link". You have to say something like: "Log into Big System a and select the Accounts menu then type in the account number and press OK. The "send me the link" version would be more like: http://big.system.a/accounts?id=123456.

Why not have every piece of information available via a URI? Why not RSS for data feeds of business data, like a Google News Search feed, instead it could be an all new accounts feed like http://big.system.a/accounts?status=new&output=rss.

Do It Yourself Stonehenge

This guy rocks! Literally. He shows what a good engineer can do if he puts his mind to it. Thanks to the Signal vs. Noise blog for this link.

Identity 2.0

I just saw a fabulous presentation on Identity 2.0 done by the CEO of SXIP. Not only is the content of the presentation important as we move into more and more web 2.0 type architctures, but the presentation style is so good it showed up on the Best Presentations Ever list at squidoo.

Give me my data!

This 2 part webcast/podcast from Ron Jacob's ARCast show is a very interesting look at the new Business Data Catalog feature of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. This is such a great concept, let IT catalog all the data sources available, secure them, describe them, control them, etc. Then turn 'em loose and let the business community incorporate that data into their SharePoint sites along with any other content they like.

This is the kind of enabling technology that will let IT start to build information platforms instead of custom applications and finally get out of the way of the business.

Links to the show
Business Data Catalog on ARCast (Part 1)
Business Data Catalog on ARCast (Part 2)

Line Rider Simulation

If only there were business process simulators and application prototyping tools that were this easy and fun to use... link

Perception is Reality

Maybe it is because I've spent so much time at work concentrating on system integration, and server-side design patterns, but it seems to me that the majority of "enterprise" developers (including me), don't know diddly squat about compelling user interactions.

So recently I've been taking in the wisdom of people who specialize in this sort of thing. I got started with the folks at 37 Signals. They have a blog called Signal vs. Noise that elaborates on all things design. Good Stuff.

Being an Enterprise Architect, I am a big fan of design patterns. That is why I was really intersted in seeing Yahoo's Design Patterns . They do a nice job of not only describing the pattern but showing it in action with animations.

Let's face it. Perception is reality. You can have a really great set of functionality, but if the site is hard to use and confusing to your users, it stinks. Conversely, mediocre functionality with a compelling user experience will be perceived as a great site.

My First Post

I keep having conversations like: "So what are you reading about lately", or "I just saw this cool website/article/book/tv show/etc. ....".

So in the spirit of having a place to keep track of all this, and in the interest of expirimenting with the blogosphere, I have created this blog.

Look out world, here I come.