Friday, April 23, 2004

Project Planning & Scheduling Software -- Project KickStart

Project Planning & Scheduling Software -- Project KickStart

KickStart integrates with Outlook -- sort of. KS projects become Outlook task categories, and KS tasks become Outlook tasks. There's no synchronization -- KS is always the source of truth and it overwrites the Outlook categories. Without Outlook that tasks must be treated as "read only" or moved out of the KS categories.

I'm going to experiment with this a bit. I'll preface each KS project with the prefix ks_ so I know not to touch those tasks in Outlook. They will also display on my Palm (unfortunately, due to PalmOne's failures, Palm synchronization is not what it used to be ...).

john

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Topix.net and mangled advertisements

Digital Cameras News - Topix.net

Topix.net is a largescale news aggregator. I prefer Google's front page, but Topix has a very large ontology (knowledge structure) of news topics. That's not evident from the front page, but if you search on a topic you can quickly get long lists of topic domains -- about 250,000 according to an NPR show.

This is their topic collection for digital cameras. They do some kind of limited RSS feed as well. I'll experiment with this and probably link from my news page to very specific Topix.net domains -- such as digital photography.

They seem to use the targeted advertising business model, which could be a great fit to these focal domains. It doesn't work so well when searching on domains that aren't in their ontology. Here's an ad associated with results from a search on "plague":
Buy Plague Products
We link to merchants which offer Plague products for sale.


PC Magazine: Top 100 Lesser Known Web Sites

PC Magazine: Top 100 Web Sites

PCMagazine (I fondly remember the original ZDNet BBS ...) has a list of 100 web sites -- but it's not the usual list. These are "lesser known gems" divided into 12 categories (lifestyle, photography, etc). At the top right side of each page there's a short list of the entires, so you don't have to navigate the entire page. I may comment here on the one's I end up liking, but they're worth a review. Many, but not all, are familiar to me.

The persistent URL for this page may also be: www.pcmag.com/top100websites

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

PuTTY: a free telnet/ssh client

PuTTY: a free telnet/ssh client

I lost track of this app a while ago. It's free and worked when I last used it. Need to try it again.

Monday, April 19, 2004

The New York Times > Movies > Scanning at 4000 lines per frame

The New York Times > Movies > 600 Macs, 4,000 Lines, One Giant Leap for DVD's
Engineers calculate that 4,000 lines of data would be needed to reproduce all the visual information in a frame of [35mm movie] film ...

By contrast, most DVD's these days — good as many look — begin with a compromise: they're scanned at just 1,080 lines, at most 2,000 (sometimes as few as 480), and the source is almost always not the original negative but a copy.

Neat story, makes me think again of the digital vs. 35 mm discussion.

If a 35 mm film were square, and a "line" was a pixel, this would be the equivalent of a scanning 8000x8000 pixels, or 64 megapixels. I think that a 35mm still image has resolution within a factor of 2-3 of this number, so it's not so far off.

In practice 12-16 megapixel CCDs seem to produce images of equal sharpness to 35 mm negatives. Given advances in technology (such as in-camera variable tonal range adjustment) and a straightforward extrapolation of today's sensors we should equal the effective resolution and color capture of consumer-grade 35mm still cameras within 2 years. With appropriate use of JPEG2000 compression the images should be manageable.

I'd love to read an article that explored these numbers in more depth.

Northern Softworks: Panther Cache Cleaner is essential?

Northern Softworks

The current version of OS X runs very well indeed -- but it does have problems with corrupted cache files. This $10 utility has been highly recommended.

Sunday, April 18, 2004

VIA Strengths Scale - a cut above the usual web survey

VIA Strengths Scale - Welcome

It takes about 30-40 minutes to do the 200 question survey, but it is a serious psych analysis. A Guardian journalist speaks well of it as a self-discovery tool.