Sunday, June 29, 2003

The current name for their company is MotionSpeak, rather catchy. Some really good thought has gone into this thing.

Questions I have are:
1) How far behind are companies like macromedia and microsoft on competing technologies? At least on the publishing side...
2) If the first target is kiosk operation, how much of the infrastructure to manage, distribute, authorize, charge, track, bill, etc. has been built. Who manages what aspects of the process and system, advertisers, advertising agents, host, host syndicate owner, others?
3) Others have targeted ASP model tools (Javu Technologies for example which built an extensive suite of non-linear editing tools for online movie editing and publishing). Is it the authoring tool, the publishing tool, or the management tool that you see as primary drivers of the business?
4) How does this compete/complement the double clicks of the world?
5) Seems like the quickest hit would be to hit the Yahoo or eBays. The complexities of establishing a management and distribution system for the other outlets may take some time.

So, Steve Youngblood and Volker Shultz have put together an idea, prototype and business plan for a company they call PointWare. In esscence, it is a flash publishing and hosting (asp) system targeting advertisers (small to medium) who want dynamic content in their online ads. Potentially targetting things such as coffee shop kiosk type advertising, online auction sites (yahoo, ebay), and double click like advertising organizations.

The system is really nice visually and creates a nifty swf file when done that is easily editable and publishable. They have done a good job with the UI and the experience, however if you are used to direct manipulation (e.g. power point) you will be somewhat disappointed in the awkwardness that this interface forces you into.

A nice tool, and some interesting potential. It also is in the arena of information publishing which does interest me.

They would like to consider me as a potential 3rd person in their company. I find this quite flattering, and have seriously considered how I could become involved. However, with the other things currently going on in my life, I'm going to have to bow out.

Monday, June 23, 2003

Thought I typed this before, but I guess it's lost...

Have a lot of things going on and many possibilities:

1) nuBridges
2) PointWare
3) Family
4) PHd

I'll go into more details on each of these later...
Okay, just got back from a long weekend helping Brian Godinez celebrate his 50th birthday in McAllen Texas. What a blast. Pam, Risa, Laney and I took off late Thursday, showed up in Corpus Christi, rented a piece of crap Cavalier and drove to McAllen. About 1:30AM woke Brian and LaLa up and quickly crashed.

Friday, 4:30 AM. Brian grabs Cliff (who fell off the wagon (14months worth) the night before and was a hurtin' unit) and me up. Drove to Leguna Somethinguna where we jumped on board with skipper Janey. She was a blast. Sun was still down, but we set out. Fished until around 1:30, caught about 15 trout, 1 red fish, and I nailed a flounder (ugly damn fish). Drank a couple beers and got damn hot.

Friday after making it back to the house, got ready and went over to Aunt Judy's for a night of celebrating with kids and full family. Judy has an amazing party house, with a pool and a party building (pool table, foosball table, the works. Kids had so much fun in the pool. Drank beer (not the kids...) and then went back to Brian's place. Drank a buttload of tequilla (brian had jiggers rather than shot glasses, so those 4 shots were really 6!). Got yelled at by Pam for being loud, and then passed out around 2:30AM.

Saturday morning --- ouch...breakfast, ouch, a couple hour nap, and then back into action. Prepare for the adult party which was held at a bar on the Rio Grande river overlooking Mexico. Great location, but damn hot. Drank, danced, roasted brian, the works. Fun, fun, fun.

Back to Brian's around 1:30 till 3AM with a few people, then to bed.

Sunday, not as painful, pretty much a hang out day. Dropped Omar and Astraya off at the airport, had a shrimp cocktail snack, it's hot like nobody's business, up to 105 down here. Shikes. Cooked up our fish (about 1/4 of it served 6 of us!), felt like a man!

Sunday around 8PM pack the kids and pam in the car and head back to Corpus. On the way, nearly have a head-on collision with an idiot trying to pass a semi. Scared the poop out of us...I just held 'er steady and let him pass us--head-on-- on our right! Pam calls 911 and tells on the idiot.

Around 10:30 get to CC and grab a Holiday Inn.

Monday (today), about 5AM, alarm starts going off...need to catch a 6:55 flight to ATL. No problems, drag ourselves there and hop on the plane. About 11, show up in ATL and head home to drop the kids in daycare so I can run errands (car registration, groceries, laundry, car inspection...oh, and test drove an '01 Z06 vette...very fun, but they want $36K for it...).

Tomorrow, back to work...

Monday, June 02, 2003

So, it looks like in general, the computer is left-brained, logical, ordered, detail, process, symbolic. What we need is the right half to help balance this...
checkout hemisphere for a test and a description of the two brain hemispheres.
So, how to apply computers to computing...and really both of my points previously (the id of the computer and software visualization) are finding ways to make the computer more useful to itself. Why is it so hard for a computer to self-recover? IBM's autonomous computing is drilling at that idea. But are they going in the right direction?

Ooh, what if we think about a dual processor, not as things to co-process, but rather as two semi-independent hemispheres. Or, alternatively, what if we used one processor as the 'concious' element of the computer and dedicated the second to be the 'subconscious'? Dedicated processing could go on that would help put context and add the relationships to the events happening in the other hemisphere....

Interesting thought...
Monday morning....

Dr. appt this morning to check my blood. See if my good fat level is better and see if the lipitor has done any good. Hopefully the exercising has been helping as well.

Okay, so thinking more about it, I'll use this area to jot down some ideas and try to expand on them...

Why haven't computers been turned fully on the question fo computing? Or have they and I am just not aware of it. We tend to apply computing to all sorts of problems, but not near enough on the problem of computing. Computers for computing sake.

Especially when thinking about thinking. How can computers help us figure this out? I'm very interested in this area...the positronic brain, Data, etc. But have we really put computers to task on this? I don't know, but I intend to find out.

Sunday, June 01, 2003

With 3.4 out of the way (almost anyway), and ISS targeted to be complete the middle of June (all the work should be done now), and SAS 70 out of the way, I should be able to start thinking again.

3.8 looks to be a trio of sprints, with John managing them, I should be able to really open up a bit about how we are doing things at least beyond the 1 month horizon.

In particular, I want to make a roadmap for my eventual phd. I'm meeting with Jim Foley in a couple of weeks to get his thoughts on the matter.

My thinking is this:
1) Begin writing
2) Get articles published
3) Get articles in a referreed journal
4) Begin the conference tour
5) Determine my target thesis
6) Locate primary, secondar, tertiary school and prof to partner with
7) Do whatever it takes to get into one of these

Now, the hard part is balancing this with family and nuBridges. The goal is to align at least the writing and thesis with nuBridges such that they can be complimentary rather than at odds. This shouldn't be difficult in that there are a lot of areas that could be directly impacted within the nuBridges scope.
okay, so now the question is how to get published. Perhaps I should take a single topic and start drilling in. Looking for places to publish, and places to make my opinion known.

The best bet is to take something like #1 and just start writing. But it would be good to have a couple of targets in mind. By the end of the week, I want to have a good list of potential targets prioritized and correlated with potential articles.

Tuesday, May 27, 2003

Okay, now to business, or rather the future of business.

I've been pondering the areas of research that need to be done in computer sciences. Over the last couple of weeks I have come up with a couple that are intriguing.

1. 'the id of the computer' - this is an idea - double entendre intended - that goes to the heart and soul of a computer. How is a computer identified and how does it identify itself? How do we reliably and securely recognize a computer, and vice versa, how does a computer reliably and securely recognize itself? It seems that the core of this is memory, the organization, and the association of memories....

2. 'visualizing software development' - this goes to the thought that if you can see something being developed, you have a better chance of determining if it is going well, adjust as needed, and you can have an entire team working hand in hand on the same problem, rather than discrete unconnected pieces. My first thought on this is to use CVS as a source for visualization data. Using the frequency, quantity, and quality of changes in a region of CVS could be used to give visual hints about the activity that is going on in a software project. This relies on an assumption that the organization of the source is somehow reflectvive of the overall project. The key would be to use some 3d tree viewer that could color code the sections that were being modified. You could see higher frequency by the shading -- with, for example, red being a very hot area of development.
Wow, what a long holiday weekend will do for the psyche. Ah, much better now!

We had a wonderful family holiday, from a quick road trip to Athens where we ran around on the Dawgs' practice football field, getting tackled by the girls), to a romp in Centinial park with a flock of other kids running around getting completely soaked but entirely excited by the prospect, to washing the car, to putting together a new desk for the girls' computer, to hanging out with some friends (the Friedmans'), going to the Decatur Arts Festival and having some yummy Felini's pizza. All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable weekend!

Sunday, May 18, 2003

Speaking of Matrix...check out this blogger.
Last night had Jimmy over to babysit for the girls. Pam and I had a nice bar food snack at Champs, hit the bookstore to pick up a couple of books: 1 SF in the series Pam is reading, something about nothing...some book about zero, GEB, and some other Pammy book. Then hit the theatre to see Matrix Reloaded. Great flick, fun, action, special effects, and some plot. A bit to contrived in it's 'depth' and intellectuality, but still a fun watch.
Sunday - It's been a relaxing, ideal kickback family day. Up @ 8, read the paper and hang with the family 'til 11. Do laundry, dishes, clean up. Play with the kids, watch the basketball finals, take a walk around the 'hood. Pick some dandilions with the girls and put them in a plastic cup vase. Read email, watch more bball, read stacked up mags.

Tonight, Risa and Pam head to the Fox for Suesical. Laney and I will do some errands...groceries, home depot...just hang together. No real work going on today. Pam spent a few hours getting caught up, but I just don't feel up to it.

Going to go hang with the fam some more.