Striking the Right Chord, If You Can Find It

• Tired after helping out at Little League practice. For some reason, my knee feels better now. #
• Watched the season finale of The Office with wife and kids. Maybe a bit mature for the 11 year old. #
• Just tried out mebeam.com. Might be useful for group video chats. #
• Looking around seriously about what new open source sw I should use to augment sutor.com. Possibly time for a theme refresh as well. #

• Amazon Launches Music Widget For Bloggers, Web Sites — Amazon.com — InformationWeek

  “The MP3 Clips Widget lets users pick the song and albums they want to display or select the latest bestsellers or new releases within a specific genre. The mini-application, which is embedded in a blog or Web page, can also be set up to play a 30-second sample of song.”

  tags: Amazon, music, mp3, OB

• SEC to Propose XBRL Mandate

  “The Securities and Exchange Commission voted May 14 to formally propose requiring U.S. public companies to file their financial reports using Extensible Business Reporting Language. XBRL tags uniquely identify individual items in a company’s financial statement. Formatting financial documents with XBRL allow the data to be easily searched on the Internet, downloaded into spreadsheets, reorganized in databases and put to any number of other comparative and analytical uses. An international nonprofit consortium of approximately 450 major companies, organizations and government agencies is developing the open-source, royalty-free language.”

  tags: XBRL, standards, XML, financial, OB

• Google Moves to Friend More Web Site Operators

  “Unveiled as a preview on select Web sites May 12, Friend Connect represents an effort by Google, a company that is not associated with a particular social network, to socialize the Internet for users. Ideally, the service will let users add profile information, photographs and other personal nuggets to participating Web sites.”

  tags: Google, social networking, OB

• Waiting on a late flight crew at Logan for my 3rd and last flight of the day. #
• Now reading Downbelow Station by CJ Cherryh. Terrific. Also have 4 or 5 more of the Foreigner novels to go, but they can wait. #
• @DaveO There’s no going back now! #
• Sleepy after one day trip to Boston and back, but Seattle and back in one day is my record. #
• Rare but typical Rochester, NY, traffic jam this morning: accident on I-390 delayed me 10 minutes. #
• @dbfarber Did they do it as a birthday present for you? :) #
• @monkchips We probably could have done it in 5, but we felt sorry for you. :) #
• Thoughts on ASUS Eee 4G as a "throw it in the vacation backpack" computer, or will blackberry do? #
• can anyone speed up my application for access to Google Friend Connect? #
• @jaltman I meant actually helping get me access to the trial program to use it #
• clarification: I requested access to Google Friend Connect so I could try it out, haven’t gotten it yet. Would like to get in soon … #

• Apple Watch - Channel - Office’s Big Mac Sales

  “Mac Office accounts for more than one-quarter of all retail sales of the productivity suite. That’s right, more than 25 percent.”

  tags: Mac, Microsoft, Office, OB

• New York Stock Exchange Runs Trades On Red Hat Linux — Linux — InformationWeek

  “The conversion to Linux followed the acquisition of the Euronext exchange in 2007, and the open source operating system is now powering the NYSE’s mission-critical trading systems.”

  tags: Red Hat, Linux, OB

We’ve heard from folks that the final post-Ballot Resolution Meeting version of OOXML has still not been made available to national standards bodies. This would be the updated 6000+ page document that included all the edits voted on at the BRM. With such a document one could actually, for example, check correctness of the edits and ensure that changes were actually inserted.

That is: it was supposed to be ready before the ballot change period at the end of March, but wasn’t, so those who voted were not working off a consolidated document.

The appeal period ends on May 28. Will it be available by then?

Will it ever be available? Does anyone care? Do any rules apply to this at all? What are the excuses for this? Just like almost ever other aspect of this particular process, dangerous exceptions and precedents are being set.

If any national bodies have this in hand, please let me know.

• Heading to Boston in the morning if I didn’t inadvertently get a batch of poison ivy tonight. I’m a magnet for it and am allergic. #
• @debdeb Angelina? #
• Flying through Philly for an afternoon meeting near Boston, home tonight. #
• On shuttle bus between terminals in Philadelphia. Now farther from Boston than when I left home. #
• Silent thought: "is the flight really closed or do you just not want to bother?" #
• Catching the T at Harvard Square #

• Louis Suarez-Potts: OOXML Has Zero Effect On ODF

  “Q: What do you see for the OOo and ODF community in the years to come? Louis : Glory. I mean it. What is the future, I could ask, of Firefox? Will IE7 kill it? No. People appreciate freedom and what it brings, for it brings innovation and the possibility of it. And it brings, implicitly, community—by which I mean a coming together of interests that are not only generated by and dependent upon marketing agendas.”

  tags: ODF, OOXML, Microsoft, OpenOffice.org, OB

• How Second Life Affects Real Life - TIME

  “What’s more, Bailenson’s research suggests that the qualities you acquire online — whether it’s confidence or insecurity — can spill over and change your conduct in the real world, often without your awareness. Bailenson has found that even 90 seconds spent chatting it up with avatars is enough to elicit behavioral changes offline — at least in the short-term.”

  tags: Second Life, virtual worlds, OB, NP

• UK agency says Microsoft hurts student interests | Reuters

  “A British government agency has told the European Commission that Microsoft (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Office works poorly with rival software used in British schools, hurting the interests of learners, teachers and parents.”

  tags: ODF, UK, Microsoft, education, OB

• Choosing a Baseball bat - A great guide for choosing baseball bats and softball bats

  “When choosing a baseball bat, there are a number of factors that must be taken into consideration, including level of play, size of the batter, cost and comfort.”

  tags: baseball, bat, little league, OB

• 12-8 Little League win for my son’s team, game called after 4 (of 6) innings because of lateness. #
• Thinking about the math of merlon spacing. #
• Just filled out application for Google Friend Connect. #

• Ringside Networks - Harness the Power of Social Networking - Open Source Social Application Server

  “Ringside Social Application Server is the first open source platform that enables website owners to build and deploy social applications that operate with existing website content and business applications while seamlessly integrating with social networks such as Facebook.”

  tags: Ringside, open source, social networking, OB

• Second Life - Bay City

  It’s worth checking out the layout, architecture, and landscaping of this new area.

  tags: Second Life, OB, NP

• Trying out OpenOffice 3.0 Beta on my Mac #

• About Becta - Becta refers its interoperability complaint to the European Commission - Becta

  “Becta welcomes the European Commission’s antitrust investigation of Microsoft concerning interoperability and confirms it has recently referred its interoperability complaint and supporting evidence to the Commission.”

  tags: becta, microsoft, EU, OB

• Learn To Play Guitar Online — Online Learning — InformationWeek

  “Online guitar schools like GuitarTricks.com, BerkleeMusic.com, JamPlay.com and GuitarSchool.net want to turn you into the next Jimmy Page.”

  tags: guitar, music, lessons, education, OB

I’m home from my trip to Italy last week and except for missing a connection in Chicago, all went well. Even the connection problem was not a major issue except that it was a Friday night and I got home over 3 1/2 hours late. I really wanted to be back with my family and start the weekend, so it was frustrating.

As an experiment I used Twitter quite a bit with moderate success. It can be a bit addicting. It had some downtime and the connection to FaceBook was broken for a couple of days, so I really didn’t feel it was a service that was fully available or reliable. One time when I thought it would be fun to use it was when I was walking around the Roman Forum, but I couldn’t get through to the network on my BlackBerry.

At that point it occurred to me that a voice-based flavor of Twitter might be interesting. That is, each message burst would be, say, no more than 5 seconds in length. You could use cheap or free VOIP to input and on the receiving end your “followers” could either listen to the recording or opt for viewing a voice-to-text translation. In the world of lol, rofl, brb, g2g, etc., it would not have to be perfect. Now that could be really distracting! If there’s money in this idea, you heard it here first.

My Linux setup on my Thinkpad performed well. I could access any available access point and it worked as expected within the IBM environments. That means I’m closer than ever to completely deleting the Windows partition on the machine. I don’t really need the hard disk room or anything, but it would be satisfying.

The third partition on the laptop is Ubuntu 8.04. This is quite nice, though I don’t yet have all the IBM apps on it that would allow me to be on it full time. The wifi support is not as dependable as what I have on Red Hat, so that would also have to be taken care of before I moved to it as my primary laptop environment. It’s something to play with in my spare time, though a colleague said that 8.10 will be much improved in the wifi area.

I put the new OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta on my home iMac this morning. Speaking personally and with very limited experience, I’m impressed! As I’ve said before, it’s nice to see this area of software active again after years of stagnation and controlled development.

• I R O N M A N. See it. #
• Cutting down an old dead apple tree, a branch or two a day. #
• Did some gardening. Feeling itchy. #

• On plane in Chicago for last leg home, 3 1/2 hours late. #
• Home. Watched Jumper and I Am Legend on the long flight today. #
• | What can I get done outside before getting Katie at her friend’s and going to Will’s baseball game? #

• Facebook to open the gates with ‘Facebook Connect’ | The Social - CNET News.com

  “Social network Facebook announced Friday the debut of Facebook Connect, a new technology for members to connect their profile data and authentication credentials to external Web sites. It makes the company the latest major Web site to embrace the concept of data portability.”

  tags: social networking, FaceBook, OB

• The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Welcome!

  “The intent of this project is to compile information about ALL the mathematicians of the world. We earnestly solicit information from all schools who participate in the development of research level mathematics and from all individuals who may know desired information.”

  tags: genealogy, mathematics, OB

• 90 minutes until flight from Rome to Chicago. Glacially slow wifi and not even free. #
• Bad sign, past boarding time and flight crew is not on plane #
• There’s really no excuse to show up at the last minute and cut to the front of the airplane boarding queue. #
• Still stuck on damn plane on ground in Rome, an hour after scheduled takeoff. #
• Plane left Rome over an hour late, missed my connection by 5 minutes after getting all the way across O’Hare. They did say they were sorry. #
• Weather permitting, I’m going to rent a jackhammer to take out some old brick stairs on Saturday. #