Dror's Blog

Yesterday, after longs hours of work on two word documents I got Word to suddenly disappear on me. There was not crash dialog (GPE, 'Send this blab la to Microsoft?'), the program just ended (like the code was calling exit(1)). Rerunning Word I got into the recovery mode where both the last-saved-by-user and last-auto-saved were offered. However, they both did not have any of my changes. I am sure you are familiar with this very frustrating scenario (although in recent years this became less frequent). Now rather than just tell you to save often (which is, indeed, a good tip) I'd like to tell you that the file: C:\Documents and Settings\<your-name>\Local Settings\Temp\~WRS<some-number>.tmp Contains all the keystrokes you typed and within it you can find all the text you entered which will help you recover manually but still recover.

Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip, gave a very compelling presentation at Web 2.0 of the Identity 2.0 concept. I highly recommend viewing this presentation, it is well done and convey the message very well. What's interesting in the presentation style is the use of one or very few words per slide. It works well for conveying concept, less so for conveying detail (after seeing it, I do not really know any better how it is done, if at all). Apparently this is a well known style and Dick gives credit at the end of the presentation. Geoff Feldman made an insightful comment on this presentation: The opposite, long sentences that the audience reads are about the dumbest kind of slide there is. If you ever notice, when this is done, you see people reading and not listening. So, their attention is not on the speaker. You can also see them then talking amongst themselves and "comparing notes". Since they are not listening, they are bored and it all goes down from there. It's not so muc...

Lots of people are talking about Microsoft vs. Google and about the Sun's angle. How and if Google can challenge Microsoft and its Office suite. Moving Office to the Internet as-is does not make too much sense. However, looking at a particular application for example, Word, there are very interesting spins to word processing that may make a very compelling alternative (even if it will be less slick to write in; Word is slick indeed). I envision a Word alternative that is built on the Wiki concept. It will be wysiwg (such as Social Text's one) and will allow me to create arbitrarily complex documents and possibly involve other people in writing them. When I send a document to someone (a link really), I can send a read-only copy or a live link, or send a frozen version. Obviously, the storage would be on Google and search would be integrated so real folders would not be needed (labels would do). Templates will make it very easy to start writing. Automatic versioning (wiki style) ...

I have recently heard about a new music service called Pandora. What they do, in a nutshell, is give you a little box in your browser window where you type a name of an artist or a song you like. Then, the Pandora box plays for you high quality songs by the artist you chose as well as by other artists with similar music and mood. That's very simple and it works just great. The name of the song or arist you chose becomes the name of a 'radio station' you can switch to whenever you are in the mood (you can keep a hundred stations). You can share the stations you create with friends by email and if they're not subscribed to Pandora they get free 10 hours to use Pandora, listening to your station or to other stations they create. Subscribing to Pandora costs $36 per year. I think it well worths it. By the way, it works with Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows and with Safari on OSX. It requires Flash v6 or v7.

I don't know how is it with you but tying my shoelaces was always a little bit of a problem to me. It's not that I did not manage to do it; it's just that the shoelaces kept coming undone. Well, today I hit upon Ian W. Fieggen's website and within minutes I dug it all. I first tried the Freedom Knot which brought me to this site - it worked but was a bit slow. Then I tried and Ian's own Secure Shoelace Knot and got hooked. So simple, so fast, so secure. So if any of you share a similar problem or just want to learn more on the subject - head off to Ian's shoelace knots site . I also liked the explanation of what goes wrong in the Slipping shoelace knots page.

I was shopping around lately for wikis. On the way, I stumbled on twiki wiki and registered there to get to try it. Today, I found that when I search for my name in Google, it brings up a page in twiki.org with the registration details I gave ( http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Main/DrorHarari ). A nice place for one to create a personal wiki though I really did not like to see this registeration fiasco.

Jon Udell wrote ( http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/01/20.html#a1155 ) on alternative programming models based on, for example, the tree structure underlying languages such as Java. He referred to a screencast and paper by Jonathan Edwards. The factorial example brings me back about 22 years to the hilarious April 1984 CACM issue where Dijkstra's "Goto Statement Considered Harmful" was "solved" using the COME FROM statement including its more advanced variants of ON x COME FROM label, COMPUTED COME FROM (See http://www.fortranlib.com/gotoless.htm ). That article culminated with a demonstration of the powerful of this new construct. The factorials function was built using COME FROM. Of course it took considerable effort to decipher the logic and understand what it does and how. When I look at Subtext, I get a similar feeling -- I cannot see and get it at once. I really have to work to decipher it. I guess the main reason for that is that us humans think in...