There’s a new e-reader on the block that I think will give Amazon some much needed competition.  The Nook is a new e-reader from Barnes & Noble.  There are two features of the Nook that are sorely missing in the Kindle.  First is the ability to loan books to a friend.  The loaned ebook can be accessed on a PC or even a Blackberry device.  No Nook required!  That’s huge.  The second feature is the ability to access Barnes & Noble’s entire ebook collection wirelessly with the Nook when you’re in the store.  If Barnes & Noble gets some comfortable seating I might be swayed to trade my Kindle in for a Nook.

I’m a huge fan of open source software.  I have been ever since I finished reading Glyn Moody’s “Rebel Code”.  It’s now available on the Kindle.  I have a hard copy version of this text.  I’m thinking about reading it again but I have so many other titles in the queue, including Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” and Craig Venter’s “A Live Decoded” and Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near”.

I took Colin Ware’s Visualization course at UNH.  It was an excellent course and his books are must reads if you’re interested in the field of visualization.  Colin is a professor at UNH where I’m currently enrolled as a graduate student.  Last Summer I had the privilege of speaking to Colin about some of the things he’s working on.  I’m hoping Colin will be involved in my thesis work (if I ever get there!).

There’s a cool writeup about some work Colin did for the Smithsonian Institution.
http://www.unh.edu/news/cj_nr/2008/nov/bp13ware.cfm

Microsoft’s Silverlight technology is still in it’s infancy.  Only time will tell if this Flash clone will take off.  Things aren’t looking so good though.  NBC has ditched Silverlight in favor of Flash following the Olympics.  However!  Microsoft has ditched Flash in favor of Silverlight on it’s Mojave site.

A no-op?  I don’t think so.

This is hilarious.  I can’t tell if this is supposed to be serious or not.  The “You can’t please everyone” video clip is as bizarre as it is comical.  The icing on the cake is that the site uses Adobe Flash and not Silverlight.

I’ve been looking for a backup solution for a while.  Apple want’s way too much money for their Time Capsule device and it’s maxed out at 1TB.  Other RAID based solutions are complex and expensive.

I had never heard of Drobo before.  Kevin Rose from Digg posted a coupon code for $100 off a second generation Drobo.  This was only good for the first 100 people to make the purchase.  I was one of those people.

The Drobo is as expensive as the Timecapsule.  It doesn’t come with any disks and it doesn’t do NAS but it’s infinitely extendable and supports disks of variying size not to mention it’s much easier to manage than RAID.  I came close to cancelling the order but I was unable to find another solution that was worth the money.  I’ll post a review once I’ve had a chance to play with it.

I just installed the WordPress iPhone app. Testing it out with this post. Hope the photo feature works.

So I’ve been trying to visit all of the actual sites on my blog roll instead of using some RSS/Atom reader tool.  This becomes a daunting task as my blog roll continues to grow out of control.  Recently I’ve been using Google’s Reader tool.  It was trivial to setup and I can get to all my feeds from anywhere including my iPhone.  The UI for the iPhone leaves much to be desired, it’s really just some HTML tailored for the iPone’s small screen size.  I’d like to see some native iPhone apps from Google.  The full featured browser UI is really nice.  I really like the way they continually append stories to the main page as you scroll down to read older stories.

Looks like the import from blogger.com was a success.

I’m attempting to move my blog here. Not sure how that will go.