Graffletopia is a directory for OnmiGraffle stencils. Yummy....

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At least not yet. There's lots of disgruntledness in the community about Microsoft own lack of preparedness.

If you bought a Zune and run vista, you'll have to resort to some hacking to get your new toy to sync up.

Want to run Visual Studio inside of Vista? Be prepared for a bumpy road.

You're a Microsoft Certified or Gold Partner and you're excited because Vista is now available for download so in an eager rush to be “ready“ you decide to deploy vista using your internal use licenses that you get as part of your partnership benefits.

There is another thread of never-ending ESB discussion. Javier posted nice list of ESB skeptic articles.

Well, sort of. I mean thre’s a healthy sized community there now creating machinima for Second Life. Alt-Zoom describes itself as: a studio less in the Hollywood model of a movie studio, more in the model of a coopertive artist’s studio. They have a monthly screening of films made in Second Life.Here’s more:Alt-Zoom Studios’ goal [...]

International Labor Organization or ILO feels that RFID has the power to create an impact on labor requirements mainly in the retail sector. For this purpose ILO had hosted a meeting in Geneva for discussing the possible impact of...

Technology often provides unique ways to be really lazy and the SMS Jukebox recently released in France by Orange certainly raises the bar for lazy geeks. The jukeboxes have started appearing in bars

I was looking up a few Second Life stats after looking at alt-zoom earlier. When I wrote about SL for the Irish Times back in September there were 750,000 members. There are now 1.5 million. About 75,000 are logging on each day and spending an average of 3 hours each there. Nissan, Toyota, IBM, Starwood [...]

Most vendors I spoke with for this week's Stepping into Identity Management painted a much rosier picture than what you'll find in the user experiences you'll read about in this feature. One vendor, however, was surprisingly candid about creating an identity infrastructure to support role-based access. Here's what Peter Houston, senior director of identity and access product management at Microsoft, had to say:

I've received multiple requests from my loyal blog readers for help in finding a GPS solution that works well for truckers. The problem with standard GPS solutions is that they were designed with regular vehicles in mind and not 18-wheelers or other large vehicles, including my beloved Garmin StreetPilot 2720. 18-wheelers often cannot go down certain roads or on certain highways due to restrictions, such as low underpasses. Using a standard GPS solution the mapping software typically doesn't allow you specify that you are driving a large truck. I checked the settings for my motley of GPS software/hardware solutions I have including Destinator 3, TomTom 5, Garmin StreetPilot 2720, and an old version of CoPilot. None of them had the ability to set your vehicle type to a large truck or to avoid roads that are restricted to truckers. They had some avoidance options such as avoid toll roads, but that was it.

So I set about to see if I could find a good GPS solution for truckers. One solution I found is from CoPilot called CoPilot CPT9US-BT Truck Laptop 9 Bluetooth. It uses the National Network Routing based on the federal government-designated highway system for oversized vehicles. In addition, this GPS software supports expanded HazMat routing options including General, Explosives, Inhalants and Radioactives. Though if a trucker driver is transporting radioactive materials and doesn't know which road to take, then we all have bigger problems.

In any event, CoPilot CPT9US-BT Truck Laptop 9 also has a 53' Trailer Routing feature that incorporates state governments' legal road designations for 53' trailers. One nice bonus feature for truckers is "Lane Change Warnings alerts" that warn you of upcoming left exits, ensuring that you have plenty of time to safely get to the proper side of the highway.

There is another model called the CoPilot CPT9US-USB CoPilot Truck Laptop 9 USB which uses a wired GPS connection over USB, but if you're going to buy this product, may as well go with the wireless Bluetooth model.

Another interesting product is from TourSolver. Truckers often have complicated routes often cross-country and spanning multiple stops. TourSolver Version 4 is a fleet-management software, which they claim significantly reduces logistical costs and operates more efficiently overall. Essentially, the software is a route-optimization solution. Major savings and benefits include reducing driving distance and the number of resources used and making better use of working time while considerably improving customer service.
 
Magellan Ingenierie expanded TourSolver's functionality to industries with more complicated routing problems. This version includes a new, activity-focused approach ideally suited to maintenance, service, and after-sales service staff. This addition can manage long site visits spanning several days, and the automatic incorporation of overnight stays away from home based on the distance of the work sites.

Early on, the software incorporated legal driving time requirements for road transportation companies. Transport and logistics professionals will appreciate the new enhancements such as "Delivery Pick-Up" for managing delivery and collection activities as part of the same route; and "Multiple Depot Management, making it possible to distinguish between a company's address, the sites of its various warehouses and possibly the home addresses of the drivers. TourSolver can also handle even the most complex journey scenarios and automatically takes account of the closest warehouses for each trip. Choice of road travel options include the use of main roads as a priority, the avoidance of toll roads, and more.

TourSolver 4 also has an updated the route calculation engine. This new technology guarantees better use of the computer's memory, and allows the possibility to optimize routes over larger areas, covering the entirety of North America.

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I knew I was old because I have 658 kids, but I never felt old career wise. I still sort of felt like the 24 year old punk who joined EMC in 1845 - and while I have watched many...

I am on the do not call list. I have called the credit reporting agencies' opt out 800 number to restrict e-mail and postal mail credit card offers. I have called every financial services provider I work with to tell them not to send me pre-approved credit card offers. And still I receive the offers. Protecting credit information is like floating a ship with a hull that's constantly being breached by indifferent financial services firms. You think you've provided a bulwark by opting out, but still the banks find other databases and use them to send those solicitations anyway.

This is via Webyantra a blog I aggregate at wripe.net.“Banglablogs is a directory of Bangla (Bengali) blogs. It has been created by Debashish, the brain behind The Indibloggies (dubbed India’s blog Oscars).”Wish we could do more to fashion links with the sub-continent’s bloggers and entrepreneurs. Maybe Debashnish could be invited to the Irish blog awards? [...]

I learned about GeoBeats through webyantra. This is what Geobeats says about itself.“GeoBeats is an interactive media company whose mission is to inform travelers about international destinations through the use of video. During our own international travels, we found that trustworthy information about the destinations was not easily available. As a result, we are changing [...]

There's an old saying in computer science:Fast, cheap, reliable—choose any two.The point is that these goals are in conflict. Improving one tends to hurt the others. Sometimes a new technology paradigm lets you improve all three at once, but within the new paradigm there will still be a conflict between the three.

Woz and I did a one-on one-chat for the Commonwealth Club on November 16, 2006 as part of his iWoz book tour. If youd like to watch a video of the interview, click here (an Andrew Bourland production with tagging...

Always good to read what David Pogue of the New York Times has to say about technology, gadgets and the folks that inhabit our wonderful worlds.

Soybean mobile phones are on the horizon!

Remember when AOL thought they were doing the world's researchers a big favor and made a boat-load of online user behavior data openly available? Remember the unintended consequences? It became fairly easy to link-up user preference data with some actual identifiable users. Users were upset, AOL looked pretty goofy, and they apologized and back-tracked. But the biggest consequence was

Courtesy of Mathew Ingram: “It’s been around for a little while now, but a site called TurnHere sort of escaped my notice until recently….”Turnhere, is a project pretty much like geobeats (see below). Thanks Mathew - it’s nice to keep the list as complete as possible.Mathew also has a cool media blog worth checking out [...]

I recently have a talk at the University of Wisconsin Computer Science Department. It was part of a panel at theUniversity of Wisconsin Computer Science Department Database Group 30 year anniversary celebration.