Seattle Times (via POK): "This is the first DVR designed to work with a high-speed Internet connection. Indeed, you must have high-speed access, such as a cable modem or DSL phone line, as well as a home network that's accessible in the room where you put the ReplayTV 4000... What the ReplayTV 4000 line offers in exchange for high prices and installation hassles is the power to send and receive video through the Net". Well, someone had to do it (although it's almost as easy, and considerably more flexible, to repurpose a regular PC). And since Groove employees get subsidised home 45mbps lines... (ohwait. Still dreaming!)

My first day working for Groove, today. I still have to write up some retrospective of the last 8 months, and some thoughts on the future. But that'll have to wait until things settle in slightly.

See, I said Jeroen and Suite75 were doing good things. Here's a screenshot of their Architect0r Groove tool. "Come fly with me..."

(If you can use some exotic booze / There's a bar in far Bombay... Suite75 are hosting the Groove partner-bash in Rotterdam at the end of April, and a whole bunch of good folks should be there...)

Jeroen Bekkers has a weblog. His company is doing some very smart things.

Did I link to the humanclock.com yet? I like it.

More nested stuff. Doc says: "David Weinberger said something like, 'If in the real world everybody is going to be famous for fifteen minutes, on the Web everybody gets to be famous for fifteen people.'". Heh. Now you know how many people read this.

David Weinberger, in case you don't read the guy, writes some good things. Here talking about Alias/Wavefront's Portfolio Wall. - this is a very smart piece of kit, indeed; the gesture language really is simple, intuitive, tactile. [Portfolio Wall needs Groove, by the way]. So DW's takeaway: "You know your product demos well if it actually causes an acid flashback"...

It's late, but this took several reads to get straight. Also via Dave, Jon Udell quotes Paul Graham (need the "blog shell" to pop the link stack?):

"You can do as much that Microsoft can't as they can do that you can't. And no one can stop you".

Well, whaddya know, Dave Winer gets it: "we are right now stuffed in their locked trunk, the damned Web browser, although we're mostly in denial on it". P2P means doing interesting things on the desktop, again. Radio is interesting (and uses the browser for UI). Dave says of Groove "I think they made a mistake by not building their whole user interface in HTML" - I'm guessing that one reason is that ol' locked trunk there.

Actually, the Microsoft browser's not bad; at long last it supports the standards pretty well; CSS is clunky but it's a good standard (better in many ways than HTML, but not as good as XML). It's not so much a locked trunk, as a slippery slope. When we were building a big medical system at Agora a couple of years ago, we had to make the decision of which browser to support just so we could get the work done; but, having gone IE, the IE5 (non-standard) "behaviours" appeared and looked really compelling (and they are); there's more of the same in 5.5 and IE6. Embrace and extend. Of course, Microsoft do that very well indeed.

So, some of the Groove UI is HTML (Pinboard, for example, and I guess a lot more in future). It's just so flexible. But the browser's a layout engine, and a client to some servers, but it's not the OS. The browser needs to be embraced and - hey. Extended.

So, while waiting for a download (not procrastinating, honest!), that "secret life of numbers" applet caused me to try googlewhacking number-pairs. I got one, but they're surprisingly difficult to find! I'm sure you can do better.

David Reed, "Attack of the Middleboxes": "a new and rapidly accelerating phenomenon - the rise of middleboxes, pieces of hardware and software that place themselves in the middle of communications. Sometimes they are called 'transparent middleboxes' - but since they don't really understand what is going on, they are hardly undetectable. Like the midwestern voice in my dream, they can introduce errors and restrict users to communicating only in the subset language understood by the middlebox".

Dan Bricklin blogs Demo 2002. Lots and lots of good stuff.

Streaming video of a 1968 Doug Engelbart presentation - "...I haven't quite warmed up to this thing yet..." shows GUI, mouse, wordprocessing, outlines, hyperlinks, collaborative editing, and a bunch more.

The Secret Life of Numbers. Discover why 8859 is so important... (via emg)

Structured Procrastination: "I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong... the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important". (via Jim McGee)

So, this site has gone away. Right now, I'm off on holiday for a short while. Yes, it's true: I start working fulltime for Groove later in the month, and I'm pretty excited about that. More updates later.

JavaLobby, "One Runtime to Bind Them All": "The Common Language Runtime is being sold as a libertarian technology that levels the playing field for minority languages. The reality looks much darker instead. The CLR is not truly language-neutral... all languages in the mix are virtually identical. Microsoft has actually invented the concept of skinnable language: changing a language’s most superficial aspects..". The article also points to a fascinating list of JVM-based languages, including truly mind-bending stuff like Funnel.

My Dad has applied for a patent on salted chips (that's french fries, if you're American). Full story here, and press release here. So today he's on Radio 4 and in a couple of the newspapers... can't find any hyperlinks, unfortunately...

A good evening today with Don, Eric, Donna and Jill. Whoo. Good company.

Some credentials, before I forget them: RAG, Brainstorm, Groovelog, Resin, Lighthouse, Rendezvoo, and of course more recent things. And there's so much in the pipeline.

Travelling again, all week.