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Blogs Computere og Internet Kim Blog (English) Technology

Jaiku-Jabber-Doo: Your “presence pusher” has arrived

Jaiku LogoI’m obviously not done writing about Jaiku, the remarkable microblogging web-application, that you can use to stay updated on what you, and your contacts are “up-to”, by following the so-called presence streams, or log of “Jaikus”, that are maintained by your contacts.

A “Jaiku” is a short message, that could be a link to a weblog entry, a photo or a TEXT message sent from your phone. Each “Jaiku” become a “presence message”, i.e. something you produced – indicating that you’re “present”. As written earlier, I love the concept.

The reason I’m writing about Jaiku again, is because they have released, in closed beta-testing, integration with the instant messengering (IM) protocol Jabber. Jabber is, for instance, the IM protocol that is used by Google Talk.

Besides the possibility of receiving presence updates as IMs, you can also update your presence by simply sending an IM to the Jaiku bot.

It works great, and it’s really convenient to have your presence stream pushed as Instant Messages, instead of having to pull it manually, by updating the web-page.

The only problem I had was that I couldn’t sign up for the beta from the web-based Google Talk client, so I had to fire-up my favourite IM application, Adium.

After I sent the activation code from Adium, I immediately began receiving messages from Jaiku in both Adium, web-based Google Talk and on my Nokia N800 Internet Tablet.

You can track progress on “Jaiku-Jabber-Doo” on the #imku Jaiku channel.

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Blogs Bookmarks Computere og Internet Education/Undervisning Kim Blog (English) Resources Technology Undervisning Videnskab

iTunes U: “e-Learning” done right?

iTunes U: the campus that never sleeps

I just discovered that Apple has launched a new section of the iTunes Store, called iTunes U – the U must be short for University.

Promising and FREE

My first impression is that iTunes U looks very, very promising.

iTunes U features video and audio lectures, lecture notes etc. from major US universities, like MIT; for instance an entire course on “Electromagnetism” from MIT with titles like “What holds our world together?…”, all organised in the familiar iTunes Store.

And the best is that the content is FREE – yes FREE.

Where are the Danish Us?

So when will we get content from Danish Universities on iTunes U? I’m not optimistic!

The reason I’m pessimistic, is the ongoing debate over “e-Learning” in Denmark. As usually, when it comes to anything remotely related to ICT, the debate is mostly about technology and ICT-skills.

STOP TALKING! Get producing!

I say: STOP TALKING: Get the infrastructure in place, and you can immediately begin producing and distributing lecture notes, audio and video content. It requires almost no ICT-skills to use an application like iTunes – all students has the skills to do so today.

Later on, more advanced e-Learning applications could be made, even though I doubt that they’ll ever work – I’m a firm believer in the fact that you’ll never be able to replace the teacher, and with the infrastructure in place, we can all become teachers as well as students.

Benefits of partnering with a commercial infrastructure provider

A major benefit of partnering with a commercial infrastructure provider like iTunes Store, is that it removes the hassles of making the technology work from the institutions, leaving them to worry about what they do best, producing content.

I’m sure that the content offered on iTunes U is available elsewhere, and that there are downsides to trust Apple with distributing the content, most likely in their proprietary formats, but the convenience of having it all show up in iTunes, which makes it so easy to access the content, and have it synced to the iPod, means that I can live with it – for now.

Despite concerns iTunes U is a wake-up call

I realise that Apple also is doing this to draw traffic to the iTunes Store, and to sell more iPods, Macs and Apple TVs, iTunes U is actually one of the biggest selling points for Apple TV I’ve seen so far.

Despite my concerns over iTunes U, it remains a great initiative – they’re getting so many things right – and it’s my hope that it will serve as an inspiration to the Danish Educational System: WAKE UP!

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'i dag' (Danish) Blogs Historier/Stories

Efterlysning: Pæne måder at sige “nej tak” til job-tilbud

En god veninde spurgte mig om nogle pæne måde at sige nej til et job-tilbud.

Hun spurgte mig, af ALLE personer?

Selv er jeg nemlig DÅRLIG til at sige nej…MEGA dårlig…

Det der sker er at jeg siger “Ja” eller “Måske”, og undlader så ofte at udføre det jeg har sagt “Ja” til, hvis jeg af den eller anden grund ikke gider.

Det er, forståeligt nok, noget der altid har irriteret mine venner, og det resulterer naturligvis også i at jeg bliver stresset. Det er noget jeg vil arbejde på at blive bedre til at håndtere.

På trods af denne mangel på en vigtig social egenskab, så kom jeg nu alligevel med at par forslag:

  • “Tak for tilbudet, jeg evaluerer for tiden hvordan min karriere skal udvikle sig, og jeg ser mig derfor nødsaget til at takke nej”
  • “Tak for tilbudet, jeg vil takke nej fordi jeg ikke mener at det er det rigtige for mig”
  • “Tak for tilbudet, jeg vil takke nej fordi jeg ikke mener det er det rigtige for Dem”
  • “Tak for tilbudet, men jeg mener ikke at deres arbejdsplads søger efter en med min profil”.

Kan i komme på nogle flere?

PS. Jeg kan godt li’ når der bliver sagt PÆN, men der menes måske “høflig måde” i stedet for “pæn måde”…

PPS. Ved nærmere eftertanke sagde jeg faktisk “nej” til noget i efteråret, men det var især fordi jeg sagde “ja” til noget andet, men det var en del “i familie” med det første.

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'i dag' (Danish) Blogs Bookmarks Caféer og Restauranter

Jaiku | Wifi-café i indre by. Anyone?

Jaiku LogoJaiku | Wifi-café i indre by. Anyone?

(opdateret 21-Juni-2007 @ 8:30 am)

For første, men sikkert ikke sidste, gang skriver jeg inspireret af en “presence stream” på Jaiku.

Denne gang blev der bare spurgt om der var nogle der kendte en café i indre by med Wi-Fi (trådløst netværk tilsluttet Internettet).

Og vupti kom der nogle gode forslag.

  • Drop-Inn
    MJ Coffee
    Nadsat
    Retro
    Riccos

Men det fik mig til at stille dette spørgsmål:

Er man moralsk forpligtet til at købe noget, hvis man bruger en åben Wi-Fi stillet til rådighed af en café? Jeg mener – man kan jo ofte sidde/stå et stykke væk, specielt med de dimser jeg render rundt med. Bænken overfor Drop-Inn er f.eks. behagelig, der er plads til mere end en, dækningen er god nok, og to-go kaffen købt andet steds var glimrende.

Svaret er vel en no-brainer, som Shevy indirekte påpegede: Man skal naturligvis støtte caféernes Wi-Fi direkte ved at købe noget.

På den anden side slider man jo ikke på inventar eller optager en plads, og man signalerer jo heller ikke direkte at man bruger caféen fordi den tilbyder Internet adgang, bare fordi man er der.

Så jeg kunne godt tænke mig en mulighed for at støtte caféers Wi-Fi, uden altid at føle mig forpligtet til at købe dyr kaffe, hvis jeg bare skal checke min mail.

Løsningen kunne være at FON stod for Wi-Fi i samarbejde med en af de store Internet udbydere, således at Wi-Fi blev mere bredt tilgængeligt, og caféerne blev holdt skadesløse.

Når det er sagt så er det meget sjældent at jeg har snyltet på en cafées hotspot, men jeg kan godt forudse at det kommer til at ske oftere og oftere i fremtiden.

I denne sammenhæng kom jeg i tanke om noget der har undret mig…

Allerede for 3 år siden så jeg Wi-Fi telefonbokse i New York…Kommer det nogensinde til disse længdegrader? Personligt synes jeg det ville være genialt, ikke mindst i takt med at Wi-Fi bliver indbygget i “alt”.

Hmm…TeleFONbokse…

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Blogs Kim Blog (English) Open Source Technology WordPress

Spammers beware: The Karmic laws will “haunt” you

I’ve hosted a wiki on my website (https://www.kimbach.org/wiki) for some time now, and in keeping with my ideals, that states that participation should be as easy as possible, it was totally open. Notice the past tense: this morning I decided to edit the configuration files, and I now require registration if you want to edit articles on the wiki.

“Low maintenance”

The old, and totally open, setup was partly inspired by the “Co-Creation Rules” session @ reboot 8. In the discussions I had “post-boot” with the hosts of the session, we discussed that “low maintenance” was key to running a successful, participatory, site.

Stop Hand“Low maintenance” means that you create as low barriers as possible to avoid turning users away, e.g. allowing updates and comments without requiring the user to register, or in any other way surrender personal information.

There’s a major problem with “low maintenance” however: Even an uninteresting wiki, like mine, received an increasing amount of vandalism and spam, so I had to spend more and more time reverting vandalism. That’s the reason I’ve decided to require that you register and login, before you can contribute to my wiki.

I’m quite sad about this, but it’s out of necessity – I just don’t have the time to keep it clean.

Spammers beware: The Karmic laws will “haunt” you

So “thank” you spammers and vandals – I don’t really care too much – since it’s your “karma” that will be taking a serious beating for your actions.

Yes to “Low maintenance”, but for me.

If I was running a corporate wiki, and had the resources to patrol the articles, I’d still recommend as low maintenance as possible for the users. However, for personal websites – like mine – it’s just too stressful.

Spam prevention tools should be in the MediaWiki core (and they might be in the latest and greatest versions – which I can’t use because my host doesn’t support PHP5 :-(), and it should work much like Akismet integration in WordPress, which quite simply, is amazing. Akismet is a webservice, that you can query and update to prevent spam comments on weblogs, and it really (understatement) works in WordPress.

Akismet of hope

Without Akismet I would seriously have considered closing my website, since I received something like 1 spam comment every minute – instantly that disappeared when I activated Akismet.

But for now my wiki will remain high-maintenance for users and low-maintenance for me.

You’re still more than welcome to participate in my public Projects through the wiki, but it does require registration now.

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Blogs Computere og Internet Kim Blog (English) Technology

A-synchronous “swimming”: How I stopped worrying, and learned how to love “presence”

2 years ago I had this crazy idea: “How do we get rid of phones” – I thought hard about it, asked friends for ideas, but I concluded that it was just too early – or maybe I didn’t have the vision at that time. People that know me would agree that my vision was somewhat blurred 2 years ago (understatement).

Synchronised “swimming” – because a-synchronous has failed

Synchronized Swimming - Russian TeamSynchronous one-on-one tele-communications, i.e. using phones and instant messengering (IM) is, in many ways, a terrible invention, it’s so stressful, at least to me, when people expect immediate answers.

To top it off, it is so rare that you really need to establish “synchronous contact” with anyone far away. “Asynchronous contact” is so much better.

Unfortunately the current batch of asynchronous communication technologies (i.e. e-mail) has failed, mostly due to lousy implementation.

  • You can’t rest assured that your e-mail is received
  • You can’t rest assured that your e-mail is opened
  • It breaks if more people are involved, endlessly forwarding revisions of documents
  • Unsolicited e-mails (spam) are filling our mailboxes, and has undermined our trust in e-mail
  • People write too long e-mails
  • People expect immediate answers
  • If you don’t provide an immediate answer, the e-mail might disappear “out of scope”, due to the constant flow of new e-mails
  • There’s no concept of body-language, and smilies doesn’t cut it 🙁

Community service for “Big Brother”

Thanks to recent technologies, I believe that it is almost possible to do away with the phone and IM.

So what recent technologies shows this promise:

I believe that it’s the so-called “presence services” like Jaiku and Twitter that are paving the road towards asynchronous Nirvana.

If you inform people, about your whereabouts and what you’re “up to”, and make it possible for them to “pull” that information on demand, they don’t really need to call or TEXT you.

What they do instead is check the log (“pulling” information), usually by subscribing to it in some way (having information “pushed”), so that they’re automatically updated, this means that they rarely have the need to call, TEXT or IM you.

I know that there are problems with the presence services. The biggest problem is that the majority of the world, isn’t ready to volunteer personal information to the public. It’s a bit like doing community service for “Big Brother”.

Another issue that many people will have, is that you, by telling the world,that you’re not at home, also are providing would-be thieves with the same information.

Finally you run the risk of becoming too personal in your presence, because you believe that you’re engaged in a conversation with friends, not realising that the entire world could be listening in.

How I stopped worrying, and learned how to love “presence”

Currently I use the presence services like a public notebook, and it’s so convenient that you can update the log simply by TEXTing the server, most of my presence messages on Jaiku can only be understood by yours truly and, sometimes, people that know me well.

The rest of the world might gain some insight later, because I tend to use the presence messages, as a stepping stone to a blog-post, like the one you’re currently reading, or it might serve as an inspiration for posting some pictures. The positing of a presence message, can also act as an inspiration for what pictures I actually take.

Think of my Jaiku presence stream as a (public) brainstorm.

Here’s my presence messages (“Jaikus”) for yesterday (the 14th of June 2007):

  • “Hello! My name is Richard”
  • Mindbender – Stringtronic
  • Synkronsvømning er “So 80ies”

As you can see the last of these messages, resulted in this blog-post – strangely enough, I got the inspiration from an IM session!

The other two are somewhat cryptic, the first one can’t be understood by anyone but my colleges at work, the second is the name of a group and an album, that was being played at “Kaffe & Vinyl” in Skydebanegade, Copenhagen, when I was there yesterday. Both messages will likely result in blog-posts and the second one, a music purchase.

I predict that the “presence services” will migrate into mainstream business applications, like e-mail and IM has already done. These implementations will likely address, and solve, the privacy issues.

A-synchronous “swimming” revisited

Synchronised “swimming” is SO 80’ies. Welcome to the Nirvana of a-synchronous “swimming”, where the majority of synchronised “swimming” will be performed in the same “swimming-pool”, the “swimming-pool” called IRL.

Now why didn’t I come up with that idea two years ago?

Photo from Wikipedia (Image:Synchronized swimming – Russian team.jpg – originally uploaded to Flickr by Jesus de Blas and released under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license)

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Blogs Computere og Internet Kim Blog (English) Technology

“Weapon of choice”: “Tölva” friendly public hotspots

HUMAN? Tölva and Kim Bach @ SjakketAs you might remember, I just found a surprising winner in the contest to find the device best suited for basic Internet access – like Jaiku presence checking – at a public hotspot: the Nintendo DS, with the Opera browser. Since all my “computers” have “names” – a practice I learned from Jerry Pournelle @ Chaos Manor – my DS is now officially baptised “Tölva”.

For the last week I’ve been carrying my “weapon of choice”,”Tölva”, around town, and I’ll be maintaining a list of “Tölva” friendly hotspots on my web-site (most likely the wiki).

Copenhagen:

I’m still amazed at the battery-life of the Nintendo DS. I hope to be able to compare it to other highly mobile Wi-Fi capable devices like the Nokia N95, in the future.

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Blogs Kim Blog (English) Technology

My Nabaztag/tag SelinaAlouette does Jaiku in my garden

My Nabaztag/tag SelinaAlouette does Jaiku in my gardenJaiku is the best thing since sliced bread, and SelinaAlouette, my Nabaztag/tag agrees.

After I treated her to an upgrade to Full Friend Rabbit, she can read ANY RSS feed, and thus my Jaiku presence feed http://kimbach.jaiku.com).

With a Nabaztag (/tag) you can stay in touch with your friends, even without a real computer, how KEWL is that.

And my beautiful Yasmine is starting to bloom, that’s almost a month early.

My garden is actually my slice of heaven, I’ll begin to appreciate it more, and SelinaAlouette will keep me updated while I do productive things, like reading a book.

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'i dag' (Danish) Blogs Bookmarks Computere og Internet Open Source Technology

Urban: Marie Østerbye har svært ved at huske sine kodeord – lad os hjælpe hende!

Marie Østerbye fra Urbans bagside kommer med nogle spændende og relevante betragtninger i hendes klumme Indtast venligst…Øh? fra Urban den 11-Juni-2007.

Uden at vide det (tror jeg) rammer hun faktisk hele den digitale verden hårdt og præcist, og hun giver os da en klar udfordring, der kan opsummeres med dette:

“Hvorfor skal vi have alle de kodeord, et burde da være nok”.

Vigtigheden af at have et sikkert system til vores digitale infrastruktur kan ikke undervurderes, og det er uhyggeligt at folk føler sig så utrygge, og det med god ret, ved at gemme kodeord på deres computere.

Problemet skyldes egentlig web-browseren, der aldrig har været tænkt som en platform til at køre deciderede programmer, og problemet er at stort samtlige hjemmesider har udviklet deres egne systemer til login, uden at tænke over standardisering.

Til jeres og Marie Østerbyes information, kan jeg oplyse om at der foregår en hel del standardiseringsarbejde på dette felt, bla. i offentligt regi, hvor det også hører hjemme, selvom løsninger det offentlige tidligere har promoveret, som f.eks. digital signatur, ikke fået den udbredelse som forventet.

Der forgår bla. et godt arbejde i projekter som OpenID, der er et åbent, decentralt og frit system til bruger-centreret digital identitet, der får stigende støtte i f.eks. open source miljøet, og listen over software der bruger OpenID vokser.

Så der er håb forude, selv om jeg nu ikke tror det kommer fra folk som Janus Friis, William Henry Gates III og Steve Jobs – som Marie Østerbye håber på – men man kan jo håbe at de følger trop, eller tvinges til at gøre det, hvis der kommer nogle åbne standarder.

De nævnte mennesker er ganske vist meget interesseret i at folk kun bruger et enkelt kodeord, men det skal naturligvis være til de tjenester de selv tjener penge på (hhv. Skype og Joost, MSN og iTunes).

Så jeg tror virkelig på at Marie Østerbye meget snart kan nøjes med at huske et kodeord, nemlig det til hendes computer, men lad os tage os sammen og sørge for at det sker.

Der er i øvrigt intet mere kedeligt end at udvikle systemer til bruger identifikation – je’ ve’ det je’ har gjort det – så kære udviklere: spar besværet, sæt jer ind i standarderne og nyd det gode vejr, i stedet for at sidde inde og genopfinde hjulet.

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Blogs Kim Blog (English) Open Source Technology

Net Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

In the beginning the digital world was a big wasteland, with scattered oases. These oases were called Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes), driven by “crazy” people that spent their savings on dial-up connections, so they could provide support for a local BBS oasis.

Episode IV: A new hope

And it was relatively quiet for a long long time.

Then something happened, the oases began “trading” information, and information began flowing between the oases, making it possible to talk to people from all over the world.

This was all being build by a volunteer workforce, and different languages were being spoken – depending on the software used to run the “oasis”. This meant that the different systems used to run the oasis, couldn’t really trade information between “borders”, and since it was all based on scheduled windows of information trade, due to the expensive dial-up connections, delivery of information was sometimes very slow, and could take many days.

“The Internet” changed all that. That was because it established “traffic-rules” that guide it. The rules are invented, or rather proposed and ratified through RFCs (Internet standards are suggested by so called RFCs – Request For Comments), in an entirely open review process, ensuring that information can flow freely. Another important difference between the rather disconnected world of the BBS oases, and the Internet, was that the Internet servers were always accessible, ensuring instant exchange of information.

Having established the traffic rules, the world could be “paved” with a computer network, driven by the military, research and governmental institutions of the world.

But it was still relatively quiet.

That was until 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) came up with the simplicity of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), that meant that all information could be refered to (linked to) using a simple string of text. You all know that as the address with the strange http:// in front. That is a URL.

HTTP is an acronym for HyperTextTransferProtocol – and HyperText documents are the documents that you download when you browse the web. HyperText Documents are formatted in a “language” called HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). HTML is a pure text and human-readable document format, making it possible to apply attributes to text like bold and italics using nothing but a lowly text-editor, that usually comes bundled with the operating system (e.g. Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Mac OS X and vi/EMACS on *UX).

TBL wrote the first web-browser, and the Internet instantly became usable. That was due to the intuitive document metaphor, and the fact that the web-browser ran under a user graphical interface, made away with the text commands, that was mostly used for navigating the web, before the web-browser was introduced.

Deployment of the web and e-mail applications was swift.

I remember talking for months with partners on how to trade information (exchange files). Usually we set up dial-up connections to local computers running either terminal emulation software with X, Y og Z-Modem protocols, or later more advanced things like cc:Mail.

Then suddenly, within the span of a few months in 1996, we all had Internet @ e-mail addresses – it was astonishing, and it’s really hard to believe that you had to send disks to your costumers a mere 10 years ago.

It didn’t take me long to discover the feature of the web-browser called “view source”, and that was how I learned HTML.

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

The Internet, and before that the BBSes, has always, despite it’s roots in the military, been a place for free-thinkers, and in parallel with the grass-roots, a number of commercial systems for online communications existed, CompuServer, Prodigy later AOL. They all relied on dial-up access – you know using the modems that made the whining fax-machine sounds – to their servers, and had expensive subscription-plans that made it possible to tap into a community of experts.

William Henry Gates The Third – amongst others – saw this clearly, and wrote about it, at great lengths, in his quite visionary book: “The Road Ahead”. Bill Gates saw the power of online services, and wanted to take the next version of Windows, Windows 95, to the next level, by providing seamless integration with an online service called MSN – The Microsoft Network. Microsoft also wanted to provide the entire infrastructure, including access-points and network access subscription plans.

Controlling the desktop entirely, MSN should have been a tremendous success, but at the same time, 1995, the Internet had gained critical mass, and MSN didn’t happen, and by the time “The Road Ahead” was issued, Bill Gates had realised that the Internet might actually become the ubiquitous network, “the information superhighway”, that he envisioned, and Bill Gates was getting ready to turn the supertanker, that is Microsoft, around.

While MSN was sitting idle, a number of implementations of the web-browser had been released, especially the company Netscape had success and had become the de-facto web-browser.

Bill Gates didn’t like that, he wanted Windows 95 to tap into MSN, and this was difficult, because Netscape, by default, sent their users to the Netscape home-page.

A leaked internal memo described the plan – “how do we leverage the fact that we own the desktop”? The answer was simple, bundle the browser with the operating system, and give it away – that will surely kill Netscape, since they charge for it.

And that was exactly what happened! Netscape lost the war, Microsoft had won, they owned the desktop, the browser (Internet Explorer market share topped at something like 95%) and MSN had finally found it’s market due to the IM client for MSN that is also bundled with the operating system.

And despite the fact that Microsoft actually was found guilty in monopolistic practices, they just kept on going, and the change of US administration in 2001, only meant that the judgement against Microsoft never really materialised, and didn’t account for more than a slap on the wrist.

The ability of Microsoft to change strategy was amazing, the supertanker did a 180 in a very short timeframe. Microsoft also managed to make Windows much more manageable, effectively killing off the concept of the Network Computer, the PC and Windows had grown up, and it became the cornerstone of the digital world.

Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi

But something surprising happened. Microsoft became lazy, complacent, and arrogant. Microsoft was also under constant attack from “terrorists” that targeted their operating systems, binding developer resources, that should be working on the next version of Windows, now known as Vista. Vista was supposed to be the long promised nirvana of Cairo, but constant delays and de-scoping of important features like WinFS, means that Vista ended up being little more than a point-release

Internet Explorer and Windows had been sitting idle for 5 years, the bugs in it becoming more and more annoying, and the security patches kept coming in, an ever increasing stream.

During that time Bill Gates also seemed to loose interest in Microsoft, focusing more and more on his reputation for posterity, being the greatest philanthropist in the history of humankind.

This relative absence of Microsoft meant that opportunities for alternatives opened wide. Netscape finally had success with their open source efforts, and released Firefox, the KHTML project from KDE (desktop environment for *UX) had been adopted by Apple with the Safari browser and now it’s even finding it’s way to Windows. The Opera browser runs great on basically anything from desktop computers over gaming consoles to cellphones, meaning that there’s an alternative browser even for embedded OSes, like Windows Mobile, Symbian and Nintendo DS.

Linux has also seen tremendous growth, and philantropic projects like Ubuntu has started spreading Linux to the desktop. Linux is no longer hiding in the back-office, and the dark rooms of the geeks.

Linux is also on the rise as an embedded OS, with Maemo and OpenMoko, and the amazing project XO, formerly known as One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte, that promises to bring computing to the children of the developing world, by thinking different.

I can’t wait for the children to start creating Wikipedia entries, blogging, sharing pictures, making music, digital art and writing books. Imagine what they can do when they grow up!

And with social web-applications and Wi-Fi access becoming universal, we don’t really need complicated OSes for our day to day computing tasks, and a new class of devices will help us shed the shackles of the anachronism, the desktop computer. If you doubt me, try to take a look at Flickr, it’s better at organising information, than your desktop operating system.

Another frontier is open standards, especially document standards are being debated. The closed standards are history, and no matter who wins the “format wars” (that I’ve written about earlier), completely closed de-facto standards for documents, is going to become a closed, and very dark, chapter in the history of computing.

The Jedi of the BBS has returned…

…may the Force be with you.

Free at last, free at last, God all-mighty we’re free at last!

ps. I know there’s episodes I, II and III, and I might write about the prequel – even though the Star Wars prequels weren’t that succesful – and Microsoft might be down, but they’re not out. I have tremendous respect for Ray Ozzie, the current Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, and the Internet Explorer team and the Mac Business Unit are doing great applications.

So there might also be a sequel: “Episode VII: Developers, Developers, Developers” – stay tuned – it will be fascinating – we do indeed live in interesting times.