Copacetic

I mentioned the idea of movies on USB key sometime back. Well an Irish company called PortoMedia has gone and implemented it (actually they were already building it when I posted the blog entry). They have a kiosk that will hold 9000 movies (an average high street video store stocks about 800 titles) and they can load a movie into a USB key in about 2 minutes.

I’ve just been skiing and here’s a problem and a solution I fleshed out with my buddy Conor (who was on the same holiday). So, your heading off to  the slopes, which are typically an inconvenient distance from your hotel. You arrive at the  top of the the first ski lift and discover you have forgotten your googles/lip balm/sun cream/gloves/hat/ski pass/ski poles/wallet/backpack/etc/etc.  Any one of which will entail a laborious return to your hotel. Add two kids to the mix and you are guaranteed to be bungee cording too and fro from your hotel every morning.

So a quick technology fix, add an RFID tag to everything you need and get your phone to give you  green or red light when you leave the hotel. Better still, it calls you and says “You left something behind”, then you check the console to see what item is missing.  This continues to work throughout the day as you stop off in gondolas, cafes, bars, creches, whatever. So you never leave anything behind again.

I’d pay for it.

 Great Video up on Crunch Notes. Good stats on how the world is changing faster and rate of change is changing faster than ever before.

I want an option in Google that allows me to say  ”never bring me to this site again”. The ideal purpose is to avoid those pay for sites which hook on a useful looking domain name and then fill the site with spurious adverts. If I can eliminate those sites from my search them I can give other sites a chance to make it into my search. And lets be clear about this, this is not a per search elimination, I never want to see these sites ever again.

Think of it as an inverted Customised Search Engine.

We pay for a whole host of stuff on a monthly basis at PutPlace. Everything from hosting to dynamic DNS. All those payments are processed by debit a credit card based on a number stored at the vendors site. So for all those annual and monthly payments I want the payment to be processed through a gateway where I can authorise payment before my credit card is debited. In this way I can cut off a given provider without cutting up my credit card or withhold payment for poor service.

Would the merchants like it? Probably not, would you, the customer like it? Yessirree.

I have (again) in my wallet a nice lumpy card key (and of course separate picture ID) for entry to the Digital Hub. This is the latest in a long line of lumpy, (expensive, I’m sure) highly loosable ID cards I have carried in my life. Well surely its time to slap this kind of system on peoples mobile phones with a little Bluetooth magic to trigger the card.

I know mobile devices as a development platform are a  nightmare, but so are bespoke card key solutions.  The mobile vendors are starting to standardise (slowly), so maybe now is the right time…

If ISPs (e.g. GoDaddy, Network Solutions) supported a REST API to DNS then applications like Google For Domains wouldn’t have to throw users to the wolves when it comes to configuring CNames and aliases.

Instead you could just give your credentials to Google and they could update your DNS entries directly. Most ISPs discourage direct fiddling with users DNS entries (for good reasons), but with the ability to customise your URL now a feature of Google for Domains, the need for non-skilled users to access this data is becoming more important.

Robert Cringely (in his new blog format) talks about IPV6 as the way the world is moving. Most particularly how China has moved to IPV6 as a way of escaping the addressing constraints imposed by the limited amount of addresses it was allocated using IPV4.

As a result this a federally mandated move afoot to move the US to IPV6 which has cost implications for backbones based on ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode).

There is a huge opportunity for Ireland to steal a march on our natural competitors in the IT space (India, Rumania etc.) by moving to an IPV6 platform. We are small enough that the costs would not be huge and we could reap several significant benefits,

• Clearly identify ourselves as a global technology leader
• Create invaluable IPV6 expertise in Ireland that can be exported overseas
• Create an environment for where companies with technology based around IPV6 can thrive
• Create an environment where startups can grow based around the IPV6 expertise garnered during the conversion process

Who do we call to get this started?
IPV6 tutorial gives the dirty details.

I downloaded Hamachi today. What is hamachi? A very simple, secure way to connect a group of PCs together in a shared, private network. Its very slick, has good installation help and works just as expected.

Now we can all connect together and also connect with our (small number) of PCs and servers that live in the office.

You create a network, members join the network by entering a password and once they are on the network you have as access to their machine in an identical fashion to a machine on the same subnet. You can also access a web-server if they happen to have one running.

Its another piece of the jigsaw that includes hosted subversion, hosted servers, hosted email and calendar and hosted DNS management.

One of the worlds most popular RAD environments is Excel. But Excel is a pain to share and god forbid you need a third party to enter data into your carefully crafted spreadsheets. Now imagine this problem compounded n times over when an organisation attempts to collate data via a shared spreadsheet. You get to play our favourite corporate games  such as,

• Who has the master copy?
• Where did all my changes go?
• I updated that last week
• We’ve changed the format this month

So we all love Excel, but we need better ways to control data entry and sharing.

So take your Excel spreadsheet and parse all the presentation material out it in order to generate a web page.  Now use an AJAX interface to hide intermediate workbooks, behinds the scenes tables etc. etc. Now ink in the data entry fields so they become highlighted. You now have a AJAX/HTML application version of your spreadsheet.

Now you load this into a runtime framework (probably encompassing the Excel DLL ‘cos who wants to rewrite all that code) and you wrap it in a proper web login environment along with profile and preference information and you store all computation and changes in a database so every version of the spreadsheet is kept when each set of values is changed by each user.

Finally you allow the designer to upload new versions of the spreadsheet and store that in a history as well. Finally you offer a sharing capability so a user can invite other users to access and use spreadsheet, safe in the knowledge that a single master and all changes are held centrally.

Now you can offer it as a hosted service, charging each user a few cents for each spreadsheet they access or charging the owner a most substantial fee on a monthly basis for hosting their application.

How hard can that be?