Infoworld reports that PA Semi launched its first product today. These are the ex-Digital guys that brought you the Alpha chip.

Underpacking Mini Rolls

Originally uploaded by Joe Drumgoole.

No, I haven’t eaten one, this is what you get inside a pristine pack. More chocolate, less mini-rolls.

Damien linked to this excellent video talk given by Van Jacobson entitled “A New Way to Look At Networking“. In it Jacobson gives a lightening history of the birth of telephony networks (its all about wires), the advent of packet switching (a way to evade circuit setup times) and our modern Internet (a mechanism for information dissemination).  He then predicts how the web will have to change and how existing content will no longer have an authoritative location but will live “everywhere” on the web.

He then points out that all existing security models depend on securing the route, but say nothing about the content, which is why spam and phishing attacks are so successful. In the future the content itself will be secured, hence the ability to live anywhere rather than being delivered by a authoritative host (e.g. nytimes.com) or its proxies.

He concludes by pointing out some of the issues around incentivising the “content everywhere” model of operation.

Important lessons for anybody involved in developing modern web applications. I’ll be watching this one again.

Gmail fixes the reply button

Originally uploaded by Joe Drumgoole.

Reply at the top, finally.

Stop trying to get people to be smart and start from the other end of the scale. Try and stop them doing the most stupid thing. This works particularily well with smart people who are usually so busy being clever about stuff that they regularily do the dumbest thing in the playbook while engaging in some really smart piece of activity.

So, get your smart people to start thinking about the  stupidest thing they could do, and then get them to not do it!

Simple really.

Adrian Holovay writes an excellent article entitled “A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change“.

• All blogging tools want to be content management systems when they grow up
• All content management systems wish they were as simple to use as blogging tools
• All wysiwyg HTML editors are capable of creating HTML they can’t edit
• Its quicker to learn to fly a plane than to learn Dreamweaver
• Its quicker to learn to fly a helicopter than to learn the Gimp
• “Save as..” HTML usually means turn that document into HTML line noise
• Nobody trusts their CSS hand edits (and nobody should)
• You can nest your tables in HTML and you can also stick your face in the fan, neither are advisable
• Apparently their are some Mac users who build their sites to work in Safari first. They also find themselves trying to pull their pants on over their shoes

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.

Heard in conversation today,

“I don’t want anymore advice from investors, I just want their money”

I sympathise, when you are running a startup eventually you’ve heard all the advice ten times over.

Get a First Life: A One Page Satire of Second Life