Friday, December 10, 2004

In other clone news One of Stefano's favorite OSX goodies that he demo'd last night was called Quicksilver, which reminded Shimon and me of ActiveWords (as seen on Scoble). It's a type-ahead, search and launch utility that works from where ever you are... it lets you look up and dial or email contacts, has de.licio.us integration and generally sounds and looks quite amazing in that it combines both search and navigation. It makes it clear why MS needs WinFS so bad. Shimon looks for something similar for us un-mac'd and finds AppRocket. I may take a look, but I suspect it's missing the semantic knowledge piece i.e. understanding what a contact is and how to dial your phone via bluetooth. I'll probably just continue to fake this by clicking [Ctrl-e] on my emacs s-exprs like so: (w32-shell-execute "Open" "testing.leo" nil nil) to launch a LEO file, or (w32-shell-execute "Open" "d:/VMS/SQLSVR2K/Win2000.vmx" nil nil) to kick-start a VM image. 8:36:25 PM      comment []  trackback []

Klik clones Linspire's Click'n'run for Knoppix ... and quite nicely it looks like. I wonder why it's just Knoppix? 8:22:47 PM      comment []  trackback []

Nerding it up @ Casablanca last night Did you know that Cocoon's creator has a fetish for both NetFlix and MacOSX? I found this out last night, when I had the privelege of sitting next to two people who pop up first you Google them (what's the term for that? The Canonical Gregor? Google-Feeling-Lucky Stefano?), Gregor and Stefano Mazzocchi. I gave Stefano a hard time for writing his blogging tool on top of J2EE -- but I guess he of all people has a legitimate dogfood excuse. Of course when I went to visit his blog after meeting him, the site was down :-). Static HTML, Stefano, is my secret to 5 9's blog uptime. Anyway, thanks Sooz and Gregor for organizing this. It was a blast. 4:18:07 PM      comment []  trackback []

Downloadable Oracle Appliances Instead of running an install wizard and then configuring Oracle's software on their computer, users who are running the VMware software will instead be able to download a VMware file that will contain both the Linux operating system, as well as a pre-configured version of Oracle's software that will be immediately ready to run. Well, I guess I didn't have to wait too long for the downloadable appliance idea. I think VMWare should take this a step further and offer an Installshield-replacement for ISV's. Don't just install the app, install a tiny OS to run it on wrapped up in a VM container. I haven't heard any buzz about them partnering with ISV's for this, but perhaps the Oracle move is a start in that direction. 4:09:42 PM      comment []  trackback []