Software

Last week I limited access to the web site by mistake with a much too aggressive security filter. The reason? A new bunch of referrer spam; something I had previously had a bout with in the summer.

Today I had a burst of comment spam, so unfortunately I have had to shut down anonymous comments -- like so many others in the 'sphere. The neat thing is that by running a few SQL delete statements in MySQL, I was able to easily oust the spammer from my Drupal site. The comment counts are wrong, but the junk is gone. The stuff was coming in so fast that Drupal threw on its throttle -- what a great feature.

What a shame, we were just starting to get to critical mass with readership and site visitors -- some good comments were starting to appear. If you wish to post on the site, apply as a member and I'll get you entered into the database or you can click on "Send Me Your Comments" on the top right of every page on the site.

The technology behind podcasting is so ordinary that my 83 year old father -- who has never used a computer and worked in radio for 40 years -- can understand it. That's why podcasting represents a revolution in media content delivery. Podcasting is not just the "it" technology of the moment. It's not PointCast or streaming or Flash or a meme. Podcasting is not just a technology. It is a technology married to an installed base. If this was 1930 and somebody had shipped 10 million radios as record players over the previous 5 years and then discovered they could also be used for listening to broadcast voice and music... Well that's podcasting. Only now we're looking at an installed base of any thing that can play an MP3 or an Ogg Vorbis. That's millions of potential listeners.

If you need to catch up; better get to www.ipodder.org now!

A new high watermark for Scoble. The evangelism is back!

"Humans want to create things. We want to send them to our friends and family. We want to be famous to 15 people."

Why didn't I write that? ...

A couple of days ago, a group of engineers training on EDSA got a chance to view a demo of Paladin. After the demo, I got a chance to sit down with the Paladin team from General Atomics to discuss their product. I would like to thank Meera, Mark, Joseph and Irene for their time and professional expertise in explaining the vision behind the Paladin project.


When I explained my take on the project, Mark Walker -- who did the demo for us -- as Paladin being like an ERP package for the technical health of an organization, he agreed. However he quickly added that, unlike many ERP implementations, Paladin projects will install on time and on budget.


The FAA is currently implementing Paladin with EDSA at key facilities. Where EDSA, on its own, can provide electrical modelling and design info; the combination of Paladin and EDSA creates a real-time model of an organization's electrical infrastructure with predictive, prescriptive and communicative capabilities. Paladin does not have an interface. As Walker explained, "we want to be HMI (Human Machine Interface) agnostic". Paladin's predictive engine -- which looks to me to be largely Bayesian -- inserts itself between the data layer of EDSA and the ouput HMI. There are a battery of web services that are used to provide business and technical rules; turning what could be a monolithic "expert" system into a svelte thin client application.


Mark noted that attempts have been made in the past 10-15 years to do the same kind of thing with architectures that were laden with problems. With web services and more open data interfaces however, predictive health monitoring for infrastructure is on the verge or a revolution. I plan to keep in touch with the team and will keep you current on the progress of Paladin.


Unfortunately, EDSA has killed direct linking on their web site. Go to edsa.com, click on the products menu and select Paladin.

I'm in Rancho Bernardo -- just north of San Diego -- today through Wednesday. Rancho Bernardo is also north of Miramar, the base made famous by Top Gun. Driving across the base yesterday I saw a monster cargo plane landing, but "Maverick" has not yet buzzed my location. I don't have a lot of free time here but I did get a chance to poke around Balboa Park yesterday and got to play with my new Olympus C5060. I've posted some of the pictures here if you're interested. If you're in the neighbourhood and have similar technical interests, give me a call at my office number (905) 521-9033.


I'm down here to learn about and noodle with a new release of electrical engineering design software called EDSA Technical 2004. EDSA is like many companies that design software systems that are both complex and niche oriented. There have been a few versions of the software before this, but with the history of the package incorporating so many concepts that were formerly separate programs it is only with this version that we see some design unity, interface cohesion, real speed and innovative functionality. It's not unusual that this happens in technical niche software. Software that appeals to consumers or to larger technical constituencies normally takes less time to exploit operating system advances since there are more programmers around who want to solve those kinds of problems. Niche teams have fewer programmers working on the project and they normally solve technical problems before they solve the interface and usability issues that arise in a package. EDSA has finally hit what I call the "RUNS" point -- it's Really Useful Niche Software.


Now, electrical engineering software would not normally be considered cool but EDSA is teetering dangerously toward the cool line. They have partnered with General Atomics to develop a program called Paladin. (I'll have more to say about that in a later post.) What makes this partnership cool? General Atomics is the company behind some neat electromagnetic, sensing and nuclear instrumentation. Most of all though, they are the brains behind the Predator AV.


Needless to say, there are some very smart people in the room down here... As Scoble says, How does it feel to be the stupidest one in the room?" Inspiring."



EDSA broke the link to Paladin (above) 2 days after writing this article. I can not direct link to their pages anymore -- pity. Go to the EDSA web site and select Products/Paladin from the menu.

I hate Scoble.

Robert has been waxing lyrical about the utility of the tablet PC recently (or try here 'cause feedster is a bit flaky...) and linked to this note on the latest beta release of MS OneNote.
As a long time user of Palm devices -- starting with the original Pilot, the III and the M130 -- I have to say I was disappointed with the first few weeks on my X5 AXIM when I first got it a year ago. What the heck has that got to do with OneNote or the tablet? Well, as a tech devotee, I have been interested in efficient, energy saving ways of getting my head into my computer. On a regular basis, I run around from office buildings and plants to data centers and health care facilities. I can't be pulling out my laptop warmer every time I have a thought. Sure, taking grade 9 typing was the smartest decision I ever made in high school and it makes for efficient text input, but I have long
sought a fluid pen-based mechanism to get text and graphics into the computer. PDA's took me only part of the way there.

The Dell Axim was a surprise offering from one of my key technical partners. I wasn't looking to make a change from the M130, but my eyes loved the screen on the Dell right away. For one thing; I could read it. I also love the ability it has to take spoken word notes and store audio files. I can stuff two kinds of
memory cards in it and take a week's worth of documents anywhere. Pocket Outlook or whatever they call the lame contact manager that came with
the Axim, is not the equal of the Palm contact management software. Even the Word and Excel wannabe apps that Palm stuffs in its box are better than the eponymous PocketPC offerings from MS. The style of rapid fire note-making with timestamps, coupled with the quick cut and paste gestures that I was use to with my Palm were not there with my Axim even with Windows Mobile 2003. So I went to work making my PocketPC more Palm-like. I use Agenda Fusion for my main worker-bee program and picked up RegKing in order to hack the registry. I didn't bother to learn any of the alternate input pen techniques that were built into Windows CE, I stuck with the Palm oriented block recognizer. I learned how to tame the ActiveSync monster and I finally got AvantGo to work after 6 months of trying (it had been a breeze to use on the Palm). And I have been blissfully in no-growth mode on
my Axim until I read Scoble. And Pratley.

My current "main" machine is a Dell Latitude C840 and, as we all do after a couple of years, I've been kicking the tires of different machines -- thinking about making a change. Tablets turn my crank but I'm cheap. I am no longer interested in paying early adopter premiums and tablets seem unreasonably expensive to me right now. When everything I need to do, from design to development can be done on my stacked Dell, my inner old-man tells me to spend less and grow more "organically". So why not try a freebie demo of OneNote and see if this represents a key technology shift? Maybe I'll be so blown away that the tablet premium will seem worth it. So I browsed and downloaded. The features list I saw talked about the ability to download notes from the PocketPC. I played. I tried. I wiped it off my machine. OneNote does not do handwriting recognition, Windows XP Tablet does and I don't have that, so