Brian Abbott

Google Docs Scripting

http://www.cio.com/article/print/493563

Interesting. Sounds like the VBA interface for Word and Excel. That would enable companies that have built Line of Business (LoB) platforms on top of the Word/Excel Office platform, to legitamately look at Google Docs as a viable small-business document-publishing option. The next obvious question is buy do they want to keep their information on a server. Microsoft is releasing the equivalent with the next rev of Office so, it becomes a validated option. Plus, it's probably safer to keep it on their equipment than their own. 

-Brian Abbott

I want this book.

This looks like a very good book on Banking: The Business of Investment Banking. This is admitedly a huge gap in my understanding of the financial markets that I need to resolve. Hopefully this book should do the trick (Or at least help to identify a set of known unknowns).

A new day is dawning.

I feel that a fundamental shift is underway in the world of Information Technology and it is being lead by a company known better for their theft of existing technologies then their innovation and invention of new ones: Microsoft. For almost 20 years now, software interfaces have been built around the same principles and concepts, namely form driven layout. That is to say, our user interfaces, with a few exceptions (i.e. the web and Flash), don’t look all that different from those applications released with the first commercially available Graphic User Interfaces, the Mac and Windows 1.0 and the Xerox Alto built in 1975, 10 years before those systems where available.

 

Microsoft is changing all that by providing a platform that will lift us out of this state of stagnation by unleashing designer and developer creativity and elevating software design and development to something recognized by the general populous as an artistic rather than an engineering endeavor. And while you don’t have to look to deep to see a cynical side to their actions, I feel these new technologies will have an incredibly profound impact on how software is built and how it is used which will ripple through our industry for years to come.

 

So, what are these technologies and what is so special about them? That is what this blog-entry and others that will follow will attempt to do: Qualitatively assess the majority of technologies being released from Microsoft under the “Ready for a new day” technology and marketing wave. Here is a list of what I’m aware of to date:

 

· WPF

· WPF/E (Separate but related to WPF)

· WCF

· WF

· CardSpace

· Gadgets

· Expression Design Tools Suite

 

There are some other new technologies that will be released probably around the same time or shortly after from Microsoft such as C# 3.0, LINQ, and DSL Tools that I want to learn as much as I can and write about but, in a separate series. This series will focus on the related aspects of the technologies listed above. Feedback is welcomed: briancabbott@gmail.com.

BookMashing

Dynamic Topic Extension or BookMashing(tm) ;) is a recent idea I had. The core concept is to utilize emerging technologies to create hybrid books from a single original book, dynamically, on the fly, as the viewer is reading the book and making selections. Originally a viewer/reader (human, not digital) would select either a topic or an existing book to begin reading. As each page is displayed, that page would be analyzed against a domain specific ontology of topical information. As the ontology recognized central topics or associations with other topics not mentioned on the page, a list of new but related topics would be built and handed to a search engine. Those results would either be displayed inline with the text as possible expansions or, on a column to the right or left of the original text. As the user began making expansion selections, that information would be associated with the concepts in the ontology and used to be apply weighting to future results.

The same techniques could be used to build conceptual graphs of the set of books determined relavant through the ontologically driven search. Alternatively, a set of graphs could be dynamically built as the user read the text associated with the source or 'injected' information. When he decides to stop reading for the time, he would have an automatic set of notes generated (as conceptrual graphs) that he could review and use to strengthen his memory and understanding of the information that was read.

I think something like this would be well suited for Oragami's or Tablet PC Devices.