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Blog: Pete LoshinMarch 28, 2008This Can't Be Happening!Here's one reason why Microsoft has such a stranglehold on the OS market: Why Linux will not displace Windows. Sure, it's comment on a long-forgotten thread on a ZDNet blog (Why Linux will not displace Windows). The comment is a stunning illustration of how "common sense" fails to account for those things the individual is incapable of imagining. Consider: You are kidding arent you? The comment goes on, but I can't. You'll have to read it yourself, if you must, to get the rest. And then, there's this: They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know. Not everyone who likes Microsoft is happy with Vista. Go ahead, read the article. It's about Microsoft honchos who got burned with the upgrade. January 25, 2008Time Travel Maps!I'm fascinated by the physics of time travel, but the type "time travel" instead of "travel time" caught my eye in the link I clicked on to get to Travel-time Maps and their Uses and this More travel-time maps and their uses. Not maps for time travelers, but maps that illustrate the amount of time it takes to travel. Very interesting and even helpful if you're in the UK: you can use these maps, for example, to figure out whether it's quicker to drive or take a train to a destination, or the fastest mode of transportation for rush hour commuting. But it's also a very neat illustration of how big piles of data can be turned into intelligence. And you don't need me to explain how that kind of intelligence can become "business intelligence" for any business that needs to allocate resources to get people or things from one place to another. It's all brought to you by mySociety, a charitable project that develops their software as open source; if you're interested in having them do custom mapping for your business, they seem to be willing to do that for a fee (or a donation, I'm not sure how that works in the UK). January 4, 2008Faking the cool OSes, with Windows XPCheck this out: 5 Packs to Transform Windows to other OS. That's right--no more do you need to go to all the trouble of installing a new OS just to get the "look" of having installed a new OS. Why? That was my own first question, but it's pretty obvious why, if you're running XP (which is what the article is about) you might want to fake running Vista, Mac OS X, Fedora Linux or Ubuntu Linux:
How would you use one of these transformation packs? Share! December 21, 2007Least and most useful articles on support.microsoft.com?I suspect that this--How to Remove Linux and Install Windows XP--may be one of the least useful articles on support.microsoft.com; my previous sporadic encounters with installing Windows have never been notable for having trouble destroying everything on the hard drive to make way for Windows. On the other hand, it is about installing Windows XP, not Vista; it turns out Pirates Stealing XP Twice as Much as Vista, Microsoft Doesn't Know How to Feel. Given that, perhaps this--How to go back to Windows XP after you have upgraded a Windows XP-based computer to Windows Vista is the most useful article there. November 23, 2007But Who Will Use Clippy on Linux?Bear with me: this one has almost nothing to do with business intelligence, unless you consider creating a clone of a brain-dead piece of proprietary software to Linux an example of "business intelligence, lack of". I followed this link, Clippy v1.00 because it was described as a free download of the (notorious) Clippy Assistant. I thought, excellent, just what I need: an annoying pseudo-sentient digital "assistant" to "help" me get through the day. Too bad, it's Windows-only. And it's just one of dozens of "prank" programs offered by RJL Software. Far be it from me to tell them how to do their business, but their claim to be: ...the providers of unique software solutions for today's changing market. RJL Software offers a wide range of Software and Services for the Windows environment. falls a little short since so much of their software is April Fools type prankery. Anyway, Googling "clippy open source linux version" came up with this: Clippy for Linux, Digg.com entry that points to this project: Vigor. As you can see from the screenshots, Vigor is, like many open source programs, both less-polished and more entertaining than the proprietary version. But it's still only at version 0.016, so there's room for improvement. I'm optimistic though, as I was able to install Vigor quite easily on my Ubuntu desktop system with Synaptic Package Manager. November 5, 2007Opening Up the Internet: Craigslist + Yahoo! Pipes = Better Data SearchingWe've really come a long way with the web and the Internet over the past dozen years or so. Back then, it was kind of a big deal to run screen-scraping software that could pull data off websites, or access corporate legacy mainframe systems through a webified front end. Now, we're seeing more and more of the web is instantiated in some seriously big data stores, and we're seeing more and more of the owners of those seriously big data stores making data processing tools and APIs available to anyone who wants them, so we can have some nice little mashup applications combining, for example, maps and data with geographical components. But here's something sort of new: a way to make an already popular, useful and generally great website--in this case, Craigslist--with another popular, useful and great website--Yahoo! Pipes. The result is even better than either one. Yahoo! Pipes is kind of like a web version of UNIX piping: a way to take the results of one command (output) and "pipe" it into another command as input. What you get is a very handy way to create very specific and powerful searches, and turn the results into useful information. So, here's the article that got me hooked: How to Actually Search Craigslist. As great as Craigslist is, it has some drawbacks. James Aaron, who wrote the article, is a student at San Jose State's School of Library and Information Science, and is looking for a job currently. He likes Craigslist, but, as he explains, it could be even more helpful if there were ways to search better: There is no way to truncate searches, such as "librar*" to include librarian, library, libraries, etc. There is no way to perform Boolean AND, OR, NOT searches. There is no way to remove frequently occuring irrelevant items. There is no way to search two sub-regions at once. So, unless I want to perform 20 searches a day and receive MANY completely irrelevant hits, I basically have to browse. The answer, he tells us, is Yahoo! Pipes, and he explains just how to use Pipes with Craigslist to make Craigslist that much more useful. In other words, more evidence of just how much the entire web is evolving into the world's biggest ever data store, with the most powerful ever set of tools for extracting business intelligence. How could you use this kind of capability to extract actionable knowledge from the web? November 2, 2007Mining Valuable Intelligence From Random NumbersSomewhere in my stack of obsolete 3.5" floppy diskettes I've got a spreadsheet that contains some interesting raw data. Long ago I was in the habit of buying a bag of M&Ms from a vending machine in the corporate cafeteria every afternoon: before eating any, I would open the bag, sort the colors, count the M&Ms of each color, and record the totals in a spreadsheet. The primary benefit I got from that activity was a nice set of data, from which I could infer some general rules about which were the most and least common M&M colors> I also got something to do during the afternoon lull to keep me from falling asleep. It was the kind of job where most of my co-workers were very bright, but we often had time on our hands; conversation topics included arguing different strategies for getting rich by inventing something really cool--and strategies for winning the lottery. Now that we have the Internet, and there's an endless supply of data sets to play with, here's a guy who actually came up with something useful on that whole lottery thing: Pattern Analysis of MegaMillions Lottery Numbers. Can you use the information in this article to increase your odds of winning the big bucks? It's not clear: if the lottery number selection process is truly random, the answer is no. But you could use the numbers, and the techniques, as described in the article, to discover hidden influences on the selection process that might skew the results. For me, though, the best part of this article is that it takes the question of whether lottery drawings are truly random and then applies a scientific approach to it. And, that all the data is available on the New Jersey lottery website, both in HTML and delimited format for easier processing. August 10, 2007More Data Visualization GoodnessTo see just how far we've come with new ways to look at business information derived from databases, check out Data Visualization: Modern Approaches, from Smashing Magazine, a web-zine for web-developers and designers. Some of these new approaches may not be as cool as their creators might wish, but they certainly do look like a whole new revolution, especially if you can remember the revolution wrought by Lotus 1-2-3? Those simple pie and bar charts made then state-of-the-art August 3, 2007Data Visualization FunEveryone knows that on Star Trek, red-shirted crew members are more likely to get killed. For the science, statistics, and good visualization of that fact, check out Analytics According to Captain Kirk. What's more important, though, is the way Matt Bailey wrote the article to demonstrate proven statistical techniques to generate intelligence (not really "business intelligence", though) from data. Even if the data is based on a bunch of made up stories that were (over)-acted out over 40 years ago. July 27, 2007Fake Names for Realistic DataI love this: Fake Name Generator. My first thought: what a great way to generate some real-sounding but fake names for writers who are having trouble coming up with good names for their characters. Not every writer has the imagination of, say, Charles Dickens. I mean, who else could come up with names like Martin Chuzzlewit, Thomas Gradgrind, Barnaby Rudge and the Marquis de St Evremonde? Check out more cool Dickensian handles at the Dickens Characters page. Of course, there's more to the Fake Name Generator than that. You don't just get fake names, you get full personal information including fake phone numbers, email addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers, home address and even mother's maiden names. If you "order" in bulk (still free, unless you want faster delivery), you can specify things like data format (MS SQL or MySQL, tab-delimited, HTML tables, etc), as well as get even more fake data like credit card numbers and expiration dates. So, what's better than getting fake random names? Getting fully authentic looking datasets of fake random names, including all the critical data that identity thieves want. Therefore, my second thought: How long before some enterprising soul start putting together complete fake datasets and tries selling them to bottom-feeding mass marketer/spammer/telemarketing firms? Or, you could just generate some nice-looking datasets for demos, testing, what have you. July 20, 2007How Walkable is Your House?Here's another one of those delightful mashup/cool websites made possible by open APIs: Walk Score: how walkable is your house? You enter your address, the website figures out how far it is to the nearest conveniences and necessities of modern life (grocery stores, schools, parks, restaurants, etc). The closer everything is, the easier it is to walk to everything; the further everything is, the more likely you'll be stuck inside a wasteful and polluting vehicle. July 13, 2007Politics and Open SourceOpen source vs proprietary software is more than a business issue: it's very much a political issue. Politicians who take campaign contributions from every other industry are just as happy to accept money from the software industry as well. Microsoft spends as heavily as any other major corporation. But politicians also have to use software, the same as businesses and individuals. So which presidential candidates use Windows/IIS for their campaign web servers, and which run Linux/Apache? Check out Douglas Karr's summary of the candidates' OS, webserver and web hosting service choices. I'm torn over how to interpret these results: just how deeply involved are the candidates in making the choice of Windows vs Linux/BSD? Do they really micromanage to that extent? Do the choices reflect campaign contributions from Microsoft (or other companies)? Or do the represent the skill/knowledge of the IT people chosen by the candidates (or their deputies)? July 6, 2007Who's hosting *this*?We all know that the Internet is nothing more than a hugely, massively distributed free-form database, right? At least, we all know you could think of it like that. One mission-critical component of that database is the DNS: Domain name system. That's the database your computer's network stack uses to translate a domain name (e.g., b-eye-network.com) into an IP address (e.g., 127.0.0.1*). There's much more information associated with each domain, though, such as who owns it, who administers it, and who's running the domain name service for the domain (see Wikipedia on DNS users). One interface for this database is whois; you can use the "official" whois website at whois.net but there are other components to the database, such as the list of which organizations/entities have been allocated certain IP address blocks. Now, there's a new Web 2.0-oriented website, Who Is Hosting This?, that answers the question you may not have been ready to ask: Who is the hosting organization for a website? What's cool is that they figured out a way to do it. At first glance, it seems like a trivial hack of the whois and other databases maintained by . But as I went about trying to duplicate the feat, manually, it became clear that it's not. So, here's a challenge: tell me how they did it.
June 8, 2007Windows History in ScreenshotsDo you remember when Windows first came out? I mean Windows 1.0 (a.k.a., "Windows Alpha" as in "pre-beta"). I do, sort of. But even if you weren't even born yet, everyone can enjoy this awesome collections of screenshots of Windows through the ages: Windows Evolution. From 1.0 to Vista. It's pretty amazing, and the comments are pretty amusing. |
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