Category Archives: Technology

wikiCalc

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Dan Bricklin, who wrote VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet program and one of the great Killer Apps of all time, has released the Alpha version of a web app which does some of the things a spreadsheet does. Here’s how he describes it:

The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet. It can be easily set up to publish to basic web server space accessed by FTP and there is no need to set up server-side programs like CGI. It can, though, run on a server and be used with nothing more than a browser on the client.

It’s available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux under a GPL licence. Thank you, Dan.

More: More information here on the features Dan expects to be in the Beta version.

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New Sony Playstation costs over $900

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And that’s just for the bill of materials according to a Merrill Lynch analysis published by Engadget. A big item is the $230 allowed for the Blu-Ray drive. Drat. I had high hopes of the PS3 being a cheapish gadget that could be hacked to do useful things. What it means is that if Sony launches the product at an X-Box-level price then they will lose even more money on it than Microsoft does on its product. Gaming is a mad, mad world.

The explosion in self-portraiture

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Interesting piece in the NYT about the prevalence of self-portraits on the Web.

Art historians say that the popularity of the self-portrait is unprecedented in the century-long history of the snapshot. “I think it is probably a new genre of photography,” said Guy Stricherz, the author of “Americans in Kodachrome, 1945-65” (Twin Palms, 2002), which includes snapshots culled from 500 American families. Mr. Stricherz said he reviewed more than 100,000 pictures over 17 years in compiling the book but found fewer than 100 self-portraits. These days you can find as many by clicking through a few home pages on MySpace, Friendster or similar social networking sites.

So what’s going on? Part of the answer is that digital cameras make self-portraits easy to do. Another part is that many people have a camera with them all the time now — in their mobile phones. But is there more to it than that?

Even in previous generations when cameras were cheap, they were generally reserved for special occasions. “In 1960 a person just wouldn’t take a Kodak Brownie picture of themselves,” Mr. Stricherz said. “It would have been considered too self-aggrandizing.”

Psychologists and others who study teenagers say the digital self-portraiture is an extension of behavior typical of the young, like trying on different identities, which earlier generations might have expressed through clothing and hairstyles. “Most of what I’ve been seeing is taking place in the bedroom,” said Kathryn C. Montgomery, a professor of communication at American University, referring to teenage self-portraits. Dr. Montgomery studies the relation of teenagers to the digital media. “It’s a locus of teen life where they are forming their identities, and now it’s also a private studio where they can develop who they are.

“What better tool could they have than one that allows them to take pictures of themselves and manipulate them like never before?”

Aside from the self-indulgent teenager, however, there’s a lot of semi-serious self-portraiture going on. I looked on Flickr, for example, and found two really interesting photostreams — one by a talented (and beautiful) photography student, the other by a busy broadcaster.

Looking at these images, it suddenly occurred to me that in nearly 40 years of being a serious photographer I’ve only once ever photographed someone who appeared to be unashamedly fascinated by the resulting portraits. Most of my subjects seem to be embarrassed by their images — even when the pictures have been, qua pictures, beautiful. And I wondered if it’s significant that the sole narcissist turned out to be a major artist whom I photographed at the beginning of her career.

Hmmm…. These are deep waters, Holmes.

‘Henry’ Gates and the Model-T PC

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This morning’s Observer column…

Many of the PCs in people’s homes are riddled with a rich ecosystem of viruses, worms, trojans, adware and spyware which exploit flaws in Microsoft software. While most companies escape the worst of these pestilences because they employ expensive IT support staff and robust defence measures, the average home user remains hopelessly exposed. In his keynote address, Gates finally acknowledged that his company bears a large responsibility in this area – which is great news. But in the same breath he went on to say that the ‘entire computing industry’ needs to get together to build a ‘trust ecosystem’. Let us deconstruct that. The problem, it seems, is largely Microsoft’s responsibility; but it’s the industry which has to fix it.

At the same time, Microsoft announced a helpful new service for those embattled home users mentioned earlier. It’s a ‘computer health’ software package called OneCareLive, which includes antivirus programs, automatic updates, back-up prompts and live customer service. It can be installed on up to three computers in a home and will be available from June. Oh – and it costs $49 a year. Neat, eh? Snake oil salesmen, eat your hearts out…

Mac OS becoming mainstream?

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Well, by some measures anyway. BBC Online is reporting the discovery of a worm that targets Mac OS X 10.4. It spreads via files transferred in an iChat session but doesn’t seem particularly fiendish. Still, it confirms the wisdom of Bill Thompson’s advice to Mac users not to be too smug about malware.

The riches of the Web

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I’m writing an article about the blogging phenomenon at the moment and, naturally, use the web as a research resource. It’s wonderful what there is out there if you go searching. For example, this excellent piece in New York Magazine, which looks at the operation of power law distributions in blogging. And then there’s Dave Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere survey and his more recent analysis of the growth of the blogosphere as media, in which he discusses some of the emerging trends in handling information overload. These are all thoughtful and helpful essays, and I can get them without leaving my study. Fifteen years ago, this would have been unthinkable. And I still can’t quite take it for granted.

Soundslides

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It’s funny how hard it can be to do some simple things using computers. For ages I’ve been looking for an easy way of creating illustrated lectures which can be published as Flash movies (a technology Larry Lessig has used to great effect, but with the aid of serious ad-hoc geekery). Since then, Larry has published a method of doing it using iMovie, which is clearly feasible (if a bit tedious), but has the downside that it produces huge MP4 files. I’ve just come on Soundslides which is still in Beta but does produce Flash files and might be just what I’m seeking.

Update: Just opened my mailbox this morning to find a message from Ian Yorston pointing me at Videocue, which is out of Beta and also works as a teleprompter. It only outputs Quicktime files, though — no Flash, as far as I can see. Still… for $39.95…

Prosper.com

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It’s funny what the Internet makes possible. After FON. com comes Prosper.com, a service described by the New York Times as “a mixed brew of eBay, Friendster and the local bank.”

On Prosper.com, prospective borrowers register with the site and allow the company to review their credit history. Then borrowers post a loan request of up to $25,000, along with an upper limit for the amount of interest they are willing to pay. Loans are not secured by collateral and are paid off over three years at a fixed rate, with no prepayment penalty.

Lenders essentially deposit their money with Prosper — which holds it in an interest-bearing account with Wells Fargo— and either review the loan requests individually or fill out a form permitting Prosper to allocate money to borrowers who meet certain criteria.

Chief among those criteria is the borrower’s rating from the credit reporting bureau Experian, but borrowers can also join or create groups with defined interests or characteristics that, they hope, will make them more attractive to some lenders.

Among the groups on Prosper are aficionados of the Porsche 914 model, associates and employees of a Berkeley cafe and Vietnamese-American students. Borrowers, who typically post their loan requests and any group affiliation, along with a description of who they are and why they need the money, then wait a maximum of two weeks for lenders to bid in ever-lower interest increments for the right to issue the loan.