Clearly, with buyouts and overvaluations now common place again in "the valley" we do have a bubble 2.0 going on. So my question is only: When will it burst?

An interesting article at the IHT entitled "Dot-com fever stirs sense of deja-vu" brought me to the postulation of this question.

It might of course be a good thing for us with our startup activities relating to the launch of transLucidonline. What a shame though that we already have actual paying customers. That might de-value us in the face of some VCs. :)

No comments. Just listen& watch:

Austar, Soul, Unwired seek funding for alternative network; when you read this article and remember the one titled "Connections line up at Telstra " from The Australian Financial Review (May 5th), featuring Sol Trujillo and his controversial investment at Telstra, especially the construction of a 3.4billion AUD optic fibre network, it looks like Australia is jumping ahead to fill-up its connectivity gap (if any).

Another one not to forget: SuprGlu! Taken from their website:
"Do you already use services like del.icio.us, flickr, blogger, typepad, etc? SuprGlu is a new way to gather all your content from those sites."

Allright, I am not using del.icio.us or flickr yet but I can well imagine that there will be a moment where this tool will be extremely useful.

I stumbled upon it over this guys site.

God, I really might start to use del.icio.us to keep track of my bookmarks. Ok, transLucid might be another good idea. Let's see which one I'll settle for.

Anyhow; thi s article at IBM gives - as far as I can tell - a nice introduction in how to build AJAX applications in Java. Looks like a good read for any Java developer wishing to get the hang of it.

We had a number of posts on the topic of the hottest topic alive in the circles of Internet geeks: AJAX.

There's a plethora of libraries and tools that have come into existence in the last couple of months, some of them looking very promising.

I thought that before the below bookmarks would take on dust in my browsers bookmark manager it'd be a good idea to post in on our blog. Hope you guys 'njoy them.

Support for ASP/ColdFusion/Io/Lua/Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby:
SAJAX

PHP class library:
XAJAX

Backbase , recommended for anyone who wants to use AJAX technology as a professional for his clients.

Links to other AJAX ressources:
AJAXMatters

WSJ.com - Google Plans Online-Payment Service

"Google Inc. this year plans to offer an electronic-payment service that could help the Internet-search company diversify its revenue and may put it in competition with eBay Inc.'s PayPal unit, according to people familiar with the matter."

And there is already one hot market eager to take advantage of this future e-payment platform

How Paypal / e-bay is reacting to that early announcement?
"Officials of Google and PayPal declined to comment."

After I upgraded to the new version of Mac OS X, release Tiger, yesterday Spotlight was updating its index very often. It stayed unresponsive for long durations.

A gut feeling, that subconcious analyzer routine which I kept back from my PC-days, told me that it might be related to my use of File Vault which encrypts all files in your home folder. My theory was that it confused Spotlight that the files kept on changing or better said the way the files were encrypted. But I couldn't be sure as I wasn't aware of the inner workings of File Vault.

To make a long story short; I switched of File Vault, rebooted and voila! Spotlight is not indexing as often and the waits are non-existent.

Now how would I tell Apple about this bug? They should have really advertised a way to give feedback. If anyone knows how to, please do inform me because this must be happening to others.

If only Google would have a more intelligent way of indexing pages. I have always found their ranking algorithm flawed. Information that I might be looking for that might be "out there" might not be popular but very relevant to my search-quest nonetheless.

But anyways; with things the way they are, I will most probably never show up on a Google search result even with all the good keywords I have on my page and the fact that it would be highly relevant AND maybe crucial for some other Mac users to find this blog entry.

Stop ranting Bjoern, do it better. Allright, I'll shut up. Back into the real world. There's wonderful weather out there which is a not so common thing in Brussels, Belgium.

One more reason for me to get into the world of Java development. Easy access to AJAX code-snippets, check it out.

Yes, I bought it (--> the new version of Mac OS X, codenamed Tiger).

I couldn't help it. The marketing guys at Apple are simply way too good at what they are doing. My poor ibook might suffer incredibly. But I want to try out Spotlight myself.

Q: Do I think it's too expensive?
A: Will be able to tell once I installed it.

Q: When will it arrive at your door?
A: It's already there?

Q: When will you install it?
A: Like right now.

Stay up-to-date on news on Mac OS X Tiger release through Google News.

Ok, I admit it. This is more of a personal note to myself. But hope you appreciate the link anyways. :) Why Google Is Like Wal-Mart

Just posted my story on the Mac site, we'll see if they publish it or not. Yes, I am a Mac addict but believe it or not: There are many good reasons for it.

---
I was a PC user for 16 years. Always the geek who would aim at and solve almost any problem that the PC (DOS& Windows) world would throw at him. Change pin settings on the motherboard, remove cards, upgrade processor speeds, you name it. I wasn't shy to mess around with my machine and quite proud of the knowledge I posessed.

I had been wondering for a couple of months if I might not want to buy an Apple Macintosh for its sleek design. With OSX running a variant of Debian I was not only compelled to it because of the ease of use the GUI the Mac was teasing me with but also with the technology under the hood of its operating system.

And then I had my eye-opener. My PC crashed after I installed SP2 of Windows XP. It simply did not let me login anymore after I opened my laptop one morning. And slowly but surely corrupted the data on my hard disk. I lost a lot of data as I hadn't backed up for a months time. The laptop was brand new and I wasn't expecting any problems to arise. Bad thinking, should have known better.

That was really it for me. Didn't want to waste any minute more of my life to deal with such issues. I was fed up with the PC world. I switched. And will never go back.

Within two weeks I had moved all my valuable data from the PC to the Mac, installed Microsoft Office, started to explore iLife and simply admired how simple it was to get something done on the Mac. It was actually sometimes too easy for me to understand. As a PC user I was used to have to plan ahead the next actions and not to do what would come naturally to me. I still discover new cool tricks on my Mac such as dragging and dropping text after highlighting it.

Next on my shopping list is a 21" iMac to still my hunger for more processing power. The iBook is all I ever needed for a mobile computer but sometimes you want to read documents on something larger than a 12". And of course I'll buy myself an iPod Shuffle, mostly because I will be able to use it on the slope and snowboard. I already own an iPod mini.

As said; will never go back. Love and dig my Mac, it made me heaps more efficient and the days are gone where I would sit in front of my computer trying to figure out what it wants from me. I actually get work done. :)

All the Best,
Bjoern Schliebitz
---

What a funny experience I had this morning, riding in the training to
Darmstadt/ Germany.
In Aachen, a person sat down right across from me and - after having
arranged his belongings - packed out - with a big, seemingly proud, grin - a
bulky HP laptop out of one of his bags. He then swiveled up the screen and
... Switched it on. He had to wait for about 3 minutes to begin work on it
as (my best guess) Windows had to resume from hibernation mode.
At the same time, the person who sat right across from him, had - without
anyone taking notice - unpacked his Apple iBook and was already working.

Ladies and gentlemen, Businessmen V1 and V2. :)

This article makes way too much sense. Just yesterday I talked with someone who sternly refused to accept that the iPod was more than merely a hard-drive, the next gen of the walkman.
I think that wired people - and a lot of us are now - have had this feeling of being inside a carefully woven web of things. That's why the Matrix appealed to so many people. We could easily picture ourselves as one of the actors in the movie.
And as this process, this re-discovery of what it means to be human - is filling the ether all around us the movie came at a sensitive moment.

The iPod is also a way for us to remain in as well as escape the pre-made form that marketing wants to shove us all in. In the ads, humans are reduced to simple shadows. What makes us unique and what gives those shadows a personal touch is how they move to their own music. Their creation is the selection process they go through to choose the music they want.

A digest and compilation of links resulting from a short research I did concerning anti-spam and mailing list management.
It is tackling with:
— legislation (US and Europe)
— mailing list management best practices
— anti spam and anti virus software
— tips, tools, and techniques to be aware of

That's meant to help the team I am working with to define the standards for emailings.
Note that It is a bit "raw" (collection of online references)...

Summary:

read more...

adaptive path » the nine pillars of successful web teams

We used that today in a workshop on usability. Useful

Gmane -- Mail To News And Back Again

That looks like the mailing list management tool we were looking for. To be investigate

Would love to go to this exhibition.
It never occured to me before but it's true that we are bombarded with the message that robots would some day control us. Why so? Why should they turn against their creators? If ever they would, it must have been a human to program that behavior into them. :)

Really only want to point our readers to this article. I am an addict reader of Cringely. My hope is that Apple can play a bigger role than he says they will... as a newly transformed Mac addict.

Might IBM save the day by keeping Microsoft in check?

The Anatomy of a Search Engine

The "in and out" of PageRank, reasoning behind usage of Anchor text, the other smart features such as location information (proximity) or font size or weigh : the bigger the better (headlines)... with this paper you discover the foundation of the most popular search engine : Google.

Very instructive,and probably still very actual, as Google must have essentially expanded on and profit from the initial concept.

Reading the paragraph about "the difference between the Web and well controlled collection", I wonder... At the time this paper was published blogs were barely nescent, certainly not as largely spread as they became in the last 3 years.
BLogs introduce a new dimension to search. It's data mining made by people... a lot of people... which also produce their own input which qualifies even further a particular web page. That looks like a relevant information to track and build indexes on, no?
Technorati, Feedster, Bloglines, do propose blogs search engines, but so far I am not convinced by their results...
I would love to know if blogs happen to be next on Google's lab roadmap...

Another one that got me thinking in the Appendix A, talking about Advertizing and Mixed Motives:
"But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market."
...hmmm... Maybe today's corporate Google use such 'hard to detect' techniques to damage their competitors? How does Yahoo perform in Google as a result of relevant queries would be interesting to watch !