For the past few years, I’ve stubbornly held out against HDTV and railed against Vista. Well, let’s just say I’m now a convert on both counts.

I bought two HDTV panels a month ago and I’m absolutely addicted to it now. Nature shows are absolutely stunning on HDTV (check Discovery HD Theatre). It’s actually pains me now to watch SD broadcast!

As for Vista, I finally took some time today to try it out on my Thinkpad (Lenovo) X41 Tablet. It was the most painless Windows Upgrade I’ve ever experienced. It’s even approaching OSX level simple! I simply ran the installation off an image, installed Office 2007, Adobe Design Premium CS3 and I was ready to go.

Just a few quick observations:

• Vista actually seems faster on the tablet than XP
• Handwriting recognition is significantly improved
• Instant Rails still works!
• I am really psyched to try ReadyBoast. It’s a feature of Vista that uses fast USB drives as extra ram. I have a fast SD card coming tomorrow, and will report about it when I try it.

Two decisions regarding technology were handed down by US courts today and I am once again disappointed by the result. Incidentally, the two cases just happen to be my two pet peeves, personal privacy and patents.

In the case of Vonage vs Verizon, a judge has issued an injunction against Vonage barring them from acquiring new customers on the grounds that Vonage has violated 3 very very broad software patents of Verizon’s. Not delving into the issue of whether software patents should be issued at all (and most of the world in fact do not issue software patents), Verizon’s own patents seem to cover nothing more than “obvious extensions” to current technology. See Clint Ricker’s brilliant analysis of the patents involved at his blog. Why can’t the US patent office do their job properly?!

In a much murkier case, a university student who was hacking sites like ebay.com was convicted based on evidence that the systems administrator of the network collected while hacking the student’s computer! Wire has published an article summarizing this case pretty well: Court Okays Counter-Hack of eBay Hacker’s Computer. This precedent can have potentially horrifying repercussions downstream. What stops Microsoft from deleting all of your files because they *think* you have a pirated version of Windows? or are we now going to let the RIAA hack computers that they *think* might contain pirated songs? Bruce Schneier, the CTO of Counterpane has written a great editorial about the subject: Vigilantism Is a Poor Response to Cyberattack.

Our civil liberties and our ability to innovate continue to get stymied by bad policies from the US government. Perhaps 1984 wasn’t nearly as fictional as people had thought.

I found this gem of a quote in Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini that characterizes the current web “revolution” remarkably well.

Our modern era, often termed The Information Age, has never been called The Knowledge Age. Information does not translate directly into knowledge. It must first be processed–accessed, absorbed, comprehended, integrated, and retained.

The 1990’s ushered in an explosion of websites, almost all of which focused on bringing as much information as possible onto the internet. The buzzword at the time was “database”, and .com startups raced to implement “database driven backends”. This generation of websites caused an explosion of information on the internet, most of which unfortunately, is useless for any individual user.

Then of course, came the advent of AJAX that ushed us into our current wave, the aptly named web 2.0. Suddenly websites became prettier and more responsive, and the buzzword of the day became “social networking” and user generated content. Yet, two generations of the web still has not produced any “knowledge”. But hope is on the way!

There are finally efforts to process all the information on the web in the form of initiatives such as Semantic Web and Collaborative Filtering.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could finally check out restaurant ratings from people who are just like you?  Afterall, you wouldn’t normally take restaurant recommendations from your next door neighbor who eats dog food, and he just rated McDonald’s 5 stars online!  The potential for a good collaborative filtering is virtually limitless, and in my opinion, will ultimately be responsible for web 3.0.  Netflix seems to be bracing for that possibility already, and is offering a $1MM prize for applicable advances in exactly that!

You can probably tell from my previous post that my own windows mobile device (DASH) is loaded up with 3rd party applications and I can’t imagine using my DASH without them. With the launch of the iPhone however, Apple has declared that there will be no 3rd party application support. Charlie O’Donnell argues that apple’s software is so superior that it needs no other applications. Though I will concede that this is indeed true at the moment, it is hard to believe that 3rd party programmers will never catch up. Case in point, firefox on OSX is in many ways a better browser than Safari. What is more disturbing to me however, is another Apple related story that also came out recently:

Apple’s Steve Jobs Is Company’s $20 Billion Asset

By Connie Guglielmo

Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) — Apple Inc. may find its most valuable asset is something it can’t protect through patents or secrecy: Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs.

If Jobs were to leave, shares of the Cupertino, California- based company might drop 25 percent or more, analysts say. That would erase about $20 billion in Apple’s market value.

Though to many, this may seem like a great thing for Apple. Unfortunately, it is actually a disaster waiting to happen. The greatest responsibility that a CEO can be said to have is the development of potential leaders around him. Borrowing from Jim Collins‘ Good to Great terminology, what enduring companies need are level 5 CEOs.

Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. it’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious - but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.

It is fairly clear to me that Steve Jobs does not have level 5 leadership skills, but is instead an EXCELLENT level 4 leader. There is no clear succession plan at Apple, and Steve Jobs’ persona is too domineering for the proper development of his other executives. Let’s hope Steve Jobs can put his ego aside, and Apple doesn’t collapse the moment he leaves!

Since I don’t have a secretary, I use a whole host of computer applications to help me increase my productivity. I’ve decided to list them all here for others to peruse. If you have a favorite efficiency application that I don’t actually use, tell me about it!

• File Management
• Amarok (Linux) - A full featured music application with full support of podcasts and bi-directional music transfers on Ipods.
• Anapod Explorer (Windows)- A bi-directional music organizer for Ipods.
• Ex Falso (Linux) - A mp3 tagger.
• Hellanzb (Linux) - It downloads from newsgroups, checks the parity files, and then extracts the files for you. What else can you ask for?
• Organizer
• FlexWallet (Windows Mobile) - Allows me to leave most of my (credit || membership || rewards) cards at home.
• Gaim (Linux) - allows me to sign on to MSN / AIM / Jabber all at the same time.
• Lextionary (Windows Mobile) - full featured on-the-go dictionary.
• Maildrop (Linux) - automatically sorts and filters my email based on my personal scale of “importance”.
• MythTV (Linux) - acts as my digital video recorder (DVR) and my video organizer. The setup was a bit torturous, but it has made up for it in all the ads I no longer have to watch (without paying a monthly fee)!
• Outlook (Windows [Mobile]) - keeps my calendar and contacts on both my laptop and my phone.
  
• Papyrus (Windows Mobile) - keeps my day to day organizer on my DASH.
• Planetplanet (Web) - aggregates all the non-private RSS streams of blogs I read and publishes it on one clean page.
• Sitebar (Web) - synchronized bookmarks wherever I go.
• Trillian (Windows) - The windows equivalent of Gaim.
• Server Management
• Amavis (Linux) - Gets rid of virus-infested / spam emails from the mail server. It is now stopping more than 1000 spams a day!
• Gallery (Web) - In my opinion, there is simply no better way to organize your photos.
• Horde (Web) - I mainly use the email portion of this “groupware”, and apparently so does a lot of universities.
• Phpmyadmin (Web) - you didn’t expect me to manage my databases all using command prompt did you?
• Phpldapadmin (Web) - Sometime last year, I thought it would be a great idea to switch my backend to ldap. Thank god for this app.
• Samba (Linux) - Allows windows and Linux computers to talk to each other in an admin-sane fashion.
• Webmin (Web) - Graphical interface for systems administration.
• Wordpress (Web) - Most of my websites now run entirely off of Wordpress (though a severely hacked version). If I still had to manage a loose collection of pages, I would seriously kill myself.