I just discovered that AOL News has a section devoted to blogs called Blog Zone. Smells a lot like MSN‘s Slate Magazine but done on a much smaller scale.

What’s somewhat disappointing is that AOL News: Blog Zone offers no RSS feed! How do you create a product in 2005 about blogging and blogs and not offer an RSS feed? I won’t go so far as to hold Robert Scoble‘s position about firing someone for not having an RSS feed, but it’s pretty embarassing.

Still, it’s a sign of forward progress and hopefully this is just a shallow view of many more improvements that AOL will bring to its free web offering in the months and years to come. Stay tuned …

Back in December 2004, I commented on Paul DeLong‘s LiveJournal about holographic data storage. He even pointed out a company called Litiholo that made an invention I’d been dreaming about, a kind of “instant hologram” film similar to what Polaroids did for the traditional photography field. I envisioned coupling such insta-hologram film with a computer to “print” holograms onto such a film that can later be read with a reader for write-once holographic data storage.

Today, InPhase Technologies published a press release (PDF) announcing that next week they intend to publically demonstrate “the world’s first prototype of a commercial holographic storage device”. Their claim is that “[the] family of InPhase Tapestry holographic drives will have capacities that range to 1.6 terabytes (TB) on a single disk.”

What I found funny were the following two quotes:

The prototype drive records data into InPhase’s patented two-chemistry Tapestry photopolymer write-once material.

From a system perspective, the device presents itself like a drive letter with complete random access, in less than 200 milliseconds, to any file on the holographic disk.

Essentially, the InPhase guys have built yet another WORM (write once, read many) optical drive. Yes, the 1.6 TB capacity is impressive, considering that the only recently has the new Blu-ray DVD-like format made it to market and the proposed dual-layer Blu-ray disks top out at ~50 GB. However, modern 52X CD-ROM drives have a random seek of ~90 milliseconds, significantly faster than the InPhase spec. for their drive. There’s also no mention on how fast or slow the write speeds are for InPhase’s drive, nor the read throughput, but the implication in the press release is that it might be fast enough to retrieve high-definition video data fast enough to broadcast directly from the media, which makes a lot of sense because of the data density of holographic data storage.

Overall, I’m really excited about this release because it means that within the next 5 years, holographic data storage could become the defacto standard replacing today’s traditional optical storage (CD, DVD) at a very reasonable price-point. I can’t wait!

Today, Zoran Vasiljevic confirmed that there is a leak in the threaded Tcl memory allocator [1] (affectionately known as “Zippy” by the AOLserver crowd). I unfortunately already knew about this (see comments) because Qiong Wei told me about it back in December 2004, but didn’t really act on it because I originally thought that it was something in his application code that may have been causing the leak, not something in the Tcl core itself. Today, I verified that it was indeed a leak in the Tcl core, introduced in Tcl 8.4.7 [2].

Here’s my test run against Tcl 8.4.6 (no leak):

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd` ./tclsh
% info patchlevel
8.4.6
% lappend auto_path /usr/lib/tcl8.4; package require Thread
2.6.1
% exec ps -p [pid] -o pid,vsz,rss,args
  PID   VSZ  RSS COMMAND
 8317 12704 1996 ./tclsh
% for {set i 0} {$i < 1000} {incr i} {
    thread::join [thread::create -joinable {}]
}
% exec ps -p [pid] -o pid,vsz,rss,args
  PID   VSZ  RSS COMMAND
 8317 21192 2272 ./tclsh

Here's my test run against Tcl 8.4.7 (has leak):

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd` ./tclsh
% info patchlevel
8.4.7
% lappend auto_path /usr/lib/tcl8.4; package require Thread
2.6.1
% exec ps -p [pid] -o pid,vsz,rss,args
  PID   VSZ  RSS COMMAND
 9358 12692 2000 ./tclsh
% for {set i 0} {$i < 1000} {incr i} {
    thread::join [thread::create -joinable {}]
}
% exec ps -p [pid] -o pid,vsz,rss,args
  PID   VSZ  RSS COMMAND
 9358 48272 29432 ./tclsh

As I said in email to the AOLSERVER mailing list, if you're using Tcl >= 8.4.7, I strongly suggest you roll back to Tcl 8.4.6, and hope that the yet-to-be-released Tcl 8.4.10 contains the necessary fix for this leak issue.

Daniel L. Smith writes a fantastic essay on the splintering of the Interweb; how data on the net has gravitated away from centralized services (mailing lists, Usenet, etc.) and towards personal publishing (blogs, forums, etc.) and how that has resulted in a “splintering” of information and service on the Internet, giving rise to new tools and applications that were and probably should remain unnecessary, if it weren’t for this splintering.

He goes on to suggest that there will eventually be a tipping point, that “we will continue to have an explosion in the splintering behavior of communication on the Net for about another two years or so, and then we’re going to hit a big Tipping Point – people will get fed up with the myriad of online avenues, and many of them will quickly die out (uh, not the people). We’re still in the “cool, gee-whiz” phase, and that will get replaced with the “ok, we don’t want to have 50 different online identities anymore” backlash.” Interesting prediction … which lead me to leave the following comment on his blog:

Back in the day, a company set out to make the gnarly techno-elite world of “the Internet” accessible to newbies. You’re familiar with that company: it was called America Online.

What it sounds like you’re pining for is a modern day America Online to come along, integrate all the “noise” and “splintered assets” of the great Web 2.0, and produce a coherent view of it all as a product.

Can lightning really strike twice? :-)

It will be interesting to see who can come along and build a service that reins in all the craptastic junk on the Interweb and makes it usable and useful to the every day person. I mean, I can’t seriously suggest to someone non-technical like my parents to “go download and install a RSS aggregator, set up a blog, go do X, Y and Z, then you’ll be able to fully enjoy the Interweb.” They need to be able to take a piece of removable media, stick it in a hole on their computer, and “just have access to it all.”

Good stuff. Keep on blogging.

Indeed, it will be interesting to see who steps up to the challenge of providing such a service, whether it be AOL or someone else. Or, if there is already sufficient momentum to make such a service impossible to create, which would be sad but unsurprising.

I’ve previously blogged, back in January 2005, about the German sensation surrounding Joy Gruttman’s “Schnappi das kleine Krokodil” song. Since it seems people are still actively searching for it, and I don’t want to keep updating the previous entry, I’ve started a new one.

Okay, publishing content via BitTorrent is annoying. I’m personally in favor of eDonkey2000, because it’s much easier to publish content with it than BitTorrent. If you’re looking for the Schnappi MP3, go download the eDonkey2000 client (scroll down for the free “Basic” versions), then use this “ed2k” link to download the MP3:

ed2k://|file|Schnappi das kleine Krokodil.mp3|947187|ebcd0b7f7160ffd9a56f1a622f192507|

The only downside of the eDonkey2000 P2P network is that because of its simplicity of publishing content, it has become inundated with adult content, spam and warez. I see a real opportunity for someone to provide a “filtered eDonkey2000 search” service that eliminates those results from searches, possibly also filtering stuff that is copyright infringing too, and it could be an excellent P2P platform.

Alternatively, you could always go to and go and buy the CD from Amazon.de but it seems to be out of stock or something — my German’s not that great. If you want a visual experience of the song, there’s the Schnappi video over at xoop.nl.

Andrew Grumet points out S5 Presents, a nod to Philip Greenspun‘s old WimpyPoint (web.archive.org link) system.

S5 Presents is based on Eric Meyer‘s S5 system: Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System, which is an incredibly simple and cross-platform way of delivering slide-shows inside a web browser. For a demo of the kind of slide show it produces, see the introductory slide-show on S5. I am so thrilled that Eric had the good sense to use XHTML 1.0 instead of OPML 1.0. S5 is a tangible example that reiterates my belief that OPML adds no value above and beyond what we already have available through XHTML alone.

I’m sold — I’m going to start using S5 for all my presentation needs where I can. I might still have to use Microsoft PowerPoint for those work-related presentations, but S5 is the killer app. All that’s needed is a decent WYSIWYG slide editor that can “Save As …” S5-conforming XHTML. Killer app.

Russell Beattie says this about modern mobile phone interface design:

Mobiles are the ultimate consumer computer. They are meant to be used by 12 year olds, teens, college kids, business people and your mother in law. But right now, the design of the interface is still way too confusing.

Russell definitely gets it. The real problem is that there’s too much choice — too many vendors, models, competing ideas, etc. A small minority of people can cope well with choice, but the majority just can’t. They need two choices, that’s it, either this or that. Too many phones with too many buttons (“… and not enough love to go around …“) — this is the land of confusion. People might even be better off if they only had one choice, but then they’d whine about monopolization and other nonsense instead.

Jonathan Schwartz made this statement after attending 3GSM:

And just in case you missed it, let me say it again: the majority of the world will first experience the internet through their mobile phones. We sometimes forget that 10 times as many people bought handsets last year as PC’s. Round numbers, there were a BILLION wireless devices sold last year, and around 100 million PC’s.

I can just see it now … millions of teenage kids surfing porn on their mobile phones, texting each other in solicitation for phone sex, mobile phone communities where they can pour out their emo whiny angst — is this where I think the future of technology ought to be? If the history of the Internet and the Web is doomed to repeat itself When The (Mobile) Revolution Comes, this is exactly where the future will end up, sadly.

As a parent of young kids, I won’t be looking for more user-friendly phones, instead I’ll be looking for phones with Parental Controls and anti-virus protection. In essence, I’ll want a company like AOL as my wireless provider, because they’ll look for ways to make my phone safer, simpler and easier to use. Sure, there’ll be the Yahoo!‘s and Google‘s of the industry creating really cool products for the niche geek audience, and they might keep a company like AOL on their toes in the user-friendly consumer space, but lets look at what company has years of experience in the space? There’s a reason AOL got the pejorative nickname “the training wheels for the Internet” — it’s true — and in the next several years, perhaps AOL can become “the training wheels of the mobile phone industry,” helping millions of people make use of their phones.

Or, maybe Yahoo will beat them to it, with really bright guys like Russell working for them. Or, something completely unexpected comes along and displaces mobile technology entirely (as we know it today) — that’d be very, very cool, too.