Vidal's Site

Installed Skype a few days ago. Maybe I am too late on this trend.... I was impressed with how it went through my Outlook looking for other Skype members. I was surprised however that it found only 4 other users out of all my tech saavy, earlier adopter friends. Hmm. If you are on Skype, let me know. Once I get some more people to talk to, I will post something about the experience of using it and whether it is worth using IMHO.

I installed this also. Seems extremely simplistic. Of course, I wasn't blown away by gmail at first, and now I really like it. If any of you are on GoogleTalk connect to me so we can try it. I only got a couple of you early adopters on it so far... You should have my @gmail.com address. If not, email me for it.

I attended Carnegie Mellon's Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI) Adopting and Using Open Source Software Conference 2005 in Redwood Shores, California on September 7, 2005. Open Source is an area that is going to impact every area of software tremendously, and it is trend that every company needs to leverage going forward. It's impressive that CMU has a center and conference on it. If you are not really familiar with open source, I think it is a good conference to checkout next year.
Here is just one small intereting take-away I got from the conference. I learned there are now initiatives like the Business Readiness Rating to rate software in an open and standardized way. As anyone who tries to use open source software quickly discovers, one of the hurdles is evaluating all the different alternatives. Obviously, you cannot use purchase price as a factor or a proxy of value. Now, of course, do things like openbrr need to be limited to just open source software?

If you have been counting cards and know that the odds are favorable to hit rather than stand (the normal play), you better think twice because the systems from NICE are watching, and you could be booted from the casino for making too smart a play. Look carefully at the photo on the right. The system from NICE is analyzing a blackjack game using video recognition technologies. It can identify the cards that you have, and it tracks how the game is going and how everyone is playing and betting. If you cheat or play too well, the NICE system will send an alarm to the casino staff e.g., "there is a card counter in seat 3 and table 20," and you will be out of luck.

Here is a tip from the guys at NICE, while most people think that an 18 is a good blackjack hand it turns out to lose more than 60% of the time based on their actual observations of millions of blackjack games. I have not checked their math. The only thing that NiceVision is missing is pattern recognition on the players’ faces, and they expect to have this soon.

Such amazing and ubiquitous video recognition has only been made possible recently through advances in computer hardware and software. The implications of such technology are staggering. Currently, systems like NiceVision are being used to at airports to scan for unattended baggage. But there is nothing to prevent this technology from being used in stores to identify you as a shopper and learn your patterns. I won't be surprised to walk into, for example, a Safeway that I have never been to before one day in 2015 and hear, "Welcome, Vidal. How have you been? You look well. We haven't seen you in a while...." How will the automated supermarket of the future know who I am? Because I walked into another Safeway five years ago in another state and the cameras captured and remembered everything. Everyone will be famous. How nice.

For my first product review on this site, I decided to share the Firefox extensions I find most useful. If you have not switched to Firefox already as your primary browser, I would be curious to know why not. In any event, one of the benefits of Firefox is all the incredible free extensions that are available. Here are the extensions I like with the links to download them. And please feeel free to comment if I left out any outstanding ones. There are so many and I am sure I have only discovered a small handful!

• downTHEMall! This is a useful for downloading multiple items, pictures, etc. from a single webpage in one shot. If this did not exist, I would have written it myself. When you need this, you need this, it can save huge amounts of time.
• MouseGestures. This extension saves you a tremendous amount of time navigating through web sites. The functionality is deep, and it is extensible, but in a nutshell you can go forward and backward through pages by just using your mouse. Very simple to use, MouseGestures is a huge efficiency gainer.
• Wayback. Adds the useful ability to go back in time and see what a web site looked like in the past. I don't use it that often, but it is incredible that archive.org is keeping this repository.
• Adblock. Names says it all.
• Customize Google. Ads useful extra links to your Google search results.
• del.icio.us toolbar. This is a must have. I have been using del.icio.us for the past few months and it is super useful social bookmarking tool., Later on this site, I have planned to publish a feed of del.icio.us links.
• PDF download. Adds the useful capability to open PDF files in a new tab which is not the Firefox default.
• Alexa Sidebar Again. Not as nearly useful as the Alexa toolbar for Internet Explorer (which rocks), nevertheless it has some value. If you don't use Alexa already to get info on web sites, it provides a lot of useful information. Someone needs to make an Alexa toolbar for Firefox soon.
• Yahoo! Toolbar. Has tons of functionality, but I don't use Yahoo! that much and I needed toolbar space, so I have this toolbar hidden by default.
• Google Toolbar for Firefox. This and the del.icio.us toolbar are my two most frequently used toolbars. Since Google is the place to search, I consider this pretty much required.
• Search Status. Displays Google page rank and Alexa rankings in the bottom corner of the browser window.
• Web Developer. If you are an aspiring XHTML and CSS geek, like me, go get this toolbar now! It adds incredibly useful features for looking at web pages. You can outline elements, look at tags, IDs, etc.

I don’t have time to write a review of this product, but I attended a talk about Yahoo! APIs on Monday and the speaker featured the Yahoo! Widgets. The widgets add helpful floating tools on your Mac or Windows desktop. Previously, this product was called Konfabulator and sold for $20 before it was acquired. Now they are free which is very nice of Yahoo!. These widgets are part of Yahoo!'s plans to start getting stuff onto your desktop, but that is the subject of another post. There is also a whole gallery of free add-on widgets. I am going to mention them here before I totally forget about them. These widgets are cool, and they look great.

To totally show off today, I am posting my first video blog entry. I took my handheld video camera to CTIA on Wednesday and recorded some clips. My first clip is a demo from my friend John Chaffee, President of Splash Data. In this video, John demonstrates his product SplashBlog which lets you instantly publish photos from your camera phone to an online photo blog to share with others. I thought this would be very appropriate for my first video blog. It's a great product, and I will let the video speak for itself. Click here to view video.

How hard was this? Plenty. I attended a presentation last weekend at Webzine 2005 about video blogging which pointed me to the excellent tutorial site http://www.freevlog.org/.

What could possibly go wrong? I had immediate video compatiblity problems between the my PC and SC-X105L camera. I couldn't get either Quicktime Pro or Windows Movie Maker to edit the AVI videos created by the camera. I downloaded numerous codecs, and diagnostic tools. Interestingly, I could view my videos just fine in Windows Media Player 10 but editing them is a different matter. After a lot of messing around (read days), and downloading stuff, I was able to get this done using Ulead Video Studio 9 which also includes a plug-in to make PSP movies in MPEG4 format. The PSP verison of the video is very cool. I didn't get a chance yet to play with all the cool editing and mixing features of Ulead Video Studio 9.

Now, I am the media, and I can broadcast video.

I was at the Apple store a few weekends ago with my daughter. She took me to see the PhotoBooth software. It's simple and incredibly fun software that lets you add effects to pictures taken with the built-in camera. The screen flashes white when it takes a picture which is very clever and emulates the flash on a camera. Of course, the computer doesn't have a flash. And since the computers in the store are connected to the Internet we were able to send the pictures off to ourselves. Very cool. The only downside to this software is that it only runs on iMacs and the new Macbook pro's. You cant buy it separately if you already have a Mac or a different one.

Checkout the following slick video to see the new, user interface improvements in Office 2007. Gone are the toolbars, replaced by ribbons and galleries. The improvements and new features in Office 2007 look really good. Will this require you to upgrade to Vista?

I was talking with my friend Ellen today who just launched a new website this March called “Bits du Jour.� This is a one day discount site where you can get incredible deals on software. It is similar to the popular woot.com, except that Bits du Jour is focused on software. Bits du Jour got mentioned last week in the Wall Street Journal. Ellen has done a great job on bringing up this site. I love the look of it. If you want some great deals, or have downloadable products to sell, check it out!

If you have a Sony Reader device, please check out my new product called “Readerette Transferrer.� It downloads RSS/Atom feeds and webpages and saves them automatically into PDF files optimized for the Sony Reader device display. This is the first of many new products I will be releasing this year.

A few weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my desktop PC to Vista. In my experience, Windows needs to be wiped and reloaded about once a year to get rid of built-up crud and it was about time for my XP installation to be reloaded. Since I had a copy of Vista Ultimate and was going to have to reload XP anyway, I gave it a try. A couple of friends who are also considering this and asked me how it went. I made complete copy of my C drive using DriveImage XML (freeware) in case something went wrong and I needed to revert. I ran the Vista Upgrade as I had read this totally wipes your Windows directory and copies over your XP stuff into Vista and there was no performance benefit from doing a fresh install. I got a lot of programs so I decided to try to save time doing this. In retrospect, I might do a fresh install next time.

• One of my 2 video cards didn’t work at all under Vista so I had to throw it away and buy a new one $$.
• Norton Antivirus doesn’t work either so I had to uninstall it and reload a fresh copy from Symantec site. The reinstall lost my license info so I had to reload that too. Annoying.
• My HP 2600n color laser jet was not supported so I couldn’t print anymore. HP says they will have a driver in June 2007. A few weeks later I found the proper driver on another HP site (!) and was able to print.
• QuickBooks 2006 is incompatible with Vista, so I had to order a new copy of QuickBooks 2007. Note: there is no upgrade pricing so you have to buy all over again. Thanks Intuit. $$$
• Two programs I rely on: VMWare and Ultramon didn’t run under Vista. Fortunately, there are betas of these two out which support Vista so I was saved.
• I had to go and download new native approved video, webcam, keyboard and mouse drivers from vendor sites even if the vendor was Microsoft in some cases. That didn’t make much sense to me.
• I synced my Windows Mobile Smartphone using the new Windows Mobile Device Center. It tried to duplicate all my data between the Smartphone and Outlook. Unbelievably bad.
• iTunes 7 will sometimes just stop playing working. No fix.
• Console2 (another favorite) also will just stop working sometimes. No fix.

Overall, it took me a few days of messing with Windows Vista and some $$$ to get up and working again. It wasn't a disaster but not a great time either. It is no faster than XP on my machine. I am spending less time in Windows these days and more time running Ubuntu 7 which I dual boot with Vista.

Contact Hero is a new web based address book and contact manager optimized for mobile devices that I have developed. Please try the service and give me your feedback. Using Contact Hero you can:

• Keep track of all your contacts from any PC or any Internet enabled mobile device at mobile.contacthero.com
• Link calls to make with contacts, and keep a Contact History
• Use Blackberry or iPhone optimized versions
• Import your contacts from Outlook, Google or Yahoo!
• And more...