Building a Better Office

Grok Headline matches for Building a Better Office

Office 2003 Sample: Building Office 2003
Research Services That Work Offline

Office 2003 Sample: Building Office 2003
Research Services That Work Offline 06/15/2004 12:27 AM
To work through this demonstration, you need Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. With Visual Studio .NET, we use the wizards to build a simple, custom Microsoft Windows service that launches Cassini, a managed code Web server that is described in the article, on the local computer. This Web server hosts the research provider consumed by the research task pane in Office 2003 editions. The code samples are provided in Microsoft Visual C# development language.

Jeeves Moves To New Office Building

Jeeves Moves To New Office Building 07/15/2004 08:58 AM
"... signed an 8 1/2 year lease to move 170 employees to the 555 City Center building on Dec. 1."

Rev Moon _Crowned_ in a US Congress
(Senate) office building

Rev Moon _Crowned_ in a US Congress
(Senate) office building 06/22/2004 05:56 AM

salon.com/news/feature/2004/06/21/moon/index.html
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Office 2003 Tool: FabriKam – The
Microsoft Office System Solutions
Learning Platform

Office 2003 Tool: FabriKam – The
Microsoft Office System Solutions
Learning Platform 08/09/2004 02:30 AM
The CHM provides an overview of the FabriKam project and how to use the FabriKam virtual PC environment and documentation to best learn about the rich potential of the Microsoft Office System as a development platform. Each solution and platform component section described the salient points that help developers focus on areas of interest.

OpenOSX Office 1.5.1: Microsoft Office
ALternative Has Some Hits, Many Misses

OpenOSX Office 1.5.1: Microsoft Office
ALternative Has Some Hits, Many Misses 04/05/2005 01:27 AM

By Rob Griffiths, Macworld

Office Suite: MobiSystems Office
Standard Updated

Office Suite: MobiSystems Office
Standard Updated 06/21/2004 09:20 AM

Office 2003 broke (uninstalled) an
earlier Office app

Office 2003 broke (uninstalled) an
earlier Office app 03/06/2004 02:01 AM
Not exactly a security story, but definitely related to my earlier posts today: Installing Office 2003 "breaks" (uninstalls) an earlier Office application, Microsoft Photo Editor. With effort (and an Office XP CD-ROM), the older program can be reinstalled, but one...

Microsoft To Bridge Office, Back Office
Apps

Microsoft To Bridge Office, Back Office
Apps 01/26/2004 01:10 AM
Microsoft continues to build bridges between Office desktop apps and reservoirs of back-office data. The "Information Worker Bridge" project now under way seeks to make it easier for integrators or in-house developers to make Excel or Word de-facto front ends for back-end accounting, ERP or other applications, sources said. In theory, this would take back-office integration beyond ODBC drivers and InfoPath, the Office application that lets people build dynamic forms on their desktops that tap into back-office XML data.

HyperOffice Brings Enterprise
Collaboration and Communication
Solutions To Small Office/Home Office
(SOHO) Businesses For A Fraction Of The
Cost

HyperOffice Brings Enterprise
Collaboration and Communication
Solutions To Small Office/Home Office
(SOHO) Businesses For A Fraction Of The
Cost 03/22/2005 03:37 PM
Intranet Starter Pack gives SOHOs and start-ups a hosted intranet complete with business-class email, shared calendars, document management, task manager, and global address books for only $14.95 per month. [PRWEB Mar 22, 2005]

Corel WordPerfect Office 12: The Other
Office Suite

Corel WordPerfect Office 12: The Other
Office Suite 04/29/2004 04:09 PM
While OpenOffice.org might get all the attention in the battle to unseat Microsoft Office, Corel's suite is the real number two in the market.

Box Office Mojo > Daily Box Office
> 06-25-2004

Box Office Mojo > Daily Box Office
> 06-25-2004 06/26/2004 03:41 PM
Fahrenheit' rocks the box office .. grosses like this .. every other movie

boxofficemojo.com/daily/chart/?sortdate=2004-06-25&p=.htm
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Microsoft Office 2003 Customers Boost
Productivity and Business Insight With
the Availability of Two New Office
Business Intelligence Accelerators

Microsoft Office 2003 Customers Boost
Productivity and Business Insight With
the Availability of Two New Office
Business Intelligence Accelerators 06/02/2004 12:06 PM
Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of two new Office 2003 Business Intelligence (BI) Accelerators, the Microsoft® Office Business Scorecards Accelerator and the Microsoft Office Excel Add-in for SQL Server (TM) Analysis Services. Designed for and built on the Microsoft Office System and Windows Server System (TM) , the Office BI Accelerators provide customers and partners with increased access to data that is critical to maximizing business performance. Information workers and industry partners can also use the accelerators to assess performance in real time and reshape strategy and redeploy resources as market conditions change, staying one step ahead of their competition. By taking advantage of existing Microsoft technology investments, the accelerators are a cost-effective way for end users and partners to increase their business insight and automate formerly manual business processes, providing greater efficiency, productivity and enhanced decision-making.

MS Office Pro users will get MS Office
Standard an

MS Office Pro users will get MS Office
Standard an 07/24/2004 05:44 PM

Migration from Office 97 to Office 2003

Migration from Office 97 to Office 2003 04/27/2004 06:12 AM

Mac Office Is Better Than Windows Office
In Some Ways

Mac Office Is Better Than Windows Office
In Some Ways 07/15/2004 06:56 PM
By Julio Ojedazapata, Pioneer Press (via MyAppleMenu)

Microsoft Office 2000 to Microsoft
Office 2003 Migration Issues

Microsoft Office 2000 to Microsoft
Office 2003 Migration Issues 04/25/2004 11:22 AM

Microsoft Office Data Assistant for
Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2003

Microsoft Office Data Assistant for
Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2003 05/27/2004 03:09 AM
The Data Assistant for Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® 2003 provides an easy-to-use method of inserting and managing graphical data objects such as Visio drawings, and Excel charts and named ranges into PowerPoint presentations. There are three basic features for the tool: inserting graphical data objects into PowerPoint, saving graphical data objects for future use, and retrieving saved graphical data objects for reuse. Because the Data Assistant creates a connection between PowerPoint and the host application of the data object (Excel or Visio), you have the option of inserting the data object as it was saved or refreshing it to reflect any changes that were made to the data object.

Microsoft Office XP to Microsoft Office
2003 Migration Issues

Microsoft Office XP to Microsoft Office
2003 Migration Issues 04/25/2004 11:22 AM

Hi, This Is Jenny and My Office Is
Currently Out of the Office

Hi, This Is Jenny and My Office Is
Currently Out of the Office 12/12/2003 10:20 AM

Blackberry News

"From Cathy S. in Calendar/Courts:
I just read a blurb in Corporate Counsel that will resonate with many attorneys here:

'Wireless E-mail Improves Productivity: A new report from The Radicati Group Inc., Enterprise Wireless E-mail Market Trends, 2003-2007, [PDF] says by the end of 2003, employees using wireless e-mail will have put in an extra 55 minutes of work per day. This figure will grow to 80 minutes by the end of 2007.' " [The KERBlog]

With my Treo 600, I'm already traveling down this path, but I actually don't mind it and it's not much of a burden. I tend to check my work email when I'm standing in line somewhere or doing something equally time-wasting. Except, now I'm not wasting time anymore. So I figure I'm racking up comp time.  :-D

Building Yourself A DMZ

Building Yourself A DMZ 06/22/2004 04:24 AM
By Daniel R. Miessler Eventually, if you get interested enough in information security or start hosting services on your network, you are going to wonder what a DMZ is and why you should or should not have one. DMZ is an acronym that stands for demilitarized zone, and in the ‘real’ world it is the location between two hostile entities such as North and South Korea. In the world of information security community, however, it’s a separate, untrusted network where any machines serving public services (web, email, gaming, etc) should be placed. It’s a buffer zone between a completely unsafe network (like the Internet) and a relatively trusted network (like your private LAN). The primary purpose for this separation is so that a compromise in your DMZ does not automatically result in a compromise of your private network as well. Design Considerations I’ll be discussing two main ways to implement a DMZ. The first is using three NICs in a single firewall machine as follows: NIC1 for the WAN : Your gateway to the Internet; everything comes and goes through this NIC NIC2 for the LAN : Behind this NIC is where you have all your private assets, i.e. file servers, domain controllers, questionable media collections, etc. NIC3 for the DMZ : This is where you put any machine that you want to allow people on the Internet to connect to, i.e. web servers, ftp servers, mail servers, game servers, etc. This is one method of creating a DMZ, but it is not the best way. This configuration allows the security of both your DMZ and your LAN to lie in one system. If your machine that has all three of those NICs in it is compromised, so is your DMZ and your private network as well. Basically, you are allowing the Internet to touch the very same machine that determines how secure your internal LAN is, and this is not ideal. The better way to do this is with three completely separate networks and two firewalls - one on the border of your WAN (which handles your connection usually) - and one on the border of your internal LAN. This design makes it so that two separate devices must be compromised in order to get to your internal LAN, and as you will see later - it’s no an easy thing to do. Implementation We’re going to proceed with the second and more secure configuration which is often referred to as a ‘sandwich DMZ’ due to the use of two firewalls (the servers in the DMZ are the meat). Let’s say you have two firewall devices available to you - a broadband router such as a Linksys, and a Linux-based firewall like an Astaro or SmoothWall box. You start by placing your Linksys on your border (right behind your modem), and connecting the LAN side of that router to a hub or switch. To that hub or switch (your DMZ hub/switch) you connect your bastion hosts/public server(s). These machines run the services that you want people to be able to connect to from the Internet. This may be a web site, an FTP server, a mail server, or a multiplayer game box like WCIII or Counterstrike. You want this machine to be hardened as much as possible, meaning that it is completely patched, not running any unnecessary services, and is tightened down as much as possible in terms of configuration. Now, to that same hub (the DMZ hub) you are going to attach another network cable that goes to the external interface of your internal firewall (your Linux firewall). It is important to note that you want your strongest firewall closest to your LAN; or, putting it another way, you want your least powerful firewall on your border. This may seem counterintuitive but it’s usually best. Basically, you want the most powerful and most configurable firewall protecting your LAN - not your DMZ. Then connect another cable from the internal interface of your Linux box to another hub (your internal hub). All of your LAN machines will connect to that. If that was confusing, think of it this way: Internet -> Modem Modem -> Router Router -> DMZ Hub DMZ Switch -> Web/Mail/FTP/Game Servers DMZ Switch -> Linux Firewall External NIC Linux Firewall Internal NIC -> LAN Hub LAN Hub -> LAN Systems Benefits Ok, so let’s take a look at the added security that is offered by this setup. First off, at the border you have NAT translation that passes only the ports that you need to in order for people on the Internet to access the servers in your DMZ. Let’s say, for example, that you’re running a web server, an FTP server, and a game server for a game called Foo. On your border router/firewall you pass ports 80, 21, and 10050 (the Foo server port). All attempted connections to your external, WAN IP address that aren’t on those ports drop dead at your router; only those three ports are allowed through because of NAT. The nature of NAT as implemented on most SOHO routers dictates that only two types of traffic can pass from the outside of the router to the inside: return traffic (traffic that’s part of a connection that originated from the inside of the NAT device, and any incoming traffic to ports that are defined as ‘passed’ in your NAT configuration. All packets traversing the device are compared to a table inside the device that is similar to a firewall policy, and if a given packet doesn’t fall into one of the two categories above, it gets put on the floor. This side effect of NAT, while not its original or main goal, is a fairly powerful security feature, and it makes up our first layer of defense on the border. Of course, if your device supports packet filtering of any sort in addition to NAT then you can further lockdown your perimeter by using that functionality as well. This first border layer, while being good, is just one layer of the shielding offered by this configuration. The real beauty of this setup lies in what happens if someone is able to compromise a machine in your DMZ. Imagine that you have the setup I laid out above, but unbeknownst to you there is a major, undiscovered vulnerability in your Apache or IIS server. While you’re out and about thinking all is well, someone launches the zero-day exploit at your box and takes it over. Now what? Now nothing. Your second and more powerful firewall (the one that they are still outside of) - does not pass ANY traffic from the DMZ to the LAN. In fact, you should have your internal firewall configured in such a way that it won’t even reply at all to any DMZ machines - no ICMP, no port scans, nothing. And now, rather than being able to bounce around on your juicy internal LAN like they planned, they are stuck in the middle of a completely untrusted, isolated network that doesn’t have anything on it other than what you intended for public viewing anyway. This is a DMZ. Even if they did know the IP of the internal firewall, it wouldn’t even consider passing connection attempts from the DMZ. This internal layer of protection is NAT’d just like your first layer, only there are no ports being passed inside like from the Internet to the DMZ. Due to the NAT table, and your lack of ports being passed, your second firewall actually has no idea what to do with packets that are designed to initiate new connections with it, so it just drops them. The only traffic that is going to make it through that firewall is traffic initiated from the inside, i.e. when you go to /., it will allow the web content to come back to you so you can view the page, but if someone tries to initiate a new connection to you, they get dropped. Both NAT and stateful packet inspection (an advanced firewall technology that’s built into modern Linux firewalls) afford this protection to you - each in different ways. Example Scenario So, to sum it all up, imagine you have your network setup the way we have talked about above, and someone with a zero-day exploit is scanning around looking for web daemons to tear up and they find yours. So, they connect to it, check the version you are running to confirm that you’re vulnerable, and then scurry to fire up their new exploit tool that someone else wrote. What they probably don’t know is that they are actually connecting to a ‘non-routable’ IP in your DMZ. It has no ‘real’ IP address as far as the Internet is concerned, and if you hadn’t passed that port on your router they wouldn’t have seen anything at all with their scan. But let’s say they do see your web daemon because you are passing port 80 through to your web server, and it turns out it’s vulnerable. They run their exploit and get complete control of your box. This, of course, causes them tremendous joy, and they hurry to tell all their buddies because they think they’re starring in Hackers now. The thing is, they have little to celebrate. All they have is a barebones server with nothing of value on it - no vital info, no browsing history, no personal information, nothing. In fact, all the attacker has access to is content that you wanted the public to see in the first place! (which is also safely backed up, of course). They proceed to poke around in your DMZ only to find that there isn’t anything there that they couldn’t have seen from the other side of the planet with a web browser. The odds are that at this point they’ll either load some trash onto your system in order to use it as a server or an attack zombie, or they’ll just deface and/or destroy it. Either way it doesn’t matter. The moment you detect what has happened (see Snort, Tripwire, etc) you simply pull the plug, reinstall the box, and restore the backup. Within a few minutes you have a brand spanking new system ready to go back online, and at no point during the process was your private LAN in danger. This is the benefit of running a true DMZ. Things To Keep In Mind There are a couple of things worth mentioning about DMZs that I’d like to cover. First of all, there are many SOHO appliances on the market that advertise themselves as having a DMZ. Be weary of these. Some do actually have a true DMZ interface that can be used in the triple-homed configuration and combined with packet filtering, but many just have a port that all traffic gets forwarded to when you enable the ‘DMZ’. This is a horrible perversion of the word, and it offers very little, if any, security. What that basically does is pass all ports from the external interface to the box that you connect to the DMZ port. If security is a priority, don’t do that. This is nothing but another example of manufacturers catching onto buzzwords and inserting them into their marketing. Rule of thumb: it’s not a true DMZ interface unless the product gives you full control of what gets passed back (via NAT) to machines connected to it. There is also some debate on whether to use hubs or switches for connectivity within your DMZ and LAN, due to security concerns associated with hubs. I used the word ‘hub’ in the paragraphs above for the sake of simplicity, but it’s important to consider the performance and security implications of using each. On the security side, many people say not to use a hub because it would be possible for someone with access to a compromised machine (and the right tools) to run a sniffer and watch all of the traffic going between the Internet and DMZ to the private LAN. This is potentially a concern, but anyone who is going to sniff your internal traffic in order to launch a sophisticated attack later is going to know how to sniff across most switches as well. It is trivial enough to do this that it’s arguably permissible to use a hub in the DMZ if you have a good reason to. I do so in order to allow my IDS machine in the DMZ to be able to see all traffic on that network. Switches with mirror ports are still a bit too pricey (but I’m watching ebay for 2950s) Last but not least, a DMZ is not an impenetrable defense vs. attacks. It’ll stop the vast majority of people that the average person running services would come upon, but if a highly skilled cracker wanted spend a whole lot of time and effort, he/she could still be successful. Nothing is worse for your security than thinking you are completely secure. For questions and/or feedback, I can be reached at daniel@dmiessler.com. ‘cat knowledge | grep understanding’

Le Building

Le Building 06/24/2005 04:49 PM
Le Building (quicktime) is a minute-and-a-half film that was used as an opening for the 2005 Annecy International Animated Film Festival. Made by students. Kids today. What can't they do? Making-of movie here. via cartoonbrew

Building a Better Fry

Building a Better Fry 05/18/2004 02:49 PM
Privately held Simplot offers fries without unsaturated fats.

Building a distro

Building a distro 01/03/2005 06:17 AM
You download a CD or maybe a diskette image, transfer it to the appropriate media, boot your computer with it, and voilà, you're running Linux. It sounds so simple -- but a great deal of work goes into creating that software. Beginning about two years ago, I spent a year and a half building a desktop-oriented GNU/Linux distribution named MfxLinux, designed to be tightly integrated with Crowell Systems' Medformix medical office management system. Along the way, as with any project a lot of design and implementation decisions had to be made -- some of which worked out better than others.

Building the Recipe Web?

Building the Recipe Web? 11/14/2003 06:20 PM

RecipeML is a format for representing recipes on computer. It is written in the increasingly popularExtensible Markup Language - XML.

If you run a recipe web site, or are creating a software program&209;on any platform&209;that works with recipes, then you should consider using RecipeML for coding your recipes! See the FAQs and the new examples for more info.

So I'm all about this microcontent thing, thinking recently about recipes since reading Marc Canter's post about them. Actually, I've been thinking about them for a couple of years now, since I'd really like to start cooking some decent meals with the web's help. Oh yeah, and I'm a geek, so tinkering with some data would be fun too. One thing I rarely notice mentioned when ideas like this come up is pre-existing work. Like RecipeML or even the non-XML MealMaster format. Both of these have been around for quite a long time, especially so in the case of MealMaster. In fact, if someone wanted to bootstrap a collection of recipes, you can find a ton (150,000) of MealMaster recipes as well as a smaller archive (10,000) of RecipeML files. Of course, I'm not sure about the copyright situation with any of these, but it's a start anyway. But, the real strength in a recipe web would come from cooking bloggers. Supply them with tools to generate RecipeML, post them on a blog server, and index them in an RSS feed. Then, geeks get to work building the recipe aggregators. Hell, I'm thinking I might even give this a shot. Since I'd really like to play with some RDF concepts, maybe I'll write some adaptors to munge RecipeML and MealMaster into RDF recipe data. Cross that with FOAF and other RDF whackyness, and build an empire of recipe data. The thing I wonder, though, is why hasn't anyone done this already? And why hasn't anyone really mentioned much about what's out there already like RecipeML and MealMaster? It seems like the perfect time to add this into the blogosphere.

Building the Recipe Web II

Building the Recipe Web II 11/16/2003 11:48 PM

Every once in a while, someone gets ideas about crossing recipes and computers. Of course, I love the idea. Two common ideas we hear a lot are 1) to put recipes in XML format and do all sorts of wonderful things and 2) that kitchen appliances should be smart and you should be able to feed them recipes and have your food made for you. They're both great ideas, but invariably, people underestimate the work involved ("But it's just a recipe!") and overestimate the usefulness ("It would be so cool!").

Here’s a good response from someone who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to recipes on the web—he’s one of the contributors to the aforementioned RecipeML format and is part of the team responsible for Recipezaar . While I think that recipes as syndicated microcontent could be a good thing, Troy makes some important points here.

Building a community

Building a community 04/23/2004 05:38 PM
Gareth Simpson: Objectively speaking, if I downloaded FeedThing in its current state, I’d not bother with it again (I know this by the pile of dead aggregators in my recycle bin). ...

Building Applications with POE

Building Applications with POE 07/23/2004 06:32 PM
In Matt Cashner's second article on POE, he describes how to fit together POE's components into event-driven applications.

"wrong building"

"wrong building" 03/20/2003 08:32 AM

still building and burning

still building and burning 02/01/2005 09:53 PM

For the past week or so, I've been furiously working on my MacWorld presentation, trying to find exactly what I want to say, and just the right way to say it. It's been a lot more difficult than I had anticipated. This is going to be a very different type of experience than what people are used to at keynotes. I'm not going to talk about the future of anything, or pontificate about how Apple is doing this or not doing that . . . I'm strictly there to entertain the audience. I'm a little nervous about how they'll respond, so I've thrown out everything and started over too many times to count. The entire time, I've watched the clock get closer and closer to 9:30 Thursday morning.

When I least expected it (around seven this morning as I packed lunches for Ryan and Nolan), the whole thing sprung into my head fully formed. What a relief! This is my favorite way to write: I can see the entire thing in my mind, like I'm looking down on a huge map. Because I know how the general landscape looks, I can zoom in on some areas and discover really interesting and unexpected details, then pull back to see the whole thing. The entire time, I know where I'm headed, so I'm not afraid to take some side trips as I transcribe what my brain's come up with when I wasn't paying attention.

I'm not going to publish all my remarks ahead of time like I usually do, because I think there will be a webcast, and I don't want to give it all away . . . but it's been so much fun to develop, I don't want to wait two whole days to share it with an audience, so I'm going to preview a little bit of it right now:

I was twelve going on thirteen the first time I saw a Macintosh computer. It happened in the summer of 1984 -- a long time ago; even longer if you measure according to Moore's Law.

I was in a bookstore in the San Fernando Valley, looking for a magazine (I think it was called "Byte.") My friend Brian told me that this magazine was filled with playable arcade games — all I had to do was copy the programs, written in BASIC, to my TI 99/4a.

"Wil, we're late for dinner. We have to leave now." It was my father. He held my brother's hand, and my six year-old sister sat atop his shoulders.

I looked at the rack in front of me: the magazine I had hoped to find wasn't there, and now I would have to leave empty-handed. I tried to stall him.

"Hey, did you see this, dad?" I took a book off the shelf. The picture on the cover showed that someone had written "hello" in cursive on a computer's built-in monitor.

He took it from me and looked at it.

"That should keep him occupied for a minute, and I can find this maga—"

"Jeremy," he said to my kid brother, "take this to mommy and tell her we're ready to leave."

Before I could protest, my brother ran the book across the store, my mother paid for it, and we were on our way to The Jolly Roger restaurant to celebrate my being cast in a movie called "The Body."

In 1984, my family had almost achieved escape velocity from our white trash roots, but we were still poor. It was a big deal to go out to dinner, it was a big deal to buy a book, and I didn't want to tell my dad that he'd paid for something I didn't want. So I masked my disappointment and began to read.

"This is made by Apple? Oh, man! Kevin has that Apple ][, and it's totally lame! It doesn't play Pac Man like the arcade, and you can't even hook it up to the television!"

To give this thought some context: in 1984 I thought that Thriller was "awesome" and letting my boxers hang out the bottom of my corduroy OP shorts was "rad," so perhaps I wasn't the best judge of what was and wasn't lame.

It took less than fifteen minutes to drive from the bookstore to the restaurant, and I read that book the entire way. By the time we got out of the car, I had completely forgotten about my silly TI 99/4a. This "Macintosh" computer, I had decided, was the future.

"Dad! This is so cool!" I said as we got out of the car. "You use this thing called a 'mouse' to tell the computer what to do!"

My dad nodded politely while he helped my mom get my sister out of her car seat.

"Oh really?"

"Yeah! And it's got this puzzle game built right into it, and you can use this mouse thing to draw pictures, and it's got something called 'MacWrite' that I could use to write stories, and there's a clock, and it makes a happy face when you turn it on, and . . ."

I took the book with me into the restaurant, and by the end of the meal I had convinced myself that I had to own one of these machines.

"Mom," I said, in my most grown-up voice, as we finished dinner, "a lot of other kids at school have computers, and they use them for homework, and to learn math and stuff."

"What about your Texas Instruments thing?" She said.

"Pish!" I said, "That thing? All that can do is play games! And it doesn't have a mouse. I hear that all the new computers will have mouses. They're very important."

My parents looked at each other.

"We'll think about it," they said, in unison.

"Oh? Good. Because, you know, it has a built-in monitor, so I wouldn't have to hook it up to the television when you guys want to watch TV."

"Thank you for thinking of us," my father said, dryly.

I beamed. This was going very well.

"And it's portable, too! See?" I opened the book, and showed them a picture of the handle that was built into the top. "I could get a carrying case, and take it with me to Aunt Val's when we go to visit. I could totally entertain myself, and I wouldn't bother you guys at all."

"That's very thoughtful," my mother said.

"Have you thought about selling cars?" my father asked.

"No. Why?"

After I tell the story of how I got my first Mac, and give a quick synopsis of my history from then until now:

"In 1988, I attended my first MacWorld, and after about an hour here, I realized that, even though I'd upgraded it to four megabytes of RAM, my MacPlus was woefully out of date. I was flush with cash from my weekly gig on Star Trek, so I went nuts: I bought a Macintosh IIx, a 30MB SCSI hard drive, a 2400 baud modem, and eight 1MB SIMMS. When I booted it the first time, I experienced a rush of excitement that I hadn't felt since I first completed that cool built-in puzzle back in 1984: two hundred and fifty-six fabulous, vibrant, living colors splashed across my screen."

Then, I plan to segue into Just A Geek. I'll talk a bit about how I wrote my entire final draft on my iBook, and then I have this thing that I hope Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak will maybe hear someday: "Steve and Woz? Thank you for being such a big part of my life. Thank you for showing people like me that if you dream it, you can do it, even — especially — when nobody else believes in you."

I'll read two stories that I hope have a little bit of a universal appeal: The Trade, and Fireworks. If everything goes well, I'll come in at just under an hour, and everyone will enjoy themselves.

And remember, if you're in the area and are not coming to MacWorld, you can still come out to Borders in Union Square on Friday night, where I'll be reading from and signing Just A Geek. I start at 7pm.

Building Web applications with JDK 1.4.2

Building Web applications with JDK 1.4.2 12/02/2003 03:03 AM
CNET Dec 2 2003 1:47AM ET

Building a better Bush

Building a better Bush 02/10/2004 06:47 AM
How an Andover-Yale preppy, scion of one of our nation's most powerful families, was reinvented as a straight-shootin' Texan with "regular guy" values. An excerpt from "Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell You."

Building Your Own LazyWeb

Building Your Own LazyWeb 07/24/2004 06:17 PM
I should have got this off my to-do list ages ago, but anyway. I've tidied up the complete code and instructions (not exactly long or complicated I grant you) to the LazyWeb. Want a LazyWeb of your very own? Have...

Photographing Every Building Everywhere

Photographing Every Building Everywhere 05/25/2004 08:49 PM
If you thought that Barbara Streisand got bent out of shape over someone photographing her house from public airspace as part of an effort to document the entire coastline, just imagine how lots of people will feel about some random van, covered in digital cameras, roaming through their neighborhood, snapping pictures of everything, to create a giant photographic database of every building in the US, connected via GPS location info to satellite photos for the view from the sky. The idea is to then offer this database to insurance companies and police to use in appraisals, investigations or... well... to spy on what your property looks like, I guess. There have been similar projects, though on a smaller scale. There was one such project a few years ago where you could tour Manhattan in pictures. Photographers had literally taken thousands of photos at street level in Manhattan and connected them to let you take something of a virtual tour of the city. In the meantime, the folks working on this "photograph every building" project should team up with those researchers in the UK who wanted to create a building recognition system that would let you snap a photo of a building with your camera phone, and have the phone immediately tell you where you are. Of course, you could also see the technology being useful for services like online mapping applications, where they could give you not only turn by turn directions, but also photos of specific buildings or landmarks where you should turn. Whether you think this is cool or creepy (or possibly, both), it sounds like the company is still a long way from actually bringing this to market.

Building a better RSS Feed

Building a better RSS Feed 07/07/2004 09:17 PM

Is It On? Building Silent PCs

Is It On? Building Silent PCs 11/10/2003 11:14 PM
The demand for quiet computers is growing, especially as people use them to play music or stream video. Several companies build them from scratch or modify boxes from the big computer makers, and it doesn't cost much to lower the decibels.

Building a better Windows XP

Building a better Windows XP 07/04/2004 08:31 PM
ZDNet Jul 5 2004 0:33AM GMT

Building Better Batteries

Building Better Batteries 12/24/2004 12:29 PM
David Pescovitz: My latest article for TheFeature is about new battery designs for mobile devices, from an onboard nuclear trickle charger that harnesses radioactive energy to a microbattery made with the same techniques used to fabricate computer chips.

"In late 18th century, Italian physicist Luigi Galvani shocked the public by demonstrating that an amputated frog's leg twitched when touched with certain metals. Galvani was convinced that energy stored in the frog's leg caused the jerk. He called the accumulated juice "animal electricity." Galvani's friend Alessandro Volta called it nonsense. To prove that the energy came from the metal, not the flesh, Volta eventually made a sandwich of silver, moist cardboard, and zinc. His device also spurred frogs' legs to spasm. In the end, Volta won the intellectual battle and also invented the battery. Two hundred years later, the technology hasn't changed much."

Link

Building Dictionaries With SAX

Building Dictionaries With SAX 01/16/2004 10:57 AM
In Uche Ogbuji's latest Python and XML column he describes an optimization technique for speeding up Python XML applications by using SAX to build specialized Python dictionaries.

Building a Better Mozilla

Building a Better Mozilla 07/07/2004 04:43 AM
Browsing the Web with Mozilla can be pretty bare-bones, but there are tons of software components available to extend its capabilities. By Michelle Delio.
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