Laszlo: rich internet applications

MINDSEYE was approached by a VC to evaluate this product a couple months ago, looks like they’re doing pretty well. The product itself (I’m sure I’m supposed to be under NDA w/ this, but whatever) is interesting in that you write your Laszlo code using a Laszlo flavor of XML, save it and then the Laszlo engine compiles it into a .swf. So instead of firing up your Flash MX editor to create a SWF, you can use a text editor. If you’re interested in rich internet applications, check out the demo.

new cms book

Haven’t read it yet, but looks interesting. I think it’s interesting that there aren’t that many books on Content Management. Because it’s easy? Because it’s hard to define? Because it’s product specific? Who knows?

butterfly economics

Currently reading Butterfly Economics: A New General Theory of Social and Economic Behavior. The books central central premise is that “… conventional economics is mistaken when it views the economy and society as a machine, whose behavior, no matter how complicated, is ultimately predictable and controllable.

On the contrary, human society is much more like a living organism — a living creature, whose behavior can only be understood by looking at the complex interactions of its individual parts.” The books chapters explore various sections of our society and world that support this premise, the most interesting of which might be the chapter abouts ants(!).

“Ants, faced with two identical food sources, were observed to concentrate more on one of these but, after a period, they would turn their attention to the other. The same phenomenon has been observed in humans choosing between restaurants. After discussing the nature of foraging and recruitment behavior in ants, a simple model of stochastic recruitment is suggested. This explains the “herding” and “epidemics” described in the literature on financial markets as corresponding to the equilibrium distributio n of a stochastic process rather than to switching between multiple equilibria.” (abstract).

Sounds scary! Succintly, ants, given a choice between A and B (where A & B are equal) don’t go to A 50% of the time and B 50% of the time; turns out that humans don’t either, which is why one particular restaurant will be packed for 3 months and then empty for 2… and I think helps explain why creating “buzz” is so important for companies today… Is PHP better than ASP? or JSP? or CFM? maybe, but so and so says that Perl is better… Should we see One Hour Photo or Simone? Truth is almost *everything* we buy as consumers is influenced by what other people tell us… I think it’s only going to get worse… I find myself not buying books until I see good reviews on Amazon, I won’t see movies until they’ve been out for awhile and someone tells me I ‘have’ to see it. Anyways..

While doing searches on google for more on ants, I came across this interesting page that talks about various AI ant robot studies.

jabber server installed

How fun is this! I had an hour free this afternoon so I read over the docs on installing the AIM transport for jabber. It took me about 3 hours, but I finally got the AIM transport compiled AND completely functioning. If you’re interested in seeing how jabber works, download exodus and then register @ jabber.mindseye.com. You can then IM with other jabber users, but more importantly, you can IM other AIM users… *someday* we’ll all be using jabber powered IM. jabber me @ ajohnson@jabber.mindseye.com