If you’ve ever wanted to run a stored procedure from the Query Analzyer, check out this MSDN article: Executing Stored Procedures in SQL Query Analyzer

Amazon will pay you to learn about their site: Amazon.com Trivia

Great article on Forbes.com on patent law and how the proliferation of patents granted by the USPTO is bad for society: “… too many patents are just as bad for society as too few. The undisciplined proliferation of patent grants puts vast sectors of the economy off-limits to competition, without any corresponding benefit to the public.” [source: slashdot.org]

The Slashdot piece was focused on a lawsuit brought by F5 Networks whose aim was to defend a patent on technology that “… improves the interaction of servers and desktop computers with Web browsers. Information such as shopping cart contents is often stored in files called “cookies” on desktop computers; F5 was awarded a patent that lets a Web traffic management device reunite a desktop computer with a particular server if the desktop computer user returns to the Web site.” They’re effectively saying that they own the technology that provides “sticky sessions”. I guess in an industry (software) where the barrier to entry is so low, patent law helps to brings the barriers up a notch or two. But seriously F5, how trivial is this technology? Your hardware device examines the HTTP stream, picks out the cookie and sends the user to the appropriate server. How long did it take to figure that out? 30 seconds? Innovation? No. I hope you all go to bed at night feeling like you made a contribution to the world.

Rael quotes a Fast Company article on google and innovation.

Reminds me of a quote I saw in Wired years ago by Thomas Watson that went something like this: “The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.” (exact quote here)

Heath Row blogged the SXSW festival. If you didn’t get to go, it looks like Heath has typed up every word spoken during the entire shindig. Especially interesting was his write up of Richard Stallman‘s discussion: “Copyright Vs. Community in the Age of the Computer Networks“.

“ In 1983, I reached the conclusion that for people to use computers freely, they needed to have access to free software and be able to use it freely. You should have the freedom to use software once you’ve got a copy. There are three freedoms. Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program. Freedom 1 is the freedom to help yourself by studying the program and changing it to suit your needs. Freedom 2 is the freedom to help your neighbor by giving them a copy of the software. Freedom 3 is the freedom to help build your community by working together to build that software.“

David Weinberger gave the opening presentation at SXSW a couple weeks ago, I didn’t get to go but I got the jist of his presentation via his email newsletter (which was packed w/ interesting btw, sign up now!). He called it “Why the Web Matters”:

“I have 10 times as many friends as I used to. I know 100 times more people. I have 1,000 times more people I can call upon for help, support or a well-deserved kick in the ass.

We are learning that the world consists of people joined by shared interests rather than simply countries divided by patrolled borders.“

Forgive me for linking to a powerpoint, but I found this Stanford class handout on Text Information Retrieval, Mining and Exploitation particularly interesting. Skip ahead to slide 21 where you’ll see examples of some of the ideas students are encouraged to use as projects, especially the visual search interfaces and peer to peer search/retrieval.

Hung out with Dave Winer and about 50 other people tonight at the Lewis International Law Center on Harvard’s campus. I would have blogged it live had I gotten the cahones to purchase the IPAQ but the notes I took on my Palm will do for now:

First question was from a law student named Jith on the ramifications of the permanence of law students blogging (ie: if I blog my experiences and thoughts as a law student at Harvard, will that come back to bite me in during interviews? will I / could I say something that might implicate me in a lawsuit or discredit me in some way in my future jobs?). IMNSHO, sure, it might, but I think in this case the good will far outweigh the bad. Blogging will certainly lead to greater visibility within your own community of knowledge, will probably result in greater knowledge retention and so on… Driving can kill you but it sure beats walking on a rainy day.

Charles Nesson was there with his dog. He left early.

Ian Blanton had alot to say. He works for a Mac Reseller.

Derek Slater (who apparently was recently /.ed for his interview with Jack Valenti) was there. He writes for the Harvard Political Review and was wearing an EFF hat. Derek has a personal website with stuff already written up about tonight.

I sat a couple feet from John Robb, COO of Userland. At one point we got on the topic of weblogs being ephemeral, which I agree with in that weblogs are constantly changing, although I brought up the point that there are websites that retain a knowledge of the content of public websites for certain periods of time (ie: wayback machine, google’s cache. What’s to say that there aren’t other companies out there maintaining copies of various sites? … ) John mentioned something about “… somethings will be remembered forever.” I tend to agree. The price of disk space is and will continue to go down, google will eventually have competitors that do the same thing they, other companies will realize that google’s cache is a business opportunity (pay us $10 a month and we’ll make a copy of your site every 10 days, restore over the internet…)

Short discussion on on RSS and the various ways in which it has branched. Check out of the end of the above mentioned Oreilly article for a list of the RSS specifications and sample news feeds.

Dave transitioned the RSS discussion into a discussion of Really Simple Discovery (or RSD) which was written by this guy (I think, I didn’t get his name). RSD is “.. a way to help client software find the services needed to read, edit, or “work with” weblogging software.” The way I heard it described is that these guys thought it would be a great idea to create software that allowed you to do “File –> Save As” to your weblog (via xml-rpc) instead of having to type into a browser textarea or a custom weblogging client.

Dan Bricklin (who created VisiCalc and founded Trellix Corporation) was there taking pictures and picking fights with Dave. He brought up an iniative that he’s been working on at Trellix that I found really interesting called SMBmeta: “…an open, distributed way for small and medium-sized businesses to communicate information such as the physical location of the business and the area it serves, as well at the type of business, to search engines and other services.” Read more about it here… I think Diane Betsy (thanks Betsy!) brought up vindigo as an example of how smb meta would work. I agree that Vindigo is an example implementation, but it’s weakness is that you can’t (as a small business owner) update your information and as a developer, you can’t access any of that information. Plus it costs $25 bucks or something like that… SMBmeta seems like it would be a killer app in combination with location based wireless services (ie: auto discovery of all open late night diners with 2 blocks of my current location)

Bob Doyle, CEO of skyBuilders was there. He’s also on the CMS list.

Interesting though: MIT is putting its’ courses online, Harvard is putting its’ people online… Point being that anyone can read the same textbook as the kids attending MIT and not learn a thing, much of ‘learning’ comes from being a community of thinkers.

Pete, all the way from PEI said no one has ever linked to him. Boy is he going to get flow today.

Donna Wentworth was there and already has notes up as well.

And that’s all for now… Sorta felt like drinking from a firehose, hopefully Dave does it again.

Amazon.com Recommendations:
Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering: “Recommendation algorithms are best known for their use on e-commerce Web sites,1 where they use input about a customer’s interests to generate a list of recommended items. Many applications use only the items that customers purchase and explicitly rate to represent their interests, but they can also use other attributes, including items viewed, demographic data, subject interests, and favorite artists.

At Amazon.com, we use recommendation algorithms to personalize the online store for each customer. The store radically changes based on customer interests, showing programming titles to a software engineer and baby toys to a new mother. The click-through and conversion rates—two important measures of Web-based and email advertising effectiveness—vastly exceed those of untargeted content such as banner advertisements and top-seller lists.“

reminder: Dave Winer tonight at Harvard at 6:30.