Decline foretold by Dow's shaky bounce confirmed today.  Unless Dow fall hard and fast Friday, I expect the weakness to continue next week.  When you feel sick, its better to throw up than to trying to hold it in.

because it slowed page loading speed and it wasn't being used much.

InfoWorld's new website design is a good example of how not to do a news portal.  Its too business, too clean, too even.  InfoWorld is forgetting that readers visiting a news site wants news first of all, followed by expert opinions and then product reviews.  In InfoWorld's new design, its the portal section titles and tabs that screams for attention over all important news headlines.  Even worse, news headlines are displayed in similar muted style as the non-news items like directory information.  While I am not advocating supermarket tabloid style for news, sterilizing of news headlines is a stupid thing to do.  This lesson impacts RSS read UI as well as there is a world of difference between reading a blog post in original context and in midst of thousand other news.

So head-and-should pattern was confirmed and Dow bounced off 50% decline support, but the intraday pattern of the bounce looks shaky at best.  Looking forward to confirming continuation of the decline.

Les Orchard, working on PersonalWebProxy, is disturbed about having to build everything including the kitchen sink into multi-platform applications, despite equivalent platform-specific tools.  Its a legit concern.  Platform-independence usually impacts integration and interoperability negatively.  This is why I have ruled out platform-independence as a requirement for Docuverse Daily.  Isolation of platform-dependenct code, however, is a requirement.

I don't think anyone in the world can claim that they use 100% of Microsoft Office suite's functionalities, including its designers and implementers.  Not only are people not using all the features, they are either not aware of or don't know how to access the unused features.

I personally use only around 10% to 20% of Word and Outlook functionalities, two Office apps I use daily.  I use PowerPoint about once a week and use 40% of its functionalites.  I almost never use Excel nor Access.  Visio, I use whenever I use PowerPoint.  Just eyeballing the numbers, I would say that about 80% of the Office suite is not being used.  That is waste of money.

Similar claims can be made against Microsoft Windows although the figure would be higher for me since I am a software developer and I know its ins and outs.  All the features and UI to access them are hidden beyond nooks and crannies that most users will never get to nor remember how to get back to.  Its like wearing a jacket with ten thousand pockets.

[a picture of Flint holding Tasselhoff's bag of holding]

After comparing Twisted and Medusa, I have concluded that I prefer Medusa over Twisted.  My reasoning is that extra functionalities and flexibilities have little value if they are difficult to access.  Twisted is hard to grok.

At this point, I am looking for an equivalent of Lucene for Python.  I know that Lucene has been ported to .NET (NLucene), but I am not aware of a Python port.  Some have suggested sgrep.  If you have a recommendation, please let me know.  As this list of search engines show, there are too many to consider and little time to do it.

This morning, I am playing with both Medusa and Twisted.  Both are Python frameworks for writing socket-based servers (i.e. HTTP, FTP, etc.).  Zope was based on Medusa, but there was talk about replacing Medusa with Twisted.  I like Medusa because its straight forward.  I was up and serving web pages in 10 minutes with Medusa.  Twisted is, well, twisted and harder to figure out.  I'll bang on it for the rest of the afternoon.  Stackless Python looks interesting and useful for running large population of desktop agents, but I don't have time to examine it in detail.  Problem with all these crazy Python projects are that documentation is generally poor and one has to resort to Googling web sites and newsgroups.  I am starting to miss Java already…

Current plan is to provide Docuverse Daily for free.  Services that require server-side functionalities (i.e. digital signature and identity services) will be bundled similar to cable TV services and charged reasonable monthly fees ($5-$45 per month).  In addition, DailyApps will be sold at affordable prices via streamlined update and purchase UI.  Third party DailyApps will also be sold through Docuverse Daily Expansion service.  With single-click purchase and bill aggregation, I suspect most people will spend about $20 per month, half for services and half for applications.  There will be no adverstisement revenue other than advertisers paying users to get past ad-blockers and pop-up filters.

With advent of moblogging, people will soon be able to associate notes, images, and audio with specific locations.  One key problem is the difficulty of assigning attributes to those ad-hoc location-bound data.  If I am at location (x,y,z), I can associate (type=restaurant, name="Isobune Sushi") to the location, but unless that information is shared by others, its ends up being just a note to myself.

What should happen is whenever someone adds information to the location (i.e. taking a picture), shared location attributes bound to the location should tag-along.  This means that if I take a family picture at a popular Grand Canyon vistapoint, I won't have to fumble with phonepad to annotate it because the common location name "Grand Canyon" will already be there.

UI for browsing and navigating location bound information space will be a challenge though.  One needs to be able to 'browse' to nearest restroom information with just a few button clicks.