I was at a meeting last week in a corporate building that has just recently been finished. Outside of each conference and meeting room is a small touch panel display that was displaying a calendar for the day.

I did a quick search for the manufacturer and found more options that are available from AMX.

After seeing the calendars, and thinking about some current challenges in my own family, here’s some functionality I’d like to see, and these kinds of panels in each room could really make it a reality. There’s also some entertainment features to take advantage of as well.

• each kid’s room has a panel that I could list events on their calendar. Easily put things like sports practices, upcoming tests, doctor’s appointments, birthday parties, etc.
• each kid’s bedroom panel could display a list of “To Do” items. Similar to Outlook calendar tasks, these could be set to automatically occur and repeat as needed.
• each bedroom panel could serve as a message center for members of the household. The messages could consist of a view of their email Inbox, voice-mail messages, and even private messages among family members.
• in conjunction with a home media server, the ability to access and play music into any room independently of the other rooms, including the ability to play the same music throughout the entire house

All of this type of information management can probably already be done, but what I think is missing is the management of the information in the first place. I should be able to add and manage tasks for each person (and their associated panel) as needed from any Internet connection. Each device could be wired into a home network or connected wirelessly for existing construction homes.

I’d love to be able to send a message to greet my kids when they get home from school, remind them not to forget to take out the kitty litter and clean their rooms. It would also be nice to be reminded of their upcoming math test when I get home and know I’ll be spending some time with them on their homework.

Post from: EveryJoe

A Few Thoughts on Family Information Tech

The Trakkboard application is developed on the Adobe AIR platform and is a quick download and install from the Trakkboard website. The Trakkboard application provides the opportunity to combine data from different websites into a single report, allowing you to see patterns across a group of similar websites perhaps.

For example, you can group and manage your e-commerce website traffic together into reports and compare how each site is doing compared to each other. Seeing spikes or traffic patterns in one could provide details on how to optimize or improve traffic patterns on your other sites.

Extending the dashboard theme, you can build as many dashboards for data analysis as you would like at once. I’ve been a user of Woopra for awhile and I’ve really enjoyed their desktop application, I’m hoping Trakkboard will extend that same type of functionality to me with all of my Google Analytics information.

Post from: EveryJoe

Trakkboard Analyzes Your Google Analytics

With Microsoft releasing Bing and Google working on their newest search algorithm called Google Caffeine, there’s a lot of effort around incorporating the idea of social search with your organic results.

One of my biggest complaints about search is that my results are impacted by just about everything that’s available on the web. If I’m searching for a question about a certain topic, I don’t want to get results from sites that are completely irrelevant to the goal of my search.

For example, if I’m interested in a question about coffee, I don’t want to get results about people who have talked about sitting around the coffee shop and chatting all day. I may be more interested in the growth regions, bean roasting methods and brewing tasks.

There may be five or ten sites on the Internet that are really great at providing this content and I’d like to just search those sites for my answer. Google provides the ability to do this kind of targeted search tuning by using Google Subscribed Links.

Google has already put together some groupings of sites in categories like Tools, Fun and Games, Lifestyle, and Technology. When you search for certain keywords that have been programmed into these Google Subscribed Links you’ll get special results based on the search links that have been put together for you.

The problem is that Google doesn’t make it easy for people to setup their own search metrics. Developers can create their own, but it’s not as user-friendly I would hope.

Post from: EveryJoe

Using Google Subscribed Links

I’m not sure how it is all these accounts on twitter have been getting hacked so prolifically lately. I don’t think all of these people have simple passwords that are getting cracked, so what’s happening? Are there machines infected with other malware that’s collecting login information?

Aside from the major PR issues that a entity like MSNBC is going to have to deal with after this kind identity theft, twitter is going to have to start doing something a little more to protect the security of the network.

If more and more people start to think that they can’t safely click on links or use the micro-blogging service, users are going to start dropping off and going to other channels for the same types of information.

I’m curious, if you’ve had your account hacked recently. Do you have any ideas of what happened? Too simple of a password? Other malware on your computer? What’s the deal?

UPDATE: If you’d like to see some of the tweets that were sent out through the account before it was suspended you can see them on this TechCrunch article about MSNBCHeadlines twitter account getting hacked. Caution NSFW! Language ahead matey!

Post from: EveryJoe

MSNBC Twitter Account Hacked

We are working on a variety of applications that consist of a number of data entry forms and displays. While troubleshooting the applications and adding features, sometimes you need to pop open the form in Access Design View and make some changes.

Because the form you’re working on is dependent on some of the other forms that are open for passing and sharing values and other parameters, they may all need to be open as well.

The challenge is that when you switch the form to Access Design View, the vast majority of the time it ends up being buried behind all the other forms, task panes and other items that may be open in your application workspace.

We then spend wasted time moving windows around, sliding them off to other screens, or sliding them off to the edges of the screens so we can get to and begin working on the form we need in Access Design View.

Why in the world wouldn’t a form that’s in Access Design View be modal and pop to the front of the display? It’s obviously the one that’s needing to be worked on if I switched it to Access Design View in the first place right?

If you’ve got a solution for this or agree with me, let us hear it in the comments.

Post from: EveryJoe

Display Access Design View Forms on Top

The images above are not to scale of each other, but the center image is the Kindle DX which you can tell is much larger, just using the scale of the person’s hands (that is unless that got some tiny person to use as a hand model).

The reason I’m more interested in the Kindle DX is because I want the larger format. Although more portable, when I’m reading a good book I prefer a larger format hardback over a smaller paperback.

I also expect to use the larger format to take advantage of reading some PDF manuals and documents as I continue to try and teach myself more about a variety of technologies and other topics.

The challenge though is the significant price difference between the three devices. Here’s a quick comparison.

Images: Product websites

Post from: EveryJoe

Stuck Between a Nook and a Kindle

There are a variety of settings you can set to tell Google search to act the way you want it to act. If you want to access all of these options, just look for the “Settings” link in the top, right-hand corner of the screen on the main Google search page.

• Interface Language – what language do you want Google to use for you
• Search Language – I’m really only interested in seeing pages in English, no need to clutter my view with search results in other languages
• SafeSearch Filtering – If I’m not interested in accidentally getting some search results that my not be appropriate for my personal preferences or safe-for-work
• Number of Results – with faster Internet speeds you may save some time by showing more results per page. The minimum is 10, maximum is 100.
• Results Window – my personal favorite, when I click on a search result I want it to open in a new window so I don’t lose my search results listing on Google
• Query Suggestions – let Google help you fine-tune your search results to get better results for what you’re looking for online
• Search Wiki – a fairly new option, but this allows you to modify and see modified search results by the Google community of users
• Subscribed Links – a very powerful feature, this lets you build collections of pages that you want to search for on specific terms or phrases

When you’re done, just make sure you click on the “Save Preferences” options.

As you can see, there’s plenty of ways for you to customize your user-experience. Now you can really show your friends that you know how to manipulate the Google machine.

Post from: EveryJoe

Setting Your Google Search Preferences

There are a couple of websites I use regularly that continually wanted me to install the QuickTime application so I could enjoy the website in all its glory. I finally caved in and decided to give QuickTime another try.

Then I kept getting updates and updates that kept wanting me to install iTunes and Safari along with my QuickTime updates. It just gets annoying and I decided I’ve had enough. So I uninstalled everything again. Then I start getting the message window above. I couldn’t figure out how to turn everything off so I set-out for an answer.

I’d recently heard about the hidden options for Mozilla Firefox with the about:config settings. After searching around for some keywords I finally found two that seem to be doing the trick.

In the “Filter:” section on the config tools look for the following:

• plugin.scan.plid.all
• plugin.default_plugin_disabled

On both of these items set the “Value” to “false” and close and restart Firefox.

Since I’ve done this I haven’t had the warnings about the QuickTime plugin. I’m hoping it stays that way.

Post from: EveryJoe

Stop the QuickTime Prompts on Firefox

The digital collaboration space is growing and the enterprise keeps on implementing and improving their collaboration capability across the whole organization. Google knows this as such they have released Google Wave technology to be able to complete in a vertical market. I have signed up for their user invitation weeks back but still wasn’t able to get an invite since I was too late on doing so.

Even if Google Wave is not yet open for everyone, the technology is progressing rapidly and Google has announced during the London meeting that the Google Wave would be opening an app store similar to what Apple has done.  This move shows the long term commitment of the search giant on this technology which they seem to roll-out to the consumer market first before pushing it to the enterprise. I think the move of Google Wave to the consumer market is aimed to help the technology grow and mature before they go full speed ahead on competing with enterprise collaboration tools like Microsoft SharePoint.

Google Wave is an interesting technology because aside from the usual collaborative functions it has, Google promises a real-time collaboration that gets updated as the user makes a keystroke instead of the usual submission of items, going through a workflow and approval process until the time the other user from the other end sees your thoughts.

The search giant also plans to create an extension gallery for Google Wave which includes hooks that invoke actions like opening new wave or launching shortcuts, merging waves, deployment on networks, etc.

As of the latest updates, third party developers have already developed applications in teleconferencing, videoconferencing, and multiplayer games.

I think the Google wave has a lot of potential and in time it would be a cheap alternative application for implementing productive digital collaboration across organizations.

Have you been given an invite for Google wave? What are your initial thoughts?

Image from Google Wave.

Post from: EveryJoe

Google Wave App Store and its potential

Here’s some of the reasons I think this might be a good idea. Let’s look at the functions of the United States Postal Service:

• delivery of mail (connecting people)
• delivery of packages
• official endorsement of dated materials (think tax returns being postmarked)
• official government documents (issuing of passports, etc.)
• economic exchange (delivery of paychecks, tax returns, invoices)

These are the basic functions that I believe are provided by the postal service. As I stated in my earlier post, thinking about the Internet being considered more of a utility, what would the impact of the USPS being the entity responsible for the management and protection of that infrastructure.

• delivery of mail ultimate function is to connect to people. The functionality of the Internet in this capacity is obvious.
• delivery of packages is more of a challenge. I think this could easily be completely taken over by FedEx, UPS, DHL and other delivery companies
• official endorsement of documents could be enabled with more development on digital signatures
• the issuance of official government documents could either be continued to be down by the USPS, or perhaps distributed out to local BMV’s
• economic exchange could be pushed more to electronic distribution with more development and enforcement of secure transactions

Post from: EveryJoe

USPS Should Ditch Mail and Manage Internet