I've just recently discovered the cool set of Wikicities (http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/List_of_Wikicities).

Some are junk and useless, but others, like the Star Wars wiki (http://starwars.wikicities.com/wiki/Main_Page) are very cool and comprehensive. They are all very much like the venerable Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.com).

Now, let's bring Groove into this picture.

Groove Virtual Office (http://www.groove.net) is about setting up a workspace for collaboration within a group of people. The richness of Groove is, in some ways, far better than the wikis. You get threaded discussions, group calendars, forms, etc. But in other ways the wiki is king. I know that I can find out very excellent information from a wiki just by searching it. Groove is poor at searches.

So, now with Microsoft purchases Groove I think there is an interesting possibility here.

Microsoft has SharePoint - the intranet collaboration tool. Groove can be used to sync SharePoint spaces into a Groove workspace that can be shared with Groove users across the web. There is a clear link between a smart client and a web site.

Why not have the same between a wiki and Groove? Can you imagine a corporate wiki that can be synched into Groove and taken on the road. Each update silently makes its way through the internet to keep all Groove Wiki users up-to-date with all the coporate knowledge, procedures, clients, projects, etc, etc, etc.

Cool huh?

(Microsoft, please open a new Groove space and/or blog to tell us where Groove is going. Please?)

I get a very odd thing with this new dasBlog.

I have to click the "Add Entry" tab twice for it to work. Not a double-click, instead the first time I click it I get a message saying that an internal error has occured. The second time I click it all is good.

Me thinks that there is something amiss with the new caching stuff.

Groove Space Spam is almost an oxymoron.

Almost.

There are three principles of Groove that I feel make the oxymoron case.

Groove has, as key to its design, spaces that people are *invited* in to. Depending on the level of authorisation required this may be specific person to person invites, or just a "open invitation" file. In other words, there is some degree of control as to whom may enter and hence whom may post messages.

Next, each user has a strong key that provides their identity. It is possible to change identities and to create "false" accounts, but in general I use Groove for a specific purpose with my specific account so it is "inconvenient" for me to use multiple accounts.

Finally, unlike anonymous email or blog spam, Groove has the ability to *uninvite* nasty people from spaces. This is a big stick that can't be applied to other forms of spam.

However, the "almost" part of the oxymoron statement is that Groove does not allow me to block an user from instant messaging me. Once they have my account in their contact list a spammer can really go to town spamming me. I am sure though, that Groove Networks would jump in at some point and disable this type of user.

Anyway, I hope this is considered spam in any way.

Google Maps - Not only a Website nor only a Service - It's also Developer Platform.

I'm in the US doing a consulting assignment at the moment. As previously mentioned Adelaide, South Australia is home. So I'm a long way from home and this is only the second time I've been to the States. The last was in 1997.

So image how important Google Maps is for me. I can whack in my hotel's address and then that of my client site and bam! I can find the way there with ease.

But I haven't limited my use of Google's maps to just using the service. I've been reading Blogs about it. I found some interesting links all over the place regarding how it works. Here's a good one: http://jgwebber.blogspot.com/2005/02/mapping-google.html

But “mini-app“ that I thought was very neat is a little tour of Keene (a small town in MA, USA). The final comment made in the screencast about GPS being the tool to “annotate the planet“ is really quite funky.

Bring on the future - oh, and Google Maps for Australia please!

I'm currently a long way from home. I'm in the United States of America. Right now I'm on a flight from Dallas-Fort Worth heading to Denver and then on to San Francisco before arriving in Sacramento to do some business there for the next couple of weeks.

Home is Adelaide, South Australia.

The US is an interesting place for me. Being an Aussie it's a lot like home, but with some differences. Let me give some examples.

English is the lingua prima - although we tend to spell words the international way and not the US way. "Colour" instead of "color" (which in some ways is annoying because my spell checker - even though it  is set to "English (Australia)" in Windows many programs just only seem to work in "English (US)". But I can get over it.

The cars (or automobiles) we drive are similar, although we drive on the left-hand side of the road. US cars are larger - much larger - and get filled by the gallon and we fill by the litre (which, of course, must be spelt "liter" in the US as my spell checker just bitched about my normal spelling).

The when the weather forecast in the US says it's 32 degrees it's cold. When it's 32 degrees in Australia it's hot. It seems that in both places we forget the add the "F" and "C".

But one area where things are more than a little different is the growing ubiquity of wireless internet access. Australia has hotspots, but most are not free. My home town has "Citilan" which has free access, but you must be a client of one of around half-a-dozen or so internet service providers to get these invisible bits of data.

In the US it seems that free access is free. I just spent half-an-hour waiting in Dallas-Fort Worth airport where T-Mobile provides free access Wi-fi (although it didn't work - I got an IP address but received no data).

I'm lead to believe that Starbucks, McDonald's and numerous other companies are providing free access just to get people in the door. Even entire cities, like San Francisco, provide Wi-fi clouds for free roaming access.

So here's the question of ethics: when I turn on my laptop and Skype automatically connects should I expect this wireless benefactor to be free or do I need to perform due diligence to determine the difference between a public service and a poorly or unsecured private network?

I ask this question because for the last three days I've been connecting to a wireless network called "linksys" in Lewisville, TX. Who is providing that link?

So where's the line drawn on free access and theft?

If began littering the local neighbourhood (aka neighborhood) with a handful of cash should I cry foul if people take my money? Is it my money or I have I made it public domain? Is there implicit permission given when one doesn't secure their Wi-fi?

Are "they" breaking the terms of their ISP contract by allowing others to share the connection? Does that change anything?

Over time will the ethics change? I mean three years ago Wi-fi hardware defaulted to open and you had to explicitly secure it. Now the default is closed and you must explicitly open it. So does that mean that when there is an open access connection that the owner has explicitly opened it or are they just using old technology?

Ah well, I got to get my email and to make some Skype calls thanks to "linksys" in Lewisville, TX. Thank you, whomever you may be.

Blogging heck! The power of the blog comes hitting home.

My post Infotriever & Check My Trip: Pain in the Proverbial... has had an immediate effect on the folks at http://www.infotriever.com. They've extended the number of characters available for comments from 255 to 4095.

It's nice to know that a blog in a public place can make another site change to save face.

An open feedback message to Infotriever as their feedback page - http://www.infotriever.com/feedback.asp - doesn't allow comments greater than 255 characters! So, yes, this is an open bitch about their product.

This is what I wanted to post to their feedback page (now they'll get a brief message and a permalink):

This app is a pain in the proverbial...

I had all sorts of issues getting it to install. I use Windows XP SP2 & Firefox.

Even using IE and allowing pop-ups it never gave me the install option. Finally I had to get the app directly from your site.

Then when I did the "Add to my Calendar" from www.checkmytrip.com it put my appointments all as GMT+10:30 despite the fact that I'm travelling to the US.

I found the option in the preference to make sure it used local time, but it wasn't smart enough to move the already imported appointments. Why wouldn't it just do that? What use-case would be valid to leave the existing ones?

Nevertheless, I tried to re-add the trip details and it told me if was done, but everything was still in GMT+10:30.

Finally I had to manually delete the incorrect entries and try again. Still it put everything in the wrong times.

I exited the system tray icon, deleted the appointments and tried again. Same deal.

I'm a power user and I have had huge issues. 99% of everyone else would just give up. In fact, I'm about to uninstall unless you can provide an easy fix.

There, I feel better now.

I was listening to the latest Dot Net Rocks! show on Windows Server where they talked about 64-bit Windows and addressable memory was discussed.

It was said that 32-bit Windows can address 4 GB of memory. Now that's 2^32/1024/1024/1024 = 4.

But they said that 64-bit Windows can address 16 TB (Terabytes). However, when I do the same calculation as above I get this:

2^64/(1024^6)=16. That's not Terabytes, that's Exabytes!

The sequence is Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte, Petabyte, Exabyte, Zettabyte.

Now, what's right? The quoted Terabytes or the calculated Exabytes?