patrickWeb

Sunday, January 30, 2005

Pop Menu Magic

Toolbox The team at Macromedia has done a fantastic job in creating Dreamweaver MX 2004. Dreamweaver contains just about everything one needs to build, publish, and maintain a website. It is hard for me to imagine building a website without strong WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) capability. The one thing that Dreamweaver does not have is an easy way to create and maintain a menu for your site. I have had a menu on my homepage for as long as I can remember but it has always been a challenge. Then I discovered Project Seven Development, a small software company in Dobson, North Carolina. They have a product called Tree Menu Magic. Tree Menu Magic is a Dreamweaver extension kit that enables you to make tree-style menus. The process is totally automated from inside Dreamweaver via a user interface that mirrors the actual menu you are building (or modifying). Tree Menu Magic is what is currently part of patrickWeb.

The product and the support have been of excellent quality but it was time for an update my menu so I stopped by PVII to see what was new. Glad I did -- because I found Pop Menu Magic. It is quite clear that the PVII team had a strong vision about what the perfect "popup" menu was and then they made a tool that builds it. Pop Menu Magic is powerful and feature-rich - a fully automated Dreamweaver Extension that allows you to insert a professionally styled popup menu on your page "in seconds" -- well I would say minutes, but definitely a very productive tool. Popup menus are much more natural and dynamic than the "tree" style currently on patrickWeb. The menu can be vertical like mine or horizontal and there are no limits to the number of sub-levels you can have. My test page with the new menu is right here on this page. This blog posting will not change, but the test page I am testing and refining will. The background color and appearance will surely change but please fee free to give me any feedback about it. I plan to complete testing and populate the new menu across all the hundreds of pages of patrickWeb when I get back from a trip a week from now.

Other patrickWeb stories

Email this story to a friend (send a short email with a link to this story)
Subscribe to patrickWeb (receive a short email when a new story is posted)
Send me feedback on this story
Make printer friendly version of this page (click on print preview in your browser)

Internet Technology January 30, 2005 07:40 PM

Monday, January 24, 2005

The Future Of Music

Music The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) [get a hint about the contemporary nature of the organization?] sees the digital music market taking off in 2005. I don't think anyone would disagree after looking at a few key facts. The number of legitimate music download sites quadrupled to more than 225. The number of tracks of music available soared to more than one million. Purchased downloads increased by more than tenfold and exceeded 200 million.

The IFPI says that "Music on the internet and mobile phones is moving into the mainstream of consumer life, with legal download sites spreading internationally, more users buying songs in digital format and record companies achieving their first significant revenues from online sales". It should be no surprise that the supply of music available digitally is proliferating and the fact that that consumer attitudes about digital music are changing should have been anticipated not just reported. The remaining question is whether the music and video industries yet understand what is going on. (read more)

Music January 24, 2005 06:23 PM

Digital Music

Music Digital music consists of a large number of ones and zeroes. You can create digital music on a PC or with various digital musical instruments, but most digital music starts out as analog music. When you go to Alice Tully Hall in New York to hear a string quartet you are listening to analog music. If you want to listen to it later at home you need to have a way to capture it, store it, and replay it. In the "old" days this was done with vinyl records and later with acetate tape. Today it is mostly done with CDs (compact discs) but increasingly music will be stored in the form of digital files such as MP3 (MP3 is one of dozens of different formats for storing digital music). (read more)

Music January 24, 2005 06:22 PM

Saturday, January 22, 2005

Heads Up -- Demo Coming

Personl Computer I am fortunate to attend many conferences each year as one can see from the engagements calendar. I find them all productive but my all time favorite conference is Demo. Demo is recognized as the major event that "demos" the products and services poised to have the greatest impact on the technology landscape in the year to come. Every year, technology executives, venture investors, journalists and analysts converge at Demo to preview and discuss new ideas. The best part of the conference is the opportunity to network with many old and new friends. DEMO@15! marks the 15th year of the conference -- the 13th year for me. In that time, 1,500 companies have launched technologies live on the Demo stage -- and a few have launched revolutions. Notable on the list have been Palm, TiVo and Java.

Below are some of the places I plan to be during the first quarter of the year. I am speaking at most of them , (including opening keynotes at both LinuxWorld and COMMON. As I updated the engagements page, it was fun to reminisce over conferences of the past four years.

Engagements - 2001
Engagements - 2002
Engagements - 2003
Engagements - 2004
Current engagements


Event	Date	Location
Optometric Practice Management Conference	01/15/2005	New York, NY
Genesys Partners Annual Dinner	01/31/2005	New York, NY
Demo 2005	02/14/2005	Phoenix, AZ
LinuxWorld	02/16/2005	Boston, MA
What's Next: Boomer Business Summit	03/09/2005	Philadelphia, PA
COMMOM	03/13/2005	Chicago, IL
PC Forum	03/21/2005	Scottsdale, AZ

Conferences , Internet Technology January 22, 2005 11:04 AM

Thursday, January 20, 2005

First Quarter Conferences

The first quarter is going to be very busy. I plan to attend seven conferences and speak at five of them. Engagement calendar is now updated for 2005.

Conferences , Internet Technology January 20, 2005 10:52 AM

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Word Craft

On the way to Brazil in October 2004, I read a book called Word Craft by Alex Frankel . The subject of the book is "naming", topic I have always been interested in. Frankel did a good job of getting behind the scenes at some of the top consulting companies that focus exclusively on coining brand names. A winning name often makes the difference between success or failure of a product. Frankel says it is not unheard of for large companies to spend as much as half a million dollars to come up with the perfect name. Wordcraft describes the entire process including marketing campaigns and public relations activities that surround a product name. Some of the examples he discusses include FedEx, BlackBerry, Accenture, Viagra, and IBM's e-business. The book is a quick and interesting read.

patrickWeb booklist

Favorites January 19, 2005 02:53 PM

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Two Cent Toyota

Toyota automobile Doug Kaye at IT Conversations told me that Halley Suitt's interview with me on her "Memory Lane" program has had 2,500 listeners. One of them was Ken Corneliusen, a fellow alumus of electrical engineering school at Lehigh University. Ken liked the mention of Lego's but corrected my comment in the interview that Legos were not around when I was growing up. He speaks with authority because spent parts of his childhood in Norway and remembers getting a small Lego set for Christmas sometime during 1953-1955. The Lego system was invented in Denmark and Ken lived on the southern tip of Norway where it was common "for people to take a ferry over to Denmark for a shopping trip". The Lego set he got was "plastic with red bricks, a few clear bricks and sloped half bricks that were used to make the roof of a small house".

Ken also could identify with the Radio Shack TRS-80 in the PC Innovation story earlier this month. Back in 1977 when I was buying the TRS-80, he was buying an 8K memory board kit for his Vector Graphics VG-1 computer. He paid $234 for it. Around the same time he also bought a Toyota for about $3,000. Based on current prices for computer memory, Ken calculated that if the price of the Toyota had dropped at the rate that memory prices have dropped, the Toyota would sell for $0.023 -- two cents. I have not done the analysis, but without a calculator or spreadsheet we all know that the telephony costs have not followed the same trend -- thanks to regulatory fees and taxes.

Other patrickWeb people-related stories

People January 18, 2005 10:01 PM

Friday, January 14, 2005

Memory Lane

Doug Kaye believes in "New Ideas Through Your Headphones". He is producer of
IT Conversations, a source of listener-supported audio programs, interviews and important events. Halley Suitt is a writer in Boston who loves to interview people for her program called "Memory Lane". It was a lot of fun to talk with her about some early work at IBM and the critical role of innovation. She took me way back to the earliest days of "tech toys" like Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets and Heathkits. The complete interview can be listened to here .

All content at IT Conversations is governed by a Creative Commons License. The concept is similar to IBM's patent commons idea that was launched earlier this week. For any of the content on Doug's site you are free to copy, distribute, or play it as long as you give the original author credit, do not use the content for commercial purposes, you do not alter it, and you make it clear what license terms you expect of anyone who may want to reuse or distribute it. Some authors are beginning to use Creative Commons instead of the traditional copyright approach. A good example is Dan Gilmor's new book, We The Media. The book is about grassroots journalism -- "by the people, for the people". I highly recommend reading it.

Other patrickWeb stories in the people category

People January 14, 2005 03:32 PM

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Patent Commons

Patent examiner The United States granted the first patent to Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont in 1790. Mr. Hopkin's idea had to do with making potash which in turn was used in making glass and in various industrial processes.Two other major patents granted the same year were related to making candles and milling flour. On January 11, 2005 the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced that for the twelfth consecutive year, IBM received more patents -- 3,248 -- than any other private sector organization in America. No company, other than IBM, has yet been granted 2,000 patents in any year while IBM has exceeded 3,000 four years in a row. Potentially more significant than the 3,248 new patents is the fact that on the same day as the USPTO announcement, IBM gave away 500 patents. Not literally. The company pledged to offer open access to key innovations covered by 500 of it's U.S. software patents. There is one catch.

The pledge is applicable only to individuals, communities, or companies working on or using software that meets the Open Source Initiative (OSI) definition of "open source" software. Some people think open source means "free". Not so. There are specific criteria that OSI defines but from a layman perspective it means that the instructions in the software that tell computers what to do are made explicit -- put into the public view so that everyone can see exactly how the software works. There are many advantages to this. For example, if a company finds a bug in Linux, they can fix it and contribute their fix to all the other users of Linux. This is unlike Windows, where if you discover a bug you have to wait for Microsoft to fix it. Their priority in fixing a bug may not be the same as yours. With open source software you can set your own priorities and you are not dependent on one company. The patents that IBM is making available are not something that an individual will likely use but indirectly all of us may be beneficiaries. This is because the OSI approved projects include Apache (used by most Web servers) and OpenOffice (used by me and by millions instead of MS Office). Software such as this may be enhanced using some of the innovations in the 500 patents from IBM. The company has also made it clear that there will be more IBM patents to become available.

The patent pledge is a major shift in the way IBM manages and its intellectual property portfolio. Surely they will continue to invent things in IBM Research laboratories but in addition they are launching an initiative called "collaborative innovation". The idea is to form an industry-wide "patent commons" in which patents are used to spread new ideas more rapidly to both developers and users. Some of the most significant technological advances are based on open standards (in the public eye like open source software) and shared knowledge and experience. Probably the best example of this I can think of is the Internet. IBM's new move may lead to important breakthroughs as IBM challenges other companies to follow suit in deploying their intellectual property portfolios for more than just legal or financial self-interest.

IBM's press release about the patents announcement
The list of exact patents pledged

IBM January 12, 2005 05:32 PM

Monday, January 10, 2005

Heathkits: A Walk Down Memory Lane

I got a note from Harry Schultz in Tennessee about the Heathkit story from this past May. For Harry (and me) the story brought back many good memories. Harry grew up in St. Joseph, Michigan and, like me, enjoyed putting together many Heathkits while a teenager. After graduation from the University of Michigan, Harry actually worked at Heath Co and became a charter member of the initial computer group that brought out the H-8. The Heathkit H-8 was an early entry into the personal computer market. Harry says that is was more like the Altair and Imsai systems of the day than the more complete Apple, Commodore and Radio Shack entries. The H-8 consisted of a "power supply and a number of slots into which processor, RAM and IO cards were plugged". The user interface was the front panel which consisted of a small LED display and a 16 key keypad for data entry. Harry wrote some of the original software for the H-8. For both Harry and I, a brief reflection on Heathkits was a walk down memory lane.

Original Heathkit story
Other patrickWeb gadget stories

Gadgets January 10, 2005 10:57 PM

Sunday, January 9, 2005

PC Innovation

Personal Computer I have been following the writings and speeches of Professor David Gelernter of Yale University for several years. He is a really smart guy and has great perspective on the future of information technology. Most recently I read with great interest Dr. Gelernter's contribution to the Wall Street Journal and the letters to the editor which have been appearing in response. The basic premise of the good professor's essay is that innovation in the personal computer space is dead and that information technology vendors are not stepping up to the major issues of users. In some respects I agree with him but as a veteran of the PC business (several of my short thirty-five years at IBM) and an avid PC hobbyist since the days of the Radio Shack TRS-80 (1977), I believe there are a few additional factors to be considered.

I think of the Personal Computer in two different ways. First as a standalone computer that I use for some number of hours per day with application software such as Quicken for financial matters and Movable Type and Dreamweaver for managing my blog and patrickWeb. Secondly, I think of the PC as one of a number of devices that I use to connect to the Internet to interact with business, entertainment and information services such as Amazon, eBay, eFax, CopyTalk, Netflix, Weather Underground, Google News, and iTunes. Let's examine innovation in each of the two categories -- PC as a computer on my desk, and PC as one of many devices connected to the Internet. (read more)

Personal Computing January 9, 2005 10:44 PM

Saturday, January 8, 2005

IBM Happenings: December 2004

There was quite a bit of feedback about the IBM Happenings. Thanks to all for that. Several people said they especially liked the "headlines" so they choose to read the details or not. December was another busy month. Here are the announcements made by the company. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.

I was particularly interested in the announcement about "Lenovo to acquire IBM Personal Computing Division " and wrote a couple of stories about it. They are both in the IBM category of the blog.

IBM January 8, 2005 04:07 PM

Sunday, January 2, 2005

Beach Cache

Beach Finding the John D. MacArthur Beach cache #1 was an enjoyable way to start out the New Year but it proved to be a very difficult find. The encrypted additional hint provided at geocaching.com turned out not to be true. This cache was in a pink square tupperware container, about 6 X 6 inches. The park is on an island which you reach by walking across a nicely constructed bridge that crosses the mud flats. John MacArthur donated the land in the 1970's, and facilities opened in 1989. The park encompasses 174 acres of uplands and another 151 acres of submerged lands. It is a stretch to call it a "hike" -- the round trip to and from the island is about 3/4 of a mile. Finding the geocache took much longer and unfortunately there was no exercise involved.

Other patrickWeb stories about geocaching

Hiking January 2, 2005 10:44 AM

December 2004 | Main | February 2005 �