Cal Jacobson’s Blog

A crisis on the family front involving the health of one of my children has been consuming my time as of late, but I haven’t abandoned my blog. I’ve composed quite a few posts, unfortunately they were all composed in my head, in my car, while driving to work and without means to record my brilliance. Damn this primitive 21st-century technology! Had I been able to store my wit and wisdom, why I would have shared with you my thoughts on the following:

• Seven months later, Truevision3D 6.5 is still nowhere to be seen by the non-paying public.
• Silverlight looks like it will be enough to kick Adobe in the pants and give Flash a run for its money. I could never get into ActionScript and decent online tutorials on Flash that went beyond “hey I’m gonna make a cool intro webpage” were few and far between; I look forward to doing this sort of thing in C#.
• Ah, Paris Hilton.
• Spambayes is still working marvelously; again, I recommend it for anybody who is drowning in spam.
• Google’s new Street View feature is damn impressive. I can’t say I buy into the paranoia that the privacy advocates are attempting to whip up: if you take a picture of my house from the street in front of it, you’re not exactly peering into my windows. If some cretin has the mind to break into my home, I’m willing to bet that he’ll case the place in person and that the Internet may be a tad too sophisticated for him anyway. Besides, by the time the magic Google vans get to my city, any pressing privacy issues and legislation will have likely taken place. Thanks for taking the bullet for small-town America, San Francisco!
• Dwarf Fortress is, by far, the best ASCII-based game I’ve ever played. Not that I’ve played that many — certainly not in the last 10 years or so — but it beats the crap out of most Roguelikes. I suspect what keeps me playing is not the random-generation element (and certainly not the graphics, the other Roguelike characteristic DF shares) but the fact that you can build rather complex fortresses and gently nudge the inhabitants in a particular direction. In fact, I think Tarn Adams should pitch the concept to Maxis; SimMoria sounds like a winner.

No, I’m not even talking about IronPython…just honest-to-goodness Python scripts hosted by Microsoft that tackle a fairly wide range of Windows tasks.  Who would have thunk it?

Joe Kraus of JotSpot announced today that his company is the latest acquisition by Google.

I’m not a JotSpot user — in fact, I’m not certain I heard of them before today. But after checking their site out I’m not surprised they were snatched up by the big G. Look at this page, which contains a bunch of wiki applications that JotSpot offers. Compare with some of the web apps Google has come out with in the last couple of years. See anything familiar?

One thing Google didn’t have up until a month ago was a product that enabled users to create their own communities online. Now that they’ve acquired YouTube and a wiki application that supports forums they have all the tools to create the next MySpace if they wish: post your photos in Picasa Web Albums, videos on YouTube, chat in real-time with your friends in Google Talk (or a next-gen version of GTalkr in a web page), use Gmail for your e-mail needs, create a knowledgebase about your favorite topic using the JotSpot wiki and Google Base, provide a real-world context by linking things to Google Maps and access everything through your mobile device via dodgeball and some of the other technology Google acquired in 2005.

Geez, now all they need is to purchase some machine translation technology so these communities aren’t limited by language….whoops, looks like they’ve already got that covered.

So what the hell is Microsoft doing? By the looks of things, they’re stuck on the desktop.

Update: Scoble describes the wiki market as “white hot” and says the MS Office team should be asking themselves what Google is up to. I disagree, Robert…they should be asking their managers what Microsoft is going to be up to. Google’s plan is clear: to dominate the field of web-based applications so it’s no longer about where you are or what OS you’re using.

I saw here that the Microsoft Internet Explorer team sent the Firefox team a cake in celebration of Firefox 2.0’s completion.  A bit odd, but I suppose if you don’t try to read into it too much it was a nice gesture from one group of developers to another — after all, who else could appreciate the painful march to a browser code release like a bunch of people who just recently did the same thing?

See?  I’m trying hard not to make a snarky comment.  Not everybody at Redmond throws chairs and rubs their hands together gleefully while hatching sinister plots to take over teh Intarweb. 

Still, I have to wonder…will the friendly relationship still exist a year from now, when Firefox 2.x and IE 7.x are the dominant browsers and each team is pushing hard to outdo the other?

It’s official: Internet Explorer 7 has been officially released. I hope that this marks the beginning of a series of reasonably frequent and substantial improvements…to not just CSS support but more evolutionary additions such as SVG support. I can’t help but think that an aggressive IE will spur other browser developers on so we see the kind of competition and innovation we saw in the mid-90s.