BBC interview with Alfred Hitchcock

BBC part 1: BBC part 2: on cut and assembly and montage and orchestration:

Technorati Tags: film, Hitchcock

mprove aggregation

After launching a bunch of blogs, I consider ways to aggregate the information for those who like to get the whole picture. Feedburner offers the nice feature to register feeds and get some scripts back to republish the content on web pages of your choice. This is what I did on mprove: blogs.
Furthermore, yahoo pipes is a visual programming system to merge, and sort, and filter feeds and information from other sources into new feeds. My first pipe takes my blogger feeds, my flickr stream, my del.icio.us updates and my Xing messages and assembles the content into mprove pipes. (BTW- does anyone know how to edit the pipe content on the fly? I like to change the title for the del.ici.us entries and maybe add the tags to the content.)
Now it is your choice to read, subscribe and republish the information you like.

Playstation 3 Home Promo Video

found via

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From DynaBook 1972 to XO 2008

Alan Kay's paper "A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages" from 1972 has just been mentioned in the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) news forum: "I just came across this amazingly insightful paper by genius Alan Kay detailing his vision of the 'DynaBook' something that took more than 30 years to finally becoming a reality in the form of the XO."

Ultra Mobile PC

UMPC - a vision video by intel: 3 minutes 6 minutes See mprove: HCI Vision Videos for more.

Joe Weizenbaum in Linz, 2007

Joseph Weizenbaum at MEDICHI 2007
Originally uploaded by mprove

Klagenfurt Campus TV recorded the keynote from Mike Mahoney What Makes the History of Software Hard and Why it Matters, the read-out talk for Niklaus Wirth A Brief History of Software Engineering, Tibor Vamos' presentation Nothing is More Practical than a Good Theory, and Joseph Weizenbaum's closing keynote Social and political impact of the long term history of computing at MEDICHI 2007.
Watch the videos here.
Find more videos at mprove: webcasts.
PS: Happy birthday Joe, to your 85th birthday today!

Lessons to learn from Newton's failure

No one would defeat that Apple's iPod is a new lifestyle device that became a tremendous success in the market. Yet, the success of the iPhone is not a given; esp. if you keep in mind the failure of Apple's Newton a decade ago. Read more about the Newton in RoughlyDrafted (Dec 2006): Newton Lessons for Apple's New Platform.

human reason

According to Joe Weizenbaum, the single most important paragraph of his book Computer Power and Human Reason is the following on page 276:

It is a widely held but a grievously mistaken belief that civil courage finds exercise only in the context of world-shaking events. To the contrary, its most arduous exercise is often in those small contexts in which the challenge is to overcome the fears induced by petty concerns over career, over our relationships to those who appear to have power over us, over whatever may disturb the tranquility of our mundane existence.

I met Joe at MEDICHI in Klagenfurt last year. A great moment where he touched me.

New blogs on the block

5 new blogs will accompany mprove.de and provide more focus in each area.

• Interface Culture - about computers as new media
• User Experience Management - about product management and innovation processes > moved to http://hci-design.blogspot.com/search/label/management
• User Experience & HCI Design - about delightful software and web applications
• OpenOffice.org User Experience - about improving the open source office suite > this came to an end because Oracle removed its commitment to OOo. It seems that the branched LibreOffice has much more backing by the open source community.  
• metascript - everything else is miscellaneous > This turned into a mini blog at mprove.tumblr.com/
  
• virtual UX - my blog at Oracle on Desktop Virtualization, Enterprise 2.0, and User Experience

Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist – An independant film by Peter Joseph An impressive film about religion, the church, culture, war, history, money, terror, media, and a little bit about the truth. But, as the author said:

It is my hope that people will not take what is said in the film as the truth, but find out for themselves, for truth is not told, it is realized.

• 1:56' of Zeitgeist at google video
• the remaining minutes at youtube