Genii Weblog


Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Thu 29 May 2014, 11:13 PM
I saw Kathy Brown's post about how Ant Pruitt asked whether we remember our first computer. Or at least the first one we ever used. I remember mine, and how I eventually managed to kill it.
 
Back in 1978, my school bought a computer that I am fairly sure was a Commodore Pet that looked something like the image below. That is, I don't remember much about what it looked like, but I remember that my good friend, Jeff, and I were the only ones remotely interested. We learned to do some things on it, simple programming and such. There were no games or anything we didn't write ourselves, but we could make it do some math and very, very simple ascii graphics. It was in a little room and we spent quite a bit of time in there. 
 
Eventually, Jeff got a TRS-80 kit and we played with that at his house. Nobody ever paid any attention to the little computer downstairs, and the last day of school before we graduated, we decided to open it up and see how the insides worked. After playing for a bit, we managed to fry the display, so we closed it up and left it. I have no idea how long before anybody even noticed that it didn't work anymore.
 

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Sun 18 May 2014, 09:45 PM
As some of you may have heard, I am working on a project to put out a rewritten and extended version of my sci fi humor serial, Judd Falcoln: Missionary to the Stars, as a series of Youtube videos. It will not be a script or movie, but it will be more than a simple narration of a story. Dialogue will be read by volunteers (that would be you, mate), and faces might be used as well in a manner of speaking. What I need are volunteers who are willing to record themselves reading expressively the lines that I send. Anybody who is comfortable with it can also record it as video (on a smartphone if nothing else), but your face may by emblazoned on a rocket that shoots up while you talk, or superimposed on a planet or whatever makes sense (ok, none of this may). You might be animated (cartoon style) or not. If you still don't want your face used at all, voices are certainly welcomed, though they may be represented by something, such as a waddling penguin.

If you are interested, we'll start with a few smaller stories to work out the video techniques. Think of them as auditions if you get a buzz out of being nervous, but I am thinking of them more as a chance to fit characters more to your voice. Drop me a line if you are interested. Warning, if ukulele music is a trigger for you, turn the sound down when you watch the videos.

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Copyright © 2014 Genii Software Ltd.

Fri 9 May 2014, 11:47 AM
We are releasing CoexLinks Fidelity 3.6 today, and I thought I'd address one objection which comes up in meetings with clients. 

Email fidelity isn't mission critical, is it?

While most people making the argument are shot down quickly by those who do actually think that how a company presents itself to its clients and customers is important, I want to show an admittedly slightly contrived example, though I think you can see how even in more realistic cases, important information could be lost. In this case, an email is being sent internally to people inside the company who all have Notes clients. But they are not all reading the email from Notes clients. Some are reading from mobile devices or forwarded to their GMail or other web mail clients. You don't even have to see what this looks like in Notes. The first of these was sent from the latest IBM Notes 9 client, the second sent through CoexLinks Fidelity 3.6, both with exactly the same content. The question is, which would you rather the recipient saw, and would the difference be mission critical?

Sent from IBM Notes 9 Social Edition (client MIME rendering)
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Sent from IBM Notes 9 Social Edition (CoexLinks Fidelity 3.6 MIME rendering)
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Remember, this was the exact same message. Mission critical?

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