Collecting and sharing your notes by using Google Notebook

Google Notebook is a service being developed in Google Labs. I have used it for a couple of weeks, and enjoy it a lot. Now there is no need for me to take the paper notebook around the office and home. Its valuable features include:
1. Collecting the points not just the links from the web, and
2. Easy sharing and collaborating.
The web-based applications like Google Notebook are perfect for team work of research and development projects. They would be efficient tools for organizations to collect knowledge from individuals and the web at large. I think the areas like E-leaning and knowledge management will see many such applications soon.

Spellcheck in Firefox 2.0

The Spellbound add-on does not work on Firefox 2.0, and I installed a new add-on named United States English Dictionary. It works just like Spellbound. There is also a British English Dictionary available.

IBM's patents

Just heard that IBM Files Patent Infringement Lawsuits Against Amazon.com. I am really curious to know these patents refer to what applications Amazon has done. The following is my guess:
"Presenting Applications in an Interactive Service" -- web application or web services or Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS)?
"Storing Data in an Interactive Network" -- database or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)?
"Presenting Advertising in an Interactive Service" -- all the Ads on the web?
"Adjusting Hypertext Links with Weighted User Goals and Activities" -- personalized recommendations?
"Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalogue" -- the whole Amazon website?

Reading PDF documents on two monitors

Most papers I read are PDF documents, and I need to read two or three at the same time to compare different approaches related to the same topic. It is luck that my boss put two LCD's on my desk. Adobe reader annoyed me at first because I could not make two documents displayed on different monitors. I found the trick is at Window->Tile. It is perfect for two documents, but things will be messy when you have more than four documents opened at the same time. Now it is time to use gsview to read as many documents as you like. The difference between adobe reader and gsview is that the former can only have one application instance running on the system, but the latter has no such restriction. Therefore, there is no way to display different parts of one document on two monitors at the same time by using adobe reader when you do not make a copy of that document.

A tutorial for new axis2 users

I just posted a beginner tutorial of axis2. Two simple web service examples are discussed. The source code is here.

Web services and utility computing meet at Amazon

Amazon web services has published more and more items based on the ideas of virtualization and utility computing. It seems that Amazon will virtualize every piece of IT and make them as utility services: from storage (Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)) to messaging bus (Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)) to application hosting (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)). Even the human resource is virtulized into Amazon Mechanical Turk as "Artificial Artificial Intelligence". The idea is really interesting and crazy. I find reward prices for most jobs in the "Artificial Artificial Intelligence" machine are ridiculous. It is just a test now, but may become popular in the future because of divers human resource markets in the world.

The concepts of virtulization and utility computing have been around for couples of years, Amazon does a great job to realize them in B2C market.

Spell check for text inputs in Firefox

For those who always type but not write, typing text without spell checking is really painful. Most editors support spell checking. Some web applications like Gmail also support that. There are lots of text input areas on web pages needing this feature. For Firefox, you can use SpellBound. The old versions of SpellBound can be found at http://spellbound.sourceforge.net. You can read this post at MozillaZine for the development version for Firefox 1.5.0. For IE, you may look at ieSpell.