Skimming through a few interesting articles in my aggregator (this pointing to this, as it happens) something flashed up briefly in the margin, just off to the left of my focus. "Oh", suddenly - "I wonder who's there"?

Imagine my disappointment: it was only a tooltip. Nobody there at all, really.

Sadly, there still exists software like that - "context" without "presence". Until we fix that bug, I'll likely have those little anthropomorphic hallucinations more often.

Some sandstorm, huh? And what happened to the wings? I wonder what the backstory is here...

I've seen WINE (see some historical work), but not CrossOver. Looks interesting...

Jeroen points to an article at OneWorld.net:

The pilot project which was initiated on September 1 this year, is funded by Groove Networks which is co-owned by Information Technology giants Microsoft and Intel, the Appeal for Nobel Peace Laureate Foundation and US-based nongovernmental organization (NGO), Academy for Education and Development(AED), and USAID.

Hopes Moragoda, "The Info-Share initiative is likely to make a fundamental change in the peace process and bring the parties to the conflict closer."

One for the Christmas list: SqueezeBox is the old SliMP3, uprated: now with WiFi. I'm not a very gadgety person, but this is nice. (via Scot)

Ray, at some length, rambling about the importance of WinFS.

...we've been teasing ourselves and our users with the power of componentized function, rich object models, schemas and persistent storage in the form of integrated application environments...
In a pre-WinFS world, each application has managed its own "documents" and "records" and "collections" as an island unto itself - each with its own indexing and interaction mechanisms, each with its own solution-building mechanisms. Good 'nuf. But in a WinFS world - just like in a Web Services world - we have the opportunity to explore what would happen if we dared to "deconstruct and refactor" our concepts of traditional client-side applications into a mesh of separately-built application components that "meet" at the level of common persistent objects and relationships.

Steve Gillmor interviews Ray Ozzie about Microsoft, Longhorn, and Groove - fascinating.

Downloadable Supplemental chapters (and sample code) from Tom Rizzo's book "Programming Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange 2003" - worth a read if you're looking at SharePoint. Chapters E, F and G give a good developer-level overview of WSS.

Hewlett-Packard using InfoPath, SharePoint and Groove, with quantifiable cost savings. Here's the headline:

Using Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, InfoPath 2003, Windows SharePoint Services, and Groove Workspace, HP automated the publishing of sales guides to its intranet, thereby decreasing development time and improving the quality of its guides.

With Groove Workspace, HP and non-HP users working outside the corporate firewall will be able to securely exchange XML documents regardless of network connection or physical location, thus allowing HP to seamlessly integrate cross functional and highly mobile teams in the content creation process. Whether an outsourced technical writer needs remote access to the content or an HP employee is on a plane, any changes they make during the content creation process will be automatically synchronized to the HP solution.

Charles Miller: A Handful of Vulnerabilities: "A series of articles detailing common security flaws found in software: stuff that gets reported to Bugtraq every day".

I've not yet had enough time to follow up the Longhorn news from PDC. But reading commentary on XAML triggered a chain of association: from Quartz -> NeXT -> PostScript fractals, and that needs a link.

Check out Yib's Guide to Mooing: Getting the Most from Virtual Communities on the Internet. Yib's radically noble and generous discursion on the text-based world of MOO. Amazing depth, well written.

File-swapping is a new trend [Cleveland Plain Dealer]:

Many companies rent a sliver of cyberspace in which to store files, which employees can then download and use. But Parizek found this laborious and slow. Groove lets him access documents faster. He stopped renting cyberspace and now shares his files through Groove.

Communication, Collaboration and Technology: Back to the Future: a new whitepaper, co-authored by Ray Ozzie and Peter O'Kelly.

To build better products for communication and collaboration, we need to get back to basics -- to revisit the ways in which people actually communicate and collaborate in the real world, to factor in the opportunities presented by computing and networking technology, and to then design products that embody the best of both worlds. It's fundamentally important for software products to directly support the communication and collaboration patterns and dynamics people naturally use, rather than just dealing with subsets of the problem space and leaving integration up to unsuspecting and overwhelmed individuals and organizations. We need to go back to the future, to recapture the early enthusiasm for how communication and collaboration technologies can augment interpersonal interaction while avoiding the limitations that have constrained earlier collaborative software products.