Beyond iCal + social networks + personal aggregators
For some provocative thoughts on social networking / integrated calendaring / event software (‘beyond iCal’) see Marc Canter’s “Just so we’re clear” + the four blogs it points onwards to, and also take look at the cool Flash widget on the upper left of his site (entitled ‘Steal this widget’) which has full Laszlo source code available to see an example of what he’s thinking about on the RSS/OPML/’beyond Flash’ front

Ray Ozzie (of Groove fame) is one of the 4 bloggers listed in Marc Canter’s entry above, and he asks the following in his entry:
Has a method to embed iCal into XML ever been approved or agreed upon? If so, let me refer to it as xCal.
Has a method to embed xCal events/etc ever been suggested as a viable item type for RSS?
Has anyone built websites that publish venues’ event calendars in such a format for subscription/aggregation?
Has anyone built an Outlook or Notes adapter that publishes personal or team calendars to such a feed, OR
Has anyone built an RSS aggregator that can aggregate multiple calendar RSS feeds into a desktop or web calendar UI?
Has anyone built an RSS aggregator that can aggregate multiple calendar RSS feeds into your Outlook or Notes personal calendar?

End of summer
Alas, summer seems to have ended with a vengeance yesterday. Waaaaaaaaaa. One of the highlights of the summer was the National Wakeboard Championship at Willen Lake on August 16th-17th, and I can’t resist showing off one of the many spectacular photos taken by Chris Valentine at the event, available on his HockeyPhotos.com site.

I had been blogging my own feeble attempts at wakeboarding, which continued throughout most of our gloriously sunny September and still ended in total failure. The good news is that I finally lowered my sights considerably and decided to have some fun kneeboarding (see a typical kneeboarding site), which at least I can manage, even to the point of doing a few elementary tricks.

Navigational intelligence

The TomTom Wireless GPS navigator for Pocket PC that I’ve described both briefly and at length has two interesting problems, one minor, one major.

The minor problem is that it does not let you set ‘waypoints’, i.e. to say I want to go from A to B and I MOST DEFINITELY want to pass by points C and D. This is trivial in navigational packages for sailors, but not in TomTom Navigator for drivers, and it should be made simpler (I understand from the company by telephone that this is ‘on the list’). The major problem, which is a wonderful AI problem, is that there is no ‘coarse-grained’/'common-sensical’ view of your route. Driving up from Southampton to Milton Keynes at the weekend, it plotted a great route for me, but (a) it wasn’t the route I wanted, and (b) it required a lot of browsing, scrolling, zooming and panning to get the ‘gestalt’ of where it was trying to take me.

I’d like to have the common-sense view in a nutshell, i.e. what a person sitting beside you would say, for instance “We’re gonna take the M3 to the A34 around Oxford, and then over to MK on the A421″. Then when I say “The M3 is horrendous on a Sunday, what else can we do?” various alternates can be found. In reality, we (= my passengers) did some fantastic real-time re-routing just when we were about to join a major traffic jam (“WAIT! SKIP THAT ROAD! [tap tap tap tap tap tap] GO HERE…”) and the TomTom Navigator found me a brilliant side road. Infuriatingly, at the end of the side road it tried to get me back into the traffic jam, when a quick glance at the ‘big picture’ (conventional) map revealed an intuitively simpler solution. Lacking that intuitive/gestalt view is a problem… not insoluble, but indicative of the common sense that is still a fundamental challenge for AI. [see Minsky's recent remarks on the continuing lack of common sense in AI]

iPaq 5550 update

Having provided a first-time user review here, I thought I should add some extra info. Basically, after extremely intensive use for over a month, my opinions are remarkably similar: it is a great gadget, with an excellent form factor, excellent ‘horsepower’, but continuing ‘brittleness’ if you spend a lot of time ‘network hopping’, turning power off and on a lot in between networks, and shutting down ‘less than gracefully’– on the other hand it is very easy to develop a cooperative modus operandi so you don’t get surprised by such situations.

I’ve switched my default calendar/task software to Pocket Informant, which beats the pants off the lacklustre stuff that is shipped with the Pocket PC (Windows Mobile 2003 version). Highly recommended.

The TomTom navigator software is also remarkable-but-slightly-brittle. The hardware GPS receiver completely died on me, but the headquarters in The Netherlands were extremely helpful, and shipped me a new unit within a few days (on the other hand, the new unit is acting up too, so I’ll have to go back to them again, which is starting to worry me). The software is great, but you have to know when to trust the GPS directions and when not to, e.g. in tricky or traffic-laden situations, or if the map is not 100% up-to-date (most of the maps are extremely accurate, just not 100%, hence the need for some judgement.