sent2null space

I recently engaged a discussion on Facebook that piqued my interest in the area of sleep and dream research. The conversation started on other topics and soon moved toward sleep and dreams and the possible reasons for their existence, both from an evolutionary perspective and from an individual physiological perspective. I think a proper theory of sleep and dreams must include what we know concerning the development of our species in the ancient past and how the increased cortical development that our ancestors experienced might have led to the selection of the ability to dream as a key survival advantage. First let's talk a bit about what we know about human cortical development. Development of the human cortical mind There are many related theories as to why our brains evolved into the large masses that they occupy today , relative to our cranium size. Compared to other primates humans have the largest brain size to cranium ratio, in fact it is believed that the gyri and sulci th...

The beta launch of numeroom.com last week has been instructive in many ways , it has allowed me to finally get over the launch jitters and the many questions of "is it ready" to now be in a proactive mode of "what can I make better?". That said, I have identified several areas that can enhance the experience of new users and I will detail them as they are being identified and engineered for deployment to the production servers. These posts will serve as an inside look into the problems that users have that the site builders rarely anticipate and how they are solved. Problem 1: Numeroom must be separately created. When I first launched the site, I had a feeling I should write the registration logic so that it would automatically create a default Numeroom for the Users, this way they could get going immediately with inviting people, sharing files but more importantly , harnessing the suite of following features enabled uniquely by the Numeroom ecosystem in the form o...

I was recently asked this question by Juliette Powell , and thought it would be the great subject for a detailed blog answer as provided below: From an architectural view , the differences lie in approach. Where as, Google is tacking on real time or near real time collaboration to their existing messaging infrastructure in the form of Google Wave; Numeroom ties a set of collaboration functions into a secure package that is useful to both individual users AND to businesses. I designed it noticing the trend in the proliferating collaboration options about 3 years ago. Web 2.0 technology (XmlHttpRequest object to the clued in) enabled real time experiences that matched previous stand alone software but enabled user interaction that wasn't possible using decentralized stand alone software. The emergence of platforms as the new buzzword and engine behind a given service gave rise to many collaboration options. Meebo, Userplane, Campfire, Parachat, MeGlobe, LivePerson , Provide Support....

Since building the AgilEntity platform I've noticed the tactics that many companies claiming to use agile development methodologies use to market their own development platforms built over the last 7 years. I've isolated these tricks and list them below. Any change to existing software is called "an application". One of the tricks that I've seen used by many of the stand alone or web based providers is to generalize the definition of the well known term "application" to include updates and modifications to existing applications. This is a subtle point , as it allows them to describe changes such as adding new views of data in existing database tables using supposedly advanced visual modification tools, as deployments of entire applications. In reality, these are not application deployments, they are application modifications. The systems are not building entire layers of back end data base tables , business logic and front end UI components but instead ...

I am proud to announce the availability of the numeroom.com website and services. It's been a few months of very little sleep, lots of coffee and lots of cold food (that should have been eaten while it was hot but had to wait a pressing problem) ;) numeroom.com provides an integrated and efficient suite of collaboration services in an AJAX based interface that allows individuals and small to medium sized businesses to quickly set up their own real time presence on their personal pages or on their business pages without any integration hassles. Head over to the site and create a free "evangelist" account, accounts created during this period will be given additional room creation rights and additional file sharing and participant count enhancements. Many video tutorials describe each feature starting with the one indicated below, how to create your new account and first numeroom in 3 minutes. check it out. http://bit.ly/19INxN