Google’s brand new App Engine allows developers to write (in Python only, at the moment), store and run programs using Google’s application environment. This is no longer just parking documents in the clouds but sky writing — for those who can fly, at least. Speaking of which, you can see how it’s done by looking at a (slow-loading) video of the coding process under App Engine on YouTube. For a while, it’s a kick to see this kid just typing out code as fast as you or I might tap out a simple declarative sentence in English.

At the moment . . . [more]

I was searching for a free Visio-like product today and luckily came across this great website that lists open source software alternatives to commercial products:

The site allows you to browse through various software categories and compare pros and cons of both commercial products and open source software.

The editor of this site, Anders Ingeman Rasmussen, boldly states in a sort of fortune cookie way: If you want success, open source is the way to go.

Who knew the answer was so simple… . . . [more]

The first video gaming research symposium at the University of Toronto will be taking place as follows:

Tuesday May 13th 2008
8 am – 4 pm

40 St. George Street
Bahen Centre for Information and Technology
University of Toronto
Room 1190

Video gaming incorporates and impacts cutting edge research in the fields of computer science, engineering, sociology, management and law. We are delighted to present a broad array of research projects that are representative of the breadth of work underway at the University of Toronto.

The presentations will focus on the technical aspects of video game design and then consider

After enjoying years of solid success thanks to its PDF technology, one of the technologies warmly embraced by lawyers, and what must be the number two piece of software in the world, Photoshop, Adobe has begun to move. Google builds a castle in the clouds out of plain boards and fittings, a trifle ramshackle-seeming but for that reason also unthreatening: hey, this is how you’d do it, if you could, honest, simple — not like that pseudo slick Disneyesque Microsoft machine.

Meanwhile, Adobe, having acquired Macromedia and its all-important Flash, has begun to construct its own set of computing in . . . [more]

Google Docs has announced that as of today, they’re rolling out an offline capacity. (I’ve checked my account and I’m not one of the lucky ones — yet.) If you’re among the favoured, you’ll see the word Offline in the top right menu, as in this graphic, taken from a simple video demonstrating how it works. You’ll have to have Google’s Gears installed to make it work.

This is a Good Thing, I suppose: any increase in functionality is valuable. But at the same time it does seem to be a bit of a zag after so much Web 2.0 . . . [more]

That’s the question raised in a webcast from Outlaw, consisting of an interview with BAILII executive director Joe Ury.

The article based on the Interview, announces that Bailii will shortly publish the 3000 most important decisions in the English common law:

Bailii approached academics at universities all over the UK and asked them to list the most important rulings in their area of expertise. It then sought permission to publish those rulings one by one.

“It’s been a long slog,” said Ury. He said that the project was returned a list of 2,600 judgments, and that it has . . . [more]

We’ve discussed the transition of the Canada Law Book Company caselaw materials from Lexis-Nexis to a new BestCase product providing electronic access to almost all the caselaw that CLB has ever produced ((Due to licensing restrictions in the arrangements that CLB has with Thomson-West, the Canadian Patent Reporter is excluded)).

Today it launched. Tomorrow Lexis-Nexis’ Canadian materials will have an entirely new set of source materials.

Along with the other Toronto research lawyers, I had an advance look at the interface last week.

The good news is that in an amazingly short period of time, CLB has managed to develop . . . [more]

An article in today’s London Free Press by David Canton of eLegal talks about the concern the European Commission for Justice, Freedom and Security has about tracking dots that some colour laser printers leave on printed material. From David’s article:

Printer makers are able to encode the serial number, manufacturing code and the date of printing through a series of small yellow dots interspersed on the printed paper. These dots are invisible to the naked eye…

Xerox has admitted it provided tracking dots to [the U.S.] government. At present, only select enforcement agencies have the capacity to read the codes.

Last week Simon Fodden caught all of us up on the issue of “throttling” of web access by Bell Canada that broke in the news in his post When It All Goes Peer Shaped. This issue has continued to be the talk of the tech industry all week with no indication of letting up.

The crux of the story is that Canadians are being denied access to certain aspects of the Internet with ISPs Bell and Rogers making the decisions as to which parts are denied, including access to peer-to-peer downloads of CBC TV episodes to which Canadian taxpayers . . . [more]

I may be the last to realize this, but Google’s Advanced Search page has been AJAXified nicely, such that as you fill out the boxes that filter your search, you can see the search terms appear correctly formatted in the uppermost text box. This is, I suppose, a way of letting you correct whatever might have been wrongly entered, but also, I suspect a way of instructing people who want to learn how to build a complex search without the help of a form or a wizard. . . . [more]

Clay Shirky, who writes on the effects of the internet and technology on society, recently published Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. If you’d like to get a sense of what he has to say on the subject of groups, you should take a look at a [40-minute] video of his talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center.

Shirky has also started a blog focused on the book.

Given the recent emphasis on collaboration as the coming thing among lawyers (see, e.g., What’s Hot – According to New York Legal Tech and Collaboration on Slaw.), Shirky’s . . . [more]

An organization called the Global Kids’ Digital Media Initiative launched the International Justice Center last week in support of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

The official ceremony featured ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Lloyd Axworthy (former foreign affairs minister of Canada), Louise Arbour (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and former Supreme Court of Canada Justice), Allan Rock (former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations), and Kenneth Roth (Executive Director, Human Rights Watch).

The Center will use web technologies and ensure a presence in the virtual reality world of Second Life to mobilize young people around human . . . [more]