The one feature that I’m especially pleased (ok, very excited) about is the ability to export your mindmap and share via their flash player. For quite a while, I’ve been advocating the need to bring mind maps to the masses (read my Call to Action), and have taken steps to create an experimental Universal Mindmap Viewer. One major pain point of most mind mapping applications, is the difficulty in sharing maps. And, ultimately, the lack of quality(user experience) of simple image or HTML exports.

The thing I really like about MindJet’s new flash player is that the look n’ feel is very similar to the real MindManager application (I would love the see a full-screen option BTW).

Checkout their player page for an interactive example.

“A genius! For 37 years I’ve practiced fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius!” –Pablo Sarasate (Spanish violinist)

Think of the greatest athlete, musician, artist or business professional that inspires you. The amazing talents that really stand out. Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods. Warren Buffett. They were each born with a special gift: wired from birth with talents and abilities that most of us don’t have access to, right?

Research is showing that it’s not that simple. In fact, many child prodigies don’t go on to major success in the area of their early gifts. And many of the greatest performers, athletes and business people never showed any early signs of aptitude.

So, how did they become great at what they do?

A couple of years ago I read an article by Geoffrey Colvin in Fortune, What It Takes To Be Great. The article is fascinating and delves into the question of innate abilities, usually referred as “the talent myth”.

Click here to continue reading the article (complete with links to download mindmaps). Thanks to Luciano @ LiteMind and, in particular, guest writer Don Campbell.

Over the last couple years, I’ve collected links to a number of sites that offer timeline-based browsing and thought I would share. Many of these sites are quite helpful for a number of areas of research, and help put many events into context and historical perspective:

From Cave Paintings to the Internet (Formerly From Gutenberg to the Internet)

http://historyofscience.com/G2I/timeline/

Timeline Index

http://www.timelineindex.com/content/home.php

World History Timeline Poster (Amazing)

http://www.worldhistory-poster.com/en/

Adventures in Philosophy: History of Philosophy Timeline

http://radicalacademy.com/diahistphil.htm

Although things have been slightly hectic, I’ve still had some great chances to get in touch with the great outdoors. Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been on a number of hikes and trips to the beach. Here are some photos (click for a brief description and full-size download):

The concept of using web-based programs like Google’s Gmail is “worse than stupidity”, according to a leading advocate of free software.

Cloud computing – where IT power is delivered over the internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained currency in recent years. Large internet and technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Amazon are pushing forward their plans to deliver information and software over the net.

But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

“It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” he told The Guardian.

“Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman

P.S. On a related note, check out:

The Google Master Plan: Comedy, Conspiracy, or Correct?

I have a *ton* of blog posts I want to get done by the end of the year. I may spend some of my supposed down time fleshing out my fountain of ideas. Stay tuned!

I quickly discovered that while I was aware of most of the blogs in the top 20, I wasn’t subscribed to many of them. I was looking for an easy way to import this list into Google Reader, and didn’t feel like subscribing to each link individually. So, I created a quick n’ dirty script that fetched the URL list, determined the RSS feed for each site, and generated an OPML file.

Right-click and save the OPML file below:

http://eric-blue.com/download/pdblogs.opml

You should be able to easily import this into your RSS feed reader of choice (Google Reader, BlogLines, RSS Reader, Vienna, etc.).

Since I purchased my new iPhone 3G a few weeks ago, I’ve been happily syncing it with my MacBook Pro. As much as I love my Mac laptop, most of my day to day work is done primarily on my personal desktop running Ubuntu Linux. I thought now would be the ideal time to move all of my music-related activities entirely from OS X to Linux. So, I recently migrated all of my music there (35+GB!), and have been trying out a handful of open source solutions for managing my music collection (SongBird, Rhythmbox, Amarok, etc.). What I’ve quickly learned is that most of these applications work fairly well, however they don’t integrate with the Apple Store (love it or hate it, they’ve got great content) and you can’t sync yet with the iPhone 3G.

Since I’m already running VMware Workstation (XP SP2), I thought it would be a breeze to download the latest version of iTunes and sync away. That dream unfortunately did not come true! It took a little while but after I imported my music library from a shared folder, I decided to plugin the iPhone. I waited….. waited….. and nothing happened! I restarted iTunes and got a most obscure error message:

“iTunes could not connect to iPhone “” because an unknown error occurred. (0xE8000035)”

After an inordinate amount of Googling, It seems this has been a common problem affecting both VMware and VirtualBox users. There was a mixture of comments. Some users said things where working fine for them, others gave up with tears in their eyes. From what I could gather, here were the most common suggestions for solving the problem:

1. Upgrade from Service Pack 2 to Service Pack 3
2. Enable USB 2.0 in your VM preferences
3. Try plugging the phone into a different USB Port
4. Set ehci.present to TRUE in the .vmx file
5. Try running the VM in VMWare Player instead of VMWare Workstation

I can safely say that *none* of these suggestions helped. The first, and most time consuming, thing I tried was upgrading to SP3. No luck! USB2.0 and EHCI where already enabled so that couldn’t be it either. Different USB ports didn’t help, and VMWare Player behaved exactly the same. As an absolute last resort, I decided to download the latest version of Workstation. My version 6.0.2 was from about 7 months ago, and I noticed that 6.0.5 was released at the end of Aug. The solution that worked for me?

Upgrade to the latest version of VMware!!

Why did this work? I browsed through the release notes, and saw mention of an iPhone-specific fix in version 6.0.3:

“With Workstation 6.0.2 the iPhone might be seen as a camera device by a Windows guest but iTunes did not list the device in its device list. In Workstation 6.0.3, the iPhone is usable and visible in iTunes for Windows guests.”

Problem solved and my iPhone is now happily syncing away with my virtual instance of Windows XP. I figured I would share this post and spread the word in case there are other hopeful, but stumped, iPhone 3G users out there.

Einstein once said something to the effect of, “you cannot solve problems by thinking within the same framework or mindset that discovered the problems.” The implication is that you need to step into another mindset, another level of thinking. So how do we step into another mindset, as Einstein implies we should? One possible method is mind-mapping, which arguably triggers a much more natural way of thinking and problem solving.

Click here to read more

Well, it turns out that there are some people out there with *amazing* memories who can do incredible feats of mental gymnastics on their own (think about the amazing Rainman - Kim Peek, or Brainman - Daniel Tammet). The latest brain wiz to add to the list is Brad Williams.

For as long as he can remember, Brad Williams has been able to recall the most trifling dates and details about his life.

News anchor Brad Williams is believed to have a “superior autobiographical memory.”

For example, he can tell you it was August 18, 1965, when his family stopped at Red Barn Hamburger during a road trip through Michigan. He was 8 years old at the time. And he had a burger, of course.

“It was a Wednesday,” recalled Williams, now 51. “We stayed at a motel that night in Clare, Michigan. It seemed more like a cabin.”

To Williams and his family, his ability to recall events — and especially dates — is a regular source of amusement. But according to one expert, Williams’ skill might rank his memory among the best in the world. Doctors are now studying him, and a woman with similar talents, hoping to achieve a deeper understanding of memory.

Williams, a radio anchor in La Crosse, Wisconsin, seems to enjoy having his memory tested. Name a date from the last 40 years and, after a few moments, he can typically tell you what he did that day and what was in the news.

How about November 7, 1991?

“Let’s see,” he mused, gazing into the distance for about five seconds. “That would be around when Magic Johnson announced he had HIV. Yes, a Thursday. There was a big snowstorm here the week before.”

He went on to identify correctly some 20 other events, including the birth of the first test-tube baby in 1978, the toxic-gas leak in Bhopal, India, in 1984, and Billie Jean King’s victory over Bobby Riggs in tennis’s “Battle of the Sexes” in 1973.

“I’ve always been this way,” Williams said. “Growing up, I never really had reason to think I wasn’t like everyone else.

Read more of this article at CNN. Credit to MindHacks.org.