Technology

This is a strictly opinion piece and I have no inside knowledge as to Google’s plans. I think Google may have hit on a great idea when they designed Gmail and the way in which their “beta” distributes Gmail addresses. It may be too short lived because of attempts to circumvent the system. Perhaps one of the most prevalent problems with free email addresses is that it takes minimal effort to get that account. As a result, we get AOL syndrome. There are too few string combinations to go around. Instead of getting simply “derik” as one’s login, you’re forced to come up with an obfuscated version, with the most obvious one being attachment of numbers to the end of it (such as one’s birthday). So, instead of “derik” you’d end up with “derik112881” (please send presents). ...

Another good way to waste one’s time is to play with Googlefight. Type two things, and using Google, it will proclaim the winner. Neat, now how does it do that? Google spits out approximate matches for any query (you know, 1-10 of about some number). One method would be to parse this from Google’s pages. That’s a kludge though which may break. A better idea? Use Google’s SOAP interface once again (just as I did for my Google cache utility, and as I will use for my custom search interface). One of the results fields is this value. This can be captured quickly and compared. Part of Google’s appeal for now and some time to come is the fact that it not only has a great and accurate engine, but it supplies all imaginable information to third-parties. That may be it’s saving grace as monsters such as Yahoo! come charging like a bull.

Slashdot | Ballmer Says iPod users are Thieves I think this speaks for itself. Ballmer is crying that the iPod and iTunes Music Store are doing so well. boohoo

I love keeping track of my favorite news sources in NetNewsWire by using RSS feeds. However, a lot of stuff I read is still distributed via email. This isn’t too much of pain with a mail client that does threading or Gmail. That said, it’s not nearly as convenient as using NetNewsWire (or your favorite RSS reader). The solution? It’s a neat, new, novel, free idea called dodgeit. There are no passwords or setup involved, but it’s easy to sign up and you instantly have RSS access to email there. This is perfect for mailing lists whose content can be publicly accessed by anyone. It can even be used by mailing list administrators to instantly add RSS access. Nifty! ...

We’ve now reached a time where most people are fairly computer savvy. However, despite knowing how most of the parts of a computer interact and work, the units are still seemingly impossible to master. Let’s review shall we? Hard drives and memory are measured in storage units. They based upon the unit byte (which is in turn 8 bits). A long, long, long (did I mention long?) time ago, hard drives were measured in MB (megabytes). Once they reached one thousand megabytes (or 1,024 depending on how anal you are), they started measuring them in GB (gigabytes). This has been true for the better part of a decade. It’s time to force yourself to type GB. As for memory, most people don’t get this wrong yet. Most users still have less than 1 GB and as such, will refer to it in MBs. ...

Slashdot | Google’s Math Puzzle It’s too bad I already have a job. I’ll have to keep this in mind for a few years down the road though.

Katie revealed a bug in Windows Internet Explorer that WordPress exposes. The comment box following articles will span the entire length of the page instead of the box, and as such, the sidebar covers over part of it. The solution is either to wait for Microsoft to fix it (*snicker* *snicker*) or get pretty much any other browser. Safari and Firefox both render it correctly. The funny part is that even Internet Explorer for Mac handles it correctly. It’s pretty amazing how Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit got so many things right when writing that browser that didn’t get passed along to the Windows version.

Mozilla has once again updated its software offerings. The new Firefox Preview Release (PR) gives us a taste of what we can expect in the fourth quarter when the full version is released. New features include: RSS Sensing If the page you are visiting has set the right tags, an RSS button will appear in the status bar, listing available feeds (RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3). Live Bookmarks Once an RSS feed is found, it is captured as a Live Bookmark. The bookmark then looks like a folder with the contents being that of the feed. Slick! Improved TypeAhead Find which now shows an unobtrusive search bar at the bottom to help control your searching. Slight UI Improvements Although the changes are slight, overall they much improve the experience of using Firefox. The URL slot turning beige when at a secure site is a nice touch. Thunderbird also sports some great new features. In particular, it adds RSS feed support. You may think: So what? You just told me about Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. Well, hold on a second. While it’s a nice new feature, it still doesn’t address the problem of managing many feeds and keeping track of what you’ve read. Thunderbird lets you treat them like email, with each article being a message. You can make them read, move them, copy them, and even delete them. Sweet. ...

The Unsanity blog recently featured an entry on a shareware author that took a slightly more aggressive stance on software piracy. Slightly might be the wrong adverb for this case as the mechanism employed had the ability to wipe out the offending user’s entire home directory. The author reportedly decided this was too harsh and removed the code a few hours later. Why do I bring this up? Well, Unsanity wanted to keep quiet what the product and who the author was, but Slashdot ran a story today revealing the identity. The cat is out of the bag, as they say. ...

My work requires me to work on a Unix box for a good part of my time. For some of you, that may sound daunting, hard, or archaic, but really it isn’t. It sure beats trying to develop things on Windows every hour of every day. It actually makes working with others exceedingly easy. We all look at essentially the same filesystem thanks to the wonders of NFS. One can log into another machine if their machine is loaded, or even into much larger computers that have no physical terminal. Very handy. ...