The Blog
14 Sep 2005 Google Blog Search
Good - It exists - It has RSS and Atom feeds (where are these for normal search?) - DC: entries in RSS - Seems to be pretty fast. Let's see how quickly they pick up on this post. Bad - Where's "Popular" and "Recent"? - There's nothing in the RSS/Atom content to say where the post came from - I desperately need a way of saying "not from this domain" Searches for "Voidstar" all come from this blog. What I want is people who point to me not me. - It doesn't seem to search tags - According to the FAQ, they're scanning the Ping services like weblogs.com So where's Google's ping service? 13 Sep 2005 In the space of two weeks we had
- Google Talk - Google Sidebar - Google Desktop search V2 - MSN v7.5 - MS buy Telio (MSN to plain old telephones POTS) - Skype Beta 1.4 - SkypeNet - SkypeWeb - SkypeMac 1.3 - Skype Voice Services - AOL announce links with Jabber - Skype bought by Ebay Now Google + Jabber open standards IM + SIP open standards Voice/Video + Apple + AOL could be a force to be reckoned with. It'll certainly make Skype, MSN and Yahoo! scared and push them into faster innovation. And Google's use of SSL provides some encryption but with the same caveats as with Skype. The problem is that Google talk is a v0.1 Alpha. And so it's not really usable. Can Google ship early and ship often? I'm curious to see how the eBay acquisition affects perception of Skype's encryption. I've written before that without peer review it's somewhat suspect. If the FCC and EU push for a wiretap backdoor, I don't see eBay pushing back very hard. What is tech.memeorandum ?
Is there something here or is it just another feed aggregator? [from: del.icio.us] 12 Sep 2005 Ebay nabs Skype before anybody else : IT SEEMS that Ebay has, after all, acquired Skype in a deal estimated to be worth $2.6 billion. The deal was done after hefty interest from other sectors including News Corporation and Yahoo, claims the Financial Times.
Ooh err. It seems that the rumours were true. Hmm. Paypal+Skype = P2P payments, and Identity with Presence Over the weekend I listened again to Gil Scott-Heron's B-Movie. This was written shortly after the start of Reagan's first presidency but all too much of it is just being repeated in Bush's. "And we would rather had John Wayne".
And then I started thinking about why Bush doesn't seem to be all there. Especially when he's caught off guard by something random happening in the world. And the answer is that unlike his dad and unlike even Reagan, there actually isn't anything there. He really is just a cardboard cutout that has been carefully selected as the front man. He can read from a script. He can follow orders. But when there's no autocue and his advisors haven't finished the script yet, he's completely lost. A lot of the conversation on the web around Katrina criticises him for not making decisions as Chief Executive. Well I think you've all been watching too much 24 and West Wing. You're judging him on the basis that the POTUS is somebody who thinks, controls, manipulates and most especially leads. Sure, there are hoards of advisors, script writers, researchers and even personal friends around them, but when push comes to shove, the POTUS makes things happen by personal force of will. And will even go against all the people round him if he thinks it's necessary. Except that in Bush's case, the lights are on but there's nobody home. We can't and shouldn't view Bush in these terms. And when we criticise Bush we should recognise that it's not Bush, the man that we're criticising. It's Bush the figurehead and front man for the organisation behind him. It's not Bush that failed America in Katrina, it's the Republican party and everyone they've put into positions of power. So when you see Bush playing guitar while people are dieing; or talking to school children while airplanes are flown into the twin towers; or going blank when he's asked an awkward question; it's just that he hasn't been handed the latest script re-work yet. He's just following orders. And sometimes the orders are wrong. And sometimes the orders are late. But, oh yeah, I remember. In this year that we have now declared the year from Shogun to Reagan, I remember what I said about Reagan…meant it. Acted like an actor…Hollyweird. Acted like a liberal. Acted like General Franco when he acted like governor of California, then he acted like a republican. Then he acted like somebody was going to vote for him for president. And now we act like 26% of the registered voters is actually a mandate. We're all actors in this I suppose. 11 Sep 2005 Visions of Aestia » Redland/Windows refresh (1.0.2-2)
Hmm. Redland RDF parser with bindings into PHP. With binaries for WINDOWS [from: del.icio.us] 08 Sep 2005 Scripting News: 9/7/2005 : Boing Boing now has distracting graphic ads in its RSS feed. So far it's just making it hard to scan their blog posts, but if it starts interfering as I scan others, I'll unsub. It'll be the second feed I said goodbye to because of annoying item-level ads. It's Feedburner again. Why they don't give users a way to opt out of these ads is beyond me.
Dave's screenshot shows him using IE6. He really should be using Firefox. I just had a look and the feeds appear to be coming from http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/* It was the work of moments to add this to AdBlock et voila, no more RSS Ads from feedburner feeds. 07 Sep 2005 Oi! You lot at the W3C! Who was it who had the bright idea of using the same character to escape character entities as the delimiter between variables in URLs?
I'd like you to meet the guy at Microsoft who thought it would be clever to turn the forward slash in Unix paths to backward slashes in Windows. TR 35 : They are the TR35--Technology Review's selection of the top technology innovators under age 35 (as of October 1, 2005).
Damn Ageists! Where's the "top technology innovators over age 35" And why are they all American? [ 07-Sep-05 8:37am ] 06 Sep 2005 Please excuse the blog spam. This is a last call for this conference. There's a lot of people here who should be interested in using Blogs and Blog like technologies in business.
Our Social World Conference Friday 9th September 2005 The Moller Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge, UK - just 45 mins from London Theme: Getting businesses into blogging and wikis! Enabling conversations with your customers and users by learning about web logs and related applications. Who should attend: All involved in business from CEO's to receptionists, VC's and entrepreneurs. Blogs can destroy or build a company's reputation: Kryptonite Locks in the USA lost a $15m class action suit on issue's first raised by a blogger. There's a stellar cast of speakers including yours truly. Anything you can do to promote this to business people (rather than geek bloggers) will be much appreciated. [from: JB Ecademy] Skype prank
Hilarious. Post a provocative skype profile. Then match up incoming chats with each other. They both think their talking to "sexy girl" but actually they;'re talking to each other. Finally, archive the results. Boing Boing: Barbara Bush: things going 'Very Well' for poor NOLA evacuees
Somebody else making the connection between the current USA and pre-revolutionary France. It's not "let them eat cake" it's "Let them evacuate themselves" 05 Sep 2005 A very strange post appeared in my home brew RSS aggregator today.
Topic Exchange: Channel 'wifi' [ 5-Sep-05 4:23pm ] [View Website] Hmmm. I may have to click through on this just to see where the letters w i f i appear. There again, maybe not. A comment from me on The Doc Searls Weblog in response to his War on Error: The poor : I wonder if it's time to go back and think again about the best way to deal with the poor in a modern civilized, western country. The comments I've seen so far have been polarised within the current frames of reference with no attempt to think outside the box.
The news on Katrina from outside the USA || kuro5hin.org
I've tried to keep away from this because my reaction has been seriously confused. But the responses on this post tipped me over the edge. "The animals that are committing these crimes are not the same Americans who believe in our nation's high moral stature. Rather, they are the product of a politically correct curriculum which preaches the moral bankruptcy of this country; at least, when it isn't preaching that morality is non-existent. What we're seeing on the news, then, is simply the embodiment of liberal values, and the natural tendency of people live up (or down) to the expectations of their communities." "First - grab a clue stick. The US is a federal system. Bush doesn't have the authority to order evacuations of cities or to move troops into them. The reason the evacuation was delayed was because the Mayor of New Orleans didn't want to declare one." "New Orleans' poverty level is not all that different than elsewhere in the US - 30ish% vs 27%." So. the problem is too much socialism in the USA. Thanks, McCarthy. The country as a whole can't do anything until the local government request it. Well thanks again, you founding fathers. But it's that last one that really freaks me out. There's a joky metaphor there that's particular apt. The only reason the successful classes have their heads above the shit is that they're standing on the shoulders of a 30% underclass buried in it. Can a society really call itself civilised or preach "high moral stature" when it depends on 30% of it's population being below the poverty level? Apart from being eerily like any number of science fiction novels (Metrophage, Escape from New York, Distraction) this feels to me like the beginnings of the French Revolution. Any time the mob loses access to the basic necessities of life like water and food, the mob will revolt. Human beings want to survive and in desperation they will do almost anything to do it. Add easy access to guns, mix in the sudden cessation of the drug supply and leave basic resources unguarded and a swift fall into anarchy is hardly surprising. And the central power's reaction is entirely predictable, send in the cavalry to restore order and try and keep a lid on it. Has Katrina ripped away the facade and exposed the rotten core? Just as the spiraling cost of bread exposed the rotten core at the heart of the French Kingdom? 
  1 to 20 of 3860 |
