I just noticed that if you search Google, you may or may not actually get a display of Sponsored Links in the results. It appears as though if there really are no matching Sponsored Links, they won’t just display some unrelated links. Searching for “no ads here” (at least right now) gives me a result page free of Sponsored Links. Same thing with a search for “Jeremy Zadowny”. (Though Google suggest I might be looking for “Jeremy Zarowny” which I find slightly amusing, since a search for “Jeremy Zarowny” has no results. (Again, as of right now… give it a few hours…) Of course if you spell Jeremy’s name correctly, and search for “Jeremy Zawodny”, you’ll get better results… ;)

I’ll leave it up to you to decide if Google is evil, but not showing totally unrelated Sponsored Links when they could seems like a non-evil thing to do… Oh, and as a sidenote, I’ve been using Yahoo! Search more than AlltheWeb lately…

I have to sort of backup Dave when he mentions FutureMe (with no link?) and Mail to the Future. Sort of. First of all, why not link to FutureMe? Don’t we link to the competition? Was it an oversight? Second, while Mail to the Future did come out many years ago, I see one distinct difference between the two. FutureMe has a social software-like feature, in it’s public entries. This simple little feature, which makes your email to your future self public for all to read, is the hook. It’s the bing! that Mail to the Future missed. The fact that people will write something wacky or insightful, or stupid for others to see, makes this a site to see.

I seem to remember that Mail to the Future might have had some API’s behind it as well, which would allow you to do some neat stuff. It doesn’t look like FutureMe has that, but most people won’t mind, they just want to try it out and read other people’s emails…

I should mention once again that none of this stuff appears as technically hard to the average geekoid, I mean, there’s some dynamic pages, they hit a database, and there’s a cron job of some sort, right? These are the kind of applications you could build in a day or two, the beauty of it is in the details, and in actually doing it. The details require some clever thinking which some people don’t really possess. That’s not to say they aren’t smart. Smart and clever are two different things… I used to know this guitarist who could play almost any song he heard, and while technically proficient knowing all the notes and chords, he lacked the creativity to write a really good song. Creativity? Cleverness? Perhaps these are some of the X’s Mark was looking for…

Those familiar with The Road to Linux will know that we’ve dabbled with Linux for many years, and tend to use it a lot in the server room, and if “Mac OS NeXT” hadn’t come around to rescue Apple from the pre-X era, I’d probably be using Linux on the desktop right now. (Anything but Windows!)

That’s changed a bit, and I am now using Linux on the desktop, as time alllows. I’ve finally gotten hardware capable of running as a desktop machine with a real live GUI and everything. It’s no speed demon, but it seems to handle Fedora Core 1 ok. As of yet, I have not really stressed the system, I’ve mainly just been installing and configuring old favorites like Firefox, Thunderbird and jEdit (which required Java as well.)

The Road to Linux continues! (And I might even update it one of these days…)

Antiword is a utility to read Microsoft Word files and convert them to plain text, PostScript®, or DocBook files… The DocBook stuff is still experimental, but the plain text seems to work quite well for me, and I’ve successfully turned Word files into PostScript® files, and then turned those into PDF filess using ps2pdf. You could go one step further than the PS to PDF Converter site and build an online converter to turn Word Files into PDF files, or, well… whatever else you can dream up.

(See also: antiexcel)

I’ve been using SQLite this week, which prompted me to look up when I last mentioned it. It appears that in December 2002 I said this about SQLite:

Could you take Movable Type (or your CMS of choice) and make it use SQLite instead of MySQL?

Hmmm, I know they added SQLite support to Movable Type at some point, let’s see, it was February 2003, about two months after I mentioned it.

You’re welcome.

(Ok, to be fair, Perl’s DBI probably made it very easy to do…)

I had gotten a letter from my cable company, who is also my ISP. It stated that back in September 2003 they offered me a trial period of increased connectivity. Faster! Faster! or something like that… I declined saying my current connection speed was fine.

So the letter states that the trial period is over, and I can choose a Faster! speed, or if I do nothing, I can keep my current speed for just $9.99 extra per month. First of all, I didn’t want this trial thingy, second of all, I don’t want to pay more… So I call the phone number they supply.

I must say the woman on the phone was quite nice, and answered my questions. I explained that I never asked for an increase in connection speed, and was told that “technology changes” and all users got upgraded to the new speed. the old speed/price is no longer available.

Me: “So basically I’m being held hostage and have to pay more now?”

Yes

Me: “Will this happen every year? Will the price increase by $9.99 next year as well?”

I don’t think it will.

After determining I don’t have many choices, she tells me the new billing will take effect April 1st.

Me: “Wow, that’s appropriate. April 1st, that’s April Fool’s Day. I guess the joke is on me.”

(No comment…)

She never got upset in anyway (what a pro!) and then asked me if she could help with anything else, and I told her to add my name to the list of customers complaining about this. She then said she would fill out a complaint form with my name on it.

Thanks for the excellent service Charter!

Perhaps Mr. Catalano does get it. I ended up having an brief email discussion with him and I came away with the belief he understands weblogs. His main point was that if someone thinks they will start a weblog and instantly become popular and read by millions, they are mistaken.

I can see that point of view, but mine is this: What makes weblogs so damn amazing is the potential for someone to start a weblog and be read by millions. This is something that the average citizen has not had access to before. The old saying goes something like “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one” and more and more we all own the press known as the Internet…

I just recently heard about NeoOffice/J, and I finally got around to installing it this week. Wow! I’ve been using OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X via X11, and while it more or less works, the experience of using NeoOffice/J has been much nicer. It looks more like a Windows app than the nice Aquafied OS X apps you might be used to, but it managed to open Microsoft Word and Excel files with ease. One less reason to use Windows…

CIO Magazine: The Myths of Open Source looks at, and attempts to dispell the myths of open source in large organizations.

What are those myths?

1. The attraction is the price tag
2. The savings aren’t real
3. There’s no support
4. It’s a legal minefield
5. Open source isn’t for mission-critical applications
6. Open source isn’t ready for the desktop

Chris Pirillo sent me a link to the new new Lockergnome design, which happens to be valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, not that nasty mess of invalid non-semantic table gunk they spit out recently that we all complained about…

Thanks, Chris, you done good…

Someone else just doesn’t get it…

Let me let you in on two dirty little secrets of blogging. First, for every blogger, there is probably a handful of readers.

Sure, blogging is a new publishing mechanism (sort of). But it has more in common with wanna-bes who self-publish deathless prose through vanity presses, or pre-teens who pour their hearts out into diaries with flimsy locks, or little old ladies who write poetry with quill pens to read to their cats and store in the sock drawer, than with actual, grab-your-audience-by-the-hair (or other body parts) and get ‘em to think writing.

Yawn…

It’s like that phone thing. It tends to be used by teenagers planning what to do on the weekend, it couldn’t possibly be a serious business tool! Or those PC’s. I mean, I love playing games too, but how could we utilize them for professional journalism? Which we need a lot more of!

Still, I no longer have the time to keep updating a personal observation blog. And lack of time is the primary reason I’m abandoning Byte Me’s companion Random Bytes personal blog and will shortly take down its archives.

Ok, so besides the fact that this guy obviously made no useful connections through his weblog, as illustrated by his whining and then saying he’ll shut it down, he adds that he’ll remove all archives, as if in shame of his failed experiment. Well, the Google cache will hold it for a while, and then if we’re lucky it’ll go into the Wayback Machine.

Try talking to people who are using weblogs for everyday tasks directly related to business, or people who use them to solve real problems, or track issues, or do research… or… Many weblogs are authored by professionals who just happen to be experts in their domain. It’s not all angst-filled teens with the weight of the world on them. And honestly, that’s as valid a use of weblogging technology as anything else, isn’t it?

They say open-source will never catch on…

Asa from the Mozilla Foundation says this:

Today in Bugzilla, over 350 bugs were resolved…

We have about 50,000 people who have ever reported a bug in Bugzilla. About 17,000 of those people are repeat reporters who account for about 200,000 reports.

Henrik Gemal is the top bug reporter with almost 2,600 bugs reported…

…more than 7,600 people have resolved at least one bug report.

Boris Zbarsky is our top bug resolver having personally put to rest over 7,700 bugs…

We’ve got a large and prosperous community of engineers and testers but there’s always room for more. Every week we’re growing those numbers, working with lots of new faces — people who have decided that they want to be involved with more than just an occasional bug report…

In reading that you might thing “Sheesh! Mozilla is full of bugs!” but consider that anyone can submit what they think might be a bug, and it might actually have already been submited (DUPLICATE) or might not even be a bug (NOTABUG.) The thing to focus on here is that the bugs are getting addressed, which is more than I can say for some software producing entities…

I know that not every piece of open-source software is Mozilla-like, but there are many projects and products out there that have similar stories, though the names are numbers might be different.

Oh, and way to go Henrik!

Via adrian holovaty: The W3C’s Semantic data extractor, which tries to extract some information from a HTML semantic rich document.

I also mentioned my idea in the comments:

What might also be of interest is a tool that clearly displayed the outline of a document (as the W3C Validator does) and explains that the words within <hn> tags have more meaning to search engines and other software, than <font> and <b> tags.

Again, the basic idea of “here’s what a computer sees as important” with the extra push of “here’s what search engines see as important.”

Hmmm, perhaps “have more meaning” should really say “are more important” or something to that effect.

Now I just need to figure out how to semantically mark up the bit above where I quoted myself on my own site with a comment I made on another site. Ah, that’s a task for another day…

Often the question of why do we need Atom comes up? Well, to be honest, we don’t. I mean, we don’t need RSS either, do we? But it is nice to have. Why? It makes our lives easier right? Well, it should. As an end user it can, but as a developer it can often make you bang your head against your desk because you long for the simplicity and ease that the users get.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of user-centered design, and putting usability first. In fact, usability should be provided to developers as well as end users. Meaning? Meaning that I want to use standard XML tools to deal with XML. I want XML to actually be XML. RSS is supposed to be XML, but isn’t always XML. Atom is proposed to be XML, and will hopefully be XML. (See Also: Liberal XML parsing related to personality?)

Dave mentions that Borland has an RSS howto, and points to it. In reading The BDN Guide to RSS I find this:

RSS is more or less an XML dialect. I say “more or less” because there is no official XSD for it (although some
have tried) and because a number of sites produces RSS that follows the rules of neither RSS nor XML. This means
that if your application intends to consume RSS generated by persons unknown in the wilds of the internet, you
must be prepared to deal with some less-than-compliant documents. Since non-well-formed documents may be summarily
rejected by an off-the-shelf DOM, some authors resort to writing their own parsers.

Imagine if someone said “Hey, there’s this thing called HTML and you can probably view it in your web browser, but if not, some people resort to writing their own web browsers…” Thing is, 10 years ago that statement would not have seemed that far out there. Today though, I think we’ve made progress, and should continue to move forward.

Here’s what a software engineer has to say when faced with learning about RSS:

RSS is deeply splintered among two competing visions. One says RSS Stands for “RDF Site Summary”, the other says RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. Within these factions, you’ll find numerous minor specification revisions. Most are similar, but differences remain. Writing parsers must be a nightmare.

The specs are really bad. I would have expected to find an official DTD or Schema, but they don’t exist. The
official RSS 2.0 specification is written using some really lousy HTML so it is impossible to print in a decent
way. I spent the last 20 minutes stripping out the garbage (like hardcoded fonts and extra HTML tables) so I could
print a legible version.

Deeply splitered between RDF and RSS? This poor soul doesn’t even know about Atom yet, when he does he’ll start to weep quitely to himself… Well, at least he’s already figured out that writing parsers is a nightmare.

Honestly I see RSS as somewhat equivalent to HTML 4.01, where you could use tables for layout and font tags, and it’s more or less ok, while I see Atom as being more like XHTML 1.0 where things are at least a little more clean and strict, and people try their best to avoid using tables unless they have tabular data to display, and wouldn’t think of throwing a font tag into the mix.

Yes, RSS is growing in popularity. It only took 4 years or so, which on the Internet is a really long time. Companies are choosing to implement RSS feeds. Why not? Everyone else is doing it? And it’s usually safe for Mr. Safe to do what everyone else is doing… Right?

Photo Matt has unsubscribe from the Lockergnome newsletters… Blink! There ya go, I just unsubscribed too. If you are an advocate of supporting web standards, the semantic web, valid code, or just plain quality, I’d urge you to think about doing the same. A nice follow up would be to email them explaining why you’ve unsubscribed, in the hopes that someone there actually cares.

Personally, I first remember noticing the Lockergnome stuff when it seemed to be a good resource for Windows folks, but later noticed they had web development stuff. I took a look and was not hugely impressed, but thought it was well enough done. Their redesign using CSS really did impress me, and make me think that perhaps I’d been missing something. They also became advocates of syndication, which was a good thing.

But now, the credibility is gone. Imaging if tomorrow you went to Zeldman’s site and it was full of tables and <font> tags and spacer gifs. You’d think his site had been hijacked, or that he’d gone mad, or that it was perhaps April 1st, or maybe April 1st, 1997.

Goodbye Lockergnome, you almost had me at “CSS…”

Matrix Expands to Wisconsin … To quote our friend Bender, “We’re boned!” (See: The MATRIX and MATRIX Misconceptions…)

Photo Matt seems like a smart guy. So does Dave Shea, but I think they’ve both been had. Matt mentioned that Lockergnome was returning to what I’ll refer to as crappy markup practices. This was also commented on by Dave at mezzoblue talking about standards as a continuum.

Now, I don’t claim to be smarter than either of these guys, but I do claim to be able to look at a calendar. Mine says it’s March, and I happen to know that after March comes April. April 1st to be precise, which is also known as April Fools Day.

Obviously this is a prank by the people at Lockergnome. Oh sure, you think it’s too early, it’s not even mid-March! Ah, the element of surprise! If they mentioned this too close to April 1st, it would blow everything.

Mark my words, this has to be a joke. Because only a damn fool would consider tossing out clean, valid, semantic markup for total crap.

Oh, just in case I am wrong, feel free to apply that ‘damn fool’ label to the folks at Lockergnome…

I drive too many hours each week, so audio content is a good thing for me. No, I’m not a proud iPod owner, but I got a Rio last year, and it works just fine. I even built a dashboard mount for it…

So where do we find good audio content? Let’s take a look.

The Linux Show is one I usually try to catch. The sound quailty isn’t the greatest, probably due to 4 or more people all talking on phones from various places, sometimes airports, or hotels, or in the deep tunnel project… Besides that, the content is good if you’re into the Linux/open-ource stuff… They’re always looking to upgrade equipment, so it should only get better.

Your Mac Life used to provide downloadable shows each week, but have stopped since they now sell these through an Audible.com subscription or individually through the iTunes Music Store. Definitely a show for Mac-geeks. Hardcore Mac-geeks, though not hardcore *nix-Geeks, as they don’t get into tech issues quite that much but tend to focus more on the Apple-as-a-lifestyle and the Mac as your ‘digital hub’ type stuff. Still, an interesting show it is. It runs about two and a half hours. Oh, if you think time-shifting is an option, you can just record the stream, which they offer free for one week after each Wednesday night broadcast. If you do this, don’t tell them about it, as it will upset them because they feel they are losing money this way. I won’t go into business models here, do what you will…

WebTalkGuys Radio Show. Ok, we’ve covered Linux, and the Mac, what about Windows? ;) Ok, it’s not a Windows show, it’s a ‘web’ show, though you can tell it’s got a slight Windows lean to it. Anyway, they do have some interesting content. The show feels almost squeaky clean though. It’s definitely got a professional feel to it, though I don’t think I’ve ever heard any sort of controversy on the show, which makes it seem a little limp compared to the others. The do tend to have good interviews, but they lose points for suggesting that Google had created Atom. (Listen to the 2-14-2005 episode, about 5 minutes into it.) They call Atom a new kind of RSS that’s not RSS. Hurm…

LugRadio is the newcomer, with just two eposides under their belt. I’m still listening to the first one, but it’s good so far and they’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback. It’s done by 4 blokes in the UK. And I mean blokes! You might think it’s called “Luhg Ray-Dee-Oh” but it’s really “Loog Rah-Dy-Owe” Thick accents for sure! Besides that, it reminds me of the old Geeks in Space show, a bunch of guys sitting around discussing whatever. There really should be more of these shows. (I’d do one if I had the time, and people geographically close to me interested in such a thing.)

Besides the shows, there are also interviews.

Christopher Lydon occasionally has one that will interest me, but I almost always get good stuff from Doug Kaye at ITConversations. Doug does an awesome job of talking to interesting people. Since I can usually count on the quality of material from ITConversations, I wrote a script to parse the RSS feed with enclosures and download the newest stuff. It’s that good.

So concludes our radio notes for this time. Tune in again for more of the same! Did I miss a good show? Let me know…

I had this idea for an application. A mirror that has limits. I don’t know if this exists yet, but here’s the idea. Let’s say I wanted to be a mirror for a popular download. In this case, a completely legal MP3 file. I would put the file on my server, and provide a download link. Instead, it would be cool to put the file on my server, and have an application manage the serving of the file, so we can track the number of times it’s downloaded, total that up, and then make the download unavailable when bandwidth has exceeded a certain limit. When the bandwidth limit is exceeded, it should send you to another mirror, or to the original download site.

For all I know, this exists, perhaps CPAN or the SourceForge mirrors already do this. Of course maybe P2P is another solution. You know what, nevermind…

I’m sure you’ve wondered what’s up with the lack of photos around here? Well, the camera is somewhat broken. By somewhat I mean that it seems to work about 5% of the time. If you turn it on and off repeatedly. Which, in reality, means that it doesn’t work. It’s like a car that only starts on Sundays, it ain’t gonna get you to work…

I’ve attempted to troubleshoot it, but to no avail. My troubleshooting included hitting it really hard, which is the technique that works well with our television when it gets cranky. So the next step is to try to track down some info using the InterWeb. I’m not too hopeful though. I did get it as a manufacturer refurb almost two years ago, for right around $150 US dollars. While at the local Radio Shack I noticed that some of their cameras were less than $100, and had double the resolution. Still, I’m one for fixing what I’ve got rather than throwing money (I don’t have) at a problem to fix it.

In the meantime I’m pretty sure I’ll get to see Bigfoot, Nessie and perhaps a few UFO’s while the camera is non-functional…

Long ago I mentioned an md5checker script that would find duplicate images and do the appropriate thing. brian d foy does something similar to clean up iPhoto dupes.

See? Great minds do think alike! ;)

You can do things the easy way or the hard way. I’m sure there are some in-between ways, but that’s not relevant here.

See, I was using the data from blo.gs for a while, and lamented that there was not an easy way to add support for XFN. So I thought about the problem, and came up with a solution. A less than elegant solution, mind you. I was going to implement the solution, but opted not too. Later, Matt makes a feature request to Jim at blo.gs to add XFN relations to things and blam! It’s in there.

So, the moral of the story is, if I had actually made the feature request, I might have gotten what I had wanted without doing much work. Even if I had done the work I had planned to, it would not have been as useful as the alternative, becuase now all blo.gs users have the XFN feature available.

So make feature requests! Even if you are some nerd who likes to roll their own, because this is a great big internet, and you’re not the only user out there…