stuandgravy

New Blogs

It's quite clear from the last post date (Nov 2004 for pity's sake!) that I've let this blog whither away.

Just in case anyone does stumble upon this site - plus, let's be honest, because that old Newsgator extension did leave this site with a fair amount of residual Google-juice - I thought I'd point out that I have been more successfully maintaining my work-related Siebel technical blog over on Wordpress.

Also, while I'm at it, I wanted to throw a link out to a good friend of mine who's started a promising blog on Identity, Identity theft and Privacy Matters. Debi's stories have already prompted me to look into the cost of a post office box... In particular, check out the Top 10 ways to prevent identity theft. 

NewsGator right-click-subscribe for Firefox 1.0

Robert Bernstein did everyone a favour and created an install.rdf for the NewsGator subscriber extension, allowing it to be installed in Firefox 1.0. I actually had a problem getting Robert's package to install, but with a couple of minor tweaks we now have right-click subscribe for the latest release of Firefox.

About time too - thanks Robert for the legwork!

Download here. (You'll have to right-click -> Save Link to Disk... then execute.) 

Google Scholar

Just launched today, the beta version of Google Scholar. To quote the Google Blog:

"...a free service that helps users search scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports. "

The results are ranked by number of citations. The correlation between the currency of the academic citation and the web link is one of those obvious strokes of genius that Google just keeps churning out. Also smart: literature that is often cited, but not available on the web, is still listed in its rightful place in the results.

This is a resource that will be invaluable for any student trying to find their own primary sources.

The MBA student sitting next to me nearly wet himself...

NTFS Partition Resize

I was installing Fedora Core 2 over the weekend and wanted to leave the existing XP installation in place, so faced the common hurdle of non-destructively resizing an NTFS partition - something Windows still doesn't support.

After a bit of a hunt around I chose ntfsresize, booting to a Linux shell from the Fedora install disk. Worked like a charm - I'd recommend it.

Google Desktop Search

It's been expected for a while, so no great shock that Google have today launched (in beta, as ever) their desktop search tool.

Their take on the 'pages I've seen' challenge appears to be similar to Dan Grigsby's IE toolbar, adding to the index a local cache of web pages you've visited.

All looks very tasty, with one huge, glaring caveat: the web pages history works with IE only. Concentrating on the dominant browser makes sense in pure numerical terms, but Google are going to seriously dent their geek-kudos if they don't get a Firefox (and Safari Mac, and Linux...) version out pretty damn sharpish. And there's zero chance of me switching over from (Microsoft's) Lookout until they do.

A new search engine

The New York Times is giving some press to Clusty, a pretender to the search engine throne. Clusty isn't a brand new engine, but a smart new skin on Overture.

The 'categorisation' of searches is definitely a worthwhile feature for certain ambiguous searches, and Clusty has a smart implementation of Overture's results. I wonder though if Clusty isn't focusing too heavily around this edge case in order to differentiate itself. For most searches I'd expect to get what I need - even in Clusty - without categories, and for these searches a less cluttered interface is going to best suit.

RSS bandwidth problem - a suggestion

Robert Scoble's done some calculations that illustrate why RSS is becoming a bandwidth nightmare for large sites.

Aggregators constantly pinging the RSS feed for updates clearly doesn't scale. This certainly isn't news, but MSDN pulling their full-text feeds is the first high profile example.

The problem can be eased by reducing aggregators' polling frequency - once every couple of hours, or even once a day - but surely that's a band-aid? Scale up the (currently tiny) number of RSS readers a few thousand times and the stickiness of RSS means you've still got a problem, even polling once a day.

Besides which, limiting polling to once per day destroys a large chunk of the appeal of RSS: I want to know whenever stavros updates, and I want to know NOW, dammit.

So what's the solution? A push technology is never going to provide what RSS does - we're immediately back in the world of email and spam and filtering and... ugh. And any pull technology is always going to poll for changes. So the solution must lie in limiting the bandwidth required by the poll.

I have no wish to descend into the depths of the RSS/RDF/Atom/Semantic Web debates, but the solution lies there, in the specification. RSS providers need a way to tell aggregators "go away, there's nothing to see here for another 12 hours". And it needs to happen in less than a couple of Kb.

Firefox Gmail notifier

To continue the endless barrage of Firefox hype, may I mention Doron Rosenberg's Gmail Notifier. This extension adds an envelope to your status bar that reports the number of unread emails in your Gmail inbox. Makes it possible for me to switch all personal email away from Outlook, without having to leave a tab dedicated to Gmail all day.

Simple, yet satisfying.

Firefox 'View Page in IE' extension

Beautiful. The number of sites I visit which require Internet Explorer is rapidly dwindling (hey, even my bank don't mind Firefox nowadays). For the few that are left the simple, inspired IEView extension makes things just that crucial pinch easier.

Via Phil Ringnalda

Essential XML Quick Reference

TheServerSide.NET have published a handy quick reference to all things XML, including XML Schemas, XPath, XSLT, SOAP etc. Unfortunately there's no nicely marked-up version, but you can't have everything for nothing.

Via Larkware