stuandgravy

Intro to .NET data structures

Only4gurus has a presentation up on .NET Data Structures (arrays, strings, collections & regular expressions) that provides a great introduction to a few fundamental .NET classes. I've been coding in VB.NET for a couple of years now and I'd forgotten some of the useful stuff that's in here!

Via Panopticon Central

X1 and NewsGator

NewsGator and X1, two tools I've mentioned a bit hereabouts, have put together a special all-in-one knowledge management deal. If you're still reading news in the browser and searching with Microsoft Find then make the most of this while it lasts!

Paradise lost

Australia is not a poor country. It's not Laos and it's not Borneo. It's a wealthy, first world democracy blessed with abundant natural resources.

So why does the irreparable destruction of virgin Tasmanian forest continue despite the opposition of local residents?

For woodchips?

(via G'day Cobbers)

Feedster 'Sites I'm subscribed to' search

In the comments to New Search Engines needed, Betsy Devine points at a great Feedster hack to limit a search by OPML. This is similar to my ability to search a local archive, but in a simple centralised location.

Betsy's also translated danimIp's neat toolbar bookmarklet that I've included again. Drag Search my OPML to your toolbar and change "http://stuandgravy.typepad.com/blog/NewsGatorSubs.opml" to point at your OPML for an always available 'Sites I'm subscribed to' search.

White roofs save the world

Apparently, the simple choice of white roofing and lighter-coloured tarmac would dramatically reduce the urban heat island effect - slashing air conditioning needs and saving millions in the process.

This would seem particularly significant in Australia's tropical northern cities, where the urban sprawl is rapidly expanding and the temperatures never drop below baking.

New Search engines needed

It's pretty obvious that the hottest field to be seen in right now is search technology. There's Google going through the preliminary razzle-dazzle for the "IPO of the century". Yahoo! spending a pile on a boring new engine after realising that subsidising your biggest competitor is not a brilliant strategy. Amazon picking up where Yahoo! left off to build the tame Google-enhancement, A9. The continuing evolution of Technorati and Feedster into seriously powerful data- and relationship-mining tools. Lookout and X1 finally delivering what's expected from a desktop search engine.

There are a couple of types of search that I'd like to see more action in though:

• Search Pages I've read. I'm certainly not the first to come up with this request, but the ability to restrict a web search to only pages I've already read would be invaluable. Locally archived RSS is a beginning, but often the information I'm trying to recall is in a destination link, rather than the original RSS item. Perhaps my archive could become the top of a search tree, with results becoming less relevant as more links have to be followed to reach them?


• Video search. This is going to become important as bandwidth increases and the internet becomes a standard pipeline for distribution. Video has, usually, something over images in this regard: dialogue. I picture indexing the (already existing) subtitles and providing hotlinks inside the video to the point your search terms are used. The thousands of hours of cookery, DIY, gardening and travel shows that could be digitized and indexed in this way would be a mammoth resource. Perhaps one for the rumoured BBC archive, if that ever happens now that Greg Dyke's been given the boot...

NGOS Right-click subscribe for Firefox

As suggested by Brad Wilson, I've put together another Firefox extension. Very similar to the last one, but this time for NewsGator Online Services users. I've not actually got a subscription to NGOS, so this is working only in theory. If a NGOS subscriber could try it out and let me know that it works I'd be grateful.

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

At some point I might get around to tarting these two extensions up into a single package using prefs and other such cleverness. Or I might not. I will, probably, get around to posting them onto mozdev and adding links from the extensions room. Soon soon...

British Swearing 101

Fantastic. For anyone who didn't spend their childhood on English parks and playgrounds, this Bad Language diagram is perfect for learning to hold your own in a British pub.

Right-click subscribe for Firefox

The little Firefox extension I put together last week is proving to be quite popular, thanks to a few choice referrals. Cheers guys.

Meanwhile, Torsten Rendelmann's taken the code a step further by utilising the draft feed: URI schema to implement generic right-click RSS subscription. I've only tested it with NewsGator, but it should work with any aggregator that implements the schema. Nice work Torsten!

Australian XML TV guide

While D1's new Linux, MythTV-based Home Media Centre does look pretty funky, I'm far more interested in the fact that they're publishing an XMLTV Web Service. Could come in handy, if they don't mind me borrowing it for a bit...