stuandgravy

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.