Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

I installed a pre-release version of Windows 7 to play with – I’m actually supposed to know what I’m talking about when I dis the next version of Windows ;-), and the second impression is what the title is about: it just behaves and looks more like Mac OS-X then all previous Windows releases.

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I’m not much of a music listener – I don’t like to listen to music idly and I’d rather much listen to talk shows when I’m doing things that do not require absolute concentration – for example while driving, cooking or doing house chores. A couple of years ago I found that podcasts are very handy in those situations – when you are away from a computer and there is nothing interesting on the radio (the demise of the radio talk show would be a subject of a different post). My current podcatching setup I think would interest people, but I’ll also leave that for another post.

Today I want to discuss a new podcast that just started¹: Free as in node.

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1. I’m a bit late on the bandwagon – the first episode was released two weeks ago, and they already have a second episode which I haven’t listened to yet [↩]

In continuation to my on-off love affair with smart phones (and after another one of my office coworkers fell prey to the dangers of the iPhone¹ ), after I finally got my Nokia E90 charged – after it has been mostly off for the last two months or so, during which I found that the Ericsson P1i does about everything better then the E90, except SSH as I just can’t get the UIQ Putty to work and it doesn’t look like anyone is developing it anymore², the P1i even comes with games installed (at least one anyway) unlike the E90 – I actually used Fring on the E90 today for its almost intended purpose, as I was sitting in a cafe, after purposefully leaving the computer in the car, and chatting on Google Talk with both a friend and my fiancé (who was – interestingly enough – far away on the other side of table 😉 ), and its actually quite cool even if incredibly battery draining: in 2 hours of really not intensive chatting I went through almost half of the Nokia’s rather large battery.

Anyway, sorry for the eclectic post – I’ve moved the blog to Amazon EC2 service and I’m going on a 3 week army reserve duty on Sunday. It might take a while until you see this new post as I’ve just changed the DNS entries a couple of hours ago (I really missed SSH on the E90 🙂 ) but once the update runs through you should have access to the new and improved (virtual) server that would hopefully be much faster.

1. What danger? oooh – another silly app that just shows a different picture when you shake the phone. Seriously – it looks like the company only operates at 50% efficiency now. [↩]
2. Also – initially I though that I’m lacking a TAB key, but apparently its very easy to graffiti any char you’re missing on the keyboard, and surprisingly enough – also TAB [↩]

Quite the contrary it seams: Adobe to release Flash 64bit first on Linux. True it is only the beta version, and the MS-Windows and Mac OS-X 64bit versions will follow shortly¹, but still this demonstrates some serious commitment to Linux as an equal player in the desktop operating system market!

All we need now is Photoshop for Linux and we’re set 🙂

Installing the 64Bit flash plugin for Linux is painless although requires some command line experience:
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1. i.e. its been almost two weeks since the Linux release and there is no Windows version yet [↩]

בחדשות היום, גוגל עושים את המהלך המתבקש ועומדים להוציא דפדפן חדש – “כרום”.

לפני יותר משלוש שנים גוגל שכרו את בן גודגר, המפתח הראשי של Firefox. ברור שגוגל מעוניינים להעסיק מפתחים ברמה גבוהה כמו גודגר, אבל די היה ברור שלגוגל גם עניין בשוק הדפדפנים, ותמיד טוב לאסוף אנשים שכבר עשו את זה (זה חוסך את הצורך לבנות גרסה 1.0 כדי לזרוק אותה), ואכן בן גודגר היה מפתח מוביל בפיתוח של הדפדפן החדש של גוגל, כפי שאפשר לקרוא בקומיקס שגוגל הוציאו לכבוד הדפדפן החדש.

אבל זה לא מה שבאמת מעניין בהכרזה הנוכחית, (more…)

In my work, I recently got to have a look (and run some statistics) on a world-class major web site (I’m not going to disclose the name, and if you know what I’m talking about then please don’t mention it in the comments – I’m not allowed to talk about it and so can’t you).

As I though it would be mighty interesting to find out what the normal internet users out there are using – not just “on my very technical and geek oriented web site I have 70% Firefox users on Linux” – here goes nothing.

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I’ve been dealing a bit in the last couple of months with some SEO related issues: several of my company’s clients have wanted us to provide a complementary service where we use our knowledge of their content to provide an internal page map for the purpose of Search Engine Optimization.

The problem is, that no two “SEO Consultants” will agree on how to best present such links¹ for Google’s consumption – everyone has their own wacky idea on what links will be harvested by a search engine and the kinds of magic that Google can weave to ignore “bad links” – this is all reminding me of some strange cargo cult.

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1. Which brings to mind Arthur C. Clarke’s 4th law: “For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.” [↩]

I’ve yet to comment on ICANN’s new plan for the internet’s so called “top level domain names” (.com, .net, etc’), and I think a very important future aspect of it was overlooked by most critics.

ICANN are planning to open up the process for adding new top level domains¹ to the point where anyone can request to register new top level domains – even in a non-latin script.

Many commenters agree that implementing this suggestion would cause an explosion in the available and used top level domains, and as a result also the number of actual domains registered, which can also be a bad thing – for example, domains named after common file extensions (Firefox.exe anyone?), for specific fringe interest groups or a top level domain per city (The .nyc domain for New York City seems to be the most coordinated).

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1. following the previous expansion of list of generic top level domains where 7 new top level domains were introduced [↩]

Not really news, but Microsoft announced support for the ISO OpenDocument format in the coming service pack 2 for MS-Office 2007 (due sometime in the first half of 2009).

This announcement is still relevant, partially as the actual product is still a ways off, but also because I wanted to discuss this more – and specifically what that would mean for OpenOffice.org.

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I get lots of spam, in email and also in the blog (known as comment spam), fortunately I have the tools to combat it (Akismet is great!). Every once in a while I look into the Akismet bucket, to check if something fell there by mistake – and this time I was homoursly surprised: