Brandon has assembled a comprehensive Linux Home Theater PC HOWTO, which is definitely worth a read if you’re planning on building your own Homebrew TiVo-like device.

The file ‘mt-send-entry.cgi’ in a default MovableType installation can be used to relay spam. If you’re not using the script to allow your users to “Send this Entry by Email”, you can safely remove the file from your MT install or change the permissions so that the script cannot execute.

However, if you need the functionality Ben Trott has posted a fix, but IMHO, you’d be safer pushing this function client-side using a mailto with some JavaScript

Jacques Distler has some more insight and there’s an active discussion on the MovableType Support Forums

Eric Sink, the man behind Marketing for Geeks, has just published an article for MSDN called Finance for Geeks, which is an overview of accounting principals from the “technologists” perspective.

Definitely worth a read if you’re starting a software company or working with finance systems.

Joe Stump over on the O’Reilly DevCenter puts together a well-rounded overview of The State of Home-Brew Personal Video Recorders on Linux (Think: Open Source TiVo). The article also includes a good threaded discussion as well. Well worth a read.

Incidentally, I’ve decided to investigate putting together my own PVR. I was inspired mainly by a recent InfoWorld article on the savings you can expect by build your own systems.

I’ve set my budget to be about $400 and so far I’m leaning toward using MythTV and ideally the KnoppMyth Bootable CD MythTV Install to make things easy, which is based on the amazing Knoppix Live CD Debian Distro.

I’ve even started a Wiki Space to collect my notes and research. I’ll probably document my progress there as well.

The Well-Formed Web has made available a
Google2Atom web service that will generate an Atom feed from a Google search query

However, you’ll need your Google API key to generate the feed.

I haven’t looked for a WiFi hotspot directory in quite some time, but I was just alerted to JiWire via Street Tech this morning and I must agree with Gareth that it is indeed comprehensive.

In fact, I learned that my local public library has its own free public hotspot!

It’s appalling to hear that VeriSign (aka Network Solutions | Internic) is STILL letting people steal domain names!

“…it appears that it is still possible to steal domains with the minimum of effort. We have been contacted by the owner of the valuable domain DVDmovies.com who was amazed, only last month, to find that his domain had been moved and registered with another company, without his knowledge.”

“That the registrar at fault was no less than VeriSign - owner of all .com and .net domains - makes it worse. The fact that the company was also recently chastised by the US Appeals Court and ordered to pay millions of dollars in compensation to the owner of Sex.com for wrongly transferring his domain makes it all the more incredible.”

Over the years I had the misfortune of having two separate domain names stolen due, IMHO, to the ineptness of VeriSign.

One domain I was never able to get back, mainly because I (and the company I worked for at the time), just gave up trying to work with VeriSign.

The other domain was transferred to another owner via a forged email. I was actually alerted to the theft-in-progress before the domain was transferred because the thief’s initial forgery attempts bounced back to me.

In fact, I contacted VeriSign (at the time Network Solutions) and told them there was a theft of my domain in progress. They assured me that they would put a hold on the domain.

The next day… Poof! My domain was gone! VeriSign approved the transfer anyway.

It then took me weeks to finally wrestle the domain back after hours of being on hold, numerous emails, letters and evil faxes back-and-fourth with VeriSign detailing the clear, plain-as-day, evidence that they even confirmed of the forged transfer.

Ugh! I could not believe how easy it was for a thief to steal a domain, it’s sad to hear that it’s still an open issue.

Raul Valdes-Perez, president of Vivisimo is quoted in
an article at New Scientist about improvements to the user experience of search interfaces. In particular he is talking about Google News, MSN’s newly announced Newsbot and Vivisimo as yet to be released spontaneous clustering approach.

“[Raul Valdes-Perez] says that the engineering of search and rank algorithms “has gone about as far as it can go”. Now the way to improve the user experience is to work on the next layer of algorithms that determine the presentation of the “search and rank” results.”

“Vivisimo is working on a different approach to the presentation of news search results. Its test news site, which has not yet been revealed to the public, spontaneously clusters links to news articles according to subject.”

In reference to my post yesterday, I don’t completely agree with his statement about the extent of ranking algorithms. In that I believe there is unexploited popularity metadata that should be used as an additional input to existing ranking algorithms. To a small extent this is similar to Amazon’s recommendations, which seems to be one the directions MSN has chosen for its news site.

“This algorithm analyses the other choices of people who have already bought the first book. A news site would instead group articles according to the reading patterns of previous users.”

Although, Vivisimo is certainly on to something in regard to focusing more on the presentation layer of search. Yet, they are not alone in that regard either with existing products such as Antarctica’s Visual Net and new comers like BA-Insight forging through the muck.

Ross Mayfield links to a fascinating article on
Boxes and Arrows by Alex Wright about Paul Otlet: The forgotten forefather of information architecture.

“In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the memex, decades before Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext,” Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar’s workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read and write their way through a vast mechanical database stored on millions of 3×5 index cards.”

“This new research environment would do more than just let users retrieve documents; it would also let them annotate the relationships between one another, “the connections each [document] has with all other [documents], forming from them what might be called the Universal Book.”

There’s much-much more… The article is lengthy (compared to most blog posts), but well worth the time.

In Tim Bray’s latest essay on search he points out what I feel is an often overlooked aspect of Google’s PageRank when it is applied to enterprise search:

“[PageRank] Won’t Work for You If you’re writing or deploying a search engine for your Intranet or product catalogue or portal, Google’s PageRank trick probably won’t work, because most Intranet and catalogue and portal pages don’t point at each other. The Web is unique in that it has millions of authors independently making decisions about what’s important; aggregating those decisions is what makes PageRank so powerful.”

“The Real Lesson of Google PageRank works on the basis of guessing that what’s popular is what’s important, which turns out to be a good guess. The technique relies on the Web’s linkage network, and while non-Web deployments can’t use that, we shouldn’t give up on the notion of using a popularity metric.”(via Ongoing)

Indeed, and lowering the barriers to collaboration via corporate blogs and wikis will provide a rich corpus of popularity metrics.

In addition, I believe there is untapped potential in mining the ongoing dialogs found in email, IM and messages boards for relevancy references. I’m not saying however, that you use the dialogs themselves in search results; I’m simply suggesting that digital conversational data can be used to determine the popularity and thus importance of an object within a corporation.

Although I’m sure privacy advocates will fault with this notion.