Gen over at PVRBlog pointed me to an excellent Slashdot thread that’s talking about building a homebrew digital video recorder on a budget, which is very timely for me.

In fact, I just updated my wiki with a rough spec for my own PVR. Now I need to refine and price out the equipment because I think I’m already over budget.

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You can create a social network search interface by using Micah Alpern’s ‘Blogs I Read’ Google Hack and/or Feedster. However it appears that Eurekster has taken it one step further:

“Eurekster uses the six-degrees of separation concept to learn from your extended network of contacts and deliver you prioritized results based on the success and proximity of the searches they have done.”

The public beta currently available seems to require a bit more effort than the average consumer “searcher” would be willing to afford. However, I would like to see how well this works within the corporate enterprise — assuming of course you can integrate much of the social network mechanics with existing enterprise directory services such as Active Directory or other LDAP-compliant systems.

Matt Haughey’s PVRBlog gives some more insight about Comcast’s new PVR box:

“Comcast was testing the PVR waters, but it looks like the rollout will soon be going full-force.”

Michael Kanellos from CNET exposes some of the research at Microsoft to make search a greater part of its Windows operating system. The following are some interesting quotes from the article:

“Search in many ways is brute force,” Dumais said. “If the two of us type in a query, we get the same thing back, and that is just brain dead. There is no way an intelligent human being would tell us the same thing about the same topic.”

“Personalization was one of the big buzzwords of the early years of the dot-com era, but many of the efforts to deliver individualized content failed. Software developers, however, are increasingly becoming more adept at using Bayesian models and other probabilistic techniques to insert intelligence into software.”

“Although the underlying calculation in these models is complex, the overriding concept is fairly simple. Software keeps tabs on an individual’s Web surfing habits, interests, acquaintances, work and travel history, work projects, and other data. It also constructs a model that tries to anticipate what a person finds important and what will be irrelevant.”

“Microsoft’s experiments differ from commercial search engines in that the universe of data searched consists of data found on an individual’s hard drive.”

“In demonstrating Implicit Query, Dumais began to type an e-mail asking a colleague about a set of slides for an upcoming conference. Before the message was complete, the program–which appears in a window on the side of the screen– pulled up e-mails, slide decks and Word documents containing the name of the conference and the future recipient. Each hit came with a brief summary of the internal content, date, the type of software the file was written in, and its potential relevance, among other information.”

This is fascinating stuff and I can’t wait to see it in action.

However, based on the article it seems to me that Microsoft’s new search is focused on an enterprise that is still Personal Computing-centric, which is ideal today, but Longhorn is still two years away and it will be at least another year before we see it implemented within larger enterprises.

My concern is how applicable will a better PC-centric search be if personal enterprise computing finally becomes network-centric?

Albeit, we’ve all seen the rise and fall of the “Network Computer”, but I still believe in the underlying concepts that will end our intrinsic relationship with our dedicate hardware. Indeed, I’m talking about an environment where we will finally be able to productively “work” from any network-connected device.

Essentially, if in the coming years before Longhorn, a network-centric IT enterprise landscape becomes more widespread then the benefits of providing a better index to ones hard drive will be diminished.

Perhaps I’m being too close-minded and not including the bigger picture — especially with regard to Longhorn’s Indigo. I expect it’s more likely that Network and Personal computing will merge within the confines of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA); whereby applications and computing power will come to the user where and when they need it. Of course this must include access to “Stuff I’ve Seen”.

This essentially describes the holy-grail of Network Computing or rather a “Personal service-oriented architecture” as Jon Udell describes.

I’m again using jpcache with my blog. This time however, I’ve integrated the PHP-based gzip and caching capabilities of jpcache with Movable Type.

You should see a significant speed improvement through out the site — especially on some of the longer category pages.

It was fairly easy to incorporate into MT since I’m already outputting PHP files from my MT templates. Basically, after following the uncomplicated install guide for jpcache and running a few sample test pages, all I needed to do was “prepend” the jpcache script to the end of my PHP files.

You can do this by adding a require(’/path/to/jpcache.php’) to your MT templates and rebuilding them as PHP scripts.

Or simply create an “.htaccess” file at the root of your blog directory and add the php directive “auto_prepend_file”, which will append the specified file to the end of every PHP script within your blog directory (this includes sub-directories).

For example:

php_value auto_prepend_file /path/to/jpcache/jpcache.php

So far, I’ve found only a few downsides however…

Since files are cached for 15 minutes by default you will not see updates reflected on the site until the cached file expires. Of course the cache expiration is configurable and in fact you can turn it off entirely, so it’s not a show-stopper for me and I’m happy with the outcome.

Ultimately however, I like to be using the Smarty Template Engine, which Brad Chocate integrated with Movable Type, but for basic file caching and gzip compression, jpcache suited me well.

Don Park gives a good overview of BitTorrent, but also provides an interesting perspective on how blog software in general could utilize BitTorrent technology.

“In my opinion, flash flood nature of blogs will be well served by BitTorrent. Likewise, link-happy nature of blogs will complement BitTorrent well. Ultimately, I think a tailored variation of BitTorrent should be built into blog clients and servers for download sharing of feeds, images, enclosures, and other blog-related resources. BitTorrent will encourage media-rich blog posts without applying power-law to the bloggers’ wallet. BitTorrent means blog torrents.”

I agree, but perhaps this idea shouldn’t be limited to just blogs. I believe it can be applied to any URI accessible resource.

It may have been said before, but I can imagine using P2P concepts like BitTorrent in a hybrid Smart Web Proxy.

For example, when a request for a URI is unavailable or times-out, the Smart Web Proxy would check trusted sources for a cached copy of the URI.

Specifically, these trusted cache repositories may well include: BitTorrent sources, Google’s Cache, The Way Back Machine, and perhaps even Freenet sources. Trusted BitTorrent sources can be determined by walking a list of peers culled from a users’ blogroll, which is of course managed via OPML.

Indeed, I’m taking the 500-foot view, but perhaps this is worth further investigation … note to self … see what you can dig-up on Google