August 25, 2004

Microsoft Engagement with Open Source Projects

Josh Ledgard Program Manager working with the Visual Studio – Community Team at MSFT has a great post regarding the broader collaboration between Microsoft and the vast open source community (via /.).

“It should be easy for teams here at Microsoft to develop extensions to their platforms and potentially pieces of the platforms with customers in an open/transparent fashion. What better way (especially for teams that make tools for developers) to form real connections with developers than working with them collaboratively on real technical challenges?”

August 11, 2004

FeedBurner and Me

I decided to consolidate many of my XML feeds using the excellent FeedBurner service. The process was very simple using Matt’s straight forward tips on redirecting existing feeds to FeedBurner.

In addition, I opted to use FeedBurner’s Link Splicer to include daily dumps of my del.icio.us bookmarks into my main feed. So if you’re reading this via a news aggregator you’ll notice the post flow increase.

Over the past six or so months, I’ve found it to be faster to post quick annotations using my del.icio.us right-click context menu hack (shameless plug). So much of what I formally posted in my main blog now gets tagged and shared with del.icio.us. This is especially useful when I’m short on time.

August 3, 2004

Photo Collection Manager with Content-Based Search

Sometimes I like to quickly troll the raw link feed from del.icio.us because you never know what gems you might find.

For instance, I caught a link to imgSeek, which is a photo collection manager with content-based search. Basically this means queries can be express as a rough sketch or you can start with a single image and find similar images in your collection. For example, select a sunset as your starting image and imgSeek will find images with alike characteristics. Very cool!

July 29, 2004

GMail Tools

I’ve been thinking about moving some of my older email out of a rather large Outlook PST into GMail, mainly for backup purposes. However, since this is far from a unique idea, I decided to see what others have done to solve this problem.

First I discovered Mark Lyon’s PHP-based Google GMail Loader (GML), which in addition to loading email, it can also be used as a remote to backup tool (I think there’s a 7.5M file limit imposed by Google).

July 26, 2004

Google Down, IPO Pricing UP?

With Google recently releasing their IPO pricing estimates ranging between $108 to $135 per share with market capitalization between $29 billion and $36 billion, I suspect this doesn’t bode well:

Update: Apparently Google’s problems are due to the latest MyDoom worm variant (via /.)

July 21, 2004

MT 3.01D Upgrade

Last night I decided to upgrade Movable Type to version 3.01D. The upgrade went very smoothly. I’m very impressed with the seamlessness the MT crew created with this upgrade. Overall the system feels much faster too.

I think the hardest part was backing up my current installation and database, which really wasn’t that hard.

I’m attempting to re-enable commenting and trackbacks, but I think I have to rebuild my site to get the TypeKey registration working correctly.

July 20, 2004

One-up-man-ship: Google, Yahoo and of course Microsoft

After a week on the beaches of the Outer Banks in North Carolina with family I feel refreshed and recharged — perhaps not recharged enough to ride up l’Alpe d’ Huez, but I digress…

During my week away there were a few notable acquisitions made by Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.

First up is MSFT acquisition of my current favorite personal search tool Lookout, which integrates well with Outlook and complements my archive of NewsGator subscriptions nicely.

July 9, 2004

Brewster Kahle Universal Access to Human Knowledge

The other day I watched Brewster Kahle’s inspiring presentation at last month’s NotCon session titled, “Universal Access to Human Knowledge” (Page with 54 Minute MPEG @ 120 MB — worth every bite ;-)

For those that don’t know Brewster Kahle, he was an early member of the parallel supercomputing company Thinking Machines. From there he went on to develop, found and sell to AOL WAIS, Inc. which was probably the internet’s first global search engine (years before the web took off). Later Kahle started Alexa Internet (the “related links” service in IE), which he sold to Amazon.com.

July 2, 2004

2004 Tour de France

The start of Le Tour is just hours away and I am already on the edge with anticipation. No matter the outcome, I guarantee that it is going to be an epic battle. Far more dramatic and compelling than any over-hyped “reality show” could force feed viewers.

Kudos to the Outdoor Live Network (OLN-TV) for their live unabridged coverage. I or my STeVo will be there from Liege to the Champs-ElysÃ©es in Paris!

June 28, 2004

WinFS is a Database Platform

Samuel Druker the Microsoft Development Lead for WinFS speaks on Channel 9 in video and in the threads about how WinFS will mean much more than simply full-text searching. (via Philipp Lenssen)

Quotes from Samuel regarding WinFS differences with respect to the current crop of Personal Search Tools:

“X1 (and enfish and lookout) do the job for full-text search on the stuff they know about in the particular application they support. However, WinFS is a database platform. As I said in the other video, it’s a storage platform. Developers write new apps, those apps use schemas to describe the user’s data and rely on the system repository to hold those items. Full-text search is just one thing that you can build on that. Much more important, IMO, is what the database guys call query and relations.”