November 3, 2003

Latest about Longhorn

John Carroll over at ZDNet has posted, IMHO one of the best overviews of Longhorn to date coming off of last weeks PDC.

Here are some good quotes from the article:

“I’ve noticed before that it is much easier to create reasonably complex user interfaces in HTML than in WIN32. For instance, it’s far easier to write a “skinnable” web site than it is to write a “skinnable” WIN32 application. Granted, you could do practically anything you wanted in WIN32, but if you wanted to escape the look and feel imposed by WIN32 controls, you had to perform a bunch of programming gymnastics.”

November 1, 2003

IT on a Budget

I was reminded of this great special report in InfoWorld about IT on the cheap via Lockergnome

“From refurbished hardware and eBay deals to do-it-yourself setups, everything you need to know about buying equipment on the cheap.”

It’s certainly worth a read or bookmark.

October 31, 2003

Microsoft pursuit of Google revealed

I was in meetings all morning. So, I missed this report earlier, but Dave just alerted me to the Microsoft and Google news.

“Microsoft approached Google, the internet search engine, two months ago to discuss a partnership or even a merger it emerged today.”

“Google showed little interest in overtures from the company that dominates the market for operating systems.”
(via The Guardian)

This is certainly interesting, yet given MSFT’s track record in this respect, the news is not surprising. My guess is that the initial rejection by Google spured MSFT’s recent MSN Search push.

October 30, 2003

Doh! The cruller is no more!

Donuts?

“Walk into any local Dunkin’ Donuts and you can purchase a caramel-swirl latte or sourdough bagel, a pumpkin muffin or powdered Munchkin. You can get a jelly stick, chocolate stick, or chocolate-coconut stick, pastries that are shaped somewhat like conventional crullers and contain roughly the same lip-smacking number of empty calories.”

“But you cannot get a cruller anymore… ” (more here)

October 30, 2003

Your Mom is so versatile you can now have her in RSS

Yes, indeed it’s true yourmom.com now has her very own set of RSS feeds!

I’m sure you’ll sleep better with this wonderful news. In fact, there’s more! Your mom even comes in Atom 0.1 format — thanks to FeedCreator class v1.3

New Joke Updates: RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.1
Most Emailed Jokes: RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.1
Most Highly Rated Jokes: RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.1

Enjoy :-)

October 29, 2003

JavaScript: Search word hit-highlighting

I found searchhi, which is a slick JavaScript library by Stuart Langridge that will highlight keywords in your documents when the referring link to you page comes in from a seach engine such as Google:

“searchhi JavaScript library is a way of automatically highlighting words on a page when that page was reached by a search engine. In essence, if you search, for example, Google for some words, and then follow a link from the search results to a searchhi enabled page, the words you searched for will be highlighted on that page.”

October 29, 2003

Google eyes book search

In light of Amazon’s recent book search service, this report on CNet about Google in talks with publishers to provide a similar service seems a little strange.

“Google is in talks with several publishers to build a service that would allow Web surfers to search the full text of books online” (via CNet)

IMHO, the service does make sense for Amazon as a way to drive more consumers to book purchases and I suppose it could also turn another revenue source for Google — certainly as a research tool for business and academia, but is the market big enough to support the effort?

October 28, 2003

Movable Type Blog Migration

Over the last week, usually in the mid-to-late evenings — after Catherine falls asleep, I have been slowly migrating my B2-based blog to Movable Type.

I must say that for the most part the process has been fairly straight forward. The MT system installed smoothly and customizing the core MT templates, while time-consuming getting them to fit my old B2 template, were rather easy and extremely flexible.

However, during the migration process I had some interesting obstacles. In particular, I wanted to seamlessly maintain the entire URL-space of my old B2 blog with my new MT blog. My initial thinking was that with a little data-scrubbing and massaging I could export the MySQL table data from B2 and import the data into the MT table-space.

October 23, 2003

Amazon’s Full Text Search

Amazon has now extended its search to include the full text of over 120,000 books. It will even do hit-highlighting on the actual pages that match. Slick!

October 21, 2003

Office 2003 and the Google Web Service API

This article about integrating Google into the research pane of Office is from a few months ago, but I think relevant given that today is the official launch of Office 2003