August 13, 2003

Craigslist to RSS

Ram Duraikannu has just emailed me about his new service that converts (almost) any craigslist mailing list into an RSS 2.0 feed.

For example, the following feed is of Bikes for sale in the New York Metro Area:

http://www.rightho.com/craigs.cgi?url=http://newyork.craigslist.org/bik/

Nice work Ram!

August 12, 2003

CXBX: An XBox Emulator

An early release of the CXBX XBox Emulator looks very promising — Although no games play just yet.
(via Lockergnome)

August 11, 2003

Personalizing PageRank

An article on CNet about a new search startup out of Stanford (link via Anil)

Kaltrix — “A stealth start-up out of Stanford University is hoping to raise the heat on one of the toughest problems in Web search–and possibly out-Google Google in the process.”

“Without discussing Kaltix’s plans publicly, the company’s founders have published research that claims to offer a way to compute search results nearly 1,000 times faster than what’s possible using current methods.”

August 9, 2003

Reviving A Dead Hard Drive

Detailed write up of swapping logic boards on a dead hard drive to recover data. (via Slashdot)

August 7, 2003

Visual Enterprise Search Tool

John sent me a link to KartOO Technology’s search engine and visualization UI that was “developed in Flash to present a friendly and clear visual interface while integrating the graphic charter of your company.”

You can see here what I think is a demo of the search and flash-based UI that’s actually meta-search engine of sorts that visually maps result-sets in the UI.

I wonder what their pricing mode is for these tools.

August 6, 2003

File Sync Tool for Unix and Windows

Unison seems to be a file-system agnostic replacement for the Robocopy tool found in the NT Resource Kit and others…

“Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.”
(via decafbad)

August 5, 2003

NewsGator 1.3 Released

Greg Reinacker has just released NewsGator 1.3, which includes initial support for Pie/EchoAtom feeds, among many other great new features!

Congratulations (again) Greg!

August 4, 2003

SMTP in a Spam-ridden world

CNET News.com has a well researched article on whether this is the End of the road for SMTP in a world that is deluged with Spam.

Some interesting quotes…

“The flaws are so severe, some now believe, that the protocol that gave rise to the most significant explosion in written communication since Gutenberg may no longer be capable of serving its purpose in a world of con artists, pornographers, virus authors and unscrupulous spammers.”

July 30, 2003

PageRank within the Enterprise

Tim Bray’s latest On Search essay alludes to the effectiveness of Google’s PageRank within the Enterprise:

“…even if it turns out that popularity [PageRank] is the key thing for Internet search, the Internet is a very special place, and itÂ’s quite unlikely that popularity is the killer metadatum for the whole universe of search applications.”

However, I suspect that part of what’s in works with Google’s acquisition and integration of Blogger is to augment PageRank in the enterprise. Yet, utilizing blogs internally to enhance the PageRank-ing of documents and resources indexed with the Google Search Appliance will require some ramp-up time to become useful.

July 29, 2003

Spam Blocking Email Addresses

Need a quick throw-away email address for an online registration? Give Mailinator a try.

Interesting idea to combat spam.