Thursday, March 13, 2003

Source: [The FuzzyBlog!] Welcome to the RSS Search Engine Formerly Known as Roogle -- I Give you Feedster !. Welcome to the RSS Search Engine Formerly Known as Roogle -- I Give you Feedster ! Well I've got two very good pieces of news for today.  The first one is the new name: feedster.com.  The site is up and working.  Feel free to stop on by. Logo help from Etation Media and I know about the swoosh... The Name I know we're going to get comments on the name.  Its ok folks.  A name is a name and this one is short (8 chars), .com and has at least something to do with the concept (RSS is a feed after all) but unique enough to be brandable.  Also at this point I think everyone would rather have us making you the best possible RSS search engine NOT doing the corporate naming exercise.  I've done those and they aren't pretty. New Feature Search results are now subscribable via RSS.  Lets say you want see daily results for a search on 'feedster' then just search for that on Feedster and then subscribe to the RSS icon at the bottom of the page.  Brent from Net News Wire pushed me on this and helped me understand the <SOURCE> element which is now supported.  Thanks Brent!  I also tested this in AmphetaDesk which worked like a champ. Known Issues Here are a couple of things: I'm not 100% certain if this RSS of search queries works correctly in Radio.  I've had problems but it could be me.  Or it could be content encoding on RSS feeds that tell me they are in English when they're really in Russian.  Until we get language detection in place, this is probably going to be an issue.  Working on it. The CSS tabs look horrible at least on my OSX box.  Anyone have a thought?  They work on IE 5.5 (pc), IE 6 (pc), Opera 7, Konqueror (more on that next post) and Mozilla. If You Find a Problem We could use the help getting any issues addressed.  There is a mechanism for reporting issues (and easily capturing the page on which the problem exists).   Let's say you do a search and notice that your blog title isn't correct (as they aren't for all too many blogs; mostly my bad).  Click on the Report Problem link and just tell us about it.  Since query results can change, you might want to paste in the blog's url.  I'll look into adding that at the result list element level but no promises since that would mean making an icon.   5:58:00 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: [The Aardvark Speaks] Fish curry in coconut milk sauce. This is another one of my favourites. Not only is it the simplest curry recipe that I know of, it's also extremely tasty. 4 tablespoons vegetable oil 1 small onion, chopped 1-2 cloves garlic 1/2 teaspoon ginger powder 3 fresh red chilies or 1 teaspoon ground dried chilies 1 teaspoon tumeric 1 teaspoon mustard seeds 1 tablespoon coriander powder 1 tablespoon wheat flour 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 cup (250 ml) coconut milk 500 g sole fillets (also tastes great with shark) salt Heat the oil in a large frying pan or wok, add the onion and fry until brown. Add ginger, chilies, tumeric, coriander and mustard seeds and fry for a few minutes more over low heat, making sure the spices do not burn. In a bowl, mix coconut milk, lemon juice, flour and salt, then pour the mixture into the frying pan. As soon as the sauce thickens, put in the fish fillets. Squeeze the garlic through a garlic press and put it on top of the fish fillets. Cover the pan with a lid and let everything simmer over low heat until the fish is well done (about 15 minutes, depending on the size of the fish). Do not stir while it's cooking, just shake the pan from time to time so that nothing sticks to it. Serve with rice and/or chapatis.   4:27:12 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: [Curiouser and curiouser!] Farscape no more. To Be Continued. I’ve just watched the final episode of Farscape (recorded from last night on BBC2) Oh my god! Not content with... [From The Orient] I had exactly the same experience. I read that the stated reason for the axing was how much the show cost to produce.  All I can say is that nothing good comes without cost and producing good shows is why you make television. This reminds me of something Greg Costikan said yesterday.  He was talking about games design and the way publishers will, by and large, only fund sequels to successful games & spinoffs of already successful licenses and how this leads to a dearth of innovative games. To quote from that piece: I'm fairly friendly with Tom Doherty, who built Tor Books from a start-up to the single largest publisher of science fiction and fantasy in the world. He has an attitude I like: There's crap you just have to publish. There's stuff that allows you to stay in business. You publish it, and you sell the hell out of it, because you know it can, and will, sell. But fundamentally, that's not why you work in publishing; there are easier ways to make a living. You stay in publishing because you sometimes get to publish books you really like. Tom Peters, the business guru, echoes the sentiment: No successful business exists to produce a profit. Yes, you need to produce a profit; in a capitalist system (and thank god we have one), profit is the condition of survival. But profit isn't the goal; no one other than the stockholders get excited at that. A corporation is one way or organizating a group of people to strive toward an objective--but that objective, the vision they share, is always, for successful businesses, something other than mere profit. A game publisher exists to publish games. If its managers and employees are decent human beings, a game publisher exists to publish cool games. And if they aren't decent human beings, they should go out of business instantly; there are far better and easier ways to earn a decent return on investment. In the same way a TV publisher exists, or should exist, to publish cool TV programmes.  But Sci-Fi and it's owners Universal Television Networks are just out to make a buck.  Profit is the be-all and end-all of their existance.  Cancelling Farscape (without a better show to replace it) proves that they don't give a rats ass about the shows themselves. A movie?  I've heard it too often. Goodbye Farscape, you will be sorely missed.   10:35:24 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: [The FuzzyBlog!] Searching Brains Not Documents. Searching Brains Not Documents Scoble made my week and truly inspired me with this comment:: Here's a homework project. Go to the RSS Search engine. Now go to Google. Search for these words: "InfoPath" and "OneNote." What do you notice? I like the quality of the RSS results a LOT better. [_Go_] I was thinking about this a lot and the best analogy I can give you this the following: We've all debated ad nauseum what blogs are.  But the one I like best is that "a blog is a conversation".  It might tbe with your friends, your employees, your customers or yourself (if no one's reading). Conversation is a product of the brain.  What else can it be? What this is shaping up to be is not a document centric search engine at all.  Its shaping up to being a conversation centric search engine or as I'm starting to think of it -- searching the brains of all the smart people out there that are talking about things. Comments?   10:04:36 AM    trackback []     Articulate []