Want to know the top queries on Google? Who's more popular on the web, Christina Aguilera or Justin Timberlake? Which web browsers are being used to access the web? Google has put together a page that answers these and other questions based on the searches that are being made through the Google service [Google Zeitgeist]. 10:27:45 AM    comment []  

The future of energy is solar power. No, the future of energy is hydrogen power. No, actually the future of energy is capturing solar power in hydrogen. How might you go about doing that? Let nature do it for you. One method that has just gotten more efficient is to extract hydrogen from biomass [Scientific American]. 5:05:52 PM    comment []  

Check out this PC [The Jem Report]. The Iwill ZPC by Iwill USA (a terrible name, BTW) is a desktop P4 in a box measuring 2x7x10 inches. That's a lot of bang in a very small package. 4:47:32 PM    comment []  

I've been waiting for years and years for a digital audio editing tool worth two cents that would run on Linux. It looks like one is on its way [Slashdot].

Ardour is a multichannel hard disk recorder (HDR) and digital audio workstation (DAW). It is capable of simultaneous recording of 24 or more channels of 32 bit audio at 48kHz. Ardour is intended to function as a "professional" HDR system, replacing dedicated hardware solutions such as the Mackie HDR, the Tascam 2424 and more traditional tape systems like the Alesis ADAT series. It is also intended to provide the same or better functionality as proprietary software DAWs such as ProTools, Samplitude, Logic Audio, Nuendo and Cubase VST/SX. It supports MIDI Machine Control, and so can be controlled from any MMC controller, such as the Mackie Digital 8 Bus mixer and many other modern digital mixers. Ardour can operate as an MTC slave or master, allowing synchronization with various MTC and SMPTE devices [Ardour].

Sounds like a cool tool. I know I am not online in the need for a digital audio editor that runs on Linux. I'm sure that as this tool picks up in popularity, it should be able to attract a decent base of developers to keep it going. 4:44:34 PM    comment []  

A mention of my favorite DVD rental service, Netflix [ArsTechnica]. It seems they're doing well since their shaky beginnings. That's good news since I think the Netflix service generally rocks and I would hate to have seen it go away. 4:38:08 PM    comment []  

I have known about validating XML editors for a while, but I hadn't tried any of them until today. So, since I am about to start using DocBook, I thought I would checkout what XML editor plugins might be available for Eclipse. I found two, <oXygen/> and XMLBuddy. They both seem pretty cool and will do such things as name completion. However, XMLBuddy is free, so that's probably the one I will settle on. For more information, IBM's Eclipse site has more information [XML development with Eclipse]. 3:03:32 PM    comment []  

Google is not happy about the fact that their trademark is entering the popular lexicon [ArsTechnica]. 6:59:08 PM    comment []  

Another spoof of the Apple Think Different ads [Crash Different]. 8:07:26 AM    comment []  

Handspring has unveiled another attempt to merge the cellphone and the PDA. This time, they have also added a digital camera [Handspring]. I applaud the attempt, but I have yet to see one of these convergent devices that actually succeeds in making a device that I would use. Either it makes a good PDA and an awkward cellphone or vice versa. That said, the Treo 600 looks like it might it's usable. 9:53:25 PM    comment []  

There's a new bot scouring the web called MSNBot. Guess who owns it? Now guess who they will be going against? You guessed it... Microsoft couldn't buy Google, so now they will be competing with them [DaveNet]. Though I really like Google (I use it exclusively for web searches), I will like to see more competition in the web indexing space. A little competition can only be a good thing. 2:07:05 PM    comment []  

An interesting, yet speculative article on the possibility that Microsoft is moving away from .Net [Is .Net On The Way Out?]. 10:53:44 AM    comment []  

Go participate in a survey on the AAC audio codec and help find out if it is everything it is cracked up to be [AAC at 128kbps public listening test]. Actually, I went to do the test myself and couldn't tell the difference between the files used in the test. So, I guess they're all good for my purposes. 6:13:08 PM    comment []  

"A synthetic language employs morphemes to indicate the relationship between units of a sentence (the boy's dog); an analytic language uses prepositions and word-order (the dog of the boy). No language is wholly one or the other. The tendency in English has been for analysis to replace synthesis, but in French the future tense derives from an auxiliary verb which has now become a morpheme, and it is arguable that in English 'll has become a (synthetic) morpheme denoting the future tense" [Traditional Grammatical Terminology]. 6:02:49 PM    comment []  

Now this is just too cool. Synthetic Morpheme came up first in a Google Directory search for "wired slashdot". I don't know how that is possible. I don't come anywhere close to the top in a Google Web search. 5:43:40 PM    comment []  

A week or so ago, I started using the Mozilla Firebird browser on a laptop at home. My goal was simply to make the machine more usable, since it only has 32MB of RAM. Firebird has a much smaller memory footprint than the standard Mozilla browser and it has made a big difference for that laptop. However, once I started using Firebird, I discovered that it is a pretty good browser in its own right. So, now I am running it exclusively on my desktop. My desktop system is a 1.7GHz P4 with lots of RAM, so speed wasn't the real issue. However, I find that I like the simplicity and configurability of Firebird over the bulkiness of the standard Mozilla suite. 5:41:01 PM    comment []  

A video of Gollum accepting the MTV Movie Awards award for Best Digital Performance [TheOneRing]. 5:52:44 PM    comment []  

"The University of Maine has now almost completed its solar system model, to be unveiled officially on the June 14th at Westfield. The final planet, Uranus, will be set in place on the 13th. At forty miles from Pluto to The Sun and built to a scale of 1:93,000,000, it will be the largest three-dimensional scale model of the Solar System in North America" [Slashdot]. 5:50:18 PM    comment []  

SCO is still going forward trying to win licensing rights from Linux users for alegedly copying source code from UNIX (which they own) into the Linux operating system [EETimes]. Okay, it's a long way before that issue ever gets resolved. My question is, can't the Linux community simple rewrite the offending components and rid themselves of this problem? SCO can still go after companies that are using Linux with these licensing claims, but ultimately, it should be a simple matter to clean Linux of the offending code. 5:35:56 PM    comment []  

The dream of the unbreakable code with quantum cryptography has been demonstrated in the lab and is expected to see commercial applications withing three years [The Register]. Of course, when the door is impenetrable, then you look for a window. 11:58:33 AM    comment []  

PeerEnabler is the new commercial P2P file sharing product on the market that will attempt to fill a similar niche as that being filled by BitTorrent.

Joltid, the Swedish peer-to-peer software company formed by KaZaA founder Niklas Zennstrom, has launched PeerEnabler, a secure content distribution technology that utilises users' own PCs to disseminate content for publishers [The Register].

The system will continually upload and download content that is popular on the network. However, it looks like the content owner will still be able to control the content in some ways that they are distributing on the P2P cloud.

The question I have is what motivation would anyone have for installing this software on their PC? These P2P systems are starting to proliferate, but what I really want to see is a single open standard for P2P file sharing that different people can implement against. If a vendor wants to add value in certain ways be adding DRM or other content controls, then that's fine. But why would a consumer want to give their disk, CPU and bandwidth resources away for free? 11:48:44 AM    comment []  

A study from New Zealand suggests that cellphones do not increase the risk of cancer [Gizmodo]. Well, of course they don't. I think it is absolutely clear that they don't. Years of experimentation with microwave radiation (the same radiation emitted by cellphones) has shown no correlation between exposure to microwaves and cancer. Some of the microwave studies, especially those done in China, have subjected test subjects to huge doses of radiation and the only side effect that I am aware of is a temporary increase in body temperature. Of course, enough exposure can cook you, but that is a much different effect than cancer. 11:37:10 AM    comment []  

Radio UserLand creates nice little pages showing all the posts in a given month, but it doesn't link them in anywhere through the weblog. So, I am putting this link here just so that the month pages get indexed by Google [2003]. 2:00:54 PM    comment []  

After performing tests to find out how much damage could be caused by seemingly innocuous foam moving at high velocities one official at Nasa had this to say, "people's intuitive sense of physics is sometimes way off" [New York Times]. 9:41:57 AM    comment []  

Since I am very interested in the Ximian Desktop 2 (XD2) and I couldn't find any authoritative source for when or if XD2 would be ported to Debian, I decided to go straight to the source. I emailed Ximian yesterday and they responded:

Unfortunately, at this time, I don't think that XD2 will be ported to Debian.

Fortunately, the Debian developer community will be working on the problem. There is one group that is working on a backport of XD2 to the woody/stable distribution of Debian and others will be adding the appropriate patches and components to the sarge/unstable branch to bring it up-to-date [debian-gtk-gnome archives]. So, either way Debian will get XD2, it will just take a little longer. 9:29:32 AM    comment []  

Today, I installed and messed around with an application coming out of MIT that is based on a new, unified model of information management [Haystack]. The application looks promising, but still has some performance issues. For instance, it completely swamped the CPU on the 500MHz PIII that I was running it on.

Conceptually, it is intended as a tool that will bridge the various ways that we work with information on computers. Whether it be email or webpages, instant messaging or documents, the tool allows you to view edit and organize through a common interface. One aspect of the system that I find very promising is the avoidance of purely hierarchical organization. Instead, any item can be labeled as belonging to many different categories and then it will show up in searches that specify any given category to which it belongs. Plus, it allows the user to completely customize the view of their information.

Haystack is a tool designed to let every individual manage all of their information in the way that makes the most sense to them. By removing the arbitrary barriers created by applications only handling certain information "types", and recording only a fixed set of relationships defined by the developer, we aim to let users define whichever arrangements of, connections between, and views of information they find most effective. Such personalization of information management will dramatically improve each individual's ability to find what they need when they need it.

The tool is still in development stages and not quite ready for prime time, but it is an interesting experiment in how we will be able to work with data in the future. I think Haystack has sold me on the concept, it now needs to get the implementation right. Or maybe I just need to upgrade to a 1.7GHz P4 before it becomes usable. Whatever the case, it isn't quite in a useful state for me to start using it. 2:41:38 PM    comment []  

"If you want to score with Google, be on the web. Otherwise, go whistle" [Guardian Unlimited]. 11:33:11 AM    comment []  

There's another package out there based on Linux that will allow you to have TiVo functionality on a PC [Gizmodo]. There's also Freevo, which I mentioned a few weeks ago [April 17]. I can't tell if MythTV is OSS or not, but you can download it for free, so it must be. The screenshots look very nice [MythTV screenshots]. I really need to get off my butt and build one of these suckas. 11:28:08 AM    comment []  

AOL hasn't fired Justin Frankel form Nullsoft like they should, but he has resigned anyway [Slashdot]. I think the software that Justin has worked on is great, but he is crazy if he thinks it is appropriate to create such software in the name of a company like AOL. He needs to create it on his own in a true open source environment. 11:16:16 AM    comment []  

There's a thread running on the debian-gtk-gnome mailing list about XD2 and its inclusion in Debian [debian-gtk-gnome archives]. According to the developers on that mailing list (which I also subscribe to) XD2 does not really include any new programs and they are already working on integrating its full feature set into Debian.

I personally was planning on releasing a working version of gnome-printinfo[1], the CUPS admin tools, and the GTK+ theme.

Note that the majority of changes are patches and not new programs, so these will be absorbed into the official GNOME releases fairly quickly. I hope the OpenOffice.org changes are the first to go in personally [Ross Burton].

Of course, with Debian you don't get the official support that Ximian is offering. So, if you are running an IT group, RedHat/Ximian or SuSE/Ximian might be a better option. Of course, RedHat/Bluecurve might be sufficient for many people's needs.

I like Bluecurve and I also like Ximian. However, I am primarily working from screenshots. I am not running RedHat, so I don't really have Bluecurve running on my system. I am running Debian with Gnome 2 and a port of the Bluecurve theme for the metacity window manager. If you look at my system, it looks like Bluecurve. However, I really liked the Ximian screenshots and I think I will switch once it gets ported into Debian. 10:48:56 AM    comment []  

My little page about P2P software [here] has started receiving tons of hits from Google. Currently, that page ranks fourth on a Google search for "waste p2p". An interesting thing to note, however, is that it only ranks 14th on a English Google search. Aggregating weblog posts dedicated to a single topic on one page seems to make the page more "authoritative" according to the Google algorithm. That only makes sense, but it still took me be surprise. 5:09:18 PM    comment []  

According to the Ximian Desktop 2 FAQ, XD2 does not yet support Debian [XD2 FAQ], it only supports RedHat and SuSE. While I'm on the topic, the screenshots on the Ximian site are very nice. It makes me want to install RedHat just so I can start using XD2 [XD2 Screenshots]. 4:23:18 PM    comment []  

Mozilla Firebird is making huge strides and claims have even been made that "it has finally caught up with Internet Explorer" [Jon's Radio].

I have an old Pentium laptop hooked up to my stereo that I use to play my MP3 collection. It is running Linux, but has very little RAM and, as a result, tends to use swap a lot when running Mozilla. However, I switched it to the Firebird version of Mozilla this week and was very pleased to see that swap usage was nearly eliminated. Not only is the Firebird memory footprint significantly smaller than Mozilla, but it is pretty polished considering it carries the version number 0.6. 10:55:26 AM    comment []  

In a move that will be immediately met by a lot of criticism and speculation, Sharman Networks is going to start paying Kazaa users to distribute authorized content. Companies will pay to have content hosted through the Kazaa software. The content will show up in normal searches made through the software.

News.com is reporting that Kazaa and Altnet are unrolling a setup where users are paid to distribute 'authorized content.' The article also mentions something about getting rid of unauthorized files, but is unclear on when and how. I'll be paying close attention to whether this P2P business model pans out; Sharman _has_ shown some shrewd business sense in the past [Slashdot].

This is an interesting direction to go, but I think, in the end, a more open standard is going to supplant the commercial P2P applications. It isn't a P2P application that we need, afterall, but a P2P platform and API that can be easily integrated into other tools. An API that allows tools to pool computing resources "Grid style" is the way to go. 10:50:48 AM    comment []  

Microsoft's Palladium is seen by the media industry as a way to protect their content from illegal copying and distribution. However, multiple sources have pointed out that Palladium could result in exactly the opposite; protection of the media pirates.

I think the TCPA would make a great platform on which to build a closed, members only, completely encrypted peer-to-peer media sharing network. As long as you can use the TCPA's tools to reliably verify the identity of every node on the network, then you wouldn't have to worry about the feds, the BSA, the RIAA, the MPAA, Lars Ulrich, or anyone else monitoring your file-sharing group. You and your peers could swap whatever you like in total, TCPA-enabled, 2048-bit-encrypted privacy [ArsTechnica].

Now how's that for irony. The same technology that the media industry intends to use to subjugate the media consumer will be used against them. It just goes to show that technology is not the best tool for controlling behavior. 10:32:01 AM    comment []  

Digital media convergence moves one step closer with the AV300 by Archos [ArsTechnica]. The device could be described as the video iPod. It has a built in 3.8" LCD screen and a 20 or 40GB harddrive. We are very close to a revolution in video sharing that will be on par with the MP3 sharing frenzy of the past couple of years. Higher bandwidth and larger harddrives and portable devices like the AV300 will make it happen. 10:27:28 AM    comment []  

If you haven't seen them yet, go check out the winners of this year's Club Mayan salsa competition [Club Mayan]. I think this years dancers are simply amazing. The bar has been raised far above what it has been in past years. 5:53:43 PM    comment []  

I have become more and more frustrated with the current state of web application development in Java. Struts was a step up, but is still far from the right path. What is needed is a web application framework that abstracts HTTP from the process of building an application and allows all presentation to be in HTML and all logic to be in Java. I thought about building my own framework and came up with some plans for what I thought would be an ideal scenario. However, like most of my good ideas, someone else has already done it. Tapestry is part of the Apache Jakarta project and represents a very sensible approach to web application development [Tapestry]. 12:21:19 PM    comment []  

The announcement of Ximian Desktop 2 is receiving quite a bit of buzz [CNET][LinuxWorld]. So far, the press is very positive. Any improvements to the Linux desktop can only be a good thing. The interesting thing about Ximian is that it isn't a Linux distribution in itself, but simply a desktop system that runs on top of any number of Linux flavors. That's a very different, and I think smart, approach than that taken by RedHat and others. I wanted to check to see if Ximian Desktop will run on Debian, but as of this post, the Ximian website was down. Probably due to the Slashdot effect. 11:16:37 AM    comment []  

Jon Udell thinks that aspects (AOP) will save the day when it comes to object persistance. I'll see it when I believe it <grin/> [InfoWorld]. 10:56:02 AM    comment []  

AOL wasn't happy about the release of the WASTE sharing software that came out of their own doors and are trying to stop its distribution. This situation echoes back to the Gnutella release a couple of years ago. It's funny that those guys at Nullsoft are able to get away with these shinanigans without getting fired [New York Times]. 10:51:38 AM    comment []  

Amazon is talking with Apple for rights to distribute the iTunes service to their customers [New York Post]. 10:45:33 AM    comment []