Month: June 2003

Changes to this blog

I added a Technorati link that shows who is linking to this blog in my blogroll OPML.  You can find it on the right hand side under My Links.  Also, I bought a digital camera today so you can expect lots of pictures in the near future (it's charging its battery at the moment).

In case you are interested, it's Casio Exlim EX-Z3 and I got it at Sharper Image for $280 including tax and all because I had $150 worth of gift certificates.  One thing I like about it is that it is really small, size of a cigarette box, yet comes with 3x optical zoom.  We'll see how it turns out.

This is my first digital camera because I used to dislike taking pictures and being photographed.  Marc Canter and Tim Bray's blogs convinced me that I need a digital camera to enhance my blog.  I'll probably end up upgrading to a 5 megapixel camera with zillion controls soon or later, but I want to ease into it with babysteps.

Wish me luck and don't forget to scream if you think I am putting up too many photos.  While I don't have pretty roses like Tim does in my backyard, I got lots of birds and other wild animals living within or nearby my house to take pictures of.  Ever seen sleepy egrets or ducks having an orgy?  It's an eternal live comedy outside my windows.

Googling for WebCore #3: I Am Just a Blogger

If you have been keeping track of my posts (#1 and #2) about my personal brush with how blogs are affecting Google, here is an update.  I searched for "webcore source code" again today and got a surprise: I am the first result!

I am not sure whether I should be glad or mad that one of my posts got more links pointing to it than WebCore itself.

Update: Direct link to WebCore Source Code to make it first as Már Örlygsson suggested.

Please Check Your RSS Feeds

If you have a blog with RSS feeds, make a habit of checking it regularly (once a week should be enough).  Blog tools are often lax on character encoding and bloggers' tendency to copy-and-paste across tools can occasionally result in illegal characters seeping into your feeds, making them unparseble.  If you are using IE, just clicking on the feed link should be enough since IE will barf on illegal characters in XML documents.  Thank you for listening.  Good day.

Etching Echo

Well, the name for the initiative led by Sam Ruby to create a new syndication format from scratch is … [drumrolll] … Echo!  Looks like they are going to use it as a brand of sort: Echo API, Echo Enabled, etc.  I proposed Wide Open Syndication (WOS-Up!) last night, but most people wanted to go with Echo.  Yeah, people will have a lot of fun Googling with 'Echo' as keyword, but then it is a sign of child-like innocence that I like so much in engineers.

Feed Money Fast

Tim is on a roll today.  His "MakeMoneyFast" post (actually the title is "$$$$!"), he writes about his experiment with Google's new AdSense program.  He made almost $16 in two days.  Cool.  AdSense reveals what Google is thinking with its Blogger.com acquisition.

Only problem is that popularity of RSS feed usage is on the upswing and will eventually lead to majority of blog news being consumed via news aggregators.  This means Google will have to get into the news aggregator business (?) eventually.  Sure, they can do this with from the server side, but to cover all the bases, Google will need a client-side aggregator as well.

Intelligent Search and VC Hanky Panky

Tim Bray's post on Intelligent Search repeats the obvious but has interesting histories involving Open Text, Verity, and Architext.  I also found this bit interesting:

"One day my CEO called me into the office and looked real serious and said “Tim, I think we’re in trouble. There’s a new search engine about to launch, called Architext, and they don’t search for words like we do, they search for concepts. See, it says so right here in their Powerpoints that this VC slipped me.”

Naughty but not uncommon.

Blog-aware Spambots and Blog Security Vulnerability

Recently, I have been getting spams with subject lines containing words I have used in my blog posts.  These spams arrive within hours of a blog posting.  If this is being done by a spambot, it seems to be using words I used to retrieve or build a short sentence.  For example, within an hour of posting "Just for Fun", I received a spam with "What are you doing for fun?" as subject.

I think bloggers open a window of security vulnerability each time a blog entry is posted.  Blogs provide hackers with enough information about the people, relationship, and context of each interactions between bloggers to attempt break-in via social engineering.  For example, if I wrote about something Marc Canter has written and then receive an e-mail with attachment from 'Marc Canter', I am more likely to open the attachment than an e-mail from "Mary Joe Slapfinger" out of the blue.

SOAP 1.2 Finalized

W3C finally signed off on SOAP 1.2 by releasing it as a Recommendation.  SOAP 1.2 is a small constellation of four documents:

Changes from SOAP 1.1 are summarized in From SOAP 1.l to 1.2 in 9 points [warning: it's reads like a sales brochure].  While I am not entirely happy with its content, I am happy to see it finally arrive.

BVRDE: Win32 IDE for UNIX/Linux Programmers

While I have done my share of UNIX programming, I hate programming on UNIX/Linux.  I know the power of Emacs and so on, but terminal/command-line orientd UIs in general disturb me too much to be an effective programmer on the UNIX/Linux platforms.  Apparently Bjarke Viksoe feels the same way.  Bjarke is a talented Win32 programmer whose news page I visit once a week to see what new gadgets or tools he has written.  This week, he had a surprise in store.

He usually writes compact (read ATL/WTL) open source Win32 GUI components, but this week he wrote BVRDE (Bjarke Viksoe's Remote Development Environment), an IDE for editing, compiling, and debugging UNIX/Linux software in the comfort of an Win32 IDE.  Written in WTL, whole IDE weights only 1 meg (plus a few bytes), but it offers:

  • Syntax highlighting for C/C++, Java, Makefile, HTML and XML
  • Remote compilation of projects on all UNIX/Linux platforms using GNU C
  • Remote debugging via GDB
  • VS.NET style management of multiple remote projects

BVRDE loads fast, uses latest Win32 GUI gadgets, and is visually stunning.  Only complaint I might have is that he isn't releasing source code for BVRDE.  Since it's only version 0.1 (don't worry, it seems solid enough for playing with), I won't complain too loudly yet.  BVRDE could mature into an essential tool in my toolbox.