mod_torrent: "Mod_torrent is a drop in solution for Apache servers when deploying the BitTorrent file swarming technology. With mod_torrent your visitors share the bandwidth burden when distributing large files on your web site. The module transparently makes all, or optionally only certain types of files, retrievable by any client implementing the BitTorrent protocol."
LAMPPIX: Bootable webserver on a CD - SitePoint PHP Blog: "Here's a great idea - LAMPPIX a LAMP web server, bootable from a CD. It uses KNOPPIX, a Linux distribution designed to boot from a CD as well as XAMPP - a distribution of Apache the usual suspects (e.g. mmCache).
For PHP solution providers seems like a great way to distribute your product to customers without requiring specialist knowledge from them - just put the CD in and reboot."
About Google's OS: What comes after GMail and Froogle?: "gGrid? Grid? gRid? ... Greed?"
InfoWorld: The joy of outsourcing: "Although most IT managers want increases, the dirty little secret of IT budgeting is that a lot of IT gets steadily cheaper even within a 12-month budget cycle. The time between the day when a budget process begins and the books are actually closed on that budget could be as long as 18 months. This means that the $5,000 server you put in your budget in July 2004 for 2005 might cost $3,000 when you actually buy it in December 2005"
WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Chinese Wikipedia: "For the 10th anniversary of China going online, PCWorld has a fascinating report about the growth of the "Chinese Wikipedia." In short: no censoring yet.
BBC NEWS | Inside the Google search machine: "Blogs are not so much of a problem," says Mr Cutts. "They show up less often than you expect."
DevNetwork Forums :: View topic - Come to the PEAR-fest: "I am one of the core developers of the PEAR package who has joined the game relatively late. I see the strengths of the PEAR installer as the reason PEAR will become an important force. The base PEAR class is one monstrous mistake, and PEAR_Error is pretty close. Everyone knows this." Well, I know now.
Bluemountain's impressive (it's an e-card service), in a somewhat nasty-you-have-to-be-a a-clever-consumer kind-a way.
Before they let you send a card, they ask you to sign up for a 30-day free trial. In order to cancel it, you have to call their customer support (you can't cancel online), which is only open during business hours. They then "verify" your address, probably to sell it, before closing your account. (I forgot to ask about that.) Before canceling, they offer a discount as well, so that's worth doing even if you want to use them.
M$ and SAP were thinking about merging: "The companies initiated merger discussions late last year, but eventually broke off talks for reasons of complexity"
Went to see Supersize me, a home-made documentary about a guy who eats nothing but McDonalds for a month. Thoroughly entertaining and informative, it's a great documentary, made with cheap gear. It encouraged me to finish the documentary I'm working on. It won't be this good, but it might be passable...
Everything TypePad!: TypePad vs. Comment Spammers: "According to our logs, most spammers try to cover their tracks by sending their posts through an "Open Proxy Server". An Open Proxy Server is a misconfigured or infected machine that forwards web requests for anyone on the entire Internet. The spammers use these proxies to avoid the one commment-per-minute restriction and the Blog Owner's IP address blocking.
So, we started blocking Open Proxies -- all 1.5 million of them. It immediately reduced the comment spam problem. In fact on our first day it blocked over 20,000 spam attempts!"
Why Wiki Works: "Deleting wiki pages is about as much fun as emptying the windows recycle bin."
Scene for Stargate with Teal'C on Flickr - Photo Sharing!. An example of the pretty f**ng fantastic photo annotation feature.
Life in NYC: "if you rave long enough, you'll arrive at something fairly reasonable eventually."
Calling the Apache htaccess masters from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent. With all the changing of blogging software lately, redirecting old URL's is a painpoint. The best suggestion so far seems to be to use a RewriteMap.
Michael's selling: Domain (studioid.com) For Sale.
On the train today I saw a weathered sign saying "Welcome home to our soldiers! Great Job!".
Not So Simple Search - Metrics - CIO: "According to a survey of 300 companies by Boston-based Delphi Group, nearly 30 percent of business users spend more than eight hours per week searching for electronic information."
Where is the qualitative research (not surveys!) about search? Who is watching businesspeople closely for days, logging exactly what they do (as opposed to what they say they do in a survey) and finding out why?
For what is one of the hottest IT topics around these days, there is surprisingly little valuable research being done on search. (I don't think I consider the above valuable research. Sorry guys, a survey just doesn't cut it.)
What's worse, the typical research findings ("business users spend x hours a day searching") are almost always followed by dodgy, Jakob-ish ROI conclusions ("At x US$/hour, this costs companies worldwide y billion US$ a year!"). Useful for convincing some of the more stupid CIO's, maybe. Not for much else. I guess I'm just in a pissed off mood today.
I am starting a mailing list for videoblogging.
1&1 Root Server. Looks good. 500Gigs/month bandwidth for US$ 49.
Steves Digicams - Apacer Disc Steno: "The Apacer Disc Steno CP-100 is a portable, battery-operated, multi-session CompactDisc recorder. Its main use is to transfer image files or other data from flash memory cards to CD-R or CD-R/W discs without a computer. This eliminates the need to buy multiple flash memory cards when vacationing or working out in the field and allows you to leave your laptop at home."
The Inevitable "Day After Tomorrow" Review. I went to see it yesterday. Bad, yes, but entertaining. When you live in New York, a lot of movies featuring the city become much more entertaining. You recognize the buildings, the people. It's kinda fun.
(Spoilers ahead)
I think many people will especially appreciate the part where millions of Americans try to enter Mexico, only to be stopped at the border. Only after the president forgives all Latin-American dept do they let them in.
LLRX.com - Trends in Blog Searching: "Recently, most major search engines have altered their algorithms to push blogs down in the search results. Engines that only return two results from any one site use this feature to limit the impact of blogs on the search results."
Textdrive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "TextDrive is a managed webhosting company created by Dean Allen (creator of Textpattern, a weblog/content management system) and Jason Hoffman, designed primarily (but not exclusively) as a hosting service for Textpattern-managed sites, similar to Six Apart's Movable Type-based TypePad service. Allen was able to raise just under $40,000 in startup funding in just over three days. The investors, also known as the "VC 200," were an assortment of web developers, designers, and bloggers. Allen chose this means of raising capital as a community-funded alternative to traditional venture capital." A competitor for Typepad :) Differentiation: you get hosting as well (meaning you can do more things than just host your blog).
I hadn't noticed this page before: IAwiki: WhereInTheWorld: IA practicioners organized per country.
PeterMorville now owns every single link on the search results page for findability on Google.
If you're considering moving away from MT, the Drupal MT import code is being worked on actively. Wait a few weeks, and your wait should be well worth it!
LanguaL Food Description Home Page: a multilingual thesaural system using faceted classification for the food industry.
Help pay B&A's hosting fees: "Because you're donating directly through DreamHost, rest assured that your donation will only be used to pay for this site's hosting fees. The site owner won't be able to run off and spend your donation on DVDs, fine steak dinners, or anything else completely unrelated to their web hosting bill!"
On some pages, in IE6+ on Windows, if you right-click properties, it doesn't show pagesize, it just says "unavailable". Why is that?
Robert Paterson's Weblog: Unjobbing?: "What is "bad" about schools is that their priority is control. What is bad about most work places that are conventionally structured is that they too are about control ..."
I'm reading Phil Murray's first http://www.kmconnection.com/ (free download), and it's excellent. I'm not saying that because it mentions me, or because I host the The Faceted Classification Discussion (FCD) mailing list together with Phil. (Disclosure always.)
Anyways, it's the magazine every IA should read (especially for enterprise work) and I hope it takes off and Phil makes enough money with it (yearly subscriptions are US$ 170) to be able to keep it going for years to come. IA needs magazines like this.
How to Share a Taxonomy with Other Photoshop Album Users?: "Photoshop Album is one of those rare applications that make meta tagging so easy that even "normal people" can use it."
JaredSpool (link): "We don't have to worry about who hires us because we charge a lot of money. It pretty much self selects. People only hire us as a last resort, for
something absolutely critical, that they can't get anywhere else. (That's what makes it fun.)"
Damn! Then I find a nice and clean PHP photoalbum script, but it lacks a good web interface (assumes you can FTP).
Most photo gallery scripts are typical open source messes with lots of useless features. Any tips for a PHP script that makes it easy to upload (unoptimized) pictures from your digital camera and presents them cleanly.
And another travel (Sout-east Asia) question. If you want to post digital pictures to your blog, how do you optimize/crop/adjust them? Do the internet cafe's have photo software? Do you carry your own software (I won't carry my own computer!) and install it on every internet cafe somehow? Does it happen server-side?
A travel question. If you travel for a long time and you take a lot of pictures with your digital camera, how do you store them? (Especially in South-east Asia.)
- Do internet cafes burn CD's you can then send home? Pros or cons?
- Do you take an iPod and store everything on that (20 Gigs is a lot of pictures)? But then what?
- Another solution?
Black Coffee: Travel Blogging Technology
MIT OpenCourseWare | Science, Technology, and Society | STS.360 Ethnography, Spring 2003 | Home: The politics of independence and technological objects.
I updated my Examples Of Web Ethnography page.
Talk on the Drupal dev list is about an upcoming MT-import module that might even support old MT URL's. That's huge: breaking URL's is for me a major lock-in factor in any software. I even broke URL's when I upgraded MT last time (somehow), and it pissed me off. So way to go Drupal team!
OK/Cancel: Diary Studies: Too Much Information?: (in the comments) "I have not had a chance to use the smart phone with a video cam but one of my colleagues in Asia told me it works "fantastic."
findability.org | frequently asked questions about findability: "PeterMorville is currently working on a new O'Reilly book on the subject of Ambient Findability."
What is the algebra rule for x exponent (m/n)? Equals x exponent m divided by x exponent n?
"Brutal" Architecture: blog entry on "parallels between physical architecture and software architecture" by Microsoft researcher.
I just discovered Bret's excellent blog. In this post, he talks about offshoring effectiveness. In my experience, communication is the biggest factor. There is a LOT of informal communication going on in any team, and if you put part of the team offshore, the amount of documentation needed skyrockets (depending on your existing development process).