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Google innovates by rebranding RSS

By on December 9, 2005 in Technology

From Slashdot: Gmail Gets RSS. Everyone with a UID and Paul Stamatiou writes “Google’s Gmail email service now sports a new feature for displaying RSS feeds, dubbed Web Clips. You might remember this name, as it is the same name Google Desktop refers to RSS feeds. Web Clips for Gmail were announced a long time ago sometime during the summer but they were finally stable enough to release to the general public. You can check out the what’s new page for Gmail here. Essentially, you subscribe to a bunch of feeds and everytime you log into Gmail it loads the lastest title from each feed which you can scroll through with left/right arrows. Don’t forget to check the actual post about Web Clips for Gmail on the Google Blog.”

Google is doing evil. Why rename RSS? It seems like the same hubris that haunts Microsoft: they believe their users are idiots who can’t handle a new term. Is RSS an obscure acronym that will cause the technology to be rejected? People didn’t have a problem with “TV” or “ATMs” or “SUVs” “FM” radio works just fine, even if you’re not sure what it stands for. “RADAR?” “LASER?” Seems OK to me. Call RSS what it is.

Yahoo! validates tagging with purchase of del.icio.us

By on December 9, 2005 in Technology

At Joho the Blog, Dr. David Weinberger (author of the great “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”) reports: “Yahoo buys Delicious – Good all around. The fact that the most visited site on the Net has bought the premier tagging site should confirm that tagging is going mainstream. Yahoo has profoundly not screwed up Flickr, so I have confidence that del.icio.us users are not going to feel betrayed or de-featured by Yahoo. Most important, Yahoo is now in a position to become a tag broker, adding value to the act of tagging, thus driving more tagging, thus increasing the Web’s memetic value. With widespread tagging, the Web means more. Congratulations to Joshua Schachter and the rest of the Delicious folks.”

What’s the big deal with tags? Stay tuned. Tags could be the next big thing, the solution to everyone’s problem, the magic pixie dust of 2005 (as Shirky below says of java, ‘sprikle a little on your application and voila! you’re app is better’). Or it could turn out to be a good idea that never really meets its initial promise, failing to scale or failing to work. Time will tell, but so far it’s pretty promising.

Clay Shirky has a great presentation, well worth the listen, over at IT Conversations: “Ontology is overrated.”

Lest We Forget

By on December 7, 2005 in Security

Arizona MemorialDoc Searls blogs, “The lessons live. December 7, 1941, FDR said, was “a day that will live in infamy”. Now veterans who remember are filling the WWII Memorial at a rate greater than 1000 per day.Most of us who grew up in the 1950s, didn’t know our parents were The Greatest Generation. We just wished they’d quit harping about growing up in the Depression. (“When I was your age, we walked ten miles to school in the snow…”)… Those two subjects, The War and The Depression, gave our parents enormous moral authority, as well as a boundless supply of instructive stories at the dinner table. We didn’t appreciate it much at the time. Now that so many of the old folks are going or gone, we do.”

MonadLUG, 8 Dec 2005: Tim Lind on anti-spam techniques

By on December 7, 2005 in LAMP, OpenSource, Technology

Guy Pardoe, the MonadLUG Coordinator-in-Chief, announces “The next meeting of the Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) will be this Thursday, December 8th, 7:00pm, at the SAU 1 Superintendent’s Office behind South Meadow School in Peterborough… Tim Lind discusses Anti-spam techniques – Using open source tools, how to build an anti-spam system that is self running, updating and allows your email users to configure their own whitelists/blacklists, etc…”

IBM Workplace to support Open Document Format

By on December 5, 2005 in OpenSource, Technology

Computerworld News reports IBM Workplace client to support Open Document Format in ’06. “In a move that could pit it against Microsoft, IBM plans to support the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) in a version of its Workplace Managed Client 2.6 due out early next year.”

Great news! Interoperability and Working Well with Others is Good.

Competition breeds Innovation. “In a move that could pit it against Microsoft?” It seems that journalists have to set up simple Either-Or binary contests when the world is far more complex than that. It’s not IBM vs. Microsoft any more than it is Novell vs. Sun: it’s an ecology of competition, progress, cooperation and differences. Companies will cooperate and join together to advance some standards, and compete on other fronts. IBM is adding another file format to its office product. It’s doubtful that IBM will drop ASCII, RTF, Word Perfect, AmiPro or MS Word format. More adoption of ODF is a welcome sign.

Apache 2.2 ships with virtual host https support

By on December 3, 2005 in LAMP, OpenSource, Technology

From Resigned to the Bittersweet Truth, Apache 2.2 is Out. The earth-shattering feature of Apache 2.2 is RFC 2817 SSL Upgrade. Basically, any HTTP connection can upgrade itself to HTTPS without reestablishing.”

“This means you can do SSL on virtual hosts without a dedicated IP address. This will greatly increase the penetration of SSL (plus free certs like CaCert) …”

Awesome! SSL on virtual hosts opens up the world of secure web transactions for inexpensive shared hosts. Way cool.

Tha hackable WRT-54 returns!

By on December 2, 2005 in Technology

Slashdot postL Linksys Adds Linux WRT54G Model Back. Glenn Fleishman writes “Last month, Slashdot and others wrote about how the Linksys WRT54G, a popular embedded Linux-based Wi-Fi gateway, had switched to VxWorks’s OS for its v5 release. Because the WRT54G has become the standard as a cheap commodity device for building your own platform (like Sveasoft, Fon, and many others), this seemed like a big blow to hackers and developers. If you could still manage to flash the device–not sure if that was possible–it had half the RAM and flash of the v4 model. It turns out Linksys wasn’t killing the Linux model. They’ve released it as the WRT54GL with v4.30.0(US) firmware and will sell it under that name for about $70 retail. It’s already in stock and the new firmware is on their GPL software download page. Linux sales represent a few percentage points of their overall volume, based on the Linksys product director’s remarks. The lesser quantity of RAM puts money back in their pockets on the mainstream model.”

DRAM dirt cheap

By on December 2, 2005 in Technology

InfoWorld: Top News: “DRAM prices slump to all time lows.

(InfoWorld) – The price of the most commonly used DRAM (dynamic RAM) computer memory chips have slumped to all time lows in the spot market, a great time for users to buy more.”

Sounds like a great time to max out your machines, before a chip fab plant suffers an earthquake or other disaster.

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