Thursday, October 14, 2004

Red Herring: Wiki Wars. 

The Paypal outage is cleared so we can resume fund-raising for BloggerCon III. If you've been waiting to make your contribution, you can now go ahead, and please do.  

I've installed Google Desktop Search.  

The excitement about Google Desktop Search is giving way to the reality. Their choice of file formats they will index is weird. And I don't care what everyone else uses, most of my valuable content is in the CMS I use to edit my blog, and they don't index that, and I doubt if they ever will. An open architecture desktop search app is a requirement. I must be able to write a plug-in that teaches it how to index formats it doesn't understand. 

Erik Speckman: "Google desktop search is a disappointment." 

Erik makes a good point. It only indexes Microsoft mail data. I would like it to index my object databases, that's where all my content is. This could all be solved if they had a driver architecture that allowed us to teach it how to index file formats they don't understand. Now that we're on the desktop this becomes possible, as does a richer API. Google's concern for server bandwidth goes away when the software is running on my desktop. 

I tried a search for Nigeria. Yup it indexes the spam too. 

Kottke: "But then there's the privacy issues." 

Very cool. It's a Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server, running on port 4664. This is the only way to go. It's conceivable they could have done it as an ActiveX component, but that would have been a huge mistake. You can use it with any browser. Right on. The fact that it's only available for Windows XP and 2000 is going to be a problem with Mac users, of course. Having waited so long, I'm very excited to be using this.  

Holy shit this thing is amazing. I just did a search on Global Google for Desktop Web Server, and at the top of the screen my eye caught a special reference to Scripting News. Wow, my subconscious said, I get a lot of rank for that. Bzzzt. Wrong. It included a result from my local hard disk and one from an email in Outlook Express. Okay, we're in another age here folks. The Web just got a major upgrade. Wow. The crazy thing is, so did my desktop.  

Other reviews: John Battelle, Danny Sullivan, BBC. 

Three DaveNet pieces anticipating this technology. 

Special audio blog post on GDS, what it means, how exciting it is, etc. 

Moral of the story: don't record an audio blog post while Google is indexing your hard disk. Oy. Basically that post is useless. File this as a bug report. A microphone is an important input device.  

Summary: Bing! Bing! Bing! Bing! Bing! 

The Age covers podcasting. "A tidal wave of sound for surfers." 

Lenn Pryor is hosting a Podcasting session at O'Reilly's Mac OS X conference, in Santa Clara on October 28.  

Here's what the new ads in the Engadget feed look like in my aggregator. At first I barely noticed them, then they looked like big glitches, but now that I see them in every post and I am starting to think about unsubbing. That says a lot, because it's become one of my favorite feeds. I honestly don't see why they need ads in their feed, because the feed itself is an ad for Engadget. Every time I read an item there's a (let's say) three percent chance I'll link to it and deliver several hundred readers. There's got to be a better way to pay for the feed.  

The obvious reason Lynne Cheney is upset that Kerry talked about their gay daughter in last night's debate is that their love for their daughter contradicts the Republican policy of limiting the rights of gay people. They'e willing to sacrifice their integrity for the votes of some bad people (following Ms Cheney's judgement re Kerry). The problem is with the Cheney philosophy, not Kerry. They have a gay daughter. That's a known fact. They also contribute to the oppression of gay people. That's the problem.  

Dick Cheney is the first veep since Nixon whose name is Dick. 

Dick Cheney: "Fuck yourself." 

Two years ago: "Now of course there are non-hierarchic links, that accounts for serendipity or daydreaming, but when you want to get a job done, hierarchies do the hard work of organizing for quick retrieval." 

Sounds like Adam is going to Starbucks to upload the next DSC.