The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
Bloomberg News, sent from my iPod touch.
Yahoo, Microsoft Strike Internet-Search Advertising Agreement
July 29 (Bloomberg) — Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo! Inc. agreed to
collaborate on Internet search and online advertising, creating a
united front to challenge Google Inc.
Under the agreement, Microsoft will get a 10-year license for Yahooâ
I’m sorry, but RSS feeds are way too slow. I know this first-hand. As part of my job here at TechCrunch, I monitor a lot of RSS feeds for breaking news. We also produce our own feed and I can see how quickly it propagates to various feed readers and feed-powered news aggregation services. The lag time between posting a story and seeing it pop up in the RSS feed is usually a few minutes, and then it can take another 10 to 15 minutes or so for it to appear in something like Google Reader.
via Speeding Up RSS .
The problem with this whole article is that it totally misses what RSS is and how it works. RSS is a data format, a very simple XML file. It isn’t slow or fast, it’s just a chunk of well-formated data. RSS feeds are produced by many systems at the very moment of publication. The feed for this very site will be updated as soon as I click the publish button. But the RSS feed is just an XML file. No speed is involved, just a file. Got it yet?
The lag the writer above seems to see is just a function of the systems that consume the RSS feeds and really has nothing to do with the RSS itself. As commonly implemented RSS is used as part of a ‘pull’ system. A remote client pulls the XML file periodically from the server. Servers and clients usually limit how often the files are pulled in order to conserve bandwidth. The idea behind RSS pull systems is that the client decides how often to poll servers for new updates. If you want faster updates, just crank up how often your client hits the server. Of course many servers will ban you if you try to update too often.
Now, I can easily imagine a system where the RSS feed is pushed out to known clients. Because the RSS specification is open and under a Creative Commons license and extensible through XML namespaces, it would just take a bit of design and programming to get RSS into shape and come up with a scheme that pushes out the updated RSS to a client that parses the XML into those stories we love. The client should be something lightweight and widgety. Once installed it needs to register with the server, giving its IP, and declare what feeds it wants pushed out. Then something new gets published and it gets sent right out to the client, queuing the update if the client is not available. As a bonus, the server can still dish out the very same RSS feed to any pull clients that want to consume it.
See nothing to it. RSS isn’t slow, it just isn’t doing what you want it to do, so go ahead and fix it.
“In order for ‘personally identifiable information’ to be personally identifiable, it must identify a person. But an IP address identifies a computer,” U.S. District Court Judge Richard Jones said in a written decision.
Jones issued the ruling in the context of a class-action lawsuit brought by consumers against Microsoft stemming from an update that automatically installed new anti-piracy software. In that case, which dates back to 2006, consumers alleged that Microsoft violated its user agreement by collecting IP addresses in the course of the updates. The consumers argued that Microsoft’s user agreement only allowed the company to collect information that does not personally identify users. Microsoft argued that IP addresses do not identify users because the addresses don’t include people’s names or addresses. The company also said that it did not combine IP addresses with other information that could link them to individuals.
via MediaPost Publications Court: IP Addresses Are Not ‘Personally Identifiable’ Information 07/07/2009.
Interesting decision. Of course it is fairly true. Since most IP addresses are doled out to consumers on a random rotating basis using DHCP, it would be easy to argue that a particular IP address does not “belong” to a particular person, so it is not a way of identifying them. In reality, IP addresses do stick around and often can be attached to a particular person. SOunds like a need for balance here.
The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.
via Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS.
So, take an open source operating system, build a new window manager, add a killer app to capture the hearts and minds of the multitudes. Hmm, sounds like Apple and OSX and iTunes. Of course this is different, its GOOGle!!! Anyway, I’ll really just wait to see it in real life. Blog posts are cheap.
We are firmly in the era of digital imagery now, and most of us are operating with much, much lower resolution than the estimated 20 megapixels to make images of the quality of those old Kodachrome images. I’m glad we all have cameras, glad that our Nedas are borne witness. But I will miss Kodachrome, which connected us simultaneously to the ugliness in this world and, in the same frame, its comprehensive, insistent beauty.
via Kodachrome, the wicked world, and the sunny day | Tech Gear News – Betanews.
Good piece on the demise of Kodachrome. I had the pleasure of shooting many rolls of Kodachrome years ago, and still am amazed at the depth and fidelity of the photos shot on those slides. Like hi-fidelity sound, hi-fidelity images are becoming a thing of the past. As the pace of technology has quickened we have traded quality for speed and ease of use. True stereo hi-fi lost to mediocre MP3 compression. Life-like photography lost to the grainy soft focus phone camera. Have we drifted into a low-res culture?
Many state court systems now permit live streaming video of court proceedings via the Internet to interested parties. The equipment used by Westlaw and its partner Courtroom Connect does not interfere with court proceedings; it typically consists of one compact, stationary video camera on a tripod, a video encoder that enables the video signal to be sent over the Internet, an audio mixer, and a device that transmits the signal. With the exception of the camera, all of the equipment can fit on a small table. It usually takes about four hours to install and test the equipment. To webcast proceedings live, a separate Internet connection can be installed in order to prevent any disturbance to the court’s Internet connection.
via Westlaw Wants Your Video Records.
Interesting development. This press release is from March 2009, but Carl Malamud just twittered about it. I’ll look into this a bit more, but it looks like this partnership is making video record of trials, which are generally public, and then selling the footage. Some portions are available for free, but full coverage is only for paying customers. Sounds like a 21st century update of the way West gained a virtual monopoly on the print opinions of courts in the late 19th and early 20th century, a monopoly that is only now being broken.
I’ve taken a quick look at the stuff on the Courtroom Connect site and this is not rocket science. They are placing a web cam in the courtroom and streaming the video back to a Microsoft server. Pretty straight forward and something that could be handled in house or by an organization that would provide the content for free.
Now, as for linking with nodes – that is not supported at this time. Is this your primary question? I’m going to assume that it’s the main issue you’re facing and turn this into a feature request – at the moment, there’s no way to define relationships between Table Wizard-managed tables and tables integrated with Views by other modules (such as the node table). Supporting that will take some work…
via Allow relationships to other views-enabled tables | drupal.org.
OK, so we imported CALI Lessons into Drupal as nodes. Now I’ve got the table that tracks when folks run those Lessons. It has about 4.4 million rows and contains what is effectively relational data: ids for Lessons, People, etc, and run data: time of run, questions answered, etc. So we were hoping to use Table Wizard to surface the data in Views2 and combine it with Lesson node info to produce nifty pages for people to see the Lessons they have run. But as noted above TW doesn’t support building relationships between TW-managed tables and existing Views tables, so no way to link the nid in the LessonRun table with the nid in the node table or the uid in LessonRun with the uid in the users table with the nifty Views2 interface. Looks like I’ll just need to code it in.
Seven Georgia banks were issued the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s strongest regulatory rebuke last month, according to an announcement Friday by the banking industry insurer.The banks, concentrated primarily in metro Atlanta, entered into cease-and-desist orders with the FDIC, an agreement that stipulates how the bank must overhaul its business, or face failure.
FDIC ups cease-and-desist orders in Ga. – Atlanta Business Chronicle:
In case anyone was wondering if the economy has hit bottom yet. Personally, I’d go with no, we’re still falling. And hitting the bottom may be about right, it will be a big hit.
My forgotten Star Trek mug.
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