The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
BetaNews | MSN Testing Personalized ‘Start’ Page
“Microsoft’s MSN unit is testing what it calls an “incubation experiment” of a new “start” page for Web browsers. The site, located at Start.com, serves as an aggregator for RSS feeds and allows users to custom tailor its content.“
I took a look at this yesterday and really like the clean, simple look. Would be an interesting thing to do.
Slashdot | Tivo Signs Deal With Comcast
“TiVo has inked a long-term deal with Comcast, America’s largest cable television operator, to develop a version of the TiVo service that will be offered to Comcast’s DVR subscribers. The deal calls for TiVo to adapt its software to work on Comcast’s existing DVR platform, and it allows TiVo to extend to Comcast subscribers the advertising it sells in the form of interactive video clips that automatically appear in the TiVo menu.”
Internet Week > Websites Crippled By Consumers Deleting Cookies > Websites Crippled By Consumers Deleting Cookies > March 14, 2005
“More than half of Internet users have deleted cookies, seriously undermining website operators’ ability to measure consumer behavior on their sites, a market research firm said Monday.“
Should I be crying? No, I think not. Maybe people really do value privacy and anonyminity on the web:)
Internet Explorer Developer Center: Fiddler PowerToy – Part 1: HTTP Debugging
“Have you ever found yourself wondering how Microsoft Internet Explorer interacts with your Web application? Have you encountered a strange performance bottleneck that you can’t track down? Are you curious about which cookies are being sent, or what downloaded content is marked as cacheable?Microsoft Fiddler can help you answer these questions, and many more. Fiddler is an HTTP debugging proxy that logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler enables you to inspect all HTTP traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler is much simpler to use than NetMon or other network debuggers because it exposes only HTTP traffic and does so in a user-friendly format.
Fiddler includes a simple but powerful Microsoft JScript .NET event-based scripting subsystem flexible enough to support a broad array of HTTP debugging tasks. Written in C# on the Microsoft .NET Framework, Fiddler is available as an unsupported PowerToy for Internet Explorer.“
Does a lot of the things that the developer extenisons to Firefox do, but as a system proxy. You can even set Firefox to proxy thru it to get the same info. It is interesting to see the way sites can react to the different browsers. Download Fiddler here.
[teknoids] OpenExpert 0.1.1 release
“OpenExpert.org (http://www.openexpert.org/) is a web based, easy to use Expert System. It is being developed by the University of Victoria Legal Clinic as a diagnostic / teaching tool to help students navigate technical areas of the law (such a divorce), more quickly, and with fewer mistakes. That said, the project is still under heavy development, with new features being added, and refinements being made. Please see the roadmap for the project for further details on planned features and enhancements (http://www.openexpert.org/documentation/roadmap.html). You can see a demo of the system here: http://www.openexpert.org/demo/ “
Rich is a friend of ours and a frequent Teknoids poster. He demoed this project last June at the CALI Conference. It is cool and I can think of a thing or two to do with now that I have the code:)
The Freshmeat announcement is here and the SourceForge summary is here.
Knoppix 3.8 and UnionFS. Wow. Just Wow.
“Klaus has released the latest version of Knoppix, 3.8, to the crowd at CeBIT 2005. This version includes the normal round of updates including the 2.6.11 kernel by default, KDE 3.3.2, and Firefox and Thunderbird instead of Mozilla. The exciting news, however, is the addition of UnionFS. UnionFS stacks your Knoppix ramdisk on top of the read-only filesystem on the CD, the effect being that you can apt-get install, and otherwise modify all of the files on the system as though they were all writeable. Here I’ll go over why I think this is going to change Knoppix in a major way.“
Of course it doesn’t appear that Knoppix 3.8 is actually available for download yet. I hope it is released soon since it sounds a good idea to build CALIoppix 2 on top of this.
Click here for the ClassCaster audio.
Click here for the ClassCaster audio.
Computer Laboratory – Xen virtual machine monitor
“Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. We have a fully functional ports of Linux 2.4 and 2.6 running over Xen, and regularly use it for running demanding applications like MySQL, Apache and PostgreSQL. Any Linux distribution (RedHat, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake) should run unmodified over the ported OS.“
Library Stuff
“Structured Blogging is exactly what it sounds like: Having more structure to a blog entry (and more importantly, the syndicated feed behind it) in order to go beyond just reading it in your browser or aggregator. It allows people to connect with others in more ways than ever. It allows for more organization (and then manipulation) of blog entries.“
I need to take a look at this to see how it goes beyond (or if it goes beyond) categories in a blog. Suddenly meta data seems to be all the rage.