Archive for April, 2005
April 28, 2005 at 2:07 pm · Filed under General
A little while back, there was this Web 2.0 conference. A bunch of dot-com bubble luminaries went there to talk about how the web is alive and well, and doing neat new stuff. (ie. “We were right after all”) Ok, whatever.
One of the bits that came out of it was clustered search. I’m a little late to realizing the importance of clustering, but its got roots in some of the AI research from the 1960’s. Cool.
So back to the story… the other day I was searching for some terms that tend to be overused in a field which I had no interest in. Google wasn’t doing it for me, so I thought I would try out Google’s clustered search, which they announced at Web 2.0 (By Mr. AI himself, Peter Norvig). I couldn’t find it on their site or on their labs site.
So then I remembered a site that a Stanford Symbolic Systems guy I work with recommended. It’s called Clusty, and it’s great. The people who created it are from Pittsburgh, PA, so I suspect that they are from Carnegie-Mellon (good CS school).
The site looks clean and it totally worked for me.
Go check it out: http://clusty.com/
I think I’ll start using them more or as another tool for the toolbox.
April 28, 2005 at 1:39 pm · Filed under General
I went to a link that was directed to a Yahoo group yesterday. I had this odd feeling. As I looked I noticed that this was Yahoo groups. Wow! Being an ex-egroupie, I was impressed, it looked a lot better than the old UI.
Check it out: http://groups.yahoo.com/
I really like it, not bad at all.
April 28, 2005 at 12:47 pm · Filed under General
It seems like a day doesn’t go by where I don’t read about Elliot Spitzer is bringing some powerful person or corporation to justice. Why aren’t the other state Attorney Generals getting the press? Why isn’t our federal government doing the same?
The incident that triggered this was a blurb about Elliot Spitzer’s office going after Intermix for spyware/adware software.
April 25, 2005 at 11:19 pm · Filed under General
I was thinking today about FreeBSD.
FreeBSD was a great OS. It had a few drawbacks that caught up with it. The community around it was a little fragile. Some of the leaders left. There was also a bit of negativity due to Linux’s popularity. It seems that the two groups couldn’t share and had some strong personalities. Linux is spiralling off into 100 distros and most of the relevant FreeBSD people are at Apple.
No matter what anybody says, FreeBSD was the most solid free OS on the planet for a large portion of the 90’s. It was so much more robust when compared to other OS’s.
I’ll mention one weakness and then I’ll mention one interesting strength.
As far as weakness goes, one huge one was the lack of a great distro. When you used FreeBSD, you had to do a lot of extra work to get the system to do something. I really have come to love the way a good Linux distro can install an entire desktop and LAMP system ready to go. (Web server, all the necessary PHP and PHP modules compiled or Perl or Python, and MySQL were humming and ready to go) FreeBSD always required hours to tune and compile things to get to that point. Once you get used to the redhat way, it is hard to go back.
As far as a strength goes, FreeBSD did have a better installer than most Linuxes, when it came to going from the thought of running Unix to actually running it. You could download just the boot floppy and it had enough built-in to get on the network. Once it did that, it would install the whole distro directly from the internet. No CDROMs to download or buy.. just one floppy. I once went to a talk (more tales from the 1900’s) given by Dave Filo of Yahoo!. He explicitly mentioned that Yahoo tried FreeBSD because it was so easy to install from the internet. After that, it proved itself well so they made it the default OS for their production site. This saved them millions in capital expenditures when other companies were spending fortunes on Sun, SGI or Microsoft tech.
Tonight I was looking around on the internet to see if any of the Linux distros could install from the internet. I couldn’t find any.
April 18, 2005 at 9:28 pm · Filed under General
I was thinking about domain names tonight, and I wanted to write this down. I would also like your feedback and take on this.
198x - 1996
In the begining, domain names pretty much matched the company.
Example: ibm.com, microsoft.com, sun.com, cisco.com, apple.com, netscape.com, etc. In fact, most ISPs had a .net name (sprint.net, uunet.net, bbn.net)
1995 - 1998
Once netscape launched, the first big change occurred and the domain land rush occurred. Oddball, but valid dictionary names started to appear.
Example: yahoo.com, isn.com, pets.com, business.com, search.com, goto.com, x.com
1998 - Now
Then we had invented names or obscure names. The key was that they were easy or catchy to remember and spell.
Example: quokka.com, ebay.com, napster.com, google.com
Then there was the whole foolish attempt to start up alternate TLDs. (.biz, .info, .us, etc)
There were also fads. I think these are the most interesting.
For example, there was a whole:
[ie].com - (Shout out to Alan Braverman, the guy who chose egroups.com)
my.com era
*topia.com era (possible mix with *opolis.com)
*er.com ??
*ster.com era (napster, friendster, etc.)
*ornot.com era (the best being AMIbiosOrnot.com)
swapping (cks with ‘x’ or s with ‘z’) - (netflix.com, orbitz.com)
*pop.com - infopop.com
*space.com - infospace.com
