I have been playing around with the CSS and the color scheme a bit. So here’s a “fresh” new look! Please let me know if anything is broke, and if you have any suggestions on the design (I suck at any kind of creative stuff, so all help is welcome).
I always have a hard time choosing colors, so this time I’ve restricted my choices to the KDE color palette, which makes things a bit easier. Overall I think the site’s looking better, atleast to me! :-)
Check out [[http://www.protopage.com/|Protopage]] — you’ll be blown away.
Just as desktops are becoming more usable and more good looking, Ajax is coming up in a big way posing a major threat to “traditional” desktop software.
Some more Ajax stuff:
* [[http://ajaxmatters.com|Ajax Matters]]
* [[http://hinchcliffe.org/archive/2005/08/18/1675.aspx|State of Ajax]] (via /.)
* [[http://script.aculo.us/|script.aculo.us]]
A few days back [[http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000172.html|Yahoo! announced]] that their search index had grown to more than //twice// the size of Google’s index (which, of course, [[http://battellemedia.com/archives/001790.php|Google refuted]]).
So some folks from NCSA went ahead and did a little testing, and the conclusion is that Yahoo’s claims [[http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/indexsize.html|might be suspicious]]. Are we entering a new world of corporate dishonesty?
To be fair, the NCSA experiment was very very simplistic. I mean, you could do it from your home computer, if you wanted. They just took the standard ispell dictionary file, created around 10,000 random searches consisting of two words and fed them to both Yahoo and Google. Then they compared the size of the result set.
A few points to note — they only compare if the number of results is less than 1000. This can bias the result of their experiment if Google is simply //better// than Yahoo at indexing documents. Its still not a concrete measure of the size of the index itself. Also, their experiments cover regular queries — specialized queries for images, audio/video files, blogs etc are not covered.
But certainly something that Yahoo! is going to note and hopefully respond to in the next few days.
Webapps are the rage these days. I think personal information management is one of the key areas where web apps have a very good chance to make inroads into conventional desktop applications, and here’s why:
* these days we use computers at work, at home, on the plane, in a cafe — everywhere. We would like to have seamless access to our personal information //everywhere//. But personal information is personal, so security it important. You don’t want to carry around your laptop with you everytime though. Most places have Internet access — why not put everything online?
* We’ve already seen some very rich internet apps around personal information management. There’s [[http://mail.google.com|email]], [[http://tadalist.com|to-do lists]], [[http://backpackit.com|organizer]].
I think a critical piece in this puzzle thats missing right now is a rich web based calendar. Currently I just use something like unison/rsync to keep my calendar/contacts updated on each computer I work at. This is cumbersome, but it works. Email synchronization is a mostly solved problem (IMAP). But synching the calendar and contacts this way is problematic.
For a while I was using [[http://calendar.yahoo.com|Yahoo! calendar]] — its highly functional (reminders, recurrances, holidays). But I think the interface still needs a lot of work. There is no free/busy support, nor is there any iCal/vCal support as far as I could tell. I want to be able to subscribe to other calendar sources and aggregate free/busy information and so on.
There was [[http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004282.html|quite a rumor]] about Google releasing a web based calendar, but it hasn’t happened yet. I won’t mind if the folks at 37signals.com did it — but someone //should// do it, and do it fast!
I don’t care too much about web based email and addressbook because I access email from a variety of sources, and for a variety of reasons its not possible to access them all online. Further, I need to access my addressbook across all of my email accounts in a seamless manner — again, for a variety of constraints this is not always possible online. A local client like KMail is much more flexible in this regard.
Although I’m quite happy with my current setup in KDE ([[http://kontact.kde.org|kontact]], [[http://basket.kde.org|basket]]) I think I’ll give backpackit and tadalist a try. A few less things to synchronize.
[[http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html|Fascinating article]] on [[http://wired.com|Wired]]
>> //The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That’s 100 pages per person alive.//
>>//How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective history and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world’s population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone’s 10-year plan.//
If you do the math, that amounts to about **150 million** pages of //new// contrent //**every single day**//. Even if we were to take 20% of that as a conservative estimate, thats still more than 30 million pages. Now //that// is truly staggering.
>> //What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds.//
A new blog **every 2 seconds**. Beat that!
But a little too far fetched at some points (IMHO):
>> //In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing.//
>>//Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The patterns of the Machine’s internal workings will be so complex they won’t be repeatable; you won’t always get the same answer to a given question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.//
An interesting read, none the less. And finally, the omnious sounding conclusion:
>> //Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.//