Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 43 of 72.

Athens 2004 Web site linking policy

The official Web site of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games has a hyperlink policy they would like all Web sites to adhere to. “Use the term Athens 2004 only, and no other term as the text referent.”Send a request letter to the Internet Department with a description of your site, reason for linking, the unique URL containing, the link, and your e-mail contact. How odd. Such policies never work, and might serve as a nice way to aggregate news coverage. I am sure the official site of the Olympics does not need the PageRank help….

Deep Lake Water Cooling System

Enwave’s Deep Lake Water Cooling is now cooling the downtown core of Toronto. Cold water is drawn from the icy waters 83-meters below Lake Ontario. The water pipes cool a closed system of water pipes that cool downtown. Enwave has enough capacity to air condition 32 million square feet of building space capacity: approximately 8000 homes. 40,000 tons of carbon dioxide are removed from the air. Enwave has a video online explaining the system in more detail. (via Metafilter)…

Six Apart Professional Network press release

Six Apart on Monday issued a press release about the upcoming Six Apart Professional Network. Over 1,000 people have pre-registered to join the network. Anil Dash’s title changed from vice president of business development to vice president of the Six Apart Professional Network. Although the network was announced it will supposedly not be live until Movable Type 3.1 launches….

MT-Blacklist v2.0e released

Jay Allen released MT-Blacklist 2.0e today. The new version is compatible with Movable Type 3.0x releases but not compatible with 3.1 beta. As the developer of the #1 Movable Type plugin I am curious how the licensing and donation system is working for Jay. Jay asks for $100 per author for commercial use of the plugin and $5 per author for educational and non-profit use. For a 5 author installation with each author using MT Blacklist Six Apart would receive a licensing fee of $200 and Jay would receive a licensing fee of $500. As the perl hacker/source code reader…

Los Angeles Galaxy fires Sigi Schmid

The Los Angeles Galaxy announced the firing of Sigi Schmid in a conference call this afternoon. The Los Angeles Galaxy currently have the best record among the ten teams of Major League Soccer. Sigi was in his sixth season as the Galaxy’s head coach. He coached the Western Conference in the All-Star game on July 31. It is very unusual for a first place team to fire its coach. Over the last five games the Galaxy tied four and lost one. It will be interesting to see how the Galaxy positions itself given the expansion of Chivas USA next season….

Feedster to add RSS advertising

Feedster plans to incorporate contextual advertising from Kanoodle in its RSS search subscriptions. Feedster will also sell its own sponsorships for some of the RSS feeds. There will be one advertisement every sixth headline and users can pay $10 a year for a feed without advertisements. The ad-free feed will be licensed under Creative Commons for non-commercial use. The eWeek article mentions the dispute regarding advertising in RSS feeds. I have no issue with advertising in RSS feeds and realize that it is bound to happen just as e-mail carries advertising messages as a trade-off for the costs of production….

New York Times on the impact of Microsoft Office

Steve Lohr of The New York Times takes a look at Microsoft’s Office unit and its future. As a stand-alone business, Office – which on average sells for about $275 – would be slightly larger than the second-largest software company, Oracle, and far more profitable. Only the Windows operating system, the other pillar of Microsoft, is slightly larger….

PHP 5.0.1 released

PHP 5.0.1 is now available. If you are running WordPress and had a segfault issues the new release will make you happy….

RetroPads

RetroZone takes original controllers from NES, Super Nintendo, Genesis, Atari, and Intellivision and converts them into USB game pads. You can now have emulation with the real controllers. I already have one of the top-loading NES systems from 1993 with the “dog bone” controllers. I like to have the full system, but finding and storing the games is difficult. Emulation combined with a nice controller is a good solution….

eBay acquires 25% of craigslist

eBay acquired a 25% interest in craigslist by purchasing a former craiglist employee’s equity stake. There is a craigslist forum with reactions, and it looks like Craig has had to deal with some bad comments that are definitely undeserved….

Movable Type 3.1 pings Technorati

Movable Type 3.1 adds Technorati to a list of selectable pings. Currently Movable Type weblogs can ping weblogs.com and blo.gs if the option is selected in their configuration space. My configuration screen does not currently show the Technorati ping option, but the hooks are in the code and database. [Update 8/17: The Technorati checkbox appears in the configuration space starting with version 3.1b2]…

NeroSoft TimeTrax: Record XM Radio to MP3

NeroSoft TimeTrax is an application for XM Satellite Radio subscribers with XM PCR hardware that allows users to convert the XM Satellite Radio stream into individual MP3 (with complete ID3 information) or WAV files per song. You can also limit your recordings by artist. See the documentation pages for more details. (via Gizmodo)…

Whatever happened to the Six Apart Professional Network?

When Movable Type 3.0 was released on May 15 a professional network was planned and better communication with developers promised. The Plug In to Movable Type 3.0 Developer’s Contest came and went and to developers not attending the BlogOn awards ceremony it seems the network remains silent. The contest page has not even been updated with the list of winners. Two months later and Six Apart may have succeeded at getting developers out of the woodwork. Designers, consultants, IT/IS managers, and enthusiasts are still untapped areas of the idealized network. Movable Type 3.1 highlights the ability of independent developers through…

Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed in Playboy

The September 2004 issue of Playboy features a seven-page interview with Larry Lage and Sergey Brin. The interview occurred on April 22-a week before Google filed its registration statement. The interview may violate Google’s quiet period and result in a cooling off period imposed by the SEC….

Designer iPod cases

CITY magazine summarizes some of the designer iPod cases currently available. Some designs need a makeover for the new iPod design (headphone cable position, no cutouts for small buttons). $265 for Dior Homme or Louis Vuitton designs: just slightly less than the iPod. (via Cult of Mac)…

Jon Lech Johnasen cracks Airport Express encryption

Jon Lech Johnasen, Mr. DeCSS, discovered Apple’s public key for Airport Express audio streaming. He also released JustePort, a command line utility to stream MPEG-4 Apple Lossless files to an Airport Express. The stream is encrypted with AES and the AES key is encrypted with RSA….

Salon: Must-download TV

Farhad Manjoo of Salon writes about technology for trading television shows online. While TiVo asks for permission from the FCC to release its TivoToGo service, developers using BitTorrent and RSS have created a similar system without restraints. In recent months, a host of developers and TV enthusiasts have been working on ways to improve online trading — they’re building sophisticated networks to record and encode and distribute shows, and they’re improving peer-to-peer transfer systems to make downloading easier. The hottest new improvement is made possible by the merging of two Internet innovations, the peer-to-peer protocol BitTorrent and RSS, the popular…

Microsoft announces Windows XP Starter Edition

Microsoft announced a five-country pilot program for Windows XP Starter edition, a cheaper version of Windows tweaked for beginning users. Users can have up to three programs and three windows per program running concurrently. The display is set to 800×600 maximum and there is no home networking support. 128MB of maximum RAM. Seems like Windows XP Starter edition would also be a good candidate for Wal-Mart….

Bag Borrow or Steal

Bag Borrow Or Steal is an online handbag exchange that brings some features of Netflix into the fashion world. Monthly fees start at $20 and are as high as $99 for access to the nicest handbags. You can borrow up to 5 bags at a time but each swap will cost $10 to cover shipping. If you like your borrowed bag enough you can buy it. (via BoingBoing)…

New feature: Search my weblog as a RSS feed

When I reworked my site last week I was unhappy with the persistent search features of Feedster and I could not get the results I was after using Technorati. Feedster did not have a full index of my site. Technorati accepts URL or keyword, but not both. So I created my own solution. Using Movable Type’s search template I crafted a RSS 2.0 file as my search result. It validates, but is served as text/html. If you would like to subscribe to any search result on my weblog you may edit this link, replacing *term* with the search term of…

Roxio sells consumer software division to Sonic Solutions for $80 million

Roxio is getting out of the consumer software business. Today Roxio announced the sale of its consumer software business (Easy Media Creator, PhotoSuite, VideoWave, Easy DVD Copy, and Toast) to Sonic Solutions for $70 million cash and $10 million stock. Roxio will change its corporate name to Napster….

Salon on Six Apart

Farhad Manjoo wrote an article about the history Six Apart for Salon. I never realized that the events of September 11, 2001 made Mena think that blogging was a bit trivial. I feel the opposite is true. When a major event happens people are looking for an outlet. Craig’s List was full of postings from people coping with what just happened. My relatives in Ireland wanted to know how we were reacting and what changed. Everyone was watching and listening for the latest news. If the entire point of creating a blog is to talk about yourself, or to get…

Atom Publishing Protocol and Movable Type

Ben Hammersley published the first draft of a chapter from his upcoming book, “Hacking Movable Type,” dealing with the Atom Publishing Protocol and Movable Type. I never noticed my Atom authentication token in Movable Type until I read Ben’s chapter. It provides an interesting overview of the Atom Publishing Protocol implemented in Perl….

Genetic Savings and Clone clones cats

For $50,000 Genetic Savings and Clone will clone your household cat. For a one-time fee of $900 plus $150 annually you can store tissue from your cat or dog for future cloning just in case nine lives are not enough. The company plans to start cloning dogs next year. The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the Sausalito company. Reminds me of The 6th Day starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. As governor he should pay a visit to Genetic Savings and Clone, preferably by helicopter….

Ireland is the lost island of Atlantis?

Geographer Ulf Erlingsson believes Ireland is the island of Atlantis referenced by Plato in 360 BC. Ireland is the only major island of the world with a plain in the middle. He believes Dogger Bank, an isolated shoal in the North Sea, provides the story of the sinking of Atlantis….