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

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 52 of 72.

Google Copernicus Center is hiring

Obviously an April Fool’s joke, but Google is hiring for their new lunar center. Lengthy for a prank. “The Googlunaplex will house 35 engineers, 27,000 low cost web servers, 2 massage therapists and a sushi chef formerly employed by the pop group Hanson.” “What happens to PageRank in the proximity of a black hole? Is there distortion that might result in link relevancy reduction or popularity warping? Could this somehow be harnessed to generate more dates for engineers?”…

Gmail, free Google e-mail, offers 1GB storage

News.com reports Google has launched a test of its new mail service, Gmail, and invited 1000 guests to participate. Hotmail presently offers 2MB of free e-mail storage. Yahoo offers 4MB. Gmail will dwarf those offerings with a 1GB storage limit. Update: Gmail has an About Gmail page, including a form field for signups….

Segway Robotic Mobility Platform

The Segway Robotic Mobility Platform is a modified Segway Human Transporter designed as a base for your robot. The Segway receives commands through a dual CANbus interface. 100 pound payload, 8 mph top speed, 8-10 mile range. Available in April….

imgSeek: sketch your search

“imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features. The query is expressed either as a rough sketch painted by the user or as another image you supply (or an image in your collection). The searching algorithm makes use of multiresolution wavelet decomposition of the query and database images.” You draw a rough sketch of what you want to find and imgSeek returns thumbnail views of the best matches. Written in Python….

SBC Park covered in WiFi

San Francisco Giants’ SBC Park will become the first stadium with wireless Internet access, according to a press release yesterday. Fans receive free access for the 2004 season, but SBC plans to begin charging its standard $7.95 daily fee or $19.95 monthly fee starting in 2005, according to the San Jose Business Journal. The Giants, along with partners SBC and Nortel Networks have installed 121 802.11b Wi-Fi access points to provide continuous universal coverage to all concourses and seating areas. [A]ll ballpark suites will be equipped with HP computers, flat-panel displays and wireless accessories that provide internet access coupled with…

Macromedia Flex

Macromedia officially introduced Flex today. Rich UI through Flash, similar to Laszlo. Later this year Macromedia plans to release a new Flex development tool code-named Brady with visual layout, code editing, debugging, and data connectivity tools for creating Flex applications in Dreamweaver. IBM already has a Flex WebSphere Studio plugin. Runs on Java app servers and you can download a free developer version on the Flex site….

Reset your MSN watch to factory settings

I was not able to find any documentation for resetting my MSN Direct watch to its factory settings, so I will post my findings here just in case another user would like to reset his or her watch in the future. I have a Fossil FX3001. Two buttons on the left and three on the right. Press down all three buttons on the right side. Wait for the watch manufacturer’s logo to appear. Keep doing this until the time resets to 12:00. The watch is configured to reset to factory settings if you reboot the watch ten times within five…

Ice-Link iPod car connector

Ice-Link hooks up to your car stereo’s CD changer port and connects to your iPod’s audio out and FireWire ports. Charge on the go and have access to all of your songs!…

Freddy Adu : Just Going Out To Play

Last night’s 60 Minutes featured a segment on DC United player Freddy Adu. Ben Olsen was interviewed as the veteran of the team. Why was Peter Nowak, his coach, and who also started his pro soccer career at a young age, not interviewed? “Freddy’s $500,000 salary from D.C. United dwarfs even the game’s veterans. It has become a cliche that every rookie with a big contract buys his mama a house. Freddy may be the first one ever to do it…and then go home and live with her.”…

Google personalized search

Google Labs has released its latest project: personalized search. I created a profile, selecting things like California, rock music, and soccer. When I search for “Dublin” my top results are now Dublin, California and not Dublin, Ireland….

Remotely driven rover

At Wednesday’s dinner we discussed controlling a rover or submarine over the Internet. It does exist. “RemoteDriver is a home made robot made out of a tablet-pc a webcam and an old rc car chassis. When online it can be driven by anyone from anywhere in the world. All you need is a good ammount bandwith and a flash player to interact with it. Login at the indicated time above for some hot rod realtime action.”…

News.com : Interpreting Search

Michael Kanellos of News.com profiles Language Weaver and MetaCarta, two search companies funded by CIA venture capital fund In-Q-Tel. Language Weaver provides functional translations of Internet articles or video clips on the fly. MetaCarta allows you to determine geographical location based on text descriptions. “There are 44 cities and towns called Paris and 69 called Al-Hamra around the world. Most places on the globe also have more than one name, which further complicates searches, he added. Filtering out irrelevant results remains a huge task.”…

Tonight’s blogger dinner

Tonight was the Corporate Blogger’s Dinner. The attendees, starting to my right: Don Park Jay Fienberg Rauno Saarinen John Dowdell Russell Beattie Phil Stanhope Venture Frogs had a strong wireless Internet signal. The conversation did not focus on corporations or weblogging but instead flowed, as it should, from one topic to the next. I learned that Microsoft showed off some new mobile weblogging software today at Mobile DevCon. Rodney Brooks has a robot summer camp for kids. We also discussed the weblog echo chamber, what do readers expect, do we care about those expectations, and what are the next big…

NY Times: Phishing

Saul Hansell writes about phishing scams in today’s New York Times. Brightmail of San Francisco, which filters e-mail for spam, identified 2.3 billion phishing messages in February, 4 percent of the e-mail it processed, compared with only 1 percent of its messages as recently as September. Phishing got its name a decade ago when America Online charged users by the hour. Teenagers sent e-mail and instant messages pretending to be AOL customer service agents in order to fish, or phish, for account identification and passwords they could use to stay online at someone else’s expense. After AOL switched to a…

500th entry

This is my 500th blog entry. Exciting that I now have a history of more than 500 posts over the last 4 years….

European Commission finds Microsoft guilty, imposes conduct remedies and a fine

The European Commission has concluded, after a five-year investigation, that Microsoft Corporation broke European Union competition law by leveraging its near monopoly in the market for PC operating systems onto the markets for work group server operating systems and for media players. Fine of € 497.2 million. Jupiter Research has a first take on the decision. Microsoft must provide a version of Windows XP without Windows Media Player. They must also provide interface documentation for server interfaces. What does this mean for Longhorn? Pushed back another year?…

Corporate Blogger Dinner

Tomorrow night, Wednesday, at 7 P.M. is the Corporate Blogger’s Dinner at Venture Frogs in San Francisco. I view corporate blogging as a marketing tool to a user base in search of something more trustworthy than a PR spin. Mark Cuban’s blog is corporate blogging. Why? It makes you more interested in the Mavericks. You fee involved, part of the action. Even if you have never been to a NBA game. How do you put a face and a name to a product people love or will grow to love? Weblogs help establish a community around your product(s) or company…

William Hung on iTunes

William Hung (aka Hong Kong Ricky Martin), of American Idol fame, is now available in the iTunes Music Store. Currently the #5 album….

Eric Schimdt talks about Orkut beta

Eric Schimdt talked about Google’s social networking service, Orkut, at PC Forum today. News.com covers the speech. He noted that most products at Google stay in beta for about a year. Google hopes to help provide better searches for people through social networking software. “We believe that these social networks will have a tremendous amount of information.” Three engineers are currently working on the service….

Six Apart to present at Silicon Valley WebGuild

Ben and Mena Trott of Six Apart will give a presentation to the Silicon Valley WebGuild on Wednesday, April 14 at 7 PM. Free for members or $5 for non-members….

Technorati redesign

Technorati is sporting a new look this morning. Dave Sifry mentions the new features of Technorati in his weblog. Three free email or RSS watchlists for members. The developer tab is nice. “Site reliability and faster response time are our top priorities. We are working hard to improve the user experience.” Good. I want to build some nice things using the API, if only the backend was more reliable. It would nice to mention working hard to improve developer experience as well, since it will ultimately lead to new users….

NY Times: Concerns Raised Over Consultants to Pension Funds

Mary Williams Walsh wrote a long article in today’s New York Times about the relationship between money managers, plan sponsors, and the consulting firms who represent both. Pension consultants sort money managers into asset classes and build databases using their own criteria to help trustees compare and select managers. Some consultants also sell their databases and tracking software to money managers and even sell advice on how to achieve higher rankings. True. Like an Internet search engine, products must be sorted into asset classes and sub-classes. Callan sells its database and tracking software in the form of PEP. Wilshire has…

First ever used MSN Direct (SPOT) watch sale

I may become the first person ever to sell his used MSN Direct watch when my eBay auction closes next Friday, March 26. Too bad my yearly subscription cannot be transferred to the new buyer. The watch is too big and I simply do not get enough utility from its added functions to justify the extra weight on my wrist. My next phone will most likely have the features included in this watch, such as the ability to receive instant messages, and view my calendar. I can always connect to the Internet using my phone to pull down the latest…

TypeKey Authentication Services

“TypeKey is a free, open system providing a central identity that anyone can use to log in and post comments on blogs and other web sites.” New service by Six Apart central to Movable Type 3.0….

Programmers At Work: 2004

This week’s Software Development Conference & Expo featured a panel of software experts discussing the past and future of software engineering. Susan Lammers, author of Programmers At Work, chaired the panel. Panelists were Dan Bricklin, Robert Carr, Andy Hertzfeld, Scott Kim, Jaron Lanier, Ray Ozzie, Jef Raskin, and Charles Simonyi. Scott Rosenberg has a pretty thorough write-up on Salon.com….