Random Brain Dump

So Google earth is old news for you? Try Google Mars or Google Moon. Cool!

When Google announced earlier this year that they’ll be offering GMail service for other domains, I jumped and registered for the service. Bluehost is a great web hosting company but their web mail interface just sucks. I reverted to using a POP client and in the end, stuck with my GMail account mainly because google’s nice web interface. So with this service, I get to use my own domain with the GMail’s web user interface. In addition, GMail supports POP3 too. All it took was a simple change in my MX record on Bluehost and GMail was up in no time and serving emails for my domain. It’s awesome.

Oh yeah, the service is free…

Given the increasing super-hype about Web 2.0, there’s lot of “noise” going on around the web. The way people are hyping it, you’d think it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Proponents like to use the term to describe the 2nd generation of web development. Is it just smoke of is it something of a new beckoning?

Many people credit Google Maps as one of the 1st Web 2.0 tool. As somebody who’s familiar with web development, it blew me away. It made mapping more interactive than other traditional mapping sites. Recently, I ran across Meebo. It’s basically a web-based instant messenger and another fine example of what AJAX can accomplish. Meebo feels like an application, not a traditional web site. You have collapsible and draggable window frames. It’s interactive & is an exemplary of a Web 2.0 application.

Like most developers, I was so ingrained with a static web, so it’s refreshing to see such thing possible. Interativity has always been the Archille’s heel of web development in term of usability. But for most users, it has all been promised before. DHTML, Flash & Shockwave to name a few. So why should this be any different? First and foremost, while these technologies are popular, they never made it down to the platform level and therefore never ubiquitous. What makes Web 2.0 promising is AJAX. This approach uses plain Javascript, HTML & XML which are supported cross browsers and operating systems. It’s encouraging to see the possiblity of the web as a platform to deliver application. It’s what Netscape promised over 10 years ago but never delivered.

My feeling is that all this is just evolutionary rather than revolutionary that some proponents trying to lead you to believe. The short of it is that Web 2.0 doesn’t represent new technology or breakthrough. Web developers are just getting better at what they’re doing, learning to apply existing technologies in more effective ways. No Intelligent Design here, we developers can evolve too! 😮

The government is trying to peek at what you’re searching for on the web! US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asked a San Jose federal judge to order Google to hand over search records of millions of its users and 1 million random web addresses in the search engine’s databases.

The administration claims that this is part of their anti -pornography efforts. But along with the recent wire tapping efforts, this is yet another encroachment on individual privacy. Furthermore, I am certain the government wouldn’t know what to do with such sheer amount of raw data. It’s a lot of data that for sure, but is it useful data to anybody? I doubt any insightful stats can be drawn from raw data like this without user information which wasn’t being requested. Worse, misleading or even wrong conclusions can be drawn from misinterpretation of this mountain of raw data. Perhaps, the feds will try to acquire user information next? Why not, if the feds get their way this time around.

I applaud Google for fighting the feds. It’s a shame that other search engines like Yahoo, MSN & AOL quickly caved in and handed the data to the feds. Kudos to Google….

Wikipedia is one of the most successful social experiment on the web. It is a wiki-based encyclopedia that is totally open. Any visitors can contribute by posting or editing articles. This collaborative effort results in a collective brain dump of the web community. It’s free, dynamic, and supports many languages. And it thrived. It is surprising to many including yours truly, how successful it has became since it is recently launched several years ago. It goes to show the spirit of the community.

I personally find the site extremely useful. With unceasing edits from the community, the promise is that not only content is free but it’s also more up-to-date than traditional encyclopedias. I certainly find this to be true when looking up technical stuffs. Type in AJAX and it spews out a list of all the entries including Ajax the cleanser and Ajax the new way for web development.

I had wondered how expansive is Wikipedia. I don’t use it enough to get a good feel for that. I suppose folks who do research for a living can attest to whether it’s comprehensive. Personally though I am impressed with it.
The first time I really use Wikipedia for real research was when I was reading Vietnamese history. I wanted to know more about several Vietnamese generals and a poet that I came across in my reading. I wasn’t surprised that Google fails to turn up much links to these obscure names. I tried Wikipedia and voila, there were several write-ups on these ancient Vietnamese military figures. Information not available anywhere else. It blew me away…

As with any open project, one wonders about its quality. Since anyone can edit, one has to be concern about the accuracy of the posts. Without traditional editors, it’s all too easy to post inaccurate information.

In the case of John Seigenthaler (pictured), the issue becomes false information. Seigenthaler is a journalist and served in JFK’s presidential cabinet in the ‘60s. The 78 year old man wrote an article expressing his outrage when he discovered an article about him on Wikipedia suggesting that he was involved with the assasination of JFK. 

It’s “internet character assasination”, according to Seigenthaler. When he tried to track down the anonymous author, he was told by Wikipedia’s founder that it’s virtually an impossible feat thanks to federal laws that protect online companies. The article since removed and Wikipedia now requires registration for posting new articles (no registration required for edits of existing articles however).

Seigenthaler described Wikipedia as flawed and irresponsible. The incident represents more than just vandalism. It illustrates the problem with online information. The take-away lesson is that one needs take care when evaluating information posted online regardless of the source. I am sure that there’re other mi-sinformation incidents like this on Wikipedia. Hopefully, they’re exceptional.

That may not mean much to victims like Seigenthaler, but it illustrates that dynamism of Wikipedia; it is self-correcting, however belated. Evil deeds like this one will be corrected by the good deeds of the community. In the end, netizens have to bank on the goodness of the community, that the good will triumph over the vicious.

This site details the timeline of vaious graphical user interfaces, starting with Xerox’s Alto in 1973. The first GUI desktop I started to play around with is GEM, pictured here, for the Commodore 64. The major problem with these early environments was speed– GEM was darn slow, to the point that it was not usable on a daily basis. Too taxing for the hardware of the day, I guess…

The NeXTStep operating system really caught my eyes when I first saw it. I probably stopped by the UCLA computer store at least once a week just to play with it.  Unfortunately, NeXT systems were way too expensive for most people. Like most, it wasn’t until Windows 3.0 that I began to use a graphical O/S. Bill Gates’s gotten us line & sinker since 1990 didn’t he?

Recently, I’ve been eyeing the Mac OS, considering getting a Mac mini for Katelyn ever since Apple announced them. Might just get one this xmas…

There’s a lot of talk about web 2.0 these days. The term means different things depends on the context, but most often it means the "new" way of developing web applications. The buzz word these days in web development is AJAX, and no it’s not a toilet cleaner.

The acronym was coined by Jesse James Garrett’s classic article, but it was Google that helped made it popular with their implementation of Google Maps & Google Suggest . The biggest promise AJAX brings is added interactivity. For example, AJAX enables fetching data behind the scenes to minimize server requests. It also suppose to enable things like drag & drop. The funny thing is that it’s not anything new. It’s just a new application of existing technologies. Goes to prove that you don’t always have to re-invent the wheel.

If you’re interested in learning more, check out this nice collection of 10 AJAX links.

I’ve installed a rich WYSIWYG HTML editor on the system this morning. No more entering HTML tags when posting comments. The editor is an open source implementation called TinyMCE and it’s 100% Javascript. It enables you to visually format text, specify colors, create lists, insert images/flash and creating tables. It even includes a dialog for inserting emoticons!

I did some quick testing on IE & Firefox and everything seems to check out ok. I expect Opera and event Safari on Mac OS to work okay as well.Your browser needs to enable Javascript to get the rich editor. If disabled, you just get the normal simple text editor.

Please let me know if you’re running into problems posting comments (let me know the OS & browser you’re running too).

If you’re like several people I know who are currently considering running your own blog, check out this smackdown of 3 blogging systems: WordPress, MovableType & TextPattern.

I’ve only use 2 of the three. After a few years running rexlam.com on MovableType I stopped using it for two reasons. First, I don’t like the new complex licensing. The free version is restrictive. Second, I was inundated with comment spams which requires hours of maintenance a month, despite various anti-spam plugins I tried. I switched over to WordPress this summer and so far am happy with it. WordPress is easier to use but is also easy to hack around. One thing I also like is WordPress generates its pages dynamically, as opposed to MovableType which I was required to rebuild the site from time to time.

I used some bad tags in one blog entry that causes the site to prompt for user id & password. It didn’t mean that the site requires login, just bad coding on my part. I started to see it last week but I had dismissed as a bug on Firefox 1.5 beta. Whew, glad that was fixed 🙂

Thanks Truc for dropping me an email about it…