Joy Blake

Joy's InfoWorld Watch

Google Desktop Search: Indexing Firefox's cache - (Found July 5, 2008 )

jotsheet Google Desktop Search is great, but its first iteration has several important drawbacks. 1. It does not index PDF files. 2. It does not index network drives. 3. It does not index Mozilla Firefox's cache. I don't know how to remedy 1 or 2, but thanks to Mike Fioritto (and originally to Jon Udell for popularizing the workaround), I now know how to address the third problem: Slogger. Slogger is a flexible Firefox extension written by Ken Schutte that will automagically create an archive...
http://underscorebleach.net/content/jotsheet/2004/10/google_desktop_search_gds_index_mozil...

Web 2.0 - (Found July 5, 2008 )

Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled I thoroughly enjoyed getting caught up in the whirlwind of Web 2.0. My summary: Including the gatecrashers there were probably close to a thousand people in attendance, schmoozing each other up and creating the kind of optimistic, wild enthusiasm that I haven't seen since 1999. Silicon Valley is buzzing again -- and the powerful, the influential, and the entrepreneurial came together to trade ideas, to make connections, and to get energized to take the..
http://ifindkarma.typepad.com/relax/2004/10/web_20.html

Google patches one security hole, but another surfaces - (Found July 5, 2008 )

Tsana Associates The vulnerability concerns the Google Custom WebSearch service, which allows third-party Web portals and other Web sites to use Google's servers to search content on their Web site. A flaw in Google's Web servers allowed malicious hackers to insert javascript instead of links to image files, allowing them to alter the appearance of the Google search results page or steal search data. After being alerted to the hole, Google fixed the vulnerability, said Nathan Tyler, a Google...
http://tsana.co.uk/2004/10/25.html#a3346

Do people know what they want - (Found July 5, 2008 )

Greg Linden's Geeking with Greg Jon Udell points to a talk by Malcolm Gladwell on the design of the Aeron chair and the "instability of preferences": "Gladwell draws several conclusions. One is that preferences are highly unstable. Another is that, when you ask people to explain what they want, their preferences tend to shift toward the conservative, familiar, and easy to explain." This is a major problem with customization. When you rely on people telling you want they want, they often don't..
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2004/10/do-people-know-what-they-want.html

Udell: Linkable Continuous Media - (Found July 5, 2008 )

New Media Hack Jon Udell posits some relatively plausible scenarios that could drive the growth of linkable continuous media. The ability to point at chunks of audiomovies from given offsets is severely lacking with current formats and players. Even worse is integration of the presentation of these chunks with other media, e.g. accompanying text. Podcasting and VOIP may be the drivers for improvements in this area. Of note is the connection by Real Networks' Rob Lanphier to the open source,...
http://costarica.cs.northwestern.edu/bmd/blogs/nmh/archives/000843.html

Open source or outsource - (Found July 5, 2008 )

Open It Up One of the proverbial back stories of IT operations has always been the battle between the "suits" and the "techies." From the techie point of view, the hapless but disturbingly powerful suits are the business guys who put more thought into picking out hundred-dollar silk ties at Nordstrom than they put into million-dollar IT decisions. Worse, the suits gravitate towards outsourcing and service firms that implement big-dollar solutions. Many techies start on the other end of the...
http://openitup.blogspot.com/2004/10/open-source-or-outsource.html

Domain-Specific Language Tools & The Software Factories Vision - (Found July 5, 2008 )

Rob Caron's Blog During Rick Rashid's keynote at OOPSLA on Tuesday, Microsoft announced a new framework and tool for building custom visual designers based on the modeling technology in Visual Studio 2005. This is the same technology that was used to build the Class Designer and Distributed System Designers in Visual Studio 2005. These domain-specific language tools are key to eventually realizing the vision of software factories. Here's where you can find the official press release: Microsoft..
http://weblogs.asp.net/robcaron/archive/2004/10/27/248618.aspx

SharePoint Services free for Windows 2003 server - (Found July 5, 2008 )

Kevin's Weblog I've been looking into SharePoint Services as something cool to implement at work. It would especially come in hand for all the documents and policies we are starting to have to handle. You can download SharePoint Services for Windows 2003 Server, for free. Yeah, that's right. SharePoint Portal still costs the extra bucks. But for a fast and unbelievably flexible intranet-in-a-can, you can drop SharePoint Services on any local Windows 2003 Server, and you're good to go. Only two..
http://www.kansastechguy.com/weblog/000036.html

Nokia Preminet-ion - (Found July 5, 2008 )

Dana Blankenhorn: Moore's Lore Nokia's Preminet is a direct lift from Brew's business model. It solves a lot of problems, but leaves some intact. The idea is to simplify how developers get their products certified, marketed, and paid for. All good. But there's one big problem that isn't addressed. Consumers. Here are some of the questions you might ask if you're a mobile phone user: How do I find these applications How do I know that an application works on my phone With my carrier How do I.
http://www.corante.com/mooreslore/archives/026730.html

Sun to add JFluid profiling tool to Java Studio - (Found July 5, 2008 )

Lambda the Ultimate According to Infoworld, "JFluid is a "profiling" tool, software that examines Java applications and informs developers of potential performance bottlenecks in their code. It was developed by a team lead by Misha Dmitriev, who was transferred from Sun Labs to the software group last week, according to a statement on Sun's Web site." Which makes me wonder about performance tools in IDEs. On the one hand, performance can be an important factor in software development, and...
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/view/341