The guys behind the PKD android project -- very cool in a geeky way. Jimmy Carter -- very cool in an unbreaking the world way. Oh, and apparently you're always a President, even if you're no longer in office, and you're meant to stand when a President enters the room. Oh, and clapping means "yes".
Just when you think you have a good idea for an application, you're employer announces that they now have one in the form of a web analytics package. So, I've set it up here, which took all of about two minutes, and am giving it a go.
Gordon at work asks me what is happening with www.frozenchicken.com. If you hit the site, then you get the Google search interface. This is because of the DNS configuration for the domain: challenger:~# host www.frozenchicken.com www.frozenchicken.com is an alias for www.google.com. www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com. www.l.google.com has address 66.102.7.147 www.l.google.com has address 66.102.7.99 www.l.google.com has address 66.102.7.104 www.frozenchicken.com is an alias for www.google.com. www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com. www.frozenchicken.com is an alias for www.google.com. www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com. You can see that www.frozenchicken.com is an alias for www.google.com, which in turn points to what is presumably my local cluster. So why do all the links of the Google page then point via www.frozenchicken.com? Well, because they're relative URLs, they use the hostname from the browser.
So, Google has released a beta of their bloglines equivalent service, and given that Liferea crashes about four times a day for me I thought I would give it a go. Login et cetera is easy, and the user interface is nice and AJAXy. It's fairly intuitive as well, although when I was importing my OPML file from Liferea I missed the message at the top saying the import was in progress as first. That said, it's been 30 minutes and it still says it's importing my 460 line OPML file. I just refreshed the page for the import, and the import stopped and said that I now had 54 subscriptions. So, I guess that means I should wait longer for the import. I'm now going to try importing over the top and see if it's smart enough to squelch duplicates.
So, I know that I have a few man pages online, but then again I wrote either the code they document, or some of the generation toolchain to create them, so I think that is different. Why does every man and his dog feel that he should put man pages online? It actually makes it really hard to search for things if the first page of Google results are the same man page over and over again from sites who seem to think that they're making a contribution to the community. Are they just doing this to grab some pagerank?
John Battelle implies that the new search result page being testing by Google could make evilness easier in the future. The premise is that offering alternate queries might be useful now, but it would make it easier to insert paid listings later. I'm confused though, and John doesn't have a comment link in his RSS output, so I'll post it here. Surely if Google wanted to embrace evil later, they could just direct their coders to make it happen? They already know what keywords you're searching for (i.e. Adwords), couldn't they just roll those into the page in a way which looks like search results? I see no real way this positions for future evil. I've been keeping an eye on Google news recently, and there seems to be a propensity towards paranoia in a lot of people (for instance the gmail displaying Adwords thing). If people are bothered, why don't they just use another search engine? You can't tell me that MSN and Yahoo! are any less evil...