Nothing Ventured
From TechWorld: Microsoft VP Jim Allchin said the embedded search technology in the new version of Windows is aimed squarely at products such as X1 Technologies' search technology -- and others.
As mentioned previously, I attended at talk on corporate blogging by Robert Scoble at Tomlinson Zisko LLP, a Silicon Valley law firm. Jeff Clavier did a real-time write-up (posted shortly afterwards due to a lack of wireless coverage). For me, the take home points were simple:
That last point is, I think, deeper than it initially appears. Being new to all this, I'm still assimilating blogger culture and I'll need to chew on it a bit.
I generally assume there is no privacy online. However, this email caught me a bit off guard:
I'm not sure if I get blogging just yet. When do you do a Me Too post and when do you just lay off and assume anyone who cares will have already seen the original blog? Anyway, I'll throw my 2 nano page ranks behind this post about Google AdSense in RSS. If you want something to really take off, find a way for it to make money. When publishers can monetize their feeds, we're going to see A LOT more feeds.
I've done some poking around on the web, but couldn't find any good histories of the development of Unicode and the various encodings. In particular, I'd love to find out why the Microsoft guys (and the Java folks, etc.) chose to use wide characters (wchar_t*s or unsigned short*s) in their APIs. This broke every program on the planet and has inflicted great suffering on programmers ever since.
Where they not aware of the work that Ken Thompson and Rob Pike did with UTF-8? Did they not know that Unicode would eventually need more than 64K code points? All these things were going on around the same time so it is hard to know who knew what when. In the end we got the worst of both worlds: We got new API incompatible with all the char*s in existing programs and we didn't get a fixed width encoding.
UTF-8 is one of the most clever inventions in computer science since the hash table. There is a great story behind its invention. I'd really like to know the story about how those wide character APIs came about.
I'm going to be attending a talk by Robert Scoble in Palo Alto next week. We're gearing up to launch the Qurb company blog, and while we've already got some strong ideas about what to do with it, I'm very interested what Scoble has to say.
X1 just did a $10M round with USVP. It looks like X1 is going to stay and party instead of heading for the exit. I have a hard time believing that enterprise search is going to be worth the investment. The consumer side will definitely be "free" (ad supported). I suspect the enterprise side will be "free" too (MSFT bundled).
Why are we still tied to low-res bitmaps? All I wanted to do was add my photo to my blog but I ended up burning an hour fiddling with pixels. In the end, there are still scaling problems. The template for my blog is 80 pixels tall but the blogger profile page wants one that is 113 pixels tall. I can't give them two different bitmaps so I need to choose between a jaggy scaled-down version on my blog or a blocky scaled-up version on my profile. Why can't I just give them the 2MB original and have them do nice bicubic interpolation to take it to whatever size they need? Perhaps IE 7 and Firefox can do bicubic scaling for all IMG tags where the width and height attributes differ from the image source data.
The Economist has been fretting about rising home prices for a couple of years now, but the rest of the media has only recently jumped on the bubble bandwagon. The number of news stories about a home price bubble has recently exploded. Dan Gillmor references two articles that appeared today:
If everyone knows there's a bubble, will it pop? Alan Greenspan spoke of irrational exuberance in 1996, but the market didn't top out until 2000. Will the cycle run its course faster this time?
Good Morning Silicon Valley is a great email newsletter, but it isn't a very satisfying feed. For the humor to have full effect you need to read all of the posts together -- it wouldn't have the same vibe if the stories trickled in over the course of the day. At the very least they should do a full content feed instead of just the headline snippets.
At lunch today we were talking about why blogging is just now hitting the mainstream. All the technology pieces were in place by '97 or so. Why did it take until 2002 for blogs to get rolling and 2004 to hit the big time? Felix had the best idea... The crash in 2001 created lots of web savvy unemployed .com-ers with too much time on their hands. It would be ironic if the popping of one bubble were the direct cause of the next one inflating.
In general I hate it when I hit web pages with Java. For me it's the web surfing equivalent of getting gum on the bottom of your shoe. However, if you like to explore names (growing up Linus has made a connoisseur of names) this Java app is worth loading:
