Technology

Finally, a theme for all you Mozilla Pimps out there: Pimpzilla [Via: Photo Matt » Firefox Theme]

I’ve signed up for a neat dual purpose service called AudioScrobbler. Essentially, it tracks every song you play on your local machine, uploads them to their server and builds a musical profile of your taste. They then use that information to sell to record companies to help them market their new music to the appropriate listeners. They do that through a great little radio station tied in called last.fm which, once you have a nice profile built up it really does a great job of introducing you to new music that doesn’t drive you completely nuts.

This is kinda amusing to me because my buddy Peter and I were just talking this morning about how it was inevitable that Google would have to weigh in on the comment spam plague. Today they announced on their blog that they will be implementing an “nofollow” tag that will allow you to block links on your site from being used for ranking purposes on Google. The same rule applies to MSN and Yahoo searches. From the blog post:

I should preface this post by saying I am not, in any real way, an open source developer. I feel no compulsion to distribute the source of my work for others to modify and distribute on their own without proper monetary compensation. In fact I am revolted by anyone who suggests that I have a moral obligation to do so. This is the talk of looters who wish to steal the works of others for their own purposes without the producers consent. However, my feelings on the politics of GNU style open source are well known and not the purpose of this post.

With all of the hype about the security improvements in Firefox there is one thing that they overlooked which is being pointed out by Peter Torr over at ASP.Net:

I personally don’t care if people choose to run Firefox or Linux or any other software on their computers – it’s their computer, after all – but we’ll never get past the spyware / adware problem if people continue to think that installing unsigned code from random web sites is A Good Idea.

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By a weird coincidence, I discovered a solution to a problem via a blog at the same time I was wrestling with it. I accidentally deleted a document that I was working on which sent me into a conniption fit about having to recreate it entirely. However, a blog post from Crooked Timber popped up at the same time which solved all of my problems. If you have Google Desktop installed on your system (if you don’t, you should), you can find historical version of your documents in its local cache. You lose all of the formatting of the document, but at least get the text of the document. It also lets you see how that document has changed over time. Really cool and a life saver if you lose something important.

Man, this is just starting to get real funny to me. Here’s another great quote from a newspaper editor furious about the increasing popularity and pressure from the online publishers:

In July, he [Randell Beck, executive editor of the Argus Leader] explained to readers that “true believers of one stripe or another, no longer content to merely bore spouses and neighbors with their nutty opinions, can now spew forth on their own blogs, thereby playing a pivotal role in creating the polarized climate that dominates debate on nearly every national issue. If Hitler were alive today, he’d have his own blog.”

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Well it took long enough, but finally the fight is over. Maybe now they can all be friends:

Reuters - Business software maker PeopleSoft Inc. has accepted a sweetened $10.3 billion acquisition offer from rival Oracle Corp., ending a bitter, 18-month hostile takeover battle, the companies said on Monday.

Even though everyone else and their dog is posting on this, I though I would pass it along for those who are living in a whole. Google has a new beta version of their search interface available called Google Suggest. It’s pretty incredible; allowing you to see what kind of results you can expect from your search string before you’ve even search. God, would I love to see the hardware/software setup on this one. Amazing product, hopefully it will make it to production.

First of I should apologize for the rambling nature of today’s posts. I just finished up a four hour requirements development meeting which has turned my brain into the consistency of tapioca pudding. The new project that I’m working on is a massive undertaking and we are working our way through a very short but incredibly massive requirements development phase. One of the issues I’m trying to grapple with is the difference a complex system and a flexible system. I’ve worked in internal IT for my entire career. Internal IT usually attempts to make a system that conforms to the specific business rules of the institution. For example, if you were building a billing system, you build a application that bills specifically for the services or products that your company offers. However, this seems to, over time limit the usability of your systems. As your business changes and grows, the system tends to become less and less relevant to your needs. This leads to more and more patches to your system, which as all of us programmers know, eventually leads to an unsupportable and rigid system.