From Yahoo Search BOSS to Rocking Fractals [Best of July '08 #2]

Jonas Bolinder — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:57:06 +0000

Lots of interesting stuff the past week (July 7-13 2008):

Yahoo continues their open strategy with the launch of Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service). This is a different offering than SearchMonkey, which just allowed you to enhance the presentation of the search results. The new service has quite liberal terms. It allows you to re-order the search results and mix in other results as you see fit. These are desired options I wrote about in my first post on this blog. The terms also have a no-attribution requirement, which expressively requires you not to mention Yahoo in your search offering. Still you are not allowed to use the search index data in any way you might want to. You must provide a search service, with a search box, and only query the index in response to a search performed by a real user of your service. Also, considering the current uncertainty of the future of Yahoo, building a business on top of BOSS seems a bit risky.
Tags: search, Yahoo
From the security department, there was much talk about a potential, yet unexploited flaw in the Domain Name System, DNS, the "address book" of the internet, which translates human friendly URLs to IP addresses. Dan Kaminsky, who discovered the flaw, secretly informed the major vendors without talking to the security community, which has spawned some speculation about the significance of the discovery. The details of the vulnerability will not be publicly disclosed until August 7. Though, it is likely related to insufficient randomness provided by the 16 bit session ID of DNS. In that respect, the vulnerability is rooted in the same problem domain as the OpenSLL flaw I wrote about in May.
Tags: security
Two news from the virtual world(s): Google launches a customizable and embeddable virtual world called Lively. Second Life, the hitherto largest virtual world, reported on the first successful teleportation of an avatar between two (experimental) virtual worlds. They also recorded a video of the event.
Tags: virtual worlds
Ars Technica writes about recent speculations about a new non-Windows operating system in development at Microsoft, code name Midori. To be released some 9 years from now, probably beyond Windows 8.
Tags: Windows
The new URL shortening service bit.ly, has a host of innovative features, including an API, as reported by Marshall Kirkpatrick. Dave Winer is one of the brains behind the service.
Tags: URLs, tools
Soon we might be able to program Flash using C, meaning a speed boost that is useful in gaming applications, for example.
Tags: Flash
Moopz, a FriendFeed conversation aggregator reviewed by Sarah Perez. Among the features are item threading, noise reduction and automatic summary and tag generation. Only items containing a link are considered, thus reducing the noise. First impression is that it's a useful service. (Btw. I'm jobol on FriendFeed.)
Tags: aggregation, FriendFeed
Josh Catone is back to blogging. Now at SitePoint, a resource site for web developers and designers, where he is running the News & Trends blog. Glad to have him back.
Tags: Josh Catone
Finally, a bonus video on the math theme featuring fractals, found via Brad Feld.

SproutCore JavaScript Framework is Pushing for Standards Compliant Browsers [Best of June '08 #3]

Jonas Bolinder — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:48:26 +0000

Interesting posts this week (June 16-22 2008):

There was some buzz about SproutCore this week — YAJF (Yet Another JavaScript Framework) if you like, though this one comes with an application framework supporting the MVC (Model-View-Controller) design pattern. SproutCore, labeled by some as a Flash competitor, relies solely on web standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In fact, the provided demos relies on elements of the forthcoming standards HTML5 and CSS3, currently supported by the Safari browser, but not by IE7, for example. However, standards compliance is always welcome, even if a bit ahead. Hopefully this can help to speed up the compliance efforts of the other browser vendors.
Tags: JavaScript, web development
Semantic search engine Hakia opens up their services to developers and provides an API. Free access to the search API is time limited "until the partners' quota is filled," as they write. The text analysing API, however, does not seem to be time limited and is free up to 1000 requests per day. Currently available for text analysis is the "Summarizer", which provides "a summary of a large text block or URL". Yet to come is the "Categorizer", "Characterizer" and "Text Meaning Representation (TMR)", which are additional semantic analysis tools.
ReadWriteWeb tested the Summarizer API component, and weren't very impressed, writing: "Mostly, it seemed to just return the headline or first sentence as the summary for articles we threw at it."
Tags: API, semantic search
Lifehacker, featuring The How-To Geek explains a few tweaks how to make Windows Vista less annoying. Something for Microsoft to read and learn. I'm still using XP, though I'll probably shift to Vista in due course. I'd rather use Linux, but I'm afraid I'm too dependent on Microsoft-only tools and software.
Tags: Windows Vista
Ed Bott asks if we will be using petabyte-sized (1000 TB) disks in 2020. That's not unlikely if Moore's Law continue to hold. Historically hard disk capacity has increased 10 fold every 5 years. To get some perspective, Google processes over 20 petabytes of data per day. Around 2035, we will have exabyte (1000 PB) disks. That can still be useful, since in 2006 it was estimated that Internet users created 161 exabytes of new data, a number that is estimated to grow to around a zettabyte (1000 EB) in 2010. Next in turn storage devices are yottabyte (1000 ZB) disks, which can be expected around 2065, which is probably beyond my lifetime though.
Tags: storage
Josh Catone leaves RWW, sadly enough. He will always be remembered by this blog for his Web 3.0 posts though.
Tags: Josh Catone

impl.emented» Josh Catone

From Yahoo Search BOSS to Rocking Fractals [Best of July '08 #2]

SproutCore JavaScript Framework is Pushing for Standards Compliant Browsers [Best of June '08 #3]