I never knew

Mark Pilgrim writes about some multi package installation he has just completed and comes up with an interesting conclusion;

In the future, there will be so much open source software available, programmers will be judged by how much they know about it and how well they can glue it together to build solutions.

He might very well be right.

I’ve been meaning to install this for a couple of weeks now and just got around to it tonight. At the bottom right there is now a “Search this site” link, once clicked you are presented with a search box and pulldown. “My site” searches this blog with Google, “The web” searches the whole web with Google and the “Blogs I read” option uses Micah Alpern’s great tool linked above to search all the sites who’s RSS feed is listed in the OPML file I export from NetNewsWire, that way I (or you) can narrow a Google search to only sites I use / read every day, in Micah’s words;

If Googling my weblog is like searching by backup brain, then searching all sites in my RSS news aggregator is like searching the brains of people I respect and find interesting.

Impressive, Peter Murphy has a panoramic VR blog with pictures in and around Sydney some of them are just gorgeous and the bastard makes me want to go back!

Michael Moore is definitly not running away from controversy, his next movie will be Farenheit 911: The Temperature at Which Freedom Burns and focuses on the links between the Bush and bin Laden families. Looking forward to that. (via boingboing)

Karl a parfaitement raison avec son texte qui demande d’ouvrir les yeux. C’est ce que je fait et ca donne le goût de pleurer.

Wow , un portfolio é – coeu – rant!
(via pressepapier.net )

Brazil is going to help Africa in trying to get the HIV pandemic under control. As most people know, the situation over there is catastrophic.

Africa is home to more than 70 percent of the estimated 42 million people worldwide infected with HIV, the virus that causes the deadly disease… In the southern tip of the continent, infection rates in some countries are in excess of 30 percent and experts say average life expectancy of people in some countries will drop below 40 by 2010 as the disease shortens the lives of millions.

Brazil will share some of it’s anti-AIDS drugs copicating expertise with Africa. I’m sure there is some financial insentive in it, when isnt there these days, but I think it’s fantastic that a country still coping with a lot of problems of it’s own offers help of that kind. Just think what the drug companies making the original product could have done in the last few years if they had gotten their heads out of their asses wallets!

A few years back there was a lot of talk about the anticipated success of Push technology , where information would be pushed to you in a variety of forms and on pretty much all devices connected to the net. In actuality the only thing that came about of that buzz and had any kind of succes was Pointcast which would install on your system and download various news feeds that you could read offline.

Macromedia is now coming out with Macromedia Central , it’s an application that installs on your system and then lets you run / download / buy light applications from various developers, here’s an exerpt of the spin they are putting on those small apps.;

Thus, a new type of application is starting to emerge, the occasionally-connected application. These applications typically run outside the browser environment, but detect when the user is online and connect directly to a web service or other source of dynamic data. The application can then run offline with the most up-to-date data.

Sounds a bit like pointcast doesnt it? Funny how Push (although the most it ever became should have been called pull) is coming back 6 years later in a new form. For that matter, all RSS readers are also doing pretty much the same thing Pointcast did, granted in a text only version as opposed to the “old” multimedia-ish product but still, looks pretty darn similar dont you think?

Getting back to Macromedia Central, the platform is way more interesting than push was and I can see some definite potential in there, very promising. Already a few write ups giving some more details;

Macromedia Central is a shell, a host, which lives on your local computer. It’s a sandbox in which various applications can safely play. It differs from Java applets or other in-browser work because the code is local—it doesn’t require ongoing connection with a server, doesn’t require a fresh download with each use. You can remember preferences across sessions without storing your private data on someone else’s machine. Applications you choose can also share their stored and live data if you permit.

Kevin Lynch
JD’s forum
Flash for Internet Applications: The Evolution Continues
news.com
and finally a futur xml based Flash dev. tool

Update 2003/03/31: I swear I hadnt read this article by Alex Wright when I wrote this post! He says pretty much the same thing I do, only way more eloquently and with some in-project info.

Google Zeitgeist for February 2003 is available, always fun to check out.

Salt fish girl