Yesterday’s terrible incidents cannot escape my mind, still. By allowing our lives to come to a halt, we allow the terrorist to achieve their goal and expose us to our weaknesses. I would like to quote a statement which I came across in PalmAddicts, written by Mike Cane:

I’ve been watching the news unfold in America and my thoughts and resolve are with the British people and the people of London. Words are inadequate in times like these.

Words may be inadequate, yet how can nothing be mentioned? I would like to express my deepest sympathies to families, friends and those acquainted with the victims.

odern browsers are among the more complex pieces of software in existence. Because browsers are expected to treat similar data (the World Wide Web) and behave consistently, there is plenty of room for bugs to crop up. Big trouble lies ahead if a browser is re-released infrequently or no updates are made available, apart from the critical. This is probably the main catalyst to the “Don’t click on the blue E” campaign.

Web developers spend extra time trying to compensate for Internet Explorer bugs. In css-discuss, for example, almost half of all questions (if not more) concern browser compatibility, fixes and hacks. Internet Explorer is often the culprit. Rather than fixing/hacking around IE bugs, perhaps we should all upgrade to a browser that is actively maintained and released to the public. There is no doubt as to how fed up development communities have become with IE, which for most users ships by default.

ZDNet report that Google will release an official Google toolbar for Firefox.

Google is poised to release a version of its toolbar for the Firefox browser, according to information sent to developers of an open source toolbar alternative.

…

It has pretty much the same features as the latest IE toolbar except of course for things like the popup blocker

Various other bars (using the same API) have indicated erratic PageRank recently and PageRank was sometimes greyed out for no known reason (see below). About a month ago it was greyed out globally for 2 or 3 days straight.

Until google release their own homebred bar for Firefox, the GoogleBar project will serve as a primary alternative. However, PRGoogleBar (formerly the PageRank bar) is much more powerful as it experimentally makes use of Google Suggest for search phrase completion. It also incorporates extra shortcuts and the ability to customise SERPs behaviour. This bar is definitely better than the equivalent from Google.

Another excellent search-related bar is SearchStatus, which additionally provides Alexa ranks and does not occupy much screen space (see below).

SearchStatus in action

Finally, also worth mentioning is Yahoo’s search bar which has been kind to Firefox for quite some time.

ood news have just arrived: the EU has rejected, with a crushing majority, the software patent bill.

The Register states:

The European Parliament has voted by a massive majority to reject the software patents directive, formally known as the Directive on the Patentability of Computer Implemented Inventions. The vote to scrap the bill was passed by a margin of 648 votes to 14, with 18 abstentions.

Some outrageously simple algorithms have recently been filed as patents. More notably:

• Microsoft filing a patent for address book encapsulated objects (i.e. more proprietary)
• Amazon with the ‘one-click shopping’
• Leaving the best for last: Amazon patenting the recommendation of books based on pages previously viewed

Luckily, such insanity is unlikely to invade Europe.

ow does one identify music which has potential of being liked? Music, unlike textbooks, does not contain text or keywords. Its tags are not always valuable either. An interesting paper from Trinity College Dublin describes a method by which music adapts to the preferences of listeners (PDF). However, can this be done purely based on prior data? Data that is provided in advance unlike in real-time? A List of records maybe? Playlists perhaps? We seem to be coming closer to realisation of this idea.

Image similarity measures are one focus point of my research; also sparks to mind is Google’s notion of ‘Similar Pages’. Why not apply similar principles to music? I now collect big daily dumps of music that I listen to (output to files using the following technique ). Bound to each entry is the time when a track started. From this, one can infer which tracks are being skipped. Alternatively, full, raw playlists can be of use and might, in fact, be more manageable as well. By exploiting a large collection of playlists, the nature of the genres can be better understood.

Given all of this data, it can potentially be used for collabortive playlist sharing, somewhat like del.icio.us (see previous reference to del.icio.us with a gentle introduction). Users can then discover other songs they might like based on other people’s playlists. The more data, the more accurate statistics will be. Getting large lumps of input (playlists) is effortless too. Just imagine yourself the scenario:

You can automatically find playlists most similar to yours and recognise the most-played tracks on that playlist. Social software has seen great success recently, so exchange of music preferences and recommendations is probably the way to proceed.

PC World, with a site powered by Windows (ASP implies so), have published a Preview of Longhorn’s latest beta alpha version. Their key line is as follows:

The newest versions of the next Windows add graphics sizzle and more search features but lack visible productivity enhancements.

Also in this review:

Over the last several years, Microsoft has touted Longhorn’s trio of significant innovations: a graphics engine dubbed Avalon; a technology called Indigo that enables programs on different computers or devices to communicate; and an indexed, searchable data storage layer called WinFS. But when faced with a self-imposed release deadline of late 2006, Microsoft decided last year to pull WinFS out of Longhorn, promising to release that component as an add-on at a later date.

Related item: Longhorn: A Trainwreck?

According to the BBC, Open Source begins to have its impact on schools in Britain.

In open source software (OSS), the underlying computer code is freely available so users can alter it and publish new versions, to benefit the community.

Leslie Fletcher, chair of governors at Parrs Wood High School in south Manchester and campaigns manager for the UK’s Unix and Open Systems User Group, offers a personal perspective on how schools can benefit.

Manchester made this courageous step, which came to my attention via the Manchester Linux Users Group. There was another recent and much more widespread initiative in Michigan.