My deceased del.icio.us bookmark

OT so long after their Flickr takeover, Yahoo take control of del.icio.us (also covered in Associated Press via Yahoo! News).

I am now reluctant to add anything to my del.icio.us bookmarks. I use my Firefox bookmarks instead. Firefox settings are available to me from anywhere, but I used to like the idea of social bookmarking, so long as it was not commercially-orchestrated. I somehow perceived del.icio.us as a Wikipedia ‘sister’, wherein the community helped organise Web addresses (links) as oppose to human knowledge.

Wikipedia has its problems too. Earlier today ZDNet argued that its Open Source label is a conundrum. More recently it began to impose restrictions and it appears to have commercially-motivated mirrors.

Another major takeover: Adobe Buy Macromedia

Also to note: Prodigy now up for sale (external)

Addendum:

• Yahoo can refine their search results using popularity figures in del.icio.us, which are good reflectants on inbound links and high-quality content.
• Wikipedia is now sold in paper form and as DVD‘s

ECOMING your own Web host and E-mail administrator is troublesome. It’s a challenge, but a very unproductive one, which can lead to entanglement and nervousness.

Try to imagine hosting your site the DIY way. Think of managing E-mail on your own workstation or a personal Web server; not a dedicated Web server, but one which is owned and run by yourself. Such server would reside in a not-so-secure environment, which is bound to lose power at times while no generator is available. Data on the server begs for regular backups that are time consuming. Moreover, the server may lose its Internet connection or suffer from bandwidth spikes, making stability and resilience prone to great risk. On top of it all, the server will require software updates on occasion, which are easier for a professional host to take care of. The professional uses time more effectively because all is done in ‘batch mode’ — hundreds of sites affected by an upgrade in one fell swoop. Experience plays a role too.

Lastly, on a less technical and more personal level, I reckon that ‘self-sysadmining’ would be too emotional. Although I have the knowledge required for doing it, as well as 3 boxes at my disposal for the purpose, I believe this could lead to a resource hog to begin with. Without peers involved and in the lack of diverse experience, the step would be a daunting one too. By running code that is questionable the Web server, which is never to be considered a computational server, everything is put at risk, even the mail daemon. Mechanical faults are another issue as there are no alternative hardware to divert that traffic ‘aqueduct’ onto.

Related items:

• Remote Data
• Leave the Hard Stuff to Someone Else (external)

Manchester’s notoriously busy transport system

There are some big plans for the transport system in Manchester. Buses might become similar to trams, but will involve no driver or rails. Alas, after scraping of the long-anticipated tram extension, we shouldn’t get our hopes up.

It may sound like science fiction, but Stagecoach, which runs most of the buses in south Manchester’s, says the new service could be in place years before any Metrolink connections are built. The computer-guided buses would be manned by a driver but new ‘optical guidance’ technology means the bus would steer itself along a prescribed route and pull up flush to raised platforms.

This is particularly interesting to me because it happens at the very centre of where I live and work. Moreover, it is related to my research, which is focused on computer vision.

Old stories:

• Autonomous Vehicle in Rough Terrain
• Autonomous Vehicle from Stanford and Volkswagen

Related news: Google launch service offering public transport schedules

Also see: Assorted Manchester photography

Tabs corresponding to separate E-mail messages in Thunderbird

ABBED views in E-mail applications (also referred to as “mail clients”) are a brand new idea as far as I can gather. Thunderbird developers are now said to be going down this unprecedented route. From the recent article:

A developer has added tabbed browsing of e-mail messages to Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail client, mimicking one of the most popular features of the Firefox and Opera Web browsers.

Tabs corresponding to separate RSS feeds in Owl

I have seen tabs in feed readers before, namely in RSSOwl (shown above). Nonetheless, I believe that incorporation of tabs into E-mail/newsreaders would be uncalled for. Much-familiar applications like Thunderbird would prove confusing to many users unless tabs are shrewdly hidden, thereby protecting users from their freedom.

Tabs make the controls finer, maybe unnecessarily so. E-mail, as oppose to feed readers, is used by merely everybody (assuming Webmail is put aside for the sake of the argument). Not everyone who uses Outlook (Express) can handle higher levels of complexity, let alone those who are new to E-mail altogether. Overall, tabs can make the entry barrier even higher. In firefox, tabs do not appear by default until/unless a second one appears. This makes tabbed browsing a function which is easy to enable if/when the user feels confident. Yet, owing to smart UI design, it never contributes to unnecessary clutter.

Thunderbird and RSSOwl are of course Open Source projects that are not bound to desires of large companies. According to Wozniak (AKA Woz), who is co-founder of Apple, the worst applications come from the large companies, Apple included. To quote Woz, “Microsoft, Apple and AOL, they tend to turn out the crappiest products, you know, software-wise”.

A shrunk-down screenshot of Thunderbird
‘dressed’ with the CrossOver theme

Isolate yourself from noise and life will get easier

UIET in a technical context is a scenario where users require little or no support. Yes again, the principles described in this post apply to most things in life. Some time ago in the Palm newsgroups, somebody raised a question and then made the observation that few people ever mention Tungsten E devices. The Tungsten E is a modern, lower-end PDA, which is certainly popular, so how could its quiet existence be explained?

The discussion groups tend to have a troubleshooting, technical nature, so fault are usually reported while praises are deemed irrelevant and almost frowned upon. Should a person assume that the Tungsten E does not sell well? No. The very few mentionings of it simply imply that the model is reliable and nobody complains about it. Quiet, you see, is often a sign of success. It means that people carry on with their work and never bother to complain. Noise, on the other hand, is an indication of failure. To use a popular example, if Windows hits the headlines very often, it is in the context of security exploits. If people speak to their friends and colleagues about their computer, even while in the pub, this often involves a rant or a request for advice — a cry for help perhaps.

Better Palm PDA’s can be compared to a power plant. Linux servers likewise. We do not hear about Linux success stories quite so often despite the fact that many organisations happily use it. Google and Hewlett Packard are almost shy to admit that they use Open Source for their operations. We rarely hear about server problems that involve Linux because mail servers running Linux can go on for many years without even requiring a reboot. All they do is collect dust and often be forgotten about. The independence of a workstation often leads to forgetting the value of stability and low maintenance requirements.

As we hear about large migrations to Linux across schools in Macedonia, one wonders if the story will ever be used as a case study. When all operations succeed, nobody will bother to say a word. Nobody can fund or promote media commotion either because Linux is not directly bound to a profit-making organisation. Only when matters go out of hand, enemies are able to grab the opportunity and amplify the story of failure. With large budgets, a certain company can also fund and echo deceiving facts — a ‘disinformation’ perhaps — which can only be described as falsified propaganda.

The bottom line: be aware that information (or conversely misinformation) can receive varying levels of amplitude, which is sometimes affected by financial incentives in companies. Also remember that when problems are not echoed, the implication is that work carries on smoothly. People are good at making a fuss when things go wrong, but choose to remain focused and isolated when no problems crop up.

KDE (yes, it’s Linux above) can be customised to
look and behave like Jaguar/Tiger (and far beyond)

UITE recently I enabled all shadows, translucency, and fade-in/out effects in KDE. The results are stunning, but they require a real-time demonstration (or animation) to be fully appreciated. The load on the CPU is almost bearable while translucency is the biggest detriment of all.

The progress made by the KDE team is tremendous, so envy (sometimes hatred) among GNOME’rs seems beyond understandable. Admittedly, I am working in GNOME while I compose this item, yet I always long for KDE. I am not mesmerised by a default KDE desktop, which is simple, user-friendly, yet somewhat dull. I am actually thinking about heavily-customised environments and powerful settings enabled as in the example above, which illustrates Mac OS X intersections.

It is also worth checking what shall come up in KDE 4. It is said to incorporate the new component titled Plasma. It’s not just eye candy, but a productivity tool, which gives power to the power users.

External Link: KDE 3.5 Released

VER at the Computer Vision Digest, I recently mentioned the IEEE in the context of RSS feeds for journals. It is most pleasant to see RSS feeds penetrating even the world of academia, which usually lags behind in terms of state-of-the-art anything. The IEEE makes the admirable exception, as always.

Several weeks ago I also mentioned my two submissions to IEEE conferences, as well as two other successes. Everything seems to have settled on the right route, which grants me a quick Ph.D. at the age of 24. This was by no means easy for me; I will not pretend it has ever been the case. The first year was sluggish and unpromising. As a matter fact, I was warranted (or rather warned about) a difficult program with potentially rewarding outcomes. This warning was raised on the very first week, as soon as I joined the Division.

Nowadays I work on my submission to an IEEE journal, namely Transactions in Medical Imaging. I must admit that their L^AT_EX templates have been made simple to use — something which I am very pleased with because I am T_EX-illiterate ( I normally use L_yX as a front-end). We are aiming for the special issue on validation.

NB: because this item will be of little interest to many, I have just added a new category aptly named “Personal” and assigned this item to it. If you wish to subscribe to just a few particular topics, see the feeds page where a broader category breakdown gets listed. I still try hard not to ‘noisify’ the blog with personal chit-chats and raves.