ollowing a recent item on imitation at Microsoft and in relation to what has become a trend, surfers spotted a stunning resemblance between an MSN search test-bed (start.com) and Google’s popular personalised pages. The test-bed is supposedly maintained by interns, but it projects badly on claims for innovative thinking over in Washington. To persuade yourself that the pages are inseparable, have a look at the screenshots below and click to enlarge.

Google’s personalised portal on the left and Microsoft’s clone on the right; click images to view them in full size

The pile of dusty Dells in my office, taken from my daily photolog

Below is a story which I discovered on Dvorak Uncensored. He pointed to an item from Thomas Hawk who talks about being denied to right to photograph streets:

Yesterday I was shooting some photos of One Bush St. (the building where Bush and Market Streets intersect) when their security guard came out of his little glass jewelbox lobby hut to ask me to stop taking photos of the building. He said it was illegal. I moved to the sidewalk and continued taking photos and he again asked me to stop. When I told him I was on a public street sidewalk he said that actually they owned the sidewalk and that I was going to have to stop taking photographs.

Even after shooting approximately 2000 photos in the streets of Manchester, never did anyone address me with a complaint. “Only in America”, some would say…

Let us think of nature for a moment. Think of rabbits whose reproduction rate is potentially very high. Once you have too many rabbits in the wild, not enough resources exist in nature in order to feeds them all. What’s more, predators that feed on rabbit will prosper and rapidly bring the number of rabbit down, thereby quickly reproducing themselves — the predators. It is a cycle in nature that has been explained by biologists many times in the past.

The same principles apply to the Web. When demand for Web sites is high (e.g. the birth in the early nineties), smashing success hits the few trailblazers and other envious business follow suit by joining. Yet, at some stage, the bubble must burst and there will be no more place for new sites to be accommodated. Is Internet reaching an anti-climax? I doubt so. According to one source, we are now observing a second dot-com boom develop. According to insightful predictions at Wired Magazine, we are yet to see the best of the Web:

2015

The Web continues to evolve from a world ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? Encouraged by Web-enabled sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music albums were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14 million blogs launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating. A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph.

…

By 2015, desktop operating systems will be largely irrelevant. The Web will be the only OS worth coding for. It won’t matter what device you use, as long as it runs on the Web OS. You will reach the same distributed computer whether you log on via phone, PDA, laptop, or HDTV.

I have made merely identical predictions in the past:

• Blogs Recession
• Towards On-Line Operating Systems

intendo’s profits are down by nearly 80% so worries about Nintendo’s vocation begin to resurface. The giant game maker has high sentimental value to many, including myself. Above is a screenshot that I took weeks ago while playing the classis Mario series from Nintendo.

Returning to the dysphoric news:

Reuters Japan passes on word from Nintendo of a 78.5% reduction in operating profits for the quarter ending June 30. Speculation from the news service on the reason for the drop makes perfect sense – the GameCube doesn’t have enough exclusives, first-party and third-party, and sales of GBA SP and GameCube have been declining.

Photo from around 1984

live a regular life, but not a normal life. In other words, my schedule is regular, repeatable, yet it varies significantly from the norm. This has come to the point where eating involves using the computer simultaneously. I rarely ever concentrate my mind on eating or cooking, I just do it motorically, much like the process of brushing one’s own teeth. I have recently come to realise that when I work out, my head easily wanders elsewhere. My body carries on with the exercise so some routines appear to have become instinctive. By the end of the day, I will not have grasped the fact that I worked out at all. Why? Because my mind is pre-occupied with computers and science.

I spend many hours a day on UseNet. I consider my role in cyberspace to be that of helping people as much as I am able to. I know several individuals with an identical perception and ideaology. I assist people in my daytime job for a mere income, which allows me to get by, and I do so all night for no profit whatsoever. If a person is unable to finish an urgent project, I feel obliged to help. If a person sobs about a faulty computer, I try my best at giving valid advice over the Net. I have no interest in money and neither do I expect to accumulate any. All my satisfaction comes from the thank-you’s that I get, as well as knowing that I contribute to society at a greater or lesser extent.

ail archives organisation is a topic which I addressed quite recently. However, good inbox (recent incoming mail) management is the key to efficient and uninterrupted work. Merlin of 43Folders agrees, even though his preferences differ from mine.

Each e-mail message in your inbox demands your time and attention. Filters and rules are great for reducing some of that demand, shunting easily defined mail such as e-newsletters and personal notes to their appropriate folders…

I think the advice given in the article is valid, but mail managements depends greatly on the nature of your work and interests. For example, not all people subscribe to mailing lists or get involved in forums and newsgroups. Moreover, people get hugely varying amounts of spam. Some get none, some get a few per day and some people get many hundreds if not thousands a day. What works for the author of the article will work for many others, but not necessarily for everybody. It is still worth a read though.

Horde Web-based E-mail management (click image to view in full size)

My related write-ups on mail management:

• Local or Web-based E-mail
• Public Mail Accounts and Filtering
• Urgent Mail Account
• E-mail Address Disclosure
• Managing Large E-mail Quantities
• Solution to Junk Mail
• Managing E-mail on a Personal Domain

30 frames, 63 colours, 200 KB in total

The GIMP is an excellent Open Source program, which among its many functionalities, caters for composition of animations. To demonstrate this powerful feature in action, I generated a spinning globe of the site’s visual identity.

Generation of video sequence is not trivial in the GIMP, so below is a ‘recipe’ which corresponds to menu layouts in GIMP 1.2.3.

• Open the image of choice
• Hold down the right-hand mouse button (right-handed mouse) over the image to open the image menu
• Follow through to Script-Fu » Animators » Spinning globe...
• Select the number of frames to generate as well as the number of colours for an indexed palette if the default values do not suit you.
• Once generated (a potentially time-consuming process), Save the image as GIF. Ensure you make it a video output (“Save as Animation“), which is not the default choice.

Manipulation and navigation between frames (actually image layers) is non-trivial in the version that I currently use (I use versions 2.x as well, though not sufficiently often to comment about it). Nonetheless, the outputs can be impressive. As another set of examples, my photo gets subjected to ripples, then waves.