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

Wikipedia will never collect dust on the shelves

A story that has hit many headlines speaks of Wikipedia closing a few doors, making it slightly more difficult to contribute content.

For more details, select your favourite source:

• ZDNet: Growing pains for Wikipedia
• CNN: Online encyclopedia tightens rules
• Associated Press (via Yahoo): Wikipedia Tightens Submission Rules
• CNET/Slashdot: Wikipedia to Restrict Creation of Articles

Related item: Wikipedia Statistics

Example of globe-like rotation: 30 frames, 63 colours, 200 KB in total

ACK in July, I elaborately described how animated graphics can be created in the GIMP. The GIMP is a free application, which is available for Windows, the Mac and Linux. There is also GIMPShop in the wild, which is a nifty GIMP fork for the photoshop-inclined audience.

I recently decided to change my static favicon.ico image with a dynamic sequence, having discovered that Mozilla Firefox supports icon animations. GIMP was a satisfactory (yet not perfect) tool for this task.

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HE effect of the Internet on everyone’s life intensifies. With higher-speed connections and rendering capabilities that grip a vivid reality, more and more people get entangled in a world of fascination — a world more worthy than the mundane at times. As some recent studies indicate, Internet addiction can become very severe.

Up to 10 per cent of internet users in the United States have a dependency that could be as destructive as alcoholism and drug addiction, it has been claimed.

Internet addiction disorder is being treated by some therapists in the same way as a chemical addiction.

The Proctor Hospital in Illinois is admitting patients to recover from obsessive computer use, according to the New York Times.

Experts told the newspaper that they see similar signs of withdrawal to those found in alcoholics or drug addicts – including profuse sweating, severe anxiety and paranoia.

On other unhealthy effects of the Internet:

• Treating Online Addicts
• Blog Depression
• RPG Fantasy World

OR the past 4 months I have been syndicating 7 distinct news feeds. The feeds contain search results for keywords of interest, which pertain to computer vision. I syndicate from a couple of sources, which makes the scope even broader; the total number of feeds is 14 at present.

I needed to keep myself regularly informed about developments in computer vision. That field is not only important to my research. It it also serves some required content, which enables me to extend The Computer Vision Digest. For the task of news ‘digestion’, I have been using RSS feeds from Google News and Yahoo! News. Both merely serve as aggregators, encapsulating and centralising news from agencies from all around the world, niches included.

As much as I respect and even fancy Google, I am disappointed with their news service. I am almost reluctant to say that their news aggregation is filled with (if not plagued by) commercial sites that attempt to sell stuff rather than provide news items. It is not only implied by the .com suffix, but also by content, which is glaringly promotional. This is of course a real deterrent, which becomes appalling at times. Others have noticed similar issues, so it is not a matter of coincidence, but a recurring pattern. I have come to take every link that spot in Google News with a grain of salt. Rather often it leads me to what can only be described as news spam — an attempt at sales that is shrewdly disguised as a news item.

To syndicate news, import any of the following templates into your feeds reader. Replace KEYWORD1 and KEYWORD2 with keywords of interest and isolate keywords using a plus (the + symbol).

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=KEYWORD1+KEYWORD2&ie=UTF-8&output=rss

http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=KEYWORD1+KEYWORD2&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt

This time, for a change, my warm recommendation goes to Yahoo. They simple manage to isolate real news from the ‘noise’.

Related items on feed-based services:

• Google News Feeds
• Yahoo RSS
• Search Results as RSS
• Weather RSS Feeds

ETTING in touch with Google is no easy chore. It has actually become a widely-known fact; even a notoriety to say the least.

Google Groups has is often becoming a gateway for spammers, from which to hit UseNet en masse. The Google Groups complaints address, namely abuse@google.com, has proven to be waste of one’s time. “Dissatisfied with the results” seems to be another time killer that rarely leads to anything productive. I have tried these myself in vain and heard from others about similar experiences.

There are exceptions, of course, which help us ‘little people’ voice our desires and be heard by the almighty Google. Examples:

• Removing pages from the Google index or removing posts from Google Groups, which mirrors UseNet.
• For unjustified site penalties, one can file a reinclusion request. It needs some careful and strict keywords, however, in order to be channelled to the right department.
• The yet-not-so-public Google telephone number: +1 605 330 0100. This enables you to get an E-mail address with a daily passphrase, which gives it priority and makes it be read. For queries about one’s site and a conversation with an actual person, the route (‘code/digit maze’) is presently 5, then 3.

I truly believe that a large company such as Google, whose dominance in IT is undeniable, ought to take user queries seriously and make points of contact more trivial and responsive. If you show you care, others will care for you too. Reciprocity is gold.

Occasionally, communication belongs to Google

As an arbitrary set of useful links:

• An academic homepage provides a description and listing of mathematical symbols in HTML.

Nice examples like the following equations have been put together:

∆u  =  Δu  =

n ∑ i = 1

∂2u/∂xi2

+∞ ∫ −∞

exp(−x2) dx

=  √π

The above is valid HTML, but as expected, it makes heavy use of tables although data is not truly tabular. From a standards perspective, this may be frowned upon.

While on the issue of rarely-used symbols, below lie my related ‘pocket links’:

• HTML accents table
• HTML symbols