oogle have recently revealed that they had used Linux from day one. Looking further into the past, why have they not openly expressed their passion for Linux? Perhaps they realised that over 90% of their target audience were Windows users. No user will be inclined to use the service of one that is different, one whose preferences are in ‘disharmony’ with the clients. Under such circumstances, there emerges an inner-conflict, whereby a Google user admits making a mistake, making a poorer O/S choice.

In this article from Computer Business, Google’s open source programs manager lists arguments as to why proprietary software can never offer what Open Source does. There is a long-standing myth that Linux people are incapable and have reached out for so-called ‘abnormal’ sides due to failure in a world that is largely dominated by Windows. I believe that Google have shown, with quadrupling revenues and an enormous rapid growth, that Linux is all it takes to gain advantage.

From the article:

While showing a slide show of Google’s hardware evolution, which began humbly with an odds-and-ends collection of “spare computers that were lying around Stanford” (hobbled together, literally, with pieces of Lego and duct tape) and ended with a present-day photo of Google’s current server room (darkened to the point of being indistinguishable, for competitive reasons), DiBona said Google has used Linux all the way.

There is still a great deal of secrecy when it comes to Google’s hardware, yet some information is now out. The server rooms have been kept in the dark intentionally. This entire revelation did not come as a total surprise to me as Brin‘s (Google co-founder) Stanford home page showed he had been a Linux user (plenty of Python) in his early days.

Machines by the dozens. Just toss a Linux distro on them.

ollowing rumours and an official announcement in the Google Blog, feeds are available for news items over at Google. Perhaps this takes us one step closer to full support for SERP RSS feeds (top 10 search results delivered to your feeds aggregator). Google News results can currently be delivered as RSS or Atom feeds. They are composed of items from a specific section (topic) or news returned for a given search term/s.

This move can certainly make Google Alerts for news obsolete, yet such alerts for non-news searches remain practical, albeit difficult to handle (periodical HTML-formatted E-mails).

Ben Hammersley (c/f: Keeping Track of Google, Google Results as RSS Feeds) has devised a workaround which enables you to get results as RSS feeds for standard Web searches at Google. Be warned that scraping is possibly involved, so the technique is questionable.

Yahoo have been offering news RSS feeds for quite some time. This has been very useful when tracking particular terms, so I am convinced Google will benefit from their recent decision (or implementation).

Having your name on top should take no more than 5 seconds to achieve

Copy and paste the URL below to your address bar and change YOUR_TEXT with any text of your choice.

The page functions as if it is the authentic Google homepage by using Google for all operations. One wonders how Google feel about use of their bandwidth from sources on another domain. However, this certainly benefits their overall status.

• Brought to my attention by Dr. Scott Tobkes.

Internet Explorer 7

iscrosoft are slowly letting users of older Windows versions ‘off the leash’. Put differently, old machines are left out there, exposed as easy prey in a world of predators. Windows 98 has not been supported for over 6 months or a year (as far as my recollection goes). Windows 2000 (and ME) support will possibly be conceded too, but maybe it was just rumoured in UseNet. According to a recent survey, half of all businesses in the United States still use Windows 2000. The implication: no patches, no software updates, which lead to saturation of viruses, Trojans, inability to open proprietary (e.g. Office) documents and so forth.

Internet Explorer 7, a recent project that touched the headlines, will be compatible with Windows XP (or later) only¹. This essentially pushes, if not forces, many Windows users to buy new computers or purchase new licences for an operating system that offers merely no added value beyond flash. Since XP is widely known to be a memory hog, an ‘upgrade’ from Windows 2000 will often require new hardware too.

A long-time Windows advocate refused to accept this move by Microsoft and recently urged his readers and followers to stick with Mozilla Firefox. He also noted that Internet Explorer 7 will continue to disobey compliancy requirements. It probably will not pass the Acid 2 test, which most other browsers (all major ones) have passed successfully. Even the humble Konqueror passed the test around June or July this year.

There exists a solution to this platform compatibility issue, but Microsoft loathe it. The solution is Java Runtime Environment (JRE) — the fear of any company whose aim is to monopolise using dot net, much as they did with VB last decade. Java (or any other cross-platform, virtual-machine language) is the reason I can run Firefox 1.0.4 on an old Windows 98 laptop. Java is also the force that motors much of the Open Source movement with products like Thunderbird and RSSOwl (an RSS aggregator).

¹ Some argue that this will motivate all Windows 98, 2000 and ME users to install Firefox. Quite importantly, the words regarding IE7‘s XP-only compatibility still need to be spread. Firefox 1.5 is due to come out next month.

Slashdot on my home computer

ood old Slashdot is one of the heaviest hubs on the Web. What distinguishes Slashdot from most ‘Internet Authorities’ is that new items get added in a linear form (reverse-chronological, much like a blog) and contain links to external sites.

It is common knowledge that once an external link appears in the front page of Slashdot, it can ‘kill’ that external site within seconds. This is known as the notorious ‘Slashdot Effect’. This deadly side-effect can have an impact on many sites if they are hosted on a shared server. Slashdot will cripple such a server, if not bring it to the brink of total collapse. That is the expected outcome when a surge of (tens of) thousands of surfers hits the same server simultaneously. Large sites with multiple servers can endure the load, but otherwise, nobody benefits — neither the sites and hosts which are linked to, nor the ‘Slashdotters’.

As time went on and Slashdot grew, the need for mirrors was realised. If local (temporary) copies of the destination sites can be retained quickly enough, the bandwidth barrier is somehow circumvented. Certain site mirrors (The Network Mirror is one such Slashdot-bound/ripoff site) can gain PageRank as high as 6 without any original content, but only the reflection of Slashdot content with a crawling depth of 1 (i.e. front pages and all pages linked from the front page).

Earlier today, yet another site bit the dust. As soon as small and modest sites appear in Slashdot, they vanish from the face of this Earth. Even the mirrors to do not appear to work unless they cycle for updates frequently enough (before the servers collapse). I sometimes wonder: “News that matter, but where’s the news?”

By the way, schestowitz.com was once cited by Slashdot and endured the load thanks to its excellent Web host, Catalyst2.

n interesting story from Wired Magazine explores the early days of Google, the foundation of PageRank and some human interactions in Google. Primarily it addresses the personal lives of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

When he first met Larry Page in the summer of 1995, Sergey Brin was a second-year grad student in the computer science department at Stanford University.

…

As Page had learned from his father, a computer science professor at Michigan State, a dissertation can frame one’s entire academic career. He kicked around 10 or so intriguing ideas, but found himself attracted to the burgeoning World Wide Web.

The story appears to focus on the algorithms at a relatively technical level. It is made ever more interesting because it speaks of social aspects like ambition and aspiration. For example, it turns out that there was friction among the founders at times, but we all know that the story ended up as a smashing success. On a related note, there in another item from Wired News which suggests that AJAX can steal control from operating systems and take everything from a Windows-centric world over to the open Internet.

Software experts say recent innovations in web design are ushering in a new era for internet-based software applications, some of the best of which already rival desktop applications in power and efficiency. That’s giving software developers a wide open platform for creating new programs that have no relation to the underlying operating system that runs a PC.

Also see: Towards On-Line Operating Systems

ignificant news (particularly to ‘WordPressers’) have come out from Matt Mullenweg, Co-Founder and Lead Developer of the open-source publishing tool some us know as WordPress. In his recent message he announces that TinyMCE, a JavaScript-based WYSIWYG front-end to HTML code, will be incorporated and set as default editing mode in future releases of WordPress (version 1.6).

TinyMCE in action

There is a real danger in moves such as this one. Even though ‘raw code mode’ should still be available, only few among the large ‘WordPress pool’ will opt for it. By hiding details from the user, a certain level of ignorance is permitted and standards begin to be compromised and degraded.

As one example of the very principle, Google Groups allow people to participate in UseNet without any knowledge of UseNet and without news reading software. The result is poor netiquette, the many faces of which include top-posting (replies at top of threads), multi-posting (duplication of messages across groups without indication of this) and spam. Some Google Groupies have become hit-and-run guests who ask a single question; once happy with the answer/s, not even a thank-you. As a matter of fact, this drove many newsgroups moderators as far as killfiling (removing) all messages posted via Google Groups. Needless to say, this reflects badly on Google.

As yet another example, it is not entirely rare for Average Joe to save horrific Microsoft Office documents as HTML and then publish the Microsoft-only HTML code on the Internet, thereby breaking the Net. Likewise, a certain proportion of Web programmers and developers bother to test their scripts and sites only under Internet Explorer, which is notorious in terms of standards compliancy and support.

It is rather worrying to know that hundreds of thousands of WordPress-driven sites will wind up automatically generating HTML code. In Matt’s defence, the WYSIWYG tool is said to produce “top-notch” HTML output. Knowing that Matt is also a real standards fanatic, I trust him when he approves the the quality of this WYSIWYG package, which was very recently added to WordPress.

I would be a hypocrite not to admit that I use L_yX, a cross-platform front-end to L^AT_EX, when composing my thesis. The result of PostScript/PDF compilation, however, does not suffer from unoptimised source.