AVE you ever thought of an (electronic) article that you once saw or read? Could you find it easily after a few weeks, months, or years? How about if you bookmarked it? Would it always allow the article to be found again? And if so, how quickly can it be found?

Mozilla Firefox offers some good facilities for previously-browsed pages to be found. Both History and Bookmarks in Firefox have a ‘find as you type’ widget. However, this only contains and uses page titles.

What would make a better feature that is able to perform a more fuzzy and full-body search? The first option is to permit a search engine to spy on you and retain a record of pages that you follow. In turn, it will index these in isolation and allow your pages of choice to be searched cohesively. It is as though the knowledge conveyed in the index partly corresponds to what you already know. So, it is somewhat of a brain search, which makes the assumption that you carefully read every Web page you visited.

The option which exposes the user to a lesser privacy invasions is this: allow the Web browser to index a page whenever one is visited or only once at the end of the day. The index is of course cumulative and it permits the user to search just a ‘subnet’ — that which he/she has already explored.

Zettair is a light and compact search engine. It is supposedly suitable for indexing one’s personal files and then searching them. This tends to remind me of Google Desktop and some weaker equivalents that are bolted onto the operating system. On the contrary, Zettair is both free and Open Source. Is it also available for a large variety of platforms, namely:

1. Linux
2. FreeBSD
3. Mac OS X
4. Solaris
5. Windows
6. Cygwin

I have not had the chance to try it, but it sounds fascinating as a free tool that can be modified and extended. Once I complete my Ph.D., there is a good chance that I will resume work on Iuron, which is an Open Source knowledge engine. I wrote a couple of proposals for it last year. Time limitation don’t permit further progress, at least for the time being.

What happens when every time you receive a product and it breaks, time after time? You lose confidence, right? Here is the story of a rather stubborn guy.

Apparently, Szarek has had not one faulty Xbox 360, not two, not even three. No, he’s had four, count ‘em, four malfunctioning Xboxes, and he’s pissed, especially since he read that the console’s maker, Microsoft, feels customers who complain about faulty Xboxes should take their gripes elsewhere.

Older item: Xbox 360 Off to a Slow Start in Japan

Links can lose their value and
get rusty, even with Google

was innocently browsing the Internet this morning. By serendipity, I then arrived at a page where Google boast their contributions to Open Source software through funding (Summer of Code). It is only one example among others. But then, upon immediate inspection, merely all links turned out to be rel="nofollow"ed. SearchStatus made it evident by highlighting those links with red shades.

I have always adamantly believed that the purpose of this new class for links was different. I thought it was introduced in order to prevent and deter spam, among other things such as accommodation for microsformats (e.g. XFN). Here is the snag: If Google themselves are using rel="nofollow" to obstruct dynamicity into relevant, on-topic links, why should anyone else be hesitant to do so? rel="nofollow", a concept that was put in place by Google, is confirmed to have become something that can be misused. Its use has gone beyond the so-called ‘link condom’ (for spam) utility. Otherwise, Google demonstrate hypocrisy herein.

IGG had me pointed at 2100×2034-pixel imagery of the Sun. This image was taken in 1999 and it shows some really stunning details which I have never envisioned.

Also see:

1. Planet with 3 Suns
2. Tenth Rock from the Sun

SING virtualisation software, someone from Hungary illustrates how Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows can be worked on simultaneously (view screenshot and further details), without the need to boot into a different, independent partition.

This comes only a week or so after Boot Camp from Apple began supporing Linux. It now caters for Linux boots, as well as Windows boots. It relies on the availability of Intel chips, which replaced Power PC in an important strategic move. This makes the prediction and vision of triple-boot machines a reality, but moreover, it does so without the obvious perils. It obviates the need to reboot Mac OS X. This equips Apple with a huge selling point.

A9 is a fairly bloated search engine that I mentioned at least a couple of times in the past. It just struck me in the newsgroups that A9 had shifted to search results from Microsoft. For quite some time they used to be happily harvesting purely from Google, but at present, with MSN/Live.com, the results are definitely poorer, as most would expect. As a matter of fact, as an important nugget of information, Microsoft’s share among search engines sank from 14% to just 11% in the last quarter alone.

Why would A9 ever consider a change? One possibility among many is that A9′s incentive was financially motivated. Microsoft have just thrown vast amounts of money, most probably in the war against Google who promote Open Source software in their search engine results. The come to consider their highly successful use of GNU/Linux, let alone their sponsorships of Open Source projects (one example among many).

Microsoft have recently begun using the same strategy to elbow IBM, who in turn migrate businesses away from Microsoft.