OMMERCIAL effects of search engines can no longer be ignored. Now that Google Finance has gone live, even economy is managed and supervised by major search engines (Yahoo Finance, MSN Money and Google Finance).

Various agencies and freelancers are finally offering services which promise manipulation of search results while businesses perceive search engines as a vital source of revenue. The
following recent article provides somewhat of a decent primer with special reference to the current industrial state-of-affairs.

Part science, part art, search-engine marketing is perhaps the fastest-evolving segment of the Internet. A cottage industry of search-marketing techies labors to adjust keywords to a search engine’s algorithm, the set of rules used to rank search results. The algorithm used by Google, the market leader, has hundreds to thousands of components that determine the results.

HE release of Windows Vista has been delayed until January 2007. This of course implies that its emergence will miss the holidays season.

Windows users: Now should be an excellent time to put resentment or fear aside and migrate to Linux.
Just because you dislike it or do not know it sufficiently well, does not make it evil. If you are still unconvinced that Vista (formerly Longhorn) will be disastrous, see the links below. This has been said time and time again, but funded advertisements begin to mask the truth. Be misled no more; put apathy and resistance to change aside.

Related items:

• Microsoft Back to Day One?
• Windows Today Worse Than Windows in 2001
• Vista Re-built From Scratch
• Vista Perils
• XP + New Colours = Longhorn
• Longhorn: A Trainwreck?

FTER some long experience with a large variety of E-mail clients, I settled on Mozilla Thunderbird. I did so without any hesitation once the application was sufficiently mature. Thunderbird is immaculate: stable, predictable, highly-extensible and even interoperable (including importers and exporters).

A calendaring component for Mozilla Thunderbird (version 1.5 or later) has been officially released. It bridges a certain gap where Sunbird, as well as another third-party applications, integrated calendaring into Thunderbird insufficiently well. The last time I checked, one such Thunderbird extension was developed to become Windows-compatible only (shame on the developer/s).

The site introduces the new extension as follows:

The Lightning Project is a redesign of the Calendar component. Its goal is to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Mozilla Thunderbird.

I am still reluctant to move my calendar from a portable Palm PDA onto a desktop. It can have an adverse effect on partability. I will have to look into the interaction between the two, as well as multiple desktops. I currently have close to 10 Thunderbird extensions, which make it beyond bloated (albeit very stable and robust, unlike an overloaded Firefox).

Related items:

• Tabs in Thunderbird
• Thunderbird versus Outlook
• Thunderbird Aqua
• Mail Readers Survey

The Maths Tower (right), which is adjacent to Computer Science (left) and was recently demolished

ATER this evening I shall attend a lecture, which will be delivered by an honourable guest: Irving Wladawsky-Berger. It takes place immediately after my meeting with the Supervisor, who happens to head the Department.

I don’t go to public talks as regularly as I used, but it’s probably because it no longer is a must. Attendance is not mandatory and absence is rarely frowned upon. I sometimes look back at them days when I attended lectures and exams. I have no yearnings whatsoever. My bad and sporadic sleeping habits had me fall asleep in virtually any early lecture. Examination has proven to be no-one’s favourite either.

The last exam I took dates back to June 2003. I remember this date rather vividly because, rather than celebrating this milstones, I prepared for an job interview that I had scheduled for the following day. At that stage, I was not at all nervous about exam. A quick ‘session’ involving Seinfeld episodes (I had all episodes on my hard-drive) become almost a must right before any exam, as a deliverer of light entertainment.

Either way, today I shall return to the Department of Computer Science to be part of what should be a fascinating presentation. As I slept 3 times today already, there is little or no chance of me falling asleep. Fingers crossed.

The affordability of Linux begins to show. Last year I was getting excited over a Linux laptop that was sold for under $500. This year, however, new barriers are being pushed. A few prime examples are listed below:

• $150 for a Linux desktop computer in China
• The $100 laptop for developing countires
• Linspire PC for $159 in the States
• In Britain, several shops sell an eSys unit for as little as 127 pounds. Nowadays, the cost keeps sliding. There are finally some laptops from eSys as well.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

N my own eyes at least, this story is pretty remarkable as it marks a certain milsetone. Sony, being a large and proprietary-oriented brand, has opted for Open Source solutions. The news has so far it has been covered in techworld.com and computerpartner.nl. To quote:

Sony Online Entertainment is to replace some Oracle databases with software from EnterpriseDB in a vote of confidence for the open-source company. Sony is the company’s biggest customer win to date.

Oracle’s acquisition of Open Source companies was not enough to prevent the inevitable. They even tried to buy and thus eliminate MySQL, unsuccessfully so.

NE part of me truly loves Google — loving Google like nobody else! Google gives me plenty of referrals: about 500 for text search and over 400 for image search every day; and that’s for my main Web site alone. So how could I ever complain? It seems to respect me and treat me so well. Then again, it is akin to having an evil spouse, whose living is made in some dishonest ways. Allow me to elaborate if I may.

As many others, I sure have my Google ‘pet peeves’. I love them and dislike them at the same time, for a whole variety of reasons. Some of the more recent controversial moves, such as censorship in China and paid-for competitive ads (leading to manipulation the search results), had me think twice. I have mixed feelings, which makes me no exception. I feel betrayed sometimes. I feel as though I have been cheated on since Google is not the woman whom I married — the one who vowed to “do no evil”.

However, and despite it all, Google seems to hurt others the most. It rarely if ever punishes myself. So should I respect that ‘wife’ of mine? Or should I sympathise with others and demonstrate whenever I get the chance? I was once approached by Google regarding a job (during controversial times too), but nowadays, I do not believe like I could ever accept it. I continue to respect the Google search engine, which is doing a splendid job, technically-speaking. I am not going to embrace too stern a principle. I am about to ‘Googlefast’, as Chris Pirillo recently called it, but I just try to remain objective and fair (thus come my outbursts of criticism).

My ‘wife’ has committed her sins. One day she may face the consequences, but I will probably abide by my commitments to her and remain passive while she justifiably suffers in court. Each crime has got to bring its bitter consequences and I just hope that the mantra was not disposed of , yet.

Google can still improve. And I am not talking about their search results.