FTER 6 years with a laptop, I gave up on it completely. This was mentioned in the context of the PDA and also 6 years to a laptop’s retirement. There are a two main reasons for giving up a laptop: (1) a desktop machine is typically more powerful; (2) a PDA can replace laptop for better mobility.

More on the deficiencies of the laptop, which I include as addenda to previous essays:

• The laptop cannot be carried in the streets or pulled out within seconds to be used for a just few seconds, then pocketed
• Laptops are heavier
• Laptops rely on wireless connections while one travels. This makes Web navigation and mail rather impractical on the go. Text, navigation and productivity through creation seem like the stronger points when using laptops
• Laptops are difficult and expensive to fix, maintain, and extend

Mockup of a more futuristic GNOME (source)

HE GNOME desktop environment for Linux appears to be losing its prestige due to KDE, despite some eye-popping video demonstrations that include transparencies, wobbling windows and a 3-D Cube in desktop switching. Looking at some mockup images of GNOME, one gets an idea of future directions. The GNOME developers camp might have to live with the damaging insults from Linus Torvalds nonetheless.

More examples of GNOME eye candy can be found in a
previous eclectic item.

HIS morning I found (and began playing with) a GPL‘d newsgroups statistics tool (homepage of the project). I compiled it from source code without the QT GUI and off I went experimenting. In case you choose to run that tool as well, there is an ample manual for its command-line mode.

I have reported a serious documentation bug to the author — a bug that cost me a fair bit of time. To quote the report, in case this helps somebody else:

In Turquoise 2.2, the help bit says:

Usage: turqstat [options] outputfile areadef(s)

Shouldn’t the ourputfile precede the [options]? It took me a very long
time to realise that.

Having run it successfully ‘off-line’, script invocation has been made a weekly cron job (i.e. a job which is scheduled to run repeatedly by a daemon). I decided that I can only post its output to forums where:

• My participation is noticeable and is decent
• My presence goes back a long time into the past
• The amount of involvement and activity is high, or else there is not much to gauge. Statistics become uninteresting otherwise.
• Nobody else generates statistics already

For the time being, I will generate and publish statistics for the search engines and Palm newsgroups only.

VER a year ago, I decided to spend a few hours of my vacation congragating and picking up school archives of mine, which were rather comprehensive. This time, for a change, I opted for digitisation of a lifetime of photographs, having already accumulated every recoverable paper archive in my possession. It is a project I have envisioned for myself over a year ago, in parallel to the aforementioned activity.

So, I took a large collection of albums and began scanning them by the page at the high resolution of 2552×3508 pixels. I then saved as highest quality JPEG‘s, which suffer from no visible ‘lossiness’. I am far from completion, having spent just a couple of days mechanically handling these albums. In the future I will begin by scanning albums of myself, then process the combined albums, siblings, parents, and finally grandparents and ancestors. Many days of work remain on the horizon. It may take years to cover the many decades of photography into digital form. It is like a housekeeping duty that compensate for a century of memories, which have been stored in a volatile and degrading form.

I finally have all my family pictures (baby pictures included) readily available on the hard-drives and I can make copies or burn CD-ROM‘s to relatives, shall I ever wish to do so. At some point, I could run overnight enhancement scripts to remove speckles, calibrate, slice, and balance the colours of all scans. Below is a sample page; one among 500+ page which I have scanned so far. It contains a few photos that remind me of simpler times.

I am more than pleased to share and show more baby photos. It is a simple cut-and-paste job, having completed all of these digitisation.

Click image for full size (warning: 1.3 MB JPEG)

A photo of a sign which I walk by every day

RIVING can be a time-occupying and risky errand, which under certain circumstances is unavoidable. I got my license at the legal age (which was 17) and have not been involved in any accidents.

At 18, as I finally started University, I chose to live in central places, which made driving (or let alone car ownership) an unnecessary ‘luxury’. Everywhere I needed to go was 15-minute walking distance at most (well, nearly everywhere I needed to attend got covered). This habit saved time and trouble such as maintenance (garage, washing, purchases), so I look back with no regrets.

I still drive a lot on vacations, usually with my parents’ cars. There are certain prohibition due to insurance costs, which is another deterrent that relates to ownership of any vehicle.

Google and Firefox are everywhere nowadays

Firefox news:

• Firefox downloads hit the 150-million mark
• Firefox developer takes Internet Explorer 7 (beta 2) for a spin

Google news:

• BMW banned by Google
• Dell-Google partnership

Computer maker Dell said Jan. 30 it has quietly begun testing a new partnership with Internet search provider Google.

Related item: Google Reward for Firefox Downloads

Attacking the competition using links

ERHAPS it is a case of stating the obvious, but this will be of interest to those Webmasters whose habit is to create directories with index.html therein. This approach often produces more elegant and graceful URL‘s, yet it may entail a hidden cost.

I believe I have identified an issue that badly affects my site and, in particular, its WordPress blog component. This certain deficiency is associated with links that point to a given page whose structure is artifically built using Apache’s mod_rewrite. Several URL’s can point at the same page (even without appending a question mark to pass extra file request arguments). It turns out that http://example.com/Example is different from http://example.com/Example/ (note the extra slash), as perceived by large engines. “Example” is assumed to be an object residing the main directory in the former case. In the latter case, it is definitely a directory, so a structural ambiguity does exist.

Apache redirections handle the two URL’s separately as well. If two inbound links are received (e.g. by creation in whichever sites), there is a chance for ambiguity, which then leads to duplication of pages. This means that pages might be penalised for duplicates in search engines’ cache. I begin to wonder if a vandal could maliciously point to ‘alias addresses’, thereby having pages duplicated in SE indices. In this way, the vandal could lead to penalties which are imposed on other sites — those Web sites where dirty tricks are believed to be employed. Such penalties do not involve the Webmaster, they cannot truly be avoided, but they can help someone knock down the competition in the SERP‘s.

DDOS attacks are another, totally separate matter because they can slow the Web server at worse circumstances, thus slowing down crawling and ruining a site’s profile. That aside, DDOS attacks are illegal and they require a lot of brute-force and excellent connectivity. Link creation does not.

Related item: Aftermath of a Zombie Attack