N interesting collection of observations: People like to mock others and identify their weaknesses. Children have no restraints, so they can be cruel at times. Adults will never truly like a person, a rival especially, as much as at the time of death. The exception are those who fail in life and lead to a feeling of self-worth to those who surround them. Regarding that last venturous statement, it is a proverb I have recently heard. The context is typically the fact that rarely do we hear a bad word about a deceased person. It still is a taboo.

THINK how much simpler shopping would have been if it were not for that opaque ’99 cent’ (or pence, or whatever) system. Aggregation of numbers should have not become an arduous task involving the combination of many small chunks of money (typically negligible coinage) like 49 and 99 cents. It can become mentally confusing and exhausting as a matter of fact.

Riddance of this deceiving system has great potential if conducted and enforced by a court of law. This simplifies banking and accounting too. Yet again, businesses might argue that it drives away customers elsewhere, so eradication of the system must be mutual and global, through lawmaking. Meanwhile, we are all bound to fall victims to the illusion that we save money. We only lose our minds.

CCASIONALLY I get reminded why productivity and Windows remain an oxymoron. Take authoring in research, for example.

Colleague: juggling processes, restoring and minimising active windows, yet unable to cope with the complexity and clutter in the desktop

Over here: 8 virtual desktops

Colleague: needs to convert many images from encapsulated PostScript to PNG. Approach: start bloatware and wait for a little while; Load all images, assuming physical memory permits it; Wait for a long time for images to be rendered; Save images one by one and change file extension by hand.

Over here: a simple 3-line script does all of the above in just seconds. It uses ImageMagick.

Colleague: uses Wordpad for composition and paint.exe for simple graphics

Over here: a decent choice of professional tools

Colleague: figure placement handled by hand, hyphenation not possible. LaTeX is not reliable under Windows as it is not ‘native’

More issues: occasional viruses, FS maintenance, regular reboots (thus restoration of workspace is needed)

I estimate that we save several hours per day by opting for Linux. I am left baffled wondering: how can anyone who uses a computer for work possibly choose Windows? Has the world turned upside down?

I will soon be writing about the transition of a close friend to Linux. He recently discovered a world of power computing and left Windows on the curb. Linux stereotypes are often the main peril.

Google continue to be the prime target of hoaxes which attract media attention in vain. Example of recent false publications:

• Opera/Gopera – Google for Web browser domination?
• Napster+Google – Google goes peer-to-peer?
• Goobuntu Linux – Google to enter the operating systems market?
• Low-cost PC – Google to sell electronics?

All of the above are recently-falsified and openly-denied rumours. Many of these rumours appear to incite hatred toward a company that is cautious about destroying its profile and has maintained a relatively ethical historical record. Are they a victim of their own success or perhaps a tool in the hands of investment sharks?

I am still catching up with some news that I have missed due to absence. I would like to write about more pressing stories and some important recent developments:

• Cellphone from Microsoft to help developing nations: challenging the good cause of a $100 laptop that is based on free software
• Virus to wipe important files off Windows machines on February 3^rd
• Internet Explorer 7 beta goes public, but careful attention is needed from careless users
• Google’s stocks crash (a 19% drop overnight)

VER three years ago I started with a personal site, which was quite profession-inclined. I used it for placement of my CV and was pleased to have had something that was beyond a notorious “blog” — a quickly-growing phenomenon at the time. But nowadays almost everyone has a homepage; everyone including my 9-year-old sister. She has a site/section that comprises a few pages. It was in fact updated with her by my side just a week ago.

Returning to the issue at hand, I felt reluctant to add opinionated opinions on a variety of issues without global consent (e.g. politics, software politics, atheism/religion). The ‘blog’ component of the site bridged a certain gap. Also appealing was the professional layout and base structure of a modern CMS, which required little maintenance other than composition (and of course comment spam purging).

The new blog spot had plenty to offer. Suddenly, rants and raves finally have their deserved place; Any opinion fits under a suitable category, even a new one sometimes; There are no limits in terms of scope; Readers are often those whose interests intersect with the author’s; The blog serves as somewhat of a diary. It is also a gateway to my work, research, my family and it neatly organises thoughts and progress chronologically. Any arbitrary thought and idea can somehow fit without any context, so rich site content can rapidly be added. This is not the case with a contextual, hierarchical site that chooses a theme. It is even the case with a single open forum, where the audience congregates due to common interests.

In blogging, anything goes. This may results in frivolous domains (or subdomains) with incoherent content, but as long as the author is happy, who is to object? With blogging emerges a clique of on-line friends and colleagues. It encourages involvement and mutual support. It also helps you help others, not only receive and digest information. The elements of Web 2.0 (Hype alert! Duck down) involvement promotes all of that.

Here’s to another year of joyful blogging!

Related item: “I Searched the Internet and all I Got was this Lousy Blog”

The infamous Google cookie

Google have once again hit some big headlines. The context is often a negative one.

• Napster To Be Acquired by Google?
  Peer-to-peer is in question; Specifically, one of the father applications, wgucg put piracy at the hands of the common man. What was that slogan again? “Do no evil”?
• Newspaper Lobbyists Take Aim at Google News
  This comes after book scanning and some subsequent court battles. It revolves around Google’s scraping of content. This probably peaked with their snatching of UseNet content, which goes a few decades back and predates Google itself. Another similar lawsuit was recently unfruitful, as the court titled Google’s content delivery a case of “fair use”.
• Google Working on Desktop Linux
  Commercialisation of Linux (no exception to Red Hat and SuSE). I do not like the sound of that, yet I hope that they at least extinguish Microsoft after endless rumours about Google O/S and the recent Windows Distribution (software pack) from Google. Google’s affinity for Linux has been known for some time. Some false speculations about Google Linux were shattered recently too.

In relation to older news

• Google Toolbar v.4
  No controversy here, but I still abide by my belief that GoogleBar is better, among combination of other tool/searchbars. Google recently began to forbid greedy requests for search results from their Web interface, after years without any such restrictions imposed. Third-party Google toolbars are badly affected by that.
• Poor Spelling Beats Google’s China Filter
  The censorship of results in China has been discussed to death in the media. It was criticised across the blogsphere while I was away on holiday. Typos have always been a soft spot for search engines. I once noted that typos have SEO potential

More related items (primarily Google in a negative light):

• Search Engines and Biased Results
• Google Finally Invade Sites
• The Google Cookie
• Death of Privacy
• Search Engines and Spying
• Dangers of RSS Sitemaps
• Google and Pet Peeves
• Google: A Monopoly?
• Google Blind to Controversy

UPDATE (1/2/2006, 7:49): Google denies plans to distribute OS based on Ubuntu (Goobuntu)

UPDATE (1/2/2006, 7:57): Google Denies Napster Tie-Up, Music Store Plan