OR the past 4 months I have been syndicating 7 distinct news feeds. The feeds contain search results for keywords of interest, which pertain to computer vision. I syndicate from a couple of sources, which makes the scope even broader; the total number of feeds is 14 at present.

I needed to keep myself regularly informed about developments in computer vision. That field is not only important to my research. It it also serves some required content, which enables me to extend The Computer Vision Digest. For the task of news ‘digestion’, I have been using RSS feeds from Google News and Yahoo! News. Both merely serve as aggregators, encapsulating and centralising news from agencies from all around the world, niches included.

As much as I respect and even fancy Google, I am disappointed with their news service. I am almost reluctant to say that their news aggregation is filled with (if not plagued by) commercial sites that attempt to sell stuff rather than provide news items. It is not only implied by the .com suffix, but also by content, which is glaringly promotional. This is of course a real deterrent, which becomes appalling at times. Others have noticed similar issues, so it is not a matter of coincidence, but a recurring pattern. I have come to take every link that spot in Google News with a grain of salt. Rather often it leads me to what can only be described as news spam — an attempt at sales that is shrewdly disguised as a news item.

To syndicate news, import any of the following templates into your feeds reader. Replace KEYWORD1 and KEYWORD2 with keywords of interest and isolate keywords using a plus (the + symbol).

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=KEYWORD1+KEYWORD2&ie=UTF-8&output=rss

http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=KEYWORD1+KEYWORD2&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt

This time, for a change, my warm recommendation goes to Yahoo. They simple manage to isolate real news from the ‘noise’.

Related items on feed-based services:

• Google News Feeds
• Yahoo RSS
• Search Results as RSS
• Weather RSS Feeds

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

INUX distributions and their great diversity lead to endless discussions at best and flame wars at worst. Because they all incorporate the same kernel, they can be equated to beer from different brands (the infamous beer analogy). Each person, however, will try to convince you that his/her favourite beer is distinct and superior to all others.

A survey was conducted by ZDNet, which aimed to identify the best Linux distribution for a small business. Among the options that have been put to the test: Mandriva Linux 2006, Novell Linux Desktop 9, Red Hat Desktop 4, SUSE Linux 10 and Ubuntu Linux 5.1. The outcome:

We emerged from our Linux experience with a strong preference for Ubuntu Linux 5.1, with SUSE Linux 10 a close second. Both did everything we required of them, and both have very low setup costs. Ubuntu, in particular, costs absolutely nothing to purchase.

Interestingly enough, Ubuntu and SuSE have naturally become my preferred distributions. At some stage, I had 2 Ubuntu boxes and one preloaded with SuSE, but I now have 2 SuSE boxes and one which runs Ubuntu. One wonders if the crucial factor which is cost could have put SuSE at the very top rank. OpenSuSE can definitely make the exception in due time.

Related link: also in the headlines, among the ‘recent attractions’, is a comprehensive review of processors — mainly a collection of benchmarks comparing AMD and Intel.

“How did a newspaper reveal so much about me…?”

PYING provides information. Information is power. The simple implication is that spying grants an organisation extra power. Especially, it gives an organisation advantages over its competitors. For this very particular reason, search engines put an end to privacy over time. As a matter of fact, the Internet in general has exposed most of us at a certain level. Controversially enough, Google can finally analyse the behaviour of rival search engines as they possess statistics of many Web sites.

Search engines and information management authorities are not alone in this. What I see more and more of are signup requirements for reading on-line newspapers (the New York Times is a notable example). I am not speaking of paid subscriptions, but rather about identification. It is no longer a secret that sales of in-print newspapers decrease, if not slowly diminish. As previously said, one must evolve and this includes publishers. More and more people simply find greater convenience in reading news on their personal workstation. So how can publishers keep up and protect their revenue? Can spying provide a solution?

Newspapers and publishers might not like the use of network bandwidth, which even when accompanied by advertisement, does not give them the same touch with the readers. Moreover, newspapers become more susceptible to plagiarism (which is a simple copy & paste), frequently due to millions of bloggers, some of whom are immoral. I occasionally find a heavily-cited article in blogs and it is ranked higher than its origin, which stems in mainstream media. Needless to say, such articles are copied verbatim, in full, and neglect to link to the source. No wonder the media is afraid of blogs.

All in all, newspaper head towards targetted content and they attain to get full information about their readers. This way, content (e.g. articles), as well as commercials, can be tailored to individuals. By localising items and customising them to a person’s taste, the relevance and thus value rises. This all comes at the expense of the individual’s privacy, of course. It all depends on the ability to make assumptions and generalisations in the process of ‘profiling’ an individual reader. Since the reader enters personal details at the start, too much is known. The browser cookie sooner or later contains full personal information about the reader, as well as all the article s/he has read. Similar issues and can in fact be ascribed to Google’s cookie.

I thought that the following story would be of interest. A little hack in the new service allowed it to be spammed rather quickly.

A technology glitch temporarily turned Google’s new personal listings service, Google Base, into a vast, virtual red-light district earlier this week.

Some bystanders speculate that Google Base is intended to take the place of eBay and Craigslist (as previously mentioned). I heard another analysis that said Wikipedia is under threat too. The rate of Google’s expansion is by all means phenomenal.

ETTING in touch with Google is no easy chore. It has actually become a widely-known fact; even a notoriety to say the least.

Google Groups has is often becoming a gateway for spammers, from which to hit UseNet en masse. The Google Groups complaints address, namely abuse@google.com, has proven to be waste of one’s time. “Dissatisfied with the results” seems to be another time killer that rarely leads to anything productive. I have tried these myself in vain and heard from others about similar experiences.

There are exceptions, of course, which help us ‘little people’ voice our desires and be heard by the almighty Google. Examples:

• Removing pages from the Google index or removing posts from Google Groups, which mirrors UseNet.
• For unjustified site penalties, one can file a reinclusion request. It needs some careful and strict keywords, however, in order to be channelled to the right department.
• The yet-not-so-public Google telephone number: +1 605 330 0100. This enables you to get an E-mail address with a daily passphrase, which gives it priority and makes it be read. For queries about one’s site and a conversation with an actual person, the route (‘code/digit maze’) is presently 5, then 3.

I truly believe that a large company such as Google, whose dominance in IT is undeniable, ought to take user queries seriously and make points of contact more trivial and responsive. If you show you care, others will care for you too. Reciprocity is gold.

Occasionally, communication belongs to Google

N airplanes, I frequently get assigned the seat that is adjacent to the emergency door. I don’t know if it’s merely a coincidence, or perhaps they ‘pre-allocate’ particular people whom they trust (shameless flattery, pat self on back). Either way, I always wonder what mechanism/s they have to ensure that suicidal individuals cannot open that door in during flights. The news from Australis give a bit of a clue.

A 34-year-old French woman, who tried to open the emergency door of a plane so she could have a cigarette, has appeared in the Brisbane Magistrates Court.

[...]

Today she pleaded guilty to a charge of endangering safety on an aircraft.

When your data is only readable to a program

EVERAL weeks back, I came across concerned Palm users in the forums. They were uncertain and confused with regards to their Palm data formats. Some were wishing to migrate their data, while some just wanted to rest assured that they were not susceptible to vendor lock-ins or needed to jump through hoops to make a transition, shall it ever be required.

Palm’s software certainly offers data export facilities, yet these are not flexible enough. The range of supported formats simply does not cut it. It appears to adhere to legacy formats from the previous decade, which is probably the cause for many other limitations, which make older Palm models compatible with some of the latest.

On the other hand, Palm’s compact formats make data access and writing quick, which is crucial for low-end mobile devices with weak CPU‘s. The formats are rather compact, although not easily compressible. As always, there is a trade-off between openness and performance. OpenOffice and Microsoft Office are just one example of that. At present, Palm appear to have learned nothing from the former. Until they learn that lesson, the observations below are worth making.

Looking more closely at a variety of PIM data files, I quickly discovered that they could be classified as “proprietary”. They were rather opaque too. These files comprised a mishmash of binary and text, which means that knowledge as to how to interpret such files laid in closed source code from Palm. It was not easily recoverable, although programs like JPilot and KPilot are able to import all data apart from the calendar (DateBook), which is the most complex among all. Likewise, there are Palm to HTML convertors that run under Windows, but they can only handle AddressBook and MemoPad data, in line with relevant, unofficial documentation.

I could not help feeling disappointed by that discovery, which means that personal information is cumbersome to access. As the Web guru Jeff Veen recently said, “Give me my data” is the quote that immediately sprung to mind. Therein Jeff talks about heart rate monitors, but here we speak of calendaring data, including extensive archives and PIM, which puts a barrier in front of its actual owner. Palm should have stuck with a more canonical form such as “vCalendar/iCalendar, which is already mutually supported across multiple platforms. This type of Move to iCal or vCal (vCalendar, iCalendar), or even comma-sparated list was discussed many years ago.

Alternatively, why not use something standardised and generic such as XML, which can be easily parsed and manipulated? Is it not a foreseeable option, especially to Palm who combat a king of proprietary, thus misunderstood formats? As I continue to look at my Palm archives on my computer, I am filled with despair. I relveal that my records are interpretable to no calendaring software other than that which comes from Palm themselves. I would definitely recommend that Palm consider re-working their formats as it can become a major selling point.

Nowadays, More and more people (and even governments) come to discover that their old mail is often meaningless and inaccessible due to formats that are vendor-specific. Berlin, Paris and Massachusetts are only few among the loud protesters against undisclosed data formats and mockery of standards. It is only today that we hear of promises (as of yet doubtful) from Microsoft, according to which Office formats will become open.

Microsoft will on Tuesday announce it is opening up access to its Office file formats to competitors, as part of a move to ensure the software giant does not lose lucrative government markets for its Office software.

Let us wait until those fine prints become legible.

Cited by: PalmAddict