The local gym – photo captured in July

ODAY I decided to re-prioritise a few hobbies and activities in my life. Thus far things have gone rather well, but I was at times susceptible to pressure and found it hard to cope with the amount of work that came my way.

I have maintained a stringent habit of working out consistently for nearly 10 years. At the start, when I was only 14, I stuck to short sessions that verged the high frequency of 7 times a week (i.e. a brief daily routine). This soon was reduced to just 6 and around 2001 was altered again and became just 5. A few years ago this was already downed to 4 and a half and this week I have finally settled at 4. This trend is somewhat worrying, at least to me. I am certainly not at the point in my life where I ought to head ‘downhill’ although I admittedly reached a plateau. I still work out approximately 8 hours a week, but I find myself more bound to the Palm handheld throughout. I simply must record my thoughts. I soon realise that I must stay connected more often. That is truly what I enjoy, inevitably.

Earlier today there was an unusually nice atmosphere at the gym so I even fell asleep there. It is not the very rare exception, I might point out. The nice music that is played on the TV set and perhaps the lack of pressure led to this, not to mention the erratic sleep patterns which I have recently adopted. The workouts themselves appear to be getting easier, psychologically in particular, over the years. This may have plenty to do with the fact that I prevent self-imposed pressure and time-constraints. I learned from past mistakes, I presume, as pressure becomes a deterrent strong enough to discourage exercise altogether.

NLY a few days ago, somebody had me aware of the Majestic-12 distributed search engine. The idea behind the engine is persistent use of other people’s computer power and bandwidth. The goal is mind is to crawl and potetially index the Web reasonably well.

This sudden ‘enlightement’, to me at least, provided somewhat of an insight. It affected the matter of practicability in my Open Source Iuron, which is in its early stages and more of a porposal at this stage. As explained before, Iuron does not index pages; it aspires to gain actual knowledge from the Internet instead. This can potentially make PageRank (or equivalents) obsolete, I believe, thereby reducing spam and search engine cheats.

Within a few days, I will be meeting the person who is arguably the father of the Semantic Web. My project will be difficult to lift off the ground without some support. Nonetheless, this now appears to be a hindrance with a simple solution. It is, after all, the kind of project where the vast requirement for bandwidth and computer power can be obtained in more or less the same way as Majestic-12. Since it is Open Source, willingness on the public’s behalf should not be a considerable peril.

On an unrelated topic which is paranoia, I recently noticed a referral reduction from Google. It became conspicuosuly significant in recent days so I thought it was an attempt to silence me. It finally turns out to have been merely a side-effect of a large-scale update at Google’s end. Many Web sites were in fact affected by this and distress became apparent in a few newsgroups. It was even pointed out that msn.com was assigned PageRank 2!

have just become aware of Flock, which is an interesting fork of Firefox 1.5. The much-anticipated version 1.5 has not been formally released yet, which makes this a somewhat controversial scenario. Flock is now being promoted by WordPress.com, where a download of Flock warrant a free WordPress blog (at least for the time being).

With all due respect, I am always slightly apprehensive when it comes to adopting, thus relying on forks. I am also aware of the problem associated with forking one’s own application. Once you lag behind, the long-invested dedication can wind up being disposed of. Flock appears to me like the conspicuous rationale behind Mozilla becoming a foundation and going by the identity of Mozilla.com.

As regards WordPress.com and the Flock relationship, I might give it a try, but I would certainly seek plenty of convincing arguments before I do so. My past experiences with Firefox 1.5 betas (AKA Deer Park) have been fairly disappointing and led to regrets. I have made two such attempts to migrate to a version that was not finalised.

Having said that, a certain other fact is worrying me slightly more. According to ZDNet, the lead developer of Flock said:

“Please note that this is a developer preview and that there are still plenty of bugs, many of which we are aware of.”

To me that sounds as if the application is not quite ready for “prime time” so WordPress.com are possibly getting users on a dangerous wagon.

It was also said, however:

“In architecting our software, build systems and engineering processes, we have given considerable thought to how our code will be able to evolve alongside the Mozilla code, without forking it”

This sounds rather re-assuring and I sure hope these folks will walk as they preach.

Related item: Best Technology Products of 2005

Some of you have possibly heard about the Nokia 770. For those who haven’t, have a look at this snippet from a recent review in the Washington Post.

The Finnish mobile firm had originally expected the Tablet, which runs on Linux-based software, to enter the market before the end of September.

I personally use a Palm handheld and I consider myself an avid Palm enthusiast. Yet, I was deeply disappointed by the move which had a Treo run Pocket PC. To me, this was beyond a simple “deal with the devil” as I also use Linux and I can imagine the implications of such a dangerous pact. Palm were committed to Linux for quite some time, but were recently taken over by a Japanese giant, so the future is uncertain and past promises or planned strategies should now be taken with a grain of salt.

I started to explore alternative paths and the Nokia 770 is one of these. I have just been reminded that it would not be surprising if Nokia dumped that rusty Symbian altogether and implemented a port of the existing GUI to run on top of the Linux kernel.

From recent articles about the Nokia 770, it sure seems as if the codebase will be made available for other devices as well. I believe the device will be ready by Christmas, so expect a homebred Linux distribution for mobile devices soon. It can then be sold to other vendors which will mark yet another revolution — the entry of Linux into the mobile phones, handheld PDA‘s, tablets, etc. First the servers, then the desktop and soon a penguin in everyone’s pocket, Palm included perhaps.

More on Linux-powered PDA’s:

• The Linux PDA Showcase
• The rather pricy PMA-400
• A cheaper PIM alternative
• Linux Pocket-sized Console

The remainder of this item slides off the theme of Linux and discusses Web 2.0-like transitions.

How come nobody has implemented a portable PDA synchronisation method? Many PDA’s these days can establish an Internet connection and very many computers reside in a connected environment with always-on connection. Would it not be rational to implement a Web-based Palm Desktop, for example? One which centalises data in on-line accounts? I still wait for a handheld that integrates with and synchronises with all platforms more seamlessly. The Internet, being open, can easily bridge that gap and assist users from the fuller spectrum of operating systems. Sooner or later, this all will happen.

Cited by: PalmAddict

Only weeks after Massachusetts decided to ditch Microsoft Office, Open Office 2 is officially announced and released to the public. This version of Open Office has been claimed by some to be faster and superior to Microsoft Office. Most importantly, it adheres to OASIS, it is inter-operable, and free.

As Computerworld puts it:

The OpenOffice.org Project on Thursday released OpenOffice.org 2.0, adding new features that the group claim will resonate with users from business and governments right down to the home desktop. The product will be simultaneously released for a range of operating systems including Linux and Microsoft Windows.

An interesting nugget of information is this: the main ‘sponsors’ of Open Office, namely Sun Microsystems, have recently formed a pact with Google. This fact on its own right can lead to endless speculations, yet Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, recently denied some baseless rumour that Google aim to implement a Web-based Office suite.

Would Google possibly opt to improve and fund Open Office? Any prospects for ownership and integration with the Web? It is no secret that Linux-loving Google are involved in a heavy battle with Microsoft these days. Simply put, it is a “winner takes all” situation.

Windows XP slows down as time goes on due to patches, protective software, and Registry bloat

INDOWS Vista was already said to be a trainwreck, primarily due to its inability to deliver something innovative. It gives no compelling reason whatsoever for users to upgrade. People who have had the chance to fiddle with the Vista beta build can confirm this. In fact, it seems to be lagging behind other operating systems, notably Mac OS X as was previously confesses by a Microsoft evangelist.

On top of it all, hardware requirements of Windows Vista make it rather unappealing. Novell have said that Vista will drive away Windows users and ultimately lead them to Linux. To many, adopting Windows Vista probably means acquisition of a new computer, which will most probably contain Windows pre-installed for a variety of reasons that involve anti-fair trade practices.

Windows XP was first introduced to the public in late 2001 and, as we approach the end of 2005, Windows XP is worse than ever before. The many critical patches, which came in the form of Service Pack I & II have made it slower and less likely to interact with all underlying modules gracefully. With more Windows viruses in the wild, it requires more attention and maintenance than before, which has definitely led to unrest among its users community. In the mean time, Apple’s Tiger has been gaining strength and has even surpassed, in term of it functionality, the Microsoft equivalents — something that even Microsoft could not truly deny. KDE, in the mean time, has been growing very rapidly and it is now comparable with any other desktop layers and often surpasses the competition in terms of its functionality. See, for instance:

• KDE Plasma
• State-of-the-art Linux Screenshots
• Next Generation of X

It is also worth mentioning Ubuntu Linux, which has done tremendously well at easing a transition to a free operating system. Hewlett Packard have recently started selling Ubuntu desktops and laptops, as a matter of fact. Ubuntu comes in just a single CD, its hardware detection is admirable, and moreover it is stable and user-friendly. Its bundled Live CD makes another big pro as users who are too resistant to delete Windows can have a period of adaptation and gain some re-assurance with regards to their platform migration.

The number of sites with PageRank 10 is tiny when compared to the number of sites with PageRank 0. Conversely, traffic is largely centralised in sites with a high PR (more details)

little tour around Google has led me to a questionably out-of-date article from the Register. This Article is 2 years old, but it seems more true than ever these days because scraping and link-related spam/attacks are constantly on the rise.

Google has made no secret of its goal to “understand” the web, an acknowledgement that its current brute-force text index produces search results with little or no context. The popularity of Teoma demonstrates that even a small index can produce superior results for certain kind of searches. Teoma leans on existing classification systems.

While Google relied on PageRankâ„¢ to provide context, all was well. But PageRank is now widely acknowledged to be broken, so new, smarter tricks are required.

Regarded as heresy when we raised the issue last spring, now some of Google’s warmest admirers, MetaFilter’s Matt Haughey and web designer Jason Kottke have acknowledged the problem.

As Gary Stock noted here last May, Google “didn’t foresee a tightly-bound body of wirers. They presumed that technicians at USC would link to the best papers from MIT, to the best local sites from a land trust or a river study – rather than a clique, a small group of people writing about each other constantly. They obviously bump the rankings system in a way for which it wasn’t prepared.”

The intersting fact is that Google themselves acknowledge the problem and I am sure difficulties have intensified, if anything, in the past 2 years. The specific reference to bloggers proves that very point as a new blog is set up every second these days.

Regarding the point about pages being indexed rather than learned from or understood, that is one of the catalysts that led me to starting Iuron. That site has attracted tremendous levels of interest since the idea had been conceived on the night on October 9^th. I set up the Web site and made an official announcement the following day. Yesterday I finished a 1-page formal proposal and I contacted the person who is perceived by some as the father of the Semantic Web. He was once my lecturer.