Tag: tech

[tech] October 19, 2002 at 1:11:46 PM CEST

Less is more

Something which has bothered me about new versions of standard software in the past years has always been that they offer features hardly anybody needs. It is probably a safe guess that 95% of all Word/Excel users never use more than 5% of all the options. They probably don't even know and don't want to know about most of them. And that at the same time the makers of Windows have not yet succeeded in developing a basic useful tool like e.g. a search of your own little hard disk which in terms of speed and relevancy can compete with a Google search covering the whole gigantic internet.

All the new features offered obviously bloat the software and though computers become faster and faster programs usually don't. On the contrary they become slower and more instable. The acceleration of CPU's and hard disks is overcompensated by the increasing complexity of the programs which results in enormous bulky 500+ MB software packages full of bugs.

The worst thing of a switch to a new version usually is the time-wasting adaptation to it (if the installation works properly in the first place) and the recustomization to the old user interface which had proved itself in practice. Take the annoying pop-up paper clip which came with Office 95?, a graphical gadget pretending to help with questions which always was a total waste and time-consuming to get rid of it. Or the shrinking menus in a later version (2000?) only showing those menu items you had used in the last couple of days. I somehow managed to disactivate them but it took me some time and I don't remember how I did it.

All these lame ramblings just serve as an intro to a contribution to a kuro5hin discussion titled An Apology For Simple Software. The post in question offers an interesting explanation for the tendency towards feature overload in recent software:

9#39 Acolytes (4.76 / 17) (#39) by epepke on Wed Oct 16th, 2002 at 11:32:08 PM EST

I categorize people a little differently, as novices, acolytes, and experts. One of the things that has happened and has driven computing in a direcion that makes me unhappy has been the predominance of acolytes over the past few years.

Traditionally, the term "acolyte" has meant someone studying to be a priest. A computer acolyte is somewhere between an amateur and an expert, who very much wants to think of him and/or herself as n expert but isn't quite there yet.

Hard systems are for acolytes, not experts. When you get into the expertlevel, the tools get simpler. Consider cooking. A blender for the home cooking acolyte typically has buttons for 14 different speeds, labeled creatively as chop, whip, beat, liquefy, puree, and nine others. If you go into a restaurant, the blender has a single toggle switch: on and off. The acolyte will use a Kitchen Magician or a food processor; the chef will use a knife. The acolyte will have a smart, self-cleaning range and oven with all sorts of features. The chef has a chunk of iron with fire inside it.

The acolyte gets off on the niftiness of a complex system, because succesfully using the system is in and of itself an ego boost. Acolytes also love words like "professional," which originally applied only to medicine, clergy, and law, but which is a good chest-swelling word. The disdain for anything but Emacs is an acolyte characteristic; experts generally don't give a rat's and just use what they have. I've been doing this stuff for a quarter of a century, and I think I'm an expert. Back during the dot com boom, when the world was swarming with acolytes, I was talking to another expert. He said that on his resume, as one of the tools he knew for web development, he put "notepad." I thought this was great.

Novices generally prefer simple tools that do one thing they want to do. Acolytes prefer complex tools. Experts prefer simple tools that have the property of synchronicity. Unx is an expert system not particularly because it is complex, but because it's synchronistic. There isn't a single executable in Unx which is anywhere near as complex as, say, MS office, but the tools fit together in ways that allow the expert to do anything.

Another thing is that acolytes feed acolytes. Acolytes are good at producing programs that satisfy acolytes. You need experts, though, to produce tools that will satisfy novices or experts, and experts often look at acolyte tools with some disdain, talking about featuritis and windowitis.

Using the same categories concerning weblogging software I like to think of Blogger as for the novices, Manila as for the acolytes and antville as for the experts. I must admit though that I don't really know Manila and I neither consider myself an expert in weblogging in general nor in antville specifically. But antville definitely is very simple to use and offers almost endless customization possibilities via those modular little bits of html code called skins and the macros for the pros.

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[tech] August 22, 2002 at 12:31:00 AM CEST

Some Google stuff

Apparently the Google Dance is going on, that is the monthly crawl of Google. You can see this when results of identical queries on the three Google servers www, www2 and www3 are different. The new results are on www2 and www3. After about five days they appear on the Google main server www. I checked the infamous "sx"-query for which I was #4 two months ago with the Google Dance Tool and found that my blog dropped from #16 to #23 on www2 and www3. Funny that the query for "sax", part of the new name, went up at the same time from #23 to #16. Even though I am happy about this development I would like to ask all people (and there are still 20-30 or even more) who use the anchor text "sx and sunshine" to link to my blog, to change it to "sax and sunshine" so that I drop even further for that query. I am still using a redirect script for search engines arriving to this blog to get less dubious visitors. They are deviated to my old home page.
A minimal Google search interface which returns 100 results with only the titles and the descriptions when you move your mouse on the titles here.
An interesting article on the central Google concept for evaluating the importance of web pages: Pagerank. Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it by Phil Craven (via ho). There I learnt that linking to another site without being linked back decreases your PageRank (PR). It's logical. As your PR is distributed via your links to other sites, a new not reciprocated link decreases the PR of the linked pages who do link back to you which in turn decreases your PR you receive from them.
A PageRank Calculator which seems to be more theoretical.
Parallax View links to an article on Google I am not going to link to (I would if there would be negative links which decrease the PR of websites). The article is called PageRank: Google's Original Sin and is by a webmaster who is apparently unhappy about the low PR of his sites. He cites Google on their PageRank system: "Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important." and then he writes: In other words, the rich gets richer, and the poor hardly count at all. This is not "uniquely democratic," but rather it's uniquely tyrannical. I have never read such rubbish about Google before. This guy should be sentenced to use Altavista for the rest of his life. P.S. The Google Dance wasn't good to me at all, finally. I am now #9 for this bloody query. And the Atomz site search which doesn't work very well anyways is also redirected towards my old home page. I am fed up. I will move to antville soon.

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[tech] July 22, 2002 at 11:18:00 PM CEST

How to keep track of weblogs I have found what I was looking for. Call it a weblog monitor, a blogroll or a weblog watchlist. I am talking of a tool which organises the weblogs you read in a chronological way, i.e. the last updated ones on top of the list and the lazy guys & girls who didn't write anything recently on the bottom of the list. Up to now I have been using blo.gs. It worked fine but it had the disadvantage that it only took into account weblogs pinging to weblogs.com and some other monitor sites or to blo.gs directly. I found freshblogs (via smi) which tracks any site even if the site does not ping. This is my current watchlist with music sites. None of these weblogs/sites pings but I can still keep track of the last updates this way. A small step for mankind but a big step for the weblog community (or at least for those webloggers like me who are not able to program a weblog monitor themselves). Freshblogs can still be improved, e.g. the possibility to immediately open new windows from the monitor would be nice but I am sure new options will come soon. Another improvement could be a more frequent update check as I have got the impression that the list order only changes about once every three to six hours. A problem seems to be that websites showing up on top of the list do not always contain what I'd call new stuff. According to the discussion thread How Does Freshblog track sites?: "When freshblogs has to scan a site it downloads the page pointed to by the URL. Freshblogs calculates an MD5 checksum from the page and stores this checksum in the database. Unfortunately sometimes people's web sites have dynamic elements that aren't really new content. The checksum dutifully reports the changes, but this isn't necessarily what is wanted. What is needed is a "fuzzy" checksum that tolerates slight differences. This will always be a best guess though and never as realiable as people "pinging" weblogs.com to notify updates to their site." Therefore I still would like people to manually ping weblogs.com whenever theý have added new content to their weblog. An easy way to do this is by using Phil Ringnalda's Weblogs ping bookmarklet constructor (you just have to input the name of your site and its url once) after every new post. The bookmarklet can be dragged to the Links Toolbar (in Internet Explorer) and is only a click away.

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[tech] May 7, 2002 at 11:45:00 PM CEST

All you want to know about Google

Today I asked a strange question on the very active and useful Webmasterworld forum about Google: "My blog is currently #17 on the search query "s&nbspe&nbspx" (without the blanks) at Google. Unsurprisingly about 95% of my Google referrers and maybe close to 90% of all referrers come to my site looking for the word in question. Therefore my referrer stats are almost unreadable as they are flooded by "s&nbspe&nbspx"-referrers. Is there a way to tell Google that my site should not show up in the results for the single word query "s&nbspe&nbspx"? " I didn't get the answer I wanted but I have to say that those people are very nice. If you have questions concerning Google here is where to go. Via the PageRank Site Value Chart on their site I also found out that my little blog which has a Google PageRank of 5 is worth $1,000-$50,000. The upper limit is quite a lot of dough though I think the value of a blog is closer to the lower limit as it stems mainly from other blogs linking to it and the commercial relevance is rather negligible. And someone proposed a statistical distribution of the PageRanks: constexp(-kPR) with k chosen by the Google guys. Interesting stuff I have to delve into deeper when I am less tired.

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[tech] April 4, 2002 at 10:14:00 PM CEST

General stuff

Random masturbation synonym generator. It says: "this Javascript program creates random synonyms from 150,000 possible combinations." Bloody hell. That means if you read one per second it will take you almost 42 hours to read them all. My favourite: "Shaking hands with the purple-helmeted warrior" (via weblog wannabe).
A quiz by the weblog wannabe telling me that I should maybe move away from Blogger which I am considering anyway. The characterization is quite spot-on but the blogging tool is not the one I am thinking of:

You are a very conservative and introverted person. You live in your own world and you're not very easy to approach.

Which Blogging Tool Are You?

- Excellent succinct comparison table of weblog software in German including blogger, greymatter, movabletype, sunlog, antville. - Zettelkasten (slip box) freeware cuecards (via sofa discussion) - Und am Ende noch ein Zuckerl für meine Handvoll deutschsprachiger Leser. Habe nichts gegen Dialekte und Akzente bestimmter Landsmänner, aber dieses Telefongespräch (300k wav-Datei) hat mich heute wirklich zum Lachen gebracht (Dank u wel Cees).

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[tech] April 1, 2002 at 8:48:00 AM CEST

More uselessness Thanks to Phil Ringnalda I found out about the weather pixie. That is a service which I customised to give you and me the information (data as of now in brackets) concerning the Frankfurt Airport temperature (12 degrees Celsius), humidity (58%), pressure (1,019 hPa), wind direction (East/North East), wind speed (2 knots) and most useful of all if it is dark or bright outside (the sun is shining so I guess it is daytime). I put the weather pixie into the sidebar. Resemblances between the startrooper guy I chose and me cannot be totally excluded. By clicking on him you get a small text in prose including extra visibility info on the Frankfurt weather. P.S. Apparently there is a fault in the automatically generated html code of some weather pixies. In mine the "img src" url started with "weatherpixie.comm". Obviously there is one "m" too much at the end.

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[tech] March 24, 2002 at 11:01:00 AM CET

Do you want to contribute to science? The guys from Google had another great idea (via Google weblog). Everybody who has a computer and an internet connection can participate in solving scientific problems. Most of the time when you use your computer it is actually idle, doing nothing. Why not let it perform some calculations for a good cause? The thing is called Google Compute and is activated in the toolbar which I advise you to install in case you haven't done so yet. The Google toolbar is a small application which lets you enter Google search queries immediately, gives you information (backlinks, link popularity, related pages, Google directory category, cached page, translation into English) on the current site you visit and lets you perform searches which go directly to the first result (four-leaf clover) or searches of the current site only. It is the most useful surfing tool I know. The current nonprofit project your computer could support concerns the geometric structure of proteins. The detailed FAQ on Google Compute should answer all questions.

P.S. The Google toolbar four-leaf clover search which goes directly to the first result without opening the Google result page is extremely helpful. It is the equivalent to the "I'm feeling lucky" button on the Google homepage.Instead of typing long URLs or navigating in my complex favourites categories I now often type one or two search words which have the page I want to surf to as first result. Example: to go to josh blog I just type "kortbein" and then hit the clover button. This brings me directly to the site. Embarrassing but true: the fastest way I know to arrive on my weblog is to search for "sex blog" but "alex fritz" works as well.

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[tech] March 19, 2002 at 8:14:00 AM CET

Blogger resources Blogger is the most widespread tool to write weblogs on the net. Some useful less known resources concerning the use of and news on Blogger are:

the Blogger FAQ blog. A Blogger FAQ must be a blog. That makes sense. The syntax of Blogger is explained in detail by Phil Ringnalda. The last post on template tags is from Sunday.
Status.Blogger.Com is a blog by Evan Williams on the latest news and developments at Blogger. If something is going wrong the answer why is usually posted there.
Philringnalda.com is on more general weblog subjects like PHP, pinging, CSS, weblog hosting etc. On the site there is also another less often updated blog bloggertech with more technical posts on javascript, archives, comments etc. Phil Ringnalda is always worth a read.
the Blogger Pro FAQ is on Blogger's premium blog service. Phil Ringnalda is the author once again.
Evhead is Evan Williams' (Ev.), who is the CEO of Pyra Labs (the creators of Blogger) personal weblog. Occasionally he writes about weblogging issues. A must read.

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[tech] March 1, 2002 at 9:01:00 PM CET

Non-music

Google loves blogs and here is why.
I try to read as many weblogs as possible. The problem is that I usually do not know if a weblog has been updated or not. A good way to make sure to read only updated weblogs is a site like blo.gs. It lets you define a list of your favourite weblogs. Weblogs must have been pinged to for example weblogs.com to appear with a correct timestamp in the list. The weblogs which have been pinged (updated) the last appear as the first in the list. In this way I know which weblogs have been updated recently. I use the Weblogs ping bookmarklet constructor. You just have to give it the URL of your site and then you can put the bookmarklet into your "Links" bar (IE). After publishing a new post you just click on the bookmarklet to ping to weblogs.com. Right now only 20-25% of the weblogs I read ping. It would be nice if more weblogs would use the pinging procedure. More infos either on blo.gs or weblogs.com.
Budget traveller's guide to sleeping in airports (via DIE ZEIT Weblog): "For travellers who are REALLY on a budget and are looking for a way to skim a few bucks off their travel expenses, why not consider sleeping in an airport? " 1,388 personal accounts of people who have enjoyed one night in an airport.

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[tech] June 13, 2001 at 8:42:00 AM CEST

yes!!! now it works. so the solution is to start a new blog hosted on blogspot and use template cutesy. this at least worked for me!

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