UnixPoet

Reading Lisp/scheme code posted on web pages is not easy - especially for noobs (like me ). Often I’d end up copying and pasting the code to my code editor. A cumbersome procedure at best.

A better solution would be for the web page displaying the Lisp/Scheme code to automatically highlight the matching parenthesis. Which is what a few lines of Javascript I wrote do - here

If you, kind reader, post code online, do not hesitate to make use of the script. I encourage you to use the script hosted on unixpoet.com so that you will get updates automatically.

The script has been confirmed to work on Firefox 1.5, IE6 and Camino on the Mac. Safari support coming soon.

Suggestions welcome.

More details here.

I do not think that Google has an Office in mind. At all.

First off, Writely, even a souped up version full of Google steriods, will still remain the Wordpad to the Visual Studio that is Office. Google is not dumb enough to do a full frontal on Microsoft Office - the way to beat Office is to make it irrelevant. And Writely does not really even to begin to do that.

What Google above all is an advertising company selling targeted ads. It needs to know its users in detail - the more it knows the better. And what better way to learn about someone then looking at their email, the IM, the news they are interested, the blogs they read, and the documents they write?

Google will offer Writely and GDrive so that it has more info to analyse about the users; the aim is to not to kill Office - that’s just a nice bonus. Google does not care if you use Office Word - but it does care that you keep it on GDrive.

Indeed, in the grander scheme of things, the more important announcement from Google is not Writely but GDrive.

Is it a wonder that the latest Google Desktop (which is great btw) saves documents on Google servers? Indeed it fits in nicely with my hypothesis

Evolution of industry dynamics:
- In the 90’s Sun hyped Java.
- percieving a threat Microsoft backed Flash
- Flash shipped with IE, which means
- that nearly all PCs today run Windows, which comes bundled with IE, which includes Flash.
- Adobe bought out Macromedia, the developers of Flash, as they saw it a good fit with the other applications in their lineup
- Google buys Adobe. Instantly can bundle Google Desktop Search with Adobe Reader and Flash. That would be a lot of installs for Google.

And all because back in the day MS used its clout to back a competing technology against a percieved threat which never materialized. Oh what a tangled web we weave…

Remember, you heard it here first

I’m reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and it is a good book. When I compare the honesty, clarity and wisdom of the emperor’s words to the senseless verbiage of modern philosophy - postmodernism in particular, I get all sentimental and mellow and put on some Coldplay.

Ahem.

It seems that the number of AJAX based desktops, all chasing VCs (yes, you Yahoo/Google) like there is no tomorrow, just keeps on growing.

My quicky evaluation: goowy has a nice interface - lots of eyecandy (all Flash) and very Macish. Fold looks more pedestrian - I only have the screenshots to go by as they are in private beta. Protopage is not a bad implementation. Neither is pageflakes - more googlish in style. Also gave Gtalkr a look. Flash-based but they could exploit it much more. Gtalkr don’t aim to take over your desktop, yet. They just repackage gmail, youtube, flickr, blogs, etc. No calendar or sticky notes so far.

Based on what I’ve seen the most impressive so far is… MacOSX ; ) Well, goowy, which is is my favourite, was inspired by it. Might as well go back to my lovely Mac.

Dear reader, before you leave I must warn you of something. I’ve heard that there is another AJAX-based desktop coming.

And its like something you’ve completely seen before …

Blog spam is annoying. Methods for dealing with it? CAPATCHs seem like a good way to do it. I saw a Bayesian plugin for WordPress but depending on how its implemented it will most probably need maintenance and training. Only one way to find out.

Regarding mail spam: a new form of spam has been hitting me and most people I know. The spammers have been reading up on their CSS to create what I’ve termed floating spam. Basically, the oh so clever spammers set certain tags in the email with display: float; so that while the source of the mail looks like a bunch of divs and spans with random single characters interspersed throughout, when rendered in a browser it will nicely spell viagra for you.

Traditional mail filters will be crap at detecting such spam. The only hope is a statistical filter - a bayesian should do the trick. GFI’s current shipping version will struggle a bit, but I’m working on an update. I feel our clients’ pain and an update is winding its way through testing and QA. If you want to know when its released, GFI ME12 only at the mo, then send me an email or leave a comment. Or subscribe to this blog

One final “spammer” - MSN Messenger. My ‘lil sis wanted it installed to IM her friends. I had already set the default browser to Firefox (ofcourse). So why does MSN insist on bringing IE up? No excuses - its behaviour like this which keeps getting Microsoft in legal hotwater. They don’t need the hassle and neither do I.