Wednesday, November 10, 2004

BBC: "The veteran Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has died in a French hospital, nearly two weeks after being transferred from the West Bank." 

Ladies and gentlemen, Microsoft's new search engine. Their press release will run at 9PM Pacific, a little less than 1/2 hour from now. I'm interested in what other people think of the search engine. I didn't see any features that would make me switch to it. But maybe I missed the important features. Or maybe those will come later. 

Microsoft's search blog.  

AP: "You'll soon be able to check your Gmail account from your favorite e-mail program, including Blackberrys and cell phones." 

Just got back from my daily walk and yesterday's Daily Source Code, which was about a minute shorter than my walk, just long enough to hear the beginning of today's DSC that begins with the soundbite from Dr Nick Riviera from the Simpsons, pictured below. Hi everrrybody! 

Micki Krimmel: "Dude, I ruled Bloggercon." True. 

Google's VP Engineering: "You probably never notice the large number that appears in tiny type at the bottom of the Google home page, but I do. It's a measure of how many pages we have in our index and gives an indication of how broadly we search to find the information you're looking for. Today that number nearly doubled to more than 8 billion pages." 

The House of Blues rocks on RSS. 

Setting up another Windows server, hitting the same wall I always hit. This time it's not Windows 2000, it's the 2003 server. I disabled socket pooling, configured TCP to know about my five IP addresses, but still no joy, I can run either Frontier or IIS, but not both. The new variable is the 2003 server. Hold the horses. Here's a technote that says they changed the way you disable socket pooling in the 2003 server. Let's see if it works. It took a couple of tries, but it appears to have worked. Here's a static file served by IIS. And here's a dynamic test site served by Frontier. Same machine, different IP addresses, Windows 2003 server. Now Uncle Davey gets a break!  

Someday I'll tell you about Ron Bloom, who I met at BloggerCon, but in the meantime he has a new blog and it's funny.  

I agree with John Battelle that Google is not a Netscape, but what a joke to think that Larry and Sergey are the next Bill Gates. John, when Gates was younger, he was a constant evangelist, deal-maker, BOGUer. He'd do anything to win. Larry and Sergey are, by comparison, cloistered, insulated, aloof bordering on arrogant. I'm sure they're smart, but in an academic way, which isn't the same thing as being smart in a commercial way. All their second acts have been duds, they're still lookiing for another hit. Also, they pick the wrong battles to fight, ones that have no bearing on their success. And they're really shitty at building consensus behind a developer platform, something that Bill excelled at, in the old days, when he was trying. 

The US Dept of Agriculture gets on the RSS bandwagon. 

Doc Searls: "I wanted people to look past the subject of making money with blogs, to making money because of blogs." 

Herb Weisbaum on where to shop for consumer electronics. 

Lots of rumors floating around about Microsoft's new supposed Google-killing search engine. Google stock is down as a result of the buzz, maybe. As you may know, I own 100 shares, bought just after the IPO at $100. I also was briefed on a new Microsoft service about a month ago. I can't talk about it now. I'm not selling my Google stock.  

Meanwhile a MSIE team guy is glad Firefox has gone 1.0. Ever wonder if MS's priorities are somewhat misplaced? Last night I booted up a new server running their 2003 server platform. Up till now I was totally happy with the 2000 version, but this time there was no choice offered. Anyway, their answer to security is to make you click in a dialog on every different website you access in the browser. Hmmm. That ain't gonna work. If they were paying attention there would be a war on spyware to equal the war on terror. With Microsoft's cash reserves, one can't help but think they could do a lot better than they are doing.  

BTW, not that Google is doing any better. They could solve the comment spam problem where it must be solved, but so far, they've said and done nothing, leaving bloggers with sites full of comments about casinos and all kinds of weird drugs. Help. 

Lying in bed today before waking up I rolled over in my mind all the BloggerCon details I had to deal with today. Earth to Dave. Earth to Dave. It's over. There's nothing to do. Waaaaah! What will I do with myself? I have nothing to do. Hello world. 

Mary Podder goes Hod-crazy. 

Don Park wonders if Atom is ready for prime time. 

Seattle P-I: "A high-speed wireless network that covers most of downtown Seattle is being rolled out by Internet service provider Speakeasy." 

Wired: "College students around the country start groups to teach their peers about copyright law and how Hollywood and record companies abuse it. To fight vacant stares, they frame the issue like this: Save the iPod."