Posts Tagged ‘google’

Random observations

Saturday, October 22nd, 2005

Well it’s a Saturday and for the first time in about three months, I don’t have any articles to write over the weekend – I have finally finished my 60,000 word series for MM describing every Linux distro in existance so I can relax for a bit. However this does give me a slight problem: lack of stuff to do. So I thought I’d post about a few random and totally unconnected things which are on my mind at the moment.

The first is the new Google Reader RSS feed aggregator. I’ve been having a play with it and am very dissapointed in it. I expect stuff from Google to be well designed and very usable, but Reader just isn’t. I’m used to using Bloglines as my aggregator which despite being JavaScript-driven is pretty fast to use and navigate. Google Reader on the other hand is slow: there’s a delay when logging in before the feeds are displayed and there’s a significant and really annoying delay when browsing from one item to the other – it does a scrolling animation, which on my obviously-not-fast-enough Athlon64 4000+ with a gig of RAM just takes too long and isn’t smooth. Then there’s the organisation of the new items: in Bloglines I have the different feeds organised into folders – blogs, news, etc. But in Google Reader you just can’t do that – all the new items are thrown into one big list with no organisation whatsoever. Some of the feeds I subscribe to generate a lot of content on a daily basis and I generally don’t read most of it, whereas some only generate content every month or so and I read all of it. Google Reader just makes it too difficult to select the content I want to read and ignore the stuff I don’t.
For these reasons, I’ve gone back to Bloglines. Sorry Google, but I expected better from you. I know other people like it, but I just can’t get on with it…

I should also pimp nerd.ws, a new geek clothing store by ex-LUGradio presenter sparkes. There’s some good original designs on there, but as someone who predominantly wears t-shirts they got free from some now-non-existant company, I find £12.99 for a t-shirt a little steep… but it’s not too bad a price when compared to other similar sites. Anyway, should you read this sparkes: good luck with it!

I’ve also come to the realisation that I’m graduating in a matter of months and need to get a job. Having failed to get one before, I’m not exactly overflowing with confidence. While I am confident in my ability to do a real technical job and safe in the knowledge that it would take a real disaster for me not to get a 1st class degree, candidates aren’t judged solely on technical ability anymore it seems: it’s all assessment centres, touchy-feely group tasks and psychometric tests. Surely the only thing a company really needs to know about an employee is that they can do the job and aren’t a complete psychopath? ;)
I’ve also only managed to find a grand total of 2 graduate jobs which interest me, despite trawling various websites and being given about a tonne of literature by my university careers service. If anyone knows of any companies advertising graduate jobs with a significant networking/telecomms element (anywhere in the UK), PLEASE do let me know (either comment on this post or e-mail me). Ta.

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Posted in General, Life, internet | 1 Comment »

Impressive Google rankings

Friday, December 10th, 2004

I was just skimming through my referrer log today (clearing out the spam mainly) and discovered that I’ve got some very good rankings for a few search terms.

Searching for “future of Samba” will give my site as the first result of 475,000.
Now this is really impressive: search for “linux movie” and my site is the 3rd result (after MPlayer and Cinelerra) of 12,500,000!!!

I always laugh at the morons who fill their sites with META tags and random words in the belief that it actually has some bearing on their rankings, and now I’ve got even more reason to do so. I’ve never made any effort whatsoever to influence my rankings: I just chuck (hopefully) useful information onto the site. I don’t really care whether anyone reads it or not, but if they do then that’s great.

So here, gentle reader, is the key to “search engine optimisation”: provide something people want to read.

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Posted in internet | No Comments »

A look at Gmail

Tuesday, September 21st, 2004

I stumbled across a post on Schwuk’s blog which links to a Gmail invite spooler. The idea is that people send Gmail invites to the site, and anyone who wants an invite submits their e-mail address and will eventually receive one. So I submitted mine and had an invite a few seconds later. Very cool!

So I’ve registed the address whatastatussymbol@gmail.com (come on spammers, bring it on. Give the filters a good test). I chose that address because I always find it amusing when people feel the need to brag about having a Gmail address, as if it makes them a genius or something…

So far I’ve had a play with it and I’m very impressed. Gmail is far from your average webmail service. Of course you’ve got all the usual features but also a stack of really useful extra things. For example, there’s an option to display a symbol by all your mail, to differentiate between mail actually sent to you and mailing list traffic. A small thing but very useful. It’s very fast as well – and I’m currently on a crap connection which gives me 5-10 Kbp/s. You can of course create message filters, but they do seem somewhat limited compared to the options Kmail gives me (but it’s not bad for a webmail client). The message threading is very nice as well. This is a relatively new feature in mail clients and it’s still not too common in webmail clients – I don’t know how I survived without it in the past.

As for the advertising, I can manage to cope with it. It doesn’t get in the way or annoy you and is always related to keywords found in the e-mail you’re reading, which (now this suprised me) can actually be useful…
One feature that I feel is missing is the ability to import external POP3 e-mail into your Gmail account. This would certainly allow me to make better use of Gmail. Also, there doesn’t seem to be the ability to create additional folders for storing e-mail. I’m on several mailing lists and it’d be nice to seperate them into different folders. Of course you can ‘label’ or ’star’ e-mail using the filters to see what’s what, but having stuff in seperate folders would make things much easier to manage.

Of course there are all the concerns about privacy…. I got the impression from stuff in the media that Gmail wouldn’t actually let you delete e-mail, but force you to store it to target nasty advertising at you and so on. This is of course, not true. Well, the advertising part is but the rest isn’t. You can delete e-mail, but Gmail “encourages” you to archive it, so that you can use Google’s search technology to search through it in the future (very useful) and of course so they can target their advertising better. My main concern is that Google will keep backup copies of e-mail – even if you delete them – which could be kept for “some time”. The privacy policy certainly makes interesting reading. They say that accounts are secure and safe from abuse by employees as well as from script kiddies. If this is true, then I think the privacy concerns are mostly small, especially when compared to that of certain other webmail providers.

All things considered, I like Gmail. For a webmail client it’s bloody good and leaves the others miles behind. Why, oh why, didn’t I get myself a slice of the Google IPO pie……

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Posted in internet | No Comments »

Lots of random stuff…

Sunday, May 30th, 2004

It’s been a while since I posted here so this entry contains lots of random and unrelated stuff which I’ve been wanting to post for a while.

First thing is all this fuss about something Richard Stallman said about AIDS in Africa when talking about software patents in London last week. The LUGRadio guys also talked about this in this this week’s episode. Here’s the quote stolen from The Register:

This won’t be the end of free software, he says. But it will kill off much of the community. “Sure there’ll still be some of us left,” Stallman noted. “But that’s like saying its OK if millions of Africans dies of AIDS because there are loads of Africans left.”

So what’s the big deal? He’s trying to make a point about the affect software patents are likely to have on the free software community and at the same time get across that software patents are as big a deal to free software as AIDS is to Africa. OK, so maybe it wasn’t the best choice of analogy, but I hardly think its worth all the fuss that’s being made over it. People should be listening to what he is saying rather than getting wrapped up in how he is saying it.

So Big Brother 5 started on Friday. And yes I am sad enough to watch it. But I really think they’ve gone too far this time. They’ve thrown together a bizaire collection of people: a homophobic asylum seeker, two gay men, a lesbian, a transsexual and some of the most irritating people on the planet. All they need is for the lesbian to have the transsexual’s baby and it’ll be just like a (very) bad soap. I think this series will either make or irreparably break Big Brother…

I’ve just bought myself a new MP3 player to replace my aging parallel port model which requires some nasty Windows-only software running under WINE. I’m replacing it with an IOPS MFP-350 which plays OGG, works under Linux, has an FM radio and has an OLED display which should be interesting. I’ve actually ordered it direct from the main Korean reseller as it’s still significantly cheaper than buying from somewhere in the UK. Rip-off Britain strikes again.

I’ve been looking through my website referrer logs recently and continue to be impressed by the high Google rankings I get for certain search terms. Search for “CD copy prevention” and I’m currently the 5th result. Search for “party election broadcast” and I’m the 4th result. Search for “abolish exams” and I’m (again) the 4th result. If you restrict results to the UK for some of those search terms, I’m sometimes the 1st result (wow!).
Incidentally I get the impression (from my referrers) that there’s some debate going on in China or somewhere like that about abolishing exams, which is an idea I’ve suggested before. Perhaps not all of my ideas are complete rubbish after all?

One last thing. I’m currently looking for somewhere to do a networking-related industrial placement as part of my degree, starting from next summer. So if anyone has any suggestions for good places to work then please either leave a comment here or e-mail me. Cheers!

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Posted in Life, Patents & Copyright, Technology, internet | No Comments »

Should Google be censoring search results?

Thursday, March 11th, 2004

Just got an interesting notice while searching for something on Google:

In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results.

I thought the whole idea of a search engine, was that it crawled the web and displayed the results. Why should Google ever have to censor anything? Surely it is not responsible for the content of the sites it lists? If Google are willing to exclude results because of supposed DMCA infringements, what else might they be excluding, when users are expecting pure, unedited search results? Perhaps they should start excluding all alcohol-related results, since it is illegal in a few countries in the world?
Who can tell what else they are excluding, and for who…

I am rapidly losing my faith in Google.

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Posted in Patents & Copyright, internet | 2 Comments »