Daily Bytes

If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay …

Machines trying to predict what humans want from historical data
can sometimes give some curious results.

Amazon is the best example
on this field. I really find it creapy when I look at their front
page and find that they really know what I like the most.

This article is about TiVo
and its not so wonderfull mind reading capabilities. I speccialy
liked the fact that it thinks that: ‘If you’re not into Korean News
then you must be Chinese’.

From href="http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1038261936872356908,00.html">
online.wsj.com.

W3C Style Guide

Sergio is on a roll
and keeps pouring links to great readings on Web-Development and
Development in general. This one is an oldie but incredibly it
still feels very current.

From href="http://blog.portugalmail.pt/K/archive/000159.html">blog.portugalmail.pt.

Mozilla 1.2 Is out

Mozilla 1.2 as just been released.

New goodies include:

• Type Ahead Find
• Basic toolbar customization (text/icons/both)
• Support for GTK themes on Linux
• multiple tabs as startpage
• Link Prefetching
• Re-filtering and filter logging in Mail
• Palm sync for Mozilla addressbook on MS Windows
• …

(Feature list shamelessly stolen from href="http://slashdot.org/">Slashdot)

Mail re-filtering is the feature that I wanted the most as it
was the reason I was still using href="http://www.ximian.com/products/evolution/">evolution as
my mail client.

See also:

• href="http://slashdot.org/articles/02/11/27/0541251.shtml?tid=154">Slashdot
  Discussion

From href="http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=2695">www.mozillazine.org.

Syndication is not publication

Mark explains why the recent movements for replacing RSS with
semantic XHTML are wrong. I think the reasons he mentions are clear
enough and only someone completely blind will continue to argue
with him IMHO I think that a standard for marking a link as the
link for that site RSS feed would be the standard that should be
proposed. Something like:

<a href=”index.rdf” class=”rssfeed”> Syndicate Me
</a>

This would help developing bookmarklets that would add the current
site to the user’s favourite rss aggregator.

Update: I’ve just been called to the attention
that href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/06/02.html#important_change_to_the_link_tag">
a standard already exists for this. A nice screenshot showing
how tools can use it is href="http://www.newzcrawler.com/images/scrshots/rssauto.gif">here.

Although it’s clear that XHTML is not the answer for syndication
I would really like to see some XHTML standards arise. For
instance, one that would provide a standard for constructing web
pages, into which compliant CSS could be applied without any
changes. That would allow web designers and web developers an
easier way to cooperate.

From href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/11/26.html#syndication_is_not_publication">
diveintomark.org.

Bag End 2

Build your own Hobbit Hole. All the plans are there. Now I just
have to find some href="http://www.hansonconcreteproducts.com/elliptical.asp">Large
Pre-Formed Concrete Pipes and a hill where to build it.

From href="http://www.stormbear.com/bagend2/">www.stormbear.com.

The Programmers Stone

This one came from href="http://blog.portugalmail.pt/K/archive/000158.html#000158">Sergio’s
Blog and it’s a must-read. Only had time to read the first
chapter. Will read the remaining tonight. This says it all:

References
Adams, Scott
The Dilbert Future
Boxtree
ISBN 0-7522-1118-8

Very funny and perceptive. A lot of nonsense is talked about Adams.
Some say that he has failed to champion the cause of cubicle
dwellers. As far as I know, he has never claimed to be the cubicle
dwellers’ champion - just a very funny cartoonist. Others say that
he is a terrible, cynical person. This is because he documents
workplace stupidity with staggering accuracy. All of the pomposity,
dishonesty, bullying and ritualism is there. The end section of
this book, about affirmations etc. should make your hair stand on
end.

From href="http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r0/">www.reciprocality.org.

Natural Voices

AT&T has the best Text-to-Speech engine i have ever seen (or
heard in this case). Just try the demo.

From href="http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/">www.naturalvoices.att.com.

Massive Attack

One of the mosts awaited scenes featured in href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0167261">The Two Towers will be
the href="http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/b/battleofthehornburg.html">Battle
of the Hornburg, also known as the Battle of href="http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/h/helmsdeep.html">Helm’s
Deep. In this epic battle, href="http://us.imdb.com/Name?Jackson,%20Peter">Peter Jackson
had to recreate 50,000 fighters. He was aided in this task by a
software piece called Massive. The big difference between Massive
and older solutions for creating digital crowds is the use of
Articial Intelligence instead of simple physical interactions
(pool-table-level physics).

Although this will be a major battle, Massive will really be put
to test in the third chapter of the LOTR:

In Return of the King, the final film in the Lord of
the Rings trilogy, the climactic battle—yes, the Battle of Helm’s
Deep is just a run-up—is rumored to employ more than 100,000
characters.

See Also:

href="http://www.deathstarinc.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=240">
Another Article on Massive

From href="http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,12543,390918-1,00.html">
www.popsci.com.

Waiconfig

A configuration tool for href="http://www.waimea.org/">Waimea. Not as complete as the href="http://www.windowmaker.org/">WindowMaker one but it’s a
start. By the way: I’m using Waimea with href="http://www.gkrellm.net/">Gkrellm and loving it.

From href="http://socialistsoftware.com/waiconfig.php">socialistsoftware.com.

Google Search: http://

Searching for http:// on Google seems to be an easy way to find out
who is first on their Page Rank System. What is nice is that href="http://www.google.com/">Google is only second to href="http://www.yahoo.com/">Yahoo.

From href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=http%3A%2F%2F&btnG=Google+Search">
www.google.com.