Oh, ok, Google Mail has hit the newstands. So yeah. Google search for email. Good. Google mail to create a corpus for personalized search? Gooder. Now, Google Mail as foothold into rolling out digital identity and relationship management?

Like the browser and the operating system wars before it, the search wars is the latest iteration of what comes down to a battle for platform domination. Will the contenders be able to overthrow the reigning champ?

It’ll be fun to watch. Maybe more fun to participate?

* This is all analysis based on speculation and observation. I don’t have any proprietary information here (which is why I’m tossing this online).

[obsessing over ads in email is missing the forest for the trees]

• Save RTSP video streams to a file – sorta works, but audio loses sync

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Sometimes it’s easy to get inured to all the lying that goes on and chalk it up to ‘politics,’ but then some things make your realize that no, it’s still really wrong, especially when these people have been given power and entrusted with great responsibilities:

Rice said in a TV interview that she wants to testify publicly, but is constitutionally barred from doing so, a senior administration official said Sunday afternoon, before the program aired. Rice also said in the “60 Minutes” interview that she wants to meet with family members of the Sept. 11 victims, to hear their concerns, the official said.

Jeez, constitutionally barred? Have they even read this document (well, we know Ashcroft doesn’t care about it)? And for their information NSA Sandy Berger testified while serving back in ’97.

Kerry quotes Bible, irks Bush camp

ST. LOUIS — Sen. John Kerry cited a Bible verse Sunday to criticize leaders who have “faith but has no deeds,” prompting President George W. Bush’s spokesman to accuse Kerry of exploiting scripture for political gain.

Oh my, now that’s funny.

Just popped back in my head. Internally at Yahoo, web standards is sold as ‘LSM’, Layered Semantic Markup. Actually, I’m sort of half-and-half on either term. ‘web standards’ really isn’t all that descriptive. HTML 3.2 is a web standard. In fact, nothing in the spec says you can’t lay out tables and spacers and not be completely valid and conformant. On the other hand, the term semantic markup gets thrown around way too much. It’d be easy to replace the ‘S’ w/ structured, but I agree with Tim that ‘descriptive’ might be the most accurate term. That being said, and while at the end of the day, I’m just not convinced on how semantically rich (X)HTML is, I guess semantics (meaning) is the goal, so maybe it’s okay. Also, I do really like the ‘layered’ part, which suggests the idea of organizing around different qualia. And nothing like a TLA to convince the PHBs of the ROI of LSM.

Okaaay, back to work.

(before that, this is a stupendously awesome troll (now at 0, Insightful — YHBT. YHL. HAND.)

Revision tracking/visualization:

• Trac – web-based project management, defect tracking, revision control, wiki integration
• Meatball Wiki: HistoryFlowVisualization – see IBM History Flow visualization (great stuff, to be presented at CHI 2004)
• Meatball Wiki: InformationVisualization – related fun: MacroScope
• Meatball Wiki: VersionHistory
• TWikiPresentation21Jan2004
• PhpWiki: Wiki Versioning – see also BetterDiffs
• Visualizing Source Histories
• Collaborative Proposal Development
• zigzag

Web page change tracking:

• WebCQ (source)
• WebVigil
• WebTracker
• The AT&T Internet Difference Engine: Tracking and Viewing Changes on the Web
• Dive into accountability
• LazyWeb Request: Change Tracking a la Word for Any Text
• CODEX RFC/Proposal

Hmm, haven’t bothered to do any searching with it, but obviously Google Personalized’s approach of manually creating a category profile is only a stepping stone to say, building a profile from your past searches or via *eh-hrrrm* scanning other personal information exchanges.

Interesting tidbits. They require DOM/JS support for creating a profile, an yes, it is Kaltix based:

• google_kaltix_results.gif
• profile.js
• categories.js

• Vim for Perl developers

Hmm, China blocks Typepad – they still haven’t learned that true control is most effective when everyone is free to say and read whatever the heck they want but that no one listens or can be bothered to do anything. Also, some good points.

SSH Tunnel manager is a great GUI for SSH tunneling for OS X. If there was a way to disable ports when not tunnelled, that would be stupendously useful (I’m thinking about in conference situations, when you have say an overly aggressive chat client)…

For Windows, I tried pTunnel, but for some reason it didn’t work. Putty works, of course, although it’d be nice to not have to have a running shell in the taskbar/screen.

— Bothered enough by the last thought that I talked w/ a few people about it. I initially started by thinking about laptop wakeup scripts, but that doesn’t solve collapsing tunnels and still doesn’t insure stuff going out encrypted. Cal suggested a firewall level solution, which I think is on the right track. A 90% solution (and one that’ll definitely solve the chat client problem) is to drop outgoing packets on the tunnel ports for everything but the SSH tunneling server. The other 10%, cleartext communication to the tunneling server shouldn’t happen if you can use secure communications (HTTPS, IMAP-SSL, SMTP-AUTH). The 100% solution is to write firewall rules to pass all data through a local proxy/daemon that will do packet analysis to make sure that there’s no plaintext (basically running everything through ethereal/ettercap. Sure you’ll take a performance hit, but for conferences/other insecure locations, it’s much better than the alternative) — actually, it’d probably be possible/easier to simply be a tunnel manager that will make sure that tunnels are up…