cool

Outbrain.com - Personalized blog recommendations

urig — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 14:49:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I've had the pleasure of attending outbrain.com's "friends night out". A small get together of bloggers, outbrain.com crew and sympathizers. Not only was it great fun, it was also educational as Dr. Nahum Sharfman (of shopping.com fame) gave a short talk about the recent web 2.0 startup boom.

Dr. Sharfman's bottom line seems to be that nobody knows what's going to catch on and what isn't, with the one exception that a viable business model should be the prerequisite for anyone thinking of getting involved.

I heartily second that. I dread the thought of a repeat of the .com bubble and its collapse. I think that if investors avoid spending money on ideas that have no clear way of returning that money, then that would keep the it market stabler and give a better chance for the genuine articles to succeed.

But I digress. What I'd really like this post to be about is outbrain.com. Outbrain's idea is to give you a steady feed of blog posts that are custom tailored to your interests and reading preferences. The key concept is that you rate whatever content you happen to read, wherever you get to read it, and based on these ratings outbrain's algorithms will supply you with relevant new sources.

Rating content is done through a small FireFox extension that gives you a standard "5 stars control" at the bottom of your browser:

An IE7 extension is to be released soon. The FireFox extension has recently been upgraded to also embed the "5 stars control" inside Google Reader, adjacent to each post:

Now how convenient is that? (With the exception of it currently only working in Expanded View :) )

In return, outbrain gives you an RSS feed with up-to-date blog posts that match your interests. This personalized feed is a great way to get to know blogs and other sources that you might not have the chance to find in other ways. I've already added 3 new blogs to my reader and I'm sure I'll be adding more.

Bottom line - You should definitely check out outbrain.com for yourself!

Which Science Fiction Writer are you?

urig — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:24:00 GMT

Take this quiz and find out.

And whaddaya know? Turns out:

I am:

William Gibson

The chief instigator of the "cyberpunk" wave of the 1980s, his razzle-dazzle futuristic intrigues were, for a while, the most imitated work in science fiction.

Which science fiction writer are you?

I couldn't ask for a bigger compliment!

When did Open Source Software become so friendly?

urig — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 21:20:00 GMT

I've just finished installing MediaWiki 1.8.2 (the same wiki engine that powers Wikipedia) on my machine at work. MediaWiki requires three things to be present on the machine prior to installing: A web server, A database server and the PHP engine.

In my case that meant that I had to install Apache Http Server 2.2.3, MySQL 5.0.27 Community Server and PHP 5.2.0 - all from scratch.

The point of this post is that I was surprised at how easy it was to obtain and install these 4 (counting MediaWiki) pieces of server software. With the exception of MediaWiki, I was able to download and install within minutes. The setup programs are robust, user-friendly and most importantly - almost intuitive.

The one exception was MediaWiki which required me to read through its online installation guide and tackle one undocumented issue during the process (It requires MySQL to run with Strict Mode set to off - I'll post about that in the near future).

It is almost amazing to me how open source software could come this far in providing a free, easy to use alternative to commercial software. The power to all the people developing these wonderful tools of our trade!

I’m a Mac. I’m a PC. The other way around.

urig — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 14:50:00 GMT

Finally (!) Microsoft strikes back against Apple's hilariously funny "I'm a Mac. I'm a PC." commercials.

It's not really a public commercial - more of an internal lampoon - and it's certainly not as sharp as some of the original Apple ads, but it goes to show that at least some people in MS are indeed in touch with reality and care to respond to the hammering they're getting on the web.

Sony also jumped into the arena with a small flash banner that you can see on their Sony Australia website. Considering the amount of evil that company is doing with its DRM rootkits, that hip cute girl you see there is one mean bitch…! :P

Via Tim Hibbard's blog and engadget.

LineRider – When wasting time on the web becomes art

urig — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 21:52:00 GMT

If you think you don't have a life – working hard hours on code, spending your free time on open source projects – you need to take a look at the LineRider phenomena and rethink that.

LineRider (beta!) is flash game, or to follow its inventor more accurately, a flash toy where you draw the two dimensional course for a cute bobsledder. Complete with an amusing implementation gravity and inertia it's a fun way to waste a few minutes online.

Unless, of course, you're insane. You're welcome to go to the LineRider Squidoo Lens to browse through some of the most disturbingly elaborate skiing courses ever built for LineRider. These guys spend what must amount to weeks, if not months, of their time to build ingenious courses that will leave you in awe.

A truly humbling display of when wasting time becomes true art.