yowkee essential

PODZINGER

PODZINGER is a Podcast search engine. Ever since podcast joined the world of weblogging, I’ve been wondering would there be such a service archiving the audio, analyzing/indexing the audio content. PODZINGER uses the speech recognition from BBN Technologies — transferring audio into words/text and archive them.

From the returned search result, users could directly subscribe to the podcast to their iTunes or Yahoo! podcast. Or download the audio to your local drive. It claims to have the feature to play the audio straight to the spot of your searched words. But right now, clicking the play button seems always getting the alert message of slow connection or files not found over there.

The search is pretty effective and accurate, though I don’t think it has enough podcasts being archived. It’s a good web service worth looking forward to.

Annoying MS Word

From Kevin Wallace:

Dear Microsoft Word,

Printing a document does not constitute a ‘change’ in the sense that you
have to ask me if I want to save it before closing. Please stop asking.

Thank you

Ditto.

Google Pack

I am looking at the list of softwares included in Google Pack — which Google claimed as a free collection of essential software. The first question pop into my mind: hmm…essential, why is there no Thunderbird ? And why Norton Antivirus 2005 (some more with 6 months subscription for updates)? Why isn’t it AVG Anti Virus Free Edition (free for personal use)? Or even ZoneAlarm ? Of course it’s understood they wouldn’t include Microsoft Anti-spyware.

Oh by the way, they don’t even include Google Talk, sounds valid since Google Talk isn’t as essential as MSN Messenger, Yahoo messenger or AIM yet…

retrievr is cool

Wow, have fun with retrievr. It has a small drawing area (I wonder why not making a big one?) let you draw something with your mouse. Whatever you draw, it would pull something similar from Flickr. The application is developed with flash. The immediate auto-search function is disabled temporary due to the high traffic (probably have been digged or slashdotted), you have to click the not-so-easily-noticed “retrievr search” button, just beneath the drawing area.

Although didn’t know what economic effect it could drive to, not sure what’s the algorithm it used to capture the similarity, it sure is fun to play with. Well, the display images being related or non-related is subjective, but that’s the fun.

clipfire

Clipfire has a clean homepage as simple as Google — a text box with a button named “Find Deal”. So you could guess it’s kind of search engine. Yes, it’s a search engine and it specialized in shopping.

What’s cool about web application like Clipfire isn’t just about how good its search feature is. It has the integrated feature just like Digg or reddit. These Web 2.0 applications are users-driven, the users form the community. They could post links, they would vote for their favourite links and comments and discussed. That created the well behaved, self discipline user group who enjoy the services provided by the website, and promoted it.

Application like digg or reddit would possibly go for the ads-profit model. But Clipfire is focus on the specified criteria: shopping. People search for goods or anything well worth buying online, recommends the good online buying experience. And hence it could not only possibly profitable from advertisement, it could go further by co-operating with various online shops.

This business has bright future. I forsee there’d have more and more Web 2.0 web applications going towards this direction in year 2006.

10 Favourite Open Source Windows Application

It isn’t easy when one has promised himself that he got to blog at least once a day. Most of the time, waking up early and sit in front of my laptop — brain isn’t juicy. At night, a tiring body (after full day working) is trying to get its control center into one ship. So I stare at computer monitor, only feel blank.

The intuitive blog experience often comes when I am going to blog about me, me and me. It’s always the easiest thing to talk about yourself since you are the one most familiar with it. Ok, let’s go with it this round.

10 seem to be the magic eye-catching number, many people use to blog about 10 best movies, 10 best novels, 10 best applications.….all the 10-things stuff, and especially during the year end. We are approaching 2006 now, so I’d just follow the main stream, but as I am no any authority, I’d only talk about my favourite Open Source Windows application (well, for 2005 I guess).

These are the 10 most frequently used Open Source Windows applications of mine. I have them open daily in my desktop at least over a year now:

1. Firefox: No doubt, as the other millions users, Firefox is my main web browser. IE would be only occasionally used when there’s testing need to be done. Somehow I didn’t have the need to go to any IE-only websites.
2. Vim: Yes, to me, Vim is the most powerful text editor in the world. For office document usage, I am still using Microsoft Office as I don’t treat OpenOffice as an better alternative. But many times I’d draft my words in Vim first before I copy-n-paste to Word. Yeah, I am vi guy, so please don’t come to telling me how good Emacs is, and I could truly understand how you feel about UltraEdit in Windows and BBEdit in Mac. Vi is just the perfect match for me. The only disadvantage is when I got to use other editor like Word or even the editor in Visual Studio or Eclipse, my left hand is typing Escape key unconsciously. :(
3. putty: This is a tool one couldn’t live without if his/her main works are performed in a Unix environment and his/her desktop is a Windows machine! The best ssh and telnet clients in Windows world.
4. Thunderbird: hmm…I knew Thunderbird isn’t the best choice out there. But it’s the best alternative than Outlook which I could get in Windows world. It performs the job well, and more importantly, the improvement is progressing, non-stop.
5. GTD TiddyWiki and Instiki: GTD TiddyWiki is a single HTML page for all your personal recording/notes need, it’s a well implemented single page Wiki and designed to adapt David Allen’s Getting Things Done style. It serve some of my need since I could put this single file in a USB flash drive, bring along it any place. And at desktop Instiki could be the simplest ever Wiki installation — all you have to do is the grab the Ruby Windows installer, install Ruby, get the instiki zip, un-compress it and run “ruby instiki.rb”. Then point your browser to http://localhost:2500 and you have a Wiki well setup. Again, this is good for personal info management although it doesn’t sounds that obvious for Windows environment.
6. Filezilla: Filezilla is my choice of FTP/SFTP client on Windows. It has the speed transfering with multiple connections running simultenously. I choose it mainly because it’s Open Source.
7. 7-zip: Ok 7-zip, if you have never heard about 7-zip, then most probably you are using Winzip and still not paying for it. I don’t know how widely of its supported compression format, not sure if it’s more than Winzip. Because ever since I’ve started using it, there’s no turning back.
8. Media Classic Player: for multimedia entertainment, get rid of bloated and heavy Windows media player, use the light weight media classic player (it’d surprise you if you are using a Pentium III level PC). I use the alternative real and quicktime with it too.
9. Eclipse and GCC: I am still speaking C or C++ or gcc is every where for me (Windows, Solaris, Mac OS X...etc). I have to admit I didn’t use Eclipse that much (instead, use Vim). It’s still the best and keep improving IDE.
10. cvs: May be it should be the time to switch to subversion. CVS is the version control system good for your any plain text files — yeah I do try the best keeping everything in text files.

Vim, putty, Eclipse/gcc or cvs are probably too geeky stuff, but others are pretty a choice even for novice users. Give it a try and you won’t be regret.

The Best Software Writing 2

Joel has collected the best writing on the web about software, and published as The Best Software Writing 1. Here’s the collection for the 2nd book. Go and submit your favourite software articles on the web.

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Slide

Slide is a new way of photo sharing. It gives you a desktop software. Once installed it would indexing all your photos in the hard disks, and categorized them into channels. With channels you could invite your friends (who should have an account in Slide too, I guess) to view your selected photos. That’s the new way of photo sharing, kind of P2P. But not really p2p, you are requried to register at Slide and you could have the options of desktop viewing and published your photos on web.

One particular feature of Slide is the software would stick at your desktop and “playback” your photos with a always-on ticket interface. The always on slide show feature seem to be an unique UI feature and allow alerting of your friends’ new shared photos.

Many companies are working on social-networking type of software. What Slide is trying to accomplish would be like what others trying to add more and more into the current sharing framework — photo sharing, tagging, subscribing (Flickr provide photo channel subscribing via RSS too), text, video, IM (Instant Messaging).…etc. Looks as if someone manage to incorporate all kind of sharable contents (stuff interesting to share) would be the winner. But the ease of use of the software interface would always be the key factor to differentiate from all the competitors. Slide claimed their software usablitity is what they are different than others. You might want to give it a try.