PC Magazine in the US recently did a “short article describing Wikis”:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1402872,00.asp (web pages that anyone can edit just by typing simplified text into a form) and rated six options for making your own Wikis. One Wiki-related technology with some interesting unique features that is free to use and doesn’t get a mention is “Bloki”:http://www.bloki.com/ and probably the largest bit of Wiki content is the “Wikipedia”:http://www.wikipedia.org/ – a 300,000 entry user-generated encyclopedia.

Thanks to Many-to-Many for the link

Like any self-respecting academic, my hard disk is now full of journal articles and other files in PDF form (as well as Word files etc). Microsoft provides a rather rudimentary ‘search for text in your files’ option in Windows 2000 – what I use – under ‘search’ on the start menu but it doesn’t index Acrobat files as standard and I have been unable to get the (well-hidden) downloadable Adobe patch to work.

As it happens I was putting together a course on “Internet Search Techniques”:http://www.nmk.co.uk/search/view.cfm?ItemID=4926 (now finished but I’ll do it again for any organization that wants it) so I had an excuse to do some investigation. Thanks to Jeremy Wagstaff’s excellent technology weblog, “Loose Wire”:http://loosewire.blogspot.com/ (and “this posting”:http://loosewire.blogspot.com/archives/2003_07_10_loosewire_archive.html in particular) I tried out:

• “DTSearch”:http://www.dtsearch.com/ (sophisticated, complex, expensive – aimed at corporate networks)
• “Enfish”:http://www.enfish.com/ (seemed to suck up my computer’s resources and slow it down – not as powerful and still quite clunky $50+)
• “X1”:http://www.x1.com/ – fast and easy to use (though it doesn’t yet support phrase search). They were going to offer a free version, which put it at the top of my list but now it costs $50. You can download a free trial if you want to try it for yourself. Its ability to highlight where in a gven file your search terms appear is very handy. It indexes email (several types including Eudora) and email attachments as well as documents. [obdisclaimer: they kindly gave me a full unlimited license to try it out]
• “SearchWithin”:http://www.searchwithin.com/ – its interface is pretty rudimentary (see below) and in the course of its installation several weird Visual Basic-related error messages happened (though having ignored them there seem to be no ill effects). The search results page is also basic – it doesn’t sort what’s found by relevance and it just gives you the first few words of the document rather than showing you where in the document your search terms appear. However it does have a big advantage over the others – it’s free (it’s ad supported – popping up sponsor ads in your web browser when you launch it and every so often when you use it). It also handles more powerful boolean search queries than X1.
  
  SearchWithin’s rather basic interface

• “Acrobat 6”:http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readermain.html – The latest version of Acrobat Reader has a way to search across multiple Acrobat files built in – but it is slow, and if you are not sure whether the document you want is a Word file or an Acrobat one you’d have to search twice.

So it looks like I will stick to using X1 for the moment – but I can’t help thinking Google or some other search engine provider should really put out something free and more professional (Compaq’s Altavista had a primitive product back in the late ’90s you could download).

I got talking recently to a guy who runs Internet hotel booking services for a living and naturally I had to ask him how to get cheap hotel rooms online. He suggested two services – Travelaxe (a downloadable app) and “SideStep”:http://www.sidestep.com/ which installs inside your browser (IE or Netscape only, apparently).

I tested these using London as an example over the weekend of Nov 15 to Nov 16 and trying to find the cheapest possible rooms. SideStep failed to find the “Atlantic Paddington”:http://www.newatlantic.co.uk/ hotel (really a hostel) which has some of the lowest prices and neither has many hostels or B & Bs – primarily because these are generally not yet ‘plugged in’ to the major reservation systems. As a result you may be better off going to (for example) “ase.net”:http://ase.net/servlet/HotelList?type=8%2C4&dist=2 and contacting the individual B & Bs and hostels listed individually.

Still, either may be worth a try if you travel on business and need/want to stay in hotels instead of B&Bs.

P.S. both apps are free of charge and the creators make their money via the commission they get from sending traffic to the hotels when you book through them. As far as I can tell this commission doesn’t raise the price to you…

I know I am coming late to this but I have finally gotten around to using an RSS reader myself and I have been tweaking my template settings now that I can see what my weblog looks like in that format. You may note I now have a link to “FeedDemon”:http://www.feeddemon.com/ which is the best RSS reader I have found so far and I now have two feeds – one “RSS 1.0 compliant”:https://blog.org/index.rdf and one “RSS 2.0 compliant”:https://blog.org/index.xml. Enjoy!

If you’re wondering what I am talking about, RSS is, “An XML-based format for headline syndication, in which headlines and links to the actual content are made available to other Web sites” (TechEncyclopedia). Interestingly I couldn’t find a definition in the “Foldoc”:http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/index.html tech dictionary or “Whatis.com”:http://whatis.techtarget.com/ which suggests to me this stuff is still not mainstream (though you’d think everyone was using it if you read some weblogs)….

“TypePad”:http://www.typepad.com/ (the all singing all dancing hosted weblog service I mentioned here which comes from the same company that does my weblog software) has now launched and costs $4.95 to $14.95 a month. Looks like Blogger (which has a free option and offers free hosting through “Blogspot”:http://blogspot.com/) gets to keep its market share.

Can’t fault them for trying to tap the “high end” blogger customer though – they have to get money somehow! I would rather buy it outright when Moveable Type Pro becomes available – though that depends how they price it…movie film dialogue scriptsmovie free porngirl next door movieguidelines ratings movieicon gifs moviewallpaper poster moviemovie poster running matessoundtrack romeo juliet moviemovie stripslut movie teacheroutstanding miss 2006 teenmodels teen abercrombieaj sex tapeanalysis alchemistfree porn beastiality 100alex teensex video blogs adult amatuerblogs porn amature Map

The new version of ICQ Lite can now also send messages to AOL and AIM users. Pity it’s the “lite” version and not the “Pro” version. I hope they update “Pro” to do that too – it might be what I need to make me ditch Trillian.

ChefMoz is a clever idea but a little under-cooked at present. Looking at the London section it has 172 restaurants listed and categorised (out of c. 10,000 available restaurants) and just 24 reviews linked – the Paris entry has 226 entries and 31 reviews. The search engine is pretty limited in its ability to use the categories that have been input. Nonetheless, it is an idea that deserves to go far and I hope it gets developed a little more. If you want to know where to eat in, say, Afghanistan (where conventional restaurant guides may fail to cover you) dmoz may have the answer one day – right now it just has one review.

The main existing London restaurant guides I used to rely on online – Zagats, the Evening Standard and Time Out – all now charge to use them.

Thanks to Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka for the link

The impressive state of Mozilla (the browser I prefer at present) is a little less impressive when you think 1) of the length of time it took to produce a good enough release (time enough for Microsoft to grab 96% of the market) and 2) when you realise that Netscape and later AOL were giving the open source software substantial support by employing programmers to work on it as well as on Netscape its commercial cousin.

Recently AOL announced it is ceasing development of Netscape and is giving the Mozilla Foundation a $2m severance package. So will Mozilla be able to keep forging ahead as an unfunded open source project or will it gradually wither and die? I certainly hope it will continue to go from strength to strength but this will be a pretty interesting test of the open source model.lesbo movies freefree lolita porn moviesredhead free movies pornclips gangbang moviessex samples movie gaygirls in gagged bound moviessex clips hardcore moviestars hot moviemovies kung fumovie lesbian strapon

It still doesn’t work too well. “Only 7.4 percent of online consumers who noticed these systems said they often purchased recommended products, according to a report issued in February by Forrester Research. About 22 percent said they found the recommendations valuable, and about 42 percent said the products listed were not of interest.”

I posted about a Wall Street Journal article on this subject earlier which pointed out such problems can be not just annoying but dangerous.movies view pay permovies pedomovie the poison ivyreality movie teensample shemale moviemovies sapphic extasysapphic incest moviesmovie shemale trailersstreet racing movieshardcore teen movies freeringtone 2.99index ringtones polyphonic 3510iringtone blackberry download 7100itaste a of ringtones honey6256i ringtone nokiaa680 ringtonesmyx free ringtone sagem 2nokia free 3570 ringtone cricket Map

RealVNC is a handy open source tool that allows people with a wide variety of different kinds of computer to view and control the screen and keyboard of a machine from across the Internet. It does the same kind of job as PC Anywhere but it costs nothing and it is small and very easy to install. Windows XP Professional can do this too but RealVNC works on anything from Windows 95 upward and 39 other operating systems!

I found it very useful when I wanted to help my Dad 3000 miles away sort out computer problems. Thank you AT & T Research and the University of Cambridge!