Sex, Drugs, Strawberries, and a New Bubble
You might have read about Cuil, the supposed Google killer which indexes three times as much content as Google does. Too bad it never surfaces anything relevant for me. And have you noticed that the “Search 121,617,892,992 web pages” hasn’t changed in days? Ok, you might guess, they’re not really going to kill Google. Instead I think we’re really re-living some sort of strange bubble at the moment.
First of all, check this out to get an insight into the inner workings of Cuil as a company. That sounds very 1999.
Secondly, working for the largest interactive agency in the world™, I’ve seen a lot of requests for proposals from a lot of companies that all want to build video search portals. That seems to be the next big thing. There are a few cool players out there, Truveo is one of them. Select sites are trying to index the videos by scene detection and voice recognition software in addition to standard metadata.
A lot of players want to build similar portals all of a sudden. Unfortunately there aren’t any really viable off-the-shelf search engine technologies you can buy to do this right. If I look at FAST Search, which is still one of my favorite engines and happens to be owned by Microsoft, they have a multimedia search add-on I want to evaluate soon (yet I’m told not to get my hopes up). I think sophisticated video search portals will be limited to a very few capable players that can invest in the technology themselves and have the proper funding for the R&D and necessary server farm required to parse through all video on the web.
And just to round off the argument, I am surprised at how many of these projects don’t have clear business models (Cuil included). It might be cool, but what’s the point if it doesn’t make money? Just because Google can throw money at 15 technologies to get one out of it that works doesn’t you should.
Anyhow, I think we’re in the middle of a (video) search bubble and it’ll be very interesting to see which players emerge from it as leaders!
Ode to M0n0wall
About half a year ago I bought an Alix 2C3 embedded system board. It’s got a 500 MHz Geode CPU, 256 MB of RAM, a mini-PCI slot (for a wireless card), 3 network interfaces, and a compact flash slot (CF-card as hard drive). It’s running m0n0wall, a free FreeBSD-based firewall software and is essentially the entry point into my home network. I had looked at other alternatives such as pfsense, yet I found m0n0wall convincingly simple and to the point. And it boots up fast from a 256M flash card.
I used to rely on a Linux box to provide my basic network needs like DHCP and DNS and every time I rebooted the box my network stopped working. This little dedicated box is not running all of it. With the three network interfaces I created LAN, DMZ, and WAN zones. The LAN is hooked up to my Linux server and wireless (for the iMac and laptops), the DMZ is connected to a virtual machine on the Linux server which is basically my public-facing web server (Ubuntu!). The WAN is directly hooked up to the cable modem.
Let’s look at some of the features that have led me come to adore m0n0wall:
- Web-based admin interface with user management capabilities
- DNS relay
- DHCP Server (much more configurable than a standard wireless router)
- Firewall and NAT rules (stateful packet filtering)
- Traffic Shaper (which I use to throttle the traffic on my public web server)
- VPN (PPTP and IPSec) – I just love VPN-ing in to my home network from work
- Logs, debugging support, and live traffic graphs
- Dynamic DNS integration (e.g. with DynDNS in my case)
Here are some fun screenshots:
 Intro Screen |
 Firewall Configuration |
 Traffic Graph |
Related Links: M0n0wall | Alix Boards | M0n0wall traffic shapping
Site Update!
The upgrade to Wordpress 2.6 wasn’t quite as seamless as it should have been but everything seems to work fine now. I further decided to go for a new – clean and simple – theme which is now optimized for 1024×768 – more content! Learn more about all the new features in Wordpress 2.6.
This site now also has a mobile version (just point your phone at it) thanks to the wordpress mobile plugin. I also integrated Twitter. Or, in web 2.0 talk: this is so like totally awesome :)
Jangaroo
My former colleagues at CoreMedia decided to release their Javascript cross-compiler, Jangaroo, as open source. The tool takes Javascript 2 / ActionScript 3 and translates it into browser-compatible JavaScript 1.x, allowing the developer to write the scripts in a much nicer — and more object-oriented language.
Here’s a sample JavaScript 2.0 class:
package net.jangaroo.example {
/**
* A simple example demonstrating how to receive and return typed arguments.
*/
public class HelloWorld {
/**
* Returns a personalized greeting.
* @param name name of the person to greet
* @return String a personalized greeting
*/
public function greet(name : String) : String {
return "Hello, " + name + "!";
}
/**
* Returns a personalized and HTML-escaped greeting.
* @param name name of the person to greet
* @return String a personalized and HTML-escaped greeting
*/
public function greetHtml(name : String) : String {
return this.greet(name).replace(/&/g, "&").
replace(/</g, "<");
}
}
}
Once translated with the cross-compiler, you can import the classes into your HTML and use them:
<script type="text/javascript" src="joo/Class.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="net/jangaroo/example/HelloWorld.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
// asserts that all required classes have been loaded
joo.Class.complete();
// instantiate the example class
var helloWorld = new net.jangaroo.example.HelloWorld();
// button onclick event handler
function sayHello() {
// grab the input and output elements
var outputDiv = document.getElementById("output");
var inputField = document.getElementById("nameField");
// call the #greetHtml method of the HelloWorld class, and output the return value
outputDiv.innerHTML = helloWorld.greetHtml(inputField.value);
}
// ]]>
</script>
Check it out on jangaroo.net.
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