Technology: May 2004 Archives
Last week when I entered my hotel room and switched on the light, the TV turned on and showed me a welcome message explaining how to use Pay TV. First I did not pay any attention to this screen, and I started unpacking my bags. When I passed the TV for about the fifth time, I suddenly saw something I did not notice before. On the top of the screen I could see a blue bar with some letters below it. I was amazed. The welcome message was simply a text file written in Write, and the whole system appeared to be running Windows 3.1!!!
It has been a long time ago since I last saw Windows 3.1 in use. I thought that everybody had already switched a long time ago to Windows 9x, but it seems that there are still some of these legacy systems around. Surely the system is running good enough, so why change it?
The radar is a handy and necessary tool in the aviation business. A long time ago, when there was not much trafic, there was no need for a radar; for the people in the control towers it was enough to have visual contact with the airplane the moment it arrived. But as trafic increased more sophisticated systems were needed. Nowadays all incoming and outgoing planes appear on the radar screens, unless they fly too low.
Exactly the same is happening on the internet. Ten years ago, it was easy enough to surf the few interesting sites on a weekly basis. But as the internet grew and more sites started to publish more material, this became a kludge. I am interested in the content of about 100 sites, which I try to read on a regulary basis. Some of these sites publish daily news, some of them are only updated once a month. Four years ago I had my bookmarks ordered by update frequency: I had a folder called 'daily' which contained sites I tried to visit on daily basis, etc. But as the number of sites increased, it became undoable to keep on visiting all those sites.
So I started using the internet equivalent of the radar: feed readers. Most sites publish their content in several formats. Besides the usual HTML pages, many sites also publish their news in a short format as RSS or Atom. My feed reader fetches those so-called feeds every X minutes, and notifies me when a site has been updated. This saves me a lot of time! But there are still many sites flying under the radar. Sites that do not provide feeds, sites which I still have to visit manually, many times only to find out that nothing has changed. I found out that I am visiting these sites less and less. They are about to dissapear from my screen, I simply do not have the time to keep on visiting them.
And I am not the only one. Many people read the texts of this site through a feed reader, and even more use my feeds to see whether I updated my site. So webmasters: don't fly under the radar, but give your readers the option to use feed readers!
Here is a short manual on finding products and services on the internet. I found this method when I was looking for SyncML servers. A quick google on several keyword combinations did not result in the product I was looking for, but using the method described below I found what I wanted:
- Write down exactly what you are looking for, and why you are looking for it;
- Publish your writings on the internet, and make sure your page uses Google AdSense;
- Wait a day, and visit your page. Notice the advertisements placed by AdSense;
- ???
- Profit!
Why does AdSense give better results than a normal search? I guess the reason is that AdSense works in a reverse way. In a normal search I enter a few keywords, and the engine returns me a zillion of results. AdSense analyses the whole text, and returns only a few results. Of course I tried to paste the whole text in a normal Google search, but I found out that Google has a limit of only 10 keywords. Another reason for the better performance is that AdSense has a very limited database, containing almost exclusively commercial products and services.
SyncML is an XML standard for synchronizing data between devices. The most common use for it is to create back-up copies of your cellphone data, or even synchronise it with your desktop PIM.
I want that too! The user manual of my phone describes how I can set up synchronisation to store a copy my data on the Siemens web site. But... it did not work. After looking in every corner of the Siemens site, I came to the conclusion that they only support SyncML for some countries, and Spain is not one of them. Also on the site of my provider Movistar I could not find anything about SyncML.
In the mean time I read a little bit more about SyncML, and came to the conclusion that it is a very simple XML based protocol. Besides that, I figured that the average cellphone has a maximum 5Mb of data, so it must be very cheap to set up a SyncML server. My friend Google showed me some companies offering SyncML accounts, but they charge the same amount that I pay for hosting this whole site!!!
Mmm, maybe I can find some software that I can install on my own server. Once again I asked my friend Google, and he offered me two solutions: Sync4j is a Java based solution, which requires setting up a Java server (JBoss or Tomcat). I run Apache, and I prefer to use a solution that also uses Apache.
The second option is a PHP solution with a mySQL back-end. That sounds a lot better! I quickly set up the database and installed the script. But my phone could not synchronize. :-( I assume that my phone uses the binary WBXML format, which is not yet supported by the script...
What next?
[Update 2004.05.12]: I found a free service where I can store my calendar en addresses: Mobical. It is a pitty that they do not support notes and tasks yet, but at least I can backup my address book. Now all I have to do is find a SyncML plug-in for Palm Desktop, and I will be the happiest mobile user in the world!
Do you recognise this:
You are at your office, browsing the internet to solve a specific problem. You open some pages looking for the right clue, and suddenly you see an interesting story, explaining how you can manipulate HotMail to send passwords of other users to you. It is not related to your current search, but you would like to read it over quietly at home --- you already imagine using this trick to fool some friends who stubbornly keep on using HotMail...
What I always did in these situations was send the URL by e-mail to my personal e-mail address. Other people post them on their site, and use Google to retrieve them, but I am not that advanced yet.
Anyways, I haven't been satisfied with this solution for a while, so I was full of joy when I found the Bookmarks Synchronizer for FireFox. I configured this little add-on to grab a file from my FTP server when starting FireFox, and to write the changes to this file when closing FireFox. Now I only have to maintain one single bookmarks file, which I can use at all my computers!
