Articles

Windows Live, that is. Microsoft has found an interesting way to leverage the screen real estate behind the search box on their Live Search site. Similar to Ask.com, they have placed skins on the search page… with a twist. As shown in the screen shot below, when the page loads, four boxes appear on the picture and then fade away. Mousing over those “hot spots” provides a tool tip with information related to the activity in the picture shown. Clicking on the box will take you to web pages with further research on the topic, or to search results on the topic. I have heard several opinions on this feature and all have been critical claiming that it is useless, distracting, and will not generate many, if any, clicks. I beg to differ. While Ask.com’s skins do nothing more than place a picture behind your search box – the feature is fluff and does not work if you turn on AskEraser to search privately – Live Search at least does something with that picture and makes it functional. This functionality is not required, but at least gives some meaning to the picture shown. It adds context to some beautiful photographs. I think it is intriguing, and I like learning more about what is going on in a picture that catches my attention. It’s like having your own personal tour guide. Even better, I can choose to ignore it and search as usual if I don’t have time to dilly-dally. It is unobtrusive. It looks like the feature has disappeared from Live Search, unfortunately. It has been replaced with a static photo showing highlights from the Olympics with a standard caption. Not that highlights from the Olympics are a bad thing. Quite the opposite. I just hope the aforementioned feature comes back once the games are over. There are still times when I simply prefer the plain, blank, minimalist simplicity of Google, too. It all depends on my mood. Microsoft may have received a lot of feedback that the hot spots were not well received, or perhaps traffic numbers indicated that the feature went largely unused. Whatever the case may be, we may never see the hot spot feature on Live Search again, and I think that’s a shame. ...

Perform a Google search for “sed” and the top result will be “Sed - An Introduction and Tutorial”. Bruce Barnett has written an excellent document that will help you quickly get up to speed using sed. It’s a must read for systems administrators who want to learn it. Sed is short for Stream EDitor. It is an application that allows you to write a script to edit a file and provide a file name to be modified ((More about sed can be found on the Sed FAQ )). It is frequently used for quick global substitutions. Along with sed, awk is another tool that should be in your Unix tool box. Lucky for us, Bruce has also written a a guide to awk. He has written several other tutorials on Unix shell programming which can be found on his site ...

(via allovertheInternet) Consumption is a way of life in the United States of America. Whether it be food, drink, or the latest gadget to splash across the wide-screen, plasma, high-definition television screen, people of all walks of life are called upon to open their wallets to keep the economy strong. It is a lifestyle. In the midst of this lifestyle, the iPhone has risen to the top of the heap as the gadget icon of the year for 2008. If you’re anybody, then you’ve got an iPhone and you flaunt it. The problem is that almost anyone can afford an iPhone thanks to the price drop that accompanied the release of the 3G version earlier this summer. So how do you stand out in the crowd if the entire crowd has an iPhone? Well, if you aren’t fabulously wealthy, but just mildly rich, Armin Heinrich has just the application for you. It’s called “I Am Rich”, and it will cost you a paltry $999.99 USD. The author describes his application. ...

It is quite possible that We missed a lot of interesting online articles before the advent of RSS. Either that, or We spent large amounts of time perusing web sites and online magazines and newspapers to the detriment of productivity and our eyes. I honestly cannot remember what i did before RSS. Whatever the case may be, the simple syndication pointed me to the On Language column in the New York Times Magazine online for this week. The column is usually written by William Safire, but this week a guest columnist took over while he was on vacation. In the article titled “Me, Myself and I”, Caroline Winter discusses the capitalization of the pronoun “i” and how it has come to be common practice to use the “all-purpose capital” in written English. The article is an interesting read and a quick one, too, coming in at just under 800 words. What compelled me to mention it was this statement from Caroline. ...

Today, i happened upon a really extensive and well-written article on URL Rewriting for Beginners. Here’s a little snippet from the introduction. URL rewriting can be one of the best and quickest ways to improve the usability and search friendliness of your site. It can also be the source of near-unending misery and suffering. Definitely worth playing carefully with it - lots of testing is recommended. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that. ...

Do you ever find yourself in the middle of a muddle wondering how exactly you got there? Do you sometimes forget to look around at the world as you pass through it? I do, too. That’s why, as I’ve mentioned before, I carry my copy of Curious George with me. It is a reminder that we need to pursue curiosity in order to achieve goals. But that’s not all curiosity does. It maintains your sense of wonderment, as well. When was the last time you looked up at the sky, or even just off into the distance? Not a glance, mind you – a real perusal of the horizon. If it has been more than a day, then get up right now and walk outside for a few minutes and take a look around. Go on. I’ll be here when you get back. ...

(via Open Culture) The YouTube video is called “Tsunami Surfing”, but it’s really Mike Parsons catching an absolutely monstrous wave (66 feet!) at Cortez Bank, California. Check it out.

The other day, I [tweeted](http://twitter.com/Ian W. Parker/statuses/870689024) a quote by Henry David Thoreau from Walden. It reads I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.With that in mind, I started to think about the challenges we encounter in our lives and the goals that we set for ourselves. For many people, much time is spent addressing the obstacles placed in their way. While doing so, they fail to recognize that they may be missing out on attaining their dreams and aspirations. [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“458.0”] Walden Pond[/caption] ...

Last week, I wrote about Google’s newest online product, Knol. Since it is a Google property, the world took notice and immediately began examining it. It seems that Aaron Wall has uncovered not so much a flaw as a bias in the way Google handles Knol articles. In his testing, he found that even though his original content was on a Google PageRank 5 page hosted on an authoritative site (Business.com) that has been around for years, the Knol article with the same content ranks first on a search. ...

Unnecessary Knowledge (via Big Contrarian) Forty percent of Americans iron their clothes while wearing their underwear or being completely naked. Wow. I would think there would be a lot of accidents related to ironing. Amount of unnecessary knowledge in the database: 101. Not a lot of knowledge just yet, but you can always upload some unnecessary knowledge.