What solutions exist for centralized searching of distributed web sites, "behind the firewall" ? I am specifically thinking about how centralized searching could be used to integrate multiple K-Log efforts within a single organization. The Google Search Appliance comes to mind, but it could be quite difficult to cost-justify without a larger KM effort and budget (GSA is $28k at the low-end).

MS Index Server is out because it doesn't have a crawler, and I haven't found anything promising on Sourceforge.

9:30:32 PM | Comments:

Mozilla gripes: Can't right-click items in the Bookmarks menu. Middle-clicking in the Bookmarks menu and toolbar doesn't do anything (ought to open a new window/tab).

8:54:18 PM | Comments:

Radio Wish: Date / Time Formatting Options

Radio's date / time macros need to be configurable. For starters, the timestamps in my posts should be configurable to include the timezone and GMT offset. The Internet audience is global, it's natural to expect that many of my readers will be in another timezone and not be aware of which timezone my content was created in.

There are people who want 24-hour times, as discussed here and here.

Months ago, Ingo Rammer pointed out the issues of using Radio to publish an English-language web site from a German version of Windows.

Ideally, Radio would default to using the regional settings as specified by the OS. I don't mean "It's German windows, we'll use German day names." Windows has a "Regional and Language options" control panel that lets the user specify any language and use any format, and there are APIs to handle the dirty work (presumably Mac OS has something similar). Radio should respect those exact settings, and provide an easy way to override them.

TZ offsets are an acknowledgement of the global nature of the Internet. Most Internet RFCs require either offsets or that GMT be used whenever time data is exchanged.

6:01:22 PM | Comments:

Winamp 3.0

I stumbled across Winamp 2.78's Unicode ID3v2 bug the other day, and when I went looking for an update I found that Winamp 3.0 is now available. "Talk about good timing", I thought. Download, install, boy is this thing different...

Marc Pasc (author of Kit) has pointers to a couple of Winamp 3.0 weblog reviews. After a few days with 3.0, I have to say that I don't like it, and am going to downgrade myself to Winamp 2.8. Here's why:

Problem 1: Doesn't support Windows Media Keys

I own at at least five of Microsoft's Natural Keyboards Pro, plus I've purchased a few for friends and family, and every one of those sales is directly attributable to Winamp. These keyboards have a row of 19 buttons at the top, 8 of which are dedicated to multimedia functions (Play, Next/Previous Track, etc).

By not supporting the media keys, I actually have move my mouse to skip some ancient Mariah Carey song that I mistakenly purchased during puberty and still haven't gotten around to deleting from my computer (I have genetic predisposition to pack-rat behavior)... Which brings me to problem two.

Problem 2: Ignores Fitt's law

I've always taken advantage of Winamp's "Window Shade" feature, and leave the windows "docked" to the top of my screen. Under 2.7x, I could "throw" my mouse at the top of the screen and double-click to expand/collapse the window. This doesn't work under 3.0, the clicks are ignored, perhaps treated as clicks on the window's border.

There are minor UI mishaps in a program that is notorious for being a UI disaster, but these represent most of my interaction with Winamp. I'll downgrade to 2.8 with the Winamp XP skin until they are fixed.

If you're the sort to interpret WWJD as What Would Jakob Do, UseItAmp is the skin for you.

Update: One more reason that 3.0 sucks, the "Jump to file" (press the J key) window has been replaced by a search box that can only be used when the Playlist window is expanded. Bleh!

2:27:20 PM | Comments:

Pocket Blog Beta 1 v0.1.5 Released

See the Pocket Blog Download page.

Improvements:

Blogger Users: Pocket Blog probably hasn't been working for Blogger sites for some time. Pyra has been silently breaking from the published Blogger API spec, and while Pocket Blog will happily ignore data that it doesn't understand, the extensions exposed a bug in my XML-RPC handling. If you've been receiving an "Object Required" error message when updating a Blogger weblog, this update should resolve the problem.

6:30:00 AM | Comments:

Grrrr...

Pyra has been silently extending the Blogger API, presumably to support some Blogger Pro features (like titled posts). Why aren't they using the MetaWeblog API, which supports titles and is designed to be extensible? NIH syndrome?

Unfortunately, the changes exposed a bug in the XML-RPC handling for "PocketBlog". If you're a Blogger user, and you've been getting an "Object Required" error message when updating, Pocket Blog v0.1.5 should provide the fix. Hopefully this will be my last release under eVB...

6:00:00 AM | Comments: