"The Web Library: Building a World Class Personal Library with Free Web Resources - "This impressive compilation is the web companion to Nick Tomaiuolo's new book. ... you're VERY likely to discover many new gems." [ResourceShelf]

The Post-Google Generation is a TR (Technology Review: MIT's Magazine of Innovation) blog entry updating their excellent article in March 2004 on Search beyond Google (subscribers only). Some interesting points of the original article are:

• It's easy to switch engines, so the competition to be best is intense. Google employs more than 60 PhDs.
  
• There is little infrastructural advantage to perpetuate dominance at Google, but watch out for what Microsoft could do - building search into the operating system, and searching across your hard drive, email, intranet, and the web.
  
• Google uses PageRank.
  
• Teoma uses a page's standing among recognized authorities on a topic.
  
• There is open-source work on search, e.g. Doug Cutter.
  
• About a quarter of users don't find their answer in the first set of links returned. That sounds pretty good to me.
  

ResourceShelfPLUS from Gary Price (Library & Internet Research Consulting) is an excellent log of research and patents on information retrieval, especially in the WWW context.

WWW2004 Preliminary Program Sessions: This conference at the New York Sheraton May 19-21, 2004 opens with a plenary session by Tim Berners-Lee.

IBM Offers Pre-loaded SuSE Linux On All Servers: "A day after rival Red Hat announced it had struck a deal with IBM to pre-load its Linux on one line of the computer maker's servers, Novell said it had reached a much broader agreement with IBM to pre-install its SuSE Linux Enterprise Server on all IBM server hardware. IBM will now pre-load SuSE's Linux on all its servers at customer request, including the eServer iSeries, pSeries, xSeries, and zSeries lines, as well as IBM's eServer BladeCenter systems. Previously, both Red Hat's and SuSE's arrangements with IBM meant that, while customers could custom order Linux with new servers, the operating-system software was actually shipped separately by the Linux distributors for customers to install themselves. "

Linux On The Desktop: "HP will offer SuSE's Linux Professional on select Compaq desktop and laptop systems sometime in the second half of the year."

"The bulk of demands by [HP's] largest customers are in relatively specialized areas. 'They're talking about call centers, help desks, and support centers that run E-mail and a Web browser and a single application,' said Martin Fink, HP's VP for Linux. 'They're looking for a client alternative [to Windows]. That's where the interest is right now in the large corporate customers.' "

"[RedHat] 'have made the decision to not pursue the client market at this time. From a desktop and laptop perspective, then, Red Hat is a null set,' he said in explaining why HP turned to SuSE instead. "

Novell acquired SUSE in January.

"With analysts predicting annual growth rates for Linux on the desktop in the 25% to 30% range, HP sees an opportunity, and won't let its competitors--Sun and IBM, especially--get the jump on it. ... Earlier in the day, Novell said it had reached a broader agreement with IBM to pre-install its SuSE Linux Enterprise Server on all IBM server hardware. IBM will now pre-load SuSE's Linux on all its servers at customer request, including the eServer iSeries, pSeries, xSeries, and zSeries lines, as well as IBM's eServer BladeCenter systems."

Web Services Journal | The Future Net Will Be Chinese, Japanese, and Korean...Not Just English: "The biggest technical challenge facing the non-profit corporation with authority over systems that connect computers to Web sites, ICANN, isn't security....it's localization - i.e., what to do as non-English languages become incorporated into the infrastructure of the Internet."

Online gamers: They aren't who you think they are: "If you envision a teenage boy when you hear the words 'computer gamer,' think again."

Wireless Froogle: Never wonder if you paid too much again. If your cell phone supports the WML wireless protocol, you can use Froogle to search for products anywhere your phone can access the web.

Microsoft's Bid to Settle Case in Europe Fails: "A ruling against the company, if upheld in court, could mean a fine of as much as $3 billion. More important, it could force the company to make fundamental changes in the way that it sells software in the European Union, the world's largest trading bloc, where Microsoft now generates about a third of its $11 billion in annual global sales from Windows." It would be a great step forward if Europe can drive some change. It seems every bright idea these days lives in fear that Microsoft will decide to make that idea part of Windows, ending innovation and competition in that space.

Good procedures for using our Athena library software: from Cobb district schools: Athena Support Board and OPAC project information.

From a Comcast newsletter today:

What’s The Danger?

As a parent, there are two things to be concerned about with the Internet: things you don’t want your kids to see and people you don’t want your kids to meet.

If you’ve spent any time surfing the web, you’ve no doubt stumbled onto sites with kid-inappropriate content. Even an innocent search on common terms that children might use (e.g. Barbie, White House), can lead directly to adult content.

In the early days of the web (just five years ago!), this problem was solved with the installation of “blocking” software. Blocking software does its job by maintaining continually updated lists of “bad sites,” and preventing an Internet browser from visiting any site on the list.

That worked well way back when, however with an estimated 3 billion web sites on the Internet today, it’s no longer possible to keep the lists updated.

Today, protection from inappropriate content is done mostly with a “filtering” approach. Rather than simply blocking certain sites from a list, “intelligent filters” look for combinations of words, phrases, patterns and even images, and deny access to sites on a real time, case-by-case basis as a child browses.

Filtering software isn’t perfect - some bad things will be missed and some legitimate sites will be erroneously blocked - but it’s a lot better than having nothing in place. With that in mind, my first recommendation is that you do as we did and purchase a commercial filtering software product. There are many available, and most are easy to install, simple to use, and relatively inexpensive (around $40 each). A few examples are CyberPatrol, CyberSitter, NetNanny and Weemote.Net.


Parental Supervision is the Key

When it comes to protecting your kids, keep in mind that filtering software is a lot like skateboard safety equipment: necessary but not sufficient! That’s where the parental supervision comes in.

In terms of the second danger - keeping your kids away from potentially harmful people – you need to oversee the Internet as you would a trip to the mall or any other public place. In other words, get involved in managing where your kids are going and what they’re doing.

In our house, we’ve taught our kids a few, simple rules: No sharing of personal information; no arranging of face-to-face meetings with people you meet on the web; and no “aimless surfing” (i.e. no wandering around the Internet without a specific objective in mind, such as research for a school project).

We also take it one step further by keeping the kids’ computer right smack in the middle of our downstairs family room, so that everything that happens is out in the open.

If you’re thinking of establishing some family rules of your own, take a look at this example put together by the folks at SafeKids.com.


More Resources

...your head may already be spinning from all the options to consider! It’s a big topic, and believe me our family certainly didn’t figure it all out in one sitting.

With that in mind, I’d like to direct you to three exceptional resources for learning about child safety on the web: the Internet Safety Resource page at TechCorps, the Parents' Guide at Yahooligans and GetNetWise, a public service site funded by an assortment of public and Internet industry corporations. All are worth spending time on and all will help clarify the issues and tradeoffs involved.

Journal of Object-Oriented Programming - ADTmag.com: "JOOP was founded in 1987, and continued to publish through the fall of 2001. 101communications and Application Development Trends offer ... here a sampling of some of these key documents from the history of object-oriented programming. Also available are some select items from the highly acclaimed C ++ Report."

YAR2BU2D - Yet Another Reason To Be Up To Date with Microsoft security patches and anti-virus software: Phatbot Trojan Analysis - LURHQ, Washington Post and NYTimes stories.

Economist.com | Wireless telecoms: So where "Wi-Fi provides coverage within a small hotspot, WiMax, which has a maximum range of 30 miles, could provide blanket coverage. It could, as a result, prove to be a far more useful, and disruptive, technology."

Under the heading of interesting but hard-to-find products, I managed to track down (the only two?) manuals for IBM's browser-based admin tooling portal Tivoli Management Portal, based on the Integrated Solutions Console.

I'm working on an Internet Explorer 6 sp1 jscript problem that only occurs on one PC. Same user on a different PC has no problem. It manifests as the yellow "Errors on page" warning in the lower left corner of the browser, with details:

Line: 35
Char: 3
Error: Microsoft JScript runtime error
Object doesn't support this property or method
line = 9, col = 3 (line is offset from the start of the script block).
Error returned from property or method call.
Code: 0
URL: https://booktravel....

It was on Windows 2000, with the latest IE and Windows 2000 security roll-ups MS04-004 (Feb. 2004).

Resolution: reinstall sp1 of IE 6, to force a reinstall of the scripting engine and all the JScript bits. Only outstanding question is whether all the security hotfixes have to be reinstalled?? They appear to still be present in the IE "About" dialog.

And here are some of the fun links I found along the way:

• Windows Explorer - Errors: "EXPLORER caused an error in module..." This looks like a helpful site for resolving Windows Explorer and maybe related IE crashes.
  
• Microsoft's main Internet Explorer site
  
  • Wininet retries POST requests with a blank header. This problem occurs after you apply the Feb. 2004 832894 security update (MS04-004) or the 821814 hotfix.
    
  • Transitioning from the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine
    
• The IE 6 sp1 download site.