Archive for September, 2004

Google censor results

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 30/9/2004
in Search Engines
. 0 Comments

I used to have a lot of time and respect for Google - their search is cool, super-quick, and the results have never been dictated by advertisers.

Now, however, Google appears to be bowing to pressure because in its recently launched Chinese language version of Google News, Google omits news sources and internet sites deemed inappropriate by the Chinese government from its results.. These include both Chinese and foreign news sites carrying reports that criticise the Chinese government.

This news was broken in a New Scientist article on 21st September 2004.

Google claimed in a response on the 27th of September that, it is not really significant as it is blocking “less than two percent of Chinese news sources” - of course the number is small, what with everyone blocking them and the government actively suppressing them!

Shame on you Google for, not just condoning this activity, but for actively perpetuating this behaviour.

Hacking into photocopiers?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 29/9/2004
in Search Engines
. 0 Comments

Yep, it’s true - I read it on the Internet(!)

No seriously, according to an article on ZDNet, hackers have realised that it is possible to find cached domain information in Google (or your search engine of choice) and thus discover and use login details for networked photocopiers so they can watch what is being copied!

So be wary the next time you are tempted to do naughty photocopies for the office party - you never know who might be watching!!!

Open Office file format to become standard?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/9/2004
in Technology
. 0 Comments

According to an article on Slashdot the European Commission has asked Sun to make the xml file format used in Open Office files into an ISO standard.

This story started back in March when an OpenOffice team and a Microsoft team were invited to present to the European Commission on the relative merits of their XML-based office document formats. In mid-July the EC wrote a formal letter to the participants of the meeting. The letter to Sun contained the following paragraph:

“Transparency and accessibility requirements dictate that public information and government transactions avoid depending on technologies that imply or impose a specific product or platform on businesses or citizens.”

Sun appear to be going to comply with the request - well, they would, wouldn’t they. Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office. It’ll be interesting to see what Microsoft’s response to the request will be.

One computer becomes ten!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/9/2004
in Technology
. 1 Comment

A Canadian based company called Userful has come up with what I think is a brilliant idea - using Linux’ native multi-user abilities to do away with computers! Up to ten separate monitors, keyboards, and users can work simultaneously off the same individual computer box. Think Libraries (Userful’s current market) think schools/universities and think Internet Cafe’s.

The product, called 1-Box, doesn’t have a price mentioned on the website, that I could find, but in a typical internet Cafe scenario, the ability to do away with servers and up to 90% of the PCs should save significant money (and it is good for the environment!).

Not sure if/when there will be a European release - watch this space!

WordPress template

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 24/9/2004
in Technology
. 0 Comments

The new look of this blog comes from a downloadable WordPress template. I had a look around some sites with templates and this site had by far the best WordPress templates I could find.

Importing Blogger postings into Wordpress

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 23/9/2004
in Technology
. 1 Comment

Looking into Wordpress as a blogging tool (in particular, in comparison to Blogger), I came across a page which ships with the Wordpress installation called import-blogger.php in the wp-admin folder.

Logging on to this page you are served instructions on how to do the import. Having a Blogger blog at www.tomandpilar.net/tom/ whose content I wanted in this blog I decided to try it out. One gotcha to watch out for - publish the Blogger archive files to the top level of your Wordpress blog (not into an Archive folder for instance).

It seemed to break the Wordpress blog when I did the import - logging into this blog all you saw was unformatted text, no links, no calendar, nothing. I checked the template and it was fine so I ftp’d into the folder and saw an index.html file which had been copied across! Re-naming this file resolved this issue and now all my blogger IT posts are in this blog too.

Tom Raftery’s Social Media is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!