LarryRoth.net

Secondly, and this is certainly a hidden feature within Mac OS X, when you Command-click on the top-right-hand button which appears in windows, you can set the toolbar’s icons and text to different sizes and combinations.

I have been working on setting up new project management processes in our company and one of my colleagues passed along a link to Trac. After playing around with it for a couple days, I must say that it is quite an impressive app. It's easy to setup (apt-get in Debian), easy to tweak (via it's command line admin tool and even by tweaking the python based templates and code), and easy to use.

Trac combines a Wiki, bug tracker, and Subversion source repository browser in one Web app. It's a nice mix of keeping project knowledge in one place as well as viewing and managing changes. I really like the simplicity and customizability of the tickets in the bug tracker.

Not only is initial setup a breeze, but ongoing project setup is easy as well. I was able to quickly add a perl script that not only setup the Trac project--with our particular customizations, but also created the source repository, and added the Trac project to the Apache config file.

If you are looking for project management support for your software projects, you should check it out.

Ebrahim Ezzy and Richard MacManus over at Read/Write Web put together a nice summary of Search 2.0 and how it compares to traditional search. They define Search 2.0 as the third generation search technologies and that they are:

...designed to combine the scalability of existing internet search engines with new and improved relevancy models; they bring into the equation user preferences, collaboration, collective intelligence, a rich user experience, and many other specialized capabilities that make information more productive.

In their post—which by the way is part 1 of a 2-part series—they examine 5 different Search 2.0 companies. They point out a key feature of each and also compare it to traditional search (e.g. Google).

What was interesting for me is that when I went to try the search engines they mentioned, 2 of them were down, 2 required a setup process, and several of them were simply returning Google results with their own "value add", such as clustering.

Does having to train a search engine or relying on an unknown communities' rankings really further search? I have always felt that technology should help automate things for us, not require more effort on our part. The lure of Google was—and is in my opinion—the simple page with only one thing to do, enter a search term. And you could be reasonably certain that you would find the information you wanted within the first couple result pages.

I must admit, I did like some of the added functionality in Clusty—although as part owner in a Branding firm, it feels wrong to mention anyone named Clusty.

I noticed a couple of comments to the post with which are worth highlighting:

• ...I think the people that want all this Search 2.0 nonsense are the people having trouble coming up with a comprehensible list of phrases to describe what they're talking about...
• Part of being a good search is... uptime! (and speed).

An interesting news item disclosed a discussion between Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and the Director of Search at Google, Peter Norvig. Mr. Norvig presented what he felt are very tangible road blocks to the usefulness of the Semantic Web. His concerns are:

• Incompetent content providers
• A lack of support for standardization
• Deliberate deception[1]

These are all valid points, and specifically, I think we are already seeing quite a bit of deception. Some content owners deliberately provide false metadata in order to improve their ranking. Tag spam and keyword stuffing are just a couple examples of this.

What was Berners-Lee's response? He feels that the Semantic Web can increase relevance by identifying the content's originator and why the content can be trusted.[2]

If you are in the market for a new Web server, Sun has announced a new 4U Web server, the Sun Fire x4500 that you may be interested in. WARNING: it is only capable of housing 2 dual core x64 AMD processors and can only accommodate 24GB of storage. Think that will be enough?

Ok, to be fair, it does start at ~$33,000. That's a little more that I paid for our last XServe, but—MAN—it sure looks sweet...