philcrissman.com

There is a “social search engine” called wink.

It looks pretty cool, though I have yet to investigate its nooks and crannies.

Some might ask, why is someone so hostile to “web two-point-oh” linking to a website that fits the mold to a “T”?

Easy; I don’t like the hype and the buzzword itself. Some of the actual websites and tools associated with it, however, are way cool.

UPDATE: I had originally made a connection between wink and hoodwink’d. I can find no corroboration of this, however, and upon further reflection, it doesn’t make much sense.

I — and probably everyone else who’s ever written about Linux — have commented before on the perrenial Linux article which seems to be found over, and over, and over, in magazines or their online counterparts. It’s that ubiquitous article which reappears year after year, and the theme is always the same: Linux, and whether or not it is “ready”.

To be fair, there are many variations on this basic theme. Viz:

• Linux is ready for the desktop
• Linux is not ready for the desktop
• Is Linux ready for the desktop?
• Why isn’t Linux ready for the desktop yet?
• [This year] is the year of Linux on the desktop
• [Next year] is the year of Linux on the desktop
• Linux will never be ready for the desktop
• Linux: almost ready for the desktop
• …

You get the idea.

Which brings us to the seminar I attended this morning. Put on by Novell and sponsored by a host of partners (including IBM, Intel, and yes, Oracle — though I was not there in any capacity connected to the sponsorship), it was a presentation of SLED 10 and SLES 10 (desktop and server, respectively) and some of their cooler features.

The theme?

Your Linux is ready.

Well, now. That’s a good theme, if you can back it up. I think they did a reasonable job; so here’s why.

The whole open question of whether Linux is or is not “ready” begs at least two other questions (if not more): Ready for what? and Ready for whom?

To their credit, Novell has tried to answer both of these questions with the words the enterprise. That is, the “who” they are aiming at is the business world; therefore, the “what” that Linux needs to be ready for is whatever the business world is trying to do with their desktops and servers. That’s a pretty broad, catch all statement, but it more or less describes what they have tried to do. I’m going to stop short of saying they’ve succeeded 100% (I don’t think I’d be willing to agree unless I had made a large deployment of some kind), but they’ve done pretty well.

Then, of course, there is the Obligatory Viral Mascot.

One of the presenters actually used the word “viral” to describe the samurai mascot. I realize that making something viral has been a real and reasonable goal of marketers in this era, but I’m not sure you can proclaim something viral just because you want it to be. But for what it’s worth, here it is. Viral (well, I am sharing it…)? You decide.

Coming off the heels of that, Your Linux is ready almost seems to be saying Your Linux is ready to slice you in half. ;-) (NOTE: for a viral mascot, he’s sure hard to find on the Novell site… anywhere.)

What I haven’t said is that the desktop presentation was great. While Xgl/compiz was easily the most impressive thing shown (okay, xen virtualization was pretty cool), another thing I learned was how to get all the “extra” compiz features you may have seen in some of the videos of Xgl/compiz in action. You’ll want to begin at compiz.net — have fun.

Exhibit A: amd.streamload.com. It offers several packages, but the free package offers 25GB of storage space, and fairly reasonable download limits (that is, you can store 25GB, but you can only download 1GB a month).

Exhibit B: GDrive speculation (more speculation), and the success of just about everything Google has ever released.

The AMD/Streamload product is a no-brainer — I signed up right away. Even if I don’t need it right now, the ability to store 25GB of stuff online is just too good to pass up.

So, who wants to place odds on how long it will take for Google to enter this space and blow them away? The idea seems (to me) to fit right in with Google’s mission and product lines. As noted above, it’s even been speculated about quite heavily, and quite recently. I’m reminded of one of Paul Graham’s comments on the Kiko affair:

The best solution for most startup founders would probably be to stay out of Google’s way.

I’m a pragmatist, in most things. I fully expect Google to come out with something in this space, I’m pretty certain it will be better, and I expect to use it. Sorry, AMD.

So del.icio.us is three.

Not only that but they have added the concept of friends; by added I really mean, I have just noticed it. ;-) This is because they linked to it in the birthday post, of course, but for all I know this feature’s been around for awhile.

This is actually a concept I’ve been thinking about for awhile. I abandoned digg awhile back as useless, and have now abandoned reddit as well as it’s become too political (ok, I’ll be honest — too political in that I don’t like the prevailing winds of reddit’s politics. Therefore I don’t care to read it). Slashdot is still a constant, and del.icio.us/popular is always usually interesting.

But what I’ve been wanting is a way to combine the MySpace concept of a “friends” network with the del.icio.us concept of bookmarks. It seemed like this would be an easy way to share what I’ve found interesting online (since I don’t always want to explicitly link to every single thing I read), as well as to see what other more-or-less like-minded folks have found interesting. I have even contemplated building such a thing as a small PHP project (the choice of PHP might deserve a post some other time — nothing profound, just some observations on ubiquity) — however, my noticing this feature in del.icio.us would render this particular itch scratched, and would probably cause me not to bother with this project.

If people begin to use it, I would think that this feature would combine the best features of MySpace’s “friends” (while avoiding the MySpace ugly-pages-syndrome) with the convenience and current feature set of del.icio.us.

My del.icio.us bookmarks can be found under phil.crissman; if you are a del.icio.us user and a reader, feel free to add me to your network; I’d happily reciprocate, since I’d most likely be more interested in what you’re looking at than what the reddit/digg/etc swarm are looking at anyways…

This no-more-blogging thing is working out quite well. For some reason deciding to quit for awhile made it that much easier to write. Is that weird, or what?

In my new expanse of spare time (you know, now that I’ve stopped blogging for awhile… uh, wait…) I decided to see how good the already-pretty-darn-good SLED 10 can get.

I’ve read some interesting things about the SMART package manager, and seen it featured on a few SuSE-centric sites, so I’ve decided to try it out.

Instructions to install are here.

The way I figure it, I’m going to have to enable more repositories anyways, and it’s always nice to have a slick package manager… if it works. It seems that this one does — or, it’s supposed to.

We’ll see.