“Google, Schmoogle…” are the famous last words of CEO of Telstra, Sol Trujillo. I wonder if he would be as cocky now, with the knowledge that Tangler’s daily usage already out ranks the crown jewel, sensis.com.au. Tangler has been in public beta for a little over a month. Oh, and the cracker is, if you do a search for Tangler on this web -2.0 search engine, the site isn’t even indexed.

_{Alexa Daily Reach – Tangler in blue, sensis.com.au in brown}

At Tangler we got a little excited when we found out that we had been nominated for the WebWare100, in the category of Community. Very quickly, it was realized that clearing your cookies would enable you to submit multiple votes. I had my suspicions as to whether the voting service (hosted by Cnet), only defense against multiple votes, was cookie based. Surely a cookie based system would be easily circumvented with a simple script that fires off HTTP requests.

On further investigation I discovered it was possible to show the current vote count by tweaking the URL. The results for the category of Community show a site called Fark sitting on 52.3% of the vote, followed by Facebook at 9% and Digg at 8%. So clearly Fark have decided to do the wrong thing and rig the results, I don’t blame them, the door was left as good as open.

So what can we conclude from this, is web voting fatally flawed? An improved implementation might incorporate some form of IP address tracking. This approach wouldn’t be without problems as very often voters are hidden behind a NAT where their IP address is shared. Possibly placing an upper limit on the number of votes that are accepted from a single IP address might help.

The bottom line is that a web based vote, that has value bound to the outcome, will always be open to manipulation.

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I ignored Marty’s last tagging, so I’m posting on this one, might be considered rude to ignore twice. The meme is Media Consumption.

Web:

• Email: Gmail for personel stuff, Outlook for work. Gmail is a killer applicaiton, Outlook is an obsese oversized elephant.
• RSS: RSS is great, I’m really happy with Google Reader. It’s doesn’t do comments which is fine by me, as I don’t have time to read all the posts let alone comments. My biggest problem with RSS is that I can’t keep up, so many great blogs, so little time. I can’t bear to ‘mark all as read’, what if I miss a really important discussion.
• Websites: The only websites I bother to browser to are news aggrigators like digg and slashdot and SMH. And Tangler of course.

TV: I literally just sold my trusty of 68cm Sony TV not 30 minutes ago. Mario was purchasing it for his grand daughter for the princely sum of 25 dollars, seems there is no market for over sized cathode ray tubes. My “traditional” television consuption is limit late evening news and lateline, for my political fix of the day. I will probably watch a television series a month, prefer to consume series in large chunks, a couple of episodes in the session. I mostly watch TV on my laptop, sitting up in bed or at my desk minimsied in the corner working on other task.

Books: I consume a couple of books a month, being a public transport guy. Always non fiction, ‘life is too short for fiction’ is my line. I source my books from friends, colleagues and wife and occationally choose a book for myself, piggy backing my wifes incomming semi trailer of books for Amazon. It’s going to be some time, before any device can replace the humble book, they are going to have to reproduce the spell before I switch.

Print: I subsribed to the economist for a coupe of years, it’s a mind expanding read, some really boring article on fiscal policy and some amazing article in the technology quarter. The problem I find with something like the economist is that I feel really bad when I don’t read every article, so to save me the frustration I stop subscribing. Yes I’m 100 perecent serious, is this a recognised condidtion? Strangely enough I often enjoying reading the local paper, keeps me in contact with the local community. I will read the newspaper occaionally on the weekend over some bacon and eggs.

Podcasts: Podcasts are great, will often download them to my iPod and listen on the communte. My big complaint with podcasts is that I want them to be as easy as RSS. Drives me nuts transfering them to the iPod tracking which which podcast I have listened to. It has become so painful that my podcast consumption has wained.

Radio: Alan Jones 2GB over muesli and yoghurt, this is one of my favourite parts of the day.

Movies: Bram Cohen + laptop.

This is an email sent from a techie friend of mine to a non techie (Mokies is me, don’t ask) in our social network. I think it says some interesting about where we are going, if you can excuse my layman statistical anaylsis, by concluding one email is a trend.

Don’t worry, I’m only pimping what Mokies gets me on to… I’m only a dealer, he’s the Mr Big of the whole operation…

Just go to http://www.google.com/reader sign up and start adding subscriptions… They look like on ebay searches (right click on it and copy link location, past it into the add subscriptions doodad in the reader)..

Lots of other webpags have them, although sometimes you have to hunt around a bit…

Get firefox while you’re at it, IE is pants…

RSS rocks because it works, it works so well you want to tell others how useful it is in your web life. The email revolution is the tool of choice to sell the next revolution, RSS. You will know RSS has gone mainstream when you over hear the baby boomers pushing it on their friends at the local cafe, over a Sunday morning coffe.

So I just finshed reading a very insightful post, When Being a Verb is Not Enough by Robert X. Cringely. Robert speculatively predicts that Google’s share price is 8 times too low.

“about $1 trillion in all — which places today’s $500 Google share price about eight times too low”

It got me a bit excited, maybe it wasn’t too late for me to join the Google party and pickup some shares. Without hesitation I fired up etrade to check the stock price only to be presented with the following error. It’s obviously not a good idea to expose the database your running on the backend, because bad guys can then target their attacks to known vendor databases security flaws. What makes me a little mad is that financial institutions are suppose to take security seriously. It’s like the iceburge above the water, if this is what I can see how many security holes are lurking below.

While I might be a little late for Google’s party. I’m content in the thought, that I haven’t missed the Internet’s grand ball, that is still to come.

<alcohol induced post>

It’s been a good year, great year, no complaints from me, loving life in Sydney, Australia. So time to set those new year’s resolutions, which I’ve never taken too seriously, “What sort of loser needs a new year to get their house in order”.

1. Get fit, check, never been fitter.

2. Find true love, check, have a beautiful wife and kids.

3. Do a startup, well it’s on the list, but I’ve made a commitment to Tangler for the moment.

4. Number one search result on Google when searching on Craig Baker, shit, bollocks, “what do you mean I’m number seven”. This is outrageous, I’ve been pushed out of pole postion by some geezer with a F-105 fighter jet web site, complete with midi music. Even Craig Baker’s Marble ranks high than moi. Probably shouldn’t link to these imposters as I’m only adding to their Google supremecy.

So my new year resolution for 2007 is final. I must make number one on Google!

</alcohol induced post>

You don’t think about it until it happens to you. You know what I’m taking about, you’re just conveniently ignoring the implications. Yes, admit it, you’d be screwed if your laptop suddenly gave up the will to live.

It isn’t until it happens to you that your realize just how much of your life is tied up in this little bundle of plastic and silicon. If you’re familiar with the ten tech commandments, then you would know that the first is, ‘thou shall make regular backups’. If you’re not familiar, that’s okay, I just made that up!

A backup will save us from a catastrophic failure, one where invaluable data is lost, permanently. However, a backup will not save us from weeks, if not months of lost productivity. I can’t simply find a new computer take my backup, add water and be back up and running again. What I can look forward to, is weeks of installation, configuration and restoration, as I mold a new machine to behave just for me.

Before beginning this post I intended to list a set of actions that should be taken to resolve this terrible state of affairs. But I don’t think that is going to help, this isn’t a new problem, yet here we are still nailed to the desktop.

Maybe it’s time that we technologist’s stopped trying to create the next modern wonder of the tech world and started trying to fix what we already have.

If we listen to the main stream press, we would know that the Internet is a dangeuos evil place. It’s the tool of terrorist, pedophiles and pornographers so we are lead to believe. Perhaps this entity we have created could have the potential to save us humans. I am the first to admit the scenario that I will put forward is drawing a long bow, but I find it an intriguing idea.

Could YouTube prevent world War III?

Let’s think back to the Pacfic War, World War II. The United States was fighting a evil soulless enemy, the Jap hordes. So propaganda on both sides formed a large part of the opinions formed of ones enemy. My question is how successful would such propaganda be in the year of YouTube. The problem with the internet before the explosion of video is that as an English speaking, reading person I have been limited to English speaking readable content. I postulate that video is the universal language of pixels for lack of a better term.

Lets take a very popular video on YouTube at the moment, a comical game played out in a Japanese library. It’s funny, it entertaining, I don’t have a clue what they are taking about yet I know exactly what they are thinking. Could the internet be the ultimate communicator, if so, could it smashes the cultural walls that humans build. Could this exchange of culture and idea lead to a greater understanding of ones neighbors on this planet? Can a truly global village lead us to true peace?

Is war anything more than the ultimate misunderstanding?

Yes I will acknowledge that this is a gross simplification of the world we live in, and yes the Internets not going to be much good for the majority of the world that doesn’t have access to the ultimate communicator, let along ever made a phone call. But it gives me hope.

If you haven't read about the Web 2.0 shit storm going down at O'Reilly Media, have a read, it's quiet a laugh. Poor old Tim won't be taking another holiday any time soon.

Java has lost the war to capture the desktop. Java 6, code named Mustang, adds some excellent improvements for building Java GUI
application. However, Java on the desktop, will continue only for the development of niche GUI applications.

Martin Wells, states on his blog, “If Sun can solve the JVM startup and memory hog problems (not an easy thing to do) then Java will be a real option for multi-platform client apps”. Reduced memory footprint and speedier boot times would be nice, but it’s just not that big of an issue. Today’s entry level desktop PC contains 512Mb of RAM, more than enough to handle the 50 Mb Java Runtime Environment memory footprint.

Eric Bruno has high hopes for Java 6 on the desktop, in his review. Eric goes on to say that, “Java SE 6 has the potential to be as revolutionary to the desktop as Java 2 was to the server. It’s best to be prepared for this storm now, and position yourself to cash in on the potential rewards available to the early adopters.” As much as I would love for this to be true, it just not going to happen! Let us be serious, are we to expect that Java6’s splash screen functionality and desktop task tray integration is going to trigger a revolution on the desktop.

I argue that Java’s failure on the desktop is rooted in the fact that Java isn’t on the desktop, let me explain.

You don’t need Java 6 to build great Java desktop applications. Java versions 1.4 and 1.5 provide an excellent, fully featured GUI toolkit and has been available for almost 5 years. The Java desktop has proven itself to be very successful in delivering high caliber GUI application for many large corporations, who require custom in house software solutions. These corporations are able to successfully leverage the power of the Java desktop because they have complete control over the client applications desktop running environment. Corporate ‘Standard Operating Environments’, are the key ingredients to this success. It is relatively easy to develop a Java client for a specific JRE. Attempting to create a Java client application, with no guarantee of the installed JRE version, and you will be heading for trouble. It is for this reason, you will not find any successful mainstream client applications written for Java.

I think this exception, sums up Java of the desktop;
java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: (Unsupported major.minor version 49.0)

What does it mean, you might ask? It simply means your java desktop application won’t be running any time soon. The JRE won’t support the compiled byte code, it’s a mess. What if your targeted desktop doesn’t have the JRE installed, the user must download and install, it is just one step to difficult. This is where Java on the desktop, falls over.

So developers waiting for the Rosetta Stone of cross platform GUI development, please don’t hold your breath.