isearch, the people finder
Lifehacker today posted about a site called iSearch which allows its users to search for people online.
I read the post and I thought “great, there are a bunch of people i’d love to contact”. I went to the site and was a bit bummed that it thought that ‘Sydney’ meant ‘Sydney, FL’ and not ‘Sydney, NSW’ but anyway… The site kinda freaked me out a little bit.
Not only did I find myself on there with incorrect details (I was never the treasurer of Skylines Australia, I was president of the club and owner of the site) but when I noticed that it had a list of ‘Associates of Christian Biggins’ and they were people I knew, I felt a little strange. Sure, it called ‘SAU Cotm’ (Skylines Australia Car of the month) an associate of mine, it still listed real people there. This site knew my friends.
If that wasn’t enough, it offered an email address for me.
When you clicked on the link, it tried to sell you an email address for $1.69. Looking at the address and the strategically placed underscores, it does actually look like one of my addresses. Of course, anybody who actually knows me, knows that a simple google search of my name will bring up a helluva lot more info on me that this site.
But, it got me thinking. Where is this leading? What information of mine will be available to complete strangers (for a price?) in the future. I have always been a bit laid back about my online privacy as I am not an overly private guy to start with, but this has definitely got me thinking. Especially when you have contributed to as much of the internet as I have (and most of the time not using an alias).
Anyway. If you want to know anything about me. Just ask. 
In the meantime, I am going to decide whether I respect iSearch or despise it.
Silly Spammer
For ages I have wondered what the point of some spam messages was. They didnt ask for anything and they did not include a link in the message. I just always thought that it was just some kids thinking they were being funny.
Well, apparently I was wrong. These spammers want you to send them an email so they can try to coax you into sending them money. Sounds silly, like, who would do that? But, as previously mentioned, a lot of people seem to fall for it.
Anyway, I am a pro member on seomoz.org and one of the members of that site decided to reply to a message that most seomoz members received. And, well, read it yourself. Funny stuff.
Code merging. Its awful without good tools.
No developer likes to merge their code in with other code after finishing a big project. Its a royal pain in the ass. I find myself having to do it at work a lot (we have a largish team) and at home because at home, I somehow find that I have 84 copies of the same thing. So, I need to merge them together occasionally to keep things maintainable.
Merging is by far 10 times easier on Linux than windows. Linux is such a good development environment (apart for .net – but then, who uses .net anyway?). I would recommend getting VirtualBox, Fedora (or Ubuntu) and installing them on a windows machine. Even if you only use it for coding, profiling and merging / deploying. Its worth it and takes bugger all time to set up.
I am using Ubuntu on my VirtualBox. I prefer Fedora, but I found it hard to get higher resolutions with it. Anyway, I’m off topic.
Once you create your two directories or files that you need to merge or create a diff for. You can open one of the three programs;
My personal favourite is Meld. There are others out there. If you use something else, let me know about it.
Using one of these apps takes the hard work out of merging. In meld, you can match custom rules (for example, you can match all files in the ‘cache’ directory) and then ignore them.
Then, once your files / directories are merged, you can use something like KDESvn to commit them (if you are not savvy enough with the command line SVN client).
All done. Merged, Committed and time for a beer.
If you are unlucky to be on a Windows machine. No real biggy, but your choice of free clients becomes slim.
TortoiseSVN is the app of choice for interacting with an SVN repo.
Once you have the directories, you can merge them with WinMerge. I do find this app a little lacking. It doesn’t display the files in a heirarchical view, so diffing 10,000 files (which I did yesterday) just lists them all one by one and not within their directories.
I have heard a lot of good things about Beyond Compare but it is not free.
Let me know what you use for comparing, diffing and merging files.
Google Chrome released
After an impatient wait of ohh, say, 24 hrs (that’s when I initially found out about Chrome), Google has released Chrome as a public beta.
My first impressions are; wow!
In the ten minutes I have used this so far, I am already very impressed. You can see the feature list for chrome here. Or, you can view Lifehackers screenshot tour.
I loaded up my site Skylines Australia in Chrome and it loaded like it was a text document. It was so fast. I also especially like the source viewer and the DOM element inspector. Also, its minimal interface and the start page are also huge bonus’. Hell I could keep going, but all the features that I love are on the sites linked above. I’m looking forward to the first stable release.
Thanks Google (even if it is just another way to collect data about me).
Amazing site
I stumbled upon an amazing web site yesterday and I cant help but share it.
There are a few things that I find amazing about this site, the first is the amazing flash navigation that is quite simple but sufficiently complex to make it interesting at the same time. The second thing I love about this site is the level of intimacy you find yourself in with the dad who is the subject of the site. You can connect with him. The photography is amazing and makes it seem as though you have known this man for a long time.
Beautiful site.
PS. You can put your mouse cursor to the top or bottom of the page and click to go up or down, or to go to an ‘index’ mouse over to the left and click.
What does google know about you?
Odds are, everything!
In a recent post about Googles data storage on SeoMoz.org it is revealed just how much data is stored about you by the Internet Behemoth.
Firefox 3 gets a release date.
That's right and we don't have long to wait either. 17th of June. 5 Days away.
Google Doctype
Google has just released 'Doctype' into its sites. Doctype is an html/css/DOM reference in a wiki form. It allows submissions from anyone and includes tests on DOM elements performed in each of the current main browsers (Not including Opera).
I will definately be contributing to this.