/devel

My long term observation: “If you’re looking forward to weekends, then your job might not be right for you.”

It’s been a week with a lot of novelty. I got a new monitor, a nice 21″ LCD and it seemed appropriate to install a more recent, so to speak new, Linux distribution to go with it. I decided for Kubuntu and so far I quite like it.

I’ve been a Linux user for more than a decade, but for last few years I haven’t really used my machine for everyday browsing. One reason were bookmarks accumulated in my powerbook and the other absence of Flash plugin for x86-64 platform. Flash plugin is still missing, but clever folks contrived a way to use the i386 one. Basically you install compatibility libraries and another, 32 bit version of Firefox.

Still, I mostly use the one without a plugin and so far it has certainly been an eye opening experience. Once upon a time sites fell in two categories, those made more or less completely with Flash and others, which didn’t use it at all. I have no idea when this changed, but it’s certainly not true anymore. These days most sites seem to be combination of both approaches.

As with Javascript it can work quite nicely when used sensibly and in an unobtrusive way. However, there are lots of sites like this, which you simply can’t use without Flash. With proliferation of video and widgets, that play ever more important roles, I feel that web is becoming less open with every day.

I probably wouldn’t mind that much if Flash player itself was open (I don’t really care about development tools). Well, when all else fails, you can always hope.

I’ve been following sporadically discussions about opening and sharing social networks’ social graphs. It’s hard to be a user of web services these days and not wish it was easier to recreate network of friends on new ones. Following sporadically means my opinion on subject may be more firm than right. I guess that makes it a perfect blogging material.

Latest article I’ve read on the subject comes from Brad Fitzpatrick, someone always worth listening to. It’s an interesting post and Brad has obviously thought about privacy issues, but there’s one conceptual problem I still don’t see resolved.

It sounds paradoxical, but I don’t think public and private data have an empty intersection. If for some reason you want to have a pseudonymous account on social network cooperating in this scheme, how can you reliably avoid being discovered? If you, for example, use same email address as with other services, then anyone using social graph data can find you out by matching hash values.

The only solution I can think of is to use a different email address, but this is neither particularly scalable and you have to decide upfront about how you intent to use the service. It also won’t work for sites, where you are already registered. There you can only hope you’ll be asked for consent before that data is given out.

Still, I’m more or less convinced that sharing will happen. Current situation is simply to painful for everyone involved (apart from biggest players) to persevere. I just don’t know what the downsides will be to which I’ll have to adapt.

Update: More on the subject from Bill de hÓra. He says exactly what I hope I would be thinking, if I was actually doing the thinking.

I’ve just read Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Heuristics and it’s a great introduction to technics and problems encountered in the field. It didn’t make me an expert, but I can fake one at parties. If you have time and interest, I certainly recommend getting a copy.

I missed one thing. I’ve been thinking and reading about search engines for a while now, as time permits, and the underlying premise of all (known to me) seems to be to find a document that answers your query. What happens if such document doesn’t exist, but the answer can be constructed from multiple sources?

I know this problem has been explored, but being a layman I would welcome at least few pages that described what has been done so far and where to look for more information. Any recommendation for a book or a website that addresses this topic is most welcome.