This is a follow-on to the first acronym of the day that I posted a while back:

WAG — a wild-assed guess.

I found this one in an article about absinthe in Wired magazine.

Humans are much better at certain tasks than computers; identifying objects in a photograph for example. This is the fundamental premise behind Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. You get paid for helping out a computer! For each Human Intelligence Task (HIT) you complete successfully Amazon credits your account. Interesting idea.

I had a brief look through the list of tasks and most of them involve choosing a photograph from a list that best represents a particular object; storefronts seem to be quite popular. Presumably this has something to do with Amazon’s Yellow Pages service. As well as searching for a particular business you can “walk” down a block and look at the shops that are located there; this probably explains why there are so many HITs involving identifying storefronts.

I gave up building my own computers a while back after a particular nasty incident involving a Windows 2000 installation. Anyway, what I am looking for is a pre-built machine with Linux already installed that I can use as a development server at home. Nothing fancy. I can install the operating system myself having done it many times before, I just don’t have the inclination to do so. I had a brief look at Shuttle but they don’t appear to provide a fully-configured machine. Dell are no good either because I don’t want or need Microsoft Windows.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

Today Microsoft announced a new collection of online applications. It’s live.com. You can view some photos of the event here.

Apparently Gates repeatedly used the term “live software”. If software isn’t live, what is it? “crashing all the time software”?

The site doesn’t work at all in Safari and there’s actually a notice at the top of the page telling Firefox users to be patient as support is coming soon.

I signed up for Windows Live Mail. It’s Microsoft’s new web mail replacement for Hotmail. When I get an invite to the beta release I’ll have a play with it and will post something about it here, assuming I can find a Windows machine of course.

Just a quickie. The best kind of course (I am referring to the short length of this post by the way).

Have you ever wondered where the word “Skype” came from? No, then you probably have a social life. Well I have wondered about the name, being a user of their software, and if you have too, here is the answer.

In a previous post I asked for suggestions about what icon/button would be best to allow the user to subscribe to a feed. Well, I think I have finally come up with an answer: get rid of the orange button altogether. Let the browser do the work. For example, both Safari and Firefox can automatically determine if a feed is available by looking at the HTML. Both browsers display a button informing the user that a feed is available. If you click on it, it displays a rendering of the RSS feed. Nice, but not quite there. If I click on it, I want the feed adding to my existing collection of feeds that I am subscribed to.

Browsers need to support a one-click subscription mechanism. The user clicks on the button, they are subscribed. This doesn’t happen at the moment. Flock has a nice feature that allows you to look at an aggregrated view of all the feeds you are subscribed to instead of just the individual feeds.

Obviously this solution depends on all browsers natively supporting RSS, which at the time of writing they do not. Still, it will happen. It’s just a question of when.

I have just downloaded and installed <a href=”http://www.flock.com”>Flock</a>, a new browser based on Mozilla. It has a built-in editor that allows you to post to your blog. It’s easy enough to configure.

If you can read this, it worked.

[Update: as you can see it doesn’t appear to handle HTML correctly. I typed in the HTML for the link by hand but it appears to have escaped some of the characters. Still, it is only a beta version. Interesting idea anyway. I imagine it would be more useful for managing more than one blog.]

Damn I love TRAMP. No, not the kind that hangs around on street corners asking for spare change but the Emacs extension that allows you to edit remote files locally.

To edit a (remote) file do C-x C-f to open a new file and then type /ssh:<username>@<domain>:<path-to-file>