Colm Smyth's Weblog

Take The Weather With You

It won't do anyone much good when in 20-50 years our scientists can tell our kids and grandkids "we told you so". Slashdot discusses a solid Science Magazine analysis that shows overwhelming concensus among world experts that a near-term risk of catastrophic climate change caused by human activity is a reality.

In a related news item, the US has told a UN conference on global warming that it has no intention of re-joining international efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Thanks guys, it's a pleasure to share the planet with you.

Even more ironically, the only thing that may save us is our declining fossil fuel reserves. Either way, nature will have the last laugh, whether we can laugh along or not may still be in our hands.

(2004-12-07 14:52:50.0) Permalink

WikiNews has arrived

Complimenting the encyclopedic definitions in WikiPedia, WikiNews is a persistent peer-based news media service. Contributors are suggested but not required to use tags that indicate the status of a news item (in development, under peer review).

Between blogs and other peer media, online journals are under increasing pressure to differentiate. It's hard to compete with a good domain-specific journal for writing quality, news accuracy and topic coverage. That said, blogs (and especially RSS feeds) provide a way to get content that is fresh, savvy, opinionated and diverse.

(2004-12-07 12:03:19.0) Permalink

Thunderbirds are go! Confessions of a former Mozilla Mail user

I switched from Mozilla Mail (1.7.3) to Thunderbird 1.0 over lunch; I can't say I've plumbed it's depths but I wanted to offer you some first impressions.

Praises:

flawless install and upgrade experience; perfect import of configuration settings from Mozilla (Outlook Express also supported)
very pretty default look-and-feel (nice skin with toolbar buttons, icons); consistent to Firefox
Mozilla mail was already fast, but Thunderbird feels subjectively even faster: message display seems about 30% faster
the search toolbar allows searches to be on subject, sender or message body; it also uses the edit area to show the current search type
searches can be saved as folders; a saved search can span one or more folders and include multiple criteria
much clearer layout for several dialogs, such as Junk Mail Controls
the preferences menu item follows Firefox's example by moving to Tools/Options, in line with applications like Internet Explorer and StarOffice/OpenOffice.org

Nits:

The toolbar button colours seem slightly out-of-sync with Firefox's palette (especially the reds and blues)
the search folder uses a close toolbar button to return the view to un-filtered mode; I think a checkbox would be clearer
I'd like to see search folders appear under a standard top-level Searches folder for ease of access and to clarify their operation (a delete on a search folder impacts the message in the actual containing folder)

Between Firefox and Thunderbird, the only thing that may keep some users from abandoning Mozilla is Composer; clearly the mail composer includes a HTML editor, but if you want to edit a longer document, you can use OpenOffice.org.

Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org/StarOffice - now that's a killer suite.

Oh, and here are the other Thunderbirds.

(2004-12-07 07:35:07.0) Permalink Comments [2]

A Better BBC

The BBC has a worldwide reputation as a quality provider of tv, radio and internet content, but they plan to tune their strategy to meet revenue targets; the steps are to: reduce and reassign staff, decentralise with more local content, focus on high quality innovative content in their established themes (original journalism, newsgathering and current affairs, original British drama and comedy, children's shows and digital TV).

This seems to be a unique strategy in the English-speaking media world which is trending towards low-quality, repeat, derivative or "reality" content with an excess of advertising. Read more on the summary on the BBC web site.

(2004-12-07 05:33:16.0) Permalink

Out-searching Google? No Worries

A new search company funded by the Chinese government claims they will find more relevant results than Google by using artifical intelligence. I wonder if they plan to use weighted semantic networks?

Interestingly they chose the name Accoona from the Swahili translation of the phrase "no worries"; BTW, OpenOffice.org now has a localisation project for Swahili - cool.

(2004-12-07 05:01:58.0) Permalink

LizardTech choose Java for ubiquity

Another company announced a Java-based product just last night (and is choosing to open-source). LizardTech have created a very efficient readonly file format, particularly for geospatial and document imaging markets. They will develop a thin open-source viewer for this format, using Java to reach the broadest set of platforms. See the article on OSDir for more information.

(2004-12-07 01:52:39.0) Permalink