WordPress, a popular blogging software package, has been busted helping search engine spammers game the Google AdWords program. Details can be found here. Not a very smart move considering Google owns and runs a major blogging competitor.

The only nice thing I can think of to say is that's it's an interesting technique, but that's about it, because in effect it's just low-down dirty spamming. The company that sets up this sort of opperation pays writers very small amounts of money for articles containing popular keywords. So it's spamming and slave labour all in one neat package.

And all this coming to light just after WordPress hit's 100K downloads. There's some bad publicity they don't need. Especially when Matt Mullenweg, the self described 'founding member of WordPress' and 'most popular Matt on Google' is going to start WordPress Inc. which is suppose to be the new commercial arm of WordPress. Doh!

I can't help thinking of that saying - If it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, it's a @#$&*%^ duck.

Update: Here are some more links in this incident.

It never ceases to amaze me the amount of sites/information on the Internet that you can just miss out on. For example, I have a healthy interest in most things 3D. Whether it be games, virtual environments, applications, you name it, and I'm interested in at least knowing about it, and probably trying it out. So I was a little surprised when I came across Second Life, which appears to be a really good online virtual environment to play around in.

I got wind of Second Life via a blog linking session that was so deep I forgot where it started, but it ended up with me arriving at a blog that's devoted to a person's experiences in Second Life. And then I found another, similar blog. Is Second Life so good that people create blogs about it - but then again, people will create some crazy theme-based blogs.

Anyways, I checked out the Second Life homepage, but it's kind of confusing, and although in the blogs I read the people were hyping SL alot, I started getting a I-don't-know-about-this kind of feeling. For one thing, it's a little hard to get specific details on what Second Life is. The FAQ describes it as;

A 3D digital world imagined, created and owned by its Residents. You can chat, play games, build houses, and go to parties, all with thousands of other people from around the world.

...which sounds ok, or at least as good as any of the other online 3D virtual environments/games - maybe a little different to the average MMORPG

But that's about as technically friendly as the site gets, the rest is left to advert-spiels and graphics. At a $9.99 one time fee for someone with limited access to creating virtual objects, or a $9.99 per month fee for a block of land and building rights, it's a bit of investment to become a fully fledged citizen. I guess I haven't really paid much attention to MMORG & co. because chasing dragons gets a little boring after a while. I once spent a few months in one of the WWII flight simiulations environments, and really enjoyed it, but it was...just a game.

So I'm wondering...does any one know about Second Life first hand. Spent some time in there and created/scripted anything. I gotta be honest and tell you that if it even resembles something like the Metaverse [although a lot more primitive I'm sure], I'd be damn interested it checking it out. Anyone...anyone???

Bits on Wheels is a new BitTorrent client and the first to be written specifically for OSX.

Bits on Wheels is the first 100% Native BitTorrent client for the Macintosh. It is completely written in Objective-C and Cocoa.

Bits on Wheels is currently a Freeware. It is not opensource nor public domain.

So out of all the BitTorrent clients out there that already run on OSX, what is there about Bits on Wheels that should get you interested? You could start with the 3DSwarm view, which gives you that all important graphical view of the peers you are connected to and whether they are givers, receivers or both. Sure you can view this with any peer list provided by all BitTorrent clients, but there's something to be said about graphical representations of data.

Bits on Wheels also provides you with a Pieces view, showing you what blocks of the file(s) you have received.

All in all it's a nice start to a good BT client. It's only a preview version at present and some features like torrent creation are still not present, but it's worth a look.

Yesterday I returned from my business trip to Tokyo. It was a success both in terms of business and pleasure. In business because I got more exciting work with lots of potiential. And in terms of pleasure because I got it a few good walks in - mainly around Shinjuku but also to Yoyogi Park. I was only there for just over 2 days, so I was limited in where I could venture to.

When in Tokyo, Yoyogi Park is always a good get away from the city. Situated between Shinjuku and Shibuya, and bordering Yoyogi and Harajuku, the park is large enough to loose yourself in nature for a few hours and contains some cultural/historical artifacts that are interesting and inspirational.

It was raining when I ventured to the park, but this had the effect of reducing the usual numbers of people that visit, which only added to the feel of the place, especially when visiting the Meiji Temple and Tea House/Gardens of the local damiyo.

Also due to the weather, the usual flea markets were mainly absent. But Harajuku, one of the hotspots for fashion in Tokyo, was still open and busy. The Harajuku entrance to Yoyogi Park is famous for people dressing up in costumes and parading around. No doubt you've all seen pictures of Japanese girls dress up as maids or groups of Gothics outdoing each other with black makeup and accessories.

In Shinjuku there seemed to be a lot of people wearing masks, which coinsides with the spring hay fever season, but could also just be that the air quality in Tokyo is generally on the decline. Living in Hokkaido where we get ample helpings of fresh air and water, I noticed this straight away and I think I've even fallen victim to some air pollution symptoms.

One of the concerns in the major cities in Japan is the amount of heat generated by air conditioners. It gets damn hot and humid in most of middle and lower Japan to the point where it's incapacitating. So the obvious solution is to bang a couple of air conditioners in the house/office. But when you have so many people living in such a small area, the population of air conditioners starts getting out of hand. Here's a photo from my hotel room of a small patch of roof-tops. The area is probably no larger than your average soccer field. How many air-cons can you see? And these building aren't that big, peaking at maybe 7 floors high.

But even so, you gotta love the place. Not only do so many people live and function in such confined space, but they do a damn good job at it. To me the utilization of office buildings as pubs, clubs, shops, brothels, or whatever, is an amazing thing. I use to street skate a lot and was always amazed that as skaters, my friends and I would be reusing [physical] corporate structures for a totally different [and in most cases, much more enjoyable] purposes that what they were designed for. Benches for slides, steps for jumps, office buildings are almost limitless in their potiental to generate fun with a skateboard. I get that same feeling when I'm walking around most of the populated areas in Japan, but especially in places like Shinjuku.

The only downer to the trip was the travel home, a 10 hour epic which went something like this - train, train, plane, train, train, car. In between the last two trains was a 3 hour wait for the last train to Kutchan - one of the bummers to living in a low populated part of the country.

That's a well deserved pay off for a lot of hard/good work. Well done to the Ludicorp people. But what does it mean for Flickr users? Not much. In their friendly and open way Ludicorp has spelt [almost] everything out on the Yahoo! purchase. See it on the FlickrBlog.

I climbed Mt Yotei again today with two friends. The first time I've done it in winter. Due to bad weather we only made it about 60% of the way up, but it was still a) worth it, and b) really hard.

The board down was really nice. And worth all the aches and pains I'm experiencing now.

I've posted some information on Mt Yotei before, but I'll add a little more.

This high, stratovolcano 1,898 meters above sea level looks exactly like Mt. Fuji. The 7,000-hectare area around the summit has been designated as a national park, where a number of protected alpine plants grow. It ranks ninth among the hundred famous mountains in Japan.

It may be the ninth most popular mountain in Japan, but it's No.1 where I live. It dominates that landscape and watches over everything. And funnily enough, I miss it when I'm away from the area.

3M have posted a How To on making a duct tape wallet.

Most people agree that Duct Tape can save you money on costly repair bills but did you know that you could create a wallet to hold all of the money you’ve saved? It’s not as difficult as it sounds and in just a few simple steps, you could be the proud owner of this year’s most important fashion statement.

According to philliptorrone on the MAKE: blog, someone is actually selling these in stores.

If you'd just landed on this planet, and heard that the best place to find out about the latest technology was from sites like Engadget or Gizmodo you'd come away with the impression that mobile phones are the most important and interesting thing since sex sliced-bread. I'm almost scared to view my aggregated feeds of these sites because I know it's going to full of the lastest mobiles.

Shiny Shiny - A Girl's Guide To Gadgets is also full of mobile phones. From one view of the homepage - Siemens CL75 clamshell for ladies, Siemens SL65 Escada Take II, LG's new 3G mobiles, Samsung's hard disk music phone coming to UK, Moto's RAZR-esque 3G phone, Samsung girly mobiles, Nathan's mobi, Smallest 3G phone so far.

Beep Beep - Um...sorry...excuse me, that's my Sony Ericsson W21S from AU [by KDDI] with the WIN account allowing me to watch TV programs, browse the Internet, find my current position via GPS and navigate to any street in Japan, send photos with cute border graphics, scan business card barcodes into the address book, remind me of and make appointments on the in-built calendar and, of course, download and listen to mp3s via headphones or the build in stereo speakers. And, if placed in Manner Mode and positioned correctly in the back pocket of my jeans, it will scratch my ass.

I can make calls and send email on the phone as well - and that's all I really use it for.

Another big player has entered the battle for the blogsphere. Or at least the battle for a leading share of it. Yahoo! 360° is still in beta at the moment, but they'll soon open their doors and offer similar services to what we've all come to expect.

While having a look at the Yahoo! 360° site, the recent metamorphosis of the sites involved in search and blog technology really started to sink in. They seem to be making their products/presences similar to each other, which happens alot between competitors. Make your product/presence similar to the other guy and customers not only don't see much difference in the products, but assume they are of similar quality. Only natural I guess. For instance, if you have a look at the 360° site you'll notice the large billboard style images like this.

And here's an advert from the TypePad site.

And if we head over the major search sites, we start to see changes towards the Google way of things. This UI has been standard for any search engine created after Google, but now it's standard for all search engines.

The original Google concept.

Yahoo!'s new interface.

And MSN's new version.

It's understandable enough.

Although Mark Pilgrim seems to have stop blogging, he's still updating and releasing software. Butler was added on 1st March 2005.

Butler enhances Google search results by adding links to competitors. It also removes ads, changes typography, and a few other useful things.

You can download Butler here. And if you're worried about whether it's spyware or not.

No, Butler is not spyware. It does not track the pages you visit, display ads, hijack Amazon affiliate links, log keystrokes, steal passwords, set cookies, "phone home," or install any bundled software on your computer. It is simply a Firefox script that modifies a few Google services in ways that I find useful. If you don't like it, you can easily uninstall it.

Something like this appeals to me much more than Google's own toolbar.

The CenterStage project is;

[a] project to build a powerful and intuitive media center application for the Apple Macintosh, this project was inspired by the launch of the Mac mini, an ideal Mac to use as part of a home theatre system.

It's good to see something like this happening. At present the Mac is probably the best platform for a homemade media center. Although there are alot of similar projects for x86 hardware base on Linux, and Microsoft has their Windows Media Center Edition, let's face it - for your average user, out of the box Windows is not secure enough to send and receive email, and Linux [in the PVR space] is running into it's old problems of hardware support. You might think I'm being a little hard on the Windows and Linux, and maybe so, but I'm talking about your average user - someone who will expect things to work with little or no hassel.

And having hardware like the Mac and an operating system that intergrates seamlessly [a product of the hardware and OS being made by the same company] you have to admit the potential for CenterStage is looking bright. The way Apple appears to be heading [into content like music and video], they may even buy the project out if it is well executed and becomes slightly successful.

One thorn in the side of the Mac-media center idea seems to be the lack of audio connections available to Macs. While the 3 default audio plugs are fine in most cases, you'll probably want your media center to be able to connect to a few different devices [stereo, VCR, etc]. There's a page describing some of the audio solutions, but now your media center consists of two devices which conflicts with Apple's mininalistic philosophy. This is where your x86/Linux alternative has one up a Mac solution. The ability to add PCI cards. There's some nice little cases available for x86 machines. They may not have an apple logo, but there's a wider range of colours and sizes - all the better to intergrate with any existing home theatre equipment, if you're that way inclined =)

But CenterStage looks like a great project to follow the progress of, which you can do via their RSS feed.

Looks like I'll be heading down to Tokyo next week for about 3 days to meet up with a friend/client to discuss some more work opportunities. I love the atomosphere of Tokyo and am looking forward to getting down there to experience it again.

Apart from the meetings about work, I should get the chance to visit a few of the art galleries down there, which makes it all the more interesting.

And I'll be staying in the much loved Shinjuku, so I'll have to take my copy of Idoru as reading material and inspiration.

Here's some slightly old, but still very interesting information about Tokyo.

Tokyo Metropolis is positioned in approximately the center of the Japanese archipelago, in the southern Kanto Area. It is bordered to the east by the Edogawa River and Chiba Prefecture, to the west by mountains and Yamanashi Prefecture, to the south by the Tamagawa River and Kanagawa Prefecture, and to the north by Saitama Prefecture.

The Greater Tokyo Area is made up of Tokyo and the three neighboring prefectures of Saitama, Kanagawa and Chiba. This area is home to around 26% of Japan's total population. The National Capital Region is made up of Tokyo and the seven surrounding prefectures of Saitama, Kanagawa, Chiba, Gumma, Tochigi, Ibaraki and Yamanashi.

Tokyo is a metropolitan prefecture, divided into smaller administrative bodies. The "central" region is divided into 23 special wards (ku in Japanese), and the western Tama Area is made up of 26 cities (shi), 3 towns (cho) and one village (son). The 23 special-ward area and the Tama Area together form a long, narrow stretch of land, running about 90 kilometers east to west and 25 kilometers north and south. The Izu Islands and the Ogasawara Islands, two island groups in the Pacific Ocean, are also administratively part of Tokyo, despite being geographically separated from the metropolis. The islands have between them 2 cho and 7 son

And a bit about the population.

As of October 1, 2003 the population of Tokyo was estimated to be 12.369 million, or about 10% of Japan's total population, the largest population of any of the 47 prefectures.

Tokyo's area, 2,187 square kilometers or 0.6% of the total area of Japan, makes it the third smallest of Japan's 47 prefectures. The population density is 5,655 persons per square kilometer, making Tokyo the most densely populated prefecture in Japan.

The 23 special-ward area is home to 8.34 million persons, the Tama area 4.002 million, and the Islands 27,000. Tokyo has 5.697 million households, with an average 2.17 persons per household. The registered number of foreign residents reached 354,000 as of October 1, 2003, some 1.3 times more than the total figure ten years earlier.

EPIACenter.com has more information on the Dual-Processor Mini-ITX motherboard.

The motherboard is currently being displayed at CeBit and it seems that the specification of the board on the VIA site and the board being display at CeBit are slightly different. This comes as no great surprise as VIA aren't planning to ship the product until mid-year, so they are either displaying a prototype or the specs haven't been updated. Or both.

In any case, it looks like it's going to ship with 2 network ports, one of them being of 10/100/1000MBit capacity. This would make it very attractive to network device developers [think along the lines of a SOHO router or NAS server, etc] or as DIY home servers. The fact that the board doesn't have all the multimedia ports also points in this direction as the typical mini-itx enthusiast wants a mini-itx board for a small multimedia PC, homebrew PVR or car computer.

However, it also seems to be the case that VIA are pushing on a new front - "high-density servers that use little physical space and a comparably low amount of power". Cottage industry ISPs/hosters, personal render farmers, mad scientists with a lot of data to sift through - listen up! This may be the answer you've been looking for.

EpiaCenter has a comparison of CN400 Mini-ITX motherboards.

It's been rumored for a while and even seen in recent months, but now it's a reality. The VIA EPIA DP Mainboard is:

The VIA EPIA DP is the latest in VIA’s growing line of highly acclaimed EPIA Series of Mini-ITX mainboards and introduces dual processing power and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to the Mini-ITX form factor for the first time. Combined with the VIA CN400 digital media chipset, the VIA EPIA DP enables the development of a wealth of high density, low power consumption, fanless, and embedded applications to be implemented in small form factor or node farm configurations with extensive processing resources.

The EPIA DP Mini-ITX Board boasts dual VIA Eden-N NanoBGA Processors that deliver superior processing power, on-die security features through the VIA PadLock Hardware Security Suite and low power capabilities through the VIA PowerSaver 3.0 technology, making it ideal for tightly integrated and highly efficient industrial systems for embedded applications with local processing power, NAS based storage applications, and cluster high performance computing applications.

LinuxDevices.com has a review of it, which includes some more interesting information about setting these little boards up in a cluster environment.

Via says developers can fit two DP-310 mainboards into a single 1U chassis, for densities up to 168 processors per 42-U rack. The company says such a rack would require 2.5kW of power.

My last Mini-ITX purchase was from BicCamera in Sapporo a few weeks ago. It was the last VIA board they had in stock and the sales assistant mentioned that they were not going to order any more because the demand in Sapporo wasn't high enough. Even Tsukumo only had a few available. Might have to wait for my annual trip to Osaka.

Microsoft to Acquire Groove Networks, Combining Talents to Create Anytime, Anywhere Collaboration Products and Services. And not only that, but Ray Ozzie [Groove Networks Founder] is going to be Microsoft's new CTO.

Groove Networks big product is Virtual Office:

Work together securely over the Internet as if you and your team are in the same physical location. Groove Virtual Office is everything your team needs to share information, manage projects, conduct meetings and get work done.

Maybe Microsoft is gearing up to try and trump OpenOffice.org before it becomes too popular.

The Sparkline PHP Graphing Library is a nice addition to any PHP project you may be working on that requires you to display a lot of graph-based information in a relatively small space.

So what are sparklines?

Sparklines are "intense, simple, wordlike graphics" so named by Edward Tufte.

What's more important [for web-based applications] is that they are small and they look great.

I'm a bit of closet history buff at times. I read the odd history book, appreciate the impact history has on the present and future and generally get a kick out of imagining how things were at different times in the past. One of the tricky things with history is getting things in context, especially time periods. Which is where timelines come in handly.

Parthenon Graphics Timelines has a set of timelines ranging in subject from Ancient History, Religion, U.S. History, World History, Classical Education/The Arts, Sports & Recreation and Special Interest. The timelines are downloadable as .gif files [which you can imagine aren't the clearest of images] or you can order full size posters. The .gif are find with me 'cause I don't think I'd have the room for a long timeline on the wall anyways.

Worth having a look at is the Native North Americans timeline, Art History: Western from 1400 and Ancient Egypt, althought that's just personal taste. There are plenty of others and they all look interesting.

The long awaited next version of BitTorrent is out now. You gotta love the introduction to the app.

BitTorrent is a free speech tool.

BitTorrent gives you the same freedom to publish previously enjoyed by only a select few with special equipment and lots of money. ("Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one" -- journalist A.J. Liebling.)

You have something terrific to publish -- a large music or video file, software, a game or anything else that many people would like to have. But the more popular your file becomes, the more you are punished by soaring bandwidth costs. If your file becomes phenomenally successful and a flash crowd of hundreds or thousands try to get it at once, your server simply crashes and no one gets it.

There is a solution to this vicious cycle. BitTorrent, the result of over two years of intensive development, is a simple and free software product that addresses all of these problems.

The key to scaleable and robust distribution is cooperation. With BitTorrent, those who get your file tap into their upload capacity to give the file to others at the same time. Those that provide the most to others get the best treatment in return. ("Give and ye shall receive!")

Cooperative distribution can grow almost without limit, because each new participant brings not only demand, but also supply. Instead of a vicious cycle, popularity creates a virtuous circle. And because each new participant brings new resources to the distribution, you get limitless scalability for a nearly fixed cost.

BitTorrent is not just a concept, but has an easy-to-use implementation capable of swarming downloads across unreliable networks. BitTorrent has been embraced by numerous publishers to distribute to millions of users.

With BitTorrent free speech no longer has a high price.

And it's about time the price for free speech got a little cheaper.

The OSX version is still 3.4.2, but no doubt that'll be updated soon. And anyways, it's in python so just grab the source and use btdownloadcurses.py in Terminal.

The developer of BitTorrent is Bram Cohen, who has written some other interesting software, and some articles that are worth a read. His homepage is bitconjurer.org. He has a blog as well.

There's an article at NewsForge called Open source XML editors examined. It includes some of the usual culprits like Quanta, BlueFish, Emacs and Vim, but also includes one I haven'd heard of before - KXml Editor.

KXml Editor is a lightweight XML editor and viewer that interfaces exceptionally well with other KDE applications. You can configure Konqueror to use the KXml Editor KPart as an XML view interface component. With its extensive assortment of excellent keyboard shortcuts, KXml Editor facilitates rapid development of data-oriented XML content. Input of element character data requires the user to employ a textbox dialog window that decreases the fluidity and efficiency of the editing experience. KXml Editor allows the user to utilize XPath nomenclature to select a single specific node, but it does not completely support the XPath query syntax, and queries that target multiple nodes are presently ignored. KXml Editor provides no support for content processing or validation, and it cannot open XML documents that contain syntax errors. KXml Editor is usable and efficient, but its limitations decrease its value as an editing tool. It is my XML viewer of choice, and it is useful for rapid production of simple XML documents, but it is less efficient than a conventional editor for DocBook authoring.

I've swung more to the KDE side of Linux desktops for several reasons - which started a few years ago when the KDE team seemed to have their act together a lot better than the Gnome team, although admittedly Gnome is making some serious ground these days. In any case, I just decided that it really didn't matter that much, seeing as every app I use on Linux, no matter the gui libraries being used, works fine. But I have always been longing for a native KDE XML app.

When developing on my Linux boxen I'm usually in Kate these days, and although Quanta is a nice app for web development, it's a little bulkier that I need/want. Give me a simple editor over a full-featured IDE anyday. With KXml Editor I get that simplicity too. However, if you're into using Quanta, you can use KXml Editor via a plug in.

Here's a nice screenshot of Kxml Editor in action - I love the classic book format they've chosen for the xml file.

Travla has some of the best mini-itx cases I've seen to date. No so much on the flashy, glossy, perspex style of case, but more on the heavy-duty, stack and rackable side of things. Especially the C147, which holds two mini-itx mother-boards in one 1U rack case. Or the C134 which appears to be a nice compact brick-style solution.

And if you need something build to spec, it seems that Travla is an off-shoot to another company called Casetronic Engineering who can design a case specific to your needs.

Due to the implementation of Markdown & SmartyPants in my blog software I've had my first reason in a while to go through and re-read alot of my earlier postings. To tell you the truth it's a cross between embarrassing and rewarding. There's some posts that I'm not that crazy about, but on the bright side there's a visible improvement to whatever writing ability I started with. It's still not anywhere near good, but the change is for the better. And more importantly it's helping me to relate ideas and concepts to others. Gives me the incentive to continue on.

As part of the review of the older posts, I did a bit of reorganizing of the categories. Doing this has allowed me to culled the amount of categories down to 9, which has also allowed me to provide a better definition of what this blog is all about. I'm still in the same situation as the drunkenbatman in the sense that I don't have an about/colphon page, but I should be able to remedy that soon. And at least I can give a very broad description about what I write about from the categories - Apple, Film|Books, General, Hardware, Internet, Japan, Linux|Unix|BSD, Software, Travel. I know, it's pretty broad.

One of the hot topics in the blogsphere at present seems to be about the new Google toolbar and how it optionally autolinks to Google pages/content. It's not only that this technology seems to have already failed when Microsoft attempted to implement it [Smart Tags], but that a company such as Google would dare to use it. Tim Bray says

...Google has established a relationship of trust with many millions of people: they provide a good service and they make good money doing it, and that’s just fine. It seems so obvious that this move is not only evil but stupid;

By hey...Google is a search/advertising company, aren't we suppose to expect some evil from them?

Dave has written the most clear and understandable argument against using it I've seen so far.

I guess I'm not really qualified to write about this because I've never installed a Google Toolbar or anything similar [from any of the search companies], so I don't know how beneficial it is to the user. From the pages describing the benefits [Mozilla/Firefox or IE] it's just doesn't seem worth it.

Personally I just see this sort of thing [search engine toolbars, desktop search tools from search engines, etc] as similar to spyware. After all, it's so obvious that it benefits the distributor [in this case Google] much more than the user.

The New York Public Library has opened a digital gallery containing a subset of free [for non-commercial usage] images from their archives.

NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.

Doing a quick search for 'fish', it was kind of weird at first to see such stereotypically library-style images returned, but then after realising that I was in fact searching such a old and distinguished library, it kind of made sense. I can see this is going to be a really cool tool. It's a credit to the people at the NYPL that such a great service has been delivered.

There's some amazing content in there. Interesting also to see that they used Cold Fusion for the front-end. And a little disappointing to see the long and ugly query strings produced when navigating. But that's just me being a picky programmer.