Month: June 2006

The “freedbacking” thing must have worked or something, because Bloglines started to improve. I’ve been monitoring the blogosphere and surely quite a few people mentioned the much needed publisher tools.

From now on, all those people who have RSS feeds can claim them in Bloglines and do some management and maintenance. For now, we can get rid of dups with the newly released Publisher Tools. Hopefully, the set of tools will grow with time.

And improve too. I’ve tried to claim a couple of my feeds, but it didn’t worked quite yet. My LiveJournal feed wasn’t found in the database, and the feed from this site caused an Internal Server Error. I’m sure those are just a couple of tiny bugs that will be ironed out in a day or two.

Overall, a good move, which is surely appreciated. At least, by yours truly.

Update: I was amazed this morning to find in my inbox an email from the Bloglines engineer acknowledging one abovementioned problem and requesting more information about another. Good work!

Tasks in Google Calendar is the feature that I miss the most. Suddenly, I thought that maybe I just don’t know enough; and left for a quick Google search. One of the first results was this article. It mentions that there are some traces of tasks in Googe Calendar JavaScript code. Hopefully, they’ll add tasks earlier than later…

I am staying a bit off the technology news recently, so I don’t know how widely these two news have been pushed around. But I discovered both of them only today, so I thought maybe I am not the only one out there.

Google has recently released two new tools that are really worth mentioning – Google Account Authentication (discovered via O’Reilly Radar post) and Checkout (discovered via Slashdot article), which is a competitor to PayPal.

I gladly welcome both of them.

Google Account Authentication will help people build websites that won’t require registration and Yet Another Login ™. Users will be able to use their Google accounts. Of course, I understand those who worry about their privacy. Google will know about all the websites you are visiting, how often, from where, and so on. But I personally don’t care.

Checkout service also gives me hopes. PayPal does a good job, but it doesn’t scale very well beyond the USA. There are all sorts of limits both paying and getting paid. Google is a very global company. It understand the needs and wants of the global community and has great potention for problem solving.

With all the privacy worries in the air, I am glad that Google are pushing themselves and the technology arena forward. I respect the company and like most of their products. Keep it up guys!

My mother, brother, and a couple of friends of mine went on a somewhat quick trip today. We drove to Platres village and had an excellent meal at Psilo Dentro tavern. That’s the one near the trout farm, if you know the place.

The food was as good as always. Most of the people ordered trout, but my brother and I had pork chops. Psilo Dentro is one of the best places in Cyprus if you know or want to know how a good pork chop should taste like. I figured out the place a long time ago, and since then I never ordered anything else. And never was I disappointed.

We also had some ice cream and loads of cherry. Elizabeth, the owner of the place, was way too kind. She even gave us all bags of cherry to take with us. And a dessert on the house. We didn’t object and thanked her for the generosity.

We were planning to go for a walk to the waterfall after the meal, but the weather stopped us. While we were eating, it was rainging. Yup, you read it right. And I am not talking about a few drops from the sky here and there. It was a real rain for about 20 minutes or so, complete with thunders. The trail got all wet, so we had nothing better to do than leave for home.

Overall, the trip was very nice. It was somewhat simple and fast and all of us seemed to enjoy it.

There are a few more pictures from the trip in this Flickr set.

I’ve been asked a billion times or so how one can make money with Open Source Software. My answers varied depending on who was actually asking the question, my mood at the time, and the availability of free time to go into details. But, as far as I can remember, I’ve always at least mentioned commercial support and customization.

But telling plain theory is a waste of time, unless good examples are given. And the examples have the tendency of getting outdated and forgotten pretty fast. So, it’s always good to refresh the stack of them.

One of the most recent ones that I’ve added to the list is WordPress. You can read all about it here. Hopefully, more information will be available later. I’d love to see the amounts of money, man-hours, and clients, as well as all the other details.