happy birthday Linus

well today is the birthday of linus torvalds. come read it and understand how linus invented linux and also how his birthday date plays a major role in that inventions.

twitter and its money making ability

I always use twitter a lot and I find it a really great tool to know whats happening aroung the world. but after sometime you might wonder how twitter is able to make money out of its service? well for almost three year since its inception in 2006 twitter had no idea of how to make money, but this were all changed when google and microsoft paid twitter for $25 million so that the two companies can search tweets in twitter in real-time.
there is a lesson here, if we want to make a web service that’s exactly like twitter then we should wait for sometime for that web service to be able to make money. actually google did this too, google waited for three years since its inception in 1998 to be able to make money out of its keyword search. The key is gathering as much user as possible then you can have the money making capability.
well I do hope that koprol which is made in indonesia by a young startup web developer can achieved the same thing as twitter did.

spider trap, a nightmare for information retrieval

a spider trap is a website that generate random pages when visited by a web crawler. according to wikipedia a spider trap is a set of web pages that may intentionally or unintentionally be used to cause a web crawler or search bot to make an infinite number of requests or cause a poorly constructed crawler to crash. this spider trap generate random pages that contains many links in one page sometimes the link could be in the counts of thousand links, these links is valid but for only a short time and when these link were shown in the search result retrieve by a crawler then the link would show an “error 404 not found” because the links already gone.

this behaviour could be depressing for a web crawler, as it’s spend so much time indexing a website and put too much stress on the server side. in the page that has a spider trap it can also contains many posting for words based on dictionary. so web crawler thinks the site is highly relevant for any search query and will give the website a higher pagerank. but actually the webpage only copying the words in dictionary and post it in the page and made the webpage relevant to any search query.

this spider trap can be avoided by not indexing a webpage when it was first found by a crawler, instead the crawler only give a quick scan on the website to know how many webpages there and come back again in a few days to see if the webpages has experienced any changes or not. if the disparity of changes is large then we can safely say that it is a spider trap and must be avoided by a web crawler but if it not then the web crawler can index it. but as precaution the web crawler can also counts how many links are there in a page and determined if it’s a spider trap or not, it is based on assumption that it would be impossible for a webpage to contains so many links (the total links could be in hundreds or thousand) and mark the website as a spider trap. a normal website will only contains link in the counts of below hundreds.

so if asked what is the enemy of information retrieval then spider trap would be a great answer.

simple program for google public DNS

i just found a great program that can turn your DNS into google public DNS with just a click and then turn it back up to your default ISP DNS if you wanted to. Go to this link here

verify redirect for short links

there are many short links available if you use twitter, the most use url shortener is bit.ly but sometime you need to make sure that the links you clicks are really the links that you are intend to visit and not a site that can install any malware or fraudulent site that can send misinformation. To do this precaution though there are now firefox addon that can do this. this addon names is verify redirect and it will ask for your confirmation to open the link or just close it while showing you the actual link of that short url. you can download the addon here

use memory fox for firefox

I always use firefox because there are many addons that can be use there. But if you use too many addons then you may experience that your firefox may crash or suddenly close itself. This is due to firefox consuming too much memory. The memory consumption is mainly done by its addons. So you’ll need to use memory fox addon to flush firefox memory every minute or so, so that your firefox will not get crash easily. go to this link to try the addon but you’d have to login first because it’s still in beta.

well at least now I always feels safe everytime I use firefox with memory fox.

got an email from google chrome

I just got email from google chrome announcing that they had released chrome version for mac and linux. actually I had requested this invitations a year ago. so it’s takes one year then for google to make chrome for linux and mac.  here is the email excerpt written in bahasa indonesia.

Halo semua pengguna Linux –

Google Chrome siap ke tahap beta di Linux! Terima kasih kepada semua pengembang Chromium dan WebKit yang telah membantu menjadikan Google Chrome peramban cepat yang stabil.
Berikut adalah trivia dari kami tentang tim Google Chrome:

60.000 baris kode ditulis
23 keluaran pengembang
2.713 bug diperbaiki
12 pelaksana eksternal dan editor bug pada Google Chrome untuk basis kode Linux,
48 kontributor kode eksternal

Terima kasih telah menunggu, dan kami harap Anda menikmati Google Chrome! Tim Google Chrome

——–
(c) 2009 Google www.google.co.id 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View CA 94043 United States of America.
Google adalah merek dagang dari Google Inc. Semua perusahaan lain dan nama produk merupakan merek dagang tiap-tiap perusahaan induk dengan siapa mereka produk tersebut.

sidewiki extension for chrome

google just released a sidewiki extension for chrome.download it here
it’s a nice feature and I have been able to comment on any web page easily now.
come and try it then.

southpark 404 error page

a real funny I think.

clipped from www.southparkstudios.com

google calendar

I began using google calendar and I find it really useful. I can pin important event in the calendar so I can know what happens and when it happens. also it has an option to synchronize the calendar with indonesian national day, so everytime my country indonesia has a national holidays then I am able to know when it might happens and why, usually for me to know when the holidays would come I’d have to buy a local made calendar to know why it’s a holiday. but now using google calendar I can know exactly what happens and sends the notification right through my email. I am loving google calendar then.