interview

The guys over at the Linux Link Tech Show held a pretty good interview with Greg Mancusi-Ungaro from Novell about their Linux products. Although the interview was a little slow at times and did not start until 18 minutes into the show it still managed to cover a lot of ground.Topics ranged from OpenSUSE's growth (approximately one install every 11 seconds) through to Novell's Linux strategy and their transition from Netware. Also discussed was the KDE/Gnome debate and the rumoured (but untrue) death of the Hula project. It was also good to hear someone at Novell say they felt the SUSE CD-Rom layout was stupid, why you should need to download 5 CD's to get a working desktop is just crazy - put important things on the first two and leave the others as optional.
Read more »

Riya seems to be a pretty promising set of technologies, although whether or not it pans out to be a successful product is another story. At the core of Riya is a set of facial and text recognition algorithms that can intelligently identify people or keywords within photographs. Consequently as photos are added to the gallery rich meta-data can be passively pulled from the photos without any user interaction. In instances where a person or text cannot be identified it is possible to manually add this meta-data or have others supply further tags to your photographs to identify people in crowds or foreign words. Read more »

After a bit of tinkering I have a FeedBurner (RSS & Atom) feed for this subject online. It can be subscribed to here. The issue was my content management system (Mambo 4.5.1) only natively supporting feeds of the site frontpage. Fortunately there is an add-on that supports multiple site feeds but setting this up is far from intuitive. Oh well, its up now I guess.

It's actually interesting to see the development of the different RSS/Atom standards. RSS begun development as a group project but then a difference of opinion between Dave Winer and a number of other members split the project in two. Dave Winer produced RSS 0.91 whilst a little while later the working group came out with RSS 1.0.