stressfree - interview

OpenSUSE developments

David — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 10:29:38 +0000

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.

Really great to see but not touched upon in the interview at all is the growing number of OpenSUSE derivatives made possible by the open-source license now employed. I especially like the look of SuperSUSE (an i686 optimized version) headed up by Andreas Girardet, the Aucklander that brought the world Yoper Linux.

Riya - Facial/Text Recognition meta-photo software

David — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 22:53:52 +0000

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.

A screenshot of Riya at work (click to enlarge)

The CEO of Riya was recently involved in a podcast discussion with Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls and a group of others. The discussion was very interesting, albeit a little slow at times and marred by a technical fault at the very end. One thing that would really benefit the technology/product is an open API to allow other developers to tie their products or services into it similar to Google Maps. Unfortunately it sounds like work is still frantically underway to get a gallery product together without any thought of an API or other applications. This strategy is probably angling for a buyout from Google or Microsoft now that Yahoo has started the ball rolling by their purchase of Flickr recently. Still a pretty interesting development and amazingly powerful if tied together with something like Google Maps for an unbelievably rich amount of meta-data.

RSS Feed Online

David — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 01:48:40 +0000

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.

I've listened to a few podcasts with Dave Winer and I definitely would not want to get on his wrong side. What he does firmly believe in is that things should be simple, not complex and that is just what his subsequent RSS 2.0 set out to achieve. Whilst RSS 1.0 was based on RDF tag syntax RSS 2.0 dropped that in favour of very simple, comprehensible syntax. Consequently RSS 2.0 wiped the floor with RSS 1.0.

Atom is a later development that has begun to tackle the difficult problems of transactions and different payloads, especially as RSS has begun to be acknowledged as a very good way of communicating (syndicating) information across a wide audience. Like RSS 2.0, Atom has left RDF syntax behind and is focusing on practical needs rather than academic principles. Unlike RSS, Atom uses a far stricter XML syntax that has led it to be incompatible with the RSS 1.0/2.0 standards...