Googlewhacking

Back in the beginning ….

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 Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 16:56:03 +1000


 From: Darren Robertson


 Subject: A new sport is born (?)


 To: ...

	http://www.unblinking.com/heh/googlewhack.htm


  


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And not too long after ….

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 Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 17:13:08 +1000


 From: Darren Robertson


 Subject: Fwd: A new sport is born (?)


 To: ...

	SCORE!!!!!


 http://www.googlewhack.com/tally.pl


 1.  indusium turquoise  Darren Robertson  Australia



  )


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Off Topic ~ The gentle art of Googlewhacking [1]
[bleedingedge]

It’s deceptively simple – to score a Googlewhack all you have to do is enter two separate words into a Google search and achieve a single (1 of 1) hit. For the purists, the words have to be in a recognised dictionary. Inevitably, there is a site at http://www.googlewhack.com/.

Be warned… Googlewhacking is addictive. Be prepared for long hours and plenty of hair pulling (for those who still have a few left)!

How hard is it two and a half years later? Eeeek!! much harder.

[1.] The gentle art of Googlewhacking [bleedingedge]
[2.] www.googlewhack.com [GoogleWhack]

Technorati Tags: googlewhack

Del.icio.us Tags: googlewhack

Flickr Tags: googlewhack

Wikipedia: googlewhack

Travelling

Looking for some travel inspiration? Or maybe an escape from your desk over lunchtime? Now as well as TravelBlog and the Thorn Tree, you can head to the Blue List.

What is the Bluelist?
[Lonely Planet]

You know when someone says they’re having trouble finding a good pizza place or a decent travel agent and you say ‘oh you should see my guy, he’s the best’? Well, you’ve just Bluelisted him. We created this term because there is no word to describe what we set out to do, which is to ‘create an evolving selection of classic and current travel experiences and destinations selected by Lonely Planet staff, authors and travellers’. To Bluelist something is the travel equivalent of ‘you should see my guy, he’s the best’. It’s the act of recommending a travel experience. Any travel experience.

You can also just straight into the Popular Lists.

[1.] Bluelist [Lonely Planet]

Welcome in the year of the Dog

Gongxi facái

At midnight on 28 January 2006, the Chinese Year of the Green Rooster (Wooden and Metal Rooster) will end and the Chinese community in Australia will welcome in the Year of the Red Dog (Fire and Metal Dog). [1]

Dog couplets in the window

Australian Daylight Savings Changes

Now this a very stealthy *gotcha!*

1. The patch requires removal after DST ends
2. The patch will need to be re-applied IF the machine is “repaired” or service patched
3. Outlook issues caused by the DST changes are *Evil* !

Australian Daylight Savings Changes for Microsoft Products for the Year 2006
[Microsoft]

The Commonwealth Games are scheduled to be held during March 2006 in Melbourne Australia. Several Australian states including New South Wales, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, South Australia and Tasmania, have changed the Daylight Savings transition end dates to the first Sunday of Apr 2006.

Daylight savings end for 2005/2006
For the Year 2006 only, the published Daylight Savings end transition dates (as at 14th September, 2005) for each of the states of Australia are:
Victoria 27/03/2006 To 2/4/2006
ACT 27/03/2006 To 2/4/2006
NSW 27/03/2006 To 2/4/2006
Tasmania 27/03/2006 To 2/4/2006
South Australia 27/03/2006 To 2/4/2006

Note: Clocks are advanced at 2am by 1 hour on start day to become Summer Time. Clocks are wound back at 3am by 1 hour at end day to become Standard Time.

The change to Daylight Savings will affect the transition settings for the following time zone rules:

(GMT + 10:00) Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney
(GMT + 10:00) Hobart
(GMT+09:30) Adelaide

NOTE 1: on April 2, you have to UN-APPLY the patch!

NOTE 2: there is no patch for WinCE, PocketPC or Windows mobile … obviously PDA users don’t care about timezones (or calendaring?) you have to manually adjust your device to the +11 time zone – on the 2 April you have to remember to change it back +10 time zone again.

1. Aussie Microsoft calendar mess
[WOW - Office Watch]
…
Lots of Aussies read Office Watch and the problem is such a blot on Microsoft’s copybook that we’re devoting most of this issue to explaining this mess.
…
When you store an appointment in Outlook it records the UTC time plus the time zone that applies to the appointment – you don’t see that directly, just the adjusted date and time show in Outlook. That time zone information comes from Windows.
…
Because Windows has not been setup with the adjusted Aussie daylight savings dates already, any appointments you’ve created in the extra summer time week for 2006 will be off by one hour.
…
This means that during the ‘extra’ week you have to ensure that no appointments (one off or recurring) for the same dates in future years are made until after you’ve patched all Windows machines.
…

Hmmm, another good reason to dislike Outlook!

Manual change from the Bleeding Edge forums

 Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\{linewrap}Time Zones\AUS Eastern Standard Time 2006]

"Display"="(GMT+10:00) Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney - Comm Games 2006"

"Dlt"="AUS Eastern Daylight Time 06"

"TZI"=hex:a8,fd,ff,ff,00,00,00,00,c4,ff,ff,ff,00,00,04,00,00,00,01,00,03,00,00,\

00,00,00,00,00,00,00,0a,00,00,00,05,00,02,00,00,00,00,00,00,00

Compare this hodge-podge fix to the elegant solutions available in Linux, Unix and OS X. Groan!

[1.] Australian Daylight Savings Changes for Microsoft Products for the Year 2006 [Microsoft]
[2.] 1. Aussie Microsoft calendar mess [WOW - Office Watch]
[3.] Time Zone & Commonwealth Games [Bleeding Edge forums]

Paper, Scissors, Rock?

Russian intelligence officers accuse British agents of planting a transmitter in an fake rock on a Moscow street.

Russia accuses UK of spying, rights bodies worried
Richard Balmforth, January 23, 2006 [The Age]

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia accused Britain on Monday of running a James Bond-style spying operation in Moscow using a receiver hidden in a fake rock to gather secret information, and said it had been caught “red-handed” funding pressure groups.

A programme aired on state television said four British diplomats used a hi-tech version of the “dead letter drop” of spy novel fame — a dummy rock by the roadside that could receive information electronically and beam it to a hand-held computer on demand. …

Maybe it will set a new fashion trend in peripherals? “That’s a nice looking laptop, and I see you have a matching rock!“

[1.] Russia accuses UK of spying, rights bodies worried [The Star]

Wartook now under threat?

(Bushfires)

The holiday house in Wartook is looking a tad precarious, this morning’s 774 ABC road closures included Roses Gap Road – CLOSED which leads into the North of Wartook.

Firefighters race to beat heat
January 24, 2006 [The Age]
… Wind changes
Fire activity has worsened in the Grampians area as winds pick up, with the DSE advising residents of townships 20km from the main trouble spot at Halls Gap to enact their individual fire plans.

Wartook, Brimpaen and Laharum are the towns north west of Halls Gap affected.

“The fire activity has picked up in the Halls Gap area,” Graham Fountain said. He said conditions were likely to become more difficult as weather conditions worsen over the next few days.

The Mt Lubra fire in the Grampians remains the biggest concern to the authorities.  …

NatMap 1:250,000 SJ54-07 Hamilton (Special), Victoria

Mt Lubra (Grampians) update 1.30pm Road closures in place in the Lake Lonsdale, Fyans Creek and Heatherlie areas include Roses Gap Rd, Ledcourt/Glenorchy Rd, Ledcourt Stawell Red Hill Rd, Illawara Rd into Fyans Creek, Roses Gap Rd, Mt Victory Rd and all access roads south of the Western Hwy. [2]

[1.] Fires Today [DSE]
[2.] Major Fires Update [CFA]

Would you like a thumb-drive with those schools shoes?

Cool for school
Lia Timson, January 21, 2006 [The Age]

Children will soon be back at school and will carry much more than books and a new pencil case in their backpacks. Laptops, PDAs and memory keys will accompany mobile phones and digital music players as technology begins to merge classroom and home.

But do children really need all that? With some schools adding high-tech devices to stationery lists, parents must decide which technological tools their children really need.

…

From as young as five, children learn to “identify and use” a limited range of computer-based technology. This changes to “evaluate, select and use” in year 6 and by year 8 students should “demonstrate appropriate ethics and etiquette in relation to computer use such as general computer care, passwords, file security, network use, printing and shared resources”.

…

At a minimum for home use, Wright {Guy Wright – Kingscliff High School}, recommends a PC, an internet connection and a USB key (also known as flash drive or “nerd stick”) to replace floppy and compact discs. And he says children need Microsoft Office, which includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint, at home rather than the programs included with Microsoft Works, which is often sold with budget-priced PCs. “We’ve had some difficulties transferring files if they don’t have Word,” he says.

…

I find “We’ve had some difficulties transferring files if they don’t have Word,” a bit disturbing, this reeks of teaching products rather than techniques … ever heard of RTF, let alone Open Office?

  [1.] Cool for school [The Age]

Glossary

The project to have a definitive list of definitions for use within ed-IT, and in the future EDFAC? What do we mean by the term resourcing, does this mean the same thing in HR and Finance?

glossary an alphabetical list of technical terms in some specialized field of knowledge; usually published as an appendix to a text on that field [1]

 

The next step is the migration of a lot of the content from \ed-it_ops\ to either \glossary\ or to \docs\. Now that is a fair bit of a mapping project to ensure that things don’t break (too much).

[1.] glossary [WordNet Search - 2.1]

Social Bookmarking

Charles Wright’s posting on the bleeding edge blog [3] has got me thinking a bit more about the use of del.icio.us, and various other social informaton network techniques. This is something that popped up on my radar last year, was was removed with the whitenoise that was the chaos of last year I had investigated some forms of tagging, and social information exchange {backpack, technorati, Flickr [Yahoo] …}

What the heck is social bookmarking? [2]
Social bookmarking is basically a web based bookmarking service on steriods. It gives users the ability to access bookmarks from anywhere and share web pages that has been deemed “bookmarkable” by its network of users.

What kind of name is del.icio.us?
Pronounced “delicious,” del.icio.us is both the company name and domain name (http://del.icio.us) of a service that allows people to bookmark web sites to an online account rather than to a favorites folder in their web browser. The service was created in 2003 by Joshua Schachter and turned into a company in 2005. While del.icio.us certainly has a tasty sounding name, that’s probably not why Yahoo bought them.

Social bookmarking produces a different ordering/ranking than search engines due to the vastly different methods involved in the listings; this is both the strength and the weakness of the method …
“One important feature of systems such as these is that they do not impose a rigid taxonomy. Instead, they allow users to assign whatever classifiers they choose. Although this might sound counter-productive to the ultimate goal of organizing content, in practice it seems to work rather well, although it does present some drawbacks. For example, most people will probably classify pictures of cats by using the tag ‘cats.’ But what happens when some individuals use ‘cat’ or ‘feline’ or ‘meowmeow’ or ‘my.favorite.cat’?” [4]

Folk Futures [5]
Despite all the current hype about tags – in the blogging world, especially – for the authors of this paper, tags are just one kind of metadata and are not a replacement for formal classification systems such as Dublin Core, MODS, etc. Rather, they are a supplemental means to organize information and order search results.

It will probably take some time to get a few links entered, and then we’ll see how useful the cross-links between other users are. I’ll also try to increase the tagging at the bottom of each blog (see today’s tags).

…s).

 

www.flickr.com More of eltham_mob’s photos

…

[1.] http://del.icio.us/dcrob [del.icio.us]
[2.] Yahoo Acquiring Del.ico.us Explained in 6 Easy Steps [technologyevangelist]
[3.] Some del.icio.us ideas [bleeding edge]
[4.] A del.icio.us study: Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community [ideant]
[5.] Social Bookmarking Tools (I) [D-Lib Magazine April 2005]

Technorati Tags: Social bookmarking del.icio.us

Del.icio.us Tags: Social bookmarking del.icio.us

Flickr Tags: Social bookmarking

Wikipedia: Social bookmarking del.icio.us

Cook’s Cottage

Fishing for Secrets (Dec 16-Jan 21)
Go fishing from the longboat of Captain Cook’s ship and catch a fish telling you your secret orders. Choose three different paths to complete your orders.10am-3pm.
C$5 A free.
Cook’s Cottage, Fitzroy Gardens, Wellington Pde, East Melbourne.

It was a hot day for it. but what a lot of fun! The Fishing for Secrets was not on, but there was another hunt for clues available for the kids so they still a great game.

While we were at the cottage we managed to pick up the Cooks’ Cottage Letterbox

 

[1.] Cooks’ Cottage Letterbox [atlasquest]