Open Source Search Has Arrived

Do you love open source? Do you remember a time before when using locked off, proprietry systems that gave you little control seemed so normal because you'd never found anything else? Are you using an open-source search engine?



Huh?



"Open-source search engine?! I can hear many of you gasp. But... doesn't Google use Linux? Yep. But can you look at the code for how they control what information you see (and don't see)? Nope. Are they legally bound to show you the best results possible? Nope. Are they legally bound to do whatever it legally takes to make the most money even if it means not giving you the best search results? Surprisingly, yes. (For fairness sake, this also applies to Microsoft's Live search, Yahoo search or *any* search run by a publicly listed company).

In fact *every* common-law country based public company is legally bound to do *whatever it takes* within the law to get the most money for their shareholders. (Note: No, I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Look it up for yourself, and also go watch "The Corporation" while you're at it.)



So if we want human knowledge to be truly free (as in beer *and* speech) what's our best option:

Wikia Search.

Hmmm... It's still in beta (at time of writing), howver: It's open-source. Everyone has access to the index (in-fact you can even automatically help build it yourself). Everyone can see how the index is ranked, but the trick is, that like Wikipedia (which was founded by the same guy) it relies on mass numbers of human users to make it relevant. It worked there. It works here, too. Before you gasp that that must lead to people gaming the system remember that human entered data is most likely what Google is using as well. Think about it. Do you really think that all that data they have when you "vote up" a result in their search rankings does nothing? And that marking that (Google owned blogspot) blogpost in your (Google) RSS reader is just ignored? And of course they would never track the number of click throughs you do on different links... oh, except for where we know they do already like Adwords.

The difference here is that Wikia lets you know what they do, has it community monitored and lets you much more comprehensively improve your own (and others) results. There's combinations of commenting, annotations, adding alternative key-phrases, giving (1-5 star) ratings of search results and even seeing which (logged in) users contributions added to the results you're seeing.

That's not to say that Google is evil. Personally I feel that in some areas we need proprietry software just to "fill the gaps" until a great open-source option comes along.

My feeling is "just" that the great open-source search option has arrived...

How I learned to stop worrying and love KBlogger

At the time of writing, Kblogger is in Alpha2 (read NOT released yet!) and has some... well.. need of love to get it going.

When you do get it going though, it's a beautiful, lightweight app that integrates nicely with KDE4 and makes blogging easy.

So how do you get past those "getting it up and running blues"? I can't offer tech support on every situation, however here's what worked for me with a blogger account and Kubuntu Jaunty (Alpha 4).



There are two main issues:

1. When trying to create an account I always got "Could not get blogs".
a. Visit your blogspot site (ie http://yourusername.blogspot.com) and log-in.
b. Click on any link (such as Create or Edit Posts) that ends in ?blog-id= and a long number. Copy that number from your browsers url bar.
c. In the "Create account" section of kblogger, click the advanced tab. Paste the number from step b above and click ok. You're ready to go! However, you'll now notice that...


2. None of the buttons appear (you know, unimportant stuff like, well, add a blog post)

Temporarily this can be worked around by adding shortcuts (settings -> Configure shortcuts) for New, Upload and Synch. Use them instead.


You're now well on your way to becoming a Web 2.0(tm) journalistic superstar! Go forth and make the mainstream media tremble!

QBBT: Copy logic bricks (and other properties, too!)

I love to block out movement and logic in the game engine before adding complex graphics. It's so quick and gratifying. Once you've got everything working how you want on a cube/dummy though, how do you replace it with your final character / mesh? Easy! Just copy the logic bricks over by:

1. Selecting every object you want to copy the logic **TO**.
2. Select the object you want to copy the logic **FROM**.
3. Ctrl+C brings up the copy menu and just select "Logic Bricks" (you can also copy all kinds of other attributes here).

Why the weird order of selecting the "paste" object before the "copy object"? Because this way you can select a bunch of objects to paste to first and copy logic from one object to a whole bunch of others in one go... Sweet!

Launching "Quick, Basic Blender Tips"

One of the great things about Blender is the wealth of in depth tutorials for it that abound all over the web. Unfortunately being more of the "jump in and learn it by doing, then search/ask when I run into trouble" kind of person, I've found that often when you need a simple answer to a simple problem that you can end up having to read through many 15 page long tutorials before you find your answer. How I wish that I had some source of simple tips that told me all the basic, but not obvious tricks in blender to learn as I went.

Well, in true open source I realised that "if it is to be it's up to me" so now I present a new section "Quick Basic Blender Tips". What are these tips? As I'm new and learning Blender, these are all the basic problems I've run into and then found a solution for, hopefully saving you the pain of making them as well! Feel free to let me know if there are better ways, or if I'm just flat out wrong!

These will be short and to the point (usually less than a paragraph), a great place for googlers to get answers and hopefully a valuable regular education for anyone who cares to subscribe.

All tips will be tagged "Quick Basic Blender Tips".

Let the tips begin!

I Love You, But...

Dear Google:

I love you, I really do. You give Microsoft a run for their money along with their (increasingly) underling Yahoo. You pay wads of students and hackers to spiff up many of my favourite applications each summer and you host this blog. You're even hosting the release party for my favourite project of the year, the very delicious KDE4. All accounts so far are that your food at the release event was equally delicious, which is why I feel a little uncomfortable mentioning something that's been leaving a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth lately...

If you really want to support us, how about officially supporting our venerable, standards based browser Konqueror?

I understand that there are a million browsers and it doesn't make good sense to support all of them. If you're wanting to support open source though, there's really only two dominant desktop environments though and that's Gnome and KDE. Your support for Gnome's Firefox is exemplary. Heck you even pay people to pimp it for you! (cheers!) But how many people are able to use KDE's official browser to use your services (particularly maps, reader, earth etc)? I don't know, and I'm betting that you don't either because anyone stubborn enough to try and plough through on your sites with our beloved Konqi soon has to change their browser identification to either Safari or Mozilla to get most things to work.

Don't get me wrong, like a needy lover I keep coming back to you even when you treat Konqi bad. You're still smart, sexy and generally do a lot of good imho. I also don't expect Firefox levels of support. Plain old Safari levels would be nice. But then, maybe, just maybe, you knew if you gave enough good food at GoogleHQ, that the community would just do it ourselves.

So Google, I do love you (please don't disable my Adsense account). Now, how about giving Konqi a bit of that love back...


PS If you feel the same (and aren't Google!) I highly recommend passing the message on to Google by clicking here and choosing "No" under "Was this information helpful". You can then enter a short message about this! Go gettem! :-D