July 29, 2008

Knol: Wikipedia’s Doom?

Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:

While I was ranting some days ago about Wikipedia being completely bureaucratic and it being overly complex to get your knowledge, I’ve completely overseen the newest buzz around Google: Knol.

As soon as I realized that there might be an alternative to Wikipedia, I rushed over to knol.google.com and created my account, and was immediately frustrated by the lack of Articles. While knol surely has some nice improvements over Wikipedia (read WYSIWYG-Editor and better author-profiles), the real treasure of Wikipedia is the huge amount of topics and articles that cover about every aspect a normal user may need,and in some cases even for in depth studies, like for me it really helps me studying, where my professors didn’t explain that well. Sure, offering the authors some share of the revenue by letting them register their AdSense accounts with their knol accounts will push a lot of users towards knol, it will be a long while before they reach the level of completeness of Wikipedia.

Completeness is the next thing I have to criticise on knol: while it is possible for anybody to create his own knols (that’s what google calls it’s posts) on any topic, there is no guarantee that the topics will be covered in a neutral way and linked amongst them sufficiently, which is a major strength of Wikipedia on the other hand.

Also the knols will not be merged into one revised, corrected and there will be no generally acknowledged version which is the reference. It will just be a collection on articles floating around, like any other web page, and not a consolidated repository of knowledge, which should be the goal when trying to compete with Wikipedia.

Last but not least, I think, there will be a run to write only the most popular articles, with pretty useless content just to grab your attention, driving you to the authors page, to give him an impression on his Ads. Partly this can already be seen already, try searching for popular terms for wikipedia, music or knol.

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July 19, 2008

Wikipedia frustration

Christian Decker wrote this terribly early in the morning:
Apparently I’m not the only one frustrated with the rules and relevance checks of Wikipedia “officials”:

The reason for my frustration is that I tried twice to add an article about a popular band in switzerland to the german Wikipedia version, but twice it was considered irrelevant. No problem so far, except that I was told that once they’d publish a CD and have 5′000 records sold they would be relevant… but hey, that’s bureaucratic germany… they can change their mind whenever they want.

So the article still isn’t online, though Des Koenigs Halunken have met all of the criteria to be in there… call it fair…

[Thanks for http://www.socialsignal.com/ for the Picture]

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July 15, 2008

WordPress 2.6

Christian Decker wrote this in the early evening:
WordPress 2.6 has been released:
I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5. WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.6
After the amazing 2.5 release with its hundreds of new features this release seems to be a bit minimalistic, but I installed it anyway. Actually this post is being written from the new Press This button which is a feature I’ve seen some years ago, but then disappeared again. Using WP-Cache I had no downtime at all, since all my posts were cached and served from that cache :-)

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July 8, 2008

Debugging remote Tomcat from Eclipse

Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:
I recently set up a new Project using Maven 2. Sadly, while facilitating the Project setup, this means that I couldn’t get all the free configuration I could have had by simply clicking through the Eclipse Wizard for Dynamic Web Projects, namely the ability to run the Tomcat container right inside Eclipse, with automagic reloading, etc… Luckily I found this post by Narendra Naidu which explains the details on how to start Tomcat in the JPDA debugging mode, and how to attach Eclipse to it:
  1. Start Tomcat in JPDA debug mode. For this, set up two variables in the environment as follows:
  2. The first variable is: set JPDA_TRANSPORT=dt_socket (This tells the VM that the debugger would talk to the VM on Tcp sockets)
  3. The second variable is: set JPDA_ADDRESS=8000 (This tells the VM the port on which it should listen for debugger connections)
  4. Go to the command prompt and run the ‘Catalina.bat’ batch file present in {TomcatHome}\bin. On the command prompt pass the following argument: catalina jdpa start
  5. Go to Eclipse and open the Debug window. Create a new configuration under ‘Remote Java Application’ . Make sure ‘Connection Type’ is Socket and port is 8000
  6. Navigate the webapplication thru web browser and see your Eclipse stop at breakpoints.
Very helpful :-)

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July 2, 2008

Toggl Timer for iGoogle

Christian Decker wrote this in the late evening:
Toggl is a very valuable tool to track where you spent all your time during the day. iGoogle (former Google Homepage) is great to have open all the time, with its thousands of Gadgets from Alphabet Display to Weather Forecasts. Sadly though I was unable to find a Google Gadget that allowed me to show the Toggl Timer in my startpage. So I decided I’d have a go and try to make it myself. After only some minutes I already had a running version, which needed a little bit of tweaking. So here it is: the Toggle Timer Gadget.Google Toggl Timer Gadget And if you’re really brave, add it to your homepage Add to Google

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