The AJAX Paradigm

Paul Kedrosky has made an interesting comment over what we should expect from the new generation AJAX apps. He makes a comparison with Desktop.com in the bubble times.

Many people are making same mistakes again. Om Malik mentioned Writely as a thin client. Why would I need a word processer over web, the inherently unreliable media. And even if I do, why would I trust keeping my documents with someone [and somewhere] else.

To quote Paul:

"What I really want from Ajax apps is for them to do stuff that it’s too hard to do with binary apps. I want them to be sensibly integrated with online resources; I want them to support realtime collaboration. I want them to do different stuff from Word/Excel/Powerpoint, not just do the same thing with a different engine under the hood."

Can't agree more.

Visual Inconsistencies: WinXP

Properties Window everywhere in WinXP adorns MS Sans Sarif font, glaringly diffent with otherwise "omni"present Tahoma, even that would have been a reasonably consistent UI scheme. But what is surprising that even the fonts across tabs are not consistent.

The font in 'Summary' tab is Tahoma, while all other tabs have MS Sans Sarif. For UI-challanged, look for a 'C' in 'Summary' tab and that in any other tab.

The Win2000 has Tahoma everywhere but the Properties window, which has MS Sans Sarif, consistently.

Take this proclaimed expert of Visual Design.

Peer-to-Peer Techniques in Searching

So far searching web has been mostly centralized affair (Google et al). There have been few attempts to develop a distributed search framework, Sun's JXTA being a prominent one.

A new European Commission funded research project aims to produce a prototype p2p search engine that's been described as an attempt to create a "P2P Google".

"The aim is to produce a system that offers higher quality results and more robustness than a centralised system such as Google," says Dr David Hales from Bologna University, a researcher working on the project. Professor Gerhard Weikum from the Max Planck Institute, who's leading the effort, and which involves computer scientists from across Europe, says "We're in the early stages of the project but are making rapid progress."

Non- English Web World

Cache mining of traffic from Wikipedia pages shows that English Wikipedia pages are accessed more than any other language(35%). The figure is surprisingly lower than expected considering demographics of Internet users and dominance of English speakers. Even more surprising was the fact that most Wikipedia usage from a country is from Japan(22%), which also explains the high figures for Japanese segment of Wikipedia. US and Germany are next, while India lying much below with 1%.

Is it just me

I havn't been able to log on Google Talk more than just twice within last two days. There has one in two chance of being able to open Gmail. Even if I do, Gmail pages are getting currupted now and then. Even Google searches are timing out. Orkut is as unreliable as it has always been("No Donuts for you"). Is Google gobbling up too much than it can handle?