I just installed BetterSearch . BetterSearch is a firefox extension that enhances search results from Google, Amazon, A9, MSN, AllTheWeb and others with a thumbnail of each site and buttons and provides a button to open a preview of the linked item in-situ.

Both features can help you find the best result more quickly. Unfortunately, the thumbnail is usually of the top level of the site, so its not always an accurate clue about the contents of the page. Also, the link to bring up the in-situ preview is nearly microscopic, which means it takes more time to hit accurately, which both reduces its utility as a productivity tool, and adds frustration.

The thumbnail issue is not an easy one to fix since the extension is relying on 3rd partys for thumbnails. For the author to do it himself server-side would surely be cost prohibitive. The BetterSearch extension could download the pages and render the thumbnails itself, but this would probably be rather slow. It could come in handy though, if the downloaded page remained in the browsers cache, because people could then view the page that much quicker.

The difficulty in hitting the preview button is an easier fix, the author could just make the graphic for the button significantly wider.

In some ways what’s most interesting about BetterSearch is its business-model. The guy rewrites Amazon URLs to include his affiliate ID. Whether Amazon regards this as an activity in line with its terms of service is another matter.

At least all parties receive some benefit (amazon gets a sale, the customer has an easier time of finding things, and the plugin author gets paid). Browster has a similar product for IE, but it makes its money by selling ads on other people’s content and doesn’t cut them in, which is lame. Also lame, coming up with yet another “ster-name.”

I was a little worried that BetterSearch was loaded with spyware, but a little searching turned up nothing, though there is a similarly named piece of adware which seems entirely unrelated.

I applaud the effort to help move us past the same old search results we’ve seen since before AltaVista, but I think I’m going to un-install better search, at least until its easier to hit the preview links.

Boing Boing: Napster-to-Go reviewed, math done

Another aspect of the Napster to Go model is that it shows that the RIAAs claims of a lost sale for every download to be demonstrably false. If you can download an unlimited number of songs via napster and play them for as long as you continue to subscribe, then the maximum loss the RIAA suffers from a single downloader cannot exceed $15/month no matter how many songs a person downloads.

So, generously assuming a music listening lifespan of $80 years, the maximum lifetime value of a customer is 80 years * 12 months/ year * $15/month = $14,400

Update: Sveasoft’s gone further than I thought in trying to work around the GPL. It’m not sure it was the case when I first commented on Nelson’s post, but these days I can’t disagree with his assessment.

Nelson’s Weblog: tech / good / hyperWRT

This is rich.

Nelson slams Sveasoft, who makes an improvement to the GPLed firmware for linksys routers as “assholes, trying to sell the GPL code for money.”

Nevermind the relevant details, namely that:
1. The GPL doesn’t prevent people from selling deriviatives of GPLed software, provided they provide the derived source code to their customers.

2. Sveasoft provides the derived source code to their customers.

3. Sveasoft’s particular approach to getting paid for selling GPLed software was actually reviewed and found complaint by the FSFs compliance manager.

I’ve been playing with using Picasa from Google for the last week or so and overall I’m quite impressed with it. It’s already better for managing a big pile of photos than the software that came with my digital camera, and that’s without making use of all the metadata, plus it provides good basic photo editing features and makes it easy to tweak and resize photos for sharing via e-mail.

I just discovered something I don’t like today though: The way it imports new photos from a digital camera. I’ve just built a new PC, and rather than installing the software Canon provided with my camera, I thought I’d use Picasa to pull the photos over.

Yuck. Before I can actually save the photos to disk, Picasa forces me to name a folder to put them in and prompts me to add various bits of metadata. This requires thinking I’d rather not do. I hate having to remember to upload my photos in the first place and would rather they just magically flow to my computer whenever the camera gets close enough. Requiring any more thought is an entirely unwelcome imposition.

Even if I wanted to think about how to categorize my photos when I upload them, Picasa imposes a flawed model. I don’t upload from my camera after ever activity, as a result, there may be a week or more’s worth of images taken on different days of different things. It’s stupid to steer me into tagging a group of unrelated photos with the same metadata.

Even worse, they practically force me to tag it with incorrect metadata since I have no choice but to assign a single date to all the photos in the batch I import. I don’t even see the point in assigning a date, since the camera time stamps each file in the first place.

As much as I resent being forced to think at a time I’d rather not think at all, I do see the value in making it as simple as possible to add metadata to photos when you are downloading them from the camera. Unfortunately, Picasa seems to have made it too simple to be of much use.

I’d prefer:

1. That Picasa has the option of automatically downloading the photos from my camera with no effort on my part other than hooking up the cable. Sticking them in folders by shooting date (either by day, week, or month, as a configuration option) seems like a reasonable bit of automatic categorization to do.

2. That Picasa stops after downloading the images and allows me to choose to add metadata, or to just click Ok and have the images imported without further effort.

3. The Picasa actually make it easy to select related images at import time and quickly tag groups of them with relevant info.

All in all though, I’m still like with Picasa, I just wish its import functionality was more sensible so I don’t have to install some other package to download stuff from my camera.

Hamachi : Stay Connected

Hamachi allows you to establish secure direct connections to computers that are not accessible otherwise due to the restrictions in network setup.

I just stumbled across another P2P app that facilitates personal filesharing across the Internet without lots of firewall traversal hassles called Hamachi. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m interested in learning more.

I tried Grouper and dropped it because of it panders to the RIAA by streaming audio files at a low quality, rather than just treating them like any other file.

Then I tried Foldershare to make some files available between my home and work machines, and also to share various files with my brother in Utah. I like FolderShare’s simplicity, and that it works well for individual scenarios (like the way I used it to make a few files available at both home and work), and for group sharing and collaboration (like the way I’m sharing some files with my brother).

Groove supports similar functionality in their products. It will be interesting to see if Skype uses the P2P infastructure of Skype to enable other communications applications like this in addition to their IM and Voice features.