A blog forSparkle Body Spray. This might be worse than “Yub”:http://www.yub.com.

At least they don’t appear to be censoring comments. Four of six are critical of the entire concept (the other two appear to be shills).

To be honest, I feel gross even linking to it, so I put in a no-follow attribute so as not to help their google rank.

via “Gaping Void”:http://www.gapingvoid.com

Google has some new beta offering called “Google Web Accelerator”:http://webaccelerator.google.com/ which promises to speed your web browsing experience. Sounds, great, right?

Conceptually, the accelerator isn’t all that different from the web caches used by a lot of ISPs and large corporations. Google basically keeps up to date copies of popular web pages and then transfers them to you using their superior servers and connectivity.

If widely used, this could mitigate “The Slashdot Effect” which often brings small sites to their knees when they suddenly find themselves featured on that popular website.

Which actually brings up another point. Often times, people will add a link to a version of the page from the Google Cache to the early comments of a Slashdot thread so that people can read the article even if the site has been swamped by the sudden burst of traffic. The accelerator is in some ways like an upgrade to the google cache.

Google also uses some other tricks, like anticipating what users might want to see and downloading the page before they click on it. Also, to save bandwidth (their’s probably, more than your’) if a page changes that you already have on your PC, it will only send the part of the page that has changed.

When I started this entry, I’d planned to post about how it was a fools bargain to turn over so much information to Google about browsing habits, but then it occured to me, they’ve long been collecting pretty much the same information, at a lot lower cost to themselves, from any user with the Google toolbar installed with the PageRank indicator turned on.

Of course, I’ve not had PageRank turned on for years. The value of the little guage in the toolbar is far less than the intrusion of them tracking my browsing behavior. This would seem to be an attempt to try to strike a new bargain with users to get at that same data.

I’m sitting at the University Village outpost of Zoka. Next to me are a couple of guys from Delicious Monster, who make a cataloging application for the Mac called Delicious Library.

They have been bitching loudly for the past 10 or 15 minutes while one of them seems to be Instant Messaging with the rep for some sort of Mac dealer chain (maybe the Apple Store).

At the root, it is natural comiseration about the frustrations of maintaining a business relationship, but the attitude is rather arrogant and negative, it’s being spoken loudly in a public place and the result is that it makes me not like them very much. I wonder what will happen if Steve Jobs takes and interest in what they are doing and launches a competing product. Will their arrogance be any match for Steve’s?

I’m not sure how I found it, but AutoStitch does a fantastic job of creating photo panoramas out of a collection of overlapping pictures, and best of all, its easy — just point it at the files and it figures the rest out for you.

In the past I’ve used various other tools, including the PanoTools package, and a few that came with my digital cameras, none of them acheived the same quality in terms of distorting, aligning and blendin the images, and none of them was as easy to use. In 3 out of 4 cases, all I had to do was select the right set of files and autostitch did the rest. In the 4th, there were complications because sailboats in the photos were moving between each frame I snapped, so I had to tweak some settings once to get it to focus on the big picture, rather than the little parts.

Also kind of cool, I accidentially selected a dozen or so photos of my dog wrestling with another dog. The software managed to match the overlapping peices of the background and blend all the photos together, leaving the dogs looking like weird smears of fur.

Another nice feature of Autostitch is that it can work with overlapping two dimensional grids of photos, rather than just overlapping strips, so you can easily build a composite image that is tall and wide.

Lastly, its free, though it looks like they are hoping to have the technology licensed for incorporation into another product. I think that would be a shame. Its so good at what it does, it would require very little additional work to polish the UI enough to appeal to a wider audience. I’d rather pay $20-30 for a commercial version of autostich than $40-60 for a fuller featured image manipulation product that included autostitch technology.

This is interesting. I’ve noticed that most of the hits on my site come from host-148-244-150-58.block.alestra.net.mx. A little digging shows that “it’s been a major spammer”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=%22host-148-244-150-58.block.alestra.net.mx%22&btnG=Search of blog comments and Wikis.

In general *.bloc.alestra.net.mx is a major source of spam on my site. I’d like to block the whole ISP at the webserver level by modifying my .htaccess file. Looking through my logs, it looks like 148.144.15.X and 207.248.240.X are the offending address blocks.

That should help.

I did a search on technorati for “home automation” to see if I could find any blogs on the subject worth tracking. What I got was pretty useless. Even multiple pages in, I get what looks like “RSS spam from a single website”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=home automation -gr8bargain.com&start=220. I tried filtering out the site, but it didn’t seem to have any effect. Near as I can tell, Technorati doesn’t have search syntax for excluding a site. Of course, why they are indexing a site whose entries seem largely repetitive is beyond me.

The is obviously just the beginning of gaming search of the incremenatal web.