Through the arched window

Tech Wednesday

OK, now I am trying to write this post once more, following the third Internet Explorer lockup in half an hour. However I am going to look at this philosophically and say it is a good thing, because it will make my post less wordy, being tired of the words I have written 3 times. So here are the technology thoughts that have come to me while planning this post:

1) Google desktop search seems like it might be a very useful tool, and at zero cost. In a nutshell, desktop search is a small program which does for your PC what Google search does for the web, so you can search your Outlook emails, Word documents, text documents and several other file types with trademark Google speed and efficiency. Also interestingly, it indexes your Internet history files, so when trying to remember where you saw that interesting article you meant to bookmark you can just run a quick search on your cached pages and Bob's your uncle.

2) Firefox is another tool that is worth a look, a web browser alternative to Internet Explorer. In fact I am using it right now, thanks to the above mentioned IE crashes I thought I would try it out. I have heard many good things about Firefox: open source, so free to use and easily extendable by a large programming community; reliable; not subject to the masses of security holes in IE; plugins available to do nearly anything you can think you might want a web browser to do. So far it seems like a decent alternative to IE to me, and judging by the number of Firefox entries in my weblogs a lot of people agree.

3) I am an awful geek. I know this because my sister frequently, and vocally reminds me of it. But you probably don't know my sister, so just in case this post didn't confirm it I thought I better be clear about this fact. What brought this fact home just now was how happy I was to run a Google search for the name of a bin (yes a garbage can) and to find that my very own site was number one in the results, not one of the most hotly fought over keywords I suppose.

Actually this personal revelation ties in nicely to the reason I was thinking about desktop search in the first place. I was reading an interesting blog post somewhere about the need for context in blogging but couldn't remember where. I think the gist was that it is very useful to know who you are reading, what they believe, and where they come from so that you can apply the appropriate mental filters to what they say. I will write more once I find the link again.

posted by Patrick ASD @ 7:44 PM