Google Deranks DMOZ
Posted 7:21 AM

DMOZ is a free, volunteer-run, manually maintained hierarchical directory of web sites. For a long time, a listing in DMOZ was critical to getting your website noticed on the internet.

It suffers from old technology, lack of semantic features, and failure to capture the "2.0" vibe in the way Digg and other website ranking systems have.

Still, DMOZ does provide a baseline categorization in a way that few other sites do. Yahoo!, with it's pay-to-play system excludes too much of the internet. But DMOZ, unfortunately, has lost its relevance probably because most of the editors that are left are merely industry representatives trying to keep competition out.

Google has apparently de-ranked the importance of DMOZ in their pagerank algorithm. Possibly they have simply improved their duplicate content algorithms. Still, I've seen a huge shift in many sites rankings in the last week or so at Google because of this. Many of the old sites ... gathering dust at DMOZ ... have been dropped. Whereas new sites - which take advantage of social networking, blogging, etc. are moving up.

Mostly, I wish there was a "categorization project" that worked. I'm thinking of something that you use to keep your bookmarks in order... that both suggests a categorization (to help you organize), allows you to modify/change/rate/hide entries (for quality control), and shares your edits with others (which are correlated and averaged).
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Tool Usage and Genetic Atrophy
Posted 10:39 AM

Most people would agree that moles developed blindness due to something called "genetic atrophy". Many complex features of our anatomy probably need constant selective pressure - without which they would fade away. (PubMed Link)

However, it's more controversial to claim that this is a driving factor in human evolution. Many of my arguments, when presented in various fora (including conversation with biologists at the AAAS conference), are met with skepticism.

Still, I persist... so here's my (probably will be unpublished) response to the recent article in New Scientist that there is "no theory" to explain the evolution of human hairlessness.

Dear Feedback,

My theory has consistently been that hairlessness evolved in response to wearing clothing.

No one would dispute that early intelligent hominids surely began to wear clothing in response to the cold.

The lack of need for warmth would induce a genetic atrophy for hair. Atrophy is a slow, but persistent effect in evolution - leading to blindness in moles, for example.

And, knowing what we do about early hominids, their wardrobe would immediately begin having cultural importance, signifying cultural advancement. Sexual selection would favor those wearing advanced clothing as a sign of intelligence and tribal membership. Finally, there may have always been selective pressure for "youth as beauty" in human culture. Children are more hairless than adults - thus selection for hairless adults would be favored.

There are so many contributing factors that, without the need for warmth, our hair probably evolved away rather quickly.

- Erik A.
Durham, NC

Labels: science

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The W3C is Trying to Kill the Internet, but Failing
Posted 10:08 AM

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the W3C is doing a lot of things it was never supposed to do.

The W3C is not supposed to *set* standards, it's supposed to *document* them based on common usage.

The W3C was never supposed to tell people, "This is what HTML is for" or "This is how it's supposed to work". The W3C's job is to say "This is how people are using HTML, this is the kind of HTML that, if you use, most browsers will support."

ALl the stuff that have come out of the W3C have been, in a word, "junk". They should back off all new standards, let browsers put in all the proprietary tags they want, and document the "winning systems" the way it was intended.

It's clear that <table>'s are here to stay... people like then, use them and want them. <font>'s are here to stay... for the same reason. There's this weird bureaucratic notion that HTML pages need to be "changeable" ... but isn't that what PHP's for? Do we really need to "encapsulate the style" of a document somewhere else?

It's embarrassing that the one of the most meaningful new syntactic markup tags ... the ICBM coordinates ... has failed to enter the standard.... whicle a bunch of junk that no one wants is squarely in there.

If W3C wanted to come up with a new standard for some thing that no one wants.. they should have given it a new name. Leave our HTML alone.
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Un-unified messaging
Posted 9:24 AM

I contacted onebox, wildgate, and solaxis, all leading "unified messaging" providers.

All of them provide a nice service where you can have 1 phone number routed to multiple numbers... and that same number accepts faxes, etc. I've used onebox for years, with OK service level but a good feature set.

However, the feature I'm looking for.. none of them provide, and I've been contacting their sales groups about once every 3 months for over a year. What's more, even Google Voice doesn't support this feature, and it looks like they have no plans to.

Basically, SOME numbers (like cell phones) require confirmation on pickup but SOME other numbers (like the office phone and transcription services) don't require confirmation.

Doesn't sound hard... but the only provider that gets close is Solaxis... and only on the transcription ... since the system requires the confirmation settings to be the same in each ring group. SO they get "some" right. But not everything.
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Obama Barcelona
Posted 3:27 AM

If you search for "Obama" on Google Maps, you get an Irish pub in Barcelona, styled in a self-proclaimed "British Africa" theme. A prescient comment on our President's heritage?


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Auto Player for Castle Age
Posted 3:18 AM

The zynga games script seems to keep breaking for Castle Age, so I fixed it, and made a "castle age only" version that works OK.

I don't know the first thing about Greasemonkey... I just hacked a bit until it worked.

If anyone cares to ask, I'll try and get the jobs thing to work.... but the autofight is good enough.
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Civics Imploding Over Obama Talk to Kids
Posted 10:49 PM

Right-wingers who don't know what the word "civics" means are hijacking the school system and winning. Some schools in America will be *shutting down* rather than show a speech by our very hard working, very moderate American president Obama.

I'm going to quote George Bush here... "When it comes to your own education, what I'm saying is take control." That was part of his speech to kids ... and I'm quoting him for every child whose parents act as political censors. Nobody closed a school when he spoke, or when Clinton before him spoke.

Every recent American president gave speeches to kids. And every one says the same basic things about the importance of education, hard work, etc.

What's the difference? Obama has dark skin... so some people are closing schools?

This is a great national embarrassment.
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msvcr70.dll Official Download How To
Posted 6:36 PM

I put my old favorite "zwhois" tool on a Vista box, but since it's a fairly old utility, it was looking for "msvcr70.dll", something that isn't on new machines. Knowing that the tool makes very slight and conservative use of the API, I figured it would be an easy download. However, searching for the file from an official source was difficult. And there were tons of "dll download" sites which I didn't trust.

The right thing to download is a "Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Package" ... most any one will do. Unfortunately, none of them (not even the 2005 one) comes with msvcr70. msvcr71 is close though, and 99% of simple apps will work fine with it (or better) ... unless they rely on some undocumented bugs in order to work.

After copying msvcr71.dll to msvcr70.dll ... the application worked fine. And I didn't have to download from an untrusted source.
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