Another blog bites the dust

I just saw that Google released the Google Ctemplate library.

While they do need to get some kudos for their efforts of releasing various code bits out as open source, I do have a problem with the Ctemplate library itself.

I don’t know when they wrote this library, but what I do know is that its yet another templating language to use. Why couldn’t they have used a standard language such as JavaScript (more exactly, ECMAScript) instead of inventing their own syntax? There are so many templating engines out there, why invent yet another one instead of trying to use an official syntax know by many?

Zoundry released a new version of their Blog Writer product. Some of the more prominent features added (which a lot of users including me asked for) are:

• XHTML Editor – You can now see and edit the generated XHTML
• Spell Checker – No more copying and pasting stuff to another spell checker :-)

Check out the full feature list and download.

I’ve been using Zoundry for the past 6 months as my primary posting tool for this blog as well as my Advanced .NET Debugging blog and it has been really helpful. With the new features now released it is now a kick ass blog writer.

I’m what you may call a medium to heavy feed junkie. I read most of the information today using my favorite feed reader RSS Bandit.

While RSS Bandit is a great feed reader it does have its limitations. The biggest one being that its a client side application and it doesn’t sync to one of the server side readers.

I sometimes want to read my feeds at home, sometimes at work or sometimes when I don’t have a computer with me and I just want to login in some Internet cafe and be able to continue reading where I left off.

I’m just watching the live feed of the SpaceX‘s Falcon 1 rocket launch.

I can’t even begin to describe what the impact of this whole move is if the launch succeeds as planned.

The Falcon 1 rocket is the first all American, built from scratch, rocket in the last 25+ years. It is built from new materials and its launch cost is $6.7 million which is about a quarter of what a launch will cost on a Delta II rocket or equivalent (even the Russian launch costs are higher than this the cost of launching Falcon 1).

I just read on Om Malik on Boardband that Michael Robertson of MP3.com, Linspire and SIPphone fame just annonced a new project called ajaxWrite.

This is a pure web application word processor without any storage behind it like Writely (when you open a document you upload it and when you save it you download it) but it seems very well written.

The only thing that bothers me is that they claim they support all major file formats but what they actually support is MS Word, RTF, Text and PDF.

Ohad, the leader of a small Israeli software studio named 3D3R, just released a cool little app named Bubbles.

The concept behind it is based on the fact that the new age of web applications doesn’t really play nicely with your desktop, so instead of living up and playing nicely with the rest of your desktop application, web application tend to stack up in your tabbed browser (if you have one of those, if not, get one here).

According to this link in Globes, the Israeli Business newspaper, Google is going to open up an R&D center in Israel in the second quarter. The center will be led by Dr. Yoelle Maarek, a long time (17 years) veteran of IBM’s research labs and will be located in the northern city of Haifa (near the Technion, surprise surprise)

The only company out of the big 3, a.k.a, GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft), that has an R&D center in Israel is Microsoft. Yahoo had something in the first bubble and after the explosion of the first bubble it was quickly closed.

If blogs are the long tail of knowledge, what are the comments that most blog posts have?

Are the comments the long tail of the long tail of knowledge?

Think about it…

A long long time ago on July 6th 2005 I’ve posted a rant post about how I’m so pissed at Google after I had to pay $37.25 to get a “Free” Google T-Shirt I won because I wrote the Google Search API .NET Wrapper.

Well, now after 8 months I finally got a refund.

It started as a strange Email I got from the GoogleStore saying something about my request being handled. I didn’t figure what this was and the Email didn’t have any special links in it.

I read a this post on Niall Kennedy’s blog about the new features in the Google Toolbar which includes the ability to store and tag label bookmarks that can also later be retrieved when logging into a different machine.

While the concept is nice (and is similar in a number of ways to the del.icio.us extension for FireFox the thing that caught my eye was the fact that Google decided to call the tags labels.