Archive for August 2007
Tafiti
Tafiti, Microsoft’s experimental search site built on Silverlight: pretty pretty, and beautiful tree visualization of search results. (As a programmer, I’ve experimented with tree visualization of search results in the past, but, personally I don’t find them very useful.)
However, Tafiti seems to be just too pretty to be used regularly, too intimidating. It doesn’t have that comfortable workhorse feel of Google search or even Microsoft’s Live search for that matter.
Butterfly Effect
Skype Blog on Skype’s outage over last week (blaming re-boots after regular Tuesday Windows updates):
“The abnormally high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.”
Too far-fetched to be true!
[Update] : Skype blog clarifies the Mircosoft connection, and that they don’t blame Microsoft for the catastrophe.
Award Winning Software?
[…] “This program does nothing at all”…Even the name of the software, “awardmestars”, was a bit of a giveaway. And yet it still won 16 ‘awards’.
BitTorrent Protocol and Client Gone Closed
Latest version of BitTorrent client (v 6.0), which is based on closed-source uTorrent (acquired a while back), has not been released, neither has been the protocol specs. The “official” BitTorrent client has never been very popular compared to other protocol implementations like Azureus and uTorrent.
Protocol specs, although technically closed, are available with very tightly maintained SDK license. And, all previous version of protocol as well as the client are available openly.
In lifecycle of any technology “The step after ubiquity is invisibility“. I always hoped BitTorrent to follow that curve. Not anymore probably.
Reverberations 
