So, now Google can search TV programs based on the subtitles. While there is still a lot of improvements, I can see one interesting use of it straight away (well, within reach anyway). Connect Google Video Search, Google alerts and Tivo (or more probably a custom coded PVR) and you can chose shows to record in slack time based on how often those shows mention your favourite keywords. Make the interface real-time (probably not very likely) and you might be able to trigger PVR to start recording a program when a keyword is mentioned.

I read Hani’s I read Hani’s incidentally. I used to have him in my RSS reader, but the language makes it hard to concentrate on the arguments (valid as they often are). I still get him through search or topic aggregators occasionally. So, when I saw Greg Luck’s deBilefication and further discussion of the Hani’s entries, I read them very carefully and empathised much more with the topic than when I read the original articles.

Frank Carver is not impressed with anti-spam screensaver. I think there is an additional danger beyond just handling the control over to the corporation. And that is a danger of somebody hacking the communication/update protocol and substituting the list of hosts. And since the screensaver was installed on purpose, user will ensure that all the firewalls are cleared and will ignore any warnings regarding the program. On the other hand, the download website already seems down.

The internet could be a very small place. One of my clued-up customers is aparently also my subscriber (and vice-versa). He was wondering why questions from ‘intelligent customers’ do not go straight to Backline (tier-3) support(WayBack Machine archive). There are several reasons. First one is that Backline (BL) and Frontline (FL) support (as BEA names tier-3 and tier-1 correspondingly) actually have different strength. Frontline support is very good on collecting initial information, checking documentation and internal support databases.

Subbu Allamaraju has written a very good description of the tricks HTTP 1.1 goes to utilise connections more efficiently. Reading his article makes very clear that persistent connections are quite tricky and developing new code dealing with the topic requires careful thought. And, of course, troubleshooting persistent connections is quite hard. Ethereal comes quite handy in here, but even that does not know how to extract individual parts of conversations. Does anybody know free tools that work in a network sniffing mode (not proxy mode)?