Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Archives for September 2005

I’m buying a Mac

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I’ve finally decided to buy (in some weeks) an 14″ Apple iBook G4.

When I was 15, I discovered the NeXT computer and the NeXTstep operating system in the French computer magazine SVM and it was love at first sight. I still remember the feeling I had just looking at those gorgeous picture of the NeXT computer and the fantastic screenshots. And I said to myself: “I’ll buy a NeXT one day…”

Today, the NeXT is long dead but NeXTstep is thriving in Mac OS X, the operating system of Apple Macintosh computers.

And that’s why I’m buying an iBook. It’s well-featured, has a very nice design and, crucially, runs Mac OS X very well.

NeXTstep, nous voilà… after 17 years!

HOWTO best read weblogs using Technorati

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We all have blogs, isn’t it? For instance, noulakaz.net is my personal blog where I (from time to time try to) publish some philosophical ramblings about technology.

Now, million and million of persons have their own blogs and it is very difficult to keep up with the most interesting ones. Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere. For instance, I just looked for the word ‘Mauritius’ and Technorati returns:

Nice! There are 7,947 blog entries about Mauritius and, among those, 20 posted today… Obviously, I can now just click on those new posts to read them. It is also possible to look for latest blog entries matching a specific tag (for instance, Technology or Music)

There is also a watchlist which contains a list of keywords (or URL) that Technorati always monitors. For example, one can make Technorati watch ‘Mauritius’

That looks a lot like searching for ‘Mauritius’ but with a twist. At the bottom of the page, we have the View in RSS format hyperlink. Clicking on it opens a RSS file describing the latest 20 blog entries containing the word Mauritius.

Now, you don’t have to click on this link (as the target is just some funny looking XML) but you can use it with a RSS aggregator like Apple’s Safari, KDE’s Akregator or even Firefox using live bookmarks.

Here we have the Technorati RSS feed for Mauritius as a live bookmark in Firefox:

So, I can easily find the new blog entries about Mauritius without even going to Technorati’s website! That is pretty neat!