There's no reliable centralized storage for your contact info

If you only use contact info in MS Outlook, mobile phone and MSN, then congratulation, you don't have much troubles of accessing all info related to your contacts.

For many people, the info related to their contacts spread through everywhere:

• Business contacts in company's Exchange server
• business Emails, calendar and tasks in company's Exchange server
• Personal contacts in Mozilla Thunderbird
• Personal emails in Thunderbird
• Personal contacts in Thunderbird
• Business contacts and personal contacts in PDA/smart phone.
• Instant messenger conversations through MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Gtalk and ICQ etc.
• Online social networking like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter etc.
• Blogs
• ...
  

There exist solutions to aggregate these info and use the info. Typical solutions:

• GrandCentral
• Social Network Aggregation like FriendFeed

I am not sure whether there is an aggregation service that aggregate my Email conversations in company's Exchange, my personal pop3 Email account and my Gmail. I would wish similar service occurred in MSN, ICQ and GTalk etc., since I keep multiple online identities for different online social circles, as many of you would. And I sometime just want to have a centralized place to review all conversations in different online social circles.

In addition, we haven't yet dump fax machines. It would be good all fax contents can be stored and indexed in computer.

There are mature solutions for business world, however, what about solutions taking both private world and business world?

Is it technically hard to aggregate all information related to your contacts? I think you would have no doubt that FBI or CIA can establish the whole aggregation of all your communication activities, if you are lucky enough in their watch list. Unfortunately they don't have enough man power and computing power to do the service for everyone, and they won't let the owner of the communication activities to review the aggregation.

Synchronize Open Contacts with Mobile Devices

Funambol is a web-base synchronization solution for PIM information including contacts, calendar, tasks and Emails etc. The beauty of Funambol is, you may use either an established Funambol Web service, and a locally installed Funambol server if you don't want to publish contact info of your buddies to the Web.



There were 2 public Funambol Web services used for testing SyncML Client for Open Contacts, one is Schedule World, and the other is My Funambol.

While the user interfaces of My Funambol was designed for mobile devices, the web service can interact well with programs running on PC conforming SyncML, such as Funambol Outlook Plug-in, and SyncML Client for Open Contacts.

After you install Open Contacts and the SyncML Client, you may change the preferences of the SyncML Client as following:

Server URL : http://my.funambol.com/sync
User: Your login name in My Funambol
Password: Respective password

Please test these Web services yourself to determine which one to use.

First Hand Experience with Free Encyclopedia Britannica

Referencing to Wikipedia in blogs is popular. Britannica is trying to make a offer to blogger. There are mix of critics and praises around. Let me have a look how such free offer will go. If you click on this reference to Encyclopædia Britannica at Britannica Online, hopefully you will see the details without blocking. Please bear in mind, as the site is implemented using Flash, it performs slower than Wikipedia.

Bowing to CCP won't necessarily benefit you

Though Google argued that it has tried to make more info available to people living in strict censorship countries like PR China, however, such stand actually and effectively helping the communism party to do propaganda (as seen in Different ways of bowing to CCP webandlife.blogspot.com/2008/0 ...), and does not help its own competition against Baidu.com. Because Baidu has aggressive pro-active censorship officially approved by the communism party, it can search and present more info than Google can within the territory of PRC, even though Google has much better algorithms and machine farms.

With currently stand and mindset, Google simply can not win Baidu even for cases of searching technology terms in Chinese.

Google need people who understand the psychology of Chinese Communism Party to make marketing strategy and fine tune the technologies to adapt the hostile environment in PRC.

What is Search Engine Market Shares?

I read a post about Search Engine Market Shares in Russia.

ComScore recruits participants for their stats by a package including security software and sweepstakes prizes, an offer which e.g. may or may not be as attractive to tech geeks.

I am not a Russian. However, I think the ComScore's methodology for gathering the statistics was expensive and not conventional.

ComScore claimed "comScore determines the size and characteristics of the total online population via a continuous survey spanning tens of thousands of persons selected randomly during the course of a year. Respondents are asked a variety of questions about their Internet use, as well as descriptive information about themselves and their households."

Who got recruited? Government officers? business people? White collars?
There are so many groups of people would simply ignore such recruitment.

ComScore's methodology may be good enough for traditional marketing research for traditional products, however, for researching search market shares, the single most important factor is how many queries to each search engine, and there is a conventional way to gather the data: Almost all search queries go through ISP, the researcher may just pay a few ISPs to aggregate the search queries and get the distributions.

If ComScore did not do so, I would say the data presented by it is quite misleading.

China is testing limited access to Wikipedia

People have been talking about "China Allows Access to English Wikipedia" at http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/06/1643223

The communism party has been testing the partial lifting, mostly open to western visitors during the Olympic Game. Because the People Republic of China did promise the openness of the internet access to the western media, PRC will try best doing so for western media only, and this does not mean fully lifting the block to Wikipedia and alike.

A possible implementation may will be like this:
* The media center of the Game will has full access to the internet.
* Other internet access points given to the western media like those in hotels may have 100% to 90%
* Other access points in Beijing will have many blocked popular site open for the period of the Game.
* In most parts of China, the censorship and the internet terror activities by the communism party may remain almost the same.

So, PRC can keep the promise for the period, while keeping the censorship to most Chinese in the mainland China.

Rewrite or Refactor

In a litter I wrote to a workmate about the future development plan for a legacy product, I present some viewpoints as following.

==================

Hi John

Among recent discussions about the direction of WinVictory, having things redesigned and rewritten was never discussed. I know redeveloping anything is risky, or at least sound risky to management and accounting.

There are some industry statistics about redeveloping legacy applications, though I don't quite remember the source. It is not uncommon. A fresh example I just got is about Google Earth formerly known Keyhole. According to the Avibar, the co-founder of Keyhole, the code base has been rewritten several times.

http://www.realityprime.com/articles/how-google-earth-really-works

I don't believe the programmers in Keyhole or Google have bad habit of software engineering, I tend to think they had to rewrite codes because the requirements got changed dramatically. The founders might not ever dream that the program can reach such large audiences of different levels of users. Fast expansion of broadband, evolution of graphic cards, porting things to Linux and different business models might not be in the early stages of requirement analysis and planning, and refactoring legacy codes may not necessarily always be able to adapt new requirements and take advantages of new conditions. Well written codes do not necessarily have unlimited maintainability, flexibility and extensibility. They don't need to be ashamed of, as no one in Keyhole could predict such changes. This is my interpretation for why they rewrote the code base.

Quoted from the book Code Complete (Chapter 3, Measure Twice, Cut Once: Upstream Prerequisites). As with building construction, much of the success of failure of the project has already been determined before construction begins. If the foundation hasn't been laid well or the planning is inadequate, the best you can do during construction is to keep damage to a minimum.

Sometimes I had to admire previous programmers having tons of memory to remember things and capacity to handle such complicated codes.

Now the construction of WinVictory has long been "finished", and what's the best we can do for maintenance? Or upgrading? Or migrating?

No matter which direction to go for WinVictory, using Win32 or dot Net assembly, the job is still maintenance, more exactly hacking codes which is what we have been doing in the last few years. I really have low expectation on any technical attempts of moving forward or backward.

Rewriting (read legacy codes and user manuals to guess requirement) to get "WinVictory Vista" is risky regarding to costs but predictable, and migrating codes forward or backward sound not so risky to costs, but may likely be unpredictable. Almost all industry statistics showed maintenance is much more expensive in average than building.

After all, it is about vision and direction which are not clear.

Regards

Andy