Microsoft are presenting a keynote session at JavaOne this week, on SOA interoperability. Quite possibly the most unlikely company to present at JavaOne, ever?
Microsoft’s ‘Bing’ search engine based on Kumo project
Microsoft’s new search engine announced and demo’d at the All Things D conference this morning is not a straight re-naming of Live Search, but is the new name for their new search engine based on a project previously named as ‘Kumo’.
What sounds interesting is it’s ability to show results based on the context of the search terms. Doesn’t this sound familiar? That’s right, this was the promise of Cuil? That hasn’t picked up any noticeable following at this point, so have to see what happens with this offering from Microsoft as they go down this same path.
Using a mounted WebDAV drive on Linux for off-site backups
If you’re read my posts recently, you’ll have read that my home Linux server died when it’s hard drive decided to not play anymore. Luckily I had a complete image of the machine so I could restore it, but the image was 1 year old, and subsequent database backups had not been successfully copied onto the Zip drive, meaning I lost 1 year of database changes.
Starting with new drives, I decided to investigate a RAID 1 setup with duplicate drives, which appears to be working well so far, although I haven’t deliberately removed a drive to test for sure that the mirroring is working, but I will test this shortly. To avoid losing backup files in the future, I purchased the Online file Folder service from GoDaddy and have mounted the drive using WebDAV over HTTPS. Incredibly, the mounted drive just appears as it is a local drive, and through my weekly cron backup script I can copy the back up files directly to this mounted drive. Very cool.
Instructions on setting up davfs2 for the WebDAV support on Ubuntu is here. The instructions are for box.net, but they work with GoDaddy’s Online File Folder service too.
Time Warner to spin off AOL as a separate company
After one of the craziest mergers of the dot com era, Time Warner are cutting their losses with AOL and are going to spin it off as a separate standalone company. This can only mean the end for AOL at this point, unless it manages to reinvent itself overnight.