The Design and Implementation of laffer1

 WSJ article

Google finally has some new competition.  I predict that they will end up like Yahoo down the road.  It might not be this engine, but someone will de-thrown them from search.

cuil.com

 I've been using Google for several years.  I'm thinking about trying some alternate search engines.  I just realized you can't easily change the default search in safari like you can in Firefox and even IE.  

Apple doesn't seem to have a preference for it and cuil's FAQ incorrectly suggests there is a setting.  I can't find it.  A search on cuil returned one useful hit, but the site was pulled down.  They also don't seem to cache pages like Google.  I decided to use Google to look for an answer.  There are two options.

1. Use http://www.inquisitorx.com/ to configure your search.  I don't know if they log searches or use any form of spyware.  They probably don't, but I consider search very important and don't want to trust this.
2. Some people have reported success hex editing safari.  I could do this, but I don't know what would happen when software update tries to push/install a new version.  Best case, I'd have to do this every time Safari gets a security update.

Oddly enough, it's easier to change on the iPhone where apple could lock users in.  I may stick with Google, but now I feel like I'm forced to.  It's sad as I like Safari in my any other ways and have even been using WebKit in BSD for browsing.

 I found a website that tracks users and topics of IRC chat rooms.

 Microsoft is offering a free service to stream video via Silverlight with ad insertion.  I think that might be a nice service for sites to add streaming content.  The only problem is that you need Microsoft Expressions software to actually create the content.  If I've got to buy software, I might as well go with Flash which is supported on more platforms.  There are also a few programs that can create Flash content in the open source world.  Microsoft needs to get Silverlight support finished on Linux/BSD.  Novell is working on this for Mono.

I'm experimenting with some new blogging features on just journal.  We'll see how it goes. 

hello nurse.