Draakwired » rant

Registering in is sooo web 1.0

Drakonen — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 10:09:48 +0000

I’m really fond of anonymous or non-registered web sites. If you can please do it, and devise some smart way to not make people to have to register. Registering on yet an other site is annoying and most of the time its totally useless. I don’t want to register just to read your site. This is probably one of the reasons why bugmenot is popular.

But for most interaction you do not need registering either. At some web stores you can make an order by just filling out your personal information, no registering required. This making it easier for other people to contribute or buy. I plan on doing this on my new project, which I will uncover later.

I read some articles about how great OpenID is, and that this makes the login procedure easier, but why not allow anonymous comments on blogs (what it seems to be used the most for) instead of offloading your registration to an other party. OpenID is a big scam to give to phishers something nice to do and make their lives a lot easier.

Awesomeness of last.fm

Drakonen — Tue, 08 May 2007 12:05:11 +0000

Last.Fm is a really awesome (to use this vague term) web 2.0 site. This site is in an ideal position in the market. What started as a simple this-is-what-I-listen-to stat site grew to a much larger community site, where people can find and share information about music. People still share their statistics, and this information is used to your own advantage. Music recommendations for example based on what other people listen.

My latest really great experience is this: A Paul Gilbert concert. Last.fm gives you a load of event recommendations based on what you listen. If it wasn’t for Last.fm i would have missed this concert. Now I wonder, do they cooperate with the ticketmaster service? It would make a lot of sense if they did, this is clearly a win-win situation for the site (commission) and for the ticket seller (more costumers) and the user (more concerts!).

Why I choose Gentoo

Drakonen — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 10:22:38 +0000

Gentoo is a source based distribution. Every piece of software is compiled on your own computer. While this can take a long time, and requires a generally fast PC to do it without really bothering you, source based distributions do have major advantages.

Some packages provide compile time options to include functions/features or not, depending on the dependencies you have installed. Like a QT frontend instead of a GTK one. In Gentoo you can choose which you want, unlike binary distributions, where you get a specified futureset. If you don’t like it, you can compile your own outside of the package manager. Which is not desired.
Debian and Ubuntu, have different versions of their distributions. These are testing grounds for newer packages. If you run an older version distribution, and want a package from the newer one, this is most of the time impossible as dependencies do not match. Source distributions allow for better mixture of stable packages and experimental packages as they are compiled against the current dependencies, if a newer one is required it’ll try to pull it in. Binary distros are at a disadvantage here.

Now the Ubuntu fans will scream that they can do this and that. They are stuck to one of the Ubuntu flavors, and what they think is right. Source distributions give you more power over your own system at the expense of longer installation time, which for me is no problem.