Friday, December 19, 2003

Hyperdictionary - designed to become a web service?

In my opinion, Hyperdictionary is the best dictionary on the web. Fast, clean, easy to use. And it's dead-easy to build the service into other sites and scripts, since each definition page is simply the word appended to the URL http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?define= like this: http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?define=petard

Very cool. This seems to be run by a group of Canadians known as Webnox - I don't know much about them, but they've got a great service.
ENUM and SIP

I've decided that I need to understand this in detail, very soon. I don't yet get all the implications, especially in combination with IPv6. ENUM is more or less a registry translation service done by an interesting Quango (Handy UK term - what's that mean?) called Neustar. Here is their whitepaper on ENUM -- I need to find similar discussions of SIP, process, and blog it here. To be continued.
John Battelle's Searchblog

This is an excellent site. On a quick read, I ended up at a really thoughtful discussion of Google. I highly recommend this in conjunction with Tim Bray's Search Series.
Searching gets smart filtering
This is damn cool. Google-enabled 'search my trusted universe' tool. When you start cascading it, you will *really* have something: "Search my trusted universe, and the trusted parties of my trusted universe, unto three degrees of separation. Go forth, my spider."

How to add it to your site:
http://www.alpern.org/weblog/php/blogsearch/mysite.php

How it works:
http://www.alpern.org/weblog/php/blogsearch/writeup.html

I found it on Kevin Werbach's site (he's implemented it) and followed it back to the source. Excellent.

Tuesday, December 02, 2003

Commodity hardware + open source = asterisk PBX

This in and of itself is not a game-changer. This is the equivalent of the "garage hosting" model of ISPs that was prevalent through the early 90s, with Mr. Modem Bank selling to local customers. However, it presages what larger players can do with the same technological building blocks -- after all, those little ISPs led to AOL and Earthlink.

"Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in three protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware.

Asterisk provides Voicemail services with Directory, Call Conferencing, Interactive Voice Response, Call Queuing. It has support for three-way calling, caller ID services, ADSI, SIP and H.323 (as both client and gateway). Check the Features section for a more complete list.

Asterisk needs no additional hardware for Voice over IP. For interconnection with digital and analog telephony equipment, Asterisk supports a number of hardware devices, most notably all of the hardware manufactured by Asterisk's sponsors, Digium. "

Software: http://www.asterisk.org/

Hardware: http://www.digium.com/