I was playing with google print beta today. It started last week and is expected to bring to the public three major university libraries in word searchable format. I found it tough to figure out what books were or were not available.

They did have a nice feature to permit you to report a bad page. For example I found a crooked page that was only partially visible.

What could be a helpful feature to those who know how to use it is often a pitfall for many. Most Microsoft Office documents contain meta-data that tells things like the author/editor(s) of the document, records dates of creation and modification and so forth. Sometimes this information is best left out of a circulated document. This article in the NY Times discusses some of the downfalls of meta-data.

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I was over at the Domestic Diversions blog the other day looking at some posts that picqued my interest. One link out was to a Forbes article I guess. I am not sure I wound up where the blog author thought I would, but I found something kind of interesting there: a form that when filled out will deliver an email you send to your self at a future date you pick — or as they called it, an email time capsule.

This is an interesting concept, send yourself something for future delivery. We kind of do it with many things these days, countdown timers on phones come to mind. TIVO type recording devices can be set well into the future, and so forth. For many years I have asked my staff to tell me when the day arrives that it is obvious that I should retire. Maybe I should set email reminders for each five years into the future to ask myself the question, is it time?

There are many practical problems with the concept, not the least of which is who will maintain everything to be sure it is functional both now and into the future. Second, what is the average life span of an email address? Will they be whitelisted under current technology in place at that time? Leaving aside all of the practical issues* it is an intriguing issue.

*I tend to be pessimistic regarding many things. For example, an interesting thing happened last night just as I was going to bed (much later than I should have, due to working on some projects that had been around a while). A friend called — now you know you are on someones “friends they can count on list” when they call you in the middle of the night because they really need help, or is it that you are too stupid to say no when you should? — about 1:30 a.m. or so. A building he was having remodelled had a plywood enclosure covering the storefront. What ever anchored it was insufficient to hold it in high winds overnight, so it took a bit of a sail. Because the front of the building was open (no doors in it) the police who observed the situation asked him to go supervise the building to avoid vandalism and to be sure that nobody got hurt walking in, around or under the structure. He focused on the practical side of things when we arrived, what were the minimal steps necessary to secure the building and get out of there. I focused on the pessimistic side of things: what should we do so that someone would not get hurt under the worst case scenarios. The wind was still strong, and we wound up dismantling a significant portion of the stucture because I was concerned that it would again go sailing. We then boarded up one door, and built a barrier to tie the well anchored half of the temporary structure to the building so that to enter someone would have to do so with malice. My point? That I look at worst case scenarios often in life, and in the above article I try to overcome my pessimism to say … that is an interesting concept.

The title says it all. Release 5 of the MySQL database server is out and ready for download now. The 5 release contains many features desired by enterprise customers and brings it much closer to products by rival companies like Oracle. Get your copy now.

MySQL recently caught a bit of flak from the Open Source community for working with the SCO group to port the MySQL database server software to SCO’s new OpenServer UNIX release. Since they are not the only ones doing that, it isn’t really that big of a deal and is unlikely to sway users to the SCO platform who are not already there.

After a very long process, OpenOffice.org has finally released a stable 2.0 release. OpenOffice is a totally free, Open Source, Microsoft Office compatible Office suite. The new release is more stable, more featured, more MS Office compatible and just generally better. Check it out.

Michigan officials have raided an alleged spam operation seizing computers and records. It will be interesting to see if there is a noticeable difference in spam received in the short run, or is this merely a drop in the bucket? The man who’s business has been closed by the seizure describes himself as a commercial mailer and claims through his attorney that he has spent a lot of money to keep his business in compliance with the federal can spam act. All I know is that every day I get hundreds and often thousands of emails for products like mortgages, viagra and natural enlargement remedies (by the way, does anyone know if those remedies can be used cumulatively?). I am happy for any break in the unwanted commercial email.

A debate is raging over the propriety of having municipalities build wireless networks, or WiFi. Many think it will bring the internet to the masses in the large cities. Here is an interesting article about proposed “Muni – WiFi” in Philadelphia that suggests they may actually save money by installing it.