Congratulations, Red Sox!

After 86 years, even the Bambino was up there saying, "You can do it boys!"

Amit Agarwal's Perfect Desktop Search Tool Wishlist

Amit Agarwal posted his wish list for the perfect desktop search tool here:

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2004/10/what-is-missing-in-desktop-search.html

I agree with a lot of what he wrote, though I'm not sure I can think of the business model for a program that's free and doesn't tie into advertising somehow.  What would generate revenue? Support? The only company I could seeing doing "free/no ads" is Microsoft which could include this in a new OS they'd sell.  Or here's an idea: provide the basic search tool sans lots of viewers for free and sell the "loads of file format viewers" version for a reasonable price.   

For what it's worth, I'd be willing to <gasp> *pay* for a tool that did everything Amit outlined. Though I'd also want:

• low use of system resources so that computer performance isn't killed.
  
• smart indexing that doesn't kick off when I in the middle of another long-running task (like recording or converting video, burning a CD/DVD, etc.)

I'll see if I can think of any more "must haves"...

Space Tourism - the Final Frontier?

A couple weeks ago SpaceShipOne won the $10M X Prize and proved private space travel was feasible.  Now it looks like a quick trip into space may someday become the new elite tourist destination. 

LONDON, England -- William Shatner wants to boldly go where he's only pretended to go so far.

The "Star Trek" star is among more than 7,000 people who have told Richard Branson they would gladly pay him $210,000 (£115,000) for a trip aboard his planned spacecraft, the entrepreneur said Friday.

Former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Dave Navarro has signed up for a ride, and a Hollywood director who was not identified has booked an entire ship.

Trevor Beattie, chairman of the ad agency TBWA -- responsible for campaigns such as the "Hello Boys" Wonderbra campaign with Eva Herzigova -- offered to send a check as soon as the project was launched last month.

In all, more than $1.45 billion (£800 million) has been pledged -- years before the Virgin Galactic spaceship is even built, Branson said.

Branson, 54, is pouring $135 million (£74 million) into his latest commercial experiment, which promises to send the paying public 70 miles above the planet to experience six minutes of weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth.

Speaking from the Mojave Desert in California, Branson told the UK's Press Association he was overwhelmed by the response.

"We are extremely pleased because it just means in a sense that the gamble we took seems to have paid off," he said...

Copernic Desktop Search

It may have been coincidence, but the day before Google Desktop Search was released, a new version of Copernic Desktop Search was rolled out. Version 1.1 includes new usability enhancements, more flexible indexing, and greater file compatibility.  Cnet.com gives Copernic Desktop Search the nod over X1. After updating my PC to 1.1, I can definitely see improvements, but I'm still torn. You can't touch X1 for support of multiple file formats. On the other hand, Copernic really does seem less intrusive when indexing.

Google desktop search falls short of hopes

Google has released a beta of Google Desktop Search. Lots of commentary on it (including here, here, here, here, here and here).  Back in May I said I hoped it would turn out to: 1) be fast, 2) respect users' privacy, and 3) be able to handle a broad range of file formats.  Looks like I got two out of three.  It's fast and small, and integrates into the same Google experience people use for searching the web. It has a pretty specific and reasonable privacy policy.

But one major thing that's missing is search/display support for a variety of file formats.  Right now it does the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Outlook Express, text files, instant messages, and your Internet Explorer cache.  Full desktop searching that's not.

If you live just in Outlook and Word, it seems to do a great job. But that's just not my reality. I use a lot of software tools and want a desktop search tool that doesn't ignore half my hard drive.  What about pictures? Music? Adobe PDFs? Contents of Zip archives? Alternate e-mail and browser support?  Other common, popular programs?

The idea of ghetto-izing my data -- searching for mail with one tool, for pictures with another, etc.  -- does *not* sound like a step forward.

Even more frustrating is that the unbearably slow, clunky and limited search feature built into XP does one basic thing that almost every new desktop search tool, including Google, skips: it indexes the *filenames* of all files even when it can't read their contents. Since I use XP's long filenames to always include at least one keyword, I can find all sort of files that other search tools ignore. Of course XP search is so bad, I'd almost never actually try to do that <grin>...

It seems like adding filename indexing would be a minor tweak for products like Google that would at least meet users of other programs halfway.

Two alternatives I've found interesting are X1 and Copernic Desktop Search. Unforunately they have their own set of warts. You have to pay for X1 (something I'm always ready to do for good software) and it supports a long list of file types, but the downside is seems very resource hungry. Copernic Desktop Search is free, but supports a much shorter list of file formats (though still *much* longer than Google Desktop Search) and makes you choose to search by category (files, music, images, web) with no choice to search across all categories at once.

So far I still haven't found a perfect desktop search tool for my needs.

Congrats, SpaceShipOne

I was six years old back in 1969 when Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the Moon.  A year earlier, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey painted a vivid picture of a future where public space travel on (Pan Am) shuttles -- complete with stewardesses -- was routine. 

Fast forward 35 years: now my son is six and there are still no robot butlers, flying cars in the garage or public access to space.  We have made great strides in exploring our solar system and the larger universe, but access to outer space has been the sole domain of a very select few with access controlled by the budgets and interests of various governments. 

So I couldn't be happier to see SpaceShipOne win a $10M dollar prize for demonstrating two successful flights of a private spacecraft capable of carrying passengers.  While there's a lot of talk about the development of space tourism, I'm hoping private initiative and competition will create many more opportunities and drive costs down.

Perhaps before my first grandchild turns six, maybe some space trips will become as mundane as intercontinental flights are today.