Techhawking

Google started it, but sitemaps has since been adopted by most of the large search organizations out there. If you own a website, and have a lot of static content, you probably should be investigating at creating and updating sitemap on regular basis.

Sitemap is basically an XML file which describes the contents and change frequency of the site. If you ever had pages hidden deep inside your website which were not getting indexed before, sitemaps is an excellent way of advertising those pages to the search engine.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

More than two years ago I wrote about a neat little microsoft project called Monad which caught my eye. The project boasted of doing something which I’ve never seen anyone else do before. They created an object oriented shell interface.

One of the examples I use to explain is that unlike unix flavor of “ps” which allows listing of fields you like or not using optional command line parameters, in Monad, you can parse the output of “ps” (aka get-process) and manipulate the objects returned to print any format you want by inspecting the object. All unix admins know how to use “cut” “grep” and “awk” for different reasons, but in a true monad shell environments where every command you type is a monad commandlet, you won’t have to use the traditional string based tools anymore.

Whats interesting is that unlike in Unix/other_shells, you can pipe the output of ps command in monad and throw it on to an XLS sheet with a pie chart attached. Neat !!

Microsoft has finally released the official 1.0 version of this product (just in time for the Vista release) and its now being called Powershell. Even though the version I installed was on my XP box, it supports other flavors of Windows as well. Watch out for this blog for more of Powershell as I’m for sure going to use it.

References

• Download here
• Powershell home page
• My Old review of Monad
• Wikipedia

Anyone can tell you an interesting story, but when it comes to Microsoft and Novell’s recent deal Linux enthusiasts around the world have more than a couple up their sleeves.

Microsoft has a long history at killing competition. They started with Novell’s Server market, they tried to do with Java, and today they are trying to do it against the Anti-Virus vendors. They succeeded against Netscape, gained significant grounds against Sony’s Playstation, and killed a thousand other products that I can’t name because I forgot about them after Microsoft obliterated them out of the market. If any of you are XBox lovers, I don’t have to tell you that in the war over consoles Microsoft has been losing money on every XBox it sells. Zune (the competition to iPod) is said to have a similar strategy. In short Microsoft has a huge bank balance and can pump in a lot of money until the competition goes bankrupt.

As a result of this announcement its not a surprise that the Linux world is almost up in arms against Novell for giving in for a few pieces of silver. I on the other hand have a different prespective on it.

• Microsoft isn’t interested in suing anyone (anytime soon atleast) because of its Vista launch schedule and the tricky negotiations going on in Europe
• SCO has already tried the same FUD which Microsoft is accused of trying. In fact if you remember Microsoft had “licensed” SCO unix in a similar deal which was indirectly used to fund SCO’s battle against IBM/Linux
• Most of the other visible products Microsoft has went after till now have been markets where Microsoft didn’t really have a foothold. Linux is one of the very few unique products which started up as a competitor to Microsoft has has gradually increased in popularity over the years. [Firefox/Mozilla is the other one which I admire]
• The other interesting point to note is that unlike most other commercial vendors who got nailed by Microsoft’s pump and dump strategy, Linux is not a commercial entity which can go bankrupt. They can kill Novell, but it will be very hard for them to kill the whole linux movement.

My personal analysis is that Microsoft is afraid.

• Its so afraid of loosing this battle that in its moment of desperation its ready to do anything short of launching a Microsoft branded Linux distribution.
• The Financial deal Microsoft and Novell signed has a few hints of where this might be heading.
• To begin with its clear both of them want to integrate each others OS using each others technology to provide a better virtualization experience.
• Its also clear that though Novell might use significant portions of proprietary Microsoft technology (for example for authentication, authorization and accounting) Microsoft will mostly be using GNU code to which Novell doesn’t have any rights anyway.
• So why is Microsoft paying Novell ?
• And what’s the deal with 240 million dollars for linux license subscription cost ? What is it going to do with that many copies of linux distribution ?
• Oh wait, they could embed it into your Microsoft operating system ? Have you ever thought which distribution of Linux you would use if your Microsoft OS copy you already have, has a Linux distribution pre-bundled with it?
• Novell also mentions that it will pay Microsoft a minimum amount of licensing fees, which can increase depending on its own sales. So may be it will sell Windows as well… who knows. But it will sell something with at least some part of Microsoft code in it.
• Finally based on my personal opinion (with no understanding of financial details) it almost looks like Microsoft has kind of bought a share of Novell’s company and wants a piece of the action every year.
• May be Microsoft is going to announce something even much more significant which will dramatically increase Novell’s sales. May be Novell is an investment after all… not just a pump-and-dump target.

My thought process finally took me to the one place I didn’t want to go… Its the thought that Microsoft will soon bundle Suse linux with one of its own products.

Coming back to the discussion on whether we should abandon Suse or not, I personally think it doesn’t matter as long as Microsoft is not trying to kill it. Stop acting like a 5 year old kid who doesn’t like the big guys. If anything, you should be excited about more commercial support behind your favourite OS. And if they really do bundle Suse with every Desktop/Server OS thats exactly what I wanted when I joined the revolution. Linux on every desktop…
I have said this before, and I’ll continue to say it that I’m not opposed to Microsoft Linux as long as others can innovate and keep Microsoft on its toes.

Microsoft came out with Microsoft Live Writer today. What surprised me was that it is one of the first tools which I can think of in recent years which has support for non-Microsoft products.

Remember the good old days of Novell servers when Microsoft came with a file server which could talk to Novell servers and what about the services for Unix or Microsoft Java VM?

I know everyone is excited about Microsoft doing this, but I being me, am skeptical about the true intentions behind this. Infact, most of the times microsoft releases a product supporting other non-microsoft products, is because when its afraid of loosing market share to a competitor. So the real question is, who is microsoft really afraid of other blogging software or services out there ? Blogspot, MySpace and services like wordpress, typepad are significant competitors to MSN spaces. Microsoft Live Writer is not very different from any other Free Microsoft products in the sense that it is designed to do one thing. Convert.

That being said, I’m glad it has jumped into the market. I can see a lot of improvement in overall blogging experience across the board. Oh and BTW I posted this entry using Microsoft Live Writer.

The two big names in the messaging industry came out with two major upgrades today. Yahoo announced “Yahoo Messenger 8.0” for Windows platform and MSN released their Windows Live Messenger. While both MSN and Yahoo are offering some form of VoIP support, the big thing for Yahoo was the opening up of the APIs for its messenger and the discussion happening is around its Yahoo! Messenger On-the-Road offering which seems to be some kind of a paid service which will grant you access to more than 30000 wifi spots around the world. On MSN side the big thing is the announcement that Philips is now making Voip handsets with embedded Windows Live Messenger in it. This trend of moving VoIP software to handheld devices is not new, but with Microsoft jumping into the market, it not very surprising why Skype is giving away free minutes.

Which brings this discussion to the third player in this market, Google. While MSN and yahoo are desperately trying attach the kitchen sink to their IM client, Google seems to be less interested in developing standalone “Google Talk” clients and is more interested in gathering generating grass root support with least bottlenecks for the end user. For coming late to the party, thats not too much to ask for.

However what we all miss to see in this picture is that in the IM world, MSN and Yahoo are not very far from what centralized networks like AOL and Compuserv looked like before they hooked up to the internet. Isn’t it a shame that you as a user of MSN also have to create a Yahoo, GoogleTalk, ICQ and AOL account just to talk to all of your friends ? And while you can sign up with just one ISP to visit all the websites on the internet is it really necessary to sign up with 10 different service providers just to exchange instant messages with your friends ? After all how different is instant messages from regular email messages ?

When Google decided to use an open protocol called Jabber which has close to 100 different client implementations, they did two things which was not very apparent outright. First they bought themselves a huge developer base which have been screaming about Jabber as an alternative to proprietary protocols. Second they have now forced MSN and Yahoo to acknowledge that inter-IM communication is eventually possible.
Infact, Jabber protocol, unlike other instant messaging protocols was designed ground up like SMTP protocol to be decentralized, flexible and diverse. Its so much alike like SMTP, that from a birds eye view Jabber could look like SMTP in the way it works.

GoogleTalk in short is what Internet was to AOL the reason why Google doesn’t care about GoogleTalk client is because Jabber like SMTP can be routed, archived and searched for targeted advertisements.

//p.s. In the current design GoogleTalk is not routable(s2s)… but that hopefully would be fixed soon.