I've finally come across a really interesting app made specifically to maintain a (plain text) searchable database of your browsing history. I think it deserves an indepth review, so if someone can find the time to write one after using it for a while that's be great.

Here's a quick rundown of the main points. I am not affiliated in any way with this product.

• hooeey webprint (still in beta)
• Adobe Air app (which, for me, equates to a somewhat annoying UI)
• Works with IE and Firefox
• Records plaintext (html) and screenshots (just the visible part of the page, screenshot recording can be disabled)
• Realtime recording worked well for all the pages I opened within the browser, when I opened ~20 pages using a bookmark manager (Linkman Lite) however, the opened pages didn't show up in the catalog immediately... they did show up one by one as I activated those tabs in the browser.
• Auto-tags pages and also lets you tag saved pages manually - creates two separate tag clouds for auto & custom tags.
• Provides stats using charts (websites by time spent, websites by visits)
• Data is stored locally. The privacy policy) seems acceptable to my untrained eye.
• Data can be exported locally (plaintext (.csv) export only, no thumbs, no stats), to their paid ($5/month) cloud service, or to 3rd party cloud services - Zoho, Google Docs, Amazon S3 - (no thumbs, "no browsed pages" <- I'm not clear about what they mean by this.)
• Password protection available for the local database - the thumbs for browsed webpages show up as a faded background when you're prompted for the password *serious eyerolling*, I assume a glaring flaw like this will be brought to their notice and fixed in a future version.
• Allows for blocklists to disable recording specific sites, wildcards and keyword filters, currently not implemented, would be welcome here.
• Performance: Doesn't seem to have any noticeable effect on system or browsing performance. Currently using a little under 100 MB memory on my system with a similar no. of pages (with screenshots) stored.

Another great true life story of someone who saw a flaw in a gambling game and how they figured it out and exploited it.  God I love these kinds of articles.

Srivastava realized that the same logic could be applied to the lottery. The apparent randomness of the scratch ticket was just a facade, a mathematical lie. And this meant that the lottery system might actually be solvable, just like those mining samples. “At the time, I had no intention of cracking the tickets,” he says. He was just curious about the algorithm that produced the numbers. Walking back from the gas station with the chips and coffee he’d bought with his winnings, he turned the problem over in his mind. By the time he reached the office, he was confident that he knew how the software might work, how it could precisely control the number of winners while still appearing random...

http://www.wired.com.../2011/01/ff_lottery/

I'm a long time use of Borland's C++ Builder (formerly Borland, then CodeGear, now Embarcadero).  It's basically a C++ development tool for Microsoft Windows, that has a large number of component-based libraries and GUI widgets.  The components are shared with the more well known Delphi RAD tool (Pascal based), that has been popular among indie developers.

Borland, then CodeGear, now Embarcadero, have gone through some turbulent times.. For many of us who grew up coding during the original IBM PC days, Borland Turbo C/C++/Pascal were like gifts from the Gods.

With the future of Embarcadero and C++ Builder/Delphi still in some doubt, the pricing of the standard editions made it nearly impossible for indie developers to continue using these tools.

• This weekend the company announced new "Starter" editions of C++ Builder and Delphi, priced at about $200.

The idea of the starter editions is that you can use them commercially, but only if you are doing a small volume of sales (I think under $1000 a year); there are just a few other restrictions (you can't have both Delphi and C++ Builder starter editions installed at the same time), but unlike their previous "turbo" edition incarnations, these are the full tools and you can install 3rd party component libraries into them -- of which their are thousands of great ones.

This seems to me a reasonable price for a very powerful tool.

Many of my larger applications are coded in C++ Builder because it let's me design elaborate GUI interfaces quickly and painlessly.  Even as just a prototyping tool I think it's worth the money.  I'm still unsure about it's future, so I wouldn't recommend it as a path for coders looking to choose a path for future development and employment.

But if you are looking to do some hobbyist programming on windows, these are absolutely fantastic tools to play with.  It's without a doubt one of the fastest ways to develop full-featured windows applications, and the free 3rd party visual components available for it are outstanding.

http://www.embarcade...s/delphi/starter-faq

BBC ran this news about a "newly-discovered flaw in Windows that could be used by malicious hackers to steal private information or hijack computers". it seems that Microsoft has issued a software patch while a long-term fix is in the works. The patch can be found here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk.../technology-12325139

Found the other day searching around for some lightweight CMS:

http://staceyapp.com

Stacey is a lightweight content management system.
No database setup or installation files, simply drop the application on a server and it runs. Your content is managed by creating folders and editing text files. No login screens, no admin interface.

I came across an interesting post on Quora today, about the lifecycle of online communities. I am curious to know your thoughts and how what she says relates to our community. Are we perpetually locked into a stage somewhere between 1 and 2, without being adversely affected by most of the negative effects listed?

http://www.quora.com...Community-Management