Visit AllTheWeb.com on Monday, November 12 to try out the latest up-to-the-hour index of web content.

From InfoWorld: FAST SEARCH & Transfer ASA will launch an upgraded version of its Alltheweb.com search engine on Monday that offers near real time searches in over 3,000 online news sources.

Entering "Anthrax," for example, can bring up news stories that were updated less than an hour ago from both national and local news organizations from various countries, and in a multitude of languages. The advanced search allows a user to set language preferences and also to pick what sections of the news to search.

Fast shows off near real-time indexing

Check it out! A new search engine startup by Todd Miller, a second-year PhD student at Georgia Tech's College of Computing.

"HyperBee is an attempt to crawl the web faster than ever thought possible. Current search engines can't keep up with the growth of the web and only index about 40% of the pages! HyperBee is a screensaver that runs while you're away from your computer, helping us crawl the web faster than any other search engine can, because we crawl it with your help along with the help of many others!"

HyperBee

This research paper was published in 2000 at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Why did Sony allow this work, yet recently take action to stop other amateur modifications of the Aibo robot?

"An evolutionary algorithm is used to evolve gaits with the Sony entertainment robot, AIBO. All processing is handled by the robot's on-board computer with individuals evaluated using the robot's hardware. By sculpting the experimental environment, we increase robustness to different surface types and different AIBOs. Evolved gaits are faster than those created by hand. Using this technique we evolve a gait used in the consumer version of AIBO. "

Also check out the following paper, published in the proceedings of the 1999 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference.

Autonomous Evolution of Gaits with the Sony Quadruped Robot
http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu:80/papers/hornby_gecco99_sony.pdf

"In this paper we report our results of autonomous evolution of dynamic gaits for the Sony Quadruped Robot."

Sony's selective enforcement on Aibo modifications?

"gnutellavision: Real Time Visualization of a Peer to Peer Network"

From Newsforge: "a Python program that connects to the Gnutella network and maps out connections between nodes in real time, written by a group of students at U.C. Berkeley."

gnutellavision: intro

A Picture of Weblogs is a Java applet (source included) that produces [...] a rendering of a great many weblogs, and all the links that interconnect them.

The author explains: "When I wrote this applet I was deep into my Edward Tufte phase, and came up with "A Picture of Weblogs" as the name since, really, that's what it is."

A Picture of Weblogs

Pastry is completely decentralized, scalable, and self-organizing; it automatically adapts to the arrival, departure and failure of nodes. A prototype implementation [...] up to 100,000 nodes [...] scalability and efficiency, ability to self-organize and adapt to node failures, and good network locality properties."

Pastry: Scalable, Decentralized Object Location, and Routing for Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Systems

VNOS, the Visual Network Operating System, is the revolutionary platform that allows you to easily create visual, intent-oriented applications to monitor, manage, control or interoperate any device or collection of devices. Think of creating a logical flow diagram for how you'd like something to work, except when you're done with the diagram, it's a fully functioning application."

Visual Network Operating System (VNOS) and X-Internet: The Next Step Beyond the Web

I've known about this for a while, and it's certainly not a new publication, but it has some relevance to ongoing discussions.

"Abstract: Conventional software systems, such as those based on the "desktop metaphor," are ill-equipped to manage the electronic information and events of the typical computer user. We introduce a new metaphor, Lifestreams, for dynamically organizing a user's personal workspace. Lifestreams uses a simple organizational metaphor, a time-ordered stream of documents, as an underlying storage system. Stream filters are used to organize, monitor and summarize information for the user. Combined, they provide a system that subsumes many separate desktop applications. This paper describes the Lifestreams model and our prototype system."

Lifestreams: A Storage Model for Personal Data - Eric Freeman, David Gelernter

"Managing trust is a problem of particular importance in peer-to-peer environments as one encounters frequently unknown agents. Existing methods for trust management based on reputation do however not scale as they rely on some form of central database or global knowledge to be maintained at each agent. In this paper we illustrate that the problem needs to be addressed at both the data management and the semantic, i.e. trust management, level and we devise a method of how trust assessments can be performed by using at both levels scalable peer-to-peer mechanisms. We expect that such methods are an important factor if fully decentralized peer-to-peer systems should become the platform for more serious applications than simple file exchange."

Managing Trust in a Peer to Peer Information System [PDF]

"Peer-To-Peer systems are driving a major paradigm shift in the era of genuinely distributed computing. Gnutella is a good example of a Peer-To-Peer success story: a rather simple software enables Internet users to freely exchange files, such as MP3 music files. But it shows up also some of the limitations of current P2P information systems with respect to their ability to manage data efficiently. In this paper we introduce P-Grid, a scalable access structure that is specifically designed for Peer-To-Peer information systems. P-Grids are constructed and maintained by using randomized algorithms strictly based on local interactions, provide reliable data access even with unreliable peers, and scale gracefully both in storage and communication cost."

P-Grid: A self-organizing access structure for P2P information systems [PDF]