Archive for web
Yahoo! puts money behind Apache
December 17th, 2007 • web
Yahoo! has recently pledged to become a “platinum sponsor” of the Apache Software Foundation and discusses such on their blog. This is a great move for what was once the most ubiquitous web server application on the planet (and by many measures, still is). Yahoo!, like Google, clearly builds almost all of the public-facing infrastructure on open source software, in hopes of offering both high-level visibility for F/LOSS and improving public image of open source software. Their entire mail back-end infrastructure runs on qmail, DKIM (which they helped pen and openly offer on sourceforge), SpamAssassin, and greylisting (shh, they won’t admit they use it but they do!).
However, moving a sizeable amount of money to the Apache Foundation is definitely a move in the right direction for Yahoo! not only for PR but for helping the project move forward in other endeavours. They even hired the VP of Apache and author of Hadoop to come to the Yahoo!sphere.
Interesting Posts, part 5
August 12th, 2007 • 3 comments interesting posts, web
Another week, another slew of interesting posts!
This is a 5 page article that dissects and discusses China’s past and present booming counterfeit economy and how it’s affecting both Eastern and Western technologies. It’s interesting to see how this affects Eastern technology companies such as LG or NEC when people are complaining that products they never made are terrible.
While Bergman made some definitely “out there” movies, no character was more prominent in his films than God, whether it was a “sane” Christian God or some perverse shape-shifting God, hellbent on raising psychological terror. BONUS: Read/WriteWeb poll states that most respondents notice no difference in search results when using personalized Google
I can mostly agree with what Mr. MacManus states however, the result set that the articles used is very skewed. How accurate can the results be when hardly any of us search for the same or similar things routinely in order to really train the search agent? If I only search for one query once, the search agent has very little data to go off of in order to really drill down personalized results for me.
I know, it’s over a week old but came out after the last installment of Interesting Posts but it’s still awesome. Even though Sega stopped making hardware years ago and gave up on the Dreamcast way too early, they’re supposedly pumping out some awesome games soon. Personal favorites from the list are ChuChu Rocket!, Nights: Journey of Dreams, Shenmue 1-3 (even though no one knew Shenmue 3 was even in production still!), Skies of Arcadia 2 (the original was so awesome), and Space Channel 3!
I can sympathize with most of this even though I’m not a problogger but I do work at home and most of the issues hit on really can affect you. Although, as a problogger, I figured they’d have better grammar
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OK, this isn’t technically an article anyone’s written but how can you deny the coolness of this stone? I think I watched the video three or four times before finally closing the browser. Something so simple and elegant yet so beautiful to watch.
Welcome CotG visitors
August 6th, 2007 • blog, carnival, web
I was recently featured in the latest Carnival of the Godless blog carnival. I want to welcome all the new visitors who will hopefully turn into readers! The new edition is up at the Atheist Revolution and go read it, it’s very good this week.
I submitted my post on the lady from West Palm Beach who wants to ban books she’s never read from her sons’ school libraries. I’m going to try and do a follow up on this shortly because I want to know how far this woman didn’t get with this.
New Boneyard’s here
August 6th, 2007 • 1 comment blog, carnival, web
No, it’s not a new barbecue restaurant or anything like, it’s a new edition of The Boneyard, a paleontology-focused blog carnival. The new one is up at Laelaps and is a refreshing read.
How awesome is paleontology?
Dear Morgan Webb
August 6th, 2007 • web
Dear Morgan Webb,
We in the tech community are glad you have a new video blog, it’s a good way to separate yourself from the atrocity of G4TV. However, there’s a problem with your show: you’re entirely too over-the-top. Calling Michelle Madigan perky is the kettle calling the pot black. Go ahead and take a look at your show yourself, we’ll wait. Your delivery is entirely too fast and your forced emotion shows through a thin veneer. We understand you have a lot of news to regurgitate to us that we all read the day before but seriously, slow down and take a breather.
Maybe you’d be able to recite your entire script more slowly if there weren’t interstitial ads tacked in the middle of your vocal blitzkrieg. We understand that 5 minutes isn’t long for a show with a lot of stories to cover but take a hint from the guys at Twatech Radio. Take it slowly and sound like you at least care about what you’re talking about because right now, it’s obvious you’re speed reading the script. Or maybe drop some of the forced facial expressions, they’re not doing anything for you anyway. The show isn’t very long but there’s enough fluff in it that could be dropped in order to make the show more enjoyable and not sound like it’s voiced by a meth addict. Remember, it’s the Internet not the Indy 500.
Lovingly,
The Tech Community
Interesting posts this week, part 4
August 3rd, 2007 • interesting posts, web
Here are this week’s interesting posts, as judged so by me!
Read/WriteWeb has spent this week talking about ways Yahoo and their new CEO could fix themselves in just 100 days. They’ve touched on a ton of salient points this week but missed the most important one, in my opinion: support. I’ve never dealt with worst customer support in my entire life, from bottom to top it’s just atrocious.
Copyblogger provides a list of lists that are some of the best writing tips I’ve seen in a long time.
A British student is suing a porn distributor for stealing her picture and using it for their DVD cover and DVD label. They call her a liar and say that she was “asking for it” (actual quote!). I guess they didn’t realize that they stole the picture of an underage adolescent and could probably be heavily fined for using child-like images to promote pornography.
Grandfather performs ‘exorcism’, nearly pops a 3 year old’s head off (Extra details: Sky News, Azcentral.com, Fox News)
This must have been “perform an exorcism, win a free trip to jail” week. I have no idea where Christians get off on this. Where did they learn (or get told) that punching and choking are involved in exorcisms? This is what fundamentalism teaches you: nothing.
I don’t expect the whole atrocious emo movement to be big in Sweden — they’re too busy being Satanists and burning down churches and churning out awesome black metal — but he’s recently run across it. I really feel sorry for Martin now. Given he found out about this movement from a magazine called Enthroned (epitomal Belgian black metal powerhouse), I’m surprised it has anything about emo in it at all!
Researchers claim this to be an amazing new discovery. Hasn’t this been known for, what, ever? Every brainy/nerdy/geeky/scholarly student in the last few hundred years has been a testament to this and it’s been common knowledge to everyone but these “researchers” apparently.
I smell a weekend project coming from this one.
Researchers have found Alexandria before it was Alexandria…in Alexandria’s bay by sheer luck.
CAPTION: Britnerine makes a surprise stealth attack on an unwitting crowd. (Thanks Mashable!)
Interesting posts, part 3
July 27th, 2007 • chatter, interesting posts, web
Digg dumps AdSense for some Microsoft love. This is an interesting business move by the web’s most loved/hated Mac fanboy Kevin Rose. Apparently Google just can’t deliver the goods — or monetization — that he wants. And in a double whammy decision Microsoft the AdeCEN advertising platform this week. Coincidence?
Jill from the University of Wisconsin reports that more teens and young adults know more about Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan than they do about current national news. I would have never had guessed, neither would anyone else over the age of 21. The current MTV generation is far more concerned with who’s sleeping with who, who’s doing what drug(s), or what the latest reggaeton song is than who the current Presidential candidates are. This is not by chance, it’s by design, partly due in fault to the popular media itself. Since I was younger, I noticed a slow trend on cable channels such as MTV where they were moving away from their core audience of music lovers and onto molding their key demographics into robots. More adolescents watch MTV and read gossip magazines/sites than they do their school textbooks and the major news outlets are now aiding this along by making the latest celebrity scandal “breaking news” rather than the gossip column fodder it was merely 10 years ago. I can walk into the Town Center Mall and approach any male or female between the ages of 10 and 24 and almost all of them will know more about pimped out cars, lascivious celebs and the latest fashion of the day than they will know about Charlie Crist, our state’s governor or what the FCAT really measures.
Astronauts are now gettin’ crunk before shuttle missions. I guess this gives a whole new meaning to the term DUI.
Telstra, Australia’s biggest ISP, bans Facebook from corporate networks. For once, I say good for them. This isn’t the first time Facebook has been banned from offices — or had employees banned from it — because it’s a huge time sink hole. Sites like Facebook and Myspace are banned from our company’s network because everyone, from top to bottom, wastes half their day futzing about instead of working.
IPTV mogul Joost, started by the same guys behind Skype and KaZaA, boasts 1M beta users (I saw this analyzed on about 10 different sites, I couldn’t link them all) but how true are these numbers? They’re definitely gaming the analytics system by saying they have 1M user accounts signed up in a “private” beta but honestly, how many of those users continually use the service? My guess — I am not an analyst — is probably less than 10% and more than likely closer to 5%. This could be seen as a falsification of market penetration and user reach by simply going on the numbers alone and has bitten other social media networks before.
And in a last minute “out of left field” appearance, “secret” web sites such as 4chan and 7chan hoard the vast nameless hacker group called Anonymous. They do it for the “epic lulz” and this almost made me fall out of my chair with laughter. I troll 7chan regularly and this whole piece was definitely full of “lulz” and “win” and the tipster who went to the news channel is lambasted on Encyclopaedia Dramatica — which is fueled by the people he used to call “/b/rothas” — and is quite funny. I cannot fathom how slow of a news day it must have been for them to not only cover 4/7chan but to actually use the word “lulz” more than twice. It’s a fine piece of fear-mongering and extreme disinformation. (Most Anonymous, myself included, really do not care to hack your computer/MySpace/Facebook/Photobucket/email. We prefer lolcats (cat image macros), flaming furries and weeaboos, and an endless stream of memes to keep us occupied. Those profiled actually fit far more into /i/nvasion idiots and ra/i/ders than the typical fare of /b/tards (the appropriate name of those who frequent /b/).)
Are big Search Engines finally concerned with privacy?
July 23rd, 2007 • privacy, search engines, web
Consumers and privacy groups have been talking about online privacy — or lack of it — for years now. Sites keep insane amounts of data on every user, registered or not, whether the end users know about it or not. We discussed this on Saturday at BR407 and it was quite illuminating. It’s even easy to explain especially when you put it in terms people understand the most: money. For example, everyone loves Amazon.com and it’s the largest online store in the world. Hell, I spend over $500 a year there. But have you ever wondered how they know what you want or would like just like you know? That comes from data mining. Amazon tracks everything you do on the site and I mean everything. They know what you’ve searched for, when you searched for it, what other products or searches match yours, if other customers bought the same item — and how many did! — or a similar item and the list goes on. Now, some of you even have the Amazon.com credit card to make your purchases even easier. Now guess what? They know your entire credit history and know everything about you, financially. What a great way to target markets and target you specifically. That’s not the greatest thing to realize is it? They know that you may have purchased some *ahem* adult toys in the past and well, they may even offer you discounts on any future purchases even though no one knows you bought said toys.
How does this example pertain to search engines? Amazon has its own search engine: A9.com. I hear good things about it however, I’ve never used it. I’m a die hard Google-fu master. Last week, Ask.com announced that they would now let users delete their entire search history that Ask.com has ever archived in the user’s account. That’s great for you Ask.com users — who are you, anyway? Now Google has stated they’ll bring their retention limit from 31 years in the future (2038, the end of the UNIX-based calendar) to 18 months. I’m glad that the last 7 years of data they have from me will be wiped clean in just 14 more months — their initiative began in March of this year. I guess that means my latest search trends will disappear next year surely to only be replaced by trends just as odd.
On Saturday, TechCrunch has reported that Microsoft and and Yahoo will be following suit, according to the WSJ. It’s odd to see both Microsoft and Yahoo trailing behind Ask.com in this initiative but it’s more interesting to see that big Microsoft is teaming up with little Ask.com to try and start a search engine industry-wide initiative to standardize privacy standards for everyone. If this goes over, it’ll mean all data is kept a uniform amount of time across platforms and when switching engines, you’ll be able to gauge when your identifiable data will be set free into digital oblivion.
I’ve spent the last 7 years of my life dealing with the fact that there’s absolutely no privacy on the Internet and it seems more and more people are starting to realize this as well. With this, it also means that end users are now ushering in some forms of online privacy forcefully on those who wholly thrive on data and its monetization. So perhaps by the time my kids are 25, there just may be privacy on our Internet.
Interesting posts this week…
July 22nd, 2007 • 1 comment chatter, interesting posts, web
Shalini talks about her recent debate with a creationist on male nipples and how (??) men evolved from women. I really fail to understand this argument completely.
Researchers have found possibly the most rapid in place evolution ever scientifically observed. I guess that sort of puts Creationists into a corner about how impossible it is to observe evolution.
TipMonkies gives up 9 easy to remember WordPress shortcuts for use during writing/editing. Extremely handy, I never even knew these existed and I’m a sucker for keyboard shortcuts!
Those wanting to kill some nosy web spiders can thank Perishable Press for writing up a very handy comprehensive mod_rewrite list for giving those spiders a handy 403.
Ebonmuse offers up a good argument against using religion as a basis for morality. Since us non-theists lack religion, people think we lack morality but we counter with the fact that they lack common sense.
Tim O’Reilly (yes, the same Tim O’Reilly who started O’Reilly Media, Inc.) discusses, with pure web data only, Ubuntu’s rise in popularity versus Red Hat, the most recognizable name in Linux distributions today. Simply by using web analytics as his metric, Tim definitely shows with ease how quickly Ubuntu is gaining ground as “the” Linux distribution of the masses.
I think I may have others open on my work PC but I’m not sure. These are definitely some of the more interesting posts I’ve seen this week, culled from my feed reader.
Sponsored Ads and Black Metal
July 18th, 2007 • chatter, metal, web
Normally I never pay attention to the ads Google places inline with my emails in Gmail but today, I got a real kick when I checked an email from Dark Horizon Records about a new sale going on to see some pretty humorous ads Google decided to give me:
Sorry for the tiny thumbnail but the picture itself is rather large but it’s a good laugh. I like how I’ve got ads for baptism, fortune telling, ghosts, low cost Paris apartments, and some forex from New Zealand. It’s good to know that Google likes reading my email as much as I do and serves me up pertinent ads! The last time I got this much of a laugh was when I took a screenshot of Super Paper Mario and emailed it to myself only to see ads for the PS3 and Halo being served to me.