Decided that I didn’t like having a main “blog” page as well as a main “home” page, so now they both redirect here. Oh, and of course I have this fancy new layout. The picture above is from our houseboat trip last year. The person in the chair may or may not be me.. but I think it is me. If you know otherwise let me know.
Adtech discovered that IE users are four times more likely to click on an ad than firefox users.
Digg users debate this in the usual fashion, and most people say it’s because of Adblock. I installed Adblock, but found the defaults to be irritating: it blocks many non-ad pages. I turned it off for a while before figuring out how to tone it down. It’s really only the pop-under ads that I block.
Well, I got tired of dealing with a couple little issues with Blogger, so I decided to install WordPress and host my own blog. It’s not too bad of an application. It has categories, which are definately handy for me to seperate out my many blogging topics.
I know I haven’t posted in a while (mostly because with the time I’d normally spend blogging, I was installing WordPress and migrating things over), but I will try to do it a bit more often in the future.
Something that seems to be missing from searches is time. Search engines base their results on relevancy, which makes finding newer methods of doing something difficult.
For example, I will search for how to do something in linux, like configuring a RAID array. There is a ton of information on this, but the most relevant hits you get are about configuring raidtools. Mdadm has replaced raidtools as the tool of choice, but since raidtools has been around so long, and there are so many old pages that link to it, it scores the highest.
I was just reading that Kingston is about to get 1,500 “smart meters” to monitor electricity, water and gas. There are a number of benefits – from ending the the monthly “estimated” bills (and then charging more/less a few months later when the meter is actually read) to encouraging people to reduce consumption during peak times, as they’ll be charged more for it.
The article mentions that the company makes an in-house display to show the current energy consumption, but it will not be installed in this pilot study.
I just took the MailFrontier Phishing IQ Test II, and I didn’t do well. As a web developer, I consider myself very knowledgable in this area, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never been fooled by a phishing email. So why did I do so badly? Simple: I guessed “phishing” for everything.
I never click on any links from email that will lead to me entering account information. All of their sample emails had these links, so I didn’t trust any of them.
I finally decided this morning that I had really squeezed everything I could out of my tube of toothpaste, after a couple of days of thinking the same thing. Finally today on my way home from work, I remembered and stopped to buy some more. I have to say, I just don’t understand the toothpaste industry.
As an example, here are the toothpastes Colgate offers:
Total Advanced Fresh – anti-bacteria to fight tartar etc, and freshens breath Total – anti-bacterial, flouride for cavity protection (also available as gel).
A few weeks ago, I took some interest in sleeping, sleep cycles, and things like polyphasic sleeping.
There are a ton of different theories out there as to what is the best way to get the highest quality sleep. This is of interest to me, as I’m someone that generally stays up late and hates getting up in the mornings. I seem to get a lot more work done at night, and maybe that’s just a mindset but it’s been true for a long time.
This is an idea for a program I’ve been tossing around for a while, and at this point I haven’t been able to find anything like it. Basically the idea boils down to an ‘offline wiki’ – a Wiki you can use locally, but that will also synchronize on the internet, letting you use it anywhere.
I really discovered the power of Wikis about a year ago when I first started to use Trac (which is an excellent source code / project management tool that I can’t recommend enough).
I’ve noticed in the last little while that there seems to be a trend happening with web services: people think SOAP is too complex. I keep coming across articles and comments talking about how web services are just over engineered. I have to say, I totally agree.
Here’s some excripts from a c|net article:
A debate is raging over whether the number of specifications based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), defining everything from how to add security to where to send data, has mushroomed out of control.