Tag: internet Posts

I’m going to do random games for fun from now on. Just because. I want the real name of the feline in question.

I love Digg. I surf it at least a couple times a day, usually when I’m bored, sitting a work waiting for something to compile. I would say that without a doubt the majority of my “cool” news actually comes from Digg. Lately I’ve begun submitting the odd story on my own to Digg. No matter how many times I try to submit something though, I always seem to get stuck on the same old problem — what category does the story fit in? The main problem I think is that Digg categories are more mainstream news oriented and less about the things I actually am interested in (even though I think most techies are interested in the same things I am). Image from here The main technology categories are: Apple – this seems straight forward Design – what the fuck does this mean? Gadgets – I can live with […]

Hey guys. I want to do a fairly simple web experiment this week. I want to try to assess real-world uptime and latency for a bunch of popular hosting sites. I need a bunch of volunteers to help out. Basically all I’ll need you to do is upload a file to your root directory and allow me to ping it from time to time to do some measurements. I’ll tabulate the data next week and put it online for everyone to see. So, if you can help out, drop me a comment and let me know: The name of your hosting company The address to your site Your email address where I can contact you about this The more people the better. Thanks. I am currently on Media Temple and HostMonster, so I can represent those two.

So here’s some food for thought for the blogosphere. Lately I’ve been pondering a few of the legal aspects of the Internet, namely what it is we are all allowed to do, and what it is some companies think we shouldn’t be allowed to. Let me give you a use-case to demonstrate what I’m talking about. Photo by Ben Sheldon on Flickr Let’s say I set up a blog, and I’m checking out Flickr and I see a photo I like. Let’s say for a second that the CC license is set in such a way that I can use the photo on my blog. So, I right click on the image, say “copy image address”, and slap it into a blog entry. Now, according to Flickr’s terms of service, I’m not technically allowed to link to any one of their images without providing a hyperlink back to the website. […]

Wow, what can I say. That is a pretty impressive sum of money. I read this before going to bed last night on Digg, but I thought it was fake. Turns out that Microsoft has just extended a 44 billion dollar offer for Yahoo! To be honest, Google has really handed Yahoo! their hand in search. I personally don’t know anyone that uses Yahoo to do search, although I’ve been told it’s still fairly popular in Asia. I have friends over at Yahoo!, and I once showed them my web logs from my blog indicating that something like 98% of all searches originate from Google. They refused to believe they were true, but that’s how the ball rolls over here. Granted, the readers of this blog are biased towards the technical side, but I think the numbers are fairly indicative of things in North America, as I’m sure most of […]

As some of you know, last year I went from having my blog hosted on GoDaddy to using shared hosting services over at HostMonster (and before that, I went from having a Linux box on the floor of my bedroom to GoDaddy). Shared hosting is a fairly cheap way to set up a website, and you can usually get away with it for less than $10/mo. For the most part, I was pretty happy with HostMonster shared hosting, although in these last few months their databases kept falling over, and I had intermittent connection problems. To their credit though, they always answered the phone and fixed everything in a timely manner. Media Temple’s iPhone Account Center That being said, I’m going to try someone new this time. I asked a few people who they use, and a couple people recommended the next step which is shared computing on a grid […]

One of the changes I made on the site the other day was the inclusion of wordpress related entries plugin when viewing single posts. Unfortunately wordpress has completely overhauled their folksonomy system in the 2.3 version, and not all my posts are tagged properly. In fact, I’d say only about 20% of them really are. I’m going to try and do about 10 of my old posts a day or something like that to try and get them up to snuff, but it’s a fairly boring process, only made possible by this bottle of pinot beside me. In other fairly exciting news, Boris Mann, everyone’s favourite Vancouver Janitor, has just pulled ahead in the competition (since he’s apparently part of it). Way to go Boris. We still have a few weeks before this whole thing is over, and so far we’ve had two big upsets. I still have a few […]

Ok, seriously. The things I would do if I had a few million bucks. I’m amazed to no end how many things about the internet kind of suck. Things that you’d think would be easy to fix, but for whatever reason nobody gets around to fixing them. First company that I need to bash is YouTube. Seriously, Google buys you for 1.6 BILLION dollars and what’s the first thing you do? Stick your head in the sand. How come there aren’t any cool features, or you know, like standard features coming your way. Why do you always screw up the audio/video sync on EVERY video I upload? Another prime example — they STILL only support 4:3 video. More and more cameras coming out support widescreen, and many of the new CCD sizes are actually 3:2, not 4:3. All new camcorders over a few hundred dollars have 16:9 modes in them, […]

I have, for the last few years, had an idea about something I’ve wanted to do involving technology. I was talking to Boris about this a while ago, and I’m pretty certain this actually has a real name and has been done many times before in various cities. But for now, I’m just going to describe what would happen, and we’ll decide an official name later (until of course Boris wakes up in whatever country he is in and chimes in). The idea is that over the course of one full weekend (that is, starting Friday at 7pm until Sunday at midnight) you get a team of people together to develop a product/service/technology completely from scratch. In my head I am thinking that it would be basically a weekend-long sleepover involving donated beer, good people, music, and tons of know how on various aspects of the web world and technology. […]

Friday afternoon I logged into my myspace account after a long absence and, after debating about it for about 3 seconds, deleted my account entirely. It’s not like it caused me any headache or anything, but I just don’t use it really at all anymore and don’t have time to maintain that and my facebook account. So, after searching around for a while, I managed to find the “Delete Account” button and forever put it into the trash. Anyone else actually still use myspace, or has everyone migrated to Facebook now? Also, a few people have been tracking my new blog entries with twitter – if you have twitter, you can add me by somehow visiting here -> http://twitter.com/duanestorey