Whatever's tugging at my brain handles
Posted in Techno Thoughts on May 16th, 2008
So I was doing some research on the prices of different kinds of animal poop for an upcoming Rough Equivalents article. Ended up in the home and garden section of Amazon.com, pricing manure-based fertilizers.
Amazon, being ever helpful, decided to show me products related to manure, and the first product... a book by Ann Coulter! [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Technology & Life on May 12th, 2008
I previously wrote about how lame I am (BTW - I didn't get the job... ), but today, I include my wife in the geekery.
If you've read my blog assiduously, all three of you, you know we enjoy BBC America and some of its sci-fi and comedy offerings. Anyhoo, we were watching "That [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on May 8th, 2008
Very quick thought.
I handle some valuable real estate on an intranet portal for my current contract. And I regularly deal with stakeholders from around the company who want brief announcements posted there.
Today, I got one where their suggested headline was "We hear you!"
My response to them was: "Our style guidelines prohibit exclamation [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Apr 22nd, 2008
A couple of weeks ago, I fired up a p2p file sharing client and downloaded a movie with the express purpose of watching it. It was copyrighted and not distributed for download by its maker. But I feel no guilt for illegally downloading a movie.
My wife and I are big Terry Pratchett fans. [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Apr 16th, 2008
Those of you who know me personally may have heard me mention the 80s retro radio show I had in college. So, it turns out that my friend Mike Brinkerhoff, a former music programmer for one of those piped-in-music companies, loves that 80s music too. Who knew? (Well, I did, but that's beside [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Stupid Thoughts, Techno Thoughts on Apr 14th, 2008
So, I've launched a new site called Rough Equivalents. Every day or two I'm posting some odd facts I generated by comparing the characteristics of things that aren't normally compared... like a state and a roll of toilet paper.
It's sort of hard to explain, so perhaps demonstrating a few of its facts [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Apr 4th, 2008
How many online lotteries can you win without entering? None. How many e-mails will you get, saying you won a lottery you didn't enter? Lots and lots and lots. They're usually one of two scams.
An Advance Fee Scam: This is where they tell you they need $5,000 to cover processing [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Apr 1st, 2008
I was browsing the XKCD archive and I saw myself... as a stick figure.
It's so sad, but true.
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Apr 1st, 2008
When Inkscape 0.46 officially released on March 24, they only had binaries for Ubuntu and Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). Well, it seems they've expanded their offerings in the past week. The Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) and Windows binaries are now available for download. Downloaded the Tiger version, just installed it, [...]
Posted in Art, Just Personal, Technology & Life on Mar 30th, 2008
READ ALL THE INSTALLMENTS: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 [here]
So, originally the plan had been to do 8 separate art pieces for my wife for our anniversary (which was today), then combine them all into one big piece and print and frame it for her. Eight is still the eventual goal, [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Mar 27th, 2008
So, I went and tried out Adobe's online version of Photoshop, Photoshop Express. It requires the absolute latest version of Flash (my browser wouldn't run it until I upgraded Flash), yet it is so lacking in some really basic features, it shocks me.
I also have a simple image editing program, constructed in Flash, though [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Mar 27th, 2008
So, in America we have a term: "Trailer Trash"
It basically means persons of low birth, ignorant, not well-educated, stupid, superstitious, easily fleeced, and so poor they cannot afford to rent or buy a home, but live on a small plot of land in a mobile home. The trailer parks they live in are a [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Mar 25th, 2008
Some of you may recall me griping about how you could only get the latest version of Inkscape compiled for Mac OS/X Leopard with Tiger users left out in the cold. But because these were just development releases and relied on one motivated developer to compile them, we all thought it wouldn't be a [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Mar 21st, 2008
So, this one came in to an address I don't use for Paypal (first sign it was bogus), but there was much more to show how bogus it was.
Here's the the text with some of the headers included...
Received: from hhc.iscs.co.kr (unknown [121.1.120.28])
by randymail-mx3.g.dreamhost.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5B28278410
for ; Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:17:32 -0700 [...]
Posted in Job Hunting, Techno Thoughts on Mar 13th, 2008
So I only post the scams that get through the SpamAssassin on my personal e-mail account or through the spam filters at Gmail or Yahoo mail. This one just got through SpamAssassin. These jerks don't even bother to go to the trouble of inventing a fake company name or backstory, setting up a [...]
Posted in Job Hunting, Technology & Life on Mar 7th, 2008
So I just got another check cashing scam. The subject was "Make $225 And More Every Day" and instead of text, they used a graphic. Inside the e-mail, they repeated the "Make $225 And More Every Day" plus a link to their scam site at fallseagull.com. A check into the registration on [...]
Posted in Success, Technology & Life on Mar 7th, 2008
Just got yet another notification that I won a lottery I did not enter. How many lotteries can I win in a day?
CONFIRMATION OF YOUR EMAIL REF NUMBER
You have won USD850,000.00 in BELGISCHE LOTTERY Email Sweepstakes Progam Corporation, held on the 5th of MARCH. 2008.in Belgium.We write to officially notify you of this award [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Mar 7th, 2008
I was IM'ing with my friend Leo the other day, and he types: "Wow, looks like I won another lottery." Of course it was in reference to another scam, all those people sending you e-mail to tell you won lotteries you didn't enter.
I got the following today...
THIS MESSAGE IS FROM THE PROMOTION MANAGER, INTERNATIONAL [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Mar 5th, 2008
My wife and I are big sci-fi geeks (yes, I married a gorgeous cheerleader who harbored an inner sci fi geek - had my cake and ate it too). So, now with the writers strike over, I decided to check into what's coming back when. The data below is from an e-mail I [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Mar 5th, 2008
I've made it a bit of a tradition with my son for us to have McDonalds together once a week. Then I looked at the nutritional information on a bag of McDonalds fries.
A large fries has 8 grams of trans fats. Now, I knew I wasn't feeding him the healthiest food when I [...]
Posted in Job Hunting, Success, Techno Thoughts on Feb 29th, 2008
So I had an idea for a fun t-shirt and needed a quick illustration. I've got some offshore artists I used to generate the artwork for FunDraw.com at low per-piece rates, but since the economy's so down I decided I should post the gig to Craigslist, even if it might cost me 3-4 times [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Feb 29th, 2008
So I read this story today and my head just about exploded. A woman, using a toilet on a train in India, accidentally squeezed out her kid... into the toilet.
Bad enough you say, but the toilets on Indian trains aren't like portapotties with their own little septic systems that get pumped. They're like [...]
Posted in Job Hunting, Society, Techno Thoughts on Feb 26th, 2008
I just got another job scam e-mail, this time offering me a sales rep position. What some of you may not know is that not all the job offer scams are intended to get you to cash fake checks or buy classes you don't need or buy supplies for a project that never materializes. [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Feb 25th, 2008
No doubt many of you have received "job offers" from companies telling you they need agents in the U.S. to receive check payments for them, cash the checks, and then forward them the money (keeping a fee for yourself). Of course, the checks are fake, but generally good enough to get initially cleared by [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Success on Feb 21st, 2008
A work friend who is also an editor pointed me at a recent post by Seth Godin where he issues some platitudes on the responsibility of a communicator for failures in communication.
"What's helpful is to realize that you have a choice when you communicate. You can design your products to be easy to [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Feb 21st, 2008
This evening, I went to my "My Yahoo" page, a customizeable personal page you can populate with news wire feeds, RSS feeds, and other Yahoo content. And it had gone back in time.
Note how all all the stories are "one week ago". Normally this feed is somewhere between a few minutes to "one [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Jan 31st, 2008
In this story from Reuters today, they reference www.jumpingjacksbar.com. When I went over there for more details... "This domain expired January 30, 2008. Click here to renew it."
Bad all around. The owner of Jumping Jacks Bar potentially lost out in hundreds of dollars in ad revenues from the traffic the story generates [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Jan 27th, 2008
I ended up sitting in on about 20 minutes of my wife and a friend planning a baby shower for another friend before I had to leave and do something else. In that time, I suggested a fun baby shower game that they're going to use. I call it "Fashion Baby".
Click the image [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Jan 24th, 2008
So, my dream of being the next Food Network star is over. The submission deadline finally passed (more on that in a moment), I waited... and waited... and just recently asked one of the other contestants I'd befriended on MySpace if they called him.
They did. A while ago. And then apparently decided [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Jan 20th, 2008
So, I was working on a project that generates a form based on a selection of items from a database, and the form could get pretty long. For performance testing I timed the execution of the script and found some very odd results. If the number of items on the list was 16 [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Jan 14th, 2008
This evening I got a comment on my post about how to detect when cell phones access your web site. It was a question about the way I went about the PHP code for matching a bunch of small text snippets against the User Agent string.
Basically, I put all the text snippets in a [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Jan 9th, 2008
I'm no Stephen Sondheim, but on occasion I'll make up a song for my son to entertain him. He's still a month and a half from turning three, so he's easily entertained.
Now, there are some that I take the time to think out beforehand, like our "traveling song" (lyrics at the end of the [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Jan 6th, 2008
We're moving my son to a "big boy bed" for his 3rd birthday next month. When I tried to order the mattress online from Ikea, they told me my zip code was not in their systems and I could not complete my order.
Zip codes change. Never intended by the U.S. Postal Service to [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Jan 2nd, 2008
In a recent blog post, web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman bemoaned niggling and annoying incompatibilities between Macs running the "Tiger" version of OS X and the "Leopard" version of OS X.
Some commenters suggested he switch to Windows XP and be done with it (note they didn't suggest Vista).
Me, I was more philosophical about it. [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Jan 1st, 2008
To sort of set my new year in motion on the right foot, I decided to put in an hour before bed learning how to make Facebook applications. Basically, I wanted to set a tone of intellectual and professional achievement for the year.
Of course, that meant being online, and of course checking my mail. [...]
Posted in Art, Society, Techno Thoughts on Dec 28th, 2007
According to this article, Sanrio is set to unveil a line of clothing and accessories for men using the famous Hello Kitty character.
"Young men these days grew up with character goods," said Sanrio spokesman, Kazuo Tohmatsu. "That generation feels no embarrassment about wearing Hello Kitty."
Maybe I'm an old fuddy duddy, stuck in a [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Society on Dec 26th, 2007
Earlier this month, my wife ordered some books from Barnes and Noble (via their bn.com site) as Christmas gifts for her grandmother. Everything seemed to go well, the order was delivered on the 20th, everyone was happy. Or so I thought.
On December 23rd, we got an e-mail from Barnes and Noble stating:
Your order [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Dec 24th, 2007
A little while back, a friend turned me on to a deal for a DVD of stock footage clips from Footage Firm for a very nice price. I'm all about collecting inexpensive royalty-free media, so I ordered one. But when I slotted it into my MacBook Pro and tried to play the videos, [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Dec 21st, 2007
One of my favorite open source applications is Inkscape, but if I want to run the latest cutting edge version on my Mac, I'm going to have to upgrade to Leopard or spend hours on the iffy proposition of compiling it from source myself.
Why is it now so difficult to run Inkscape on Tiger? [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Dec 19th, 2007
Finally! A news story today announced that the book Pop Culture Mom by Lynne Spears (mother of Britney Spears) has been "indefinitely postponed".
When I first heard about the book, the reporting said it was slanted toward being a "how to" on raising a Christian child in today's culture of loose morals and poor values. [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Dec 14th, 2007
Replacing a short bit of text in PHP is easy. You just use str_replace, as in $bobo = str_replace("foo","bar",$bobo). That will replace all instances of "foo" with "bar" in the string $bobo.
But, on a recent contract, I had a client's site where it only worked properly in Microsoft Internet Explorer and part of [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Dec 11th, 2007
So, there's this little quirk in Quicktime that's been bugging me and I finally decided to Google for a solution, only to find out there isn't one and people have been complaining about it for years without Apple doing a damn thing.
Now this isn't one of those "why can't Mac be more like Windows" complaints. [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Technology & Life on Dec 6th, 2007
After many announcements of cool new features... which I've been too scared to try after a development build of Inkscape crashed on save and trashed an hour of work... Inkscape announced a "chill" for the 0.46 release of their awesome vector drawing program!
Over the next couple of months, they'll be fixing up bugs, heading toward [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Dec 6th, 2007
Validation is the art of checking and modifying input from users so that it's all of what your web site needs and none of what it doesn't want. Validation can be as complex as anti-hacking and anti-spam measures or as simple as making sure someone's not putting their phone number in the box meant [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Dec 5th, 2007
While a lot of people have written in with kudos on my PHP code for detecting mobile browsers, others have written in with questions on how to use it.
The code in question is a PHP function that returns a true or false value depending on whether the browser viewing the page has been identified as [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts on Dec 2nd, 2007
I have Google alerts running to spot when my last name (since it is uncommon) comes up in a newly indexed web page. Usually, the mention is about me, but sometimes it's one of my distant cousins. Anyhow, there was a link to the Dallas Morning News that came in today, but my [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Nov 25th, 2007
In the "Dear Margo" column from Friday, Margo Howard addressed a reader's concern that Yahoo! employees were reading her private mail sent through the Yahoo! Mail service.
In response, she provided a statement from a Yahoo! News vice president, which I'm quoting here under the belief that this constitutes fair use as editorial/public commentary.
"User privacy is [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Nov 16th, 2007
Pulled up the calculator on my Mac to do a series of small calculations, each of which I could have done in my head, but which in combination were faster with the calculator.
The first... 599.74 times 2.
The correct answer: 1199.48
The answer the calculator application bundled into Mac OS X 10.4 gave: 1,199.48000000000001
Now I've run into [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Nov 12th, 2007
Ay of you who have been reading Brain Handles for a while might remember when I blogged about a CSS Hijack on MySpace back in April.
Well, in recent weeks, it's reared its ugly head in a big way when MySpace pages belonging to Alicia Keys and many lesser-known artists were hacked to dispense malware. [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Nov 2nd, 2007
There's further controversy today about "Manhunt 2", an extremely violent video game from Take Two Interactive Software. The main tempest is that if you have hacked your Playstation Two in complicated ways, you can unblur some of the violent content that was blurred so the game could be sold in more stores.
But that's not [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Nov 2nd, 2007
News sites are buzzing about the new Everex PC going on sale at WalMart for $199, running Linux. It's new, it's daring, it's revolutionary... It's something WalMart tried five years ago.
In September 2002, they announced a line of PCs from Microtel, running Linux. Like the Everex machines, they ran Via processors [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Nov 1st, 2007
I'm on the mailing lists for a couple of open source projects that interest me. Between trying to hustle contracts, satisfy contracts, and build up my own web empire so I don't have to hustle or satisfy contracts any more, I don't have time to actually contribute code, but I do like to know [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 29th, 2007
I recently ran across a few stories about a little brew-ha-ha going on down in Portland, Oregon (our neighbors to the south). Seems a gentleman by the name of Sam Adams is running for mayor.
Getting into the swing of things, two morning show disc jockeys in Portland registered samadamsformayor.com and mayorsamadams.com, suggesting he could [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 29th, 2007
So, I was browsing some tech sites today and saw an ad for a tech/coding forum called DaniWeb where people can post questions/answers/etc. about tech issues.
But having been online for 13+ years, seeing "DaniWeb" immediately made me think of Danni Ashe, an adult entertainer who owns one of the oldest and most successful softcore porn [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 26th, 2007
UPDATE:About an hour after this post, Google posted to the the AdSense Troubleshooting discussion thread that the problem had been fixed and they'd be working on retroactively fixing the bad reports from the past few days.
More and more people, posting to the AsSense Troubleshooting discussion thread are complaining not just about discrepancies between overall numbers [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 26th, 2007
After my post that AdSense was still broken, a Google rep posted to the Google Groups thread twice at 4:20 and 4:42 pm.
I'm still waiting on updates from my team on this issue... Thank you
all for your patience.
(Changing the subject to something more descriptive to draw more users
to this thread.)
Somehow his subject change got overwritten [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 25th, 2007
Yesterday, I wrote about how AdSense is reporting inaccurate figures for custom channels. Well it's now the third day in a row, and with no further word from Google. They acknowledged the problem on Tuesday in this thread on the AdSense Troubleshooting discussion on Google Groups, but haven't given an update since. [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 24th, 2007
Google AdSense reporting is broken for the second day in a row today. And no, it's not ironic that an AdSense ad follows this sentence. It's just the template.
Since Tuesday, October 23rd, webmasters have been complaining that while they may be getting accurate impression and click reporting for entire domains, the impression and [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 22nd, 2007
I'm writing this post from a Firefox browser within Ubuntu within a Parallels window on my MacBook Pro. So far... so good.
And while Parallels has made installing Windows XP onto your Mac a breeze, installing the latest version of Ubuntu (7.10) is not nearly as easy. First, look at this set of instructions [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 20th, 2007
Today I was watching a CNN video report on why today's PCs are so bogged down with trial software, demo software, and other useless freebies that benefit the manufacturer's bottom line but effectively slow down and cripple the PC.
It's a reasonable question. I got a Sony Vaio laptop in late 2005 where removing all [...]
Posted in Society, Techno Thoughts on Oct 19th, 2007
So, there's this computer program they're selling which claims to make your PC emit 34,000 homeopathic bioresonance patterns that improve your health and repair damage done by electromagnetic waves from your computer. And it's only around $80. What a bargain, eh? Wouldn't you buy it?
Enter Sense About Science, which has put out [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 18th, 2007
Again, working on my current project, one of the things it offers is the ability to define another user as your friend (and you their friend). My site isn't social networking, but has some features in common, such as defining friendship relationships.
Now, it's easy to create a simple three column table of user IDs [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 18th, 2007
I wouldn't really call myself a Linux critic, as there are many good things I could say about it, but I have regularly criticized it for one particular shortcoming... not having the hardware support Windows does.
Now, this is not necessarily a failing of Linux itself, so much as it is a failing of the hardware [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Oct 15th, 2007
UPDATE: The code has just been tested against the WURFL database of over 6,750 different mobile browser User Agent IDs, and proved 94.34% effective at catching the User Agent IDs in their database, yet providing NO false positives on the 63 most popular browser/OS combos on the desktop. And remember, that's just one of [...]
Posted in Insurance, Medicine, Techno Thoughts on Oct 11th, 2007
Today, Wyeth pharmaceuticals was hit with a $134.5 million judgement in a case over its hormone replacement therapies for menopausal women. That wasn't a judgement that pays for a large group of women in a class action suit. It was for three women. And it's still not all. The jury still [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 11th, 2007
So, there's been some hubbub in the "publisher" world about Google's new AdSense video unit. It's a video player that embeds ads plus videos from Google Video or YouTube. When people click on the ads in the player, the web site operator who's displaying the video unit gets paid, plus if the creator [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 10th, 2007
So, I've been a busy little beaver. After creating my "evil genius calls death ray tech support" post, I stumbled upon an abandoned missile base for sale on eBay. Realizing that this would be a perfect evil genius lair, I created the Evil Greg's Secret Lair blog, trying to get people to donate [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 9th, 2007
My son's education has been on my mind as of late and I've been looking into what we might do to ensure our son gets the best possible education within our budget.
Now, of course, the best in the Seattle area might be University Child Development School, which reminds me of The Mirman School in Los [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 5th, 2007
So, I don't obsess over the Google page rank of individual pages or even my sites, but I do check every once in a while out of curiosity. If my rank changes during the periodic updates of the "toolbar page rank" (TBPR), it shows I'm moving the needle, for better or worse. Though [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 5th, 2007
When I've read PHP tutorials and you've got a list of values you want to check a variable against, the values are usually in an array, and a loop is used to check the variable against each value.
For example, we'll look at this block of code, assuming that $userin is user input...
$people = array("fred","wilma","barney","betty","pebbles","bam bam");
$match=false;
for($i=0;$i<count($people);$i++){
[...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Oct 2nd, 2007
This week I'm on a break between contracts and have been working from home on my own projects. Some of that has been goofing off, some of it has been housekeeping, and some of it has been creative. Today has been a particularly bandwidth intensive day.
I started the morning catching up on some [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Sep 28th, 2007
Famed director Francis Ford Coppola is claiming he lost 15 years of irreplaceable data when his studio in Argentina was burglarized. Among the data lost were writings, family photos, and more.
Apparently they were making backups, but to a NAS drive on the floor... which got stolen along with the primary computers and hard drives.
Two [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Sep 28th, 2007
A while back, I wrote about how the U.S. and Canadian dollars hit parity for the first time in nearly 30 years and discussed the effect of a weak dollar on the price of imports. Well, more proof of this has hit the news. The price of Canadian marijuana is going up.
I can't [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Sep 27th, 2007
Palm introduced its first "non-Treo" phone today, the Palm Centro. And, you know what? It's a freakin' Treo!!!
If you look at the specs for the Centro, you'll find they very closely match the Treo 700p specs. Same screen, same camera, same version of the Palm OS operating system. The main differences [...]
Posted in Gadgets & Gizmos, Stupid Thoughts, Techno Thoughts on Sep 26th, 2007
ACME Weapons Systems would like to thank you for holding. We appreciate your patience. Your estimated wait time is thirty eight minutes. This call may be recorded for training purposes. Please hold for the next available representative.
Brad: Thank you for calling ACME Weapons Systems tech support. My name is Brad, [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Sep 25th, 2007
If you're alone in the house with your dog and you die, your dog will wait until it is starving before it considers taking a bite out of you.
If you're alone in the house with your cat and its food bowl has been empty more than three hours, don't take a nap.
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Sep 24th, 2007
When the Inkscape team put up a news post at the beginning of the month, thanking their Summer of Code interns, I thought that release 0.46 must be coming any time now. With less than a week left in the month, I'm not feeling so confident.
Inkscape 0.45 was released in February with a bugfix [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, World Affairs on Sep 24th, 2007
Have you been reading about that cool XO laptop, the result of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program and thought "I'd love to have one of those"? You can get one... in November.
For two weeks in November (12th through 26th) OLPC will offer a Give One - Get One program. For an [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Sep 21st, 2007
In an article entitled "Desktop Linux? Stick A Fork In It!", InfoWorld blogger Randall Kennedy tries to expose community development and control as a myth of open source software, or at least as being more inconsistent than some would think.
In many projects, the community does rule, and the community development model rocks. But as [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts on Sep 20th, 2007
So, this guy contacts me the other day. Wants to pay me $200 to put up a couple of paragraphs of text (with links in them) on this site.
Now, before we get to how screwed up his offer was, read what Google says about paid links. Google blogger Matt Cutts has opined in [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Sep 18th, 2007
I just read an article about Ooma, a new VOIP phone service that's currently in beta.
According to the article, you'll have to buy a $400 hardware hub and $45 per room extension ports, but then all your phone calls will be free.
The way it's planning to do this is unique. Whenever someone sets [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Sep 9th, 2007
So, there's a porn actress by the name of Shyla Stylez. A friend sent me a link to her Wikipedia entry, crowing about how there was a hot, female, Jewish porn star (back then they were listing her birth name as Amanda Friedman, but now it appears that Amanda Friedland was her married name [...]
Posted in Society, Techno Thoughts, Technology & Life on Sep 5th, 2007
To those who actually say "content wants to be free" with a straight face and seriousness of purpose...
"Content wants to be free" makes as much sense as "content wants to be a fireman" or "music is a Republican."
When you say "content wants to be free," you actually mean, "I don't want to pay for content" [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Aug 30th, 2007
There's an article in the latest issue of A List Apart where Håkon Wium Lie advocates for a downloadable truetype font spec in the next generation of CSS. But is this really necessary?
One of the reasons he advocates for it is that many people currently use images to include non-core fonts in web pages, [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Aug 26th, 2007
Well, seems the virus writers are trying a new social engineering scam.
What does "social engineering" mean? That means that instead of using technology to get you to do what they want, they use psychology. For example, they've been sending out notices that you got a postcard from an old friend and tell you [...]
Posted in Miscellaneous Thoughts, Technology & Life on Aug 23rd, 2007
So, I was googling some old friends from my days at Santa Monica College in the early 90s, and one generates no hits. None. It almost seems impossible that in the mass of pages indexed by Google, that someone as outgoing and quirky as Roy wouldn't end up at least getting mentioned on [...]
Posted in Politics & Religion, Techno Thoughts on Aug 23rd, 2007
My friend Dan Gray started up a new site a while back called MPGomatic, focusing on which cars provide the best gas mileage.
One of the cool features is the gas mileage calculator, but even more cool and eye opening have been his articles on cars made by Ford, Honda, and other manufacturers that combine great [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Aug 21st, 2007
What's the latest in virus spreading e-mails? The fake membership confirmation.
I've been getting a bunch of these lately, and Symantec just posted a warning about them today.
The basic format is...
Welcome,
Thank You for Joining [name of site].
Membership Number: 398571733
Your Login ID: user4265
Password ID: uk110
Your temporary Login Info will expire in 24 hours. Please login and [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Aug 3rd, 2007
Yesterday, CafePress sent out a notice to its shopkeepers about a policy change that would raise prices on the average t-shirt by 15% or more.
With this launch we will begin charging a $3 second side printing surcharge for all garments* featuring more than one print area. To minimize work on your end and to ensure [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Jul 29th, 2007
So, after agonizing over whether or not I had the chops to be "The Next Food Network Star", I decided to submit an entry for next season.
NFNS 3 submission videosAdd to My Profile | More Videos
If you're feeling generous, please drop by MySpace and give it a "booyah" vote.
My name is Greg Bulmash and [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Jul 20th, 2007
Tonight, I was driving my son home from day care, telling him how Grandpa was going to be here tomorrow and Grandpa was going to bring him presents.
Being that my son won't even be two-and-a-half for another month, I wasn't sure if he had a concept of tomorrow. So I asked him "do you [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Jul 19th, 2007
One of the great things marketers have been promising since the dawn of the commercial Internet is personalized advertising; ads targeted to what you really want. Really? Right now ads that could be targeted with trivial effort... aren't. Where's the great future of targeted advertising?
Highly targeted advertising is supposed to be the [...]
Posted in Just Personal, Stupid Thoughts, Techno Thoughts on Jul 19th, 2007
I had the strangest dream and I can still remember a lot of details, so I'll share...
I was in a house in a beachside community with a view of the ocean (not on the beach, but on a hill a few blocks away) and I was looking out the window at the water, when many [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Jul 13th, 2007
The recording industry is crying about CD sales being down, and while digital/online sales are rising, the overall revenues of the music industry are dropping. And they're blaming music piracy.
Let's look at the history of the music industry. For decades, it was all about the single, sometimes with a B-side. And they [...]
Posted in Dangerous Thoughts, Politics & Religion, Techno Thoughts on Jul 13th, 2007
A few weeks back, there was some brouhaha about Dick Cheney asserting he wasn't subject to certain White House rules because he's part of the legislative branch of our government. Of course, when he was convening his energy task force and the legislative branch tried to compel him to disclose who he met with, [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on May 21st, 2007
Just when I start challenging anti-copyright activists to prove their methods work, corporate jerks and their political puppets continue to undermine the argument for reform instead of abolition by trying to make copyright laws even more onerous, pernicious, and restrictive.
The Copyright Alliance, a new lobbying group formed from the usual suspects (RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, Disney, [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on May 21st, 2007
In my conversations with anti-copyright proponents, both publicly and in private, I ask about the alternative: How does an artist make a living in a post-copyright world?
I'm a big fan of open source art. I use the Open Clip Art Library extensively, both using its art for my site with clip art and a [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on May 10th, 2007
Karl Fogel posted a thoughtful and calm response to my essay, "Should Copyright Be Abolished?" and invited my reaction. So here goes...
First, I'm afraid you're misreading some of my statements or intentions. I never say the right to control your work is a natural right. In fact, if we look at the [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts on May 8th, 2007
I read an interesting article today about a couple who tried to use Google to help pick a baby name.
The odd thing about it was that they didn't Google for baby names. They Googled specific baby names to try to find one that formed a unique combination with their last name so it would [...]
Posted in Politics & Religion, Society, Technology & Life on May 6th, 2007
There's an old joke in which a man asks a woman if she'd sleep with him for a million dollars. After some thought, she says yes. Then he asks her if she'd sleep with him for 50 dollars. She says, "of course not! What kind of girl do you think I am?"
"We've [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on May 2nd, 2007
What is "link cloaking", you ask? It's when you use an alternative URL to represent the actual URL you're linking to. For example, if you were linking to http://www.fakeurl.jib/blog/post.php?postname=why_the_heck_is_this_url_so_long, you might instead cloak it and link to http://www.mysite.jib/linkout.php?link=89.
The arguments for link cloaking include:
Easier link/click tracking
Making links short enough to fit in [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts on Apr 30th, 2007
Back in March, I did an experiment on whether Google indexes content inserted into your page with JavaScript. Weeks later, the results are conclusive... no. The words inserted into the test page via JavaScript were never indexed. Lots of pages talking about the odd words I used come up in searches for [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Apr 30th, 2007
A question lots of web site owners ask themselves is "how do I stop people from stealing my images?" The short answer is: you can't. If you put it on the web, someone can steal it. But that doesn't mean you have to make it easy for them.
Skip The Discussion And Just [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Apr 27th, 2007
It's a common frustration for people running WordPress. You set the number of posts displayed per page in the "Options|Reading" tab with the "Show At Most" option, and it uses that number both for your front page and for all the archive pages (category archive, monthly archive, etc.). So if you're showing four [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Apr 26th, 2007
You've seen them as a feature of Web 2.0 web sites, big bunches of keywords called tags or a tag cloud. You've got a large database of items and you'd like to add this feature to your site. It's easier than you might think.
Step 1: Getting The Tags From Your Users
The first part [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Apr 25th, 2007
Author's Note: Now the stuff below is not the code you'd use if you were building the next Digg. It's just a simple demonstration of the concepts. But if you're looking to start building your own rating script, it's an excellent start to get you familiar with how the most elemental functions [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Technology & Life on Apr 24th, 2007
Apparently Opera is touting how its mobile version has outpaced Apple's Safari browser for market share... in Ukraine.
Is it just me or is this a non-story? In this PC World story on the topic, they say it's proof that mobile browsing is growing. But look at the percentages... 0.3% and 0.2%. That [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Apr 23rd, 2007
After my post about being screwed with small print, one person posted a comment on my Slashdot journal post about it that I should file a dispute with PayPal. Ahhh, if only it was that easy.
Prior to joining Boxed Art, I found a site selling a package of web templates and clipart for $49.95. [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts on Apr 22nd, 2007
A year ago, with a potential client who wanted sort of standard design, I signed up for a service that allows you to download pre-made templates, called Boxed Art, owned by a company named Big Resources, Inc. They also had some music loops I thought I could use for another project. Both projects [...]