Archives for January 2009

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The Entire Web is Unsafe to Browse, Says Google

Posted on January 31, 2009 ·

Chances are you got scared away from visiting a webpage this morning by Google’s malware warning:

Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!

Suggestions:

Or you can continue to http://www.google.com/ at your own risk. For detailed information about the problems we found, visit Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostic page for this site.
For more information about how to protect yourself from harmful software online, you can visit StopBadware.org.
If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google’s Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong with the site you are looking for.  Google give false warnings on ANY site today, including their own.  Here’s the Google search result for the keyword Google:

If you try to click on the diagnostic page, you get a Server Error.  So go ahead, ignore the warnings – or perhaps limit your browsing to “known territories” until the error gets fixed.

(Cross-posted from CloudAve. To stay on top of Cloud Computing news, analysis and just our opinion, grab the CloudAve Feed here.)

Filed Under: Software · Tagged: , , , ,
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Ma.Gnolia Data Loss – Is Your Data Safe?

Posted on January 30, 2009 ·

Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking service is down, lost all their user data and they don’t know if / when they can recover. 

This is as bad as it can get for any Web 2.0 service (and more importantly for users), and the backlash against Cloud services has already started.   My first reaction is taking Stowe Boyd’s approach – a quick overview of how safe my own data is.

Read More …

Update: also read Krish’s post @ ClouDave: Magnolia Effect – Should We Trust The Clouds?

Filed Under: SaaS · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Implementing DISQUS

Posted on January 28, 2009 ·
SIERRA MADRE, CA - MAY 29: Seventieth anniver...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Quick note: I’m in the process of implementing DISQUS now.  (Thanks for the help, Daniel!) Thousands of comments are being imported, but they don’t show under the relevant posts yet. Also, DISQUS labeled a few hundred comments as spam – I need to manually comb through those.

So if you commented here before and don’t see your comment now – apologies, hope to sort this out soon.

Update (1/29):  Pre-DISQUS comments are in the system but they don’t show for some reason.  Bear with me for a while – either we’ll have a fix or I’m removing DISQUS soon.

Update #2: Removed DISQUS, due to ongoing SPAM trouble.  I may write more on this one day…

Filed Under: Misc · Tagged: , , , ,
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*Chirpy, Chirpy – New Twitter Client DOA.

Posted on January 28, 2009 ·

*chirp (won’t that asterisk in the front backfire with some search engines?) is supposedly the best, cutest, Twhirl-killer mother-of-all Twitter Client.  Except it’s Dead On Arrival. Read the full story here…

..and in the meantime a little consolation prize:

Filed Under: SaaS, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
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Mike Arrington Spit-Attack – He Joins Elite Company

Posted on January 28, 2009 ·
Michael Arrington

Image by jdlasica via Flickr

Disturbing news this morning: TechCrunch Founder Mike Arrington was about to leave the DLD Conference (hey, Eran, where’s your review?) when a stranger approached him, deliberately spat in his face and disappeared in the crowd.

This is as lowly as it gets. It’s also very cowardly.  TechCrunch covers a lot of companies and people, some positively, some negatively, others not at all, which can hurt… and Mike does get occasionally abrasive, but does not go into personal attacks.

Anyone who has issues with Mike him can bring it up publicly, in a civilized manner. With zero barrier of entry to blogging, Twitter..etc there is no excuse not to do so.

Mike Arrington is now taking some time off, not only because of the spit-attack, but also to reflect on earlier threats on his and his family’s life and security.

What happened today is a despicable act, not to be taken lightly.  I am not making fun of it either … but perhaps to cheer Mike up, I must point out that he is now in a Very Elite Club, where his fellow members are none other but Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. 

We probably all remember how Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer received the egg treatment in Budapest last year:

 

But I suspect some of my readers are too young to recall that ten years before the Ballmer-incident, Microsoft Founder Bill Gates received a full cream-pie in his face on a visit to Belgium:

 

(Cross-posted from CloudAve. To stay on top of Cloud Computing news, analysis and just our opinion, grab the CloudAve Feed here.)

Related posts:

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Misc · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
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Underwater Ironing (???) World Record

Posted on January 22, 2009 ·

From the it doesn’t get any stupider than this department: 86 people in the UK have broken the World Record in underwater ironing. 

 

What’s wrong with these people?  I wouldn’t want to be anywhere close to an ironing board even on land, let alone underwater.  These people should take a flight on Us Airways… (oops, sorry, bad joke).

Here’s another world record in a much more pleasant category. smile_wink

Filed Under: Humor · Tagged: , ,
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How I Beat TechCrunch for the Second Time

Posted on January 22, 2009 ·

First time I beat TechCrunch was in July 2006:

…their Feedburner subscription base grew almost 100% overnight.  But it pales in comparison to my 2.5million % growth rate … yes, I went from 200 or so to 51k.   Jeff Clavier did quite well, too, at 56k, but hey Jeff, I am catching up!

 

Too bad it was due to a Netvibes glitch, and once they fixed it, my readership fell back to – well, normal levels.

Today I am winning again:   TechCrunch has 0 –yes zero – subscribers, while I have 1141. smile_wink

This time the culprit is Feedburner, which chucked the subscriber stats to zero for many blogs, including TechCrunch, while I lucked out, and only “lost” about half my subscribers. Over @ CloudAve we were less lucky, the migration to Google’s new setup cost about 85% of our subscriber base, but that still beats zero…

Yet it’s a Pyrrhic victory, which I hope won’t last – Feedburner (Google) needs to pull their act together.

Filed Under: Blogging · Tagged: , , , , , ,
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InfoWorld’s 2009 Technology of the Year Awards

Posted on January 21, 2009 ·

InfoWorld announced the winners of the 2009 Technology of the Year Awards in Applications, Middleware, and Data Management:

The Awards are presented in a slideshow format, and InfoWorld made it almost unreadable: there is an ad in between every single page, you either 20 second to flip a page, or have to click “skip” every single time, then click one more time to close another page that hides the slide. Frankly, I think they went way overboard with this.

That said, I did the work for you, here are the winners:

  • Mozilla Firefox
  • Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show
  • Day Communique WCM
  • Telligent Community Server 2008
  • Oracle Database 11g
  • Talend Open Studio
  • Denodo Platform

Congratulations to the winners!

(Cross-posted from CloudAve)

Filed Under: SaaS, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , ,
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Bush Street Renamed Obama in San Francisco

Posted on January 20, 2009 ·

(Photo Credit: *takeitez* on Flickr)

Filed Under: Humor, Politics · Tagged: , , , ,
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Hulu Fails on Inauguration Day

Posted on January 20, 2009 ·

O-Day was supposed to be the first US Presidential Inauguration largely available online. I thought it was a good idea to provide the embedded video here, courtesy of Hulu.  It worked well for hours .. during the countdown.

Then it promptly died as soon as the actual broadcast started.  It appears Hulu killed the embed feed, while the video on hulu.com itself is still working well.

Hulu = Fail on O-Day.  Way to welcome the first tech-savvy US President.smile_sad

Filed Under: Technology · Tagged: , , , ,
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