post

A Dead PC is a Safe PC – says Microsoft

Posted on October 17, 2005 ·

Microsoft appears to think the safest PC is one you don’t access at all…

CNET reports Critical Windows patch may wreak PC havoc: 

“Installing the patch can cause serious problems, Microsoft said in an advisory posted to its Web site Friday. The patch could lock users out of their PC, prevent the Windows Firewall from starting, block certain applications from running or installing, and empty the network connections folder, among other things, the software maker said. “

But wait, here comes the best part: 
“ Even if users experience PC trouble after installing the patch, they will still be protected against any attack exploiting the Windows flaw, a Microsoft representative said. “

Let me get this straight: I get locked out of my PC, and I’ll be safe from attacks.  (???)

I have a few better ideas:

  • How about not even turning on the PC?
  • Or not even buying one?  Shouldn’t that be the safest option?

 

Tags: , , , , , ,

Filed Under: Customer Service, Humor, Software, Technology ·
post

Sponsoring the Web 2.1 BrainJam

Posted on October 4, 2005 ·

SQLFusion is now a proud co-patron of the Web 2.1 BrainJam along with Kron 4, D-BAM,  and  TechCrunch. 

A BrainJam is a new type of event (inspired by BarCamp, Gnomedex, TechCrunch BBQ and WebZine2005) that brings people from diverse backgrounds together to focus on a few key questions, sharing knowledge, collaborating, solving problems, demonstrating cool tools, networking and hopefully making the world a better place while having fun. You only need to bring your mind, your past experience, some new Insytes and something for note taking. The event coordinators supply you with a general direction for the conversation, WiFi access, some collaboration tools and an opportunity to create magic.

It will take place this Friday, October 7th, and registration is open now at a hefty $2.80.   That is not $2.80 per minute, but the full price 🙂  But should you not be able to afford it, Scholarships are available: all you need to do is write and explain why you are deserve  a scholarship in 1,000 words or less, or under 2 minutes in audio/visual length.   (You have to appreciate the Organizer’s humor…)

Talk about Organizer, he needs help, please check out the Wiki.

See You there!
Tags: , , , , ,

Filed Under: Bay Area, Blogging, Business, Marketing / PR, Software, Startups, Technology ·
post

Web 2.1 Announced :-)

Posted on October 4, 2005 ·

Skip Web 2.0 (not that you have an option unless already registered) and go for Web 2.1 directly.   At $2.80 even I could afford to register:-)  Here’s the program wiki.

(via Jeff Nolan)

Tags: , , , ,

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Social Networking, Software, Technology ·
post

Technorati Winning the Search Wars? Not Exactly. Just a Skewed Test.

Posted on September 15, 2005 ·

The announcement of Google Blog Search prompted Steve Rubel to set up a test blog to compare several Blog Search tools.  But what exactly is the objective of the comparison?

Steve’s original definition: “ Let’s see how quickly/well they work “   Then, in the test blog itself he talks about testing “the different engines’ ability to spider the full-text of a blog “. 

Well, there’s not much to test there, we already know from the announcement that “Bloogle” only indexes feeds, so that’s a given.  Nevertheless, Steve picks a search term ( “ms. mxyzptlk” ) that is AFTER the extract Blogger uses for the Atom feed.  No wonder the search term produces no results – it’s not supposed to.

However, when Steve declares Technorati a winner, he clearly characterizes it as a test on timeliness: “ Only Technorati indexed my blog search post from yesterday so far, nearly 18 hours after I posted it “

There is a small problem though:  Steve’s post is already  indexed on Google at the time of his second post, but of course one can  only find it by searching for a text-string BEFORE the feed cutoff (like i did in the above link).

Conclusion: this “test” is irrelevant to the speed of the search engines, all it did was confirm that Bloogle indeed performs as stated.

Of course one can debate whether searching feeds instead of the original html is a good idea or not, but that’s a completely different issue.   And, perhaps the right question to ask is just how we should manage our feeds?

I have previously argued that it’s a better practice to publish full feeds anyway.  At least for people who care more about their message getting out, than click-throughs on ads on their site.

On the other hand, indexing full content seems to be a bit shaky, at least for Technorati: they admittedly “get lost” and mix up post body, title, tags from different posts in their index. If parsing full html is so difficult (not that I agree with that), than perhaps using the feed is a safer bet (?) 

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, SaaS, Software, Technology ·
post

The Emperor’s Naked: Technorati

Posted on September 2, 2005 ·

(Updates at the bottom)

Technorati is dressing up a dying sick body in fancy new clothes.  Who cares, if the body fails it’s basic functions?   

The latest new feature, Blog Finder meets more criticism than welcome:  here, here, here, here, to list just a few, but it’s all so irrelevant. Let’s face it: it really does not matter, whether this latest feature works or not.  There’s an old IT axiom:  Garbage In, Garbage Out.  If you have the wrong data to begin with, it really does not matter how many layers of extra services you put on it, the output is still worthless.

Everybody seems to be talking about performance problems; for example here, here, here, here, here and  here, but IMHO not getting data out of Technorati is by far not the worst; getting the WRONG information is far, far worse.  Techorati has major problems parsing the main pages of blogs built on standard templates of major bog platforms, and the result is the result is entries in their metadata where:

  • the body of a post appears with the title of another one (mostly, but not always, the previous one)
  • the body of a post is associated with tags of another one.

I myself, and other bloggers documented this before: here, here, here  and here again just giving a sample, and here’s a  little gem of a title and article that have nothing to do with each other:

Technorati

 (actually, the above image is a “triple whammy”: the tag, title, body come from 3 different posts)
 
I always wondered that if parsing the main page is so difficult (it is not, actually) why doesn’t Technorati use the permalink page, or even better, the RSS feed instead of the main page where they “get lost” – perhaps THAT is a performance issue?
 
In any case, as seen above, the search problems are the tip of the iceberg, the real problem is building the wrong index.  From a blogger’s point of view, this makes us look like complete fools – posting meaningless articles.

Now, let’s talk about communication:  emailing techorati support is a complete dead end.  Bloggers quickly learned the trick: emailing Dave Sifry (CEO), or perhaps Kevin Marks, or tagging blog entries with their names used to result in a response, and sometimes even corrective action.  That’s no longer the case.  I understand.  The CEO personally emailing back is not exactly scalable communication.  But why doesn’t Technorati have a searchable Knowledge Base, or at least a FAQ of known issues and solutions?  This is really Customer Service 101.

The SiliconBeat, Joi Ito, and many others welcome Dave Sifry’s post discussing the problems: “ Once we got our keyword search infrastructure back on track, our infrastructure team has been working 100% on fixing Cosmos search. Our current plan is to have Cosmos search back up and running by the end of September .“

Sorry, Dave, but your keyword search is far from fixed, it still results in timeout in more than half the cases.. in fact the Technorati homepage is often unaccessible.   On this chart  a response time above 3 seconds is considered critical – wow, I am generally happy getting anything below 30 seconds, if at all.   On the input side, Technorati claims to index posts within minutes, yet several influential bloggers complain they have not been indexed for weeks.   Dave strikes an honest tone and discusses some of the issues, but frankly, I doubt he really knows the status of his own business.

All this makes me wonder if Technorati is an “idea company” – they truly are Innovators of the Blogosphere, just can’t execute.  This makes me wish BL Ochman’s recent “hot tip” about an imminent buyout were true. 

 Update (9/10) This is pathetic:  New Orleans is listed as #6 on the Tehcnorati Top Search list, yet clicking on it results in this:

Technorati new orleans

Update (9/11) Can’t log in to Technorati account, infinite loop asking to log in again and again …


Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Customer Service, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology ·
post

Hybrids in the Carpool Lane – The Race is On

Posted on August 11, 2005 ·

(updated)
Today for the first time I filled her up with $3 gas … no, really, $2.997  only… 

Today is also the first day drivers of certain hybrids can apply for the sticker that allows them to use the carpool lanes on California higways even if they drive alone.

This cute (?) / ugly (?) little thingie is getting more and  more of a viable option:

One caviat: the law limits the number of special stickers at 75,000.
So far 57,000 hybrid vehicles have been sold in California.   The race is on…

Update (11/28) Busines Week: “The status vehicle of choice at the Googleplex is the Toyota Prius hybrid, which both co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page drive. Google even offers employees a $5,000 credit for buying an environmentally friendly hybrid car.“

Update 2 (12/03) This is interesting, less than half hybrid owners applied for the privilage of driving in the carpool lane.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Filed Under: Bay Area, Misc, Technology ·
post

Time to Dump the Shuttle

Posted on July 31, 2005 ·

NEW Shuttle problem:  “A couple of short strips of filler material dangling from Discovery’s

belly had NASA scrambling Sunday to determine whether the protrusions

might endanger the space shuttle during re-entry and whether the

astronauts might need to attempt a repair. The potential trouble has

nothing to do with launch debris ….” read more

This is sickening… with all the billion$ spent on the Space program,

we’re dealing with pieces of foam, tape, glue, pieces of junk

protruding, falling off…  are we talking about kids’s toy models

or space-age design and materials here?    As so many

other’s stated, instead of band-aiding it, it’s time to dump the old Shuttle , and either build a brand new one, or leave space travel to the Russians … or perhaps Private Enterprise.

 

digg story
Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Filed Under: Technology ·
post

New Private Space Craft

Posted on July 28, 2005 ·
Jeff Nolan ponders about why taxpayer $ is spent on trying to send tired old vehicles up in space, instead of creating new ones.  Btw, for all I know the Russian Progress and Soyuz flights are just as aging as ours, an they had their fair share of problems, too.  Anyway while NASA is spending OUR money on band-aid solutions, private capital gets into building new space vehicles, albeit sub-orbital ones:
 

Richard Branson and Burt Rutan Form Spacecraft Building Company
By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
posted: 27 July 2005
03:09 pm ET

British entrepreneur, Sir Richard Branson, has teamed up with aerospace designer, Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites to form a new aerospace production company. The new firm will build a fleet of commercial suborbital spaceships and launch aircraft.

Full article here.


Technorati Tags: , , ,

Filed Under: Business, Misc, Technology ·
post

Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) Already Broken

Posted on July 27, 2005 ·

Wow, this didn’t take long!

Rafael Rivera has posted instructions on how to circumvent Microsoft’s WGA on IE and FF.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Filed Under: Software, Technology ·
post

Debris Falling from Discovery

Posted on July 26, 2005 ·
 CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA officials are analyzing video of a portion of Tuesday’s shuttle launch “frame-by-frame” after one of several cameras aboard the craft captured what appeared to be pieces of debris separating from Discovery, according to Local 6 News.

  • “The question was asked whether this was a danger to the orbiter?,” Forbes said. “Officials said they did not think so but they are still going to analyze the video.”

    Local 6 News aired video showing the pieces apparently coming loose while the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters separated (pictured, left).

    SLIDESHOW: Cam Catches Debris Falling Off Shuttle
    VIDEO: Video Shows Pieces Coming Loose
    IMAGES: See The Launch

    There also appears to have been a large piece of debris coming off the external fuel tank two minutes into the flight — but it doesn’t appear to have hit the orbiter, Associated Press reported.

    Watch the video here.

    Update:  NASA now reports Discovery hit a bird seconds after launch. Full coverage here.

    Technorati Tags: , , , ,

     
      

    Powered By Qumana

    Filed Under: Misc, Technology ·
    « Previous Page
    Next Page »