Archive for the Nerdy Stuff category
August 1st, 2008
It’s time for me to jump on the Cuil-bashing bandwagon. I first heard about the search engine after reading the Toronto Star Tuesday morning. When I got to work, several non-technical people were asking me about it, so it obviously got some serious hype in a short time.
At first, I was like, WTF is this? How do you pronounce it? “Quill”? “kwee-uhl”? Is it French? Maybe “soo-ill”? I never would have guessed “cool”. I’m no branding expert, but right off the bat, the name just doesn’t seem like something that will catch on easily.
Functionally, the site hasn’t had very positive reviews. They claim to index more pages than Google - over 120 billion. However, looking up very simple words often brought no results, and as of two days ago, searching for “Cuil” returned no results related to the site itself, either. If they can’t find themselves in their own search engine, who’s going to trust them for anything?
A search for "Cuil" returns nothing related to itself
In a timely fashion, the guys at Google’s blog had a post last Friday mentioning they’ve indexed 1 trillion unique URLs on the web. Take that Cuil, with your measly 120 billion…
It makes me mad to see some ex-Google employees drum up 33 million dollars over a bunch of hype. I hope the investors lose their money. They deserve it.
June 5th, 2008
Last week I went to log into my robmaeder.com webmail account, and I was greeted with a little message saying “Hosting for this domain has been suspended”. Perplexed, I checked some of the other domains I host, and they were all working fine. I contacted my hosting provider, and I was informed my account had been compromised and a bunch of shit was being uploaded to my webspace.
After digging around, I realized I was using a pretty old version of WordPress, and it contained some security holes that were exploited by someone who thought they could use robmaeder.com for their nefarious purposes.
The entire domain was locked down to prevent any further problems, and I spent a good hour or two cleaning up the mess that was left behind. Lucky for me, nothing was deleted, but a bunch of weird files and scripts were uploaded all over the place. Once that was all fixed, I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, and also installed the Automatic Upgrade Plugin to make future upgrades easier.
Once WordPress was upgraded to the latest stable version, I noticed the theme I was using was broken, since there were some major changes made to the software. That’s why I’ve got this spiffy new layout here now.
I learned an important lesson: keep your blog software up-to-date. WordPress is open source, so it’s always being updated and fixed up. But there’s also new exploits and security issues being found all the time, so it’s important to get the latest versions, which will fix bugs and patch up the security holes.
February 15th, 2008
I joined Facebook rather late compared to most people I know. I always thought that if I wanted to contact people online, I’d just use email or instant messaging. If I wanted to share photos, I could email them or put them up on my website or on one of many sites dedicated to that purpose. I didn’t think it was necessary to join some “social network” in order to stay connected to friends.
That all changed in February 2007, when I finally cracked and joined Facebook. I remember the first month being pretty exciting as far as online events go. I would get emails every day telling me someone added me as a friend or someone added new pictures. This quickly died down once I was linked up with just about everyone I know. It was kinda cool to reconnect with some old friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, and to see what people were up to. I found it easy to get sucked in, and I know a lot of people who were obsessed with Facebook for a while.
A year later, Facebook is not nearly as exciting or relevant, at least among my group of friends. I remember back in the day there would be so much activity on my news page every single day. Now I can go several days without checking Facebook and find that very little has changed.
Another reason I think Facebook “jumped the shark” is allowing third-party applications to be installed. I was never emo enough to have a MySpace page, and I liked the clean layout of Facebook, which is part of the appeal that led me to join. While there are some interesting apps out there, most of them are ridiculous and annoying. Oftentimes, if I want to leave a message on someone’s wall, I’ll have to scroll through their zombies, vampires, pirates, ninjas, funwall, superwall, daily babe, top friends list, booze mail and stripper name just to find it. All this clutter is reminiscent of the many hideous MySpace pages out there, and ruins the sleek, original design that I liked about Facebook so much.
The way I see it, Facebook has become a marketing machine, with little relevance to my life anymore. I’m disgusted that it’s been valued at 15 billion dollars. Facebook is no longer cool, but I’m still hanging on, and I won’t be deleting my profile anytime soon.
February 6th, 2008
After being reconnected the other day, our Internet access went down again. We called Rogers back, and there was a recording saying there were known outages in the Whitby area, so we figured that was it. However, after three days with no Internet access, we called back to be informed we were suspended for a week because we still had a virus on one of our computers.
As I mentioned yesterday, I agree with the idea as long as we are given notice. When Rogers just cuts us off without any warning, it does nothing to help us. Now we’re stuck without Internet access until February 11th.
It’s pretty inconvenient, and I think Rogers could have handled the situation better.
February 5th, 2008
The other day, we had a message on our home phone from Rogers High Speed informing us our computer had a virus and they would be temporarily shutting off our Internet access if we didn’t get it fixed within 24 hours. I think my dad mentioned something about running a virus scan, and that was the last I thought of it. The next day they cut us off and we were without Internet access for a little while.
Apparently Rogers runs scans on their network to search for viruses, trojans, worms and open ports on their customers’ computers. Although it was inconvenient to be cut off, I do agree with this practice. Many viruses and worms will send emails or try to send data all over the place, wasting resources and infecting other machines on the network. So by cutting us off, Rogers is preventing other people from potentially getting infected, and they are probably saving themselves some bandwidth at the same time.
Getting reconnected wasn’t too bad, except for a half hour wait on the phone to talk to an actual person. They simply told us to run a virus scanner, make sure everything is clean, and then they reconnected us. They also warned us that future virus problems could result in longer suspensions or termination of service. I don’t necessarily agree with all of Rogers business practices, but in this case I guess they are just doing their part to ensure we are responsible Internet users.
