Eventually, I realized there was no point trying to play server administrator, because the hassles just weren’t worth my time. So back in April, I moved my email hosting to Google Apps. It’s free for personal use, and was fairly easy to get set up. Now all of my robmaeder.com email goes through Google’s servers, which do an incredible job of spam filtering. All my email is read through GMail, which is so much better and easier to use than any other web-based mail software I’ve tried.

Since making the switch, I can recall only seeing 3 or 4 spam messages actually reach my inbox. My spam folder currently has 27,931 emails in it from the past 30 days. That’s getting close to 1000 spams per day. I highly recommend Google Apps for this sort of thing. It’s way easier than rolling your own, and you don’t have to worry about updating software regularly, since it’s all taken care of for you. Thanks to Google, my email is now usable again.

Large Hadron Collider

The LHC is a particle accelerator that shoots beams of protons at each other at nearly the speed of light so they collide and explode into little subatomic particles like quarks and gluons. It doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re a physicist, but the thing’s incredible, nonetheless.

Basically, it’s a giant 27km long circular tunnel buried 100 metres underground, occupying parts of both France and Switzerland. There’s a bunch of pipes, huge superconducting magnets, giant sensors to detect the presence of dark matter and other crazy shit, and it’s all cooled by 96 tonnes of liquid helium to reach a temperature of -271 degrees Celsius, which is just two degrees above absolute zero.

The 27km long circular tunnel was created in the early 80′s, and the LHC construction began in 1996. To date, the project has cost about $6 billion! It’s a joint effort, with thousands of physicists, engineers and technicians from over 80 countries taking part in the construction, operation and analysis of the LHC.

Scientists hope the LHC will answer a lot of questions relating to matter, antimatter, gravity, extra dimensions and all kinds of stuff that sounds like it came out of a Star Trek episode. This has been a long time coming, and now that I know a bit more about it, I’m pretty excited. The LHC is the biggest scientific achievement of our time, just like the moon landing of my parents’ generation.

Here’s a few more quick facts about the LHC:

• at full power, the LHC will use about $100,000 worth of electricity per day
• the LHC will generate enough data to fill a CD every second
• protons will make 11,000 laps around the 27km tunnel every second
• each proton will cross the France/Switzerland border 44,000 times per second

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The site uses a technology called “audioscrobbler” to collect information about the songs you listen to, and in turn creates a profile of your musical tastes and listening habits. It’s easy to use, and all you have to do is register, then install a plugin for your music software. The plugin sends information back to Last.fm’s database, and the information is then available on your profile page. Last.fm creates detailed statistics, displaying the top artists and songs you’ve listened to, and the last ten songs you’ve “scrobbled.” There is also a “taste-o-meter” displayed on other people’s profile pages, that compares your musical tastes with theirs.

I don’t really use the “social networking” aspect of the site too much, since everyone uses Facebook for that, but it’s another nice feature that I could see being useful to some people. I really like the fact that I can look up information about the music I listen to, seeing artist bios, related or similar artists, and how many times they’ve been listened to by other users. The recommendations Last.fm gives is probably my favourite part of the site, because it has introduced me to a lot of new music that I otherwise would not have heard of.

Overall, I’ve been very impressed with Last.fm since joining about eight months ago. In that time, I’ve “scrobbled” 10,000 songs, learned about a lot of new music, and gained some interesting insight into my music listening habits. If you’re a big music fan, I’d definitely recommend checking it out.

I’m not going to get into the social aspects behind all of this, but I recently came across a couple of articles that talk about people saving lives because of what they learned in video games.

The first incident involved a young boy from Norway, who “feigned death” to prevent a moose from attacking him and his sister. He learned this technique from playing World of Warcraft. I don’t know anything about WoW (thankfully), but apparently this is a skill used in the game to pretend you’re dead so you aren’t bothered by enemies.

The second event involved a man who witnessed a car crash and was able to treat the passenger’s injuries based on what he’d learned playing America’s Army. The man reportedly stated “I have received no prior medical training and can honestly say that because of the training and presentations within America’s Army, I was able to help and possibly save the injured men.”

That’s interesting stuff, and I think it helps show that video games aren’t all bad, and can actually have a positive effect on people.

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday a new comic is posted on xkcd. The drawings are usually simple, with stick figures and are almost always just black and white. There is always a witty punchline or comment in the alt-text of the image, which can be half the fun of Randall’s comics.

For some dumb reason, I always check the forums to see comments on the latest comic. It’s better than reading the comments on a Youtube video, but sometimes not by much. Half the comments look like they were written by well-educated 15 years olds and the rest are just people repeating what has already been said using different words. Many fans seem to think of Randall as some sort of god, claiming he can read their thoughts. They marvel at how timely and appropriate the current comic’s topic is to their own lives, as if the comic was written solely for them. You’ll often see several comments like this:

Oh god… this is amazing.

It’s so relevant to my life right now.

or

Good comic. More evidence that Randall has bugged my house though.

Anyway, it’s a great comic if you’re a bit on the nerdy side and want to read something that’s both witty and clever.