Monthly Archive for May, 2005

Isn’t It A Perfect Fit?

Published
by
Chris Meller
on May 19, 2005
in Daily Grind and Work
. 1 Comment

Well, not that we all really had any idea what he did in the first place, Mark Jen appears to have moved into advertising… or is that more Human Resources?

My question is… Do you have a job opening for a total bum? See, I’m not really into the whole work “thing”. I’ve tried it for a couple years now, and decided it’s just not worth it. I’m looking for a career move that involves sitting on my ass and collecting a very large check every few weeks…

I’m thinking Plaxo might be for me!

How about this “Internet QA Engineer” job? It says I have to be self-directed, which I’ve so got down! I can direct myself to the couch for some soap operas or the computer chair for a little mid-morning UT2004 all on my own, and all without a safety net! It also says I have to “know and care what the customer wants from our service.” Well, that’s easy. If working closely with end users for the past 5 years has taught me anything, it’s what the customer wants from a service. That’s right, I have the answer. Want me to tell you? Ok, here’s what the customer wants from a service: nothing… and everything… and things totally unrelated to your product. That’s right, they really don’t have a CLUE what they want, but they want it, and they want it now.

Oh, but those aren’t all my glowing skills. “You should like to break things, be exhilarated when you discover that really complicated bug, and be detail-oriented.” Are you kidding me? You have to be… I mean, give me a sledge hammer and let me go to town on that b**ch! When I’m done, your own programmers won’t recognize their app’s. And you can’t even begin to describe the kind of orgasmic rush I get when I stump a programmer with an obscure bug, or when I insist he move a box 2 pixels to the left because the gradient behind it is covered up too much.

So what do you think Mark? Am I perfect for this job or what? I mean, I don’t think we even need to go through that whole resume THING, do you? Go talk to your boss, have him send me a huge check, and I’ll hop on the next flight to California!

DDoS Attacks

Published
by
Chris Meller
on May 17, 2005
in Announcements
. 0 Comments

For the majority of the afternoon and evening of May 17, 2005, the network this server is connected to (not the server itself, simply another one on the same network) was under an incredibly heavy Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.

As a result of this attack, many of the sites and servers hosted on the target network were intermittently unavailable and inaccessible to the public at large.

As of approximately midnight, the attack seems to have either been blocked by an upstream provider or subsided on its own accord, and service has been fully restored.

I apologize for this inconvenience and have assurances from my hosting provider that they are doing everything within their power to prevent and prepare for any future attacks of this nature. Thanks to their spotless record of reliability and quality of service, I have no doubt this is the case. Thank you for your patience during these outages.

The RSS Epoch?

Published
by
Chris Meller
on May 17, 2005
in Commentary and Reviews
. 0 Comments

Could it be at hand? If you don’t think so, perhaps you’ll reconsider after you read this post.

This looks like the beginnings of exactly what I want! Newsgator is a great all-around web-based RSS reader, but I don’t like the Outlook integration, and I insist on desktop support. This may get their $20 a year out of me yet!

Battle of the Titans — Yahoo!’s Achilles Heel?

Published
by
Chris Meller
on May 16, 2005
in Commentary
. 1 Comment

As much as Google and Yahoo! continue to battle each other for ground in the search engine wars, I’m really surprised at some of the areas in which they don’t compete at all.

First, let’s look at some of the things that have been matched play-by-play on each side. These are in no particular order, nor am I indicating in any way which came first.

Google Yahoo!
Google Maps Yahoo! Maps
Google News Yahoo! News
Google Image Search Yahoo! Image Search
GMail Yahoo! Mail
Google Toolbar Yahoo! Toolbar
Blogger Yahoo! 360
Google Groups Yahoo! Groups
While these aren’t strictly the same, they do provide the same basic functionality — communication among groups.
Froogle Yahoo! Shopping

Now, we could go on and on with this list, and even though one might be the leader in one category and the other in another, in the end we’d come out fairly even. I don’t want to get into which is better, or even if they really are at all. My point here is simply that they’ve been neck and neck with each other for years. No matter what Google does, Yahoo! always matches or tries to beat it, and vice versa.

So as you can understand, I’m a bit surprised that Yahoo! has let Google be the leader in a few areas. Namely:

  • Adsense
  • Site Search

Now, as you may or may not know (and which I’ve been meaning to rant about), back in December, I actually tried to cheat at Adsense. Now, it was honestly more of an experiment than it was actual greediness. Every night I’d sit down and run thru some known open proxies and generate clicks on my own ads, just to see how much I could make and if they’d catch me. Well, along about Christmas time, I gave up and decided it wasn’t worth it (after about a month of cheating the system and earning around $70).

Well, a month later (the end of January), I got an email from Google saying I’d been found in violation of the Adsense Terms of Service. Ever since, I’ve found that I’ve been totally blacklisted from everything Google. Not only do my new Adsense registrations drop into cybernetic oblivion, but if I even try to register for a regular Google account (such as for Search History tracking), I get a meaningless error that the service requested is unavailable (registration goes right through if I use a different email account). Because of this, I’ve grown increasingly pissed off at Google, not because it’s in the wrong here, but merely because it refuses to stand up for itself and tell me that I’ve been blacklisted. No, it just decides to covertly ignore my Adsense registrations and give me a meaningless and totally inaccurate error message when I try to register for anything else.

So, the reason I told you all that is this: I’ve been looking for Adsense alternatives. Since Google has also removed links to the offending site from their index and refuses to do site-search for the site, I’m also looking for alternatives to it.

In my quest to find alternatives, I first started with what I thought would be the most logical alternative: Yahoo!. They’re Google’s biggest competitor, I figured they’d happily be offering alternatives to every Google product in existence.

Unfortunately, Yahoo! only appears to offer their advertising network to sites receiving an enormous number of hits a day (I believe the figure was 2 million/day). They also don’t offer any form of site-only search, unless you manually specify the site in your query (ie: “site:www.incoherentbabble.com”).

I find this very odd. Both of these products are one of the most attractive offerings Google provides to website owners from small to insanely large. Whether you’re picking up some extra cash to help cover your hosting bill every month or making $1,000 like Weblogs, Inc. Adsense can help you get the money you need. Site Search also helps keep you from re-inventing the wheel when you need to search your content. If I were running Yahoo!, I think I’d take notice here. This is obviously a very lucrative deal for Google, and one that I’d think everyone else would want to try and get in on.

Maybe that’s just me though…

Back from the Dead

Published
by
Chris Meller
on May 16, 2005
in Commentary and Reviews
. 2 Comments

Mark Jen is back from the dead (finally!), and he’s not disappointing us in the slightest!

Even before I read this post just now, I’d read the original source on Scoble’s blog. Basically the entire point of the story is that Internet Explorer 7 will have tabbed browsing, according to the development team at Microsoft.

This doesn’t really mean all that much to me, since I’m a loyal Firefox user (even though I would really like to be able to use Internet Explorer, for various reasons), but the one thing Mark brought up that really interested me was this clip:

I don’t know how much thought they actually put into it, but my question is, why isn’t there tabbed browsing everywhere? Hey Longhorn shell team, if you’re listening out there: I want tabbed Windows Explorer as well. I can’t tell you how many Explorer windows I have open when I’m copying files around, organizing music, etc. I hope the tabbed design permeates through many other experiences.

What an amazing idea! I’d never thought about this before, but it’s absolutely wonderful!

Just think about it, how many documents do you have open at a time? How many e-mails? IM windows? I typically have pretty much a huge mess on my taskbar. 5 x Word, 8 x Outlook, 3 x IE, 3 x Firefox, 15 x IM, Photoshop, Illustrator, 40 x Notepad… I think you get the idea ;)

Not only do I constantly have 5 to 10 Explorer windows open, but I also absolutely hate how Office 2003 opens new windows for each of your documents. Tabs would kick some major ass throughout the rest of the Windows world. IMs (at least in Trillian and GAIM) already support tabs, but I see no reason we couldn’t expand this idea to Outlook for separate email messages or Word and Excel for documents. As for notepad, I’ve already solved that problem with the far superior TextPad, which has tab support built in.

Gee, maybe you should disappear more often Mark… You make some great points when you finally show back up.