Archive: Posts about Internet
January 28th, 2008, 51 Comments »
UPDATE: After some confusion (see the comments), I’ve established that the cable provider is in fact Shaw, not Rogers, in Victoria. I’ve adjusted this post accordingly.
Maybe it’s just the plodding web access here in Morocco, but today I visited both Shaw and Telus’s websites today to scope out Internet access when we settle in Victoria in April of this year. They both offer a premium service at 5 or 6 MB/s and a 60 GB maximum per month for about $40 to $45 (before all those ridiculous extra fees). I assume there are discounts when you package Internet access with a landline (unlikely) or TV (likelier).
This is like voting for a prime minister in recent elections. Which is the least distasteful choice? I’ve complained (and heard many complaints) about both services in the past. Which is, uh, less worse? My criteria would probably be:
- How long does it take to get service after signing up?
- How reliable is the service?
- Who’s less likely to penalize me for exceeding the 60 GB maximum (a real concern, now that you can download HD movies that might average 4 GB)?
- Who’s less likely to filter network traffic and selectively decrease download speeds for bittorrent traffic and the like?
- Whose corporate policies are less repugnant?
What would you recommend? Maybe I should just go with carrier pigeons?
When we lived in Yaletown, I could circumvent this sort of red-state, blue-state problem by voting independent and signing up with Novus. Are there any such alternatives in Victoria?
51 Comments »
October 21st, 2007, 2 Comments »
My friend Todd has been writing a series of blog posts on passwords as a technology. I haven’t read the others yet, but the fourth installment is great. It discusses how to create strong (and more importantly) easy-to-remember passwords:
These improvements happen at the will and ability of the people making web and desktop applications. As such, users will always be waiting for them to happen if they haven’t already. This post takes things to the methodological side, which is more the user’s domain, by describing the rules I use to make strong yet memorable passwords that are unique for each account.
Todd provides a handy, dandy formula for creating passwords that you’ll take to the grave. I really ought to apply this advice, as I’m totally irresponsible on the password front.
I dugg Todd’s article, and thought you might want to as well.
2 Comments »
October 20th, 2007, 7 Comments »
After signing up for the Sheraton’s Internet service, this was the ‘thanks for registering’ graphic they showed me:
Nothing says ‘go use the Internet’ like a guy smelling a cantaloupe.
7 Comments »
October 11th, 2007, 5 Comments »
I was perusing my HitTail stream o’ referrers this morning (there’s kind of a zen calm watching the river of referrers go by). Right between searches for “saran wrap but ass” and “george stroumboulopoulos is he gay”, I found this search:
allintitle: “in films”
You can probably guess what it’s for, but here’s the official word from Google:
If you start a query with [allintitle:], Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title. For instance, [allintitle: google search] will return only documents that have both “google” and “search” in the title.
The technical writing is a little ambiguous there. Do they mean the page title, as in the phrase that appears at the top of your browser (and comes from inside the title tags)? Or do they include headings on the page as well?
In any case, I’m not sure how useful this will be, but it’s always handy to learn another search shortcut.
5 Comments »
September 13th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis invited me to check out his new human-powered search engine. Specifically, I installed Mahalo Follow, a kind of ’search buddy’ Firefox plug-in that pops open a sidebar when it thinks Mahalo has some content relevant to the page I’m on (mostly search engine results, but I think it’s opened on other pages as well). That content tends to be a list of the ‘best’ links associated with the content. Here’s an example.
Obviously this service is straight-out-of-alpha, and needs to be populated with much more carefully-selected content. But I don’t think it’s for me.
Like you, my dear readers, I’m a pretty sophisticated searcher. I’ve been doing it a long time, I understand how the search engines work, and so I usually have good intuition about where (and more importantly whether) I’m going to find a particular piece of information.
As an exercise in thinking about how I search, I made a little list of search queries I ran the other day. This isn’t complete, but it’s a pretty representative sampling:
- How many units did the Sony Walkman sell?
- What is the URL for iLife on Apple’s site?
- What is the URL for Google AdWords?
- When did Malta achieve independence?
- Are there any Bill Callahan videos on YouTube?
- What nationality is KT Tunstall?
- Verify the correct spelling of ‘tchotchke’.
- Where’s the trailer for ‘Atonement’?
- What, if anything, do Dennis Leary and the BC Lions have in common?
- What century was the Great Siege of Malta in?
- What’s the URL for a Malta Times article I read in the paper?
- What does the BlackBerry Curve 8310 Smartphone look like?
- Where’s the Wikipedia entry for Geocities?
- How wide is Sicily?
- Who is playing Johanna in Tim Burton’s “Sweeney Todd”?
General Knowledge About Plasma TVs
My searches are really specific. Mahalo seems to want to help me out most with general information (by providing links) on a topic.
I can imagine that, if I was seeking some general knowledge about a suject, Mahalo might be a decent resource. If, say, I wanted to know more about plasma TVs. But it’s quite rare that I want that kind of generalized information. And when I do, Wikipedia rarely fails me.
Speaking of Wikipedia, Mahalo will live and die on user-generated content. It pays contributors US $10 to $15 per page of search results they create. I might give it a try, but that money isn’t worth my time. If Mahalo agreed to share the revenue generated from that page with me, then it might eventually become a better deal.
Besides, I’d much rather contribute to the emerging collective knowledge of humanity that is Wikipedia. Mahalo, after all, is just a company.
UPDATE: In writing this article, I’d meant to cite a recent post by Seth Godin, in which he touches on the problem I gather Mahalo is trying to solve:
The fact is that search engines are very good at fairly simple searches, and very good at finding information about single products, services, people and ideas.
But they’re terrible at connections, at rankings, at horizontal results. They can’t help me find the 25 most important up and coming artists in the United States. They can’t help me find six products that are viable alternatives to something that was just discontinued. They can’t help me rank the service of four accounting firms.
1 Comment »
August 17th, 2007, 18 Comments »
As I’ve been whinging about, I’ve had a ton of meetings this week. Colleagues have been late for or cancelled a couple of those meetings. They notified me about this via email, 15 minutes or half-an-hour before the meeting, apparently assuming that I had a Blackberry or similar device that supports email.
Given that it’s 2007 and I’m in the tech industry, that’s a fair assumption. I’ve resisted getting such a device because I wanted to avoid being constantly tethered to my email. I’m just not that important, if you get my meaning.
Anyway, apparently the practice has become so ubiquitous that I need to climb on board the caboose of the mobile email train. Plus, I could obviously use a new camera phone.
Aside from the iPhone, what fancy phone thing would you recommend I get?
While looking for a photo for this entry, I was surprised and pleased to discover that Flickr users find blackberries more interesting than the Blackberry.
18 Comments »
June 24th, 2007, 4 Comments »
While searching for a solution to my aforementioned gallery comment spam problem (solution: delete all the comments and implement a captcha), I happened upon SpamPaint. It’s a German online art project:
Let’s assume a spam bot comes to a weblog and leaves a comment. Let’s also assume this blog is using the Akismet plugin to recognise spam. Now that the blog software knows it has been spammed it will either delete the comment spam or, if we are lucky and the blog is contributing to SpamPaint, it will be automatically sent to the SpamPaint engine.
After receiving the comment SpamPaint will analyse it. For example: comment spam nearly almost includes links to websites (after all, the intention of comment spam is to promote websites) so SpamPaint visits these sites and grabs the colors and some images. SpamPaint also checks from which country the spammer is and shows this in the generated graphics. That’s just two of many steps.
If not beautiful, at least the gallery is kind of fun. I quite liked this one.
4 Comments »
June 10th, 2007, 5 Comments »
Thanks to this site (and despite the cheeky disclaimer on the Contact page), I probably get three to five unsolicited email questions from strangers a week. A few years ago, I used to ignore 60% of these emails.
Over time, I’ve observed how people I admire like Tim Bray and Seth Godin work hard to answer each email they receive. And they probably get ten or fifty times the email I do, so now I endeavour (though I don’t always succeed) to do the same.
To take a slight diversion, Derek pointed to this article about professionals getting constantly solicited for free advice:
Las Vegas poker champion Scott Fischman, who writes about online poker, says that when he’s invited to social gatherings, he has to decide: “Do I want to spend four hours answering questions [about card-playing] or should I just stay home?” If he does venture out, he strives to remain helpful, briefly explaining how winning at poker comes from “learning how to learn” the game.
Most of the questions that I receive can be answered by some judicious Google searching, so I often send people links to Google results pages. You know, teach a man to fish and all that.
But here’s the thing: at least half the people to whom I reply never respond to say thank you. I hate to sound like some fuddy-duddy, but a little courtesy goes a long way, especially in the anonymous, nearly context-free world of the Web.
Some subset of questions probably thinks its more courteous to choose not to send an otherwise meaningless thank-you email, but I don’t. I’d rather hear whether I’d helped them, and tkae the extra seven seconds to read and delete that email.
Don’t believe me? Go ask Curtis E. Bear.
5 Comments »
June 5th, 2007, 10 Comments »
Geoff linked to my post about the peculiar article length trends in Wikipedia, and also referenced a Something Awful article entitled “The Art of Wikigroaning“. What’s Wikigroaning?
For example, the article called “Knight“. Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we’ll go with “Jedi Knight“. Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created.
It’s sad but true. There’s some pretty funny examples of Wikigroaning pairs, including:
Steam
Steampunk
Astronomy
List of changes in Star Wars re-releases
You get the idea. I wanted to think of one of my own. The best I’ve got is:
Bass
All your base are belong to us
10 Comments »
May 28th, 2007, 18 Comments »
I have a web admin question that’s beyond my meagre knowledge. Quite by accident today, I discovered that when you go to, say:
http://foo.capulet.com
You get a link farmy landing page. Which, obviously, doesn’t belong to us. Is this an exploit and is there some server-side setting I need to change? Or is this totally normal and I shouldn’t worry my little head about it?
UPDATE: Thanks for the advice, everybody. I’ve made an enquiry with my webhost, though they don’t handle my DNS. I’m going to get some more information from them, and then hit up my domain registrar (who also handles my DNS).
18 Comments »
