October 13, 2008Upgrade!My hosting provider recently sent out a notice stating that MySQL 4 wasn't going to be supported starting 1/1/2009 and they could turn it off at anytime without prior notice. Therefore I've switched the backend DB over to MySQL 5. This post is really just a test to see if the switch occurred correctly. Hopefully there are no [more] problems. Posted by Guy at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack September 24, 2007Something New From Yahoo?Every once and a while I troll the new technology and "lab" sites of the major players (MS, Google, Yahoo, etc) keeping an eye out for what's new. Today I ran into this from Yahoo! [yahoo.com]  Posted by Guy at 07:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack December 27, 2006That Sucked!Wow, I haven't been able to access my blog since the Taiwan earthquake. In case you didn't notice already, this blog is hosted in Hong Kong and with the undersea cables near Taiwan being compensated site access was SOL. It's funny that the headlines first read "Taiwan Earthquake, Internet Crippled" then people started saying "why is that such a big deal when people have died?" Well, let me answer that. People believe that the Internet is just a way to communicate with one another or perhaps more than that a glorified platform for sharing ideas. Well, yes it is that, but then it's so much more too. It's a business medium, a lifeline, a mover and maker of consumerism. I say it's a lifeline because there are probably networks of life-saving organizations that coordinate over these lines. And the devils in the details. This coordination may itself be the source of saving lives, but a mis-coordination may also end up costing lives. I would think it's almost (but not totally) safe to say that having East and West communications compromised in such a way has the potential to kill more people than were killed in the earthquake. But then again, I am a technologist. Posted by Guy at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack November 24, 2006Comment SpamI've been getting tons of comment spam lately. Last night I think I got over 150 comment spams. So, I did a little searching and found this post [stefangeens.com] about some anti-spam measures. Hopefully this will help with the crapflooding [wikipedia.org]. Posted by Guy at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack October 30, 2006WTF Spammers?It looks like I had some sort of comment and trackback spam bomb go off over the weekend. Normally the comment and trackback filters work well at detecting spam, but these comments weren't strictly spam. In fact they were random sentences that obviously could not be construed as a comment with legitimate looking links. Now this is just me hypothesizing, but they could have been probes. While the links looked okay, the email addresses were kind of horked up. How this probe would work is
This technique, while clever, is doing nothing more than poisoning legitimate comments. WTF spammers? Posted by Guy at 07:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack December 28, 2005FeedpingI found something referenceing this [feedping.com] sometime last week and I've been wanting to blog about it. Apparently it's a service that will submit your site (or is it RSS feed?) to a variety of services, such as Feedster and Technorati. From the site itself FeedPing.com is the brainchild of Matthew Stephens and Joey Mazzarelli. We started this site to fulfill a need for many of the new RSS developers who didn't own blogs. We believe that RSS is the future of Internet content syndication and felt obliged to help get the feeds out to the masses. So enjoy and if you have any feedback, please contact us. Thanks so much! Well, what good is it? It's good for helping people find your content, which (theoretically) should increase your site's traffic and subscribers/users, if applicable. I've used Technorati and Feedster before, but I think this service really gets the word out. Posted by Guy at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack November 13, 2005New GraphicsCheck out the new graphics! I got a new favicon too, so if you have some bookmarks try to update your icons. Oh yeah, hi Leif! Posted by Guy at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) July 01, 2005FeedsterJust claiming my feed for feedster here. No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster Posted by Guy at 04:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) June 30, 2005TechnoratiI finally broke down and am starting to promote the blog through the channels. The first one (channel) is Technorati, which is really cool! I guess they scan blogs, sites, etc. for keywords and provide real-time tag searching of the web. That being said I'm going to mark this blog with the tag lunablog [technorati.com]. More tags to come. Posted by Guy at 06:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) June 21, 2005AdvertisementsIf you were here a couple of months ago you would have seen some Google ads on the sidebar. Well, that didn't last too long. Apparently Google killed my AdSense account because of violation of the TOS. Unfortunately, it really was my fault. I was trying to figure out what everything meant, how it worked, etc so I tried clicking on the ads myself a couple of times. Whoops! Google is quite draconian in killing accounts for any violation and sometimes even when there isn't a violation. Turns out that lots of people have been stiffed by Google before they were going to recieve their first payouts. On one message board some guy had said that he was up to $200USD and then Google disabled his account and refused to pay up! Normally when dealing with a company like Google ("Do no evil") I would be reluctant to believe this persons story, however, I contacted Google via email and explained to them what happened and tried to appeal to the sane part of management and all I got back from them were snippets of the TOS. It felt totally automated to me. Because of these experiences I led more credence to this individuals story. And then I found others. Lot's of similar stories each time Google couldn't or more probably wouldn't acknowledge that these were honest people. In fact, someone is trying to get together a class action lawsuit against Google and their nefarious AdSense practices. There is a shining beacon though. Yahoo Publishing Network (YPN) is set to launch a contextual ad affiliate service similar to Google's AdSense. More can be found in Waxy's archives [waxy.org]. For those who can't wait, there is BlogAds [blogads.com] and Advertising.com [advertising.com]. Not to mention a co-op advertising network [digitalpoint.com] run by Digital Point Solutions. Posted by Guy at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) June 10, 2005New WebsiteIf you come here then you'll have likely noticed the change in layout. I think it's a lot better than the standard MovableType format. I haven't changed over the archives or any other supporting pages yet, I'm still tweaking the main page. BTW, the main page was inspired by the Apache Harmony Blog [mackmo.com]. I was thinking of setting up a main site also, but I'm not sure how I want it to look. I obviously don't want a corporate type homepage, but I definitely don't want a cheesy "This is my personal homepage" type site either. I took a look at the Nullsoft Installer Homepage [sourceforge.net] and I think I like the layout, fonts, color coordinations, etc. The first step I've done when creating past pages is to decide what you content is like. You have to decide if you're going to use it as a side business, offer things like tutorials or other services, provide topics of interest, do you have something you're trying to promote, etc. Based on what it is you're trying to offer, i.e. your content the shape of the page should evolve. Posted by Guy at 07:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) May 24, 2005Thanks for the ButtonsThanks to Antipixel [antipixel.com] for the buttons! Posted by Guy at 07:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) April 20, 2005Google AdSenseOooohhh, aaaahhh. Shiny new Google Adsense on the right. Am I a real blog now? Posted by Guy at 03:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |
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