Entries Tagged 'Blogs' ↓

Well, well. We have a new firestorm brewing in the online world of companies overly obsessed with SEO and other acronyms: Google’s Search-Within-A-Search ! I can only say that this is the time when site owners who are particularly worried about it just need to do one thing, and that is start promoting other search sites. The biggest problem they face with the B.S. they call SEO is that there are today only 3 or 4 real contenders for web search. If they want to really, truly have a fair shake, they simply need to invest in and promote other search sites. Everything is concentrated in Google. It’s like trying to get TV ads out, but the only purveyors are the major networks or the local cable company. Remember the days of the yellow pages? Particularly before the breakup of Bell Telephone? There was ONE BOOK. And that is exactly where we are today with Google.That’s not all bad, because Google generally tries to do good things for everyone online. I really believe they try their damnedest to be as egalitarian as possible. The flaky wankers who really don’t like this are the companies who would be happy if they could BUY the rights to be the exclusive result returned for search words!!! Funny how this works, isn’t it?So, there it is. All you retailers and e-commerce giants and people who don’t pay for AdWords ads… …go out and build a better search! Or even just better market a so-so search engine. Microsoft didn’t get where they are today by always building a better mouse trap! Marketing. Google did get where they are by building a better mouse trap, but that was in the wild and wooly 90’s dot-com bubble era.

Duh?! Physical access to any machine makes it highly vulnerable to accessing the contents of its storage media. Apple knows that. Any IT manager worth spitting on knows that. Steve Ballmer probably knows that. George Bush might even know that! These guys who developed the cold memory dumper are butt stupid because it’s a waste of time and effort. This is no big secret or mystery. If you have an OS X install disk that is not older than that particular Mac, you can simply put the disk in, force power down, restart booting from the install disk, from the Utilities menu launch Reset Password Utility. This allows you to change the password for any account on any connected bootable volume as well as enable the Root account! That’s a hell of a lot easier than this bullshit attack.Apple’s not stupid and this is no secret.If you really, really need more security, you simply do not allow physical access to the computer. Need more? Do not allow network connectivity. Need more? Enable a firmware password on the drive. Need more? Get custom firmware that disables startup keys normally available on the Mac OS. Need more? Be a Luddite.Security is always a trade-off with any connectivity. The old phrase Boot Access IS Root Access exists for a reason. 

So there is no GPhone as rumors have suggested. There is a new open mobile phone platform called Android, and supported by major players from across the wireless industry and across continents!! This is a great move. They finally realized they could stop reinventing the system engineering of the phones every 6 months (in Japan) and instead focus and doing cool things with them.

This dumb video report by Michael Kanellos proves how lame Americans and their Journalists are. Does EVERYBODY just get their information about the world from crappy guidebooks?! Give me a break!
He starts out in Shibuya, rambling about how futuristic Tokyo is, but come on dude, people live there, it’s real, all you’re looking at is advertising in one of the world’s biggest cities! You get the same stuff in NY and London.

Next he’s off to darling of the guidebooks, Akihabara (except that nobody actually calls it that, it’s Akiba). Only tourists go there. It’s just like Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Truth is, you can buy all the same consumer electronics anywhere in Tokyo. It’s been that way for years. Don’t waste your time in Akiba. If you’re looking to buy or sell large lots of OEM components, then Akiba may be a good place to start… on the back streets in offices. But these days, even that is questionable. B2B online is real in Japan too.

I wish people would stop putting out such repetitive, derivative crap on Tokyo. It’s not that way. I lived there for 5 years, believe me. Wonderful city, but it’s not the Blade Runner set you like to imagine it to be. It’s just a big city with lots of people.

I’ll keep it short. Microsoft’s recent investment in Facebook certainly garnered attention. Makes sense, valuation made based on current and projected number of unique users who can be vectors and targets of advertising sales.

Microsoft has thus far failed in every web venture of their own, other than selling crappy web dev software solutions. They’ve been trying to do something since MSN first debuted to be an AOL and then kept trying to be Netscape, to be Yahoo!, to be Google, et. al. ad hominem. Now it’s their chance to get to the social networking yawn fest late in the game by trying to be myspace.

Much like their acquisition of Hotmail, you can expect eventual destruction of what people like about Facebook and a replacement of the current crop of users with a crowd of more clueless individuals (think Yahoo! Chat) and topped off with an infiltration of MS .net garbage openning the doors to malware galore.

Goodbye Facebook. I didn’t know you long, but I was never a big fan anyway.

Google is pretty good at stopping spam. Gmail is a godsend. They’re great at search. Blogger/Blogspot is/was a great intro to blogging for me tons of other people. I even got spurred by it to learn CSS and eventually web development and programming. But, it’s broken. They’ve got to stop the JavaScript and XSS stuff going on there. Surely they themselves have noticed how rampant it is?! Every 10th blog is a porn site with popups and the Blogger bar disabled with DOM scripting. Not good. One fun pass-time is clicking on the “next blog” randomizer link. I used to do this in the 90’s with WebRings, go to the next random site in the ring! It’s fun and interesting to be surprised by what’s out there. But the spammers are at it again. Taking all the fun out of life. Oh well…

So, what’s the next big thing gonna be? TAG SPAM. That’s right Continue reading →

Sometimes I find myself creating database tables for something that doesn’t really need to be in a database at all. Think configuration. Say you build a CMS or a blog system of some sort, and then you want some simple data to be accessible without putting in a database. You don’t need all that over head for everything!

So, what to do? This is part of the Mystery of Rails Models! Just create a model. Continue reading →

This article by Bruce Eckel, acclaimed author of Thinking in C++ and Thinking in Java, shows why programmers make bad designers. Continue reading →

I hate to talk trash publicly, but the Rails Talk List SUCKS for people new to Rails! But what’s worse, it sucks IN GENERAL. Continue reading →