Google seems to have gone down. I’ve never known this happen. I wonder how long it will take before it comes back up.
Edit: about 20 minutes. Not that long in the scheme of things but long enough to start wondering how very different my experience of the web would be without the ever-useful search engine.
Google’s latest addition to google maps is too beautiful for words: now you can explore the red planet from your desktop.
I’ve been trying out amazon’s dvd rental by post system for the last couple of months and while their selection process could do with some improvement and their charging per dvd for two-disk sets is annoying, I am nonetheless impressed by their response to lost rentals.
Of the 12 films we’ve been sent, two never arrived and one vanished in the post when we returned it. In each case, amazon has just taken us at our word when we reported them missing, no questions asked.
The post in London is notoriously bad but I’m still a little shocked to see quite how unreliable it. I can’t really imagine why it would be worth risking your job to steal a random dvd with almost no resale value - and nor can I imagine how amazon will be able to continue with rentals if our figure of 25% stolen in the post is typical.
You can help bring about greater public awareness of the dangers of software patents by voting on the following two sites:
[Pasted from a ffii.org newsletter]
Today we would like to bring two more online polls to your awareness:
- Corporate Europe Observatory, an organization that keeps an eye on
questionable lobbying tactics, has nominated the so-called Campaign for
Creativity, a Microsoft/SAP pro-patent lobbying entity, for the “Worst EU
Lobbying Award”: http://www.corporateeurope.org/worstlobby/?showcontender=1
“Nominated as a fake NGO brilliantly disguising corporate demands as
grassroots concerns”Please vote “for” the so-called Campaign for Creativity:
http://www.corporateeurope.org/worstlobby/?vote=1 If they “win”, i.e. if that
campaign is chosen as the worst lobbying initiative in the EU in 2005, then
there will be some additional attention to the methods employed by the
pro-patent lobby.- IT website Silicon.com, which belongs to the CNET network of IT websites
(ZDNet, News.com, Builder.com etc.), recently named Florian Mueller, the
founder of NoSoftwarePatents.com, among the 50 “Silicon Agenda Setters”. As
always, Florian himself has pointed out that he owes such nominations to our
entire movement.There is an online poll in which Silicon lets its readers determine their
own ranking among the top 50 people in the IT industry:
http://www.siliconagendasetters.com/vote.htmFlorian is #43 on the ballot, or the 8th from the bottom of the list.
Visit The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) if you’d like to know more.
Amazon have taken the idea of outsourcing tasks at which a human outperforms a machine (eg image recognition) and building an API to a marketplace that makes these jobs available and retrieves the results. They call this the Mechanical Turk after Wolfgang von Kempelen’s 1769 pseudo-mechanical chess-playing automaton. Coders can call the Mechanical Turk with a query as though it were a normal RPC request.
It’s a fascinating concept with all kinds of political ramifications I don’t want to think about right now. Read more about the technology side of it here.
What was unique about social software and it’s design principles was how it didn’t emphasize tools, but practice and an understanding of social context. Too much of Web 2.0 is not just made of white people, but an alphabet soup of supporting technologies that mean nothing without communities, networks and even real business models. As the market we helped found continues to froth, commentary on new business models based on power laws matters even more.
Joel Spolsky is more succinct:
When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day.
I find I’m moving more and more to a networked way of working. I don’t want to be tied to static files on one machine because I can’t guarantee where I’ll be next but wherever that is I want access to the same information.
This is why I use IMAP for email, bloglines for RSS reading and del.icio.us for bookmarking.
But what if del.icio.us went down?
To backup is simple. wget http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all --http-user=username –http-passwd=password will download all your del.icio.us posts into one xml file (saved as “all” - you might want to rename it) which you can then store safely.
(NB this sends your password in the clear and it could be seen by anyone else using the same machine if they were running ps at the time. If you are concerned about this man wget will provide you with some suggestions for keeping your details private.)
Quick tip: to convert a html document to text, stripping out all the markup tags and just leaving the content, use the lynx browser:
lynx -dump example.html > example.txt
This works on both local and remote files.
In the process of migrating my girlfriend’s email to a new account, I ended up downloading several messages more than once. Fortunately cleaning the mess up took only moments with the Remove Duplicate Messages Thunderbird Extension. It’s an excellent tool.
I migrated her email to mailsnare. I’ve been using their service for several years now with no trouble at all and have set up accounts for a number of friends all of whom are equally satisfied.
They offer IMAP which lets you file your messages in folders and have exactly the same folder structure and messages available whatever machine or client you use to view them. I don’t know how anyone manages email without this - in fact, given most people’s overflowing inboxes, I’m not sure they manage at all. You don’t need to be a “Getting Things Done” fanatic to appreciate the value of keeping your inbox clear of clutter and your old mail filed and accessible wherever you are.
IMAP also allows server-side filtering of email into folders which is a huge bonus if, like me, you sometimes check your email over a slow, costly connection such as a mobile phone and don’t want to waste time and bandwidth on email newletters you can read at home. Filter them off with a rule and just get the important messages in your inbox when on the road.
Again, having the rules on the server means that you don’t need to waste time and risk errors duplicating your mail filtering rules on each machine and client you use.
Changing email addresses is a painful business. Mailsnare makes it easy by letting you integrate other email accounts into your new one seamlessly, using fetchmail to suck in mail from other POP3 and IMAP accounts. I kept my old address running for two years after making the switch and had mailsnare check it for me and filter the mail into an “old account” folder until I was finally sure I’d re-educated even the slowest of my contacts to note my change of address.
Mailsnare’s spam filtering is also excellent and highly configurable, with a whole range of options including black-, white- and graylisting available. Other goodies include two different web-based interfaces to your mail, wap access, the ability to use SSL and the option to use your own domain name.
Have you guessed that I really love this service? I’ve tried several email providers - including hotmail, yahoo, various isp offerings, the defunct geekmail, fusemail, gmail and fastmail - and in my opinion mailsnare is the best. If you’re looking for an easier way to manage your email, I’d recommend you give them a try.
(Disclosure: I am a mailsnare affiliate which provides a minor compensation for the unpaid work of setting up accounts for friends.)
Two weeks ago, one of my credit cards was cloned.
I pay for my internet connection using that card so, after cancelling the Visa, I tried calling Bulldog Broadband to update my payment details.
No one answered that day or the next or the next or …
This morning I held from 7.50am to 9.40am. Finally I hung up and called their sales line. The phone was picked up within two rings.
The sales person, however, was obnoxious when he realised I was an existing customer and hung up on me.
I called back and demanded to speak to a manager.
She apologised, took my new card details and promised to have my account updated with the correct details. It took less than 30 seconds. Too bad I had already wasted close to 20 hours listening to hold music in the last fortnight.
So, if you are struggling to get through to Bulldog I advise you to call their sales line instead of their Customer Service, Technical Support or Finance departments, none of whom ever answer the phone. It’s 08000 15 16 17. Be assertive.
Any company that cannot be bothered to properly staff its Customer Support areas deserves to have its sales lines tied down with non-sales issues. If this starts hitting them in the wallet by preventing new sign ups then maybe they’ll do something about the problem.
If you do not have a Bulldog account and are tempted by the adverts - resist!