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How Microsoft FolderShare Totally Screwed Me Over

Regular readers know that I test a lot of products. I don’t let let a measly little “beta” label scare me away. But once in a while, you get screwed. And when that once in a while comes along, be sure I’ll let you know so you can avoid a similar fate. In this case, [...]

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iPhone Phrustration

I did it. Last Saturday I took the bait and plonked down the cash for an 8 GB iPhone. I’ve been using an HP iPAQ hw 6515 for the past two years. It runs Windows Mobile 2003 and can technically do a lot of the same things that an iPhone does. In practice, the iPAQ [...]

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Google Mishandles Urchin

Ars Technica has a great article on how Google dropped the ball with their 2005 acquisition of Urchin — a web analytics company based in San Diego. Urchin provides web site administrators with the ability to analyse their log files and understand how people use their web site. To Google’s credit, they took some of [...]

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WordPress 2.3 Upgrade

I’ve been having weird problems with the WordPress admin console. I didn’t get they nifty little icon bar for TinyMCE when composing a post. When I bulk moderated comments, only the first change would actually be applied (the other changes remained in the moderation queue). Things just didn’t always work the way I expected them [...]

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Saddam Hussein, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton

What does the former leader of Iraq have in common with these two party girls? Wordtracker publishes a report that shows the top search terms used on various meta-search engines like Dogpile and Metacrawler. Wordtracker’s Top 300 Surge Report shows the top results from the past 48 hours, and the top ten are: saddam hussein [...]

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Flickr files patent for ‘Interestingness’

You know I’m a big fan of Flickr. The online photo community has, for me, been fun, useful, amusing, educational and immensely interactive. Flickr helped popularize the whole concept of folksonomy tagging. And their secret formula for calculating ‘interestingness’ has an uncanny knack for surfacing truly amazing photos. What exactly is interestingness? Well, it’s a [...]

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Blog Spam

Anyone who’s blogged likely knows about blog spam. It’s the scourge of the blogosphere — automated programs that search out blogs and auto-submit “ads” as comments — usually for gambling, erectile dysfunction drugs and porn. It forces responsible bloggers to moderate all comments. Fortunately, WordPress’ Akismet plug-in does a good job of detecting spam, but [...]

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Let this be a lesson to you

This past week, a group of script kiddies found a way into my Paypal account. My Paypal account was tied to one of my bank accounts, and they promptly ran up over $500 in charges. How did it happen? Still not 100% sure, but it wasn’t through a phishing scheme. I’m savvy enough to quickly [...]

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Digg Down

Yes, it happens to everyone. I went to digg an article this morning and found that Digg was indeed Down. No report on why or how long on their blog, but I was interested to see site recommendations from the Digg staff. Amar recommends a BBC site about Planet Earth. As a long-time resident of [...]

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What the hell is a “plog?”

Stopped by Amazon to pay my month usage tax (don’t ask) and had to look twice and rub my eyes to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. Yep, right there on the Amazon home pages was my very own plog. Of course after got over the initial shock, I had to ask — what the [...]