Yearly Archives: 2004
Indiatimes Offers Blogs
I’m not a huge fan of Indiatimes, however now that they’ve added weblogs to the roster of services offered, I applaud their using the .Text engine. Dottext and WordPress have to be the best weblog engines out there, for free or pay. This automatically means Indiatimes bloggers have a far better tool (and far better blogs) than, say, Rediffblogs. I wish Indiatimes would go easy on the advertising, though.
The quality of writing on Indiatimes’ weblogs isn’t anything worth writing home about, though — barring a few good ones, most are faux stream-of-consciousness textstreams.
Scripting News and the Kerry Campaign
It’s sad to see Scripting News turn into a soundbite site for the Kerry Campaign. Weblogs are supposed to wear their biases on their sleeves (and Dave has laid his biases bare: this election has one and only one issue for him: Anyone But Bush); however, it is interesting to see which way a weblog turns when there’s a conflict of interest.
Regular readers of Scripting News know that the relationship between webloggers and journalists is a fairly regular topic here. Because of that, the silence on Scripting News about the Swiftvets and their (non-)coverage in the media was mystifying. Here was a story where the weblogs were getting all the action, and I for one expected Dave to point to it and rebutt it vociferously. However, the position on Scripting News was radio silence. Now, this could be simply a result of Dave having too much on his plate, however, given the things he is likely to write about I have to wonder if the silence was a result of a battle between his politics and his professional work (as a thought-leader in weblogging), a battle which his politics won.
A great counterpoint is Scoble’s point about who you should point to: to be an authority on the operating system industry and to become an authority you must point to ALL stuff, not just that that’s friendly. Substitute ‘integrity’ for ‘authority’ and ‘politics’ for ‘operating system’ and there’s a point the guru of weblogging could himself take to heart.
Victor David Hanson on Europe
So insular had [Europe's] utopians become under the aegis of NATO’s subsidized protection that it was increasingly convinced that the ubiquitous United States was the world’s rogue nation, the last impediment to a 35-hour work week, cradle-to-grave subsidies, and wind power the world over. [...]
But this is no parlor game any more. Islamic fascism, scary former Soviet republics, rogue Middle Eastern nuclear states, an ever more proud and muscular China thirsty for oil? these and more specters are all out there and waiting, waiting, waiting…
Welcome back to the world, Europe.
Gmail Notifier Beta
Gmail Notifier is Google’s official Windows-based Gmail biff tool. It’s in beta, but works well for me.
Iowa Electronic Markets
For this year’s US Presidential Election, the graph to watch is the Iowa Electronic Markets Winner-takes-all market prices graph. Interestingly, it’s been running close to a dead heat these past two weeks. What does the market know that we don’t? (For those interested, the IEM’s 2000 Elections markets have some fascinating data as well.)
India's Olympic Medal Chances
(Via Slashdot) Slate on Macroeconomics and Olympic Destiny:
The model projects such big losses for established Olympic powers — and such big gains for nobodies — largely because of the influence of GDP growth. In the past four years, France and Germany have had comparatively little growth compared with, say, India and Mexico. So, France and Germany are projected to lose medals, while India’s total is expected to rise from one to 10 (!) and our neighbor to the south could win 11 medals, up from six in 2000.
This is all good, but given the paltry sums budgeted for our athletes ($30,000 per athlete actually budgeted — and rampant corruption ensures that what actually reaches them is far less), I’ll eat my words if India’s medals count exceeds five (yes, I know India won its first silver today in double-trap shooting).
Quick Bits: Sofia, XP SP2
I’m back to posting after a long hiatus. Lots going on now so posting will be light; however I’ll try to keep posting once in a while.
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I was in the beautiful city of Sofia on a business trip. Even after years of Communist rule, it has managed to retain its old world charm. Some photos:
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Windows XP SP2 is out. This is a must-have upgrade; now Windows users have no excuse for letting spyware all over their systems. MSFN notes that even users with pirated copies should have an easy, hassle-free upgrade:
There have been a number of discussions on this newsgroup regarding whether SP2 will install on non-genuine (aka “pirated”) versions of Windows. Here is the official Microsoft position on this topic:
We expect that nearly all Windows XP users, running genuine or pirated Windows, will have access to the security technologies in SP2. The same users that were blocked from installing SP1 – those that have used a small set of legacy pirated product keys – will be blocked from installing SP2. We believe that there are very few systems in use today that use these keys — in other words, the pirates have moved on to other keys which we are not blocking.
So how do we characterize our policy?
We want to make sure that the broadest number of people can install SP2. The nature of malicious attacks on computer users is constantly changing and we will continue to evaluate how we deal with security updates for pirated versions of Windows to best protect our genuine Windows customers.
Thanks,
Gary Schare
Microsoft
Given the number of users running pirated XP and jamming up the net with trojan traffic, this is great news for the net at large.
Apple Invents, Microsoft Steals?
That’s often been the lie around Apple, that they invent and Microsoft steals. I like to tell the story of how Mac scripting software came to be. I was in the audience at a Bill Gates speech in the early 80s in Palo Alto where he described a system-level scripting language for a personal computer, connecting various apps, a spreadsheet, word processor, plotting app. I made a note. That’s a good idea. A few years later I started work on such a program. Showed it to Apple. Next thing you know, Apple has this great idea. A system-level scripting language for a personal computer, connecting various apps, a spreadsheet…
Spyware injecting ads into Google results?
One of my friends was cribbing about how the quality of Google’s search results seemed to have gone down the toilet lately. Some questions later it was obvious this was not the usual griping about Pagerank. He sent me a screenshot which he said “has junk inserted at the top” (I’ve obscured personal details in this image).
Look at the third result in the screenshot. Unless Pagerank has really been flushed down into the sewer, there’s no way qksrv.net would feature as #3 for a search. Some googling later I found this post dated July 14 –
there appears to be a form of adware that is able to hijack google results and insert ads to make them appear as if they were real results.
The poster goes on to provide this screenshot, in which another well known ad server (click.atdmt.com) features at #1.
I’d love to know what particularly ugly piece of spyware is behind this. So would Google’s lawyers, I’m sure.
Update June 28: CNET’s now got the story. If you think your PC has been troubling you, get a good Spyware remover like Spybot Search and Destroy and see if there are any of these pests on your system. And oh, switching to Mozilla Firefox as your primary browser is strongly recommended.