You know you’re a programmer when you misspell “cash” as “cache.”
Category: Tech
Blast from the past: dredged up my old netscape.net address
Blast from the past. Doing some email testing & dredged up my old netscape.net address. Had to re-activate it, and the handful of messages I probably saved way back in the day were gone, and now it’s aim.com instead…but it’s still got my years-outdated contact list, including people I haven’t interacted with in a decade.
As near as I can tell, I put together the list when I was in college, and never updated it. It’s still got all the old uci.edu and geocities.com addresses.
Oh, wow…there’s a pager number in there! (Remember those?)
Originally posted on Google+
Recent Tech Links
Some interesting technology articles I’ve found over the last few weeks.
- Cornell lab prints food (LA Times) – One step closer to the day we can order pizza online…and download it!
- Ping isn’t always the best way to test network connectivity (or even speed) – ISC Diary
- XKCD and the paradox of password strength. ISC responds: it’s not that simple.
- Consolidation in the Telecommunications Industry since 1984 (the government-imposed breakup of AT&T into the seven “Baby Bells”) – WSJ
- ISC asks: Should We Still Test Patches?
- Introducing CloudFlare’s Automatic IPv6 Gateway – Very cool use of an existing proxy to make any website reachable by IPv6 with no changes to the server.
- Extrasolar planets seen by Hubble in 1998 revealed by new image processing techniques.
Recent Links: Social Networking
Some interesting links I’ve seen over the last few weeks.
- Twitter Click Research: What types of tweets get the most clicks? (via @danilolee)
- The half-life of a shared link is 3 hours on Twitter, Facebook, email or instant messaging…but twice that on Youtube.(via Mashable)
- YouTube Founders Aim to Revamp Delicious (NY Times) – I’ve used Delicious for years mainly as a cross-platform bookmarking service, not so much as a social link sharing service, but these days I mainly use XMarks. (via Techcitement)
- OAuth Needs Partial Authorization – as Alex King points out , many sites that let you log in using your Twitter, Facebook, or other accounts ask for too much access to your account. If I’m not going to use the service to post status updates, it shouldn’t require permission to post updates in my name.
On a related note, I’ve set up on Klout and PeerIndex, mainly out of curiosity. Their topic analysis needs a bit of work, though. Klout was convinced that my Speed Force accounts were influential about Washington, DC (rather than DC Comics) and, inexplicably, ducks. PeerIndex seems to think I post a lot about breakfast cereal.
Recent Links: Netflix/Qwikster Edition
By now, you’ve heard that Netflix is splitting their business in two: one for streaming movies over the internet, which will keep the name, and one for renting DVDs by mail, which will be called Qwikster.
Edit: As I described it on Google+ last week:
Dairy farms get together to raise prices, putting the squeeze on your local grocery store. The local store raises their prices to cover their higher costs. People blame the grocery store.
Then the grocery store responds by spinning off a separate store. One store will only sell milk in cardboard cartons and cheese. The other store will only sell milk in plastic bottles or yogurt. This is, of course, to make your life easier.
Anyway.
Here are links to several funny (and a couple of serious) takes on the situation.
- Quickster? That sounds oddly familiar…
- Webcomic The Oatmeal explains it in terms of the food service industry.
- Woot’s CEO parodies the “apology” letter by announcing Crapster.
- Interesting theory at ZDNet: Splitting off the DVD business sets up Netflix to be bought by Amazon without subjecting Amazon to sales tax requirements in all the new states where they (used to) have shipping centers.
- I was tempted to leave this funny Netflix comment up, but it was also spam. Good thing I’ve got @lol_spam for that: Netflix Drunk-Dialing
Facebook, or Firehose?
Between the ticker and the plans to auto-share even more activity on the timeline, I’m beginning to think that Facebook should call itself Firehose instead.
I’m tempted to ask, “Who the hell wants this?” but based on past experience, that usually means I’m just not in the target audience.
TechCrunch | Share Buttons? Ha. Facebook Just Schooled The Internet. Again.
(Originally posted on Google+)
Netflix Drunk-Dialing
Over on another blog, I noted that Netflix’s new DVD name Qwikster sounded familiar. I got some support requests and a small spam run, including this comment:
I keep getting these creepy late-night phone calls from the CEO of Netflix saying that no one else is ever going to love me like he does.
Why do I get the feeling that someone read Woot’s parody of the post?