This is going to sound familiar to those that have been here before, but I’ve just had a once over of a batch of machines that are going to get thrown away tomorrow and felt compelled to make a list of the top ten things to do before you throw away, give away, pitch or otherwise dispose of your computer…..
Sometime during the winter, I recall President Bush visited the NSA headquarters if I’m not mistaken and there was some press footage of him shaking hands in a very important looking techy monitoring room. A network operations center of some sort. I think they called it the Threat Operations Center. There was one backdrop that was quite impressive and made the rounds in some of the photos of the visit. There was the ISC threat meter, dshield, a square showing updates of exploit tools and vulnerabilities, viruses, intrusion detection signature updates, etc… all packed into a nice size screen.
This isn’t exactly “high tech”…. but earbuds are one of the ways we “interface” with high tech devices… A couple weeks ago I had the annoyance of my long time pair of earbuds failing to work. At first I thought my right ear was stopped up from allergies, but in swapping ears (well… buds) I discovered that one of the buds was failing and it sounded like a loose wire connection. Unfortunately, they’re too small to try to repair, so I thought I’ll have to get a new pair. I didn’t realize it would be quite the quest it turned out to be.
I was just skimming a couple articles after noticing two sites that I had reported to google as having WRONG cache information had disappeared. It looks as though there is a certain amount of flux going on in the Google results (more than I would expect just a usual churn.) For instance, this site has 70 pages available from one datacenter and over 1000 pages if I search at another datacenter.
New category for Google Adsense – I talk about it enough here…. anyway. I’ve noticed today that they’ve expanded the referrals program. When it started, the deal was $1 for Mozilla Firefox (with Google toolbar) referrals and then the Google Adsense referral for which you earned $100 (If I recall correctly), when the signup earned their first $100. Then they rolled out AdWORDS referrals which was $20 when the referral spends their first $100….. Well, now they’ve gone and added a few more options….
I really like a lot of features about WordPress. One is the ability to start a draft post and hang on to it indefinitely. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve spent a good part of the afternoon cleaning out a batch of some of the many draft posts I’ve accumulated over the last few weeks. (Along with some items that are fresh in the last day or two.) What I like about it is an opportunity to do a quick link in a post with a title and be able to retrieve that from any web-accessible computer to follow up on. It acts as a neat reminder or post-it note system as well.
Recently I had a dillemma of sorts. I had a document that had printed to pdf…. each page to it’s own pdf. I didnt’ have time to spend figuring out how to make the document print to one multi-page pdf and so it seemed like it should be pretty easy to attach multiple pdfs into one big multi-page file. Fortunately it is fairly easy (at the linux command line). There are windows tools to do the same, but today this is a linux tip….
Search engine rankings are one of the concepts that I think is vaguely understood. It’s amazing to me how a subtle change in a series of search terms (or quoting a pair of words) can so drastically alter the results. Let’s say you’re searching for discount shoes, there’s a difference between a search for discount shoes and “discount shoes”… Of course, if you’re hosting your own site…. it’s awfully nice to be able to get an idea of where you turn up in the search results for given terms. The biggest problem is…. most search engines give a chance for you to see if pages on your site are found with the terms, but that doesn’t tell where in the rankings you compare to other sites. The hard way of course, is to type in your search term and go from page to page until you finally encounter your site. This can be painfully tedious though.
Or at least Google may be…. stories here and here. The way the Register puts it is that Google is in an arms race with blog spammers, with tools out that can create 100 blogs in 24 minutes and shops that can provide mass numbers of private label articles, they contend that google is drowning in the spam so to speak. I can’t help but connect it (as they do) with the changes related to the Big Daddy update which really seemed to mark a drastic change in search rangings for some of the pages on this site. Search terms that had for a time done quite well for me (page 1) dropped an average of 3-4 pages almost overnight (literally over two nights).
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before here, but languages are one of the things that fascinate me. I’ve studied Spanish, German and French. Although right now I would barely be able to recognize a handful of words in German and French. Of late, spanish has been the language I’ve focused on *(3 1/2 years at this point.) My goal was to spend at least 5 years reading/listening to *just* one language (in addition to my native English…) anyway, I’m at a point where I feel like I have a very good understanding of written spanish, pretty good understanding of much spoken spanish (depends on the accent/pace/pronunciation of the speaker, but in some cases I feel that way with English as well…….) From time to time though, I’ve used web tools to automatically translate a page or a bit of text to see how well I’m understanding….
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