I buy things at Newegg. I have found them to be a trustworthy merchant. However, they’ve just instituted a new policy that I find irritating on a number of levels. When I see an item for sale, I want to know how much it costs. They have just instituted a “Price-Available-at-Checkout” policy. This is different from their already inconvenient “See-Price-in-Cart” practice, where some items are set so you cannot see the price until the item is in your cart. Continue reading “Newegg: Axe the Price-Available-at-Checkout policy.”
New Website: mjCheck.low.li
This new site provides a small free service. It posts what the latest version of magicJack’s firmware update packages for both Mac and Windows. It checks once a day on an automated schedule, and if either file has changed, an email goes out via google groups to anyone who is subscribed to the list. Needless to say, this will likely be a very low volume list. Check it out when you have the chance. If you have a magicJack, why not subscribe?
Ferret
Dreamhost provides shell access for users. Sometimes it helps to view the logs for websites created in those users’ names. There are probably a number of scripts out there that already do this, but I thought it might be nice to bring together a number of suggestions from this wiki page to give users a few tools that may help them find out whether someone has been hacking their sites.
No this script does not provide answers — only clues. Hopefully, someone out there will find the script useful. Please make comments below. The script may be downloaded from github here.
The script is really only meant for people on shared hosting with a few sites that don’t have an ocean of traffic. If you do have a lot of traffic and/or a lot of web sites, this scripted solution is not comprehensive enough for your needs.
If you would like to see other capabilities added to the script or would like to suggest changes, please let me know in the comments.
Enjoy!
Google Plus – The Rollout
I read this article on CNET. Google Plus has been around for months, now. I keep hearing about how fantastic it is, but most of us who clicked the ‘Keep Me Posted’ button or received invitations can’t join because they’ve ‘temporarily exceeded maximum capacity’ almost since the service began. I’m not sure that most of the famous bloggers/tech-heads who were invited to field-trial membership are not aware that most people simply never got the invite or weren’t allowed to fulfill an invitation. And while the president of Google may not be posting publicly, unless we’re in his circle, maybe we’ll never know whether he’s one of the 40% who have stopped posting publicly altogether, preferring to publish exclusively to specified circles. Continue reading “Google Plus – The Rollout”
Improving Google News – Can it i-happen?
MG Siegler writes on TechCrunch.com comparing Google News with other tech news venues. He suggests that algorithms alone are not enough to make decisions about what actually is news and what is stale. His comment about re-bloggers getting purposed before the original story shows just how stale the information really is. But I have to go a couple steps further than Siegler. The most important thing to remember about the ‘sci/tech’ section of google news is that it’s supposed to encompass science and tech. Grouping them together in one section is akin to smaller book stores grouping science-fiction and horror together. They really are separate entities with a blurry overlap. Continue reading “Improving Google News – Can it i-happen?”