Still going after all these years.
WSJ: Verizon’s Fios Service Moves US Internet Beyond a Snail’s Pace. Um, me please. Though the economics are a bit tricky. Even at $45 for bundled Fios and local phone, we would still be paying more, net-net, when considering the impact on our Comcast cable prices without the Internet bundle.
Damn it, though. Getting higher throughput on the internal wireless network and 15 mbps wired?? I wan’ it. Sniff.
Google’s Blog Search is now live in beta. (As you can see from the link, it’s also localized in German.)
So far I’m the first Jarrett blog that shows up. That might change at some point.
Interesting: there seem to be a large number of spam blogs that appear pretty high in the rankings. Try searching on iET Solutions (my company’s name) and see the spam weight loss blogs that float up because of the search term solutions.
On the eve of my trip to Munich, an unbelievable set of WWII-era aerial photos of various bombing sites in Germany surfaces on Flickr. The poster says he found the photos inside a book he bought at a library sale for a dollar. The monochrome photos really make clear the impact of the Allied bombing. (Via Boing Boing.)
I have griped in the past about the dangers of lock-in, but never figured I would be directly impacted myself. A few weeks ago, my RSS feed started having problems in Bloglines. I’m not sure what caused the problems, but I suspect the Added Values plug-in, which redirected permalinks and may have redirected my RSS feed, is to blame.
At any rate, my feed stopped updating in Bloglines. Now here’s where it gets fun. I contacted Bloglines about the problem, and they said they fixed something with the feed and that it should now work. Unfortunately, it didn’t. So Craig pinged them. This time, Bloglines deleted the non-responsive version of the feed, and said that re-subscribing should fix the problem. Now the number of people subscribing to my feed in Bloglines—or at least the “working version” of my feed—has gone from 41 to 4. At the same time, my average daily traffic has dropped substantially. I think there are a bunch of people who only saw my content through Bloglines and who aren’t coming to the site to check in.
If this were an RSS issue, I might be able to do something to correct it at my end. But since it’s a Bloglines issue, I have no way to notify any of the subscribers of the problem—except to post it here and hope that someone comes across it. Please re-add me to your subscriptions if you want to continue to get information from this site!
house of warwick: Trackbacks are Dead.. Having started a regime of checking my Trackbacks every two weeks (particularly necessary since Manila provides no notification when trackbacks are received), I would have to agree with the sentiment here.
I would also hope that, when Steve asks Jake at Userland to look at Radio’s code to provide some spamproofing in Radio’s Trackback code, that the code will migrate to Manila as well. We sorely need it.
NYTimes: Canceling AOL? Just Offer Your Firstborn. Nice roundup of levels of difficulty leaving AOHell, which quotes old friend and fellow Hooblogger Tin Man.
Your first NY Times quote has to count for something; however, I think that this is actually Tin Man’s second.
New York Times: Missed church? Download it to your iPod. A logical, and perhaps lower-cost, extension of the radio services long used to connect churches with their stay-at-home members, this description of various podcasting churches is ringing a few bells for me.
I have long bemoaned the lack of a strong principled moral opposition to conservative politics in the US, and have thought that the liberal church might provide some of the material to arm that opposition, if only it would speak up. Originally I thought the answer was religious bloggers, such as the Real Live Preacher, coming from a church dedicated to principles of equality before God. I am now imagining the church that I attend, syndicated to the blogosphere, serving a similar function for a similarly scattered flock that KEXP serves for the indie-rock faithful. I also had a discussion with my sister, who is entering her third year at Union PSCE, about technology education for theology students. Maybe this article will provide some inspiration…
(Technology note: Godcast.org, which is serving as an aggregator for a series of religion-themed podcasts, runs on Radio Userland.)
Follow up to yesterday’s post: I can be reached at tjarrett at gmail dot com on Google Talk. I don’t really use Gmail for mail services, so use the standard mail form if you want to contact me in a non-IM way.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog is one of a bunch of sites talking about the leak of Google Talk, also known as Google’s implementation of Jabber. Nice to see Mac support (albeit apparently unofficial) in a new Google product before it ships.
Also nice to see Jabber getting some traction. With an open API and an open source client, it always surprised me that more people haven’t adopted Jabber as a messaging platform of choice, the way UserLand did. Including me. At the moment I can’t even remember my Jabber address.
My new Sony Ericsson S710a arrived yesterday, after a three week wait (oy—for anyone who’s playing along, this is the drawback for ordering mobile phone service from Amazon). I plugged it in and let it charge overnight, and started setting it up this morning. First impressions: the phone is much shorter but just about as thick as my old Nokia. The screen is better, but the keys feel more sluggish—though online forums suggest that there are firmware updates that may address the latter problem.
iSync works well, though I get a spurious message at the end of the sync that “Device memory is full.” I have all my contacts and calendar info on the phone, though, which is A Good Thing. The Bluetooth range also appears to be much better than on the old phone.
A few drawbacks. I can’t find a way to send more than one photo from the phone via Bluetooth at a time—though given how long it took me to figure out how to do it on the Nokia, I’m somewhat unconcerned about this right now. I also wish that the screen wouldn’t completely shut off in Standby mode; I have gotten used to using my mobile as a watch, since the Nokia displayed the time on the screen at all times the phone was on. To get the time I have to press a button. Not the end of the world, but less inconspicuous. I also hate the animated wallpaper and will be changing that at the earliest opportunity—ditto the startup sounds.
The real test, though, will be the reception. So far it appears that reception is better at our house, but I won’t know for sure until I start making calls.
Boing Boing: There’s a restaurant in Japan called “Chicken Pecker.” As Xeni says, ’nuff said. Except that these sorts of restaurant names seem to be not uncommon.
From DC up at least as far north as Newark, there is a chain of greasy fried chicken shops called “Cluck-U” that’s frighteningly good (their “traditional recipe” uses honey, which doesn’t concur with any tradition this nominal Southerner is aware of, but it’s tasty, yo). And, further afield from the chicken area, Bellevue, WA sports the charmingly named What the Pho’, which sells Vietnamese noodle dishes.
As a sometime user of Audioscrobbler who frequently forgets that the service has a web site, I visited Audioscrobbler.com yesterday and got the surprising message that “Audioscrobbler has evolved,” along with a pointer to Last.fm. Now that the site has gotten over the transition, it looks like the merged site represents an update of the old Audioscrobbler look and feel and tighter integration of the Last.fm functionality.
The new site is still a bit slow, alas (not that Audioscrobbler.com was a speed demon). But it’s usable, and you can visit my profile page to see what I’ve been listening to (newly relevant since I installed the plugin here at the office) or even add me as a friend. Hey, I have to know more than two other people who use the service…
I followed a Doc Searls link this morning to a promising blog, “Hello Fan, Here Comes the Sh*t,” that identifies blog spammers from domain registration info and discusses tactics for taking them down. I used to do this with email back in my pre-blogging days; maybe this is a better way to fight fire with fire.
Regarding my own spam problems: I mercifully escaped another round of comment spam this weekend—maybe this is because of my own public anti-comment-spam arms race—but I do seem to keep finding trackback spam. As I noted a while ago, there are very few good ways to find trackback spam reliably on Manila since there is no notification process. What I’ve taken to doing is loading all my news item category pages and searching for any unusual trackback activity. I found a few more nests of spam pings but unfortunately will have to repeat the process periodically to root them out.
One thing that cheered me up: either the trackback spam ping tool that this last person was using is broken or the person who was using it was an idiot. I found lots of spam pings that didn’t preface the trackback URL with http://, meaning that when you clicked on it you got a useless 404 page deep in my site. Heh.
This could be good for all sorts of time waste: a PHP version of Zork. Actually, judging from the leaflet in the mailbox (you did open mailbox and take leaflet, didn’t you?), it’s a port of Dungeon, the predecessor to Zork, but who’s splitting hairs? As long as it has grues, it’s all good.
See also my previous mini-post about an implementation of Zork (and other Infocom games) over AIM. Judging from the comment thread, the bots are still a-runnin’.
UserLand Blog: Another Manila 9.6 Teaser. Finally multiple category support. What’s cool about that is that I can really see using categories as something closer to tags now. I also like Jake Savin’s comment on Scott Greiff’s blog that there will also be support for no category at all on news items, even after categories have been defined. Coooool. Hope that the “no category” thing is carried forward into the XML API. I always hated having to enforce a default category in my Manila-related posting apps.