I picked up a great explanation of the great divide between business speak and tech speak at Rands In Repose today entitled “The Words You Wear.” The engineering burden is that when it comes to the product, we know how it works. Everyone else outside of engineering has vastly less working knowledge of the product; they don’t need that depth for their job. The engineers know the intricate details of the system, the people who built it, and what it…
I really used to look forward to WordPress updates, probably because there were so many things that needed to be fixed. Now we’re at a point where it’s in very good shape, and, frankly, the interim releases are kind of boring. Still, it’s good to see that I can finally click on automatic update, for either plugins, or the main software itself, and it actually does the update. In other WordPress news, they have a new developers survey out for…
Boston.com has an interesting article today entitled “At the tone, please don’t leave a message” heralding the death of voicemail. In an age of ever-speedier communications, a growing number of people are unwilling to endure voice mail’s shortcomings. Some can’t stand the endless prompts just to hear a longwinded – and often pointless – message. (Hi, it’s me. Why aren’t you picking up? I’ll call you later.) Others dislike voice mails that can’t be searched, easily forwarded, or surreptitiously played…
It was utterly inevitable…via CruchGear and Matt Brodeur: So this seems like a good enough idea. It’s called MySecretCircle and it’s basically it’s a closed social network for girls. You and your buds buy a USB key that acts as your login. It autoruns under Windows and OS X and brings up a photo and journal sharing system that only allows certain people access to your daughter’s personal info. In theory and in practice this is great. It ensures your tween…
Over the past couple months, I’ve been working nights and weekends to get Reel-time.com updated and running on WordPress. The project, while far from complete, reached critical mass this week and I was able to go live Tuesday night. This site has been around since 1995, and frankly, if you knew where to look, it was showing it’s age. The homepage was left justified, which is something designers haven’t been doing since around 2001. There were a lot of challenges. …
Gizmodo has published an interesting article entitled “How the Conficker Problem Just Got Much Worse” and I’ve got to say that I’m generally concerned. …and here’s why that is deeply, deeply scary. As we explained, Conficker has built a zombie botnet infrastructure by registering hundreds of spam DNS names (askcw.com.ru, and the like), which it then links up and uses as nodes for infected machines to contact for instructions. In its earlier forms, Conficker attempted to register 250 such DNS names…
Yeah, the Conficker worm is supposed to update on April 1. Stick to standard protocols, use Windows Update if you aren’t already doing it automatically, run a thorourgh virus scan with your favorite anti-virus, give the machine a quick check with something like Lavasoft Adaware, and TURN YOUR MACHINE OFF IF YOU AREN’T USING IT.
When I started blogging at this site, I threw in a Google Adsense ad basically to fill up a column. That was a year ago. Today, on a whim, I decided to check out my earnings. As you’d probably expect, I have about enough in the account to buy an 18 pack of domestic beer. Luckily, I like domestic beer. So I figured, I might as well take the payout. Why leave it with Google? They had an answer…
(Uh, Jeff, Kelly, move on, nothing to read here. Nothing of interest to you at all…really…) I had one of those moments today. Mistakes were made. Bad mistakes. The “oh crap, I’m editing on the production site, not the qa or dev server” type of mistakes that immediately have you picturing your career dissipation light suddenly burning bright. So I noticed after working on this highly important site that I’d accidently overwritten something on the live site. Yech. Luckily, as…
Om Malik reports this morning that Skype is now the largest long distance phone company. That’s a huge stat when you consider that Skype wasn’t even a blip on the radar a few years ago, and flat out didn’t exist a decade ago. We’ve come a long way. Remember when you got calls from MCI, Sprint and the rest almost every day? Remember the incredible bills when your kid called American Samoa or Rangoon? Telecom was one of those…