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Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Be the Google

Would you like 500mb of web hosting, plus Python, plus Django, plus a lot of Google database and application goodies? Would you like it for free? Then, my friend, what you need is Google App Engine. No mention yet of what the pricing is like after you hit your 5 million hits per month. But trust me, if you're at 5 million hits per month, you don't care.

Sorry Amazon S3, but you can basically suck it.

Update: um, yeah, it's wait-listed. Though if you have Google Apps, you're probably in.

Labels: code, google, short, web-x.0

Monday, March 10, 2008

G-Archiver and the Risks of Random Downloading

This is a pretty amazing story about a free utility with a malicious back-end twist.

This is so bad that I assumed it was a hoax. However, I downloaded the program, installed it (on a virtual machine), decompiled it, and verified that it is, in fact, "phoning home" with your gmail user name and password. Yikes.

The manufacturer's page has been updated to indicate that this "was in no way intentional," but does it really matter?

Labels: code, psa, short

Sunday, February 17, 2008

This Meme Needs a Name

All of a sudden (though probably not--I'm just catching on) there's a rash of services that crunch plain text or data keys and return parsed, formatted, drilled-down usable data. For example...

Tripit will digest all your travel confirmations and produce a rich itinerary.

Google SMS will take a zip code, flight number, etc., from your cell phone, and return a rich data node.

Opencalais is a platform for doing stuff like this.

So what do we call it?

Labels: geek-out, short, web-x.0

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Mailinator: Free, Instant, Completely Unsecure Email

What if you're downloading a product demo, need a unique address to get the key, and never want to hear from that company again? Good luck! Actually, you don't need good luck, just mailinator.

Send to any address at mailinator.com (or one of several other domains) and then go to the site and check your email. But make it a long, complex address, because there's no password. In fact, anyone can check "your" email if they know the email address (including the person/company who sends email to you).

If you completely understand the limitations, this is a wonderful service.

Labels: geek-out, privacy, short

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Windows Cracks Me Up

One wonders how bad things have to get before you "need" to defragment.

Also, has anyone noticed that the Windows 2000 defragmenter is more aggressive than that supplied with Windows XP in terms of defragmenting free space?

Labels: geek-out, humor, microsoft, short

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Scientists to The World: Two Billion Must Die

Like a bunch of real-life Rip Van Winkles, the scientific community has awoken from a 20-year slumber and come to the conclusion that the world has two billion more humans than it can possibly support. And while a phrase like "the scientific community" is often a euphemism for "some guy at a liberal arts college in Oregon" in this case we're actually talking about "388 scientists reviewed by roughly 1,000 of their peers." As far as scientists go, I think that's pretty much all of them.

Speaking of which, have you seen Al Gore's new business card?

I told you so

Labels: green, short

Friday, July 20, 2007

Platitudes

Life is less fun, but more interesting, when you know you're being persistently and expertly manipulated. (No links, because you're soaking in it.)

Labels: rant, short

Directed Attention Fatigue?

There's no way this is a "disease" or even a "condition." This is called having a job and a cable modem. Stand-up comics have exploited this for years. In high school we called this acetylcholine deficiency. So you know it's not new.

Labels: rant, short

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Winzip for Wordsmiths

I'm a little shocked this still needs to be said, because it's just about the only lesson I remember from every writing class I ever took. And I'm really shocked that a blog post about omitting needless words and writing clearly is so repetitive and fractured. But just so we're clear: be concise.

Holy crap. Did we forget that great writers sweat over sentence structure and word choice? Read some Hemingway or Steinbeck whydontcha!

Update: I have a modern, blogging example of this: Jorn Barger's blogging and writing are so concise as to be nearly uncompressible.

Update 2: It further occurs to me that there's a term for uncompressible, unskimable text that distills only the essence of meaning: poetry.

Labels: blogs, rant, short, writing

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

In Case You Forgot to Fight Terrorism on Your Morning Commute Today

On one hand this is my (semi-)annual license plate posting. On the other hand, we're in Texas, which tends to rave in favor of the machine. And yet, this still gets to me:

Yeah, it's right there in the upper left:

"Texas, Fight Terrorism, 9/11/01, REMEMBER" or some ordering thereof. Because I know you forgot.

Fortunately, the god plates still cost more.

Labels: politics, rant, short, texas

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Finally a Way to Hate Microsoft for Being Too Mac-Like

In case Vista hasn't pushed you over the edge into Ludditism, there's always Surface.

Update: I probably should have noted... that link is not the tired demo you've seen a million times but a great parody thereof.

Labels: humor, microsoft, rant, short

Apple + AT+T = A Customer Service Perfect Storm?

Having dealt with both companies, I for some reason failed to consider that the iPhone would catalyze a singularity of passive-aggressive obsequiousness when it came to sales and support.

Yes means no; no means fuck you. Fortunately Apple fans are already well-trained masochistic subs.

Labels: hardware, rant, short