For years now many of us who regularly buy things online (or at least window shop online if you’ll pardon the pun) have spent some time time poking through websites and forums designed around enduser reviews of the products we’re interested in. For those of us who don’t have a Consumer Reports account, or find their reviews have become less rigorous over the years, there are a multitude of websites that cater to the natural human urge to not be ripped off. Now you’re beginning to see the customer review feedback right on the manufacturer’s own websites!
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In one of the more embarrassing Microsoft stories I’ve heard in a while, Computerworld is reporting that Microsoft has issued a warning that editing files stored on Microsoft’s Home Server using any of a bevy of Microsoft programs (and potentially many non-Microsoft programs) may corrupt those files! Home Server was Microsoft’s (inept, we find) response for the home and small business market to the growing popularity of NAS (network attached storage) for backing up the huge amount of digital detritus we are all accumulating.

I’ve been using Gmail for a long while now, and really like the web interface. In fact, I had *almost* completely stopped using a regular mail client for personal email. It was accessible anywhere, had an easy to use and understand layout, was fast, could collect email from several different accounts, now offers IMAP - the list goes on. BUT, I host most of my sites on Dreamhost, and for some reason Google has decided to Grey List them. Grey listing is a technique where a mail server is configured to ‘temporarily’ reject incoming mail from another mail server (or a range of them), with the knowledge that the standard configuration of those sending mail servers is to retry the attempt later on. When the sending server re-sends the mail, the grey listing server will accept it. The thinking is that spammers have their servers set to not retry because it draws attention to them and increases the risk that they will be identified as a spammer. There are some problems with this technique though, and they may be enough to make me stop using Gmail for good.

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update: Nov 2008 - this is one of the most popular stories on the blog (if the stats are correct) so I thought I would update it a little bit. Google Street View is a nifty web mapping application that allows you to view actual 3D photos taken from the Google Vehicle Cam of any place the car has imaged. Since Google Street View went live, Google has done its level best to keep potential lawsuits to a minimum by scrubbing out pictures of bikini clad sunbathers, and by removing or air-brushing out anyone who complains that their privacy has been invaded. There are still a lot of cool things to be found using Google Maps or Google Earth and there are several sites that provide a place for folks who are interested in this stuff to collaborate. Google Sightseeing is one such. Back in September, I discovered that the Google cam just happened to image Coopers Lake campground during Pennsic!

Original post (May 31, 2007)
Noticed tonight on Wired that Google Street View is now live on Google Maps, so go check it out. True, it’s not new - Microsoft already had a beta test of their version of this type of thing out. It’s also a bit Orwellian in that it seems like a bit of invasion of personal privacy - allowing voyeuristic users to zoom in on images of real folks caught about their daily business by clicking here and there on a web-based map in a browser. I don’t really like the way it all works so much - you have to look for roads or places that are outlined in BLUE, and then drag a little avatar guy onto that outlined portion of the map. Once you perform this rather cludgey manipulation a video window akin to those 3D Quicktime mov files appears with which you can interact and ‘move’ about the real images of a ’street view’.

I have to use Windows at work for various reasons and over the years I’ve found a bunch of cool little apps that make using that atrocious operating system slightly more palatable. If you use a Mac, you’ll recognize the name Stickies. As Erica Sadun put it on O’Reilly in a story about using that Mac program: “Stickies is quite the cool application. It lets you put notes on your screen and float them over your workspace. You can use Stickies to add reminders about appointments, phone calls, or just to store frequently used text.” 3M makes Post-It notes (those little yellow sticky pads you use in the office), and at some point decided to offer a digital version. I used it for years, but it wasn’t free and I always found it much clunkier than the OS X version. Today I discovered that Zhorn Software out of the UK offers a freeware Stickies for Windows that is on par with the program of the same name on the Mac. In fact, it offers a bunch of features not found in my OS X 10.3.9 version of that program (like peer to peer networking shared stickies and recurring alarms). If you need an easy and elegant way to take quick notes, make a quick to do list, or set an alarm on your Windows PC, check it out.

This is one of the coolest little projects I’ve come across in a while. Lots of people have a flash stick, or an iPod with disk space and recently there has been a lot of buzz about ‘portable apps’ (little programs that are compiled to run completely off a flash drive without needing to be installed on the host computer), but since I use many different operating systems including Windows, Linux, and Mac these portable apps have limited appeal for me. They will generally only work on one OS (unless theyre Java based?). StickWiki is not really an application in that sense, but a single HTML file (initially ~50K) that can be opened in any javascript-enabled browser to provide a full-up wiki!

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There’s a Great article at Baseline about the technology behind Myspace. Starting with just a couple Dell servers, to today with almost 200 the article goes into the technical details behind all the upgrades that were necessary over time to keep up with demand. Warning, this article will only interest the IT folks out there who wonder how they would be able to keep up with this kind of growth. [found on slashdot]