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i'm writing this post on my iPhone, using the new i.typepad.com application.
I am on the commuter rail.
I'll just see if this works before I hunt and peck too much.
It is the first iphone webapp I've tried, and it seems really slick.
Is there a web based program to help you manage your private bookmarks? What del.icio.us can do would be perfect, but I'm too shy to put my links out there for all there world to see. Is there a private equivalent? (See I post questions, but unlike Dave, nobody reads my blog, so I won't get 40 answers in 10 minutes like he does.)
My wife was commenting about all the Verizon trucks around town. I checked the web, because I was curious what they were doing. How cool is this - my town of Needham MA is one of the first in the country to get Verizon FiOS. FiOS is their Fiber-to-the-home, with many glorious Mbps of speed. (15 Mbps / 2 up, or 30 Mbps / 5 up). It is even cheaper than my current cable modem. We have Comcast at the moment, which just blows. I've signed up to get my notification email, and I'll be dumping Comcast as the first day I can. I'm pretty geeked out.
Here's an interesting post about the economics of Google's hardware systems. I didn't know they had 100,000 servers; the number 10,000 was always repeated in press reports. I also didn't know Rob Pike of unix/Plan 9 fame was working for Google.
Update: this June 14, 2006 New York Times article by John Markoff says the best estimate of the number of servers Google has is 450,000. And growing fast...
I use Fastmail for my email, and I'm very happy with them. They recently updated their anti-spam filters with a new Bayesian one. It was catching virtually all of the roughly 125 or so spam I was getting each day.
I've noticed over the past few days that most of the spam that gets through is using the same trick. The message includes a paragraph of randomly selected real English words. Those "non-spam" words must be given enough credit in the message to overcome the normal spaminess. My lastest spam used this list:
igor prague vestry centroid asylum butt mathematic plentiful inhabitation puppeteer sybarite pittsburgh carney delete playwright noun teamwork vestal vote diatomic crouch drank crotch widen damsel ephesus construct bail amplify dupe sung intermittent sparrow what'd yard metzler gross collector ditzel cascara merrimack pour cheek quirinal carolinian mcelroy spatula splay actress crease bequeath turbulent crotch antithetic delicious bayedYou could detect that the words were not in a sentence by checking frequencies of pairs of words. However, it seems pretty clear that the next step will be to randomly select sentences or paragraphs from Public Domain books. How the heck are we going to detect that? They can make this section arbitrarily large, to improve their ratings. I bet that spam of the future will be a unique combination of penis enlargement and classic literature.
Verisign is just an evil company. In particular the part of Verisign that used to be Network Solutions, the .com registrar. Personally I think they started going by their parent company name when too many people were catching on to their evilness. Here's a quote from Doc:
"Network Solutions is evil."
Why are they evil? Well, they give customer "service" that only a monopolist could get away with. I had trouble getting my domains transferred from their wreched grasp. They've sold private info (as Doc was talking about), the did those really nasty "renewal" notices that changed you back to their registrar if you sent them in. (That would be illegal slamming if they were a phone company.)
Today's new evil tactic is their Sitefinder "service". If you misspell a domain name (try www.alskdjfsdf.com), you're taken to a page displaying Verisign content. Who died and let them be the default web page? Thankfully, the BIND people are patching BIND so that Sitefinder won't work. This Wired News story explains.
They are the only company that I actively discourage my friends from using. It is a shame that many people still think they're the only source of .com domains, since they see the ads on TV. If you have a domain with them, you should transfer them somewhere else before they screw up your service. I use EasyDNS, and have had a great experience with them, however they are expensive. Don't let your email or web provider host DNS for you either. That way, if either of those cop out on you, you can get a new provider and repoint your DNS service to them in a matter of hours.
