hintofsarcasm
am i still ill?
Archive for Technology
January 29, 2007 at 11:07 · Filed under Technology
When it was first launched, Virtual Earth from Microsoft was nothing more than a Google maps clone, with older aerial photographs.
Then came the ‘Walk the streets‘ function which was very impressive, but never actually made it into full production and has remained in ‘Preview’ mode and thus still has only limited availability (San Fransisco & Seattle) which makes it untenable.
Finally though, the Microsoft Live development team have come up with something unique and worthwhile. Birds eye view mapping.
Using Virtual Earth, users can now see images from a Birds eye view of most major (and quite a few minor) cities and towns in the UK in their web browsers.
The images are much closer and more detailed than the aerial photography that was used previously and the shots are far more recent.
I have analyzed the shots taken over Cardiff and have come to the conclusion that they were taken sometime in the early summer of 2006. Perhaps May or June.
Here we see Cardiff Castle, as viewed from the South, looking North.
Another great feature is that you can change your vantage point, you can choose to look from any point of the compass. The magic of this is that the map is not simply rotated, but seperate photos have been taken from each different view. If you are looking from the North to South, you can see different sides of buildings, etc. It’s all very impressive.
Here we see Cardiff Castle, as viewed from the North, looking South.
The images have more than likely been taken from an aeroplane, or perhaps even a helicopter, which has clearly spent a lot of flying time shooting all of these high quality images.
The software is impressive too, as AJAX applications go, this is pretty neat, and being written using AJAX, no dowload is required to view the maps. There don’t appear to be too many glitches, especially when using IE7. I have come across the odd few, but nothing too major, certainly nothing that inhibits the use of the website.
Bravo Microsoft, you have outdone yourselves this time.
Microsoft Virtual Earth (Live Search)
January 27, 2007 at 17:24 · Filed under Technology
Talking to the BBC, Youtube founder Chad Hurley has confirmed that a scheme will be rolled out in the next couple of months that will “reward creativity”.
Youtube are clearly using this to give users an incentive to make their own videos and not to upload copyrighted material.
The money will come from the advertisements which are displayed when a video is viewed on the website, this is another system which the Youtube team are working to re-vamp, more than likely taking away the banner ad system which currently graces each page to be replaced by rolling advertisements before or after the video.
Revver, an alternative to Youtube, has already started a revenue-sharing system like the one proposed by Youtube, but it’s user-base is nowhere near as large as it’s rival and thus the impact has been limited.
So, does this mean that my videos could start making me money enough money to quit my job and become a full-time Youtuber?
Well, no, and not just because my videos are awful, but because the amounts that the user will actually receive are likely to be very low, even less than 1/4 of a penny per view would generous.
January 27, 2007 at 13:29 · Filed under Technology
LG Shine - Review coming this week
December 15, 2006 at 08:56 · Filed under Technology
It’s not surprising that Nintendo have decided to recall 3.2million Wii controller straps after seeing horrific pictures such as the one below, caused by people simply playing games, as they were meant to.
Wiihaveaproblem.com has been cataloguing user submissions of Wii related incidents since the console was release and there has been an alarming number of cases of the straps that keep the controller securely in your hand actually snapping and flying across the room, often taking out a piece of electrical equipment or furniture with it, like this poor persons rear-projection TV, pictured below;
Of course, not all damage has been done to inanimate objects or indeed by fault of design, some incidents have been caused by human error, to say the least, like in the case of this poor lady who was injured whilst her boyfriend swishing his ’sword’ around, playing Zelda.
Or even, this woman who dislocated her knee whilst playing Wii sports Tennis in high heels, look away if you’re grossed out easily…
Unfortunately, at this time there is no information on how customers are to receive their replacement straps…
November 25, 2006 at 14:06 · Filed under Technology
I’ve just had the new Firebox.com catalogue through the post this morning and my-oh-my are there some goodies in there this year.
You thought the USB rocket launcher was good? Well just wait until you feast your eyes on the USB Cannon!
I think that with both of these setup in the office, we could start some kind of inter-office foam dart war. Fun! This is definitely on my christmas list.
Next, the Penny Pusher.
Remember going to the seaside, into those dark dank amusement arcades which were so loud that to stay in there for longer than 10 minutes would cause irreparable damage to your hearing?
Well, now you can bring a quieter version to your desk.
Everyone loved the Penny Pushers. Pop in a 1p or 2p, watch it fall down and hope to god it fell flat so that it would push some money out of the machine! Hours of fun.
Next on the list is more for pre-christmas fun that as a christmas present as such, the USB Christmas party pack is great for the office. I bought one last week and put up the lights this morning. Unfortunately due to recent company directives put in place for decorations, I cannot hang them around my monitor, but I’ve found a place that is just as good.
The partition behind my monitor, plus some sticky tape = great christmas décor.
I think they compliment my usb rocket launcher greatly.
October 11, 2006 at 10:37 · Filed under Technology
So, our free ride is almost over.
Spend as long as you can watching all of your favourite videos on Youtube as I’m sure that they will soon all be gone, replaced by the videos that are allowed to be uploaded by the record, movie and television companies.
No longer will be you be able to dance in front of a webcam singing to a song looking like a moron and ‘Broadcast yourself’, as is the initiative that they have been pushing since May 2005.
It is fair enough, however, as the site and its creators must have been losing an absolute bundle every month in bandwith costs. 100million video views every day must cost a pretty penny, even at the relatively low resolutions that they are displayed.
In the Flash format that they use, the size of the file is approx 1mb per minute.
If we do a little maths, assuming that each of the 100million videos are 4 minutes in length (about average for a music video).
4mb x 100,000,000 = 400,000,000mb daily.
400,000,000mb = 400,000gb
Bear in mind that this is assuming each video is 4 minutes long. Youtube allows a maximum play time of 10 minutes, so it could vary.
400,000gb of transfer is a lot and can cost a lot if you don’t negotiate a good deal with your bandwith provider.
Needless to say, I don’t think any ‘unmetered’ provider would ever take them on, they would most likely have to have their own datacentre and supply themselves with leased lines, etc. A costly exercise, which up until now has been funded mostly by Google Adwords (which don’t actually pay that much).
The copyright implications are vast and quite what Google has let themselves in for will be seen over the coming months, but it’s certainly going to be an interesting time for Youtube, Google & their users.
Watch this space..
August 24, 2006 at 17:50 · Filed under Technology
Apple has decided that it’s notebook computers are also too dangerous to be allowed out in the wild, thus are recalling 1m batteries which are made by Sony, which are similar to those that were recalled a few weeks ago by Dell.
We haven’t seen any spectacular explosions appearing in pictures as yet, but, surely somebody will come up with some sooner rather than later, even if it is just someobdy putting some spare C4 onto the keyboard and releasing the pictures, just for effect.
Doh. Sony, Dell & Apple are going to have a lot to answer for.
Now I’m glad that I stuck to my guns and chose Compaq and Acer for my laptops.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5283424.stm
August 24, 2006 at 09:11 · Filed under Technology
“I see you have a Dell laptop, sir. A fine choice.
Would you please follow me behind this little screen,
oh, the surgical gloves? They’re nothing really…”
So, Qantas have been smart and have put a directive into place to stop it’s passengers and crew from turning into a big lithium-ion fireball mid-flight.
If you are carrying a laptop, it will be checked to see if it is a Dell. If it is. You can still use it, but, either battery only or battery out and connected to the mains. Never battery & mains at the same time.
Bearing in mind that Qantas’ first policy on defective Dell’s were to take the battery out and tape up the contacts, this is rather leniant.
But, to be honest, if you know that your battery is affected and is part of the recalled batches, why the hell are you still using it anyway? And you also want to use it on a plane? Do you not fear for your life?
August 7, 2006 at 07:33 · Filed under Technology
No longer will a certain typo go unpunished when navigating to a web address.
Happen to miss out the O in .com and you will be directed to a page full of advertising.
The nation of Cameroon, which controls the .cm TLD, has put a wildcard into its DNS system, so that any domain on the .cm system that is not registered, is directed to this advertising page.
Pretty sneaky, in my books. But then, it was worse when Verisign tried to do it back in the summer of ‘03.
What they did, was exactly the same, except, obviously, it had a bigger hit range. If you navigated to a non-existant .com or .net web address, you would be confronted with a page of possible suggestions, and of course, some paid links.
Plus, it broke other things. SMTP, for example. Because, essentially, every single domain was ‘registered’, if you sent an email to an incorrectly spelt domain, instead of getting an error message back from your SMTP server, you would get either nothing, or an error returned from the Verisign SMTP server, which is not good for many reasons.
Needless to say, it didn’t go down well and Verisign were forced to remove it after just a few days.
Of course, if you are really aggreived by the fact that Cameroon want your typos, you could just edit your hosts file to send *.cm to 127.0.0.1 (or similar), thus rendering the entire TLD out of your range. I mean, when was the last time you visited a Cameroonian website?
Check out my Cameroonian website, if you will.
http://www.hintofsarcasm.cm
July 21, 2006 at 08:05 · Filed under Technology
Managing your own server is a pain in the arse at the best of times, namely because if it goes down or has security issues, there is nobody to blame or to find a resolution but yourself.
My hostees have been having a rough time for the past two or three months, the rack has been down more times than a cheap hooker.
I couldn’t work out what the issue was initially, just that for some reason, almost immediately after being booted up, the resources would slowly become more and more sparse which would inevitably result in the box falling over and the only thing that would revive it was a restart.
After some investigation however, it came to light that it was a script that was doing the damage. Which script, you might ask?
Well, none other than wp-comments-post.php, the process that deals with Wordpress comments. It was being hit thousands of times a minute and obviously, because I use a captcha (the little code thing that you have to type in before you can post a comment), all the requests were being denied, but, still serving up a hefty page of html on each failure.
Spambots are the bain of any hosts life, especially in the age that we live in now.
It used to be that inboxes just got clogged up with erectile disfunction emails, but it seems that spam filters and tired, vigilant recipients have made the mail spammers redundant, so they have gone out on a limb to carry on their work in new and inventive ways.
For bloggers, that means comment spam and trackback spam. In the early days of blogging and the use of ‘CMS’ (Content Management Systems) this was not an issue. In fact, it only really started cropping up in 2004, and when it started, I wasn’t even too sure what was happening. But since then, a war has been declared on the blogging community by the spam peddlers.
If I didn’t have any spam protection, hintofsarcasm would easily receive over 1,000 spam comments per hour.
But just because they don’t get through doesn’t mean it won’t generate traffic.
Each time a spam comment or trackback is rejected by my website, it generates an error message, which under normal circumstances would be helpful as a human would be reading it and could correct their error. However, a bot just discards this information and thus it becomes a waste of precious bytes.
In these days of metered internet and high bandwidth costs, this can be a substantial hurdle to any blogger trying to prove their worth.
As soon as a blog becomes popular, the spambots will start to hit it, and depending on the size of the blog, they can hit hard. As previously mentioned, HoS gets hit thousands of times a minute and there is very little that I can do about this, short of banning entire continents from viewing the site.
I have put in place a temporary workaround, changing the name of the script that handles wordpress comments, as many bots use cached information of what url to hit and then setting the old wp-comments-post.php to redirect instantly to a non-existant website (something like goawayspammingscum.com). This still generates traffic, but gladly, only a few bytes, compared to the kilobytes it was using before.
It won’t be long however before the bots re-train and pick up the new script and I have to change the name again. It’s an endless circle.
But, what can you do? Answers on a postcard..
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