Category Archives: Internet

Robert Waldmann discovers that Google, and therefore a Google-dependent parent, is neither infallible nor omniscient.

One of the dangers of spending a lot of time online is that sometimes you will follow a link to something that you really wish you hadn’t.

So don’t say I didn’t warn you, that only two clicks away (I’m not linking to it, I’m just linking to a page that links to it), is one of the most evil mind-rotting videos I’ve had the misfortune to see … well, since whenever I last saw Bush speak, and possibly much longer. You really don’t want to view this, and if you do you will be sorry.

Don’t click. Really, don’t click. It will upset you.

And if you do, don’t blame me.

Update: Youtube.com, which hosts this video, appears to be down. Karma! [further update: the problem seems to be in the Bellsouth DSL network]
Update3: Bellsouth is up, YouTube is down, at least from here…

This is funny. Dreamhost, the cheap but imperfect hosts of this blog, have a blog of their own. And in a recent entry, DreamHost Blog | Web Hosting’s Dirty Laundry, they describe their correspondence with a supposedly neutral and objective service that offers consumers reviews of hosting companies.

This is how hosting-reviews.com describes itself:

Hosting-Review is an independent provider of web hosting reviews. We base our reviews on knowledge, personal experience with webhosts and user feedback.

What emerges from their correspondence with Dreamhost, is a little different: if you want to be listed in their top 10, you pay them.

As an encore, Dreamhost offers a defense of their sales policies. It’s written with a certain panache, and convincing as far as bandwidth and disk space go. But I can testify that there’s nothing in the sales literature that I read which put me on notice as to their quite restrictive CPU throttling policies.

Basically, if this blog gets hit with a wave of spam, they threaten to pull the plug. And I’ve had to disable a number of PHP-intensive things to keep CPU usage down. DH’s business model is great for static pages. Lots of them.

But while it may be a great service for a porn server, it is only OK for serving stuff that gets built on the fly, or gets rebuilt often.

Why do I stick? It’s cheap, fairly reliable, friendly, cheap, and I can’t face the switching costs (especially the time & energy). Also, I have a separate managed dedicated server for work (not as cheap!) which performs very well, and I like having the same interface for everything I do.

Just yesterday, yes less than 24 hours ago, I was reading the news feed from a group blog and desperately wishing I had one of these so I could filter out the most obnoxious of the group.

And today, via Boing Boing, comes a link to FeedRinse, a service that “that filters the RSS feeds you subscribe to, hiding items that match keywords or authors you don’t want to see.” Yes!

Only trouble is, the free version is very limited; otherwise you have to pay.

But surely an open source version can’t be that far away? (Oh, please someone build this into FeedOnFeed Redux, please.)

They had a special event over at the 7th grader’s middle school yesterday, in which a special guest speaker lectured students on the “dangers of the Internet”.

This is something like the fourth program this year for parents or students about the evils of high technology. So far we had the evils of violent video games, the dangers of instant messenger, something or other about how you should never surf bad places or the gremlins will get you and more that I forget. (The stupidest by far was the violent video games talk, by one Jack Thompson. I wrote a letter complaining about that one.) The other talks have been optional evening events, but this one was during school hours, so it was the first one that one of us actually attended.

The 7th grader found it all rather dull. He had on board the idea that it would not be too bright a move to agree to meet a stranger that one ‘met’ online (and indeed is mostly interested in single-player games at the moment). He found the repetition of this idea for more than 50 minutes to be rather boring.

“She talked for the entire period,” he moaned. “And after the first few minutes I just sat there and thought ‘you won’t get me with this Jedi Mind Control’“.

I more than half suspect he is thinking the same thing when we talk to him…