I'm not sure what to think of this yet.
Blue Security Ceases Anti-Spam Operations
May 17th, 2006 · No Comments
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David Blaine Stunt Scam
May 9th, 2006 · No Comments
I like some of Blaine's street magic and his previous stunts were interesting if nothing more than physical endurance or some sort of grand magic trick. With Blaine you could never tell, until now. I'm pretty sure this whole underwater thing and trying for the world record was completely setup and planned from beginning till end. It is just a huge promotional thing with no magic involved and not much of a physical feat either.
At least it is more interesting than David Copperfield's completely fake big magic tricks that are nothing more than camera tricks with a complete shill audience. Does anybody really question why there were only about a dozen people to witness live the disappearance of the statue of liberty? Come on, what a joke. Same thing for the plane. Dumb.
Here are reasons why this thing was completely setup:
1. The announcer points out very quickly after they hooked up the chains that they are unexpectedly heavier than they thought and it might cause problems for Blaine being able to come up for air or some such nonsense. First of all, any preparation for this kind of thing would have gone through about 100 trials beforehand. No way this would come up as a surprise and no way the announcer would key into it within seconds of putting the chains on.
2. Just seconds before “trouble” starts, the announcer just happens to mention that if we see bubbles that will indicate a problem. The announcer again says, “we're watching for bubbles”.
3. Seconds after watching for bubbles their is a convenient black-out of the broadcast while the announcer is announcing there is trouble, there are bubbles, blah blah blah.
4. Why do the divers have to make a dramatic rescue anyway? He used a breathing device for days under there. Why not throw that on his face instead of going through the whole routine of getting him free of the chains. Or, you would think they would have a nice release valve at the bottom that would drain the water in a few seconds in case of an emergency. But having divers jump in and struggle makes things that much more interesting.
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Ask Tucows Chat
May 3rd, 2006 · No Comments
Joey deVilla of Tucows hosted another “Ask Tucows” chat yesterday. Brent and I sat in since they used our BlogChat service for the chat. For a transcript of the chat visit Joey's post.
This was the second such chat and there are two more scheduled this year:
Tuesday, Aug 1
Tuesday, November 7
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Toronto Watermain Break
April 27th, 2006 · No Comments
Waterboy points out:
Toronto Star has a picture to go with the story. Very cool for the star to use Google maps to show a location for the story. That’s a pretty nice touch but it’s static, couldn’t they link to the proper Google map?
What is more interesting is that The Star is likely breaking Google copyright and certainly their Terms of Service.
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Mark Skapinker of Brightspark Starts Blogging
April 22nd, 2006 · No Comments
Mark Skapinker of Brightspark (a Canadian seed stage software venture fund) has started blogging this month.
He already has a couple excellent blog posts:
Check them out.
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Debugging Code Under Stress
April 10th, 2006 · No Comments
I think Scott Johnson has this just about right:
Here’s a simple way to know if you’ve got a good architecture – its what I call (apologize for swearing: The Fuck Factor. Listen to yourself work as you debug code under stress. The quality of your architecture can be determined as a mathematical operation (seriously) tied to the number of times you say “Fuck”. Now if your favorite swear word is Shit then use that. But, honestly, if debugging makes you swear then you’ve got a problem.
Of course I have to link to Brent's evil N voice mail after working with one of those N's. This didn't have to do with architecture but rather having to deal with one of those evil N's.
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Jon Udell Screencast on Microsoft Atlas
April 8th, 2006 · No Comments
An excellent screencast on Microsoft Atlas (Microsoft's AJAX framework) by Jon Udell and Shanku Niyogi. Jon's blog post about it is here. Atlas actually looks pretty promising for the .NET folks.
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Boot Camp – Macs Do Windows Too
April 5th, 2006 · No Comments
Finally Apple starting to wake up a little bit. They just released Boot Camp which will allow one to run Windows XP on an Intel based MAC.
I wrote “wake up a little bit” because what I've been saying for years is that they really just need to go all the way and allow OSX to run on any Intel box not some specialized piece of MAC hardware called an Intel MAC.
Update: Parrellels just announced a public beta release of their virtualization software so that you can run Windows, Linux etc. in a virtual machine within OSX. No need for dual booting (Apr 6, 2006).
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Spam Cube
March 29th, 2006 · No Comments
Interesting little spam device called Spam Cube. However, there doesn't seem to be any indication that they update the spam detection on a regular basis (i.e. like virus definition updates with virus programs). If that is the case this device has about a couple weeks worth of use before it starts letting in all kinds of spam.
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Goodmail Is Just Bad
March 19th, 2006 · No Comments
David Gewirtz has a very good article on why Goodmail is just bad.
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