Category Archives: Tech

Technology, gadgets, software, and the industry around them.

ongoing VoIP

Tech

Tim Bray on Vonage. I’ve been happy with my Vonage phone, which I’ve had since around December. The only problem is it seems to have to go in front of my router, and the double NAT makes a lot of things tricky. Also my box is really tiny, not sure why he says they have to get smaller.

The Google Blog

Google, Tech, ,

As nearly everyone in the world has noticed, Google has a blog now. It’s too bad they didn’t go with the /blog/ URI because this one has extra redundant redundancy, and that doesn’t seem very Google-like. The new blog is very generic, it barely seems like a Blogger blog. On the same day Blogger releases gorgeous XHTML+CSS tempates from Doug and the crew, Google releases its blog with a table-based layout and funky HTML 4 (with no doctype). Also, Blogger uses utf-8 encoding by default now (like WordPress) and Google’s blog uses iso-8859-1.

So there isn’t a lot of information on their blog yet. The first post was signed by Ev, but after that it’s been non-entities writing (and modifying) the posts, which is very weird for a blog. Where to go for more information? Their Atom feed of course. The first thing I noticed was the <id> element, which contained tag:big.corp.google.com,2003:blog-1720. Big corp, ha! So who’s the mysterious author of the two entries after Ev’s?

<author>
<name>A Googler</name>
</author>

Well that’s helpful. Their second post on outsourcing has a more interesting bit of metadata.

<issued>2004-05-10T15:30:52-07:00</issued>
<modified>2004-05-11T17:40:57Z</modified>
<created>2004-05-10T22:39:01Z</created>

Bloggers edit their entries all the time, but “A Googler” actually changed quite a bit, removing a paragraph on outsourcing to India. Perhaps Google is already sharing more than they had planned, but I’ll stop now before they take away my Gmail account.

0wn3d

Meta, Personal, Tech

I’m not sure if I’m one of the “six prominent webloggers” Brad mentions in his post Gmail major security flaw, but when I got a mail from him saying that I was guilty of exactly what he described, I thought it would be a good time to change my secret question and password. I guess he was really anxious to get a Gmail account. He could have asked though, I let Adam poke around mine.

My thoughts on Gmail? It’s really well-done in terms of how the interface works. It’s faster than Thunderbird for common tasks and I could see using it full-time. But I wouldn’t even consider it until they provide a good way to import and export everything. Email is the lifeblood of everything I do, and I’ve been burned too many times to trust it to a third party—even if it’s non-evil Google. When I put my address out there in a previous post I was pleasantly surprised to get emails from a number of people I’d never corresponded with. Unfortunately soon after that the spam started coming in. It’s more than I get on my “real” account, but I can’t expect a beta product to compete with a finely-tuned SpamAssassin installation and 22MB bayesian database.

Speaking of passwords, a few months I switched to using 8+ characters of random junk for everything, and different passwords for everything. You can use the random password generator to get a few of your own. Throw in SSH tunneling, a great VPN through my university, and consistent rotation schedule and I’m feeling pretty secure. (Knock on wood.) I just need a fingerprint scanner.

In other news, the place of residence has been spruced up a bit with surround-sound speakers, a cut-glass-hanging-thingy, and some additional lighting. Pictures forthcoming.

Finally, the mosaic thread currently stands at nearly 669 comments, and soon there will be more comments on that post then there are posts on this site. I don’t generally talk about traffic in public because I think it’s bad taste, but the numbers this month have been intimidating. In terms of bandwidth photomatt.net used a few dozen gigabytes last month, mostly in photos. So far this month the usage stands at 305 gigabytes for this domain alone and I’m at a loss for words, except to say it’s nice to know I have that sort of scalability. I think I’ll go back to posting pictures of my cat.

Update: Final usage for April on photomatt.net was 511 gigabytes.