This news item comes from MOSNEWS.COM:

Kushnir, 35, headed the English learning centers the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the Centre for Spoken English, all known to have aggressive Internet advertising policies in which millions of e-mails were sent every day.

For harassment purposes, their telephone numbers were disclosed in Wikipedia.

Figures have recently come out, which break down search engine usage in the States. According to one report, Google has been losing some of its impact

Google’s market share of US searches for June 2005 was at 36.9% compared with 37.5% in May 2005.

Then again, according a different study which was cited on the very same site, Google’s usage has been rising lately.

Google’s share of U.S. searches hit 52% in June, up from 45% a year ago, according to Web analytics firm WebSideStory Inc.

A careful read would reveal the obvious. The total volume of queries declines throughout the summer and likewise Web traffic in general. Google is probably more prolific outside the United States and among IT-savvy users.

June 2005 referrals to this domain

Example image from the local Gallery installation

Gallery is one of the most popular photo management packages on the Web. As a matter of fact, this domain has a Gallery installation (feed: ) as well. Gallery was built in PHP and is absolutely free. The number of features it makes available to site visitors and the site administrator is endless.

A fourth beta version of Gallery 2 has just been released and a demonstration purposes site was set up to boast the features of this next generation of Gallery: interface language, tree structure navigation and nice flexible page layouts are only a few enhancement that catch the eye.

I am not too keen on the beta name though: “Flippin’ Sweet!“. Not something you can recommend to your boss…

There is a supposedly reliable Google updates list on the Web, though its retainers are not affiliated with Google so can only make predictions. Among the updates included in this list:

• Toolbar PageRank Update
• Google Directory Update
• Backlink Update
• Algorithm Update
• Toolbar Program Update

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

Some time the past I composed a little tool from various scripts to correct for the differences between Windows and Linux servers. To quote just the gist:

The Linux filesystem behaves differently from that of Windows. For example, Linux treats index.htm and INDEX.htm as if they are separate files; Windows does not.

In the logs, I repeatedly observe errors like the following (from half an hour ago):

[Tue Jul 12 05:48:11 2005] [error] ...
[client 207.46.98.35] File does not exist: ...
/home/schestow/public_html/guestbook/spam/

The correct URL is in fact /home/schestow/public_html/Guestbook/Spam/ (note case)

Performing a reverse DNS lookup, I discovered that MSNBot was the culprit. Its Windows-egocentric requests invoke errors again and again, making false positives and adding noise to the error logs. Phrased differently, whenever requesting non-existent pages (by manipulating their names), MSNBot flags errors which result in a chaotic mess (I view my error logs several time a day).

Are Microsoft intentionally tempering with Linux servers? Are Microsoft punishing us because we did not buy their expensive server software? That’s what it boils down to.

aving gathered statistics, I estimate that my Firefox theme adaptations had over 100 downloads from this domain. The more popular of the two themes is the Mac OS X clone (shown below). It can be downloaded or directly installed. Enjoy!

Note: this theme should be compatible with all platforms

Click image to see it full-sized

Martha Irvine of Associated Press writes about the price of telling too much over the Internet (via Yahoo):

…putting one’s life online can have a price. A few bloggers, for instance, have been fired for writing about work on personal online journals. And Maya Marcel-Keyes, daughter of conservative politician Alan Keyes, discovered the trickiness of providing personal details online when her discussions on her blog about being a lesbian became an issue during her father’s recent run for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois (he made anti-gay statements during the campaign)…

…Some also speculate that more scandalous blog entries — especially those about partying and dating exploits — will have ramifications down the road…

I have noticed a few bloggers who fear nothing they publish. One has to remember that blogs do not have to lead to personal discussions. This is perhaps one of the advantages of technical blogs where opinions expressed are about products or companies, seldom about individual people. The mentioning of names is still a true danger.