That’ll keep everyone away for a few hours

O anyone who wonders why I have not posted in 24 hours or so, I am working on a new Mandrake Linux machine at home (photo). The work primarily involves setup, customisation and data migration. The nature of my ‘disappearance’ is symbolised by the amusing picture above.

I have been settings everything up so that I can seamlessly work from all locations, including a Ubuntu machine (photo) at work and the SuSE machine (photo #1, photo #2)¹ at the University. In this state of affairs, I can handle data quite uniformly, keeping files and settings in a single place. I also need to work on installing some peripherals like scanner, digital camera and a Palm handheld. Linux on the desktop has made so much progress recently. Installation is, quite frankly, easier than that of Windows, assuming no prior experience with Windows. It is no wonder that Dell is beginning to ship pre-installed Linux machines, much as I predicted a several days ago and also mentioned briefly some months ago.

¹ I’d post pictures of my children when I am old enough to have a family. In the mean time, may computers be equivalent to kids ? I’ll take the risk making that perverse ,very sarcastic statement!

ULTIPLE sources I have come across are citing the same article from Reuters (first John Dvorak, now Slashdot). The facts are truly unbelievable. If it had not come from Reuters, I would not have quoted it. Judge for yourself:

An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building.

…

“We tested his clothes with a static electricity field meter and measured a current of 40,000 volts, which is one step shy of spontaneous combustion, where his clothes would have self-ignited,” Barton said.

“Googlebombing” is the term used to describe a situation where inappropriate SERP‘s get returned due to intentional (hence unnatural) intervention with the Google algorithms. Anchor text of links (text in the vicinity of a hyperlink) gets heavily used for classification of pages and this observation can lead to overt misuse.

I can recall that in the past, due to large amount of poker-related spam, bloggers decided to link en masse to the Wikipedia page on poker, which in turn made it a prime search engine result for the term “poker”. Therein, poker and gambling were discouraged as well as the practices they use to promote themselves, destroying cyberspace in the process.

More recently, there has been a lot of talk about binding between the term “failure” and the White House, in particular George Bush’s official page. The voices of witnesses have grown loud enough to justify a post in the Google Blog.

If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We’ve received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I’d like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns…

My vague recollection tells me that several years ago, Google humour got involved when searching for the term “weapons of mass destruction”.

This afternoon, as I was watching over the front desk at work, I had no alterrnative but to use an operating system called Microsoft Windows. It did not have a good browser installed. I once installed Firefox on it, yet somebody insisted on removing that ‘spyware’. In that browser that ended up using, my site looked corrupted at times. There were no tabs either and when opening a context menu over a link, I lacked the ability to use key bindings, which would open a link in a new window. The experience was a very frustrating one. I felt imprisoned for that long time period, namely half an hour.

Most annoyingly, at the top of my Web log, I noticed Google AdSense advertisements, which usually get blocked in my Firefox installations owing to some nifty CSS. The advert I got served in my own site occupied two AdSense slots that clearly stated:

Linux versus Windows

Windows performs better than Linux according to independent studies

Guess where the link pointed? It pointed to Microsoft’s Get the Facts Campaign. I took no screenshot as the process is rather laborious under windows: print screen, paste in paint.exe, crop, then save.

Let me clarify a few facts:

• AdSense is Google
• Google is competing with Microsoft whether they admit that or not
• Google uses Linux only and runs Linux servers
• AdSense should preferably be kind to my visitors, not drive them away
• AdSense should reflect on site content, not oppose it
• Visitors seek the truth. Look again at the link above

Now, why would Google have my site point to that garbage? Can it not sense the Microsoft bashing that is contained heavily in a decent proportion of the pages? Are they trying to make me, as their client, promote false propaganda that feeds the same lies which I strongly oppose and detest? If Microsoft are allowed to infiltrate, by the means of money (verging the notion of “bribery”), a site like mine, then how can their deceitful campaign ever reach an end? Linux bashing on my own turf?

My writings are rather blunt and honest. I feel rather disappointed and filled with mixed feelings about AdSense, which can be outrageous at times, although not voluntarily so.

previosuly mentioned one site that was using my GPL‘d theme.

Further on that particular aspect, somebody in Panama bought schestowizt [sic.] dot com only a few days ago. Should I feel flattered as my site is only 13 months old? Can this registration be an attempt to ‘absorb’ IBL‘s from some misspellings? I continue to wonder, but I came accoss an article titled “Para-Sites that Live Off Misspellings of Bigger, Better Sites” Just to clarify, my family name is very rare so it could not have been a coinidence.

A quick whois.net record lookup returns:

Registrant:
   Unasi Inc. (SCHESTOWIZT-COM-DOM)
   Galerias 3
   Zona 5, Panama 5235
   Panama
   +1.3094067818
   +1.3094067818
   info@domaincar.com
   
   Domain Name: SCHESTOWIZT.COM
   Status: PROTECTED

Administrative Contact:
   Unasi Inc. info@domaincar.com
   Galerias 3
   Zona 5, Panama 5235
   Panama
   +1.3094067818
   Fax- +1.3094067818

Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
   Unasi Inc. info@domaincar.com
   Galerias 3
   Zona 5, Panama 5235
   Panama
   +1.3094067818
   Fax- +1.3094067818

Record last updated on 13-Sep-2005.
Record expires on 13-Sep-2006.
Record created on 13-Sep-2005.

Domain servers in listed order:

Name Server: NS1.MY-NAME-SERVER.COM
Name Server: NS2.MY-NAME-SERVER.COM
Name Server: NS3.MY-NAME-SERVER.COM

As I compose this item, I am told by Trevor from nntp://alt.www.webmaster that the same guys snatched a domain that he had dropped. I suppose it is indeed just a case of so-called ‘para-sites’, which I consider to be flattery.

I actually noticed that my site keeps climbing in Google quite rapidly. For example, a search for ‘roy‘ had me ranked 248^th in June, 151^st in July, 99^th in August and now I appear in the top 50! Google sourcers have recently shown some interest in me; specifically, the position of System Administration/Software Engineer that maintains the google.com site. I wonder if I am permitted to blog about this. After all, I am still employed by the University…

EVERAL months ago I read about a Macromedia (now acquired by Adobe) manager who was very much afraid from a Microsoft response to Flash. A response as such was the only thing that kept him awake at night.

The Windows maker is now releasing Sparkle, which is a Flash equivalent, striving to become a ‘Flash Killer’. While there are many people who would be glad to see Flash die¹, they would not like to see a replacement, especially not one which suffers from poor cross-platform compatibility.

My guesstimate is that Microsoft will stick to their aggressive nature in order to penetrate the market, nudging Flash aside in the process. With control over so many computers, they will be able to manipulate user preferences, exploiting an existing monopoly. Does anyone still remember Lotus? It is only one among dozens of examples. Moreover, having faced proprietary formats like wma and wmv (audio and video respectively), I know that they aim to maim competing platforms (as a side-effect perhaps). Tools that promote such formats are provided by default along with bundled software for Windows users. It is common knowledge that tools which get bundled with the operating system promote proliferation by serendipity.

What are the implications to those who snub Flash already? Some of us will not need to block not only Flash, but also Sparkle, which means a bloat in terms of plug-ins. It is worrying that a Flash equivalent will soon be bound to a vendor of a platform. Very scary it must seem that the target for Sparkle output is the open Web. That is when media serves as a promotion for the operating system while crippling the opposition. I, for one, fear such technologies.

As regards unoriginality of the name, would it not be similar to renaming their Web browser Firedog? The words flash and sparkle are almost analogous (Macromedia Fireworks comes to mind too). This is by no means the first time Microsoft are copying names, slogans, or graphics.

Related item: Microsoft to Fight PDF’s

¹ Along the lines of “Flash is evil”; confer Jakob Nielson, a Web usability authoritative figure.

A heat map showing regions where high volumes of spam come from

WO sites have recently been Slashdotted, both of which provide ‘spam maps’:

• Mailinator (jump directly to map) – an almost real-time spam map, which is refreshed every few minutes and builds upon the Google Maps API
• TrustedSource Portal – seems like a service surprisingly similar to service above, which was Slashdotted only two weeks beforehand

Was there truly really a point in recommending two tools which do practically (or roughly) the same thing? The two tools are quite similar, but one could argue that they complement one another.