CNN have published an insightful article on the rebound of big dot-com Web sites. Although their arguments seem convincing, many will remain skeptical. Scott Kessler is among the skeptics:

I’d hesitate to characterize this is as comparable to what was going on in the late 1990s,” said Scott Kessler, an equity analyst with Standard & Poor’s. “Not every Internet stock is doing well.

Picture from CNN

oogle results page (SERP‘s) have been unstable recently. This may have affected anyone using Google. It caused a great deal of distress to many Webmasters while others observed a significant, unexplainable surge in traffic. Unlike the many rumours, an article from WWW Coder draws a clearer picture:

Google is undergoing some of the most sweeping changes in its short, seven year history. As of next week, Google will have finished sorting what might be its largest algorithm shift ever as the final points of the 3.5 part Bourbon Update were installed last Monday. This update has been staggered into three and a half sections in order to avoid a massive amount of dislocation in established rankings as was seen in previous major updates. While changes stemming from the Bourbon Update have not actually manifested into a full reordering of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), many individual webmasters have reported fairly significant losses or gains in ranking over the past few days.

It is re-assuring to know that the folks at Google keep maintaining and improving their highly-ubiquitous search tool.

discovered this long-standing site with a large number of links to just about any emulator type for a variety of operating systems. The ones of interest to me were Palm, Super Nintendo and Megadrive emulators for Linux.

I then took screenshots of some favourite old games: Mario, Street Fighter and Sonic.

Life in Manchester involves passing by some worrying signs. Here are a couple that I grabbed a picture of:

I am slightly confused by the upside-down car, but I’d say these figures are terrible news

This one speaks for itself

The hard-drive peripheral in for the Playstation 3 will run Linux. This news is by no means surprising as Sony’s direct opponent in the realm of home gaming is Microsoft. This news item, as usual, opens the door to common jokes (snippet from my post at Slashdot):

Who wouldn’t buy the Playstation 3, even just to play a game that no-one can resist: compiling the Linux kernel. That sure can keep one up until 5 AM.

…

Salesman: Here you see the latest Xbox which renders a zillion polygons per second.

Customer: Does it come with gcc?

Salesman: Is that one of the latest patches?

Customer: *sign* Not interested…

Ever wondered how popular your first name was? Is it becoming less common as the years go by? Or is it on the rise? It takes only 5 seconds to find out.

Firefox and Thunderbird do not integrate well under Linux. In order to associate the mailto protocol with Thunderbird, follow the steps below:

• Download this small shell script and put it somewhere sensible in your hard-drive
• Change line 3 to include the path of your thunderbird directory where it was initially installed, e.g.:
  export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME="$HOME/Main/Programs/thunderbird"
• Open Firefox and enter the page about:config
• Add a new string; name it “”network.protocol-handler.app.mailto” and set its value to the full path of your new script, e.g. ~/scripts/tbmail.sh