Incompetent Boobs

Wednesday, March 29th, 2006

This story simply astonishes me. Anyone who doesn’t know the difference between GET and DELETE has no business designing a web app for their kid’s lemonade stand, much less taking on a multi-month contract for the government. Not that I haven’t seen mistakes like this before, but what really gets my goat is that the government agency doubtless paid a huge amount of money to these morons to develop their site. Doubtless these mouth breathers had the necessary security clearances, and wore the right suits, and took the right people out to play golf. I’m sure the fact that they had no fucking clue how the Web works never entered anyone’s mind.
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Sticklers of Wikipedia

Wednesday, March 8th, 2006

One of my absolute favorite things about Wikipedia is one of the most trivial. When I see a minor spelling error, typo, or grammatical mistake, I can just go right in and fix it. No registration, no e-mail, no nothing. I do wish I could do it inline without even loading a separate page, just like I might fix a typo in a Word document I had open. However Wikipedia’s the easiest I’ve seen.

Call for Vote: Prices or No?

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

I’ve been playing with adding more Amazon affiliate links to this site (and eventually others) since so far that seems to be the only thing that makes any real money. (Google ads don’t even qualify as pocket money, and Yahoo’s even worse.)

There are a number of ways I can structure these ads. One option is to use plain pictures like these:
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Yahoo Ads Beta Flops; Moving Back to Google

Tuesday, February 28th, 2006

I agreed to participate in the beta for Yahoo Ads because they would let me put ads in the feeds, unlike Google; but it was clearly not ready. The targeted ads were incredibly poorly targetted compared to Google AdSense. Perhaps that was just a function of fewer advertisers. I don’t know. However there were two problems that were definitely Yahoo’s fault and convinced me it just isn’t as smart a company as Google:
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Spammers getting smarter

Wednesday, February 15th, 2006

The comment spammers are getting smarter. I had a pretty effective antispam system of moderating any comments that included two or more URLs. However recently I’ve noticed several comments that included zero or one URLs. (The zero-URL spams work by shoving the URL on the commenter.) Plus they aren’t showing the usual gibberish I was seeing in comment spam. They’ve got plausible generic content in the comments. So far the amount of spam isn’t crippling; but if it continues to get worse I may have to take more serious measures.

E-mailless for the Moment

Monday, February 6th, 2006

I’m in the process of restoring some email messages Thunderbird lost. While this is going on I have limited ability to send or receive e-mail. It’s amazing how much this restricts me. Every second thing I think of doing requires reading or sending e-mail to or from someone. I hope this is done soon.