Archives for January 2003

Ideas.. ideas..

Activity Log. About a week ago I started keeping an activity log on the Web. It details what Iâve done and plan· [Aaron Swartz: The Weblog]

I haven’t yet read his testimony, and will do later tonight, but this reads and looks impressive.

And I thought everything was all hunky-dory over there?

Blix Tells Security Council That Iraq’s Cooperation Is Limited. Hans Blix delineated a long list of problems relating to his ability to adequately ascertain the state of Iraq’s arms program. By Timothy L. O’brien. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

This is why I’m glad I did my own upgrades.. I can upgrade when I want…

Upgrade my servers? Yeah, right.. In software engineering, laziness is a positive attribute. If one can accomplish the same task in 3 lines of code instead of 30, a good engineer opts for the 3-line version. That’s why libraries of code are so popular. Engineers… [Michael J. Radwin’s blog]

I hope the President can make the case that needs to be made – the way that he did ten days after September 11th…

State of Union message to focus on Iraq [CNN]

Kmart reports evidence of wrongdoing [CNN]

Apple, in fact, is already doing this.

I’m doing this on my humor sites, and soon on my other sites as well.  It’s a great way to keep your users interested.

John Rhodes: “Why not use RSS feeds to keep customers aware of new products and services?” [Scripting News]

A Google Win in SearchKing Case. In SearchKing v. Google the judge has denied SearchKing’s request for preliminary injuction. In other words, SearchKing asked for their PageRank to be put back to where it was while the trial was being held, and the judge said no. LawMeme has the full story, including several interesting quotes from the judge’s dedcision. The author has an interesting thought in the comments:Let’s step over into Bizarro world, where Badgle, the leading search engine, is run by Dr. Evil. Badgle uses familiar algorithms to rank pages, except that whenever its engineers find a page they don’t like, they manually drop it down a hundred pages in the search results. And, interestingly enough, the only pages Badgle doesn’t like are those that praise Austin Powers. Thus, when you run a Badgle search on “Austin Powers,” you get back only pages making fun of his bad teeth. Whenever someone wonders why the leading Austin Powers fan page has a low ranking and asks Badgle what’s going on. Badgle replies that the page’s operator “was engaged in behavior that would lower the quality of Badgle’s search results.” Would this scenario change your point of view? Maybe not, but I suspect that there are many people who support Google whole-heartedly in this lawsuit, but who wouldn’t be so willing to support Badgle’s actions.So this decision could have much farther-reaching effects than whether search engines can demote the PageRank of “spam kings”. Stay tuned…. [Google Weblog]