Category: IT

Happy Birthday Google…

Is it me, has it really been only been 7 years? Seems longer than that to me? For some Google is kinda new.

Another thing I’ve noticed recently is that to me at least Google is becoming less effective.

Simple searches are yielding less results than they used to. More and more links go to sites that mean nothing or are unrelated. Often blatantly misleading.

I know there are hundreds of thousands of anti-Google sites out there just to mess with Google and their results, and it’s really starting to annoy me.

I’m also getting tired of reading how Microsoft if scared to death of Google. M$, simply build a better search engine if you can, if not do what you do best, pony up and buy Google 😉 or simply steal the technology and call it your own innovation.

The Archnemesis to Britannica? Check out The Uncyclopedia a Wiki based encylopedia that anyone can edit and contribute to. Full of misinformation, satire, and lies.

Slashdotted on September 19th.

If you like gadgets and tech goodies or are in the market for a computer you need to watch Bens Bargains

It’s 90% tech stuff but there are other usefull items too. Last year I had 10 cases of water delivered to my house for less than $40.00 Yes, 10 cases, 24 bottles in a case, 16 oz bottles, delivered for less than $40.00

Watch the rebates though, some sites and stores are just plain bad about sending money back.

WordPress and Gallery Integration.

You’d think I was trying to put a man on the moon. What should be a simple task of searching for a simple plug in, installing it and using it would be what, a 20 minute job at best?

Nope.

Word press is great. Really nice web/blogging software. Dave (stacys.org) is using the same package. He’s also using a plug-in called exhibit.

Simple, install it, activate it and viola’. It appears to work, sort of, but you can’t attach pictures. At least not here. So I spent about an hour moving my blog from \blog to the root just in case that was messing it up. No luck.

I shouldn’t have to fix someone else’s PHP, stuff like this should be plug and play.

So I go digging and find Gallery. What an awesome package! I do a quick search, there seems to be about a half dozen plug-ins for it. Great.

I spend about an hour setting it up, loading up a few photos. Then grab a plug in or two for testing. Well #!#$# none of them are updated for Gallery 2.0 which stores the thumbnails in the database. This is dumb.

Don’t do that, or give me an option to turn it off. I don’t want all that binary thumbnail data in my database. I don’t want or need to put the burden of that on MySQL. What are these people thinking?

MOST home users, most home hacks, and tech weenies are going to use what ever left over hardware we have laying around to put our servers together for stuff like this. For our family websites. Not everyone will have high end hardware to serv up a bazillion binary images out of our MySQL databases.

Dudes, stop.

Oh, and I still don’t have easy, post a photo while blogging integration.