Just checking the stats for YYZtech.ca, oddly they’ve been down this weekend. Since most of the site’s visitors are Canadian, I’m thinking, “What? is this everybody getting ready for the Grey Cup or something?” So much for Hockey Nation – or does that I should be looking for another downturn in the spring, about the time the Leafs start falling (apart)?
Well after running ZEE4 since about 2002, I’ve decided it’s finally time to get a server. Basically the high cost of semi-dedicated machine has been the major hurtle. Thanks to a 1970s-style Canadian dollar (means an automatic 2% discount on U.S. prices as of today) and general price drops in servers, it’s about time.
Well this summer’s project, Halifax-Restaurants.com was a bit of a disappointment (stillborn would be a bit cruel), mostly due to my unfamiliarity with the CakePHP framework I used as the underlying framework, I was surprised to see that it was actually starting to attract visitors from the Halifax area, according to Google Analytics.
That’s the good news. The bad is the time I have to work on it. Ideally, I’d like to re-write nearly everything about it, then fix up the layout, which is too ad-heavy, as opposed to content for me right now. I have a few ideas about how that can be improved, but the fact is, adding content is the biggest task right now.
Found this posting on the author’s experience with WiFi in Toronto and Montreal via the Wireless Toronto mailing list. While Toronto doesn’t come off so well, he promising a second posting on some of the good spots he’s found.
I’m always looking for good explanations of technical subjects. Over at CBC.ca there’s a good write-up on Bluetooth, the wireless protocol widely used in mobile phones for everything from wireless mics to file transfer.
On the topic of phones, there’s a new series starting on CBC.ca next week, read about it here while fuming over the slow pace of adoption of phones in Canada – case in point, Fido is just now rolling out a G3 service, nice Flash animation, but we’ve got one phone for now.
The CBC series will will be hosted over at http://www.cbc.ca/technology/ and feature a number of industry people from Research In Motion co-founder Mike Lazaridis to Sir Richard Branson. Should be good.
Somewhere doing the day the name came to me: WeirdPro, kind of sounds like WordPro – ok, seriously dating myself here, but I swear I was about 9 when this was sota (State Of The Art). What it references is much older, the phrase “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” which is, of course, from the late Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing?… Johnny Dep?)
Anyways, this is going to be an occasional entry of lists of the weirdest, you can’t make this up stuff – kind of like what you can say about HotDocs - documentaries about these characters that if someone wrote them, no-one would say they’re beleavable.
So, now it’s 10:40pm, the Second Cup is closing and I’ve run out of time – so no list for today.
I caught this article a few days ago on something similar to what I got on YYZtech.ca a few weeks ago: spam without any urls. The author has two theories: 1) they are trying to train automatic spam filters to allow certain words – that will be later used from spamming, and/or 2) they want to get the e-mail addresses where the spam was sent from white listed, again, to use for “real” spamming later on.
The last few weeks I’ve been selling off a bunch of older titles I had laying around (instead of working on this blog), one of them that almost went off to the local BMV was PHP 5 In Practise; Fortunately, I passed on that one and tonight, while trying to finish off a tag-generator for Halifax-Restaurants.com, it saved my tail at least once. When I originally reviewed it, I was impressed with the amount of material in it- it’s still one of the best books out there when you’re looking for something like- “how do I remove white-spaces from a string” and such basic but necessary things.
I’m sitting in a local Second Cup dashing (ok, bit faster than crawling) through my TTD (Things To Do) list, fueled by cold coffee (yes, more caffee – same price) and I’m thinking about the “Digital Bedouin” (so termed by a U.S. writer Dan Fost in his article WHERE NEO-NOMADS’ IDEAS PERCOLATE, written a few months back) and I’m wondering what it means- kind of like the team cybercrime or auto-crime (yes, apparently when cars where new, criminals who used cars where refered by their tool, much like there is crime and there is cybercrime – I give it another 10-15 years before it’s just called “crime” except for the old folks at CTV – yes, they still show temperatures in Fahrenheit, what 20 years on?).
Anyways, I’m thinking that it’s one of those things that people will just start doing without really thinking of it as anything special- go to a university campus and you’ll see students working on laptops far from the classroom – in a few years some of them will be working far from the boardroom- hopefully with newer laptops. Doubt most of them will describe themselves as Digital Bedouins as much as anyone called themselves a “computer user” past 1990.
In the mean-time, there’s a few good links over at Slashdot, ShannonClark, or Going Bedouin at Web Worker Dail if you’re looking to get into it anyways.
Well summer is coming to a close and I realize that I have a lot of books to finish reviewing – some of them have been sitting around since late June.
So far I’ve finished:
Teach yourself Flash C3 in 24 hours
next up, a book on building photo equipment and another on Photoshop, CS3.
ZEE4YYZtech.ca