hosting

seriously, never use global internet solutions.

January 1st, 2005

Canonical URLs

So it would seem that one of my sites NoSlang.com recently got hit by the so called Canonical URL bug.

Some of you may remember a while ago when MSN was posting a PageRank of 2? This wasn’t a mean Google joke, it was a case of people linking to both http://www.msn.com AND http://msn.com (without the www).

Since it’s possible (although a bad idea) to actually have 2 different sites on those urls, Googlebot got confused and thought it was 2 different sites with the same content. Thus, the pagerank of the www suffered, and the non-www was seen as a new site (so no pagerank).

This happened to Noslang.com in that it’s main page had a 0 pagerank (unless you went to /index.php of the non-www then it had a 3), but all the sub pages had a pagerank of 5.

January 1st, 2005

Give Her Fetus a Ticket

A woman in Arizona is trying to avoid a ticket for driving in the carpool lane by claiming that her unborn fetus counts as a person, thus she’s entitled to the carpool lane.

Ignoring all the neo right wing conservative christian arguments, this is ridiculous.

The law was intended for licensed drivers. I believe that if your 6 year old is in the car with you, that shouldn’t count either. It’s not like your kid can drive their own car. It’s carpool for a reason.

If the court does agree that the fetus is a person however, they should promptly issue it a ticket for not wearing it’s own seatbelt.

January 1st, 2005

Is Freedom Worth Dying For?

Germany just passed a new law that says all telecommunication companies must store all information to be searched at a later date by the government to help prevent terrorism.

This includes all Internet, Cell Phone, Land Line, SMS, text messages, etc. Anything that has a signal that travels through a medium that’s not yours is now recorded.

Slashdot says it’s 1984 in Europe, which begs the question: can you buy Lyrica over the counter Is Freedom Worth Dying For?

A long time ago, our forefathers thought it was, but I can’t say the same is true of today’s society. We’re willing, if not eager to give up any of our freedoms to prevent a possible terrorist incident.

You’re cowards, all of you.

Since when are our individual lives more important than the ideals our founding fathers fought for? If Jefferson knew we were giving up so many rights in exchange for a false sense of security against “terrorism” he’d have a stroke.

With freedom comes consequences. A long time ago people viewed these concequences as neccessary for the good of the whole. It’s because of them we can work the jobs we choose, live where we want, worship the Gods we choose, and think what we want to think. People died horrible deaths, but because of them society continued to prosper.

These ideals are slowly being challenged however, and in a self righteous bid to “protect the children” we’re actually condeming them to an Orwellian future.

Stand up for your rights people. The terrorists don’t need to attack our freedoms anymore, we’re doing a pretty good job of destroying them ourselves.

January 1st, 2005

Dear DTE Energy

Please stop calling my phone.

I never wanted to give you a phone number, but you wouldn’t turn on my lights without one.

You woke me up at 7:am today to have a recording tell me I can pay a constant bill every month by signing up for your new service.

I don’t want to pay a constant bill. I want to pay exactly what I owe, no more no less.

You then called me at 4pm to let me know that you have a “direct payment” option that ties right into my checking account.

Couldn’t you have just tucked this information into my monthly bill so I can promptly throw it out? Did you really need to wake me up at 7am, AND bother me during a meeting at work?

I tried calling back, but it was busy.

Also, this “gas prices are rising due to lost profits” thing… let me explain something to you.

If I say “I want to 500 million in sales this year” and end up only hitting 300 million, that extra 200 million is NOT a loss. (RIAA pay attention)

Projected shortcomings do not qualify as a “loss”. They may be a failed opportunity and imply business problems, but they’re not a loss.

If my operating costs are 400 million, and I only make 300 million, that’s a loss!

According to your latest figures, you’re still making more money than you pay out in operating costs. That means you’re in the black. Sure, the profits aren’t as big as you would have liked, but it’s NOT a loss.

Raising rates due to this “phantom” loss makes no sense at all. What if other companies followed your ideas?

“Dear consumer – We sold xboxes this year at a low price of $149 expecting consumers to buy an average of 7 games, since you only bought 2 games this year, we need to charge you $200 to make up for our loss”

“Dear sir, when I diagnosed you with cancer I expected that it would be life threatening and that you’d be recieving treatments from me for the next few years. Now that your cancer is in remission, I need to make up for my losses, so your son’s school physical will be billed at $25,000 this year. Thank You.”

Get with the picture DTE. If you didn’t own a monopoly on the energy market, you’d have been out of business a long time ago.

January 1st, 2005

Google Homepage API

The Google Homepage (google.com/ig) API was just opened up, and I managed to make a nice little NoSlang Translator for it. More info at the slang blog

Coming soon: Snake and Rock Paper Scissor, and Hopefully TextMemos.

any other ideas?

January 1st, 2005

Bowl Time

It’s college football Bowl Time (almost)

anyway, I’m struggling with my pool this year. We’ve got to do it by the spread, and rank each one of our 18 picks for 1 to 18 points.

Here’s what I’ve got prelimnary (based only on my gut instinct).

Any feedback would be great:

Here’s what I’ve got. Leave feedback in comments.

January 1st, 2005

oh btw, I read your email

Analytic programs like Google Analytics or Resultrak are great.

Thanks to them, I can now read your email.

Seeing that I got a hit from a springdaleschools website, I decided to look at the URL that it came from. With 1 click inside my Google Analytics program for my website I was able to read this person’s email.

Granted, you can’t read it now (or I wouldn’t have posted this)

Examine the following URL (it won’t work)

http://mail.springdaleschools.org/WorldClient.dll?Session=CTRXMFB&View=Message&Number=2422&Page=1

See how it has the session ID right in it? This is a BAD idea. Her session was still active (she was still logged in) while I was browsing my logs, and BOOM.. I unknowingly hijacked her browsing session. The computer system thought I was her. I was logged in and everything.

Developers: Stop storing sessionIDs in URLS, especially for confidential information. This email just happened to say “check out this website”, but it could have been “here are our projected 4th quarter earnings.”

Just something to think about next time you click a link in your email.

January 1st, 2005

Catsup is NOT a non-renewable resource

Remember when I said I’d be posting alot more? Hows 3 posts in one day (so far) for you?

Yes I at one time used to work fast food, so I do know that giving away ketchup when the customer doesn’t ask for it is wasteful.

But when they do ask for it, give them some!

When confronted with the proverbial “can I have some catsup packets?” question today, the portly register jockey responded by looking off into the distance and handing me 1 packet.

Of course, I followed up this engaging conversation with “I’m going to need a LOT more than that”. To which, without missing a beat this plumper dug deep under the counter, and handed me a whopping 2 more.

3 catsup packets will not work for a burger (ordered sans catsup so I can put my own on), large fry, and chicken nuggets. It’s a fact.

Anyway, now that I’m done being fat for today, it’s time to get back to work.

January 1st, 2005

Plagiarism

Pla • gia • rize v. -to use and pass off (the ideas or writings of another) as one’s own. (from dictionary.com)

Notice I gave my source? Everytime you take something from another author you’re required to credit them; even if that author is a website. If I hadn’t, it might have been one of the weirdest cases of Plagiarism ever.

I was recently doing a presentation at work about the power of using article syndication to get traffic to your websites. I searched Google for a recent article I had written called “Does Google have a Sandbox?”. (if you Google that you should see about 100 results for my article)

Anyway, the first article I had clicked on was credited to a person named Kritika, and my biography had been replaced with a link to a Porn Pills and Poker site. Needless to say it had killed my presentation.

After sending a cease and desist letter to this website, I found out that the “Kritika” article was in fact on a bunch of websites. How could this be?

I used a syndicate called GoArticles.com to get my article out there, and it worked rather well. It seems this Kritika person just copied my article, change a few words, (mainly my URLs and names with his) and re-submitted it to GoArticles.

The sites getting the content had no idea it was stolen (sorry to those of you I contacted).

Anyway, Kritika has now been banned from GoArticles, so there is a good side to the story.

But seriously people, free content IS free. Just make sure you give credit where credit is due.

January 1st, 2005