Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

I must be dreaming…

Microsoft’s Photosynth Technology Preview includes support for Firefox in the form of an plugin. It looks like it installs via an extension (which improves user experience by a factor of 10). The plugin is nppsynth.dll for anyone who is curious. Awesome to see MS support alternative browsers.

I’m off to bed for real now.

Interesting to see that after a Blogger was sued over comments posted a blog, there is a federal court ruling that pretty much says that’s not allowed.

Something tells me, if a kid clicks on a blog spam link that goes to a porn site, you can still get 40 years in prison.

Spam is easy these days, there is enough filtering technology available. But legitimate, yet vile comments still can sneak by. It’s hard to police sites at times. We don’t all have the time to sit and watch them. I do my best but every so often, I do believe one may slip by that if I had thought longer, I would perhaps have moderated.

Google has started providing notification before it lets you visit a search result known to contain badware. It’s done in partnership with StopBadware.org, who has a list of sponsors including: Google, Lenovo, and Sun Microsystems.

So far the feature seems pretty good. I’m sure there will be a few C&D’s trying to get this feature taken down, now that some companies have found their revenue model shattered. To help prevent accidental blacklisting they have been trying to contact websites that are blacklisted so they can try and fix it (should they want to). Hopefully that will eliminate/minimize any errors.

I’d venture most people stumble upon these sites one of a few ways:

1. Spam, or it’s instant messaging counterpart Spim. Linking to dubious websites in hopes of generating revenue at a computer owners expense.
2. Search results. The prime situation where a web surfer visits sites out of their ordinary traffic patterns and may fall victim to such practices.

Google just took a big bite out of #2. Gmail/Yahoo/Microsoft/AOL have been working hard on #1. That should really help make the web a safer place… until the next menace takes the web by storm.

An interesting review of Norton 360 was posted by CNet. Overall the review was very positive, they seem to like it. Interesting to me was:

We also found that Norton 360 is optimized for Internet Explorer only, and not Firefox and Opera browsers. It could be said that Symantec realizes that Internet Explorer users need more protection, but it would be nice to use the antiphishing feature in Norton 360 on Firefox or Opera. Of the three super suites, only McAfee supports Firefox; none support Opera.

I’d be curious to know if support is planned through an extension or not. They could potentially leverage existing infrastructure to do the job quite nicely. I’m not sure if anyone has used this functionality to date. As far as I’m aware nobody has. Not even PhishTank.

I’m still not sure if Norton 360 is really a product I’d be interested in. I use Norton AV, and despite a few small things, it’s a pretty solid product. I’m not really sure I see the added stuff in 360 as something beneficial. But I still have a little while on my subscription for the year, so I don’t have to decide just yet.

This is a great page on RAND() in MySQL. Very nice breakdown of how to gain performance with one of the biggest “it should be simple but it isn’t” problems in DBMS’s.

The Lenovo Blogs are just fantastic examples of corporate blogging. A great example is this rather candid post on Junk in Preloads. There isn’t much that’s really “new” in the post, but the amount of honesty in it is somewhat refreshing. My favorite quote is simply:

Now let’s be honest. We load up this software because we receive money from the vendors to do so. You as a consumer are much more likely to buy the full or upgraded version of a program if you already have it preinstalled. This is worth real money to PC vendors. On the other hand, it works both ways. It is this revenue from the software that helps fuel the PC price war. You all directly benefit from this practice. Without it, PC prices would be more than a few dollars higher.

How many would expect a PC vendor to say something like that in the past? They also seem to be using Flickr.

Dell is now getting in on the action as well with it’s own blog.

Still no true Apple blog. People have become desperate enough for a blogging presence that even Apple’s age-old Hot News has been referred to as a blog a few times. Most recently in regards to Steve Jobs Thoughts on Music. One day…

Since 9/19/2006 when I last emptied my Junk folder, my personal email address has 1.65GB (yes, gigabytes) of Spam/Viruses in it. That is in my opinion a sign of a serious problem.

Oh yea, a few weeks ago, we began auto-rejecting email from certain blacklisted servers, which drastically cut down on spam. And still it almost hit the 2GB mark.

Imagine how much wasted electricity spam filtering costs due to consuming CPU cycles and hard drive I/O. Not to mention the financial cost.

On a side note, for Thunderbird users:

I like to keep a mail archive, I do so using the trash. I just don’t empty. But I don’t want my “Junk” in there. So what I do is periodically delete it.

Edit: See comment #1 for a better way, or for my way, read on.

First close Thunderbird. In your profile, find your Mail folder, then your mail server, and you’ll see a file called Junk. Delete it and create a blank. Or in any Unix OS:

rm -r Junk
touch Junk

Then open up Thunderbird, right click on the Junk folder (will still show # of items, though none exist), select “Compact”. It will soon reset to 0. Done. Nothing mixed in your trash. Perhaps a nice extension would be a hard delete, one that didn’t go to the trash, but just wiped the contents away.