Archive for October, 2006

I’ve heard numerous people complain about how outrageous the Windows Vista prices will be. It seems NewEgg is offering a great promotion to get people to buy XP. If you buy Windows Media Center right now for $110 dollars, when Vista comes out you will get a free upgrade to Vista Premium edition. The better version of Windows you buy now, the better version of Vista you will get later. Quite a nice deal and a great incentive to upgrade.

With the hype of Mozilla releasing their version 2.0 of the popular browser Firefox, their servers are under heavy load. Alexa is already reporting 4 times the normal amount of website hits as usual.

Currently the .com version of Mozilla is rated at 105, while its .org version is at 151. Normally firefox.com is rated at around 11 thousand, while this week’s average is 5.8k and the days average is 2.5k. Still huge jumps in traffic, with all the devoted Firefox fans :).

Mozilla is urging large websites to not link directly to one mirror because the bandwidth costs for them would sky rocket, or it would crash them. Specifically mentioned were websites like Digg and Slashdot. Mozilla’s links use load balancing so not any one FTP server takes a large beating. Along with the new browser is a fresh new website which appears to be following the new web2.0 look. We won’t be able to see the Google trend graphs till the end of the month, because according to their FAQ they are updated monthly.

With the ever increasing popularity of social networking websites such as MySpace.com, more and more jobs are starting to search for the dirt on you. Everything you’ve written on your blog, myspace, or even posted on a flickr account is available to the whole internet. What you’ve posted years ago could come back to haunt you.

Meet Reputation Defender, a service claiming to “destroy” all traces of what you’ve posted in the past. Their service claims to work on MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, Bebo, Flickr, and YouTube. It doesn’t go into detail on how they do this however. They say they will scrape the internet looking for every trace of you, and present it in a monthly report.

To DESTROY, at your command, all inaccurate, inappropriate, hurtful, and slanderous information about you and/or your child using our proprietary in-house methodology.

The site is more geared toward parents protecting their child, or themselves. Some situations it would be used for are applying for a job, a school, or meeting others online. A 6 month membership is going to cost $15.95. Seems like a fair price to pay to dig up some dirt on your worst enemy ;)

Shortly after the release if IE7, Mozilla has released the final version of Firefox 2.0 today. While not officially released on Mozilla’s website the 2.0 final build is uploaded to their FTP server. It’s scheduled to be “officially” released on Tuesday; technically today as I am posting this at 3:40 AM. Thanks to CyberNetNews for the code to download it using their load balancing system. The final build doesn’t appear to be any different than RC3, however it has a much nicer feel than the 1.5x series.

Enjoy!

That’s just what TWERQ is calling their new search engine. One of the main features they boast about is tabbed searching.

Upon making a search on TWERQ, you have a few options of how searches are made. You can use two ++ signs to open two new tabs. For instance searching for Ajax++PHP would open two tabs one searching for Ajax, and one for PHP. You can also do Ajax+PHP\\tutorial which would append the word “tutorial” to Ajax and PHP in the search tabs. For a full list of all their commands you can see their site. Or you can take the lazy route and watch their video tutorial. All results found on your searches will be relevant of course, because it’s just using Google’s search. Optionally if you are used to Yahoo, you can configure it to use it. TWERQ will open the search tabs you had open since you’ve last used it; even if you close your browser. This is because they use cookies to store some information. You can drag and drop the search tabs to order them in any specific way you want, along with your RSS feeds as well. The evolution of searching, probably not; but very cool and useful nonetheless.