This has been one of the most interesting things I have seen for along while – the practice of driving around with a laptop and suitable software to map wifi access points – has been known for a long time and has been dubbed war driving.
Some enterprising Geeks have gone to the next stage of this and lauched such a system atop a rocket to cover 50 square miles at one time.
Interestingly enough I am doing couple of Cisco courses this year – Wireless lan design and wireless security this hear at the local college – which does have an aero space programme so watch this space ;-)
In a twist on the Chuck Norris Facts meme some enterprising crypto geek has done a Bruce Schneier Facts site
with such gems as …
“Bruce Schneier was to star in a movie called “S-boxes on a plane” but the studio feared it would be too scary for the audience, so it went a different direction.”
well it made me smile ;-)
Joomla (an OS CMS) is not my favorite piece of software to work with – and out of the box runs like a dog.
I have been working on speeding up on of our clients sites that runs off Joomla – and found that.
1 Turning on cacheing in site->global config
2 Turn off stats again on the site->global config menu.
3 For all of your modules enable caching (if the module suports it)
4 Use image ready(or other graphics software) to reduce the size of any images
you can also try turning on Gzip page compression ( this may help it depends where the bottle neck is)
I am going to look at the database as well but is probaly the usual dogs breakfast that most os mysql databases are so I am not hopefull of finding any speed ups there.
Yahoo(tm) has had a very basic sitemap functionality for a while now – last week they launched a new and improved tool called sitemap explorer
Which whils’t not as Functional as a Google ™ sitemap it now looks like Yahoo(tm) will be giving webmasters and site owners some usefull information about there sites.
Sitemaps don’t get your site indexed quicker but the do give you invaluabel info about what the search engines view of your site is.
The google map diagnosed a realy nasty problem on a new site I took over the other week I wont link to them to spare their blushes.
Just as Google joined the elite club of Brands that have become so pervasive that are used as a generic term (Hoover Asprin etc)
Various Papers marked the occasion of “google” had entered Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary(the equivalent to the OED in TH uk)
You might have though that Google tm would be happy that they have so trounced the opposition – but no various papers have got snarky letters from Googles Trademark bots^h^h^h^H lawyers.
Some of the suggested correct ways to use are “Interesting”
Appr opriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party.
Inappropriate: I googled that hottie.
Interesting that a company that’s banging people with the big corporate stick over its trademark should use such “ill advised terminology”
Google make a huge play on how hardcore their recruitment process though from the outside it does seem to be more about being able to memorize language specs and to discus OO in a way that would make Jacques Derrida squeal with pleasure. Maybe they sould pay more attention to real world issues you know that big room with the blue ceiling ;-)
Google has won a biding war for the right to serve adverts on myspace. The deal is worth approximately $900 million – but given the revenue that Google will make from adsense should more than make up for that.
Having said that a large proportion of my space user base are not old enough to have credit cards – and there is anecdotal evidence that college students and older myspace users migrate to facebook or other more “grown up” social networking sites so not all advertisers may feel inclined to display adds on myspace (and I am fairly sure as eggs is eggs that before 6months is out there will be a moral panic about in appropriate adds – probably stirred up by the usual suspects and I cant see the daily mail passing up a chance to have a pop at Murdoch.)
Given that the average myspace site could charitably be described (adapting a quote from a royal courtier) as “Ugly, Ugly, Ugly”. It will be interesting – as Google checks if a page that is going to serve addsense adverts for quality – to see which pages on my space carry adds – and for what advertisers
