Regular readers will know that I'm a fan of WordPress, and in fact I use it on all my blogs.
With WordPress 2.0 came the Akismet plug-in, designed to catch and prevent spam from making it to your comments and ergo your blog posts. It is exceedingly effective - on just one of my sites, I trap about 300-400 comments a day, and over 6,500 over the course of the last three months.
Akismet is a network enabled verification/checking system that shares information about marked spam with a central server. As well as improving the quality of the spam filter, it also means that they can get spam statistics for all of the Akismet enabled sites that use the service.
Regular readers will know that I'm a fan of WordPress, and in fact I use it on all my blogs.
With WordPress 2.0 came the Akismet plug-in, designed to catch and prevent spam from making it to your comments and ergo your blog posts. It is exceedingly effective - on just one of my sites, I trap about 300-400 comments a day, and over 6,500 over the course of the last three months.
Akismet is a network enabled verification/checking system that shares information about marked spam with a central server. As well as improving the quality of the spam filter, it also means that they can get spam statistics for all of the Akismet enabled sites that use the service.
Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of when I started blogging here at ComputerWorld.
So this week, I'm going to be doing a combination of looking back at some of my past posts, composing some thoughts on how the computer market has changed in that year, and looking forward to what might be happening over the next.
To document what's changing this week otherwise though is much simpler - the T2000 is going back. I really don't want to send it back, because of all the machines I have had on test it is the one I have most enjoyed simply 'playing' with.
I don't mean playing in terms of games, but I do mean in terms of letting my imagination, thoughts and applications run wild on the box. I've tried all sorts of things, from database benchmarks and full applications, right down to simple processing tasks and even the distributed.net client.
Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of when I started blogging here at ComputerWorld.
So this week, I'm going to be doing a combination of looking back at some of my past posts, composing some thoughts on how the computer market has changed in that year, and looking forward to what might be happening over the next.
To document what's changing this week otherwise though is much simpler - the T2000 is going back. I really don't want to send it back, because of all the machines I have had on test it is the one I have most enjoyed simply 'playing' with.
I don't mean playing in terms of games, but I do mean in terms of letting my imagination, thoughts and applications run wild on the box. I've tried all sorts of things, from database benchmarks and full applications, right down to simple processing tasks and even the distributed.net client.
This is starting to be real problem, not just for companies who want to move on from Windows XP, but also for those who waited for the next revision before upgrading. I know, even now, of companies that still use Windows 98 and Windows 2000 because they chose not o upgrade to Windows XP but wait.
Of a larger concern, particularly to Microsoft, are those people at home who are waiting for Vista so they can play Halo 2.
Skype have a small preview of a new system that will enable you to create broadcasts based on your interests and share them with other people.
Called Skypecasts. Unlike Podcasts, which are entirely one-way, Skypecasts are a way of promoting your forthcoming online discussion and getting a decent multi-way conversation on your chosen topic. Since you all talk via Skype, the conversation is free and I would guess this is the next logical progression from online communities, conferencing systems and IRC to a point where like minded individuals can discuss, in real-time, and around the world, about their favorite topic.
There are few things more frustrating than finding a new piece of kit you want and then having to wait months for it to make its way across the water to here in the UK. There are countless examples of products that I've waited months for.
That delay is shrinking - often the reason was lack of a suitable PSU, but today most PSUs are auto-ranging/switching anyway. Today people also find out about products a lot earlier than the one to two months delay there used to be when magazines were the main way of disseminating this information. There's nothing like missing the initial hype period to lower sales.
Having effective backups are a critical part of any business, but the open source community was for a long time ignored. It's only in recent years that we've had tools and extensions that allow backup of Linux software - I've been using the backup client for Retrospect from Dantz now part of EMC for years.
But what about open source backup tools for open, and proprietary, platforms. There have been many bubbling under, although I doubt I will be the only to admit having used tar, cpio or rsync for years on their Unix systems. In fact, I've been using a variation of the same backup script now for about 12 years. Others probably use ufsdump or similar for their backups - a tool that has been part of Unix for many many years, but it is hardly an effective solution for very large systems.
I commented earlier last week on Seagate's new 750GB hard drive and suggested a few possible items of data that could be used to fill it up.
Yesterday, MacNN announced the availability of a Firewire based unit using the drive. The price is quoted as $560 - to me, that seems remarkably cheap. That might be because I'm used to buying large drives, but, in fact, a quick couple of calculations show that at this price, you are get ting 1.34GB/$. Compared to other Firewire hard drives, a LaCie 500GB unit comes out at 1.28GB/$ and a 400GB worse at 1.21GB/$. (Those figures are all recommended prices, I've no doubt the actual ones might be a lot lower.)
I've been using with Parallels on my Intel iMac - the Beta5 was released yesterday with a slew of new features, including virtual machine USB support and lots of bug fixes.
First of all, this virtual machine technology is fast; it certainly feels faster than VMware on similar hardware and running the same OS. Compilation is so quick within Gentoo I constantly find myself doing double takes to ensure it really has completed what I asked for.
What seems to be even faster though is the speed of development. We seem to get a new release every week of the beta, and it isn't just bug fixes that are being incorporated, we get new features with virtually every beta release too.