Toluu : neat fun stuff

neat fun stuff

Sorry that the blog was down for a few hours. Yesterday I did a throwaway post that somehow ended up getting 3800+ diggs or so. I didn’t have WP-Cache or Supercache turned on, so my blog melted to a little puddle of fail.

“Matt, you idiot! How you could run a modern WordPress blog without caching turned on?” you may ask. The first answer is that I’m stupid and figured that I was boring enough that I wouldn’t hit digg or Slashdot for anything.

The slightly-less-stupid answer is that turning on WordPress caching interacts really badly with the FreeBSD systems that my webhost Pair runs (I’ve written about this before). That means that for me, upgrading WordPress takes hours and is a pain in the butt. The last time I upgraded my WP install, I didn’t install Supercache simply because it was such a headache to uninstall before.

I have to do some thinking about what I might change (blogging platform, webhost, etc.) in the future to make this less painful. Frankly, the idea of racing to update my software every few months (so that I don’t need to worry a

YouTube adds “Read Comment Aloud” feature from xkcdOctober 8

A couple weeks ago, xkcd ran this funny comic:

Randall Monroe, the creator of xkcd, suggested that if YouTube commenters had to listen to their comments read back to them aloud, it might lead to better discussion on YouTube. Some Googlers thought that was a pretty fun suggestion, so they did it. YouTube now has an audio preview so you can listen to your comment before you post it. I love that Google had the sense of humor to add this feature.

Hat-tip to Fitz for pointing this out.

Completely unrelated other than it’s a cool piece of software on the web: Yahoo is revamping their web calendar software. It’s based on the Zimbra technology that Yahoo acquired last year. It looks like it can do several fun things (e.g. handling invites and to-do lists), but mostly I like it because it sounds like the new version supports open standards and can interoperate with other popular services like Google and Apple. Go Yahoo!

Halloween costume for 2008?October 8

I think I know what I’m doing for Halloween this year, but if anyone wants to throw out suggestions, I’d be delighted to hear them.

My Five Months With Google ChromeOctober 6

Om Malik wrote an interesting post about Google Chrome one month after the public launch. While I was reading Om’s post, I realized that I wrote a post for the Google Chrome release that I never published. I’ll include it here, and then let’s meet at the bottom and compare notes.

Like many Google engineers, I’ve been running Google Chrome for several months. When I sat down with a blank piece of paper to write down why you should try Google Chrome, I ended up with several reasons, including speed, security, stability, and openness. I’ll run through them for you.

Speed. Google Chrome is wicked fast, especially if you use AJAX/JavaScript-heavy web applications such as Gmail. And it’s not just “benchmark fast,” it’s end-to-end fast. Google Chrome puts special emphasis on never making the user wait. Opening a tab is essentially instantaneous, and all the little pauses that would normally interrupt your workflow just don’t happen. Of course, sometimes a remote web server is slow to return data–there’s nothing that a web browser can do about that–but for everything else, the browser speeds along like lightning.

When Gmail came out, it took me months to switch over. Before Gmail, I used mutt and I had all kinds of crazy customizations an

Quick comment for pixelrnOctober 3

I tried to leave a comment on pixelrn.com but the problem with talking about hacked sites is that you often end up using language that gets flagged as spammy. Here’s what I tried to say but the WordPress installation over on pixelrn wouldn’t let me:

Hi Beth, I checked and it doesn’t look like you have any spam-related penalties or anything like that. For a long time, something seemed wonky on your WordPress where http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:c_RD9jcaIRUJ:www.pixelrn.com/2007/08/10/us-nursing-schools-getting-you-down/+site:pixelrn.com&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=175&gl=us if you view the site showed “<title>Nurse + Blog = PixelRN</title>” as the title instead of the name of the post. In fact, a search like http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLD_en&q=site:pixelrn.com&start=170&sa=N shows some really weird title and snippet behavior.

Ah, this appears to be a problem too. Check out view-source on http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:c_RD9jcaIRUJ:www.pixelrn.com/2007/08/10/us-nursing-schools-getting-you-down/+site:pixelrn.com&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=175&gl=us and you can see that your site was hacked. View the source and see stuff like <a href=”http://oregonstate .edu/~silvat/wordpress/index.php?list=524″ title=”Byetta - Exenatide Injection”>Byetta - Exenatide Injection</a> at the bottom. So your site definitely appeared to be