How Much Bandwidth Do Search Engines Take Up?
There are an awful lot of search engines out there and they all try to index as much of the web as they can, as quickly as they can. For this site, search engines seem to cause more traffic than anything else:
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Now admittedly a lot of those hits will result in Not Modified responses but still, when you expand this to every site on the internet, that’s a lot of HTTP requests being fired around.
About That MySQL “Benchmark”
I’m sure I’ve mentioned numerous times that you should pay no attention to benchmarks, and apparently the benchmarks Anandtech used in their recent PPC vs Intel article were pretty bollocks too. So if you read or heard about that article and now believe that threads on OS X are too slow, you should read this response from Ridculous Fish. You should also read the first comment (which was the only comment when I read it). Then you should return to the real world and forget about all this nonsense.
Is Apple Switching To Intel?
I hope not. Not that I don’t think the Intel chips are superior at the moment, but because I really don’t want to have to deal with all the problems of major architecture changes – particularly such a major shift as PPC to Intel. That’s a major headache for developers and a whole heap of compatibility problems for consumers.
Worse than that, it’s yet another platform for us to test on and there’s already way too many of those.
Online Photo Resources
Mostly so I remember this later, this article lists a bunch of good online free (and royalty free) photo archives.
Scoble Proves My Point
Not so long ago, I said that people tend to use Windows because of Microsoft’s monopoly more than because they actually like Microsoft. Apparently, when Scoble asks them why they run Windows, these are the common responses:
Have you ever gone up to people and asked them why? I have. And the reasons people give are quite varied. Yes, “my boss gave me this” +is+ a common answer, but it’s only one I hear maybe one out of four times.
Any Jabber Experts Around?
Currently at Ephox we use MSN Messenger for a lot of communication but the servers are somewhat unreliable and it would be nice in some cases to be able to tie conversations into various internal systems (for instance, when talking about a bug it would be nice to “invite” the bugzilla bug into the conversation so that the conversation is logged). There’s a bunch of other things I’d like to play with but don’t know where to start. For the following, please ignore privacy issues, this is for company related conversations only and I’m aware of the privacy issues and will deal with them in time – I just want to play with the idea and see how far it can go first. Something like archives could potentially be written so that only the participants of the conversation can access the archive.
Coolaid for Table 3!
Scoble just doesn’t get it sometimes. Here’s a tip – there’s a difference between using Windows and liking Windows. Most people hate computers in general – they don’t like Microsoft, they don’t give two hoots about Apple (though they love iPods). Most people these days are forced to use computers. Most people aren’t qualified to evaluate which computing platform is better for them and can’t be bothered learning how to do so (when was the last time you met an average Joe who could accurately identify even a couple of key differences between OS’s).
Where Has All The Spam Gone?
I got my first SpamKarma report on comment spam for symphonious.net in over a week today. It reports no attempted spam whatsoever. Previously I’d been getting almost a hundred attempted spam comments a day and now suddenly it’s stopped. I’m pretty sure I didn’t change anything and I don’t think my comments are broken (though I had to relax the spam protection a while back as it was blocking comments with more than one link which caused problems for a couple of people). Course if my comments are broken, let me know below….
Another Win For The Full Text Brigade
Great to see Ugo Cei joining the side of good, er, those with full text feeds. Shame to hear about the cause of it but I’ll definitely be reading a lot more of Ugo’s writings in the future – the barrier to entry is now much lower. There’s no need for me to decide if I’m interested in the post based on a short summary, I start reading and don’t stop until I get to the end or get bored. Essentially the impetus is now on my to decide I don’t want to read the entry instead of on deciding that I do.
iTunes Can Sure Upsell
Somehow I got the song Your Feets Too Big stuck in my head and since I don’t have a copy, I went searching the iTunes music store. I found the original Fats Waller version but decided I liked the version from the new cast of Ain’t Misbehaving, The Fats Waller Musical more and added it to my cart. Then of course iTunes recommended I buy the entire album (all Fats Waller hits) and after a sampling the various songs I succumbed and bought the lot. It’s very good.
Eclipse 3.1 M7 On OS X
I just downloaded Eclipse 3.1 M7 and tried it out. This is the first eclipse build I’ve tried on OS X 10.4 (on Java 1.4.2_07 and Java 1.5.0_02) and for the first time it actually appears usable on my powerbook. Previous builds (on previous OS’s with previous versions of Java) were always frustratingly slow to use and I’d rapidly give up and go back to a Linux or Windows box (or vi). With this release it appears to keep up with my typing, editor windows open and close quickly and startup is really fast.
NetNewsWire and Feedster
I may have commented on how great NetNewsWire is a couple of times before (1, 2) but I have to do it again. If you have the full version of NetNewsWire (as opposed to NetNewsWire Lite), you can easily create and subscribe Feedster searches using File->New Special Subscription->Search Engine. There’s a range of search engines you can choose from and a bunch of other options in the New Special Subscription that may be useful as well.