Posts
Friday, January 16, 2009
This is pretty old, but I just found it so I thought you might enjoy it. [How to Start Your Very Own Blog in 52 Steps]
Here is a list I compiled of my favorite web apps I use.
--Music--
--Video--
-Sharing and Watching--Editing-
--Photos--
-Sharing and Viewing-
-Editing-
--Productivity--
-Word Processing-
-Spreadsheets-
-Presentation-
-Blogging-
If you know of any other good sites please let me know!
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
There seems to be a huge rise in hacks on popular websites recently.
Twitter has gotten hacked not once, not twice, but 33 times! It seems as though the group behind the attacks is called Digital Gangster. Check out the full story here. [Twitter gets hacked] [Digital Gangster is the culprit]
There is still uncertainty about who is behind the MacRumors site hacking though. [MacRumors hacking]
UPDATE: Now Cork'd, a wine finding site seems to be hacked to link to another not-so-family-appropriate site. [Cork'd gets uncorked]
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Journalspace.com was a place for people to blog and share pictures, etc. However, their database was overwritten and they had no real backup, so their company is toast.
One might ask why they did not have a backup.
Well, they did, sorta. They relied on a RAID configuration to keep their data safe. So if one of the drives failed, they just swapped it out for it's backup drive. However, in Journalspace's case, the drive did not fail, it was overwritten which also means (because the drives are configured in a RAID format) the other one had the copy written over too!
The moral? Don't rely on any one technology to keep your data safe. In this case it was RAID, that didn't turn out the intended results. The technology didn't fail, it did its job by copying the one drive, it just had no way of knowing that it was not supposed too.
So remember people backup your data often on removable formats, and always have a backup kept off site too!
---Info for any Journalspace users---
- You can find out more information what happened. [Journalspace News]
- A blog post about how to attempt to recover your posts and pictures via Google's cache. [Andrew's Blog]
- Journalspace also has a twitter account set up so you can view the updates [jsupgrades@twitter]
- Also the company is planning to release the source code for the site to the open source community
Friday, January 2, 2009
Wikipedia has completed raising enough money to run through the fiscal year til June 30, 2009.
Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder has written a thank you letter to the donors [Letter]
But remember, Wikipedia has extraordinary costs required to run it, so please continue to donate to this excellent knowledge resource. [Donate to Wikipedia]
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Facebook is a social networking website that by definition, "is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade" (wikipedia.org). It has become an extremely "hot" site and as of June 2008, pulled 50.6 billion page views worldwide.
The website allows users to contact friends and family. There are many a story about long-lost friends reuniting and co-workers meeting up again by using the site. But it also includes features that enable users to share pictures, videos, and play games with each other.
Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a student at Harvard University. He intended it to become a site for college students. However as it grew, Facebook, Inc opened its service up to anyone over the age of 13.
Facebook is a free service that runs on revenue from advertising.
Facebook allows users to do many things besides sharing media with other too. Users can post "notes" which are like small blog entries, but they are not meant to be as regularly updated as a blog. Friends can post comments on each others walls about anything including photos and friend status' (a small regularly updated comment that the person posts to let others know what is happening or how they feel at the time). Also the site allows developers to create apps that can range anywhere from games to quizzes to picture editing.
Also Facebook Connect was just created that lets external sites access your profile, friend list, info, etc as a way to build contacts and simplify login procedures.
Some problems with Facebook include; recently a number of people had their friends list deleted on accident, some apps produced by external developers are buggy and cause web browsers to crash, and page loads can be extremely slow at peek times of the day .
Sometimes people also worry that by using Facebook they can have their privacy compromised, but Facebook has measures to prevent this, such as requiring users to accept that they know each other in order to add them as a friend on the service.
Overall Facebook is a wonderful service, but it just has a few minor quirks that need to be ironed out.
