Category: News

Google Down?

Google 

I’ve had to temporally pull my Google based ads off my site because they just don’t load. Whatever servers normally serve up those little potential pennies are having a bit of a rest. Could this be the mark of a system wide problem with the 800 pound search gorilla? Maybe it’s just a local thing, someone forgot to plug a router back in or perhaps it’s the work of a group looking to get in the news. Anyway, you all get a break form the ads for a while. Keep coming back though if that’s why you were here in the first place. 🙂

 

Flickr’s Down For a Kip

Flick is down contestI like a place that when there is an outage they make it into a contest:

Just print out this page and colour in the dots. When the site’s back up, take a photo of your creation and post it to Flickr, tagged with "flickrcolourcontest".
Team Flickr will pick a winner in the next couple of days, and that lucky duck will get a free year of Pro.

The Flickr blog says that they lost a temporary storage facility so some of the older photos, some 20 TB worth(!), are being restored from another location. Nothing was lost but it might be a little bit until things are back to normal in Flickr land. Until then I’m breaking out the crayons!

Flickr’s Down

The End of SciFi is Near – Speak Out!

What will the idiots do next?In light of my recent post about the SciFi channel (a channel supposedly devoted to science fiction programming) deciding on showing "an alternative brand of wrestling suited to fit the SCI FI Channel’s commitment to fuel the imagination", a friend of mine reminded me that you can send feedback to SciFi and tell them what you think about their programming. The page is http://www.scifi.com/feedback/ and the email address you want is feedback@scifi.com. Send them an email telling them that wrestling isn’t related to science fiction (unless its Godzilla doing the Tokyo stomp with a fellow monster) and you don’t want to see in their line up. Tell them you want science fiction programming, not stuff about ghost hunting or C rated movies about killer moths or black holes. Be polite and make sure you mention ECW so they don’t get confused, after all this might be read by a programming executive.

Billie Piper to leave Doctor Who

Billie Piper leaves Doctor Who 

British pop star turned actress Billie Piper has officially announced that she will not be returning to her role as Doctor Who‘s traveling companion Rose in the third season.  She was quoted as saying

"It has been an amazing adventure and I can confirm it comes to an end, for now at least, as series two climaxes… Rose and I have gone on the most incredible journey over the past two years, I am truly indebted to Russell and to all the Doctor Who fans old and new who have been so supportive."

Male fans everywhere are in mourning.

Billie Piper to leave Doctor Who

Nuke it From Orbit, it’s the Only Way to Be Sure.

 

 

Man, when the guys at Microsoft are saying that it’s better to nuke a system than to try and clean off the malware you know it’s getting bad. I think that in the future Microsoft will be releasing virtual environments for your browser to work in. Much like running Virtual PC on a Macintosh or VMware, these will be fully self contained virtual machines that can be wiped and reloaded on the fly. The only thing I can see that would be a problem is that keeping personal configurations like bookmarks or cookies around after a nuke might pose a security problem.

For now, having a healthy collection of tools and the know how to use them is your best defence. I personally use SpyBot Search & destroy, RootkitRevealer, Windows Defender, HiJack This. If these don’t cure ya, you might want to try an Apple.

Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impossible

Nike + Apple = Personal Theme Music

Apple Nike IPod

As soon as I saw this the first thing that popped into my mind was "Cool I can have personal theme music!" Apparently Nike will be selling special shoes that have a sender sensor in the insole that will transmit information about your workout to a receiver that fits into an iPod Nano. This will let you load up you Nano with music from iTunes that will match you workout. Now, I suppose you could just wear the sensor shoes around during your normal work day, this way the music you load becomes your personal theme music. How cool is that? Just like Peter Griffin in that episode of Family Guy where he had three wishes. I understand that there will be a ‘power song’ selection that will let you have your chase music for running across a street or your sneaking around music for using your 733t ninja stealth to grab that last cruller from the office kitchen.

Cool Hunting: Nike x Apple = Nike Plus

Apple