Category: Geekdom

RSS feeds are great as a spam-free tool for publishers to distribute information. However, the biggest problem is that, unlike Web hits, statistics on who’s reading the feeds aren’t available. There’s no tracking features apparent in RSS.

A couple of firms are trying to change this:

A couple of marketing firms, IMN and RSSads, recently debuted what they claim to be trackable RSS feeds that go along with their services. How does it work? IMN president Kathleen Goodwin told ClickZ, “We’ve encoded all the links — usually with an RSS feed you get a subject of an article and a link. Every link provided is a unique trackable link. When you open up the feed we know it. Every time you refresh the feed we count it. And when you click to read a particular article we register that.” Apparently, RSSads take a different approach, by embedding a transparent GIF in the feed. It will be interesting to see customer reviews on how accurate or useful these statistics really are.

I can see this, if this works, as the major stumbling point for adoptions by other major media outlets, especially now that ads are appearing in RSS.

Not only is the Pentium Xeon MP getting bumped up to 3.0 ghz, but it’s getting a 4 megabyte L3 cache. However, the thing’s going to run nearly $4,000, while the AMD Opteron can be had for less than half that.

A very interesting article at K5 analyzing the comments in the leaked Windows source code.

When I finally get around to getting a portfolio of my work on line, I might try doing it this way.

Go into your Weblog config, and add “http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2” to your URLs to ping. So in addition to blo.gs, weblogs.com, and the Moveable Type recent update key, here are all the sites that get pinged in my config:

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

Update: http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php (got that from here)

Update: http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/ (got that from the comments on Neil’s Pinging Service Run Down)

So a total of seven nine sites that get pinged whenever I post. Posts sometimes slow a tad to ping, but it’s really not too bad. Besides: I get traffic from all of them, so it’s worth it.

Why would you want to ping Yahoo? They are launching an RSS Aggregator.

Google has introduced more features like flight tracking, vehicle ID numbers, UPC codes, Area Codes, and US Postal Service tracking numbers (after adding UPS and FedEx tracking before).

While all these new features are all neat and nifty, I have one question: when is all this going to be integrated seamlessly? It’s nice that they finally have all the features listed on one page, and the system is smart enough that if you type things in right, it will just work, but how do people know it will work?

They’re starting to get news results implemented more into the results, but I’d like to see the image results, news results, USENET, catalog results, froogle, and DMOZ results all in one place. So, if I search for Microsoft, I’d like to see this, this, this, this, this, this, and maybe even this, this, , and maybe even this, all in one neat, clean, fast and graphic-free interface.

Will it ever happen? Probably not. It reality, Google will probably look like this before long.

A co-worker of mine wanted me to look at her computer as she complained it was running really slow and had a bunch of “illegal stuff” (they were windows Illegal Operation Errors) and had a bunch of porn pop ups.

After running SpyBot and AdAware, I found there were about 450 (no joke) entries found between the two programs. Ran AntiVir XP, found another 90 files infected with about a dozen different trojans. Ran Windows Update (which had downloaded all the critical updates in the background, but nobody bothered to install them) and got everything up to date, and now have an AV program running in the background (she had McAfee, but it was disabled for some reason). She already has a firewall on her dial-up setup (she’s not on broadband — thankfully, or this would be much worse), so I’m leaving that as is. I also told her to not let her friends touch the system, as she claims her boyfriend’s friends were downloading porn or something. Based on the types of dialers and such that were on the system, I told her to keep an eye on her phone bill to make sure these things weren’t “calling home”. It was a mess.

But I have to say, in all my time that I’ve been working on systems, this is the messiest system I’ve ever come across.

Update on 1/14: Oh man is it so messed up.

OK, so I spoke too soon. I thought I had it all cleaned up, and life was good. Ran two different anti-virus programs and three different anti-spyware programs over and over, and the system came out clean. So I plug back in the ‘net connection to install the various MS Office updates. Just for kicks, I ran SpyBot again, and it starts finding more stuff. “Oh crap” I thought. I look at the network activity in the XP Task Manager, and every few seconds, there’d be a large spurt of activity. I throw a packet sniffer onto the system, there’s piles of HTTP requests going out to nasty sites and they’re coming from explorer.exe.

Lovely.

So I open up the previously-emptied MSIE Temporary Internet Files folder, and the thing is loaded with cookies, graphics, and a whole ton of other crap.

From that I can tell, somehow explorer got over-written or hacked to include a virus that “calls home” the minute it finds an Internet connection. It’s a mess, and every time the anti-virus software says it’s cleaned it, it comes back and starts doing stupid crap again.

So what next? A reformat. There’s no personal data left on the system as viruses gutted the My Documents folders for both the users on the system. So this weekend I’ll be doing a low-level format and then use Dell’s recovery disk to reinstall everything.

Man, what a mess.

Get a Knoppix CD and follow these directions. Link via Neil.