Programming / IT

Apple’s Ping Sows the Seeds of Facebook’s Demise

Facebook is the cool site to hate these days, because while you just know they are going to come up with yet another appalling way to violate your privacy, you keep going back, because, well, all your friends are already there. It’s like a giant party that no one is having very much fun at, but no one wants to leave because there ain’t nothing going on anywhere else. Of course, you could have said the same thing about MySpace back in 2006, and Friendster before that. The conventional wisdom says that eventually something will come along to topple Facebook from its perch at the top of the social networking world. (More after the jump!) Read more…

Been away for a while

My host (Hi Andy!) was changing ISPs, and I knew I was going to have to change my DNS information, but I never got around to doing so, so the blog has been offline for a while. Sorry about that. We’re back after 59 days of downtime (according to Google), absolutely none of which was due to the hosting provider. I suppose if I’m going to be a blogger, I should keep my DNS entries up to date.

Will Intel Keep 32nm Tech At Home?

In this ZDNet Asia article from last week, Vivian Yeo speculates that Intel will not make investments in deploying 32nm semiconductor technology in its Asian manufacturing facilities. Intel recently announced a $7-billion dollar initiative to accelerate deployment of the new process in its US facilities. However, when asked about deploying the new technology in plants in Malaysia and China, Intel executives were non-committal. Intel recently announced a planned closure of a test and manufacturing site in Shanghai, although it intends to relocate the majority of affected workers to other Intel sites within China. These are interesting tea leaves, and there are multiple ways to read them. Is Intel moving to concentrate production of its newest tech within the US? Or is Intel hedging its bets, and anticipating that the current economic conditions will persist into and beyond 2010, and that the US-based capacity it is building out will be sufficient to meet the demand for the high-end parts that will be built on the 32nm process, and that the best sellers for the next few years will be budget tech based on 45nm processes like the Atom and other low-end gear? Or, are rising manufacturing and shipping costs beginning to make overseas production make less sense? I have no idea what it means, but it’s interesting to ponder.

MyEnTunnel – An SSH Tunnel Manager For Windows

I use SSH all the time for general admin work, and for most things, PuTTY (or Plink, if I don’t need to bother with a terminal) gets the job done with no muss and no fuss. But recently, I needed a solution to replace a VPN from our colo to our HQ, and decided I could get the job done with an SSH tunnel. However, since the tunnel needs to be up 24/7, just using PuTTY or Plink wouldn’t do the trick. That’s where MyEnTunnel comes in. MyEnTunnel is a wrapper for Plink that monitors the SSH connection and reestablishes it when it times out. It’s written in Delphi by someone who refers to himself as “Nemesis][” and describes himself as “old soul in this world of techno babble“. The product works well, is easy to understand and set up, and actually outdoes PuTTY’s own interface for managing tunnels. The only downside is that it doesn’t run as a service, but my particular needs were on a box that is already running logged-in 24/7 anyway, so that didn’t matter to me. If you need a high-quality easy to use SSH Tunnel Manager, definitely take a look at MyEnTunnel.

Random Thought, or How Long I’ve Been in IT

I’ve been piddling around with the Intrepid Ibex beta on an Acer Aspire 5735 laptop that I picked up from Best Buy for a couple of weeks ago. I’ve got VirtualBox installed, and I’m running OpenSolaris, AsteriskNOW!, and Slax 6.0.7 simultaneously in virtual machines. I was setting up NAT port forwarding so that I could use certain services on the virtual hosts from my MacBook Pro over the wireless LAN when it hit me that for my first “real” job in IT about twelve years ago, I was a sysadmin in charge of (among other things) a couple of SPARCstations and a Nortel Meridian phone switch. Those boxes cost multiple tens of thousands of dollars when they were purchased way back when (although they were getting a bit long in the tooth by the time they got to me), and now I am able to set up essentially the same services in a completely virtualized environment on a computer that cost less that $400. In fact, if I wanted to, I could use a service like EC2 and skip the hardware altogether. It’s scary what you can do with very little money from a technology standpoint these days.

Hacking The Olympics

Stryde Hax, a new blog popped up yesterday claiming to show definitive proof that one of the gold-medal winning Chinese gymnasts is much younger than her officially claimed age of 16. Young enough that it’s actually against the rules for her to be competing in the Olympic Games. The blogger, known as “Stryde” searched Google for Excel documents on Chinese websites listing the name “He Kexin” and the date “January 1, 1994″. Google had a single hit, but the underlying document no longer existed on the Chinese government servers that Google had previously indexed it on, and the cache of the document had expired. However, Stryde hit pay dirt on the Chinese search engine Baidu, turning up two registration spreadsheets that listed He’s name with the 1/1/1994 birthdate.
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Apple-Haters and the iPhone 3G Release

I spend a decent amount of time surfing internet forums, between research on professional topics and just plain goofing off, and one thing I have noticed that I just can’t understand is the way that Apple products tend to polarize people. You either completely buy into the “reality distortion field” and vociferously defend Apple, or you take every new Apple product release as an opportunity to slag on the company for being expensive, elitist, and (most often) for not releasing the exact product you wanted at a price where they would lose $100 a unit. The release of the iPhone 3G has been no exception, but it did appear to me that the haters were out in force.

And you know what, I just don’t get it. The iPhone is the one product where Apple has gotten it so spectacularly right that it’s hard to believe anyone could complain. And yet, they do. I’ve taken my some of my thoughts on this phenomenon and put them into a short essay that’s right after the jump. Enjoy!
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What the Hell is Wrong with Hotmail?

Since about mid-afternoon, I’ve been unable to log into my hotmail account. This isn’t a huge tragedy, since I don’t get too terribly much mail there anymore, but the weird thing is the mail notifier built into MSN is still notifying me about new emails – that I’m unable to log in and read. Finally got tired of it and shut off MSN altogether. I’ve got some emails in there that are work-related, so I hope it’s not down too long.

Comment Spam Sucks

If anyone wonders why I don’t update this blog more often, it’s because I spend more time cleaning the comments queue of spam than I do writing posts. In all the time I’ve had this blog, I’ve gotten less than ten legitimate comments. Since I blog more to get things off my chest that earn money, that doesn’t really matter. In the same period, though, I’ve deleted literally thousands of spam comments. What I don’t get is that many spam comments are just random gibberish without so much as a link to a product. Ah, a day in the life of a lightly trafficked blogger.

Why Aren’t Podcasts Distributed by BitTorrent?

Random thought, but why aren’t (more?) podcasts distributed by BitTorrent? It’s the perfect way to transport this type of content, which is heavily downloaded the first 24 hours after release, but only sporadically after that. Actually, why isn’t almost all static content distributed by BitTorrent?