Former SCO chair behind Utah WiFi age verification proposal

Former SCO chair behind Utah WiFi age verification proposal : “A bill that would require those operating WiFi networks to verify users’ ages has come under fire. Introduced to the Utah House of Representatives by Rep. Bradley Daw (R-Orem) late last month, the bill seeks to protect children from accessing “material harmful to minors” via public WiFi networks.” Like wow. Also, it seems as if Yarro (formerly of SCO) came up with the CP80 proposal. If that is in any way representative of the technical insights of said company — well, need I say more?

February 6th, 2008 / Tags: geek, cluelessness / Trackback

All the Cake…

All the Cake: well, sorry for that lame pun. Anyways, for those of us who can’t or won’t run Rails (like, say, if we are on a shared host and the admins don’t really fancy memory leaks and stuff) there is CakePHP. True, there is not a high-profile ref app in the wild (yet?) — but these three apps look neat-o nevertheless: ScienceHack, Elistic and Mingle2. And all of them are one-man efforts.

July 12th, 2007 / Tags: geek, php / Trackback

Oh, to be a wise guy

Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, one Jakob Nielsen tells us. And that is because:

Blogs are also fine for websites that sell cheap products. On these sites, visitors can often be easily converted and the main challenge is to raise awareness. For example, a site that sells pistachio nuts should post as much content about pistachios as possible in the hope of attracting quick hits by people searching for that information. Some percentage of these visitors will buy the nuts while visiting the site.

While

To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.

So, if you sell peanuts, you can blog. If you sell stuff, you can’t.

One wonders what to think about Mr. Nielsens dictum from 1997 that users don’t read on the web… Yeah, sure: people have changed in 10 yrs (that’s some quick adaptation…)

Of course, one could also just presume that Mr. Nielsen is a clueless hack that should be rather grateful for his long (and, I guess, lucrative) career in advicing hapless PHBs about something he himself barely understands and constantly has to struggle to keep up with.

In that context, this is fun.

July 11th, 2007 / Tags: pompous gits, geek / Trackback

Dark Room

Dark Room: an editor for Windows; full-screen, green-on-black. Nothing else. But for helping you focus on writing it is very interesting. (Blockwriter is another, slightly humorous, take on this.)

January 17th, 2007 / Tags: geek / Trackback