- Separating Explosives from the Detonator – A sensible response to the pants bomber…
- Google ‘open’ memo betrays deep corporate delusion – "Aside from Apple, no tech outfit is more secretive about what goes on inside the company."
- Q: “Once in a blue moon” is a rare event. But what does “blue moon” really mean? – These things are never as simple as you think they should be…
Tag Archives: internet
My delicious.com bookmarks for December 4th through December 9th
- US switch to new lethal injection scrutinised – However you do it, killing people is a cruel and unusual punishment.
- Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys – "Lemasson … suspects that a dense jungle environment drove the evolution of syntax. Since the monkeys had trouble seeing each other, they compensated by talking."
- Google DNS – Why would Google make their own DNS service if there's no direct way to sell advertising from it?
Web-host Whinge
I normally try to be pretty positive here. Most reviews you’ll find here are of products that I’ve bought with my own money and that I’m broadly happy with.
That makes this post the exception.
You may remember that ZX81.org.uk went off-line for over twenty-four hours last month. Shortly afterwards I switched away from Adept Hosting, but it’s not only, as you might expect, because of the reliability.
I posted the following review at Review Centre:
When their systems are up and running everything was fine. Technical support tended to be accurate when a response was received.
That’s the good. But there’s way more “bad” to note. Their servers were not terribly reliable and tended to go down for extended periods of time without warning and with no mention on their support website. Worse, getting through to their technical support team was almost impossible. I have sent four messages so far about my domain name transfer and have not received any response or action so far. I may have to force through the change through Nominet which wipes out any savings that I obtained by using Adept in the first place.
In short: not recommended.
In Adepts favour they were cheap. Plus some of the things they were bad at — billing for example — worked in my favour.
Maybe that’s their problem, perhaps they’re too cheap. They should be able to support their customers. Their suggested response times are not great and they have, in my experience, consistently missed even those.
But whatever their excuse and however cheap they are it’s no longer good enough and I’ve gone elsewhere.
www.cut
I try to keep ZX81.org.uk free of direct promotion of my iPhone applications but I think the launch of a new one warrants an exception to the rule.
www.cut is a utility that shortens URLs so that they can be mailed, Twittered or FaceBooked without worrying about character counts or line breaks.
Find out more at the above link or head straight to the App Store to download a copy. It’s free so you have nothing to lose!
My delicious.com bookmarks for August 25th through August 27th
- Clive Thompson on the New Literacy – Maybe the Internet isn't the end of literacy after all…
- Galileo’s telescope reaches 400th anniversary – "Exactly 400 years ago today, on 25 August 1609, the Italian astronomer and philosopher Galilei Galileo showed Venetian merchants his new creation, a telescope – the instrument that was to bring him both scientific immortality and, more immediately, a whole lot of trouble."
- Creationists, now they’re coming for your children – "The Greatest Show on Earth is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an antireligious book. I’ve done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again. Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it."
My del.icio.us bookmarks for December 17th through December 30th
- Market Yourself An iParadigm – "The part I love the most is that the people making the 'just market your app!' comment have no real idea how much effective marketing costs. Oh sure, you can go far on viral and word-of-mouth marketing, but it all pales in comparison to even a small banner graphic in the App Store." Making your application visible is hard.
- Matthew Alexander on Torture – Nice examples of why torture doesn't work. Worth reading the linked articles.
- Robbery suspect left his address – "Chicago police have arrested a man who allegedly robbed a bank using a threatening note written on the back of his own pay cheque." Brilliant.
- Reliving Cuba's revolution – Interesting to see this on "film." They wouldn't let us take cameras up there when I visited in 2004. (Plenty of other pictures of Cuba on ZX81.org.uk though!)
- What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting – "Once one understands that a text message travels wirelessly as a stowaway within a control channel, one sees the carriers’ pricing plans in an entirely new light." I worked on text messaging software back in the late nineties and, at least for GSM, is absolutely true.
- Internet sites could be given 'cinema-style age ratings', Culture Secretary says – "Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, [Andy Burnham, British Culture Secretary confirms]." The government still seems not to understand how the internet works. If implemented, this will basically result in a system that's easy to circumvent and is paid for with higher ISP connection fees. We all lose.
- Happy Birthday Earthrise – "Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Isn't that something…" Still very much awe-inspiring even forty years later.
- Fearless: Apple's Macworld Expo exit is part of its DNA – "In Apple's estimation, the best time to kill off a successful product or brand is 'as soon as possible.' Dropping a winner means creating a new winner to replace it, and that's exactly what Apple has decided it must do to be successful: create great new products again and again."
- If programming languages were religions… – Apparently I'm into Voodoo and Taoism…