Archive for July, 2008

I upgraded Surflizard.com to the latest version of WordPress today, and took the opportunity to update the site design. Let me know if you experience any problems navigating the site or encounter any usability issues.

Top ten iPhone games: With Pictures!

Yahoo!’s new BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) platform allows anyone to create search based web applications using the Yahoo! infrastructure. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS [...]

Overstock.com will no longer sell products that contain animal fur, effective today. Calfskin pumps and other leather goods are still in plentiful supply, as is yummy-looking food of the dead animal variety.

Yahoo! is a big fish in the casual online game business, attracting millions of unique visitors each week. Many of the games they offer are free to play online, but downloadable versions have cost money in the past. However, Yahoo! announced today that it will begin offering hundreds of games as free downloads backed by revenue from in-game advertising. From the Yahoo! press release: Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO) today announced that Yahoo! Games will offer ad-supported downloadable games from the top casual games publishers. With more than 400 ad-supported games available to users by the end of the [...]

The Register: “Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets disappeared today for close to an hour, proving that the world’s largest search engine is a long way from perfecting the art of online business applications.”

When Apple thinks you’re over-charging, something is wrong. Canadian Apple stores will not be carrying iPhones. Instead, Canadian consumers will need to go directly to the wireless carrier, Rogers Wireless. This unexpected move is believed to be because apple is unhappy with the service plans Rogers has attached to the iPhone, starting at $60 for a paltry 150 minutes of talk time, 75 text messages, and 400MB of data (avoid YouTube!). Over the last few weeks, there has been a public outcry over the service plans, which do not include an option for unlimited internet usage. Canadian iPhone [...]

Automatically keep multiple versions of your important files, so you can roll back changes and undo mistakes. The free version of FileHamster gets the job done. From the publisher: “FileHamster provides real-time backup and archiving of your files while you work. It enables you to monitor specific files on your hard drive and automatically create incremental backups whenever those files are modified. It also enables you to store notes about the changes that have been made, allowing you to quickly locate a specific revision or provide a detailed account of the work you’ve done on a [...]

I’m at home today waiting for Dish Network installation, and I find out that our local CBS affiliate will no longer be carried on Dish, starting tomorrow. Apparently, they want more money from Dish for carrying their signal. I’m going ahead with the installation, since one channel I watch a few hours a week isn’t a deal breaker. Honestly, I think small local stations are in danger of over-estimating their importance when services with hundreds of channels filled with competing content are available. For the few CBS shows I really want to see, I’ll probably just hit CBS.com, [...]

Hooking up broadband service is generally pretty painless these days — usually you just plug everything in, and it works. So I was expecting our switch from Cable ISP back to DSL to be easy. And it sort of was, although there was one big hiccup. It seems that the DSL modem we were sent used local IP adress 192.168.2.1 — the same address that most common broadband routers default to. Once I figured out the problem and changed my router’s address to 192.168.10.1, all was good. However, this isn’t something the average (non-geek) customer would have been able to resolve [...]