Blogs
What are yellow pages good for?
Tue, 02/02/2010 - 17:05 — Alexis WilkeSince I work a lot with the Internet, I often have people asking me whether the Yellow Pages are still useful...
The fact is, there are still many people using the Yellow Pages. Most advanced geek will use an online directory such as superpages.com. Yet, for certain things such as looking for a plumber, people still use the Yellow Pages.
So, how do I choose whether to have an ad in the Yellow Pages?
Simple! Take the latest Yellow Pages book you've received and look under your category and see what your competition does. If you have 1 or more full page advertiser, you bet that you have ...
Cell Phones now open to telemarketers!
Fri, 01/29/2010 - 12:57 — Alexis WilkeThat's it! The phone commissioners have finally decided that it's OK for telemarketers to call cell phones and try to sell you their products and services.
Personally, I do not think that, in itself, it is a bad thing... except that if I receive even just 1 call a day and have to spend 1 minute each time, I will be burning 30 minutes a month for nothing. (Okay, with 1,000 minutes a month, it wouldn't matter that much, but that's like text messaging... if you receive spam via your phone and you have to pay 20 cents for each spam email you receive, the bill goes up quickly ...
GoldMoney.com
Wed, 12/02/2009 - 10:53 — Doug BarbieriWatching the spiraling price of gold (the spot price as of this writing is $1,213.40/oz) has been a humbling experience for me. There are all kinds of marketing forces happening to cause this, but if you follow what the Austrian School folks are saying, this is not a surprising trend at all. Central banks around the world are dumping their U.S. dollars and buying up gold, which is driving the price up. But I think this is different than just another commodity bubble, because the way gold is perceived--as a store of wealth. Traditionally investors who feel the currency they are in is threatened ...
PostgreSQL and Drupal conflict
Sat, 11/28/2009 - 04:33 — Alexis WilkeWe have been running Drupal for some time now and we have noticed that it generates a very large amount of warnings in our log files.
The warning is in link with improperly formatted strings. PostgreSQL tries to follow the SQL specification to the letter and that means you cannot use the backslash character to escape special character sequences (such as \n for a newline character.)
I knew that in most cases the error was generated because of the function saving a full page or some other content in the cache. In that case, the system includes the characters: \012 and \015 (\n and \r.) That ...
The W3C has a new look for their website!
Sun, 10/18/2009 - 00:45 — Alexis WilkeIf you have not seen it yet, the W3C now has a new look.
They are using a Web 2.0 system with PHP running on their server along Apache version 2.x. In other words, they most certainly are running Linux as their server operating system.
And for those who do not know that yet, this is the consortium that takes care of making your browser work.
McAfee to acquire MX Logic, but...
Mon, 08/24/2009 - 22:09 — Alexis WilkeToday I read that McAfee is to acquire MX Logic (was http://mxlogic.net/).
I may have heard of MX Logic before, but the reason why I went to their website today is because I had multiple connections from their mail service to my mail system.
So I quickly checked out the MX Logic website to see what that company is about...
With proprietary technologies, a global security platform and a comprehensive suite of online solutions, MX Logic serves organizations worldwide to eliminate online threats and protect the integrity of their business communications.
They are selling ...
Space going green!
Sat, 08/01/2009 - 13:19 — Alexis WilkeToday, the only way to go in Space is to use rockets or fast planes (although the latter does not get you as far as needed to reach even the IST.) Either one of those uses a tremendous amount of quite poluting carburant.
In the future, however, we definitively need to find a way to build an elevator. The building of such a structure has not started though. At this time there are two main reasons why: (1) we think we do not have the technology, and (2) what we have thought about can break with the consequences of getting the debris all over Earth and that could be quite dangerous.
Now there ...
Your cell phone is hackable...
Thu, 07/30/2009 - 23:02 — Alexis WilkeThis is a quite interesting article which I thought I should share and keep a copy of!
Most of us, even if we can determine whether a piece of software (or hardware!) can be hacked, we just do not have the time to spend on testing each device we use to ensure that no hackers will be able to get it. We rely on the manufacturer to do that work for us.
This article shows that even though all manufacturers have protections, all are vulnerable! And that means your data is vulnerable on your cell phones... Hope this does not scare you too much!
Note by the way that those people who have plenty of ...
A new kind of memory!
Sun, 01/18/2009 - 13:59 — Alexis WilkeResearchers are always testing new methods to enhance computers. These days, as presented in the Physical Review Letters (Dec 29, 2008), people have been working on phonons. These are heat particules.
A new concept: Throwaway Software.
Wed, 10/01/2008 - 09:53 — Alexis Wilke
More and more, people are learning new software as they go. A few will stick to one software for a long time simply because it is easier, but changing is easy too, especially if the new system is easy to use. But how do you produce throwaway software? And is it worth the trouble? As we see things evolving, more and more, people want to use software anywhere they go. This means software that runs on the Internet in some ways. For instance, you can use Google Map anywhere you go, as long as you have a computer to access the Internet.
