February 2008

What besides the red roses expresses your true feelings about a person? Through of my adult life and most likely my early adult too I’ve known the meaning of the Rose. For the most part I’m what you call a feeling sharing dofus. With gifts I’m even worst. Some kind of phobia about giving and receiving of gifts. Celebrations scare the hell out of me. A birthday party for me with a crowd? Absolutely no way. But flowers I understand. This is one situation in giving a gift that brings me joy and comfort. When it comes to Valentines Day this year I know where to turn with help in this department.

So by 9:00am’ish on Feb. 8th macewan.org had received 435 views. As seen from the graph below traffic continues upward - great news.

Two new sites were rolled out recently. That leaves me with time for a consulting job (SEO, dev & advertising) along with my goal of 2 new stores (BuyBANS), CarolinaHockey.tv with assistance of Carolina Hockey experts Jane & Andy Olsen (the Olsen twins). The site itself is Jane’s third site though it diviates from the blog only realm into a monetized mashup to include eBay sales via CJ, Amazon Associate, Video and blogging. Seeing just how far they’ve come in the last few months I have no doubt CarolinaHockey.tv will be a success.

In checking my current CommissionJunction balance I see that it has already surpassed that of last months check. Shaweet. Google ads are coming along just fine and TLA bringing cash to the table too. Grandmaster P3 and others in the biz of buzz are coming along nicely. Several days again I opened Posties.us to help with open communication between Izeas posties and the posties themselves. Apparently posties were peeved at the thread closings used to stop touchy discussed subjects like everyones loss of PR or the lack of advertisers currently in the network.

Some folks need all the help they can get…

The inner workers of a sites back end fascinate me. Take the world of entertainment sites such as gambling and that surrounds it. Did you know that they use C++ and Java to produce those sites? Java I suspected because of Sun Microsystems media blitz of past emphasizing security. Admittedly my knowledge of Casinos or Casino Gambling period could best be summed up as zilch.

By now you’re probably thinking, “then how do you know it is written in Java?” Well, I’m glad you asked for I was just as clueless on this subject. Earlier this morning I stumbledupon a resource site. The funny part was how easy it was to track down. Hrm, how ever does one learn more on the online casino topic? Actually, it really wasn’t that difficult - Online Casino Topic dot com provided an understanding on the subject.

One of the more interesting features of the site are the reviews of 6-8 firms that produce the software used by those gambling sites. For no other reason than liking the name of the company I chose the Cryptologic software review. This is where I first heard of the Unlawful Gaming Act of 2006 which prevents sites from accepting wagers from U.S. residents. Who’d a thought…

The US government recently passed a bill that was signed into Law by George W. Bush on October 13, 2006 known as the UIGEA ( Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act).

I would have thought with all the more pressing issues we have in this country there wouldn’t be too much time to spend on cherry picked projects like that. Guess he’s a better time manager than I first assumed.

Besides providing news on the industry there’s game info, strategy, tips, free software, resources and a section to play game free of charge. Oh, on second review I see a section on game odds. On a side note… how many of the programmers are also players? =)

As mentioned earlier this form of entertainment may be fascinating from the back end perspective (yes, I have at one time dabbled in Java) however, the write-ups on well known games may pique your interest too. So if you find yourself curious about the inner working of this field then head over to see what’s being taught.

As seen in this video Google is expanding Google Apps to include the Team Edition. A quick review of the offering shows the ability to share documents and calendars quickly.

Now, I’ve been a beta tester of Google Docs from the time before their Writely acquisition. Only now, in Jan., they have added the ability to insert a header and footer on the word processor. This news came to me this morning as I opened Google Docs and an instance of OpenOffice.org 2.3. Why OpenOffice.org when GDocs was available? Well, I need headers and footers so you can just image my excitement with this mornings news.

Especially after the disappointing testing of IBM Lotus Symphony (later uninstalled). The IE integration is seriously flawed or perhaps it experience the typical problems found in Microsoft’s halfassed attempt at Internet standards in the form of the ubiquitous default install of Internet Explorer version whatever. These upgrades to IE, which only usually take place when they feel their browser market share is threatened, do not necessarily improve any of the short falls found lacking in the browsers standards compliance. No, this obvious expectation is ignored in favor of features consumer enjoy in Firefox. By copying this Mozilla derivative adding favorites like the tabbing to the platform limited IE instead of placing more focus on the needed features requirements of a modern browser they only further delay overall adoption of current W3C recommendation. Could it be their inability to follow basic suggestions only because they can’t leverage their PC dominant position to sway W3C votes on future direction?

Regardless of the foot dragging found here they’re now ready to take on the responsibility of directing the future of Yahoo! (at the tune of 43′ish Billion dollars). I’m no raving fan of Yahoo! but I can acknowledge the work in the area API usability compared to Google’s. I have no doubt this will cease if and when Microsoft gains control for in every instance a company is fully absorbed into Borg of Redmond the back-end technology is moved to the sloppy unsuccessful Microsoft attempt at the same industry. Their failure to win the hearts of users leads to the need to them needing to buy and absorb rather than innovate and organically acquire.

This will lead to what I call the great Yahoo! mass exodus wherein hords of fearful users will grab their docs, email, pictures and whatever else from Yahoo! properties that were rightly left in original company format. So where do they go? Well, for starters Zoho has a much better word processor than that of Google’s from the Writely.com company. I place a bullseye on Zoho as a Microsoft target just as I did last year with Yahoo!.

Is this yet another conspiracy to move the minds of all users back to only trusting harddrive devices yet again killing our hopes of a networked work environment? In any event you mind consider a visit to http://www.openoffice.org and grabbing a copy (free of charge).

As for me? Well, after mildly disappointing short lived test of the header feature in Google Docs I kept the copy of OpenOffice.org open and continued with my work. As for my views on their “Team Edition” - pft. Nothing to see here everyone just keep moving. Nothing to see.

update: Google along with Yahoo!, Microsoft and other heavy hitters have joined the OpenID Corporate board of the OpenID Foundation. Why is this important? Well, it was thought that if Yahoo! was absorbed by Microsoft their signon process might be handled by the unpopular Passport system that currently infects the ms online offerings.  *yeah, that was a jab. = )

Test installed on a Winders boxen. Works, GUI is easy on the eyes, but it’s gut wrenching slow to the point of pulling your hair out. More to follow.

As stated on their site this is BETA software and true to form it tended to crash when browsing (due to “known” Microsoft Internet Explorer problem).