I was just doing a quick search for Lemony Snicket books (of which there are apparently now 11) on Amazon.com
Oddly enough when I did the search I got the following within the search results:
It appears that they are using google ad words, and one of the advertisments offered was for a competitor.
It does seem a bit odd to say the least, to be advertising a different online store …
Weird things seem to be happening in the Palm OS sector. PalmSource recently bought China MobileSoft which is a Chinese linux smartphone developer. This comes after spending about $11 million to buy BeOS from be back in 2001.
One obvious motivation in buying a Chinese company is to get access to the Chinese market (which is always going to be huge real soon now. IBM is thought to have similar motivations in selling it’s PC division to Lenovo. But PalmSource is now also talking about basing future Palm OS versions on Linux. So maybe they were after technology as well as market access.
The alternatives aren’t pretty. PalmSource hasn’t been making much progress since the incremental Palm OS 5. Licensees have yet to ship a PalmOS 6/Cobalt device. The software seems to be available to device developers but everyone is still on the PalmOS 5 platform. Not one Cobalt device has yet been released commercially by anyone. It almost makes one question what exactly is wrong with Palm OS 6. Performance? Memory footprint? Price? The about box?
In the operating system market it seems anyone writing operating systems and selling them (as opposed to open source things like Linux) always has a major failure when trying to develop the next big operating system. Apple had Copeland (which would have been Mac OS 8 if it had been released but was actually abandoned) before Mac OS X. Microsoft had OS2 (with IBM) before developing Windows NT/XP. Now perhaps Palm OS will fail on Palm OS 6 before releasing a new platform based on Linux?
This evening I went along to the Edinburgh BCS talk on Ethical Hacking. It was really eye-opening and made me suitably paranoid about my own security.
Peter Wood of First Base Technologies gave a remarkably useful, informative and funny talk on the subject. (and left me totally paranoid as I said before).
Some interesting points and some thoughts
Overall fascinating and really interesting.
Weird thing happened today. I was checking my email and I saw a message from ebay stating that my account had been suspended. I assumed it was fake and went to visit ebay itself. But it seems real.
The whole business is odd. I have never bought or sold anything on ebay. I think I once made a few bids, but they were unsucessful. Who knows what’s happening. It doesn’t reassure me though about the ebay security system.
Perhaps more information will appear shortly.
I’ve got tired of people spamming my web log. So I’ve changed the name of the comments posting page. I’m going to see if it makes a difference. If it does then the people spamming are automated, if it doesn’t then the automatic system is either too smart or it’s figuring it out in some other way. I’ve got some more ideas so if this doesn’t work then I’ll move on. Either that or ban URLs in comments altogether.
Potential spammers should note that advertising or commercially orientated posting in the comments area is specifically prohibited. Under no circumstances is any such posting permitted. Posting any such comment counts as unauthorized and illegal use of this machine.
Currently I’m using flyspray for bug tracking.
I use cvsweb to view the cvs tree online.
One thing that I really wanted was to be able to click one bug numbers in the cvs log reports and see the bug tracking entry that matches it.
It turns out this is amazingly simple. I added the following code to the cvsweb.cgi file inside the htmlify function, just below the bit that does the urls. (new section in bold)
# get URL's as link
s{
((https?|ftp)://.+?)([s']|&(quot|[lg]t);)
}{
&link($1, htmlunquote($1)) . $3
}egx;
# replace FS with correct bug track link in flyspray
s{
FS#([0-9]+)
}{
&link("[$1]","/flyspray/index.php?do=details&id=$1")
}egx;
# get e-mails as link
And now my cvs logs display a link whenever I use FS#100 or a similar bug number. Next I suppose is to integrate it the other way and have the cvs system automatically close resolved issues in flyspray. There is actually already some code for subversion so it wouldn’t be very hard to implement probably (but there are better things to do with my time).
[edit]
subversion code is at http://flyspray.rocks.cc/bts/index.php?do=details&id=310&area=attachments#tabs
The people over at mini-itx.com have a picture of a most amazing looking pc. It is mounted vertically in a table like case. With amythtv software, a video projector and a wireless keyboard it would make a wonderful, stylish and invisible home entertainment system.
Zdnet and others are announcing firefox PR1 will be released later today. The mozilla homepage is already showing download links but the Mac OS X links aren’t actually working as I write this.
Firefox 1.0PR1 will probably be a defining moment in web browser history, along with Netscape 1.0 and Internet Explorer 3. A browser release that represents a fundamental change in web browsing behaviour.
It is also a milestone in open source development. Firefox is one of the more visible pieces of open source software around and it definitely seems to have caught people’s attention. It is gaining against IE in terms of popularity and without the advantages that IE has, such as integration with windows and the marketing support of Microsoft. It is suceeding on the strength of its own quality as a piece of software.
The Mozilla software project is a sucess!
[edit: download now available]
Lots of fun new features have just appeared over at Binary Thoughts. Dhruba’s site now has loads of really clever new bits. I really like the css3 link icons.
I just had the thought that there is email that I should have, but can’t find. Which is bad, given that I’ve been trying to archive all of my email. The key question obviously is where has it gone? And I suspect the answer may be that it is gone forever.
This might be really bad, alternatively it might not. Who can tell?
I think the best thing might be to convert my email to html at intervals, rather than leaving it in my email imap server. If it was carefully indexed and sorted it would probably be a better way to to do things.