Dawn of the Geeks

I got an e-mail pointing out that a number of ringtones weren’t able to be downloaded to Blackberry devices. This was most likely caused by non-perfectly standard headers used in the file retreival script. It was recently discovered that FireFox is overly anal in this regard and I updated the headers to be standardized. IE is a lot more intelligent and is able to deal with things that are not perfectly by the standards so I don’t always catch potential problems. My cell phone has also never had a problem downloading tones. But regardless, it should be fine now. I’ve also updated the script for the DevCenter and Drivers.

Also, this site may be unaccessible at various times. This is due to the hurricane which is affecting Hosting Matters. Most of the site is hosted on an alternate server and is unaffected. This includes the DevCenter, Drivers and Ringtones.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9132814/

According to the Daily Mail, assistant headmaster Richard White said the policy was aimed at 15- and 16-year-olds in two classes which are considered troublesome.

“Within each lesson the teacher will initially tolerate (although not condone) the use of the f-word (or derivatives) five times and these will be tallied on the board so all students can see the running score,” the Daily Mail quoted White as writing in a letter. “Over this number the class will be spoken to by the teacher at the end of the lesson.”

Draft Iraqi Constitution

It’s all formatted nicely for your reading pleasure. I’m sure much commentary will be written about this thing.

Flipcode is done.

Flipcode has been around 6 and a half years apparently. They’ve always been second or twentieth banana to GameDev.net. What doesn’t make any sense to me though is why they yanked the ads. They’re leaving up everything as read-only including the forums. Why not continue to profit?

I’m by no means getting rich off of this web-site but it is making money. I can’t think of a good reason to cut off a positive revenue stream. No matter how little it is. Just because you’re not getting rich or not making as much money as you used to doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make anything at all and in fact, end up losing money. Without ads, Flipcode is just going to be paying hosting costs and have no way to recoup them.

IcarusIndie.com has been around since July 24th 2001. The site has been around since January 2001 though. I just didn’t choose a final name until July. I don’t see it ever closing its doors. I’ll always find a use for this domain. I may pull services or revamp the site every once in awhile but the site as a whole isn’t going anywhere.

I think the problem is that most technical people aren’t business people. GamingMatrix.com is a prime example of a big site run by financially incompetent people. It’s been saying “the dream isn’t over yet” for months. The site has actually gone under a number of times. The reason is because the idiot running the site thinks they can offer the world to people for free with no ads no nothing. No means to recoup costs. The person running it is absolutely petrified of money. The last time it went under he was trying to bring it back and I asked if he had any plans for covering costs. Nope. I told him he was raising the Titanic just to sink it again. And he did. The owners just don’t have enough sense to be able to successfully run a web-site.

Heck, they don’t even have enough sense to just scale back the content so they have something to try to attract visitors without killing themselves on bandwidth costs and then build content as revenue justifies it.

I dunno. I guess some people just can’t do anything without forcing themselves into bankruptcy rather than finding ways to cut costs without giving up entirely. I was paying $175 a month to run this site. When revenue wasn’t justifying cost I changed gears. Now it costs $28 a month. I wonder what kind of mindset it would take to force yourself to pay $175 a month until you were eating out of a garbage can rather than finding an alternate means to host the material?

Time to start focusing. Until two weeks ago I was perfectly content where I was. I have a nice job that pays the bills and doesn’t demand I actually follow a strict work schedule. But now it’s time to finally graduate from Arizona State University. I’ve been going to college since 1998 having a good time just taking classes that I enjoyed. In 2002 I decided maybe I should try to get a degree in Computer Science. Two years later I decided what a bad idea that was and switched to secondary education. I started at a community college and spent way more time there than I realized. I was there for four years. I had just gotten myself into a rut. I had no drive to go anywhere. I just wanted to have fun. But then one day I woke up and realized I needed to advance and get somewhere.

For some people, sitting in front of a computer 8 hours a day or more is good for them. For me, being a computer geek for my whole life, that seemed like a logical choice as well. But eventually I learned that people are more important. I can’t have such an unsociable job and be happy. I don’t care how much it pays. I need a job where I can be around people. Where people are what the job is about. Not technology.

I like technology in sofar as it can kill time and make me some money while I work on getting a job doing something more important. This web-site, for example, this month is looking to return triple the $28 it costs to run. I think it can do better. I can’t think of any good reason why this site couldn’t bring it at least $100 in ad revenue every month. People try to charge $2-$3 a ringtone and I give away over 50,000 of them and I can’t pull in decent ad revenue. There’s something wrong here. People will pay rediculous amounts for something but if you give it away they have a hard time doing anything that might reimburse the provider for the service.

Awhile back I installed the javascript check. JS enabled users went from about 46% to nearly 57% now and climbing. Ad revenue also is going up. It’s probably not so much that people don’t want to reward those who give them free stuff, they just don’t think about it. Because obviously, when people are reminded to turn on JS they do and then they see the ads and decide that maybe they are worth checking out.

My plan for the school year is to post some blog entries and some wiki entries but as far as major updates, there won’t be any. It’s back to school and time to focus on moving my life forward. I don’t have any plans to ever pull this site down. It’s just going to continue evolving into a different kind of site.

Kodee Kennings

For 2 years The Daily Egyptian was posting columns about a daughter who’s mother was dead and her father was killed in Iraq. The problem? It was all a hoax.

Natalee Holloway

The wiki entry will become a scrapbook of reports covering the story. Blogs work great for reporting as things come in but a wiki is better suited for keeping an indepth history of a story.

Books for Sale

After years of going to college collecting books along the way I’ve decided to go ahead and sell most of them through half.com since I don’t ever use them. It’s interesting to see what books have held their value and which have lost it.

If you would like to help support this site, buying these books would be a great help. I’ll be posting a bunch of old programming books as well at a later date.

Google has just opened up instant messaging for gmail users. Let’s do a quick run down on information streams that Google is trying to take over: Instant Messenger,Search,Blogs,E-Mail, News, Usenet

Basically all forms of on-line communications plus they know where you’re going on-line. They’re penetrating the markets by being free and relying solely on ad revenue to cover costs.

But hey, their motto is “do no evil” so I’m sure nothing bad will ever happen with them having stored indefinitly all this information. They’re also looking to digitize thousands books.

What Google isn’t doing is supplying the web with original content. Their business model is quite simply to provide the world with an easy to use infrastucture for information transmission, to gather as much information as possible from as many sources as possible and then to throw up ads and profit from it.

It’s brilliant really. I should put up a web-site like that some time.

European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”.

In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy.

The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of “k”. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f”. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the fourth yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl.