Category: internet

bookmarks

It’s been a while since I posted anything about online bookmark managers. I’d pretty much settled on posting bookmarks to Spurl, then letting Spurl post them to del.icio.us. This was working great for a while, but the del.icio.us integration in Spurl stopped working a week or two ago. A few people have posted about it in the forums, but nobody from Spurl has said anything about fixing it.
To get around having to either post everything twice, or give up either Spurl or del.icio.us, I’ve been looking for another way to post to them both at the same time. I found a site called OnlyWire. It looked legit, but I was initially wary of giving them the passwords to my Spurl and del.icio.us accounts. I gave it a shot, and it works OK. However, it turns out that their terms of service allow them to post sponsor links under your IDs. They say that they’ll only do that once, but that’s enough to make me want to avoid doing business with them. If you look at the “Hot Spurls” and “Just In” lists on the Spurl homepage, it looks like this service (and possibly others like it) have already polluted the bookmark pool, so to speak, to the extent that useful bookmarks are being pushed down the list in favor of sponsored links.
I’m starting to think now that maybe I can do something with Greasemonkey. I haven’t really looked into creating Greasemonkey scripts, though, so I’ll need to do some research first.

hosting

I’ve been hosting this blog on a free “preview” account from 1&1. The deal was for a free account for three years, and those three years are just about up. I just switched over to a $4 per month paid account with the same feature set as the free account. They have a bunch of other options for paid accounts, but, strangely, they don’t match up with the preview account in a logical way. Both their cheaper and more expensive accounts allow more disk space and have a higher monthly transfer allowance, but only the most expensive option allows cron jobs, for instance. Kind of weird, but I haven’t blown the limits on the preview account, so I guess I should be good just continuing it.

Election Day

I never got a ballot in the mail for this year’s elections, so I decided to try and find one online. The Somerset County Board of Elections page has a bit of useful info, but I couldn’t find a ballot. I’ll do some more looking tonight before giving up, but I think I’ll probably have to wing it when I get into the booth tomorrow. One amusing thing I found on the site: a really cheesy, and almost entirely useless, video. Click on the “upcoming elections” link to watch it. The background music is hilarious.

Ray Noorda

I just found out that Ray Noorda died today. The linked article calls him the “father of network computing,” and I guess that’s accurate. I used NetWare for years, starting with version 2.15c, I think, in the early nineties. I earned my CNE certification when NetWare 3 was big. I switched allegiance from NetWare to Windows NT grudgingly, in the late nineties, and by that time, Noorda was gone from Novell.

The obituary on the Canopy site says “In lieu of flowers, the family requests that each one of us put in a little extra effort today to enable someone to reach their fullest potential in their work — that’s what Ray would have done.” I’ll try.

A9 no more

A9 has dropped their toolbar, the instant reward program, and a few other features. I was never 100% satisfied with their search results, but they were pretty good, and the 1.57% off on everything at Amazon was too good to pass up, so I just kept using them. Without the toolbar or the instant rewards, I’ll be heading back to Google for most of my searching. And switching back to the Google toolbar, of course.