Algorithms or human judgement? Give me logic

• December 23, 2006
• James Skemp

Earlier today, it was noted in the news that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is working with Amazon on a search engine.  This new engine supposedly will use human judgement to weight results.  Naturally, sources are saying that this engine's competition is Google.  While Web 2.0 has some good things going for it, this is one of the silliest ideas I've heard of in a long time. First, DMOZ anyone?  Want your site to show up high in the DMOZ directory?

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UW Madison map - Ruby?

• December 2, 2006
• James Skemp

There's a very cool interactive map for the University of Wisconsin Madison campus. You can see it at map.wisc.edu. In other news, hopefully I'll have some photos of my new car, a 2007 VW Rabbit that was built just for me.  My previous car was a 1987 VW Golf, which makes my new car 20 years newer.  Not too bad for my second car. With just a little luck (not very much at all), the Rabbit should last 20 years as well.

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Three reasons Microsoft Firefox is a hoax

• November 14, 2006
• James Skemp

Three reasons Microsoft Firefox is a hoax, in order of when I spotted them. 1) "it's better now ... like seriously ..." 2) Site Ground banner in the bottom left corner. 3) Create a better video, eh? Microsoft doesn't need to reuse the same video they used elsewhere. 4) Free email address?  How 90s/early 00s ... The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/14/ms_firefox/ Microsoft(R) Firefox | We've Made it Better

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My first video to Google Video?

• September 25, 2006
• James Skemp

Yesterday, I did multiple takes for a video on how to create snippets in Dreamweaver 8. The video ended up being pretty good, I think, albeit the video size was a bit large, and the resolution was a bit small (640x480 is what Google recommends).

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Lynx for Win32

• September 5, 2006
• James Skemp

Courtesy of Jim Spath, you can download Lynx 2.8.5rel1 for Windows here.

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How Charter Madison stacks up - Speedtest.net

• August 15, 2006
• James Skemp

On CNET this morning I ran across Speedtest.net.  Like sites and tools that have come before it, it's meant to test connection speeds between one computer and another.  Unlike previous ones, however, the UI is much more attactive (i.e., more Web 2.0-like). If you haven't tried it out yet, I recommend you do so.  My results from Charter, in Madison WI, are below. It'll be interesting to see just how long this stays up.

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Four working browsers (at least)

• August 10, 2006
• James Skemp

There's just something about having four different browsers on your computer, to say the least. I do believe I've Lynx installed as well, but it's hardly used these days ... for better or worse.

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July '06: Month end stat thoughts

• August 6, 2006
• James Skemp

I've been moving the last couple of weeks, hence no posts.

I just figured out a problem I was having connecting to the Internet yesterday, so today it's been browsing browsing browsing.

I also just grabbed last month's stats (from AWStats) for my site, and hooked up Google Analytics (having grabbed an invite from the Digital Point forums - to quote Gavin, "woot"). Looking at browser stats in particular (from AWStats - Analytics won't be functional until tomorrow), I noticed a couple of things.

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Google Videos - How social networking can work

• July 27, 2006
• James Skemp

I was trying to pass some time, and came upon Adventures in Linux - Episode I, on Google Video. While the top 100 is full of material of little lasting value, it's nice to see the 1-2% of content that actually serves a purpose.

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How will they deal without Gates?

• June 15, 2006
• James Skemp

Wired News reports that Bill Gates has that he will "transition out of a day-to-day role at the company he co-founded to spend more time on global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation". The question after reading this is, what will they do?

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