So, I put DD-WRT on my wireless router. It’s pretty nifty - maybe marginally more polished/focussed than OpenWRT, but it takes up a fair amount of my router’s four megabyte flash storage. It helped me get WPA bridged client mode on my Mitsubishi R100 wireless router working for the first time; but I also want to use it as a print server, and there’s no room left in flash for the necessary software. So, back to OpenWRT it is.
The problem is, DD-WRT was refusing to take the OpenWRT .TRX file. Renaming it didn’t help, and I couldn’t see either Javascript on the page, nor responses in FireFox’s LiveHTTPHeaders to indicate what might be blocking it.
The solution? (Continued)
Nokia have kindly sent me an invite to their “Open C” conference. Open C seems to be a C port to Symbian; code written in standard C should be pretty easy to port to Symbian. I’d link to the invite page, but it borks if I remove my unique ID.
The interesting part is that the only venues they’ve listed are Chennai (AKA Madras), Bangalore and Bangkok; none of which I live near. I wonder if they are running such conferences elsewhere?
More Fedora hilarity, this time caused by me naming my machine something meaningful via the hostname command.
I couldn’t tell what was causing it, but applications - even simple ones like the image viewer - were taking 1-2 minutes to load. A little network sniffing showed me that my Linux box was sending IPV6 DNS requests (for AAAA records) to my ADSL router over IPV4; my ADSL router was either ignoring or rejecting them, depending on its mood.
The fix is to add the new hostname to /etc/hosts, on the line where it defines localhost:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost [machine name]
With a bit of luck, that’ll fix it.
“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend… if you have one.”
George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
“Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second…if there is one.”
Winston Churchill, in response
Link
From the Wikipedia:
Dexter was the class valedictorian at Pacifica High School in Garden Grove, CA and was a Ph.D. candidate in Molecular Biology from the University of Southern California, however he declined to get his Ph.D. in favor of focusing on The Offspring. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Biology and a Master’s degree in Molecular Biology, both from the University of Southern California.
…In his personal time he enjoys flying, being a licensed pilot who has made a solo trip around the world in 10 days. He also recently participated in the 2006 Los Angeles Marathon, his charity of choice was the Innocence Project, a non-profit legal clinic that handles cases where post-conviction DNA testing of evidence can yield conclusive proof of innocence.
….and happens to be lead singer of “The Offspring”. I’m not saying it’s the best band ever, but you have to admire a man who succeeds in multiple fields.
Live outside of North America? Trying (in vain) to set the date format in Thunderbird to Day/Month/Year in Fedora? The command is system-config-language. Yeah, I know - you were looking for a “Locale” dialogue in Thunderbird - but no, it’s a Gnome command, it has little to do with location, but if you set it correctly your dates should look right.
Dear (Saintly) Fedora maintainers - may we have this as a separate applet under the “Administration” menu? Windows has this under Date/Time - which is not ideal, but at least it’s close to your timezone.
From Business Week:
The idea is that Brickhouse will give Yahoo a way to push the envelope and develop brand-new projects, while employees have the chance to experiment with ideas far from their day-to-day jobs. Horowitz is well aware of the risks. “The Valley is littered with examples of how this doesn’t work,” he says. But he compares what he and Fake are doing to what record label executives do, searching out the best talent. “Caterina and I think of ourselves as A&R people, signing up bands,” he says.
It’s an interesting image. Real A&R people sign bands - the output from a company, not the company itself. I wonder if that’s what YHOO are doing - buying back catalogues? Hiring artists, for N albums?
I think maybe Google are.
Frank Schilling has an interesting post up on Search Engine Arbitrage:
You buy traffic at Google under keyword “hair accessories” and send that traffic to a made up website you created like hairstyling101.com, loaded with staged pseudo content and links to higher paying results at Yahoo. Because the visits from Google are highly targeted and land at pages that look like content (but with well disguised PPC listings), nearly everybody clicks through and the guy running the site simply arbitrages the cost of traffic at Google (plus bandwidth, staff salary and site creation/maintenance) against the amount he will earn from the click at Yahoo. Buy a click for 30 cents and sell it for $1.50. The whole thing happens seamlessly across tens of thousands of keywords; and moves millions and millions of eyeballs from Google over to Yahoo.
While arbitrage has been around forever, I hadn’t thought about using the price differential between buying and selling ads before - I mean, they aren’t exactly a commodity, are they? Yet that’s what Adsense et al turns them into - you’re just selling a block of ad spaces on a given site; Google (or whoever) turn it into actual ads. Search Engine Arbitrage is just leveraging three interesting characteristics of the web:
- The “instant travel” effect - the fact that you can jump from the search engine to the arbitrageur’s site to the end destination in moments;
- The fact that hosting a nearly-unused site can be dirt cheap;
- That unsuccessful pay-per-click ads cost you nothing.
Get traffic that are will respond to two different ads, on two different sites, on the same topic - and you’re in business. I wonder, though - given the rapid convergence of Internet markets - the speed at which pricing information travels between buyers and sellers - how long is it going to last for? Are primary marketers - as opposed to the arbitraguers - just going to start running two- and three- tier pay-per-click campaigns, with different per-click price-points on each tier? Maybe make the branding a little less obvious on the not-so-good ads? Or the same ads, with different keywords/key phrases separating the tiers?
From the site:
What is BritePic?
* BritePic adds interactivity and ads (if you want them) to the photos on your website.
* BritePic is free and easy to use.
* If you’re an HTML coder, use BritePic instead of the ![]()
tag.
Maybe it’s the new Photobucket. On the other hand, it was founded by the guy that started [cough]ed company and AdBrite.