Gadgetopia

PCWorld.com - Best of 2004: Some eye-openers here: Opera as Best Browser? Outlook as Best Email Client? Groove as Best Collaboration Tool? Panther as Best OS seems legit. I like the Dell Dimension 4600 as Best General Purpose PC because I just bought one. Microsoft Money unseating Quicken as Best ...

Apple to sell Macs at Best Buy: I wonder how this will affect the plans for the Apple Stores around the country? Will they only sell in Best Buy markets where they don't have a retail presence? "The Cupertino, Calif.-based computer maker plans next month to launch a pilot program ...

Words fail me.

Best Buy initiates a battle of the brands: Interesting. Best Buy wants to put its insignia on consumer electronics. The retailer has quietly begun selling a range of devices, including large-screen televisions, portable DVD players and desktop PCs, under a new in-house brand name, Insignia. Via John.

Best Buy Web site pricing probed: If Best Buy actually did this, then they're brutally stupid. Blumenthal said his office received at least 20 complaints after a columnist for The Hartford Courant reported the experience of one Connecticut man who found a laptop computer advertised for $729.99 on BestBuy.com, then ...

Finding the Best Programmer's Font: I can't say I've ever put this much thought into it. I'll admit that the winning font is quite attractive. Becoming frustrated with source code not aligning in my favorite source editor I decided to hunt for the best font. In particular, I began to ...

Bad Lingo: Blog-Media Cliches: We are guilty of so many of these, yo. Best. [ultimate thing or experience.] Ever/Evar. [undesirable counter-example], not so much. [Argument], wait for it, [rhetorical flourish]. etc.

FatWallet sues Best Buy over DMCA misuse: Fat Wallet is a Web site that posts retail sales information before the sales come out. Best Buy was a little irritated about this and invoked of all things the DMCA to stop FatWallet from publishing BestBuy prices on the Fat ...

Befunk Gallery :: My License Plate: Anyone else know of some good geek plates?

WordPress Wins Best Open Source Social Networking CMS: I was a judge on this panel. Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress ...

MONEY Magazine's Best Jobs: Software Engineer ranked number one in Money Magazine's "Best Jobs in America" report. Software engineers are needed in virtually every part of the economy, making this one of the fastest-growing job titles in the U.S. Even so, it's not for everybody. Designing, developing and testing computer ...

Mozilla FireFox has been awarded "Best In Show" at the LinuxWorld conference, which is taking place this week at the Moscone Center in 'Frisco. "The winners of the LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards represent the best that open source has to offer," said Warwick Davies, group vice president, IDG World Expo. ...

O'Reilly's Best of 2003: O'Reilly doesn't really write a bad article. Here's a list of 15 great ones this year. Even if they deal with technology you never touch, they're so well-written that thay're worth reading anyway.

No 'ifs,' 'ands' or 'buts': simple queries work best: A new study indicates that complicated, boolean-laden Google searches are no more effective than simple searches. "Our research shows that query operators, commonly thought to narrow searches, don't return more relevant results and don't reduce the number of non-relevant results," said ...

10 Best Intranets of 2003: The big items for this year's winners: workflow, self-serve content management, and design consistency. He also notes that half of the winners used Microsoft platforms, apparently way up from previous years. "This year's winning intranet designs emphasized workflow support, self-service content management, and offloading tasks ...

Top Ten IKONOS Satellite Images for 2004: There's something innately powerful about a satellite image. Here are the best of 2003 with a neat little Java viewer. Space Imaging, the world's leading provider of Earth imagery and related services to commercial and government markets introduces its top 10 images from ...

The 20 Best Hacker Movies: An interesting list. I don t disagree with his top 2, though I would have reversed their order, and I did when I talked about this a few years back. While none of these next 20 movies depicts the true motions of computer hacking, most of ...

Just don't what to say about this one, except that seastream.com doesn't respond. It's registered to "Davidson House Limited."

Best Buy circles the track: This is about a year old, but I just saw it float across CNN tonight (the TV version). Best Buy has a semi-secret line of stores called "Escape" that try to....well, escape the Big Box store mold. In Chicago's hip and trendy Lincoln Park neighborhood, ...

2007 Open Source CMS Award: Packt has started up their 2007 awards for open-source content management, and yours truly has been selected as a judge in the Best Social Networking CMS category. What s cool is that Bryan over at CMS Report got selected as a judge too, which means humble ...

I'm embarking on a (very cool) project to port an app from SQL Server to Postgres. To this end, I need to get up-to-speed on Postgres stored procs. I looked around for some good books. Joseph Scott -- Postgres champion that he is -- recommended a few as well. However, ...

10 Best Intranets of 2005: I actually purchased this full report back in 2001. The price has gone way up it was $44 then; $128 now. However, if you're in the middle of an intranet rebuild like I was at the time, it's worth it for the screenshots alone. ...

Is the relational model of data storage the best, most effiicient way to store data? I'm talking about the traditional database model of tables, fields, row, foreign keys, etc. What are the other ways? There's object oriented, where you have a table of classes and attributes, object instances and properties ...

Geek squad to the rescue: I don't know why, but I hear a lot about these roving Best Buy tech support guys. I have no idea what suddenly elevated them above "normal" on-site computer techs, but Best Buy seems to have struck on a good marketing thing here. Best Buy's ...

Bad Lingo: Blog-Media Cliches: Man, I am guilty of so many of these, yo. When you make words for a living, you will inevitably find yourself drawn into certain ruts of repetition. That's why you'll see the same tired cliches popping up in the same media outlets Via kottke.

CMP Media's Software Development Magazine Announces Finalists for the 16th Annual Jolt Product Excellence & Productivity Awards: The Jolt Awards for this year have been announced. Everything from the best in books to the best in databases to the best in frameworks. Rails made the list, so did the .Net ...

Something fairly obvious hit me in the face yesterday: robots.txt files can be a cracker's best friend. We knew of someone who had a directory on their site filled with the install files and license keys of all their software so it would be easy to find. In a cursory ...

You know something goes mainstream when it has its own goofy awards show. The winners of this year's Bloggie awards have been announced, The Bloggies are a set of 30 publicly-chosen awards given to weblog writers and those related to weblogs. A few of the winners are probably already the ...

The Ideal CMS: This is from last year, but still very interesting and relevant. Tony Bryne puts together a content management All-Star Team, identifying what systems are best at what pieces of the content management process. What if you could graft the best features and attributes of individual Web content ...

> Features >> Fourth Annual Weblog Awards">Fourth Annual Weblog Awards: The Bloggie winners are out. No big surprises. Boing Boing picked up a handful, including Blog of the Year. Movable Type is the best tool, and Simple Bits won Best Design. Gadgetopia won, nothing.

I got to thinking about this today, and so I'll throw it out there for comments. My vote is Wargames from 1983. That film introduced a lot of people to a world we never knew existed. Tron is a very close second. Surprisingly, The Matrix isn't even on my Top ...

How do you or your company release code you re compelled to release under the GPL? One of the core tenets of open source is that you release your changes to the community. Everyone pays lip service to this idea, but how do people and companies actually do it? Does your ...

Macromedia - ColdFusion Support Forums - Cold Fusion/SQL Server programmer needed: I agree with just about everything here: Please DON'T respond [...] If we have a tense moment or we say that we don't like the way you did some work and that it's not absolutely perfect and you're not ...

best of CNN: CNN always has a central picture on their home page. They do a pretty good job most of the time, but sometimes they have to montage something up to have it make sense with the lead story. Here's a gallery of some of their best or worst ...

css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design: We've covered CSS Zen Garden before, but if you haven't been there lately, you're missing some of the best work I've seen in a while. Take a look at new designs like Corporate Zenworks, Port of Call, and No Frontiers. That's the ...

Navicat - the World's Best MySQL GUI: I worked with a lot of MySQL clients, but this is by far the best I've seen. Gorgeous interface, and support for all the cool upcoming features of MySQL 5. It's $95, but if you work with MySQL a lot, this ...

Best Buy 'Geek' accused of taping woman taking a shower: I'm in ur houze, being a s3x offender. A 22-year-old woman and her mother are suing Best Buy and its "Geek Squad" computer repair team for dispatching a technician who they say videotaped the daughter taking a shower. When you ...

In a surprise twist, a security flaw has been found in IE's impenetrable armor that allows a trojan to install its payload and monitor for passwords sent over https connections. Your account number? Now it's everyone's account number! Thanks for sharing. A "Browser Helper Object" is a DLL that allows ...

opensourceCMS: This site has several dozen installed CMSs for you to play with: "This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to 'try out' some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be ...

TechWeb: The Business Technology Network: I just thought I'd mention this TechBlog contest. No reason. Just thought you may want to know about it. Seriously -- totally casual, no ulterior motive... Do you read tech blogs? We're looking for you to tell us which are the best of the best. ...

Techsploitation: This site gets my vote for the best header graphic ever.

Quiet Computers - End PC Noise: I was just thinking about this the other day. "Welcome to Endpcnoise.com! We feature all of today's best solutions for quieting your noisy computer. We are your one stop computer silencing website, featuring the very latest and best quiet computer products..." We take it ...

Pricelessware: Really good stuff here. What I like is that very few of them requires installation or uninstallation they're just statically compiled executables. The Pricelessware list is a compilation of software collected through a yearly vote by the participants of the "alt.comp.freeware" newsgroup. It is a list of what ...

Microsoft to hackers: Take your best shot: I'm fascinated to see how this is going to work out. After suffering embarrassing security exploits over the past several years, Microsoft Corp. is trying a new tactic: inviting some of the world's best-known computer experts to try to poke holes in Vista, ...

NewsGator buys syndication rival: Huh. Newsgator bought FeedDemon. I think these two are the best client-side (as opposed to Web-based) aggregators on the market right now NewsGator is near-perfect integration into Outlook, and FeedDemon is IMHO the best standalone RSS client. NewsGator plans to distribute Bradbury's products, including FeedDemon ...

Amazon wraps up best holiday season to date: Is the coming-of-age year for online retailing? Amazon.com said Friday it finished the best holiday season in its history, capped by a single-day record in terms of units sold...The nation's largest online retailer said it set a single-day record with more than ...

Google Guide: Interactive Tutorial Making Search Even Easier: A good tutorial on how to plumb the depths of Google. If you're like many people, you use only a fraction of Google's features and services. The more you know about how Google works, its features and capabilities, the better it can ...

Google's new ToS: Now you can say how much you make: Gadgetopia made $460 from Google in its best month. We probably average a little less than that. I like to see about $14 a day. Glenn sez, "Google updated its AdSense TOS and now lets its affiliates discuss what ...

Here are a few accumulated thoughts that need to be said to companies that think content management is the solution to all their Web site woes. The fact is that content management just manages content from a technical perspective, not from an editorial perspective. The editorial part of content management ...

Engadget's 20-year BBS Flashback post is chock-full of utter nerd deliciousness. All done-up BBS style, with relevant stories from August 22nd, 1985. They're probably best known for their tires, but lately Finnish industrial conglomerate Nokia's been making a big push into the wireless biz with its Mobira subsidiary (best of ...

Taken in the local Wal-mart parking lot. (Best picture I've ever taken with my phone.)

Applications have patterns -- ways of doing things that have stood the test of time. These aren't object modeling patterns, about which books and books have been written, these are...best practices for how to solve a particular type of functional problem. Around my city, you see a certain style of ...

Toshiba Battle Royale: FM and Toshiba have put together something kind of cool: the Battle Royale. The gist is that the Ninja poses a question, and a bunch of A-list bloggers (and, uh, me too) write answers. You guys get to vote on which is the best answer. I ll make ...

Halo 3 Review (Xbox 360): The first Halo 3 review is in (I m told it s the first no idea how true that is), and it s good. A 9.7 out of 10, though I wonder about the neutrality of a site called Team XBox. [ ] we’re happy to report that ...

Well, it's been about six months since we last posted a Friday Diversion, which makes it less of a weekly feature and more of a biannual one. We've got two here that won't keep you busy all weekend (I hope not, anyway), but should get you frustrated enough to build ...

Programmers Don t Read Books But You Should: Jeff Atwood criticizes the concept of reading a book on programming: If programmers don t learn from books today, how do they learn to program? They do it the old-fashioned way: by rolling up their sleeves and writing code while harnessing the ...

Perplexed consumers dial up tech 'geeks': Our original post on the Geek Squad is one of our most active. This is an article about the surge in computer support jobs in general, and it includes this bit on the Geek Squad: Best Buy last week said it hired 1,500 more ...

Joel Spolksy has a reputation for hiring great people. He made a movie about his intern program, in fact, which cultivates the best of the best. He s distilled all of this hard-won knowledge in a new book, which is titled for his theory of good programmers: Smart and Gets Things ...

Google's AdSense a bonanza for some Web sites: An article about AdSense that states numbers, which is rare: Tales of AdSense riches range from a few hundred dollars a month to $50,000 or more a year, though high-dollar paydays are rare. They require a Web site with tons of traffic ...

The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities: A fantastic list of free programs. They have programs for things I didn't even know there were programs for.

Ideal Science: Bulletin Board Software: Here's a very high-end Web forum product that runs on Windows. With all the free alternatives out there Invision, PhpBB, vBulletin, Snitz, etc.) I don't know how someone can stay float selling these things (especially for $2,000...on Windows, no less). I mention it because their ...

Plaxo Contact Networks: Web sync for your Outlook and Outlook Express contact information. Getting raves from some, jeers from others. It's like PayPal it works best when everyone on Earth joins.

The 2004 Senate race is starting to heat up here in South Dakota, and with Republicans trying to unseat Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, there's one thing that's certain: We'll get to see plenty of political ads before it's over. It seems that American politics aren't really much about representing ...

PHP Thumbnailer Class: This is probably the best dynamic thumbnailer I've ever seen for PHP. Extremely well-planned and executed. Nothing special -- just a shout out for some good code.

It's a long weekend coming up for us U.S. folks, so we'll need some extra diversion this week. I was thinking of keeping this one in my back pocket to slowly mete out future Friday Diversions, but this way you can divert yourselves if I miss a Friday or two ...

ATT now has a browser-based relay service. Best of all, it's totally free, except for 900-numbers. Now you don't even need to pick up a phone to order pizza.

Stever Robbins has written a great article with tips on managing your email. He makes some good points in here regarding the fact that it's so easy to send email that we seldom put thought into sending it, which leads to some behaviors that wind up wasting the time of ...

Mephisto -- The best blogging system ever: First we get Beast, a forum in Rails; then Radiant, a CMS in Rails; and Mephisto, a blogging platform in Rails. There may be something to this Rails thing.

We unleashed our new search page over the weekend. To make it work correctly, we had to retroactively keyword all past entries (a endeavor about which I will write more later). but with that done, it seems to be working quite well. The engine returns terms in two groups ...

The Napster Card: DId you know you can buy Napster gift cards at Best Buy? It's a gift certificate for the online service that the recipient can use to pay for music. Brilliant.

This is an extraordinarily broad overview of technical writing. So broad that the author delves into subjects like how to write your resume, how to take criticism, and even how to avoid on-the-job injuries like repetitive stress injuries and eye-strain. And, oh yes, somewhere in there is some information on ...

Open Source a No-Brainer for Developing World: This is something I believe in quite strongly. Open source is a nice alternative (even a novelty) for us in the first world, but for countries like sub-Saharan Africa, open source is the only game in town. They can't afford to feed the ...

Top 10 Mac Failures: An interesting look at Apple miscues. Among them, the Flower Power/Blue Dalmation iMac and my personal choice of unforgiveable design, the round mouse. Users were not universally pleased with the new mouse. It was now totally symmetrical, preventing many users from easily telling which way is ...

Law of Demeter: I just finished reading "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Dave Thomas. I didn't think the book was all that good (see below), but it did talk about a really great principle that I've seen articlulated numerous times before. The Law of Demeter (LoD) is a simple style rule ...

A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User's Perspective: This is an exhaustive (15-page) review of OS X by a diehard PC user. In the first few paragraphs he explains that he uses and enjoys PCs, but he'll give the Mac a shot. He spent a month with ...

Digital Web Magazine: This site just keeps getting better and better. They have a new design, which is top notch, and some of the best content of the Web for designers and architects. A true gem.

CMS Review - Features, Resources, Demos, and Downloads "The mission of CMS REVIEW is to give you the resources you need to choose the best content management system for your organization." I'm doing you all a dis-service.

A few months ago, I read Steve McConnell's book "Code Complete". It is, without a doubt, the best book on programming I have ever read. It doesn't matter what platform you code in, this book will help you do it better. An absolute goldmine. Besides down-and-dirty coding strategies, McConnell discusses ...

And the YouTube award goes to...: Just watch -- YouTube will become a franchise, like MTV. The video-sharing Web site announced Monday that it will hold the first YouTube Video Awards to recognize the best-user created videos of 2006.

Since everyone but the janitor started blogging at Microsoft, they've been aggregating their blogs into one big honkin' feed that I call The Fire Hose, since reading it is like trying to drink from a fire hose. I find some interesting stories occasionally, but I probably missed 50 since I ...

Fear of Girls: Oh, man, this hits close to home. It's a short film (11 minutes) about "elite tabletop role-players." I think one of these characters is based on me 20 years ago. True Love is but a +2 Broadsword away. These guys need to meet up with the "Lightning ...

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW / **** (PG): Some interesting information in Ebert's gushing review of this movie (it hits theaters today). Apparently there were no physical sets. Much will be written about the technique, about how the first-time director, Kerry Conran, labored for years to bring forth ...

Baseline: Case Studies, Tools and Best Practices for Better Project and Process Management: I had never heard of Baseline before, but they seem to do a good job covering enterprise IT project management. Great content, and it appears to be 100% free (though ad-heavy).

Finding what you need with the best search engines: A good list of search engines and the searches they're good for. Or...maybe the reverse searches you might want to make, and what engines you should use for that. Lots of engines I hadn't heard of.

The legendary Fabian Pascal showed up yesterday to tell us all that we were stupid over in the relational data model post. Specifically, his comment was: None of you know the relational model, which is why you think current products are relational, which they are not. This whole thread is ...

> Features >> Fourth Annual Weblog Awards">Fourth Annual Weblog Awards: The Bloggie nominations are out. The coolest thing for me is that Dean over at Heal Your Church Web Site got a nod for "Best Web Development Weblog." Very nice. I get linked to quite often from that site ...

There are a couple interesting Flash games I've seen lately that both subscribe to a particular format: pick choices in the right order. It started with Grow, and its siblings Grow RPG and Grow Cube (all found from this list). I liked Grow Cube the most of all. You pick...things ...

I think that we're rapidly approaching the point at which hardware vendors will no longer be able to ignore Linux. My wireless router has been misbehaving badly lately. When using my (wired) desktop or (wireless) laptop, you occasionally get no signal and no response from it. Trudging down to the ...

Firms jump on the eBay wagon: Here's an article about eBay proxy companies outfits that take your merchandise and sell it on eBay for you, taking a commission off the top. We've talked about these before. This article explains how eBay is really working to help these firms instead ...

Mozilla Coffee: You can get Worldly Lizard, Lazy Lizard, Nervous Lizard, or Enviro Lizard. "Welcome Mozilla users! In an effort to support the worlds best browser and email client, RJ Tarpley's has agreed to donate half the profit of all orders from Mozilla users directly to The Mozilla Foundation."

Yet another Friday diversion, this time, from our friends from across the sea. BBC Learning specializes in corporate training video. Apparently, they also have a sense of humor (or is it humour) by sponsoring a little web diversion called ...To The Rescue. After 5 minutes, my personal best is only ...

Brad Choate joins Six Apart: Six Apart has picked up Brad Choate, writer of two of the best MT plugins: MTSQL and MTKeyValue. While I can't write a post about all our new hires, I wanted to take an opportunity to write about the newest addition to our engineering team, ...

Firefox (Mozilla Corporation/Mozilla Foundation) made $72M last year?!: I wouldn't have predicted this in a million years. The best piece of information I got out of BarCampLA was that Firefox, which is produced by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, made $72M last year and is on target to have 120 employees ...

Report: Wal-Mart to exit VHS business, free space for DVDs: The death of VHS tapes happened awfully suddenly. [Wal-Mart's decision to stop selling VHS tapes] comes after an announcement from Target that it will phase out VHS sales by September. Best Buy and Circuit City no longer sell VHS tapes, ...

I just need to point out an obvious fact: hard drive space has gotten ridiculously cheap. I just took delivery of two 300GB drives that I got from New Egg for $132 each. That's 44-cents per GB. I remember when storage dropped under $1 per GB, everyone thought that was ...

Peter's Evil Overlord List: This is an absolute classic of the Internet. It's a list of things NOT to do if you become an evil overload. Number ninety-nine is the best: Any data file of crucial importance will be padded to 1.45Mb in size. Though Flash drives are probably making ...

List-o-matic - generate CSS-styled navigation based on list items : Very cool service. Enter the items in your list, pick a snazzy style, and it will give you all the HTML and CSS necessary to build it. Great for people like me who learn best through reverse engineering gimme ...

Vaporware: Nuke 'Em if Ya Got 'Em: Wired has named the best in vaporware. They even gave a Lifetime Achievement Award. "After all," [a reader] wrote, "what could possibly compete against a game that is six years in the making, is called by the own company's president 'turtleware,' and has ...

Music industry raids offices of Kazaa: Australian authorities went after Kazaa today, looking for evidence of copyright infringement. The raided sites included the office of Kazaa owner Sharman Networks, the homes of two of the company's executives, three Australian universities and Internet service providers. Fark had the best headline for ...

Ars Technica acquired by Condé Nast: the low-down: Very cool. Good for them. Once we realized that an acquisition would be the quickest way to accelerate the growth of Ars, the question turned to who the best possible partner could be. Respect for our community and our stewardship of the ...

This is so cool; a live web cam in the wilds of Botswana. (Click here to download the Real Player .rm file.) Best viewing time is from 7am to 12pm local time. I'm watching right now (12:25am CST) and there are several types of antelope, lots of birds, a few ...

Sitting outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia is a sculpture called Kryptos. It was sculpted by James Sanborn who was kind (evil?) enough to etch an encoded message on the surface: The message on the sculpture contains 865 characters in total. Sanborn has since revealed that the sculpture contains a ...

This article is a little light on content, but it speaks to a point very important to me the requirement that Web sites flow within the browser window, no matter what that window is sized to. "...nine times out of ten, the 'best' web layout is the one which ...

Space Imaging :: Image Gallery: This a great satellite imaging site with a "best Of" gallery full of satellite images related to current events. It's dominated right now with Tsunami photos, but there are some other gems in there too: Stage 13 of the Tour de France, a good archive ...

Chuck (TV series): I saw a preview for this show on the flight from Denver to San Francisco. It looks pretty hysterical Chuck is a member of the Geek Squad Nerd Herd at Best Buy Buy More, and he gets a bunch of spy secrets embedded in his brain. ...

.NET Rocks! hosted by MSDN: .Net is the only programming language with its own radio show. It's like Letterman for dorks, and I mean that in the best possible way. Carl Franklin and Mark Dunn interview .NET experts and other industry movers and shakers, and answer your .NET questions on ...

'Madden Football 2006' delivers best hit yet: While hailed as revolutionary, Madden 2006 may be getting a little out of hand: In Superstar mode, you create an NFL star from the very beginning of his career. And that means the very beginning. It starts by choosing from randomly generated parents, ...

The Sunbird Project - Standalone Calendar: Since they can't use "Firebird," Sunbird was the next best thing, I suppose. The Sunbird Project is a redesign of the Mozilla Calendar component. Our goal is to produce a cross platform standalone calendar application based on Mozilla's XUL user interface language. At the ...

Six Apart ProNet - Plugin Directory: The Movable Type plugins directory has really grown up. If you haven't been there for a while, it's worth stopping by and browsing. Lots of new stuff. I maintain that the quality of plugins for MT is far and away its strongest asset and ...

Major Security Flaw Found in Greasemonkey: The best round-up I've seen so far of all the issues and information surrounding the recently-discovered Greasemonkey vulnerability. If a user running a vulnerable version of Greasemonkey visits a website that triggers at least one of their user scripts then that website can read ...

Sixth Annual Weblog Awards: The 2006 Bloggie nominations have been released (three days late...not that I was checking every day or anything). We didn't make the cut, but in looking at the names on there, we're not even in the same league. Dooce and Go Fug Yourself are the names ...

The Best of Both Worlds: This Daily WTF is about something else, but it includes this bit in the intro that will make you think about SQL injection attacks. Ponder this. If you've ever worked with a database, chances are you know the difference between "dynamic queries" and "parameterized quires". ...

The Gaming Open Market - Welcome: Our first available service is the GOM Currency Exchange (GCX). The GCX makes buying and selling your game currency incredibly easy with our market overview and historical charting. Each currency has its own page where we consolidate all buyers and sellers giving you the ...

Well, here we are at #4,000. This puts us just 1,000 posts away from our stated goal of 5,000. Along with the 4,000 posts, we have 6,050 comments as of this writing, and that's very cool. We appreciate all the interaction everyone has with the site. Interestingly, we hit 2,500 ...

NY Times writes its own obituary: Bummer. The notice was on the front page of The New York Times, announcing the paper's imminent ritual act of suicide. Most of the most-interesting parts of the Times will now be closed off from the general internet. Instead of letting everyone see ...

Eastgate Tinderbox: the tool for notes: This is become a trend: software to organize all your stuff without having to do anything. This is for Mac only it analyzes your content and puts it in the order and groupings it thinks work best. Tinderbox is a personal content management ...

Rebuilt New Orleans could be cutting edge: Very interesting idea here. Now how I'd want to advance my cities technology, but still interesting. Ugly as she was, Katrina may have given BellSouth a rare opportunity: the chance to turn one of the oldest cities in the USA into a showcase ...

GoodLogo!com - World's finest selection of logos: Vote, then bring on the next one. "This site is dedicated to the artform of the logo and its accompanied corporate identity. We hope to serve you here with the finest selection of logos, selected and submitted by everyone from all over the ...

Mac Mini might inspire buyers in mass quantities: Gee, you think? Once Apple gets its manufacturing into gear, the launch of the Mac Mini its first budget computer is expected to pay big dividends for the company, which has been transformed by success of the iPod. Apple has ...

INFOCOM: This guy created a tribute site to InfoCom, the coolest part of which are free, DOS versions of Zork I, II, and III. Welcome to the INFOCOM Homepage! It is my intention to create a definitive homepage to pay homage to the company that created some of the best ...

Does Your Code Think In Ink? is a contest to develop your best PowerToy for the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. A Tablet PC is not even required to enter. "The Tablet PC Platform SDK application development can be done on a standard Windows XP desktop. The SDK provides the ...

What is the Best Way to Handle a GPL Violation?: There should be a Web site solely to track GPL violations. It'd be a nice way to keep everything in the same place. When you find that somebody is violating the GPL by distributing your code or a derivative of ...

The South by Southwest conference (SXSW) is in full-swing, and they have the winners of their Web site competition on their front page (I hope it's still there when you read this). Not surprisingly, there's some really high-quality stuff there. I'm not a big Flash fan, but Motel Records gets ...

Internet Toilet Roll Browser: Nothing here besides a picture and this text, but still enough proof that the word is ending. Please, someone, tell me this is a hoax. "Fancy catching up with your emails? The Internet Loo Roll Browser is a novel and unique product designed to make best ...

Knee Defender - protect against reclining seatbacks on airplanes : Being 6'4", this may be the best gadget of all. Knee Defender stops reclining seatbacks so your knees won't have to. Unique, patent pending Knee Defender offers you some control when confronted by a faceless, determined seat recliner who doesn't ...

Blowing in the Wind: Given my fondness for (1) ships, and (2) wind power, this is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. A German company is introducing sails it says may help propel ships across the sea cheaper and faster than modern engines. [...] SkySails' system consists ...

outrun2 route A time - Google Video: This speed run of an Outrun 2 level is a blast to watch if you like racing games. made on the 15th april 2005 was my best time but i've beaten that now lol I don't see how. He pegs the car at ...

My Dream App: It's American Idol for applications. My Dream App is a grand experiment to see what happens when you combine the expertise of some of the best talents in the software and tech world with great ideas and feedback from everyone else. It works like this. For the ...

Word of Mouth Marketing Association — About WOMMA: I didn t even know such a thing existed. WOMMA is the official trade association for the word of mouth marketing industry. WOMMA s mission is to promote and improve word of mouth marketing by Promoting best practices to ensure more effective marketing Protecting consumers and ...

The Web Empowered Church: This is a system to power your church Web site that's built on Typo3 -- the founder of which proclaims his faith directly in the license agreement. The WEC is a ministry of The Foundation for Evangelism designed to help churches around the world apply Internet ...

Web Pages That Suck -- Examples of Bad Web Design "Speaking of covers, in Chapter 5 of my latest book, I state that 'Heroin Content Is the Best Content' because when a site has addicting content, then it doesn't really make any difference what the site looks like because people ...

Gateway shares climb on eMachines purchase : I think Dell will follow suit here, in an effort to get in retail shelves. The deal would allow Gateway (GTW: up $0.49 to $4.58, Research, Estimates), which sells PCs in cartons with cow-like markings through its own stores and the Internet, to ...

The 2003 Online Journalism Awards Program is Accepting Entries: PaidContent.org won the "2003 European Online Journalism Award" for best news Weblog. Do I see this award in Gadgetopia's future? Probably not. "The fourth annual Online Journalism Awards, presented by the Online News Association in partnership with the USC Annenberg School ...

Embedding SEO Best Practices in CMS Implementations: A good article on how to make your CMS serve up more search engine friendly pages. What's interesting is that all of this is Web Development 101 if you're coding by hand. But when you throw a CMS into the mix, a lot ...

Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service: Woman gets harassed on Twitter. She asks Twitter to enforce their Terms of Service and ban the other user. Twitter refuses, then states that they will review their TOS, presumably to change it so they don t have to take action. Apologies for the ...

Car stereos come with USB ports: Looks like USB drives in car stereos are becoming the next big thing. Stereo makers say they want to accommodate both digital music players and thumb drives to give customers choice. "The whole point is people want music their way," says Amy Gilroy, senior ...

Microsoft preps slimmed-down Content Management Server: Apparently $42,000 per processor was a bit too steep for most folks. Especially considering that Microsoft CMS wasn't considered the best package out there it was just priced like it. "The Standard Edition of Content Management Server will have all the functionality of ...

ogo: Home: I think this project is admirable and necessary, but I think they'll have a tough time getting any traction. I really wish them the best. The ogo project aims to clean up PHP, starting with fixing the inconsistent (and difficult to remember) function names. PHP needs clear naming ...

Like the Aquada, but you're looking for something that will hold a few more of your friends? Try the Terra Wind "We have combined the best features of world class yachts and Motor Coaches in a revolutionary design and YES IT DOES GO IN THE WATER!" The pictures of this ...

Salesforce.com buys Web content management firm: I don't get the integration angle here. What's the benefit of integrating CRM with Web content management? Salesforce.com, best known for its hosted sales applications, is pushing into Web content management. The company on Tuesday expects to detail new products and the acquisition of ...

Elevator 2010: Move over XPrize, Elevator:2010 is here. They're offering $50,000 to the best "climber" prototype, with a couple of other contests for some other pieces of the puzzle. We firmly believe that the set of technologies that underlie the infinite promise of the Space Elevator can be demonstrated, or ...

Java Developer's Journal - Is J2EE Too Big for Its Own Good? "I question whether Sun's current monolithic approach to the Enterprise Edition is either appropriate or effective: (1) Big projects tend to move at the speed of the slowest task. (2) Coping with problems caused by unstable and changing ...

Six Apart - Project Comet: It's vague like an Amway presentation, but the folks over there aren't dumb, so I'm sure it'll be huge. Project Comet will launch in early 2006 and will combine the publishing power of TypePad, the community aspects of LiveJournal and the years of insight garnered ...

ImageWell: Neat idea for a little utility. It's lightweight image editor designed specifically to modify images then post them to a server. Via Reinvented who call it a "bloggers best friend." ImageWell is the easy way to edit, rotate, crop and resize your image and upload it to your iDisk ...

Six Apart Guide to Combatting Comment Spam: Could this be the be-all and end-all guide to comment spam? A lot of good research, opinions, and information here. This document describes how malicious or unwanted comments ('comment spam') affect weblogs, the techniques spammers use to abuse weblogs, and the tactics that ...

Brainbench - Predicting Employee Success: Don't like the certifications Microsoft offers? How about this: Looking for the best way to measure, improve and promote your career skills? Brainbench provides the opportunity to earn certifications in over 600 of todays leading skills. While I can't vouch for this particular outfit (can ...

Versioning web services: This is a good article on how to change a Web API without breaking things. I have this same problem right now -- I have a REST API on a project, and I need to consider versioning. When I add a new feature to Tagyu's web service ...

Wired News: Porn Purveyors Getting Squeezed: An anonymous hacker is taking down porn sites all over the world unless he's paid a ransom. It's no idle threat either he knocked several offline with massive DOS attacks. "The string of bizarre incidents started June 30, at gof**kyourself.com (or GFY), the ...

Report: Toshiba making funeral plans for HD DVD; Wal-Mart to go all Blu: And just like that, the format war is over. Throughout the battle with Blu-ray, Toshiba and the HD DVD Promotions Group had fought aggressively to defend HD DVD, even as Warner Bros. abandoned ship. But that strong ...

Internet 96: A fascinating look at the Internet back in 1996. It wasn t a greatest of places, actually. Many screencaps. McDonalds wow. I decided to peruse the Wayback Machine s earliest archives to see what the internet looked like in 1996, when I was 14 and evidently had much less free time ...

Carnegie Mellon Wi-Fi Data: Carnegie-Mellon University has a page which shows a map on on-campus Wi-Fi activity in real time. There's a dot for the location of every connected wireless card. This reminds me of those campuses a decade ago that had Internet-enabled soda machines that would report their temperatures ...

The 9th Webby Awards opens for entries from the best of web: The Webbies are open for entries. Hint, hint (oh, I'm kidding much like myself, Gadgetopia is too ugly to win anything...) Starting 24 September, web sites from around the world can get in the running for a ...

Characteristics of the Best Systems: Here's a fantastic collection of usability guidelines that cuts across authors to reveal they're all really saying the same things, just in different ways. If all software developers would follow these rules, it'd be a whole new world. "This is a collection of heuristics, attributes, ...

XVR27's "Weird Al" Yankovic Homepage - Lyrics - It's All About The Pentiums: Gotta be one of the best (only?) geek parody songs ever made. Sung to the tune of Puff/P Daddy/Diddy's "All About the Benjamins." You've gotta be the dumbest newbie I've ever seen You've got white-out all over ...

Microsoft Embraces Modeling: "The Redmond, Wash., company is developing its own model-driven architecture for a future release of its Visual Studio .Net development environment. The new architecture will be based on the UML (Unified Modeling Language) standard, sources said." This is great! Microsoft has announced that they're going to improve ...

101 ways to improve your news site: Some great suggestions here on how to improve news Web sites. I emailed this link to the Webmasters of the big three news stations here in Sioux Falls. Post a form at the end of a breaking news story asking witnesses to send ...

I've Never Met a Boxed CMS I Like: SitePoint has a brutally accurate post about CMSs and making them run actual Web sites. The first issue is that the very nature of a CMS is not easily boxable, without creating an application that tries to do everything for everyone and ...

The Mystery Blog: It's been revealed -- the mystery blog that was auctioned for somewhere in the $60K range. I have never heard of this blog. Not once. The blog is The Blog Herald, as several people at Blogaholics guessed (ultimately, John Evans won the contest, which included a free ...

QuirksMode - for all your browser quirks: I wasn't there ten seconds before I learned something new: the * selector (warning: deep link into a frameset). Who knew? "QuirksMode.org is the personal and professional site of Peter-Paul Koch, freelance web developer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It contains more than 150 ...