Blogs

With the iPhone, it's all about the apps. At least that's what the commercials on TV tell us. Naturally, I wanna see what apps are available on the App Store. Disappointingly, it only shows a categorized selection - out of the 100,000 that's available. Directories died a long time ago; just give me a search box.

The fiasco over the weekend with T-Mobile Sidekick and Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, struck a cord with me. If you haven't heard, their server that held nearly a million users' contacts, emails, photos, and appointments went kaput.

I don't understand why there's all this hate towards the new release of Windows Mobile 6.5. First of all, there's a reason why it's called 6.5. It's just a partial upgrade, not a full upgrade like Windows Mobile 7 is supposed to be. Nonetheless, 6.5's sole purpose was to make the device more finger-friendly. And for that purpose, it succeeds.

You may have noticed that Wopular was down for most of Friday. The database crashed and one of the tables was corrupted. It just so happened that it was the most important one. It stored all of the headlines and teasers. Yeah, why did it had to be that table. I tried repairing it, which usually was't too bad, except this time, it was.

The New York Post just launched their redesign earlier this week. First impression - looks like CNN except a lot busier.

Having managed two aggregation sites, I really wanted to write something original and insightful to dispel what Rupert Murdoch and the Associated Press had been spewing out to the media regarding news aggregators.

I just installed a really useful FireFox addon: Tree Style Tab. It allows you to place your tabs on the top (default), left sidebar, right sidebar, or bottom. For me, it's the option to put the tabs on either sidebar that's most useful. My screen resolution is 1440. Since most websites have a max resolution of 1024, there's still a lot of space left for either sidebar.

I'm just starting to submit stories from my blog to Digg, hoping against hope that they'll get some Digg love and drive some traffic back here. So far, no luck. The only Digg love my blog entries get is from me - and ONLY me. But I noticed a nice side effect - articles submitted to Digg almost instantly appear in Google's search results. Nice! Sure, the link goes to Digg, but from there, potential users can get here. It's a good trade-off.

I recently upgraded to FireFox 3.5 because I accidentally clicked on the upgrade button. I didn't mind initially because FireFox upgrades hadn't done me wrong in the past. My initial reaction was: "Hey, they copied Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 with the new tab button." Chrome and IE, of course, both copied FireFox's tabbed browsing feature to start with. So everyone's copying everyone. I'm surprised at how convenient that new tab button is. I initially thought that button would be useless. I didn't think I would ever use it because I'm so used to pressing Control-T. Well, I did.

I was testing a couple of caching software to stablize the site. Wopular used to crash 3-8 times a day. I had thought the main culprit was mysql because whenever resources become low, there is a logjam of queries waiting to be processed. They eventually pile up and consume all available resources and crash the site. Since I was able to set the server to reboot whenever it's near the melting point I didn't mind it too much because it only takes about 2-5 minutes.