sixtyPercent: Cochlear Implants, Aviation, Technlology, and Philosophy 2006/08
My new MacBook is very nice.
Count me among the many new MacBook fans. I've had mine for all of a week now, and it's without question the best computer I've owned.
I have switched back and forth between the PowerBook and iBook lines for a number of years. The PowerBook (now MacBook Pro) has of course always been targeted to the high-end, or "pro" user and that's me. The problem is, I use my computer every day -- a lot. I use it at work, I use it at home, while I traveling, and so on. The iBook line (now MacBook) always seems to be able to handle the wear and tear better than the pro-line.
So now the pendulum swings back to the consumer model, and I have replaced my 12" Aluminum PowerBook (PPC) with a fully-loaded black (of course) MacBook. It feels pretty tough -- and I hope it is. It is certainly very, very fast, especially with 2GB of RAM. I have no heat or fan issues or dead pixels; I am fortunate in that all of the applications I use for work and play are fully Intel-native, so there's no PowerPC emulation penalty to pay. It connects to my 24" LCD monitor at work and spans the display to include the extra pixels without any trouble. WiFi performance is much better than my "old" PowerBook; the built in video camera works well with iChat, Delicious Library, and Skype. My calendar and contacts sync to my phone via Bluetooth.
Everything just works, and works well.
by David Creemer : 2006/08/26 : Categories technology (permalink)
Deep Linkers -- Not Thinkers
I posted a blog entry a while back about my observation that the Aeronca C3 airplane looked a lot like Droopy Dog. Of course the search engines crawled the page, and pretty soon the Droopy image was in their image search results. Apparently a lot of people found this image, and "deep linked" to it from various sites.
By "deep linking" in this context I mean this: someone built a web page (or more commonly posted a comment on a blog or other forum) that included the image served from my poor little server. Every time the page on that website is served, the image gets pulled from my machine. In effect, I'm providing free image hosting of a sort. Now actually, I don't mind this too much, but recently the deep links have come from some very high traffic web sites.
Instead of just removing the image I configured my web server to look at the referrer header when receiving a request for the Droopy image. If the request came from this website, Yahoo, or Google, or if it has no referrer, then the Droopy image is served. If the request comes from anywhere else, then a different image is served. This has the nice effect of continuing to show Droopy on my website as it always has, and letting that same Droopy image show up in Yahoo and Google search results. But if used directly by another site -- then no Droopy.
I'm writing about this for two reasons: my amusement, and to let the deep linkers know (should they care to investigate), why the image they linked to of Droopy Dog:
now looks like this:
by David Creemer : 2006/08/10 : Categories humor technology (permalink)
