It’s been incredible following the social media updates on the 11/26 Mumbai attacks in India on various channels,.. the old school media (BBC, CNN, IBN, etc etc) is all fine, but hopelessly following behind the social media. Twitter has managed to stay up (accessible) during these sad attacks in India and the #mumbai tag has been flooded with updates from the ground that the traditional media simply can’t keep up with; be it for school closings, updates on ground activities from individuals... Read Full Story

Well, it was a matter of time with the few Canadian cell phone carriers having jacked up their rates for SMS text messages. Bell was the first one to do it, when they revealed that outbound text SMS messages would be $0.15 as of August 1st… and despite a huge consumer backlash and government involvement: nothing happened. Now Twitter has officially announced they will no longer deliver SMS updates to Canadians (who use cell phone carriers in Canada such as Bell, Rogers, Fido and Telus) due... Read Full Story

In these times of uncertainty, domain name investments are a good choice – even though the pickings are far from what they were 3-4 years ago (or during the real gold rush back in the late 90s.)… GoDaddy has an excellent promotion right now to get a .com domain name registration for just $0.99 for one year. That excludes the $0.20 per year ICANN fee, but regardless, it comes out to less than a $1.50 for a .com domain for one year… all included. The above link includes the $0.99 discount... Read Full Story

503 Service Unavailable No server is available to handle this request. I monitor availability of several of the larger sites in Canada, and noticed some trouble over at one of the larger ones… The above error message seems to indicate something beyond a load balancer is not working - or perhaps RC is having a problem with their CDN (content distribution network) provider…. ReseauContact – one of Canada’s largest dating sites has been virtually unreachable for nearly 2 hours now… The popular... Read Full Story

So, yes, I love watching Jim Cramer on Mad Money for analysis of the days market with a great dose of humor and interesting insight from this former hedge fund manager… who my mom noted seems to be slim and in great shape (unlike many financial folks) despite television usually adding a few pounds to people… Well, tonight – tune in to CNBC for Mad Money *right now* because he’ll have Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) on the show for an interview. Eric Schmidt was last on with Jim back in August... Read Full Story

So while my current health situation recovering from my extreme varicose vein surgery goes on (and on, and on)… I’m managing to at least somewhat stay in tune with a minimal amount of news from the tech world. I’ve been pretty ambivalent about Skype 4 which has been in beta for several months. There are some major changes in Skype 4: most notably to the UI which now is much larger and groups all chats into one monolithic window. This has been really hard to digest (for me, and many others... Read Full Story

OK, so if you’re a dedicated You’re a Hottie application user on FaceBook, you’ve no doubt become used to the message: Pet is temporarily disabled for server maintenance over the last few days…. (at least since Tuesday)… Sounds like either “Pet your hotties” has been gamed and people are somehow abusing it (rolls eyes innocently) or something really wong…. Anyone with tips, feel free to leave a comment Related posts:PHPFox Konsort Social Networking Script Sale - $100 off during Summer... Read Full Story

With help from my trusted PHP & JSON guru Pritesh, I can confirm that Akismet doesn indeed work very well with WordPress 2.7 (Beta 2)… Some people have asked me if the current beta of WordPress 2.7 is stable enough for production use… I would say that it depends on how much traffic you get, how many plugins you have (and how frequently they’re updated), and most importantly: Will you be able to get used to the drastically changed (albeit improved) WordPress admin back-end. With the AJAX... Read Full Story

The other day, the CEO of Tupperware (Tupperware Brands Corporation; TUP on the NYSE), Rick Goings , was on CNBC with Jim Cramer discussing the recent drop of the share value (from $38 to $24) of his company despite good P/E ratios (around and also promising business in many global markets (including India where they’re looking at thousands of new Tupperware reps…) Jim Cramer considers Tupperware a “recession play” in that it is solid in times of hardship…. I mentioned it to the GF, who... Read Full Story

Well, our favorite bloated PDF viewer / reader Adobe Reader is once again victim to a fairly critical flaw that could allow a malicious user to gain control of your machine simply by your opening a PDF file using a vulnerable version of Adobe Reader. I read about this latest vulnerability in an article by Ryan Naraine over at the ZDNet Zero Day security blog… the article is worthwhile but a bit misleading perhaps: this vulnerability affects multiple versions of Adobe Reader, but not Adobe... Read Full Story