Mike’s ramblings

Under the label Zero Punctuation on the escapist Yahtzee Croshaw made a funny video that sums up the differences between the three “next generation” consoles quite well. Check it out on the escapist.

With the recent problems at Paypal, this is already the second time in a month that an eBay company reports a major outage. The first one of these was the Skype outage, that reportedly lasted more than 36 hours. Now Paypal reports that their subscription service is out since August 30 and is going to be out until about September 5 or 6. That is more than a week of outage. These two occurrences seem far from normal for two high-profile companies with a strong track record such as Skype and Paypal. The fact that both companies are owned by eBay and that some of their servers probably are hosted in the same datacenters makes it even more interesting.

I highly doubt, that this connection has anything to do with the outages, but I find it very interesting, that companies like these two, whose products have worked for years without a problem can experience such severe problems all of a sudden. One would expect that if an entity with pockets as deep as eBay’s is behind something, that major outages should not be able to happen. Of course an outage is always possible, but with so much manpower behind, the companies should be able to reduce the out time to under a few hours.

We’ll see if over the next couple of month more companies won’t be able to handle the rising demand that is put on today’s web applications and there will be more outages.

Hi folks!

I just watched this historic version of the 1984 Apple Macintosh Superbowl commercial on Google Video and while looking closer at it, I discovered that someone has edited an iPod into the video. The “Apple Girl” is wearing it.

Interesting and well done…

Update: I found out over at Wikipedia that Apple edited the commercial themselves for the 40 year anniversary of the Mac in 2004.

Hey folks! I just wanted to let you know, that I’m in Nice right now to improve my French. As you can see on the picture, Nice is actually really very nice…
I know bad joke.

Some links on (or a little off) the topic:

• Dictionary French - German - English - Spanish (one of the best sites on the web anyway…)
• Pictures of Nice on Flickr

Read you next time!

A couple of days ago I found this really funny site about a girl called Hope who is, indeed, emo. She is really sad and maybe you want to join her in her sadness about the really important things…

Yes the odyssey of the stolen Sidekick is finally over. The NYPD arrested the girl that stole it and they got their Sidekick back.

Besides the fact, that this girls life may be ruined now, I really like this site. It shows that with the great tool of the Internet you can use the power of the masses to do justice (sadly also to do wrong…).

For the ones of you who haven’t heard of it before (Here the NYTimes link for a longer summary.): A girl lost her Sidekick in a cab and noone returned it. Another girl from Corona got it in her hands and was stupid enough to make pictures of herself with it. (As anyone else knows, Sidekick’s stuff is saved on T-Mobile’s servers.) A friend of the victim opened up this website and millions of people got interested in the story.

Someone from the Uboot helpdesk answered me regarding my problem. He said that they can’t unsubscribe me from the list after I my account got deleted because it is run by a third party… Why can they unsubscribe me when I have an account but not when they deleted it?

More to this annoyance and a possible solution later.

As many sites report a French blog portal (part of the Microsoft site) was hacked by a Turkish hacking group. As stated in this article it could be, that there is a security flaw in IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003. This could lead to another worm which would have a very big impact on the internet. (Netcraft says, that the number of Apache runned sites is declining in favour of IIS.)

Let us hope that this is not the case. Microsoft said in a statement, that the hack was possible because of a misconfiguration in a third party hosting center.

I registered a few years ago in the all cool and trendy teenager cellphone social networking page uboot. At first it was really nice because I could send text messages for free but after some time they couldn’t afford that anymore.

I haven’t used that account since but I still get spam (or ‘business’…) emails from other companies in the name of uboot. At the end is always that nice message that says ‘login to say NO to our emails’. Well… I tried, and after finding out my username from archived emails and trying to recover my password I find out that my account doesn’t exist anymore. Now I am still on their mail list from which I can’t unsubscribe because my account got deleted. Really annoying.

I really think that online businesses maybe have to send emails like that to survive, but I really never got asked to get these emails and unsubscribing shouldn’t be more complicated than clicking on one link.

I can sure not say that I am blogging right now just because so many people read it and follow my words every day (or week/months considering the amount of posts I plan to make). It is probably more because it is now cool for more than a few years and I did a very good job ignoring it until now, but it seems to be a medium with future.

By the way, the thought of having so many people read your column in a distant future is in itself pretty cool and worth to start that whole thing… So lets start blogging!