A Google Dance is the term for when Google updates all of it search centres. It can take a few days and during that time, search results, and Google Page Rank can go hither and thither.
One of my websites personality tests had had a Google Page Rank of 5 until a week or two ago when it vanished. At the same time, my C, C++ and C# topic had dropped from 7 to 6. I held my breath (best advice under such circumstances- figuratively I mean, not physically!) and lo and behold, they’re back today.
Having become an SEO expert, I decided I had to give some of my knowledge back to the world- so what better way to show it off than by writing a book about everything I’ve discovered in Blogger, including some stuff that no one knows about.
Google bought Blogger and they tied in the two in so many ways that only now are we beginning to discover them.
If you use some of the secret codes (all documented in the book), google recognises them and boosts the popularity of the page without altering the PR.
Follow this link or click the book cover to find out more. Enjoy!
I joined About.com a few months back as one of their 600 guides writing about C,C++ and C#– see an earlier entry. This involved passing prep, preparing a launch website then going live and building up the content. Then there came the three month review. I’ve passed that and now working on the site.
If you have a bit of flair for writing and the time and commitment (you need considerable amounts of both!) have a look at Be-A-Guide, there may be a topic on which you are knowledgeable and can write.
The leaflet pictured is from a local pharmacy and was posted through I guess most of the letterboxes in the street. I reckon its advertising their services but with all the languages on it..shouldn’t English also have been included! (Not much use to me without!).
Also, after recent arrivals in the area (we are so… cosmopolitan) I think Lithuanian, Ukranian and Polish should also be on the leaflet as well. Mind you there should be a few more Christmas trees and lights this year!
It was nuts today. A one hour commute became two and a half. After changing at Mile End from Central to District Line, that ground to a halt due to a fire on South Kensington. I was at Embankment, so changed lines and and scooted up to Picadilly Circus where the Picadily line tube went as far as Green Park and stopped due to more problems. I then changed lines and got to Bond Street and back on the Central Line as far as Notting Hill Gate where the station was closing due to problems at Earl’s Court.
A bus then took me near enough to Fulham Broadway and a one mile walk got me to work, 90 minutes later than usual to a very quiet as in no one else here office.
My day off, to work on a project when I got asked to sort out a problem. A Linux system I setup with Suse a few months back on it has crashed. By the look of it a hard disk was having difficulties- it only booted intermittently- and it was manufactured in January 2006!
I wondered if something had damaged the Linux box as it was failing to boot with a Kernel Panic error. Couldn’t find a bootable partition. I don’t blame the hard disk manufacturers as the hard disk in this was replaced a few months ago. Dodgy controller perhaps?
So I had an unbootable disk (formatted with Reiser FS) containing very important customer data (backups! Don’t ask- they do not know how lucky they were- someone there had switched off backups a few months ago!).
There are some pretty amazing open source utilities and Yareg (which is a front end to the excellent RFS Tools) let me plug the drive (which was Sata- thankfully Maplin sell a USB- SATA drive enclosure) into My XP box. I was then able to see all the folders and files and drag and drop the mysql database and website files onto my XP box. It looked like the disk, though failing had not corrupted anything.
One last trick. If you have the correct version of Mysql – you can download them from mysql.org, install, run it, set up default root admin etc then close it down. Now copy the mysql data files into the data folder and restart mysql. It’s quick and dirty but it sems to work ok. Result… I could view the data. It was from a live system and the latest update date was last night. Phew=-All data rescued!
Where I faced serious questioning. Sounds serious, but it was actually to take part in a fun quiz, as guest of my friend Kate (who owns Christchurch Tower
The Bank’s staff were raising money for two charities- the RNLI and I think Demelza house (a childrens hospice). It was very well organised- had to be with 300+ team members in 60 teams plus a hot supper and drinks. Our team probably came about middling in the ranks, thanks in part (he says modestly) to my love of pop music. 
One round had photos of people and you had to name them and whether they were dead or alive. We clearly jinxed Milton Friedman who was on the photos and was supposed to be still alive. He though had different plans and kicked the bucket yesterday.
It was a great event and good fun. We’d have scored higher if I knew more flags of the world… d’oh!
On the BBC, a report why Christian Aid charity are still using Closed Source (Windows) rather than Open Source. I’ve nothing against Windows- horses for courses mind. But it’s the reason that the techy guy gave!
…But Steven Buckley, who runs Christian Aid’s common knowledge programme, prefers to buy software from the likes of Microsoft. Is this not odd for a charity?
and
He also explained that what is seen as one of the advantages of open-source – that the core code can be examined by anyone – could actually work against the charity.
“We are a funding organisation that ships £90m around the world – the last thing you want to do is open up your systems to anybody to have a look at to deal with bugs,” he said.
Except guess what the Christian Aid website runs on? It runs on Linux… D’oh!
While browsing through a Pound Shop in Romford yesterday, I found a “Classical Greats” Double CD. Heck for £1, if it’s no good then it is not exactly a great loss.
But I never thought why it was that price until I looked at the case and ahah! This is genuinely as I found it- no photoshopping of the scanned image except to highlight it with a red box drawn round the affected area. It’s from the external cardboard CD box. The inlay for CD 1 is correct on the inside but on the back has the same mistake. The 3rd track is actually by Bizet who appears to have been deleted so all the following names are out by one except for the last.
I reckon the perpetrator knew that “Ride of the Valkyries” was by Wagner and adjusted it, but weirdly added Debussy in to fill the gap. There are NO Debussy tracks on either CD (D’oh!) . He clearly forgot the idiom “When you reach the bottom- stop digging!”
So with a batch of dodgy CD inlays the publsihers could hardly flog this full at full price (I think it was a budget range anyway) and it would have cost too much to reprint so they sold them off cheap to the “Remainder market” or wherever Pound shops buy their stuff from.
Last week I published an article on Averting Global Warming suggesting using a shield in geostationary orbit to diminish the amount of sunlight reaching the earth.
Today I noticed that the Science Magazine website published a similar idea but using the Lagrange Point (L1) which is a point where the gravitational attraction from the Earth and Sun is equal. You can see the 5 Lagrange Points in this image, borrowed from Wikipedia (Thanks chaps- I’ll return it when I’ve finished with it).
Great minds as they say! (“Think Alike”). I think my idea is better though for the following reasons: