ABCSEO.com blog

Acer Aspire One Review

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:03:49 +0100

I've just picked up an Acer Aspire One from my local Interdiscount in downtown Geneva for 449 CHF (which is around 280EUR). It is moderately more expensive in Europe than in the UK or US. Tant Pis! The missus wanted the French accents on the keyboard. It is not quite as tiny as the Asus EEEPC 900 which we use as a support computer to monitor our server farm but it looks a lot cooler in a shiny metallic blue case.

Acer Expired

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:18:35 +0100

I didn't get much further with my Acer Aspire One installation as the screen went dead. Plugging into an external monitor showed that the machine was working. Closer examination revealed that the back light had failed. A problem with Acers it would seem. So two dead Acers in the space of a couple of days doesn't speak wonderfully for the reliability of the Aspire One. However I've not heard of many other problems apart from BIOS upgrades bricking the machine.

blog:adit

Thu, 17 May 2007 10:09:00 +0100

====== Adit - PHP advertising management package ====== The last few days I've been working on a small advert management system written in PHP. This is my first small PHP project although I've done a lot of single page scripts in the past. The project is called Adit and is aimed at the pmwiki content management system. It selects adverts for a page based on the page title or group name and geographic location (country). If there is more than one advert matching the critera it selects advert…

blog:anti-seo

Thu, 17 May 2007 10:38:00 +0100

====== Anti SEO ====== For those immersed in the world of search engine positioning (aka SEO) it is quite bizarre, although all too frequent, to come across clients who seem to have still been in bed when the clue-train pulled out. Last autumn I was asked to take a look at a site. The client had a copy of my book, the ABC of SEO but had been too busy to read it. He told me his website looked groovy and he'd paid a Web designer top dollar for it but he couldn't understand why it didn't seem to…

Aspect Oriented Development

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:31:21 +0100

I never realized that I was one of the pioneers of Aspect Oriented Development (AOP). However I was randomly browsing the web the other day when I came across this paper from the [|5th International Conference on Aspect Oriented Programming] in which the paper on using AOP for Performance Management cites my x.Link profiler.

Canonical HTML Tag

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:34:27 +0100

The major search engines (that is Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live) have introduced a new canonical url tag. The aim of the tag is to inform search engine spiders what the correct (or canonical) form of any URL is. This kind of information is important for dynamic websites where different URLs can lead to the same page content. In particular parameters in the query string can get picked up by search engine robots producing all manner of weird but unique URL format.s

dokuwiki vs pmwiki

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 23:08:34 +0100

I've been working a lot with PmWiki over the last year for a client but recently installed DokuWiki on this site. Both wiki's are written in PHP and use flat files rather than the traditional MySQL (or other) route for storing pages. This can cause some file/directory permission problems where you only have ftp access to your server. On Unix the FTP process and web server usually run as different users and groups. Unless you set up very open initial permissions on data directories files created …

ExtJS

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:37:50 +0100

I've been developing with ExtJS recently. ExtJS cross-browser JavaScript library which enables the construction of rich applications using AJAX techniques. Now AJAX is all the rage and I've already done a proof of concept using Direct Web Remoting (DWR) but ExtJS is in a whole different league. It provides a whole gamut of GUI widgets to enable the building of simple forms to complex GUI applications. At RGIS we've recently built an ExtJS front end onto a data browser applications and the differ…

Feeding the habit

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 09:19:44 +0100

It has been a long time since I've written anything. Since September I've been working for an outfit in Switzerland developing a CMS and it has been pretty full on I can tell you. One of the jobs I had was adding RSS2.0 feeds to the system. Not something that complex you would think, until you have to retro fit it to an existing system. Anyway this got me into looking at writing a simple feed aggregator for my website. I wanted to take feeds from a number of sources, merge them, sort them by dat…

First Post

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 14:11:27 +0100

It has been said that what you do today will echo in eternity. Nowhere is that more true than on the Interweb thingie. With Google, Waybackwhen Machine and sites like Facebook keeping a record of our passage long after we've moved or passed on. News that the smiley is 25 years old today got me thinking about when I first posted to the “net”. Although I was using email in the early to mid eighties the first post to the Usenet news system that I could find was in April 1989 - that's over 18 years …

blog:google-custom-search-engine

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 15:51:00 +0100

====== Google Custom Search Engine ====== Wouldn’t it be great if you could find a search engine which cuts out all the Made for AdSense, Commercial and Spam results and concentrates on the sites with useful information? Yesterday the Search giant unveiled Google Custom Search Engine which lets users build their own, Google powered, search engine. To get started building your own search engine all you need is a Google account such as a gmail address. A wizard guides you through the process…

blog:google-targets-mfa

Mon, 28 May 2007 16:11:23 +0100

====== Google targets MFA websites ====== In mid-May Google started a new round in its campaign against so called Made for Adsense websites. Offending Adsense publishers have been receiving emails telling them that their accounts will be terminated on the 1st of June. It seems like two kinds of publishers are being targetted

blog:google-website-optimizer

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 23:00:00 +0100

====== Google Website Optimizer ====== Google has unveiled a new tool called Google Website Optimizer targeted towards businesses using the Adwords services. It helps web designers tune the flow incoming users to conversion, be that a product purchase or other action. Although the AdWords service is used as the primary example the tool can tune any “landing page” on a website. Research has shown that a large proportion of visitors will leave a website if they don’t find an immediate and compe…

Hacking Adit

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:30:46 +0100

It's been a major programming session over the week-end as I have been modifying my banner advert management software called adit to be a more complete product. I originally wrote Adit as a pmwiki plugin but wanted to use it to replace openpads. Now you may be wondering why I would replace a mature and respected ad management software with something I hacked up over the weekend? Well because OpenAds is widely used it has had to respond to a lot of diverse requirements. When you have a lot of adv…

blog:is-google-code-search-evil

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 23:00:00 +0100

====== Is Google code search evil? ====== On Thursday Google unveiled code search the result of a Google labs project. Already used internally the idea is to allow developers to search for useful program snippets on the Internet. Google's general search does not index any computer programs it finds. However commentators have suggested that Google hasn't really thought the wider implications of code search through. Computer geeks were quick to find many examples of copyrighted code that had f…

JSON request caching

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:31:43 +0100

I had a strange bug in a Google Web Toolkit front end I'm developing. The app consists of a tree explorer and a details page. This is all built using nice MVC structure with the observable pattern as outlined in Robert Hanson's GWT in Action. I can change the name of an object in the detail page and this should cause the name to be updated in the tree view. This worked ok under Firefox but not on IE. I determined that IE is caching the request.

Maven Voyage

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 16:11:00 +0100

As some readers will know I've been hard at work refactoring an EJB 2.x system to use EJB 3.0. The new EJB 3.0 is a pleasure to work with compared to 2.1 with all the inherited methods that needed implementing. Even if IDEs such as Eclipse could generate all the stubs for you. Now the client phoned up wondering if I had any experience with Maven. Not much, I admitted, my friend Vicent Massol is a dedicated committer to the project but I'd last spoken in depth to Vincent over pizza in Paris a cou…

blog:microsoft-search-patent-blitz

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 14:32:59 +0100

====== Microsoft search patent blitz ====== Microsoft applied for a number of search related US patents in 2005 and these were published recently. Now software patents are pretty controversial as detractors claim they often document systems for which prior art is available or which are obvious and that they stifle innovation. The most interesting patent applications from a search engine optimization viewpoint are the following: Patent application 20060248068 describes a method for finding se…

blog:samsung-d361-cheap-camcorder

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 10:35:00 +0100

====== Samsung VP-D361 Camcorder ====== I recently needed a small camcorder that I could carry around in a coat pocket to take sports and publicity videos. My main target would be YouTube. Now it is arguable that a solid state camera would fit the bill as the video compression would be a good match for YouTube. However they often have poor video performance and optics better suited to still pictures. The biggie though is if you are going to aggressively compress your images for Internet use y…

Scrum

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:32:22 +0100

Ken Schwaber co-developed the Agile process talks Scrum to some Google engineers. Ken is a good speaker and the talk is pretty interesting and worth giving an hour of your time to. I'm a big fan of these online training videos. It would be very hard to see a speaker of Ken's calibre where I'm based.

Spring Security 2.0

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:10:05 +0100

I've been looking at Spring Security in my free time with a view to integrating it into my Magneato CMS. The Spring approach is based on declarative security. You basically tell the Security Filter what you want to protect with which roles. It handles user logins/logouts and checking the user has sufficient rights to access each resource.

An occasional blog

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:35:40 +0100

An occasional blog

The JSP compiler cannae take it Cap'n

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:11:24 +0100

We ran into the old Java method limit problem compiling a JSP the other day. In the webapp log file we saw org.apache.jasper.JasperException: Unable to compile class for JSP Generated servlet error: The code of method _jspService(HttpServletRequest, HttpServletResponse) is exceeding the 65535 bytes limit

Vélib'

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:34:10 +0100

I was up in Paris for a few days last week to sort out some tax affairs with the United States IRS. I'd not been in Paris for four years but had been an assiduous cycle commuter in the city. My daily run was from the Latin Quarter out to Puteaux and la Defense, about 12km. Okay I sometimes did it on roller blades. I was therefore interested to test out the new Vélib' system.