Category Archives: Internet

First tr.im, then bit.ly

If after tr.im’s near shutdown you came over to bit.ly, happy they’d had funding and had Twitter’s approval and seemed rock-solid and had 100% uptime, think again.

Now bit.ly’s looking dodgy too, with a two hour outage earlier today.

OK, it’s not a full outage or anything, but if people are relying on this thing for Twitter and other uses, and maybe this isn’t the worst thing in the world… but there are going to be times when you can’t wait two hours to generate a short URL — you need it NOW!

Is the answer really to host one of these things yourself?

tr.im goes west

After some problems in the last week or two tracking stats (often they’d show zero hits), URL shortening service tr.im shut down suddenly this morning around 8am AEST, citing lack of investment:

tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.
Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.
Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.
We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.
There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner.
There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.
We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.

Personally I liked tr.im, but with its demise the quest for the ultimate URL-shortening service continues. Search Engine Land has a good list from April.

I’ve signed-up for bit.ly, and it looks okay, though already I can see one annoyance: it tracks everything by US time, with no apparent options to change that.

And I guess I’ve got about 4 months to manually go through the best of my Tweets and save the expanded tr.im URLs — something I started doing last week to prevent any future problems with stuff I’d written being lost.

Interestingly at least one of my older URLs from tinyurl.com (which has a very good record, having been around for 7 years) looks to have been corrupted: http://tinyurl.com/34sov somehow points to http://51744jqgt36.jqgt36/JQGT36 instead of http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/10/so-you-think-yo.html Odd.

Another example: http://tinyurl.com/263hx would have linked to some media article I think; now it goes to a Polish photo web site.

Update Tuesday: More interesting reading on tr.im

tr.im RIP — official post from the company, Nambu
Was denial-of-service attack the final straw for tr.im? — Sophos’ Graham Cluley’s blog

Update Wednesday: tr.im is back… for now.

Google Chrome Lego logo

(from the Google Chrome video competition)

NineMSN perfects time travel

NineMSN’s video pages appear not to work in Chrome, but even when you get them to display in IE, the maths on the stories is a little odd. How can “August 4, 2009” be “1 year ago”?

Youtube – What the…?

Oh great. So Youtube has been running flawlessly all day, allowing my kids to watch any number of videos, but the moment I want to upload something it starts having problems.

Right now, youtube.com is responding to me with this joyous news:

500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

Also, please include the following information in your error report:

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What the hell that means is anybody’s guess.

Wikipedia featured article

Oh bravo Wikipedia, well done. Today’s Wikipedia featured article (found highlighted on the front page) is Gropecunt Lane.

That should do wonders to help convince doubters that Wikipedia is an authoritative resource able to be used by everyone, particularly families and those behind company firewalls with over-zealous administrators.

Now, I’m no prude, and I don’t think the article should be excised from Wikipedia or even censored. But I do think that if you want your product to be mainstream, you probably need to keep what is generally considered the single most profane word in the English language off the front page.

Use FoxIt Reader in Chrome

Chrome fast. FoxIt reader fast. But by default they don’t work together so well, insisting on PDFs being saved to disk before FoxIt will open them.

Here’s how to get read PDFs inside Chrome using FoxIt reader:

Copy the file npFoxitReaderPlugin.dll from C:\Program Files\Foxit Software\Foxit Reader\plugins to C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\plugins
If the plugins directory doesn’t exist, then create it
C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome… only exists if you’ve used the Google Pack version of Chrome. If instead you’ve got the version that (oddly) shoves it into C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\ then you’ll need to find the right place under there for it.
Restart Chrome

(Source: Chrome forum post, and some fiddling/experimentation)

UPDATE: As commenters have noted, unfortunately the relevant files may be in place only if you installed the Firefox plugin with FoxIt Reader — which may not offer to do so unless it detects Firefox is installed.

Firefox mixes up favicons

Is it just me who sees Firefox continually mixing up its favicons on the Links toolbar?

Surely it can’t be that hard to keep track of them correctly?

Hello to Sam Hamilton and James Dee

So I was looking at the comments awaiting moderation. Two showed up on this post: Why Facebook sucks, a rollicking read about over-bearing security dialogues just to use Facebook’s video application.

Here’s the first comment — I’ve zapped the email address, but one was left:

Sam Hamilton 76.243.71.190
Submitted on 2009/05/29 at 9:37am

If you are tired of facebook but want a way to connect with artists and musicians
then you should check out http://www.putiton.com
If you are tired of facebook but still want to connect with your friends then pick up the phone…

Fair enough.

Here’s the second:

James Dee 75.85.9.225
Submitted on 2009/06/03 at 3:16pm

I’m an artist and I haven’t been satisfied using facebook or myspace to promote myself… too slow and too much junk. I’ll give putiton a try… it looks clean

The problem here is that the first comment is still awaiting moderation. (Yes, it’s several days old. I don’t check as often as I should.)

So why would “James” decide to try putiton, a social networking site which basically nobody has heard of (well at least I haven’t) if nobody else has suggested it (eg the first comment isn’t visible to anyone)?

Curiously, “Sam” and even “James” have left similar messages on other, similar posts on other blogs.

(Sam has a profile on the offending site.)

Google blurs Colonel Sanders? Maybe.

Oh lordy. I wonder if this is some kind of joke, or if it’s true?

The Telegraph reports that Google has blurred the image of Colonel Sanders on KFC signs in the UK, on the basis that he’s a real person.

The company says it took the decision because he is ‘a real person’ – despite him passing away in December 1980 aged 90.

If it’s true, then can I just say: IDIOTS!

1. It’s a cartoon image, not a photographic likeness.

2. He’s been dead for 29 years.

3. What, you think we won’t know who it is? “Hey, who’s that on the KFC sign?” “Dunno, could be any southern American military guy who knows about chicken.”

4. Are they doing the same for cartoons and photos of real people on billboards and the like?

5. How is the late Colonel’s privacy being spoilt if people could see the cartoon image of his face? Hasn’t the horse already bolted on that, given the image of him is up on thousands of KFC outlets all over the planet?

Of course, it could be that the whole story is a crock.

Or maybe they just haven’t implemented their policy (whatever it is) very well.

The reason I offer these two possibilities is that I found this unobscured KFC sign, and this one too, both in London.

Certainly it appears the Colonel in Australia is freely visible:

If they did institute such a policy in Australia, I wonder what they’d do about other cartoon face logos, especially of people who are still alive. Dick Smith is one who springs to mind, though now I think about it, I think they’re phasing out use of his face on their signs and literature.