Georgie Casey

Looks like so called blackhat (is the term even relevant anymore?) expert quadzilla is organising a party at Oktoberfest along with other ‘experts’ where they’ll be divulging their top ‘secrets’. All for the low price tag of 5 grand. Of course, ‘If you can’t afford the cover charge then this gathering is not for you.’ Lolz

Anyone who pays that kind of money for a session needs a kick up the hole, you won’t learn anything that isn’t freely available on the net or is just plain common sense. But I have to admire the cheek of the guy who regularly blogs looking for people to buy him dinner where he’ll divulge more ‘secrets’. If you manage to get 10 idiots to pay you off and let you actually profit from getting wasted at Oktoberfest instead of spending the time infront of a computer making money, well, then kudos to you!

Cushy little number at Mahalo, you get paid to play GTA4

I don’t know what’s happening at Microsoft, are they losing all the good programmers to ‘cooler’ companies or something because everything they’ve brought out in the last while has been crap. Installed the new Office and they completely changed the interface for Word and Excel to make it simpler. i.e. for fucking idiots who couldn’t use a basic piece of software like a word processor. After a many a Google I managed to find where they stashed away all the useful features.

But Outlook: what the hell is going on. I tried importing my 2gb pst file and it was going dirt slow. Can’t blame it, it’s a big file so i left it overnight. It had barely got a quarter of the way in the morning. It was importing an email every 2 seconds! With about 100,000 emails it would take a while. So I split up the .pst files into 200meg chunks and only loaded 3 at a time. 600 megs of pst files, surely it can handle that?

Nope. Flicking through emails slows the whole thing down no end. This is on a new comp with 4gb RAM and a dual core at 2.4ghz. You can’t search emails with any useful criteria until installing an addon called Microsoft Search Companion which is like Google Desktop only it hogs about 4 times the resources. Every now and then with Outlook not open the system would slow to a crawl when this thing would start indexing. So I uninstalled that.

And send receive… is just unusable. It starts off lively and then just… halts. Computer completely unusable until this finishes. Hard drive whirring like it’s processing terabytes, mouse barely moving. It takes about 5 minutes to download 10 emails. Loads of people with similiar problems as me, businesses who spent 20 grand on Outlook for an entire company.

A leaked PDF from Google setting out guidelines for ‘quality raters’ when they’re doing handjobs on spam is doing the rounds on the Interweb. An interesting 43 page read albeit with no real bombshells. Had to laugh though when they were describing thin affiliates around page 35:

Recognizing thin affiliates

Clicking on a “More Information” or “Make a Purchase” button takes you to a merchant on a different
domain.
Right-clicking on an image on the page with your mouse and looking at “Properties” shows you that the
image has a different URL than the URL of the page. This indicates that the image originates from the
other merchant’s site.
Example of a thin affiliate: http://findmeatune.com/artist-Pink
This is an Amazon thin affiliate. Looking at the properties of the images on the page reveals that they
originate from amazon.com.
There is no value added (e.g. reviews, price comparison) on the page, and the value of the page is only in
the link to the merchant’s site.
You cannot complete a transaction from the thin affiliate’s site.

This site belongs to an Irish blogger in my feed that I’d never expect to be a spammer, but what Google says is gospel, eh? 🙂

Full PDF here if interested

Ordered the Asus EEE 4gb Webcam PC about a month ago but due to serious stock shortages it only arrived today. First impressions, very impressed. Here’s the obligatory unpacking photos:

Comes with a nifty little case so you can fuck it in your suitcase when you’re off travelling. And a charger, manual and support CD or something for your proper laptop which are not needed. It’s idiot proof to set up. Just enter time/date and admin password and it boots. Four tabs when it boots, Internet, Work, Play and Settings. Internet has Firefox, wireless and LAN setup, messenger and Skype. Work has open office word, spreadsheet, presentation software which all load in around 6 seconds. Also has Adobe Reader.

And the most useful app for me, is the console/shell access which you get from File Manager in the Tools menu. Allows me to SSH into my servers. Perfect. I had installed symbian Putty on my Nokia E61 but it didn’t work out. There’s just too many keys missing from a mobile – like Tab for completing Linux filenames. Simple things but without them drive you crazy. The EEE has a small but full keyboard so I can see myself using this at airports to get some coding done. Keyboards small so if you have stubby fingers like me, expect a lot of mistakes. Here’s Open Office Word or whatever you call it:

Sound from the speakers is louder than you would think from such a small yoke and crisp as well. Same with sound from earphones. Comes with 3 usb ports, some kind of a card reader, Ethernet port (nice surprise) and a VGA output. No CD or DVD drive of course. I ordered the optional webcam which is great quality. Here’s a shot of a youtube video on Firefox. As you can see, the video takes up all of the screen space:

This is one of the coolest little toys I’ve bought in a long time. It cost me 300 snots with delivery and everything from PC World Business. Can’t go wrong at that price, compare it to the Macbook Air which starts at €1700. Get the Asus EEE as your ‘cloud’ computer.