Saturday, July 26, 2008

Google Indexes One Trillion Web Pages

Google announces that their index has passed the one trillion mark.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Python Success Story

This is an interesting Python success story in Pythonology about the Wing IDE.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Firefox 3 Continued

So far, so good. It doesn't seem to have the memory leakage I was seeing with Firefox 2 on Windows XP. I've gone on and upgraded to Firefox 3 at work as well, on my desktop and on my Macbook Pro laptop.

For the Ubuntu systems I'll probably just want for upgrading to the current versions of Ubuntu so that all of the libraries are in place, etc.

On the Mac laptops, I'll ask the familiy owners about adding it to them. The Macs should probably come next.

Saturday, July 05, 2008

Firefox 3!

Okay, I've taken the plunge and upgraded to Firefox 3, at least on one machine—my Windows XP workstation at home.

I thought I'd give it a spin among promises of better performance. So far, most importantly, I haven't experienced anything not working.

I had to re-install the Google Toolbar which was simple and not a surprise.

I read through all of the features, release notes, etc. Nothing among the features is particularly exciting to me. It seems like there's some overlap between Firefox functionality and Google Toolbar functionality. I hope that doesn't cause any conflicts or confusion.

So far I haven't experienced any problems. It seems faster, but that's very subjective. I didn't think to check my memory usage before upgrading but, quickly firing up Task Manager, memory usage doesn't look recognizably higher than normal.

I'll see how things go. If all is well, I'll start to upgrade on other systems. I suppose the MacBook Pro would be next.

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Amazon EC2 Spam Problems

From this blog posting and this article on Slashdot, it looks like Amazon is having trouble with spammers creating machine instances on the EC2 and blasting out spam.

I think the approach of dealing with accounts is the solution. Amazon either needs to block email ports on an account basis (instead of by IP address or machine instance), or they need to limit, disable or otherwise slow down those accounts and their instances.