stuart test blog

I’ve removed the Snap Previews from the site as I had complaints that they were slow, annoying, and added no real value. I still think the Snap search site is pretty nifty, but the previews won’t be making a return.

Flickr have just notified all users that they must merge their “old skool” Flickr accounts with a Yahoo! ID by the 15th of March or else they won’t be able to log in. Lots of Flickr users (including me) are not happy with this and the blogosphere is making this known (also the mainstream news sites like BBC.) Yahoo! are also forcing a couple of other limits on their pro accounts which weren’t there previously: you are now only allowed 3000 contacts, and a maximum of 75 tags per photo. This doesn’t affect me at all, but long time, hardcore Flickr users are affected and these super-Flickr-fans are now slating the company and encouraging users to leave.

My take on the login system is that it’s much easier to associate a seperate login for each website I visit. That way I can manage password resets, email notifications, display names, etc, all seperately. That’s why I never liked Microsoft’s Passport system, and this is also why I don’t want to switch over to a Yahoo! ID. I already have a Yahoo! ID that I set up to check out their new webmail system but I never use it and don’t care about it – i.e. it is disposable. The other problem with getting a new Yahoo! ID for those that don’t already have one, is that it’s nearly impossible to get one that even closely resembles what you really want. The reason for this is that Yahoo! has a huge user base, and all of the good names are taken – so you’ll end up seeing users having to get a Yahoo! ID that looks like this: john.smith.74588394

So what to do next… Well I guess I’ll end up merging my Flickr account into my Yahoo! ID if I have absolutely no choice, but at the same time I will lose all loyalty I have towards Flickr and will start looking else where. The closest thing to Flickr at the moment is Zooomr, and thanks to a bloggers promotion I have a pro account set up there too. Unfortunately Zooomr has an even more complicated login process than Flickr – they force you into signing up for an OpenID, which is reminiscent of Microsoft’s failed Passport system. You can also, somehow, log in using your Google ID which is no better as I have to get a password emailed to me everytime I log in. So it would seem hypocritical to switch to Zooomr because of Yahoo!’s login system, when Zooomr’s is just as bad (if not worse!)

I’m not sure if it’s too early to call this a “movement” but Ethan Kaplan from blackrimglasses wants everyone to unsubscribe from RSS feeds that don’t provide the full posts. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while now anyway, so I’m unsubscribing from the following feeds:
All About Microsoft
Ars Technica
BetaNews.com
Digital Photography Review
Web Worker Daily
ZDNet News
Cnet News

Mark Cuban recently posted on his blog about how he thinks that BitTorrent is facing some challenges, and the (slightly-biased) Torrent Freak blog picked up on some of his points and argues against them. I actually agree with some of Mark’s comments but I think that they have been taken out of context slightly.

* Conflicting Clients – I think he means that in the future, media companies may ask users to download a custom client in order to download their movie files. For example, you may have a Sony movie downloader, and a Fox movie client, and a Paramount downloader too. All these different clients would try to use the bittorrent protocol which could cause conflicts on computers.

* End Users dont understand how P2P works – I don’t know for sure, but I’d say that the majority of bittorrent traffic on the internet today is from users that DO know what they are doing and are using it to download illegal content. These users often belong to bittorent-site communities that have rules about leechers. The maxim is usually that you allow other community members to download as much from you, as you have from them – this keeps the community going. In a commercial world, why would you donate your bandwidth and traffic to other users that are downloading from commercial sites? This only helps the corporations save on bandwidth costs. If I’m paying $10 to download a 2GB movie, and I have a 10GB or 20GB traffic limit each month, I don’t want anyone else uploading content from me – especially if it’s going to cost me extra money.

I think that once end-users understand that they are only helping corporations save money on costs, they would be less inclined to give up their precious bandwidth.

Last week Juha reported that TradeMe experienced a ten hour outage due to a failure of one of their core, load-balancers. This morning, TradeMe appears to be down again:

UPDATE: TradeMe have now posted the following message, doesn’t look too good.

11 January – Problems this morning
Trade Me’s auction site suffered a database failure at 3:50 am this morning, and was unavailable between 3:50 am and 8:05 am this morning.

All auctions closing between 3:50 am and 9 am have been extended by 24 hours. Eg. an auction scheduled to close at 6 am this morning will now close at 6 am tomorrow.

We also had some data problems between 11:55 pm last night and 3:50 am this morning. We are continuing to investigate this issue.

We sincerely apologise to all the Trade Me community for the disruption and inconvenience this outage has caused. We will post further updates here if other relevant information comes to hand.

ASB have released a new service in NZ called pago (lower case intended) which allows you to make payments for goods using your sms with your mobile phone or by email. The site is clearly targeting a younger audience, even encouraging you to use your TradeMe or MySpace username as your pago login name. There’s even a ‘cool’ beta logo in the top corner. What’s worrying to me is that this service doesn’t seem too secure as if someone steals your mobile phone or gets access to your emails they will be able to steal your money and you won’t be able to do anything about it.

If this doesn’t sound like a good thing to you, be sure to read the terms and conditions to highlight how dangerous this service is. Note how many times it’s stated that if you lose money, you will not be refunded!

For example, you want to pay your friend $20 towards dinner, but you mistakenly enter their username wrong – you lose your money. No refund. No help from ASB. I really don’t think they are making the risks clear enough here, and I guess they are hoping that the younger crowd are more naive and that they won’t read the terms and conditions.

ASB needs to sort this out quickly.

I’ve been playing online poker at Party Poker for the last couple of months but I hadn’t been playing for real money up until tonight when I made my first $50 deposit.

On the play-money tables, you can win a lot and it’s not always that much fun because players will bet stupidly, not caring about losing points as you can just sign up again and get more. So all the poker sites that I’ve been reading to get advice has all seemed pointless because the tactics don’t work when people don’t care if they win or lose.

But on the real money tables, it’s a completely different story. Players take the betting much more seriously and there are a lot more folds than on the play-money tables. So all of a sudden the pro’s tips started to come in handy and I started to play with a bit of controlled agression.

Granted, I was only on the 25c/50c tables, but you feel the pressure once you realise that you’re playing with your hard-earned cash. I had to force myself off the table to get to bed as it really was fun. I finished on $13.20, up from my original $10 I started with so I was quite pleased with that.

If you’re thinking of giving it a go yourselves, drop me an email and I’ll send you an invite. (There’s a referal system that includes bonuses for signing up.)

Less than a day old and there is already a critical security alert for Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 7. This vulnerability only affects IE7, so I guess it’s not recommended to upgrade just yet.

This is a big blow for Microsoft as they have been touting this as their most secure browser ever. Let’s hope they can get a fix out for it soon.

Link to Internet Explorer 7 “mhtml:” Redirection Information Disclosure – Advisories – Secunia

Here’s a nifty site that may or may not be useful to you. FeedRaider lets you set up your own pages with feeds that you choose displayed in a variety of formats. Not too sure what market this is aiming for as you can already do this with Netvibes and the other home-page providers. But it’s a cool site anyway and worth checking out to see if it’s useful for you. I created a page here, which should accessible to the public: http://feedraider.com/u/amanzi/p/4fxd1/

Juha over at Computer World has just broke the news that Vodafone has bought iHug for $41 million. This is huge news for NZ residents and although I’m not sure how this will pan out, it can only be for the good.

Vodafone have just launched their own mobile broadband and will be offering home phones too. Now with iHug on board and the unbundling of the local loop this will give them a huge boost to face up against Telecom on all fronts.

Source: BREAKING NEWS: Vodafone buys iHug for $41 million