I thought is was bad enough when I saw that Freshmeat.net had implemented pop-up advertising. As of this morning, the last day of 2004, I noticed that slashdot.org is now running them too. Being part of OSTG, I guess I shouldn’t be too supprised but I am. Slashdot has obviously, over the years, catered to the tech-savvy crowd. The ones that not only hate pop-ups but the type that also is smart enough to use Mozilla Firefox or a newer version of IE, both of which can stop them. These modern browsers let one know when a pop-up has been blocked so that you can see if you need to allow them or not. It seems that with the new pop-up blocking ability that newer browsers have, pop-ups will go the way of the dodo and I’m supprised that OSTG has opted to implement them.
Rob was a good friend to many. Jim Freeman wrote an email today to several mutual friends with a link to Rob’s obituary published in today’s Deseret News. We are all very supprized at his passing. He was a very good person, a friend to everyone. I remember when I was working at Caldera, stopping by his office once in a while to talk about Linux and technology. He was always inviting and easy to talk to. He also knew my parents well and always asked me to say ‘hello’ when I saw them next. Rob, you will be missed by many…
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Well, I took the plunge. I recently purchased two HD-3000 Hi Definition Television PCI Cards from www.pchdtv.com. I will be setting up MythTV with the two tunners to make my own PVR. It has more features than TiVo and is not as restrictive as TiVo has become over the years. There are more features and add-ons for MythTV and the scheduling comes for free from various online tv scheduling guides on the net. It is also completely OpenSourced which is a definite plus as far as servicability, hackability and extendability go.
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I never thought I ‘d see the day when an OpenSource centric group such as the one that runs Linux.com, Slashdot and Freash Meat using pop-up adds considering how that method of advertising is hated by the OpenSource community so much. I guess it was enevitable. All of their associated sites have started running banner ads which have over time (like commercials on television which now take up a third of your viewing time), become intrusive and in-your-face. Like all of the worst parts of Internet advertising, it rises to a threashold balanced between marketing forces and the point of people avoiding the site because of them.
I went to Freshmeat today and noticed that Mozilla Firefox gave a warning that it had blocked a pop-up for an ad from questionmarket.com. Depressing. I was hoping that at least the OpenSource Technology Group was going to stay clear of pop-up adds.
The 100 Hour Board is a blog of sorts at BYU that attempts to answer any inane question posted within 100 hours. They also have a rss feed for thoes who want to follow it more closely. There are some interesting questions answered there from physics & computer science to religious and docrinal (Mormon). Most have a tongue-in-cheek air about them despite their haveing some pretty decent answers. If anything it provides a good read.
Well, it took a while but I set up SquirrelMail and a secure web server at webmail.mecworks.com. Now the people with email accouns on Mecworks can access their mail securely from where ever they are. The hardest part was setting up Apache2 on SuSE 9.2 to do SSL in a virtual host. It was more taxing than it should have been. Anyway, it’s up and running. I’m going to bed.
