Google on Evan Hoffman

Chaos theory and Google's crawler

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 17:30:38 +0000

I’ve been moderately perplexed by the recent spike in traffic on basically unrelated keywords. Apparently this site is currently the #5 result for “fedora 15 beta download” despite my having never written about Fedora 15. In an attempt to funnel people to a useful page I created the previous post with links to the FC 15 ISOs. I feel bad if people come here looking for an answer that’s not to be found.

Thank you Cabinetparts.com!

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 21:10:31 +0000

A couple of weeks ago the hinge on one of the cabinets in our kitchen broke. I took the door off, unscrewed the hinge, and went to Home Depot to try and find a replacement. No luck. I went to a local hardware store, same deal. I was annoyed, and worried I’d never be able to find a replacement. I headed home.

I looked at the broken hinge and found imprinted on it, in tiny numerals, was “32.260-01”. It also had “blum” imprinted on it, which I assumed was the brand name. A long shot, but I entered “blum 32.260-01” in Google. I was thrilled to see that while there were no organic results, there was a paid link for CabinetParts.com. I clicked through and found the exact part I needed. They were a little more than I’d hoped to spend, but since I had no idea where else I could go to find them, I was happy to pay it. I got the part a few days later and it was exactly what I needed. Cabinet: repaired. So, hooray for them!

Relaying through Google Apps using Sendmail to bypass EC2 spam blockage

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:48:06 +0000

Update 3 May 2011: I’ve subsequently modified our EC2 systems to relay SMTP mail through Amazon’s SES which doesn’t have the 500 messages per day limit that Google Apps does.

A few months ago I moved a site into EC2. I didn’t want to move the existing IMAP server (ugh) so I moved the email to Google Apps. There are only about 10 mailboxes so we went with “Standard” edition (free). Once we completed the move to EC2 we discovered that emails from our webserver were bouncing due to our EC2 IP address being listed in a spam RBL. This sucked, so I looked into relaying the mail from the EC2 webserver through our Google Apps account. Fortunately this turned out to be pretty easy.

How does paid blogging work?

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 10:44:43 +0000

I’ve been hearing for years about paid bloggers. If people are getting paid to write their crap down in an ad-supported industry, it seemed like it might make sense to throw some ads up on this very site to see what happens. I’ve had Adsense running on this site for a few months now and the short answer is a whole lot of nothing. Here’s what the earnings look like since 1/1/2009 (my Adsense account is much older than this site; I put the banner ads up around Fall of 2009):

A less insidious way to use Facebook?

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 08:58:19 +0000

I deactivated my Facebook account a couple of months ago. I just kind of got tired of seeing silly updates from friends and “friends” - people I’d friended but wasn’t really friends with. I was also frustrated by the privacy implications of using such a service: you tell it about yourself, you tell it about who you know and how you know them, you keep adding more information about you and your friends to its huge brain that it’s free to use or abuse however it wants.

More thoughts on Google's tracking abilities

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:34:22 +0000

It all comes down to the cookie.

The Wall Street Journal recently began a series of articles called What They Know, detailing the different pieces of data that online marketing companies have about people as they traverse the web. None of this is really new, especially not to me, since I work in that industry. But I was surprised at some of the data that was present in the cookies right in plaintext:

More thoughts on Google's tracking abilities

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:34:22 +0000

It all comes down to the cookie.

The sinister side of Google's Picasa face tagging

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 09:34:53 +0000

So, let me start by saying that I love Picasa, Google’s photo organization tool. It automatically finds new photos as you add them to your hard drive. It lets you crop pictures, remove red-eye, adjust colors and make a few other basic edits that cover probably 95% of what most people need to do when editing photos. It lets you select a few photos from your library and email them to anyone with just a couple of clicks. It also integrates with Google Earth and Google Maps to show you on a map where a particular photo was taken (for those unaware, GPS-enabled cameras, including many mobile phone cameras [e.g., iPhone] embed your GPS coordinates within the EXIF metadata of the photo, so any person, program or website with access to the image will know the location at which it was taken).

The sinister side of Google's Picasa face tagging

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 09:34:53 +0000