Category: Tech

Please make a comment on the blog about how well this is working and what kind of computer you are watching from, if you want to use the chat I think you have to register with ustream, but it doesn’t look like it’s working anyway

Goodbye analog… anyone miss it?

For any bloggers out there who want to avoid Google tagging things and marking them as you or related to your site, a handy bit of code to know is the rel=”nofollow” attribute of an anchor tag. Links on your blog usually are considered related or relevant to the original page, otherwise why is the link there? If you link to a bunch of stupid things then google will say ok blogx = bunch of stupid things. Lets look at the best example of this. Everyone open a new tab in your browser and type in Nathan Fernsten into your google bar. Now click to search google images. What do you see? As you can see in the screen shot below, Nathan Fernsten has become a hideous cross breed photoshopped thing.

How did this happen!? screams Nathan. Well Nathan, it’s very simple you see your blog isn’t very popular, but you have google indexing it. And when you linked the mccullochs site on your sidebar to that image as a joke, we let you keep it there for a few weeks. And each time we visited your site we clicked on that link, showing us that image, (not on purpose to set you as that image, but b/c we wanted to see if you had changed it yet) since you didn’t change it this is what google saw. (Start talking like a computer) Person wants to find Nathan Fernsten, person found Nathan at this site, person clicked on link that says mccullochs, got picture, ended session at nathan’s site. Hmmm this image is now the most clicked on link on Nathan’s site, this image must be very important, set this image as very relevant to Nathan. (end computer talk)

So thank you Nathan for the greatest trick ever played on yourself. I will enjoy clicking on that image each time I search for you in google images to make sure it still thinks it’s relevant. And remember every one else, if your site is being crawled by google (ours isn’t), use the rel=”nofollow” tag to tell google what’s not important to your site.
<a href=”http://example.com” rel=”nofollow”>example</a>

SO Windows 7 is coming out this holiday season, and I have to say… It’s pretty cool. Now by cool I mean I have found 2 things I really like. First and most important: Windows Media Center. The single reason Windows is still a good operating system, tweaks and updates all around on this one. Trust me if you’re looking for a cheap DVR, upconverting DVD player, media streamer this is it. And it shows the time while you’re watching tv so no more getting sucked in till 11:30pm Joy. SECOND, you can link your live account with your windows account. This link gives you access to shared resources automatically. For example I just installed windows 7 here at work, I linked, then my pictures, music, and recorded tv from home popped up. I watched a couple minutes of curious george just b/c I could. Way to go Microsoft!

Get Windows 7 RC1 for yourself (good till next June)

SO face recognition is probably the coolest thing any photo app could have. And I thought until now that Apple’s iphoto was the only one to have it… turns out it’s been sitting in Google Picasa for a long time. I activated it and have been automatically tagging away! If you use Picasa web albums, check out “name tags” it will scan all your pics uploaded and automatically detect faces and group them for your easy one click tagging. Plus it’s very entertaining to see who it thinks is who, because it tries to guess for you. For example, here it couldn’t tell if angry Joy, angry Jessica and Stephan was Nada, Jason or Tyler.

Hey all you IE lovers, time to wake up and hit that update button again. AND I’m not kidding on this one. You’re FINALLY getting proper CSS support! And a bunch of other cool stuff. I’ve been using the beta 2 at work now for a bit on a test box. Most everything looks better, and feels better, except our company website (Liferay doesn’t work, ooch). I liked the social tie in (optional) where you can click a button and blog about the page you are on, I mainly just liked the fact that McBlog looked correct. So if you are true blue to IE go get IE8 right now!

I decided to help out a bit on this boring Friday. If you get online 4 times a week, the following list should be a part of your life. I’ve decided to compile of list of things you should be using if you have the internet at your house.

1. Gmail – This email program is web based and has so many features I can’t shake a stick at them all. As a geek, trust me, you shouldn’t be using _________ (fill in the blank) as your email. Sign up for gmail right now.
2. Google Reader – wow! If you’re not using this you are probably wasting hours online! This is a RSS reader. It goes to each website you tell it to and grabs the latest content. Making so you don’t have to go to each webpage, you just have to hit up your reader and see if anything peeks your interest. For example if you “subscribe” to McBlog’s content Feed, each new post will get delivered to your reader. If you “subscribe” to the McBlog comments, each new comment will get deliver to your reader. You won’t miss another thing. The image on this post is the univeral symbol for RSS feed, if you click it 99% of the time you’ll add the pages feed to your reader.
3. Firefox browser – still the best browser out there. 3.1 (coming out soon) will put it as the most advanced browser available. And yes I do plan on putting special content on McBlog for everyone running Firefox 3.1. If you love IE and must have it, upgrade to IE 8 which doesn’t seem that bad as it actually renders McBlog properly with CSS 2 support and has some cool blogging features.
4. How about instant messaging you ask… hmm that one’s hard, I do use it everyday but I still haven’t found one network that everyone agrees on. That forces you to get a program that can log into multiple networks to see all your buds. If you follow the above advice, Google Talk with video support is built into Gmail. Coincedentally that is what I’m logged into all day long via iChat.

Well that’s about it for me, what do you use on a daily basis and what does it do for you?

Dec 2nd, Apple revamped their security advice, saying “Oops, turns out that macs are not invincible, please install as many anti virus things as possible.
– source

Comments form other sites: Apple’s advice to use multiple antivirus products may signal the end of an era of carefree computing for Mac users, many of whom have never bothered to install antivirus software. Consider that last week,CA (NSDQ: CA) identified two new Mac OS X Trojans.

“Mac OS X threats are still incomparable to Windows threats, but with the growing popularity of Mac systems we are unfortunately seeing attackers taking more interest,” the CA blog post said.