Author Archives: Donncha

Search for "Jew"

I possibly need a “Search Engine” category. Hmm, especially if I put anything down about my SEO experiences! 😉
Anyhow, via the Google Blog comes an article explaining why anti-Semitic websites showed up in a search for the word Jew. In the interest of fairness, I also search for the words Christian, Muslim, Church of Ireland, Protestant and Catholic. A quick glance shows that most (all?) of the top-ranked sites listed on those searches are ones in favour of the searched for religion/church.
Why can’t we have dissenting voices? Is all good and pearly white in the world again?

DomainKeys – encrypted and verified email

Now this looks very interesting – DomainKeys is a method for verifying email. It uses a public/private key infrastructure to verify the domain an email was sent from. Public keys are distributed by DNS.
Yahoo! has been granted a patent on the framework which annoys some but their license terms seems rather liberal, even allowing one to “yodel” it if that’s how your smtp works!
More: Jeremy, Simon, and Justin.
Several excellent comments on Jeremy’s site, including a link to Sender Policy Framework, a very similar technique already in use by the likes of AOL, Altavista and others. (I knew I’d seen idea this before!)

Bill Biggart's Final Moments

It was two weeks after two jetliners had plowed into the towers of the World Trade Center. His good friend, photojournalist Bill Biggart’s body had been recovered from the rubble. His personal effects, including his cameras had been released by authorities to his widow, Wendy.
Some of his images are amazing and all the more real to me today as I spent a few days in New York last August.. He was really very close to the buildings.
(Via Ryan)

SAP – Seymour Hersh

I heard this discussed on the radio on the way to work this morning and promptly forgot about it. Must read it at home tonight!

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites

Disclaimer – I haven’t read this yet, I’m heading out the door and home to make myself some dinner! I see that this paper is from 2002 but when the author recommended using Perl I had to link this and read it later! Cracked me up. hehe.

… few languages are as bad as PHP for doing serious development work. The author and his colleagues have had good results with Perl, and believe that languages such as C++, Java, and Python should serve equally well.

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