Posted by Ryan
August 16, 2005
Slashdot: Death of Cookies, Spyware Greatly Exaggerated?
My uneducated opinion? I think people are deleting cookies because Spyware and Adware remover software companies (along with media) have made people believe they are evil. Why? To make money.
That’s the end of my uneducated opinion on this matter.
Posted by Ryan
March 4, 2005
Either search engines have taken a dive in delivering relevant results or I’ve just been searching for more and more obscure things lately. Maybe both. Whatever the reason, lately it seems to take me twice as long to find what I’m looking for. This change has happened within the last month. One of my friends noticed the same thing and mentioned it to me.
Is anyone else experiencing this?
Of course, all I’ve been searching for are things programming related so that may have something to do with it as well. BUT! Since when does searching for something like “php round to nearest ten” * bring up results that have nothing to do with PHP, but pages that contain the words “round” and “nearest” and have a .php extension?! I would think that a file’s extension should not count towards rank. The way it is now, if two duplicate pages about PHP exist and one has a .php extension and the other a .htm, the .php page would probably get a higher rank. That’s stupid in my opinion. The extension says almost nothing about the content except that it’s probably dynamically generated, but even then you can’t be sure.
Then again, if there were really no results that had contained the word “php” and there was one that had the extension .php, I guess it might as well be displayed. But not if real related results do exist without using the extension.
* = I needed to round a number to the next highest value of 10. Example: 321 –> 330. PHP’s built in functions round, floor, and ceil are all for floating point numbers. What I needed was ceil, but that works only with floating point numbers. I’m terrible at math, but a friend finally pointed out the simple solution to me (yes, laugh why don’t you! mock my math skills! I know I’m terrible at it.):
$notRounded = 321;
$rounded = $notRounded / 10; # 321 becomes 32.1
$rounded = ceil($rounded); # 32.1 becomes 33
$rounded = $rounded * 10; # 33 becomes 330
It’s been said that girls only like guys with sweet skills. I just hope I can make up for my lack of sweet math skills with something else like burping.
Posted by Ryan
October 14, 2004
It’s been barely two months since Microsoft made a pop-up blocker available for its Internet Explorer browser–but Web advertisers have already found a way to slip their loathed marketing pitches past it.
“Pop-ups are a cat-and-mouse game,” said Bart Decrem, a spokesman for the Mozilla Foundation, creator of Firefox. “We are continually improving our pop-up blocker, and content developers are constantly developing a way to get around the pop-up blockers.”
For those of you who don’t know, I wrote the very first popup blocker way back in 1998. The first at least as far as I know anyway. It started when the webmaster of nonags.com posted a message on the forums one day about his frustration that there were no known popup stoppers. Close Popup was born! Of course, it didn’t take long for everyone and their dog to write a popup blocker and then after not working on it for two years (why?) I discontinued it.
I was thrilled when web browsers actually started including popup blocking IN the browsers, something that should have been years earlier. It’s interesting to see the battle unfold. I, of course, hope all the popup advertisers die a slow and painful death. :-P
I do have an about page, but since this little section down here exists I should probably use it.
Basically, I love to read. I love to dance. I love to travel. I am fluent in both Spanish and English.
Also, New Orleans Dixieland Jazz music is pretty much the best music ever.
I'd like to thank the establishment and also, Wordpress.
© Ryan Martinsen, 2010.
All rights reserved.
