Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Foursquare’s adorable puppy

One thing I like about people who love what they do is that they usually don’t take themselves too seriously.  They can smile and joke about the things they passionately love.  Today I came across an example from Foursquare.  In the Settings screen about the notifications that Foursquare sends to you, there is an option to “Also include an adorable picture of a puppy in my weekly update“.  Here is a screenshot in case this will disappear with time.

RFC 6585 – Additional HTTP Status Codes

If you’ve missed it like I did, RFC 6885 has been published recently.  It introduces four additional status codes for the HTTP protocol.  The codes are:

  • 428 Precondition Required
  • 429 Too Many Requests
  • 431 Request Header Fields Too Large
  • 511 Network Authentication Required

Here is a blog post that gives a nice summary of purpose for each of the new status codes.

Flickr update

For a while now I’ve been on the fence in regards to the Flickr vs Google Picasa battle.  With both services constantly changing and improving, it’s difficult to make a decision and stick to it.  But I think finally I’ve decided.  Flickr it is.  They’ve caught up with the features that I wanted so much for so long, and just in the last month released two of my “most wanted” – a much improved uploading tool, and quick and easy image editor.

Both of those additions pushed me to finalize the upload of all my pictures to Flickr.  So now, all I had from my digital camera, is there.  And I’ve enjoyed making the pictures better, more attractive with the editor – all it takes is just a few clicks to convert an average picture of which I have thousands into an eye candy.

Flickr has also recently released and improved its Android app, which once again makes me think about my mobile pictures.  I will probably start pushing them into my Flickr stream as well.

And as far as Google Picasa is concerned, I think they’ve spoiled it quite a bit with such a tight integration with Google+.  And their URLs are still ugly, making it pretty much impossible to migrate links from the blog via automatic redirection. Bad Google, bad.  And while I’m sure they will improve, I don’t think I will change over any time soon – the decision process tired me down.

Fedora 18 : Spherical Cow

First, the source:

Thank you to everyone who participated in voting for the Fedora 18
release name. The name for Fedora 18, the follow-up to Beefy Miracle,
is:

      Spherical Cow

Voting period:  Friday 2012-04-20 00:00:00 to Friday 2012-04-27 00:00:00
Number of valid ballots cast:  429

That offset a lot of people, it seems.  But personally I like it.  I think it’s always a good idea not to take yourself too seriously.

Microsoft tried to sell Bing to Facebook

Slashdot reports on the rumor that Microsoft tried to sell its search engine Bing to Facebook.  After all the hype around how much of a leader Microsoft is in the web industry, I find this to be quite funny. (Provided that it’s true, of course.)

Microsoft is not a web company.  It doesn’t think or behave like a web company.  Sure, they can change, but these things don’t happen so fast.  Facebook, on the other hand, is a web company.  They know the difference between Bing search engine and Google search engine.  More so, they are a social company, and they do know the difference between attempting to index the whole web, and receiving users’ Likes and Shares.

While I don’t use Bing myself, I think there is plenty of cool stuff in there.  But problems that it has to solve as a search engine, are much easier to solve with Facebook’s social graphs – things like SPAM, results gaming, relevance, etc.  So for me it’s really not a surprise that Facebook declined the offer.