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.

Who is Sergey Brin?

Here is a snippet from a TV program “To Tell The Truth” where people try to guess which one of the three candidates is Google co-founder Sergey Brin.  Many people will have tough time to do so even today.  The video is from 2000.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsLBuCp23QA]

My LiveJournal is no more

This is just a quick update to let all of you know that I deleted my LiveJournal account.  It’s been a long while since I used it.  I didn’t see any value in it anymore. And it was getting so much spam that I decided to get rid of it altogether.  All entries in my journal were deleted, while all community posts and comments that I made are still there.  From now on, if I ever want to comment on someone’s LiveJournal entry, I’ll use my Twitter or Facebook or WordPress or Google credentials.

Hopefully, this will give me a little more time to update my blog, Twitter, Google+, and whatever else I will meet on the way. Thank you for understanding.  Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Mark Malkoff : Apple Store Challenge

Here is a funny short video where Mark Malkoff tests how far Apple Store will let you go.

Things that he tried and got away with are:

  • Pizza delivery.
  • Romantic date.
  • Darth Vader iPhone repair.
  • Bring in a pet goat.
That’s pretty cool.  The biggest surprise for me though is not with Apple Store, but with that pizza delivery service.  If it wasn’t the crew, then I am pretty impressed.  I’ve never heard of pizza being delivered to a visitor of a shop.  But then again, I’m sure many services exist in the States that don’t in Cyprus.
P.S.: I wish it was on YouTube.  It would have made so much easier to embed.  I tried the code that is on the site, but it doesn’t work for some reason with my blog.  And I’m too lazy to look into it.

Incapsula – fast, secure and reasonably priced CDN

A month and a half ago I blogged about CloudFlare – a Content Delivery Network with security concerns and simple users in mind.   CloudFlare is flexible for webmasters and they make it easy for us to take advantage of all the benefits they offer. I have moved several of my sites to CloudFlare and I am pretty happy with the service they provide.  One of the things that I didn’t do at the time (or every since) though is a review or research for some alternatives.  I mean, of course, we all know about Akamai and that big guns use it.  We also know that Akamai is one of the most expensive services on the Web.  But who else is out there?

Today I received an email from Incapsula. In essence, they offer a service which is similar to CloudFlare.  They do caching, global delivery, and security.  They do also offer a free plan for small, personal websites.  They also have a few packages of varying prices and features.

As I mentioned earlier, I do run all of my important sites now through CloudFlare.  And I don’t feel like moving to Incapsula just yet.  However, I do want to try them out.  I have a couple of new projects coming up, and I think I will use Incapsula for them just to see all the features they are offering and to compare with other alternatives out there.  I’d be interested to hear the reviews, if you’ve tried the service.  Especially, how they compare to the others and if they offer anything cool that nobody else does.

As a side note, website performance is becoming more and more important – with increased competition, impatient users and more weight to search results metrics in Google.  Also, web application security is becoming increasing complex – it takes so much time and effort even for trained technical people such as myself, that I can’t imagine how huge of a task it is for “normal” people to maintain common sense security levels for their websites.  It’s nice to see that there are more and more services and applications that take care of all the infrastructure problems, leaving more time to do the cool stuff – blogging, sharing, communicating, etc.

P.S.: Reading about Six Great Human and Computer Collaborations will expose you to new technology developments.