Posts by happygeek

You can always send cheques/cash direct to:

DaniWeb® LLC
1140 RXR Plaza, Uniondale, NY 11556

Your contributions are very much appreciated!

I have a funny feeling that Google was not expecting this to turn into, frankly, something of a media shitstorm. It was meant to counter the bad press it had been getting for Google search being saturated with content farmed results, but the reality is that the algo update has in many cases made it worse as well as hitting innocents along the way.

I honestly cannot see Google trying to ride this one out, and imagine behind the scenes there is a lot of tweaking going on to resolve the problems for sites such as DaniWeb.

@HG - can't agree more. Imagine our befuddlement at the fact that the WRU chose him as the face of their advertising campaign just before Christmas. I reckon a soup dragon was involved somewhere in that plot.

I felt really sorry for the Welsh lads who had been giving their all, playing for the national team and giving their all and yet were looked over for that gig in favour of someone who had pretty much proven he couldn't give a toss about club or country.

Seriously, you guys need to get rid of Warren Gatland and the upper echelons of the Welsh game who employ him...

Who is playing flyhalf if he is not playing?

I think Saracens are playing Owen Farrell, son of Andy Farrell, at the moment. He's actually pretty good for a kid, but he is still a kid and needs his game to mature somewhat before you'd consider him a rel top flight premiership player in my opinion.

People rate him highly due to his profile more than anything. I think his courting of fame may backfire on him.

Henson narks me as he has pretty much proven that he doesn't take rugby seriously enough. The guy was a total genius, then decided he liked the 'celeb' thing a little too much.

To think that he somehow has a right to come straight back into the game at the same level as he left it, on his terms, after pretty much sticking his middle finger up at the game for the last couple of years is, to be kind, delusional of him. He just does not deserve a first team place at any first flight team until he has proven he can still play. The evidence so far would suggest he cannot.

Welcome to DaniWeb

Welcome to DaniWeb, again :)

Somehow I don't think Ardav is a great fan of the English premiership ;)

I am no ASP expert so cannot really help with topic choice. However, I have been a full time writer for more than 20 years now and can safely say that your best option is to choose the subject you know most about and are most comfortable talking about, especially for your first tutorial. That way you are likely to enjoy writing it, and if you enjoy writing then people are more likely to enjoy reading it.

Good luck!

Apologies, I should have explained the 'dual lock' system in more depth in the review.

Saracens did sign Charlie Hodgson, but he's not starting until next season. Which kind of leaves them a bit short in the 'really good fly half' department.

And that's about the only good news for Tigers at the weekend I reckon.

Henson? Nah, he was so crap that Saracens released him from his contract after just a couple of games and he can now be found being very crap for Toulon. :)

Clearing the browser cache is one of those miracle cures that nearly always works, and indeed worked for me on this occasion... :)

Oh the irony that at the top of the comments to this story is an advert from Google suggesting we use Google to find what we want... :(

Yep, if Matt Cutts intervened to get Google to change something as a result of publicity about Cult of Mac (be that algo tweaking, which is unlikely, or some kin d of whitelisting which is more likely) then there must be some hope for other innocents such as DaniWeb.

Fingers crossed!

Is Hougaard match fit yet? I thought he was still off with that ripped hamstring.

thread solved and now closed to prevent further spam posts

Tigers v Saracens should be an interesting match, what with the core of the Tigers team on international duty and the core of Saracens being South African so pretty much a full strength squad there.

Not to mention the fact that Saracens are the only team to win at Welford Road since October 2008, of course :)

Me as well, very confusing to say the least.

Hi Muhammad, welcome to DaniWeb

Quite agree about Jonanthan Davies. Decent enough player in his day, but what an annoying git as a commentator.

On the evening of 24th February, Google Principal Engineer Matt Cutts promised that a newly tweaked search algorithm that impacted on 11.8% of search queries (an absolutely massive change to the way that search works, in other words) would "reduce rankings for low-quality sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful" while at the same time producing "better rankings for high-quality sites with original content and information". Nobody would argue that these are good things, exactly what most of would want our favorite search engine to do, in fact. So what went wrong?

Well the main thing would appear to be that neither Cutts nor Google has delivered upon the promise that the Farmer Update, as it has become known, would reward high-quality sites. I appreciate that everyone will have a different definition of 'high-quality' content which depends entirely on what it happens to be that they are searching for, and what their expectations are of the resulting hits. However, most people would be more likely to reach a consensus concerning low-quality content, much of it produced by the so-called 'content farms' that churn out huge quantities of poorly put together advertorial driven by whatever keywords happen to be hot at the moment. Yet early analysis of the impact of the Google Farmer Update by search marketing number crunchers at Sistrix would seem to suggest that many of …

But you do use DaniWeb, and DaniWeb is being hit hard by these changes which means, ultimately, that you also suffer as a result...

As a freelance journalist working for both print and web, I would be absolutely lost without HyperSnap which does all that you want.

Sorry bud, but you really are going to have to do better than just posting 'gimme teh codez' if you want help from the DaniWeb community.

Looks like it is working from here, unless I'm missing something (other than my hair and a good night's sleep) Walt.

There was an interesting article in The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/feb/28/google-changes-sites-affected) yesterday which shows just what a nonsense this Google change is. The article mentions some of the big name sites, including DaniWeb, that have been hit by the change and some of the other names on it are the likes of Cult of Mac, British Medical Journal and The Well.

Crazy, just plain damn crazy, that such sites should be punished for being content farms...

The simple answer is to let Brian Moore officiate at every match. >:)

I'd worry about the layers of skin somewhere else, considering where that steam is blowing...

Surely we do care, that's why we joined DaniWeb!

Stranger things have happened than giant names in tech disappearing, even search tech giants: anyone remember Alta Vista?

However, I'm not sure any of that helps us at the moment...

Last week a group of six 'm-commerce' experts took part in a round robin discussion in Manchester, England to determine the best ways forward for developers interested in creating a serious mobile web presence yet wanting to make money through the medium of mobile advertising at the same time.

Anyone who has been involved in this particular area of Internet growth will appreciate just what a serious challenge the mobile web presents to those who have not invested, in thought and deed as much as financially, in getting to grips with a realistic m-commerce marketing strategy.

Unless you are creative in your interactions with an increasingly savvy mobile consumer audience, unless you truly grasp the nature of the mobile web itself, the opportunity to see a healthy return on your development investment is going to pass you by.

Here's what the experts in Manchester had to say:

Paul Harris, Marketing Director of web hosting company UKFast reckons that there is a "huge potential pitfall waiting for those who choose to do what they have always done because this isn’t appropriate for mobile." What is needed is a new level of thought and a much cleverer approach. "Applying your tested formula to a new medium is the wrong way to go about it entirely" Harris said, adding "The use of a banner advert on a free app for example is intrusive – it completely misses the point and doesn’t work on mobile in …

And those who can do neither, enter politics.

No, we become journalists :)

Those who can, do
Those who cannot, teach
Those who cannot teach, write about it

Plus there's the small matter of TrueCrypt requiring admin rights on the host machine which kind of restricts portability a tad, no?

For some reason the phrase 'luck of the Irish' keeps ringing around my head today. I felt sorry for Scotland not coming away with the win, to be honest, and I have Irish blood (I'm of Irish Romany descent on the paternal side of the family, Arab on the maternal) in me.

Also, Nigel Owens had a stinker of a game IMHO. If he got them any closer in the scrum he'd have to shout "Crouch, Kiss, Cuddle, Engage" I reckon. I know it's easy to lambast the refs, and I bloody love it (the wife will testify to my anti-ref ranting during televised matches) but Nigel made some really bad decisions which cost the Scots dear in that game.

Ireland will need to kick most of their team into touch and start from scratch if they want to make any real impact during the World Cup methinks. They are just starting to look, well, really old and stale.

Welcome to DaniWeb

A lot more specific, to be fair :)

One does have to wonder how things might have panned out if the home advantage had been reversed though.

Wow, what a game just finished. England, on their home turf, well done. Not what I expected at least. Palmer deserved man of the match.

Blinding game of rugby. Not pretty at all, but talk about physical commitment from both sides.

For me, the revelation was the way that England were able to come out after the half time team talk and completely ramp up the game, pushing forwards into the breakdown and correct the errors of the first half. The French didn't look prepared for that.

Fair play to the French (and the weather) for totally shutting down Ashton, apart from the forward pass 'try' which was a shame - although not as big a shame as Tindall being giving a 'non' for his which, to be fair, I thought looked OK.

Too close. Wales rubbish again. My prediction: 16:22 result 16:24. Not bad.

Wales deserved to win that one, mainly because Bergamasco (known as McDonald Fiasco here for obvious reasons) kicking was total crap. If Italy ever find someone who can kick consistently well, they might actually not come last in the six nations every year.

Yep, the more retweets the merrier I say - regardless of hashtag!

Username now changed to tachyonimpact

In conclusion, the security of already existing usb drive encryption software and Conseal Security is practically the same, as brute forcing a AES encryption has 2^200 possibilities which would take longer than the age of the universe to complete (source). However, as you need to pay for Conseal Security ( 20 euros per year, as stated in the article), I would prefer the free usb drive encryption software such as TrueCrypt.
~G

As I say, the cloud-based management is probably overkill for the average home user, but for the power user or a small business for whom that centralized access control is important then the Conseal USB solution starts to become very appealing. Not least as it is far cheaper than the enterprise level solutions which do this, and which also come with varying degrees of hardware and vendor lock-in.

its cool how can i get it

Try clicking on the manufacturer link which takes you to the Conseal Security website... :)

Weekends are the same here :)

Work during the morning - then the afternoon is taken up with watching the live matches followed by those I recorded at the same time (ESPN HD, Sky Sports HD) and often I'll even throw one of those 'highlight round up' shows into my night time viewing.

Of course, if the Tigers are playing at home then the family are happy as I'm out of their hair for half a day. I spoil it when I get home and watch the match again, having recorded it of course!!!

(just thinking out loud here)

It certainly appears that Google is rewarding those sites which are 'narrow and deep' while penalising those which might be better described as 'broad and shallow' in terms of content.

Nick may well be onto something, in that the Internet Marketing and Business Exchange forums are the ones which attract the most cut and pasted content, the most 'me too' content, the most spam content and the least in-depth content. Perhaps if we cut back on the breadth and focussed on the core (narrow) community strength, which is the programming/development/geek expertise, it could turn things back around in our favour with Google?

I appreciate it's a very tough call, especially as the marketing and business forums pull in a lot of traffic. However, in the light of the Google turnaround perhaps it is time to seriously consider whether it is the right type of traffic.

thread closed

Unfortunately we have no control over who retweets what on Twitter or which hashtags they associate with those retweets.

FWIW, Wolfy, I agree it makes little sense...

So much for Google claiming that the change would simply filter out the content farms and give more visibility to genuine content creators such as DaniWeb.

:(

Let's hope that as the brown stuff hits the fan, and the media starts displaying how the change is impacting upon the wrong people, Google might tweak the algorithm again.

Which of the following answers is true?

A. Try doing your own homework rather than expecting others to do it for you

B. With a little bit of effort, Google might provide the answer

C. You probably could have found out in the same amount of time it took to post this same thing across various Internet forums

D. Nobody at DaniWeb is going to tell you