Disqus - Latest Comments for Tony

Re: We’re Not Rock Stars Anymore

Tony — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:12:55 -0000

If a startup relies on ad income -- yes, they will get hit by a recession.

Though it seems that a lot of startups, especially in the earlier stages, are really zero-revenue operations. If the plan is to simply grow the user-base for a while, and worry about having a business model later, then the only additional caveat is hoping for the economy to be out of recession by that "later".

Re: » VeloCity - Incubator 2.0 or something completely new? | StartupNorth

Tony — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:36:11 -0000

A couple of Waterloo students were talking about putting together a group interested in startups. I'm not sure if they are behind this or not, but there's certainly student level grassroot interest in this.

It's a great idea, but it's prone to problems. I think the biggest would be determining who gets into this residence -- there needs to be just the right mix of creative/technical/business people to foster a startup environment, but I can see a lot of students applying to get in just for foosball.

Re: Are life scientists really information scientists?

Tony — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 02:42:43 -0000

"sub-domain of information science"? Maybe...

Biology is a wealth of information. The genome project would be the most trivial example, perhaps followed by computer models of various systems - playing around with evolution theories perhaps?

Ultimately "life" is execution of DNA encoded information, in a given environment. Computer Science would just facilitate the use of computers as a tool to work with all that information.

Re: What Text Link Ads Publisher May Not Know.

Tony — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 16:05:13 -0000

You should manually look up your benchmark stats (PR, Alexa, Technorati, RSS subscribers) and send an email to TLA support. (If you've made it into ReviewMe, you should as easily make it into TLA). I've recently have done so myself, was accepted into the program the following day, and had a first link sold the day after.

Re: What Text Link Ads Publisher May Not Know.

Tony — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 16:05:13 -0000

Re: Interesting Bug

Tony — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:27:52 -0000

Well if you curl the feedburner url, you just get a 302 redirect to the second url (I figure it's there just for click-through stats). So why not just follow the redirects and use the end result as the content's url?

Re: Putting Rollerskates on a Cow… Not Always a Great Idea

Tony — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:13:19 -0000

Having a degree is an excuse to get hired by an HR (one of those people who doesn't understand what Computer Science is) into one of those large corporate cubicle positions that pays well (it has to for anyone to put up with any of _that_) and chugs out the code that gets peer-reviewed... on The Daily WTF.

Though the same type of person chasing to cash in on a career trend will be in the same sort of a mess in any other sufficiently technical field. The programming community takes a hit because it isn't a regulated profession (imagine the same type of people buying a job of a doctor or a lawyer with just a degree). Though by the looks of it, the video game dev colleges are even worse.

Re: Putting Rollerskates on a Cow… Not Always a Great Idea

Tony — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:44:05 -0000

Indeed. In my experience startup-level developers would prefer to stay out of large corporate environments (perhaps with an exception of dedicated R&D units). Still, banks seem to enjoy having software. I guess this explains why my online banking experience sucks so much.

Re: Google is evil

Tony — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 14:14:19 -0000

Well there are some SEO reasons for nofollow. Having every other "cool post" comment link out to an arbitrary location dilutes the value of the links that you do endorse explicitly. My personal choice is to moderate for quality comments that really extend the discussion of the post, and reward those on a case by case basis.

Oh yeah, and it appears that spammers are not educated enough to know what rel='nofollow' is, as automated posts still flood the internet tubes.

Re: Google is evil

Tony — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 18:51:51 -0000

Ben, it sounds like you really don't know what you are talking about. Quality comments are not spam by definition, as they contribute to the discussion and are wanted. The author gets a linkback out of it? Well it's a recognition of his/her contributions.

Virtually all of the "spam" spam is caught by Akismet or Spam Karma plugins.

And you clearly don't know how the WordPress platform works. Or much about good programming practices...

Re: VeloCity - Incubator 2.0 or something completely new?

Tony — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:36:11 -0000

Re: SQL Injection

Tony — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 01:59:36 -0000

One is probably better off with

\'; DROP DATABASE; --

Though ether way, this is simply awesome. I wonder what kind of an excuse ("I have _really_ weird parents?") would get special characters into a legal name...

Re: Why? What Would You Do on a Sunday Afternoon?

Tony — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 13:50:44 -0000

That was quite a well written story, yet about something as trivial as cleaning one's keyboard. Quite a perspective, impressive =)

Re: Science, Engineering and Technology » Ajay - On the Road called Life

Tony — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 07:10:38 -0000

I would think this is a bit more trickier. For one, Engineering is the application of not only Science (and Math, etc), but also of the existing Technology. We use tools to design better tools.

Re: Americans are NOT stupid

Tony — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 17:32:31 -0000

It's surprising just how different of a video one can put together, just by editing the order of a bunch of short clips. Though even with that in mind, some responses are pretty funny.

Re: 笈の小文

Tony — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:00:53 -0000

That "month of work" is only a month of waiting for an account to mature. Sending emails and requesting search results is incredibly easy to automate, as it's all text. You might think that this will introduce a significantly larger barrier of entry for a new spammer, but what will end up happening is that instead of buying CAPTCHA entries, they'll begin to buy slightly aged emails/profiles. In bulk.

Re: 69 Year Olds Overrepresented on Social Networks

Tony — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:36:16 -0000

Should have been "lonely teenagers with a short attention span". Seeing as next year all of the social networks will bump their age up to 70.

Tony's last blog post..re: CompSci.ca Survey.

Re: Consumers Want Businesses on Social Networks

Tony — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:04:28 -0000

The problem with Beacon was that it infringed on user's privacy in the background. ("hey, maybe I don't want to tell all my friends that I just bought whatever it was").

On the other hand, if I can follow a business I like on Twitter, or get my friends to recommend me businesses I'm interested in on GigPark -- that opens a channel of communication and perhaps even conversation, that I think many consumers are in favour of.

Tony's last blog post..Online introduction to Computer Science from Stanford Engineering (for free!)

Re: You Just Can’t Take Too Many

Tony — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:53:23 -0000

At least there weren't any "COMEFROM"s

Re: MSDN: New Look

Tony — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:56:43 -0000

It's still largely a mock-up. Some of the navigation is just static text, others admit that a feature is not yet implemented in this "prototype". Some random things like appear. Also their layout seems to require 105% width, as the horizontal scroll bar simply doesn't disappear at any stretch.. weird.

Though it does seem a bit cleaner than the current MSDN.

Re: “Pics for MSN Friends” Steal Your MSN Passwords

Tony — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:40:02 -0000

Microsoft might also be interested in this highjacking of their user's accounts and spam.

In the meantime... is anyone interested in submitting piles of made up account information to this phishing form? ;)

Re: Turn down the wrong work

Tony — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 22:41:00 -0000

There's a similar saying for Engineering - "quality, quantaty, price, pick two"

And I could relate from co-op job experience, at the beginning one has little experience and can't be too picky about what few job offers come. I've been doing mostly web development instead of Engineering jobs that I'm studying for. Though for sanity sake I told myself not to take any QA jobs or development with *gasp* VB.

I think long-term health benifits outweight those less than sane positions. Thank you for showing that I'm not the only one crazy enough to pass up on job offers =)

Re: Connected Internet Directory Hits 200 Links

Tony — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 02:14:15 -0000

Quite an interesting idea. Does this have much of, any, effect on the parent blog, or does the directory act mostly as its own entity?

Re: Top 30 WordPress Plugins

Tony — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 02:19:03 -0000

I suppose that Spam Karma 2 was replaced by Akismet.

The list is pretty extensive, not much to add to it. Though I do run a couple of custom plugins that help with certain tasks, or are effectively a part of the layout.

Re: Connected Internet Directory Hits 200 Links

Tony — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:11:48 -0000

I guess a more specific question would have been "do reciprocal links point back to the parent domain (which happens to be this blog), or to the directory specifically (in which case it's the subpage that gets direct benefit, which is then shared between all the listed links)".

I've also just realized that running a directory will give a very nice Alexa boost, as that is always aggregated for the parent domain ;)

Re: Google Testing Left Side Tabs?

Tony — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 18:47:46 -0000

I've got this one too (have couple of screenshots lying around somewhere), while my friend was seeing nothing but the old layout at the same time.

Must be a limited trial type of thing, same as their Ads by Goooooogle AdSense tests.

Re: Google Testing Left Side Tabs?

Tony — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 00:31:29 -0000

What? I've said that I replicated the results on my computer... I guess I'd have to post about that, but I'm not going to get back to my saved screenshots until Tuesday.

Re: Scrollin hits triple-digit readership - introduce yourself

Tony — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 01:15:26 -0000

Well I'm totally expecting to be featured in a new post now, because this comment is showing up on a brand new RP0 page, and the link is rel='external nofollow' ;)

Though congratulations on 100 readers! I'm aiming for the same goal myself, but looks like I will not make it this month.

Re: Microsoft Employee Blogs About Switching to Ubuntu

Tony — Wed, 02 May 2007 23:50:02 -0000

Nice mockup!

Anyways, Microsoft is a pretty big Mac software developer (well... MS Office, and a few others), and it would probably be in company's best interest to have their technical staff more... well technical.

Re: Joost Invites Everyone

Tony — Wed, 02 May 2007 23:56:33 -0000

Ever since Gmail, it's a whole marketing strategy to keep apps "invite only", but making those easily accessable. Oh well, I guess there's a certain level of appeal to get "in" and try it out. I'd take an invite, thx!