Geek news, reviews & more

Lots of people are struggling with the templates on Wordpress. Trying to get it to look just right. Wondering how the hell to use Photoshop to make a decent logo, or even banging your head against the wall over the jumbled, confusing CSS and HTML. If you don't know what that is, you especially need to look at this! If you do and you struggle with it all the time, you deserve a break, and try out some new and totally free custom made Wordpress themes. They are made by, and only byprofessionals and your site will stand out from the crowd and demand hit after hit, just to see that fantastic template you have! ...by the way these are free, and you can use them without restrictions, (so use them for whatever you want).You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The theme may not be resold, sublicensed or rented.

Aug 11, 2009

Design,

Monday

Aug102009

ny times Discovers the word Fail - Hilarity & science Ensues

Ricardo Trejo

Aug 10, 2009

Internet

What do you get when you mix up popular internet phrases and The New York Times? You get this. The New York Times, whom I don't read much from, not because I disagree with them or anything, but mostly because CNN and USA today cover the big headlines just fine for me. Although, I do love their homepage's layout - looks just like a newspaper, remember those? But back on topic; so why would I turn to the New York Times for anything, if I don't pay attention to it most of the time? For laughs and science, that's why.

Enter Ben Zimmer, a man who is a master of all things language. If there's ever anything you need to know about linguistics, he's your guy. He writes for the New York Times occasionally and his most recent foreray into language brought his research to internet meme's, most importantly here, the word "fail" and its meaning and use in popular internet culture.

"Popular usage will, of course, be the ultimate arbiter of the durability of fail. One sign of fail’s staying power is that it has already made the move from noun to adjective in some circles. Karl Hagen, who teaches test-preparation classes for Elite Educational Institute in Los Angeles, recently overheard a student who had done poorly on a quiz say to his friends, “I’m so fail.” As an interjection, noun or adjective, fail is proving to be an epic unfail."

-Benjamin Zimmer

It's an interesting read, and he makes me think: if internet memes begin showing up in places that can be accessed offline, like a twitter for example (I know you need an internet connection for twitter, but you can access tweets from app's and phones without necessarily going into a browser online), then does that mean that memes become mainstream once they cross that boundary?

[Via NY Times]

Ricardo Trejo

Aug 10, 2009

Internet

Saturday

Aug082009

social Networking - Not just for Kids anymore

I've been following a few articles in the past few weeks on TechCrunch and CrunchGear about the recent decline of younger users on Facebook and Twitter.

Ricardo Trejo

Aug 8, 2009

Internet

Thursday

Aug062009

Twitter being used to start and feed Ddos attacks

Aug 6, 2009

Hacks,

As news trickles in about the events in Iran, where apparently students are protesting the results of the elections and the government is cracking down on media outlets and journalists, there are DDoS instructions being posted to Twitter. The targets of the packages include:

http://www.leader.ir/
http://president.ir/
http://www.irib.ir/
http://www.iribnews.ir/

Here is one of the posts to Twitter:

Pagereload.com is evidently a way to get your browser to hit a site. The service is owned by someone in Karachi, Pakistan. LOIC is Low Orbit Ion Cannon, another Denial of Service tool. Another tool being linked to is BWRAEP, a GET flood tool, with a list of image files to grab from the above sites, causing the web servers to fail.

Meanwhile the brilliant folks at Renesys have posted a chart of network outages in Iran that are probably feeble attempts by the government to restrict Internet access.

While Twitter is not contributing to the action in the street (it is blocked in Iran by most reports) it Is being used to spread this type of cyber crowd sourced attacked.

A couple of good Twitter IDs to follow for updates on the situation in Iran:TehranBureauandpersiankiwi

Update June 15. A Google Doc has been published and spread via Twitter with many more target sites and links built for pagereboot.com

Aug 6, 2009

Hacks,

Tuesday

Aug042009

Kevin Spacey teaches us (and Letterman) about Twitter

Aug 4, 2009

Humor,

Videos,

This just goes to show, how powerful twitter is. One of the most famous actors in the world, has become a Tech-Savvy Gentlemen because of twitter and the impact of the "Twitter shock factor" of having 912, 000 (yes nine hundred and twelve thousand followers) in a matter of less than 5 months!

Twitter has become a Huge media hub for celebrities to give on-going, die-hard fans a look into their (believe it or not), almost normal lives. OMG they walk their dogs, who knew!?!?

Also twitter made a post on their Blogger.com blog about the video, from CBS's youtube channel:

David Letterman was introduced to Twitter viaKevin Spaceyon last night's Late Show. Once Dave got past the concept of typing with his thumbs he was able to characterize Twitter as "a waste of time." That's generally how Twitter was characterized in 2007 so Dave's only two years behind—we'll give him a little more time to catch up.

@KevinSpacey

@T3chH3lp

Aug 4, 2009

Humor,

Videos,

Friday

Jul312009

Microsoft's Bing Search Engine Partners with Yahoo | What do you think?