Day: April 16, 2003

  • Why American SUVs Scare Me

    Hummer H2 vs. Volkswagen Golf
    Hummer H2 vs. Volkswagen Golf

    I was killing some time at a Best Buy this afternoon before class.  I parked my car, browsed for a bit, and came out to find a brand new Hummer H2 Soccer Assault Vehicle parked next to me.  I took a step back to view how absurd this looked.  To the right you’ll see my ’98 Volkswagen Golf.  You’ll notice that the bottom of the mirror on the H2 is above my roofline.  The top of the brush guard on the H2 is a few inches below my 5’10” shoulder height.

    It’s funny but scary.  I’m in that car on the highway with these H2’s.  Down the road when I’ve got kids in my car, I’m going to have no choice but to become part of this arms race and buy something bigger and safer.

    If I lived in the UK, I’d probably be running around in a Lupo GTI or some other small zippy fun car.  Now I’m rethinking this whole compact car thing in the States.

  • Kearney on Compression

    Bill Kearney has an excellent piece on using compression for your web sites:

    As pages get larger and sites become popular the drain on available bandwidth can become a problem. The worst thing that can happen to a site is for it to become suddenly popular. Or an RSS feed gets pulled repetitively by dumb aggregator programs.

    Eventually I’ll be migrating this blog to a server that supports mod_gzip or mod_deflate, and you know that I’ll take advantage of it.  Definately check out the rest of his entry for links to tutorials and many other great points.

  • Spicing Up Administration

    Scott Johnson has a great idea about spicing up automated administrative emails.  He added a fortune to the bottom of an email containing df -h information:

    We all get way to many automated things via email and if you at least make them interesting then you might bother to read them.

  • Firebird 1.5RC1 Released

    Speaking of Firebird (the database), they released 1.5RC1 today.

    Something tells me that Phoenix will only be named Firebird for a short time.

  • The Amazing UPS Network Device

    CNet:

    The new UPS-developed Delivery Information Acquisition Device (DIAD) has a record number of ways to wirelessly connect, believes telephone industry analyst Jeff Kagan, who couldn’t recall any other handheld that connects with infrared, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) and two cell networks: CDMA1x and GSM/GPRS.

  • Ask Yahoo! RSS

    Michael Radwin:

    Ask Yahoo!, a daily column that features Q&A with Yahoo!’s expert team of Surfers, is now syndicating its content via RSS.

    I just hope that this will last.  I loved the Y! Finance RSS beta, but I missed it a ton after it was discontinued.