February 14th, 2009
At 11.31 pm GMT yesterday UNIX fans across the globe celebrated and partied into the night as the “epoch time” clock reached the historic time of 1234567890.The clock was started on the 1st January 1970 and is used to measure ‘Coordinated Universal Time’ on all UNIX based systems.
While the majority of fans are celebrating this anniversary, there are those that are looking to the future and the issue of what happens whenepoch time runs out!
The system was designed to measure time in 32bit, which means it can olny store 4,294,967,296 seconds or 136 years. So on Tuesday, 19 January 2038 UNIX systems will effectively restart their clocks. This is being referred to as the Unix Millennium Bug, due to the similarities with the Millennium Bug caused by the date roll over to 2000. Not that big a deal you may think, nothing happened in 2000, but as UNIX servers run everything from ATM machines to air traffic control systems, not to mention the most part of the internet, I for one am glad a few computer scientists are looking into the problem.
Plans are already in motion to upgrade the system to use 64 bit, which would last for about 293 billion years giving future generations something to worry about.
You can read more on this story on the following sites;
Tags: Co-ordinated Universal Time, epoch, Millennium Bug, UNIX
Posted in T'Internet News | No Comments »
February 8th, 2009
Ensuring the information a search engine has on your site is of critical importance. We need to ensure that new content is added into the search engines as quickly as possible, web crawlers visit your site at various intervals, some search engines will allow you to set the rate at which they visit your site, google and ask.com are the two that come to mind, but this still doesnt ensure your new page is added into the index as soon as possible.
The best way I have found is to alert the search engine to an update, you can do this by sending a ping request to the search engine via an api. This api alerts the index that new content is available and to instruct the crawler to visit the site, below are the uri’s of the top search engines sitemap ping api’s
- Google – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=
- Yahoo – http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=
- Live.com – http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=
- Ask.com – http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=
Just append the url with your sitemap location and off you go. I have modified my sites cms to send a request via cURL to the api’s when ever a new page is added or deleted from my site. This ensures search engines are alerted to any changes in my sitemap.
Tags: ask, curl, google, live, SEO, sitemap, yahoo
Posted in SEO, Website Design | No Comments »
February 8th, 2009
Struggling to think of that great name for your new web design company or even a name for your blog, then check out this great Design Company Name Picker
It gives some great suggestions, also a few weird ones come out but still a great little tool.
Another post brought to you by
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What company name do you get?, can you think of a better slogan to match it than I did with mine?
Why not leave a comment with your company name suggestions.
Posted in Other | 2 Comments »
February 1st, 2009
Someone at Google will be looking for a new job this weekend after accidentally adding an ‘/’ to the list of malware sites identified by StopBadware.org The search engine giant uses StopBadware.org to identify websites as containing malware, by adding a ‘/’ to the list it ment any website with a ‘/’ in the address ( that would be all of them ) were incorrectly marked as infected.
At 3.30pm yesterday, anyone searching google for any kind of search term were prompted with a warning that the site may possible contain some “dodgy” software and may harm their computer. While it only lasted for 40 mins while their “rapid responce team” removed the affending item ( 40 mins to remove a ‘/’ not that quick if you as me ) it kind of asks the question, should we really place all our SEO eggs in Googles basket??
Now I admit I’m not a real fan of Google as the biggest hypocrites on the internet but they do what they do well so you have to give it to them, but we must remember that they aren’t the only search engine around and if something were to happen to google, e.g. their servers shut down again, those that only focus on google will be left in the cold.
Webmaster tools, analytics, adwords all great but remember both yahoo and micro*cough*soft*cough* (find it hard to say that) also have their own versions.
Anyway enough of me follow the links below to read and make your own minds up
Tags: google, human error, malware, search engine, stopbadware.org
Posted in T'Internet News | 1 Comment »