Month: July 2002

Crash of 2002?

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

CNN/Money has an article today “The crash of 2002” with the sub-title “Stocks’ four-month slide has left investors battered and bloodied. How bad will it get”. According to the article, we may not be in for good financial times ahead:

Ten trading days, 1,360 points off the Dow. Let's start calling the “sell off” what it is. Let's call it a panic. Let's call it a crash.

Indeed, after rallying following Sept. 11, the markets topped out in March, and have been careening downward ever since: The Dow is down 25 percent since then; the S&P 500 is down 27 percent, and the Nasdaq is down 32 percent. […]

I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised by their assessment, but I would have preferred better news. Still I was amused by this bit:

In Mar. 2000, 500 shares of JDSU would’ve bought a Porsche 911 Carrera. Today, they’ll buy a 1990 Dodge Omni Hatchback with 100,000 miles (no a/c).

“visited links” — denied

Ashley Bischoff4 Comments

I often visit DFWBlogs to check on updated blogs in the area. I primarily check my friends’ blogs, so I figured that it could be handy to have a “visited link” color for the list of blogs along the left side.

I wasn’t sure who to e-mail about that, so I e-mailed both Leia and Matt:

Hey guys,

I wasn’t sure who to e-mail about this suggestion, so I’m just e-mailing both of you ;). Anyhow, like any good blogger, I make use of DFWBlogs to check whether my friends’ blogs have been updated.

However, could you assign a “visited link” color? That way, I’d be able to more easily find blogs that I frequently visit among those on the list.

And, Leia replied:

Hmm. Interesting point. But, I declare designer’s prerogative and say no. I think it would make the list look too garish.

Alternatively, you could go make your own list of favorites at http://www.freshblogs.com

I was disappointed to read that and I disagree with her prerogative :-/. I really thought that a visited-link color would add something to the site.

Update: Just to be clear, there’re no hard feelings here — this is just another ordinary post about blogging :).

Mozilla Hangs with HTTP Pipelining

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

If you’ve recently been gettings hangs with Mozilla, you may be running into bug 146884 — in a nutshell, if you turn on HTTP Pipelining (Preferences -> Advanced -> HTTP Networking), Mozilla will likely hang, sucking upwards of 100% CPU within a few minutes.

It’s been suggested that the bug could be added as a dependency of the “make mozilla 1.1beta not suck” and “make mozilla 1.1 not suck” bugs. But, those requests have fallen on deaf ears.

So, in the meantime, just be sure to turn off HTTP Pipelining.

PS For the Mozilla nuts in the audience, I see that Sspitzer has all kinds of cool pre-made Bugzilla queries on his homepage, such as “smoketest blocker bugs”.

SpamSlayer

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

I just ran across SpamSlayer, which is a set of mail-filters for Mozilla that can apparently eliminate 80%-100% of Spam from your Inbox.

SpamSlayer is technically a “filter package”. It filters your email transparently and most spam never even reaches your inbox. Anything that looks like spam is directed into a separate “Possible Spam” folder for later review.

It looks interesting but, of course, I use SpamCop for my e-mail anyway. For just $30/year, SpamCop provides an account accessible via IMAP, POP3, or even webmail. And, through an extensive set of regular expressions, hardly any Spam gets into my Inbox. To top it off, SpamCop runs on Open Source software including as Apache, Perl, and MySQL — I highly recommend the service.

“We’ll leave groundbreaking to someone else”

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

ABC: “We’ll leave groundbreaking to someone else”, as spoken by ABC Entertainment President Susan Lyne at the twice annual TV Critics Association tour.

What?? That’s like Avis saying “We’ll let other people try harder, for a change”. I mean, really, are they surprised that I don’t watch their network anymore? (well, except for The Mole)

From time to time — if I’m on the elliptical machine at the gym or I otherwise have some time to ponder life — I sometimes think about what I might select if I were only allowed 5 television channels. If I had to choose today, it’d probably be: Comedy Central (for BattleBots and South Park), TLC (for Junkyard Wars, Trading Spaces, and Robotica), Discovery Channel (for Monster Garage), CBS (for Survivor and Big Brother) and TNN (for Car & Driver TV and TNG).

(Link from MediaBistro)