Trying Flock Again (2.0 style)

After way, way, way too much time I figured out that Flock wasn't the cause of my high CPU usage spikes of DPC's it was from other people copying things off of my external hard drive.  So, with a positive outlook and hopes for good things I have installed Flock 2.0b which is based off of Firefox 3 (which goes live today as well).

Sadly, right off the bat I hit a snag.  As soon as I installed Flock, and tried to launch it, it crashed.  I think this may have been because I already had Firefox 3 RC 3 running but I'm not sure.  I am currently running it in safe mode (flock.exe -safe-mode from the command line) and it seems to be working fine.

In fact I've added a few new accounts to different sites to have in my "people" bar and am blogging this from the built in Flock blog editor.  I've noticed some sluggishness while typing (text not showing up right away) but beyond that and a bunch of false positives in the spell checking (seems and this?) which I think is just a screen drawing issue (also reflecting the sluggishness) it seems pretty good.

As I use the editor I am actually finding a couple of other small problems.  The first is that you can't pick which blog your publishing too until you hit publish.  From a usability standpoint I think this is a problem as I wasn't sure what would happen when I clicked on publish.  Now that I know I hit cancel to amend this post and the editor tells me the blog post was saved (when it wasn't).  This false positive notification is probably just a beta bug that will be fixed by the time it is finalized.

My Pipe Is Featured on Read Write Web

Kind of cool but not too big of a deal - I just visited Read Write Web and I saw an article about their favorite Yahoo Pipes and my pipe, Netflix to Amazon is present. I don't really go out of my way to advertise anything, particularly not something this trivial - but it is still cool to see my work featured somewhere.

So thanks RWW (and Yahoo).

Currently there is one small problem - my netflix user id is temporarily disabled becuase I am trying to cut back on expenses. So I need a new user id to be added as the default so that the demo returns something. If you want it to be your user id just leave a comment and the first one I get will be the one I use. Or you can email me at wmrspam@gmail.com with the subject line of Netflix to Amazon and include your user id in the email body. Thanks

Geeks Don't Pay The Bills - Dog Lovers Do

I use Google Adsense on this site and a few others I own. One is a site dedicated to helping rescue Dachshunds. I don't really make much money on the various sites but I decided today to compare the month of may and what I saw kind of surprised me.

Domain	Page Impressions	Earnings
doxie.org	2,157	$21.75
cf-bill.blogspot.com	8,494	$4.47
rawlinson. us	3,751	$2.60

I'm not really sure if I'm supposed to be showing this kind of stuff publicly but I figured, what the heck. This site is typically visited by developers and, clearly, we don't click on many ads. The rawlinson.us site is actually visited mostly by people setting up blogs due to a plugin I have there.

The doxie.org site is targeted toward dog lovers. I have to imagine, more than likely, it is actually visited by people who are looking to buy dachshunds (which, they can't do via the doxie.org organization). In fact I typically blacklist places that sell doxie's if I see one of their ads because we are trying to help dogs that need a new home get there and we are opposed to puppy mills and backyard breeders. However, if my site, that doesn't come up early in Google still manages to make this much money per day (about $1) off of the ads that make it up there I can't imagine how many of these little dogs are actually sold and thus how much money is actually made in the business of dog breeding. It's kind of stunning really.

Ethics in Programming

Most of the time there is nothing involved in my job that involves an ethical decision; I implement simple business rules for a wide variety of customers. However, Jeff Atwood identifies a perfect example of an ethical problem in his latest posting at Coding Horror - a website that isn't your email provider asking for your email credentials.

I have been prompted for my email password on a few sites such as Yelp, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn. It is becoming more and more and more of a common occurance on all of these social sites. They all promise they aren't saving your password but I don't know these people so how can I trust them with my email password?

Jeff hits the nail on the head. Your email password is the skeleton key to all of your online locks. You give out that password and you have given out the password to every account you own because almost all online accounts will send your "forgotten" password to your email account.

I realize I'm not adding anything new to Jeff's post but I thought it was important enough to reiterate and point people to it so they are aware of the issue.