Philip Jacob / Whirlycott » General

Yahoo Search Usage

Philip Jacob — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:20:37 +0000

The Gap Between Google and Rivals May Be Smaller Than You Think – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
Over the last 5 years or so I have seen, based on traffic to my sites, Yahoo and Microsoft (MSN, Live and now Bling) fall to less than 5 percent total share of all traffic… combined.

I didn’t make that comment, but I could have. It’s possible that the world is misinterpreting comScore numbers, but nobody I know sees >5% of their referrals coming from Yahoo and Microsoft. I’m sure such sites exist, but the comScore figures that we see on a regular basis would have us believe that this is quite normal. It’s not.

Being modern

Philip Jacob — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:12:10 +0000

Op-Ed Guest Columnist – Notes From the Chairman – NYTimes.com
“Jazz is about the moment you’re in. Being modern’s not about the future, it’s about the present.”

A brief analysis of social media spam

Philip Jacob — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 03:43:34 +0000

A fun little post over on the StyleFeeder tech blog about social media spam.

Douglas Bader quote

Philip Jacob — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 21:44:46 +0000

“Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools.” from Douglas Bader on Wikipedia

Closed indeed

Philip Jacob — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:11:40 +0000

You can’t possibly be serious

Philip Jacob — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 01:59:18 +0000

I wanted to futz around with Django tonight, so I figured I’d update my installed version with the latest release, but I didn’t count on having to deal with crap like this in order to get the python MySQL driver working on the current version of OS/X. I’d understand if I was trying to install a Teradata driver for SBCL on an ancient version of DG/UX, but this is a bit ridiculous.

The Global Pool of Money

Philip Jacob — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:44:43 +0000

I remember listening to this TAL show while driving in my car earlier in the summer. The Global Pool of Money seems like something that our politicians should have been listening to for years, but I’d have been happy if they had started paying attention to this mess before, well…

Amazon finally launches a CDN

Philip Jacob — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:59:52 +0000

That only took 21 months since I asked them nicely. What I don’t like about what I’ve read so far is that they are not using a lazy-loading proxy (ala Akamai, EdgeCast, Panther) and are instead opting for S3 as the content origin. That sucks, because it basically means that you have to do something in order to get your content onto their network. With a lazy-loading proxy, you just tell your CDN provider to effectively make static.whatever.com a mirror of www.whatever.com. It’s much simpler.

Amazon EBS

Philip Jacob — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:56:43 +0000

I think this is the fifth blog post that I’ve written today. Seriously. Just a quick pointer to an article on Xconomy that I wrote this morning about Amazon’s new Elastic Block service.

That&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#039;s a good way to put it

Philip Jacob — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:51:41 +0000

if you feel compelled to comment, please try to think of something interesting to say. youtube needs remarks like “awesome song” and “this video sucks” like it needs another shaky, blurry, garbled & distorted, 27-second camera-phone clip of Feist performing 1234 in [YOUR TOWN HERE]. thank you.