Software utilities

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I’m not sure if this is an anniversary worth commemorating (apart from the a**holes who send it out in the first place), but today is the 30th anniversary of the irritating phenomena that is ‘spam’. Yes, dear readers, break open a bottle of champagne, and munch on copious chunks of cheese, because 30 years ago, on the 3rd of May 1978, the first ever spam was sent out.

On that blessed day of our Lord, a ‘marketing message’ was sent to 400 people via Arpanet (a pre-internet network). Alas, if only 400 was still the magic number. Nowadays, it’s far more common for 400 spam mails to be sent to one person every day. My Yahoo account comes pretty close to half that every day and I know of people who get way more than that.

‘Spam’ was given its name in 1993 by a guy called Joel Furr who worked as an administrator for Usenet. Joel got his idea for the name after watching a Monty Python sketch in which a bunch of Vikings were shouting and chanting ‘Spam, Spam, Spam’ in a restaurant where too much meat was featured on the menu.

(It would be interesting to find out what ‘spam’ was called pre-1993)

Now sent out in their gazillions, 3rd of May 2008 marks the advancement of technology and more technically-sophisticated and persistently-irritating a**holes who either have nothing better to do, or are looking to scam you out of your money. Either way, these are geeks who really should, instead, be working for Microsoft so that the company never comes up with the disgrace that is Windows Vista EVER AGAIN (wishful thinking, I guess).

In any case, spam is unfortunately here to stay for now. I can only hope that in 2038, on the 60th anniversary of the first spam ever sent, that huge strides would have been made to eradicate it.

If you ask me, the whole Microsoft bid to takeover Yahoo is getting to be a bit of a joke, don’t you think?

After 3 months of negotiations, you’d think that the finest minds in the technology world would be able to wrap up a deal – but nope, Microsoft and Yahoo are right back where they started (which was where exactly? Maybe they were never anywhere in the first place. Maybe Yahoo was never interested in giving up their goodies and were merely interested in getting some inside information on Microsoft.)

First of all, there’s the embarrassment of looking ‘stoopid’ when things don’t go according to plan – which is exactly why Microsoft should have kept its pretty lil digital mouth firmly shut and not blubbered to the whole world and their mama that they were looking to buy Yahoo out (who does their PR for god’s sake?). I call it cockiness. Serves them right.

In terms of a super-duper advertising network, Yahoo is almost Google; almost, but not quite, but will do very nicely for Microsoft, because Google sure as hell ain’t gonna give up their golden jewels to Microsoft. (Maybe Microsoft was never really looking to take over Yahoo anyway, but were just trying to puff up their chests to Google, i.e. ‘We’ve still got the technical funk, itty bitty Google. And you’d do well to remember that, or else next time we try bedding Yahoo, we’ll win. WO-HA-HAAA.’)

As much as I don’t particularly like Google (or Microsoft, for that matter), I think Google should try stirring things up a bit with their pocket change and make a Yahoo bid of their own. That should take the heat off Britney for a while!

Ah well, I guess we’ll have to watch this space and see what ole’ four-eyed Billy boy’s next move will be.

(Update: Well, it looks like Microsoft have dropped their bid altogether. Apparently, Yahoo asked for a $55bn minimum to the $47.5bn Microsoft offered (up from the $44.6bn previously offered), but neither party could agree on a final figure. Oh well, Google, here’s your chance …if ya think you’re hard enough).

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Sometimes I experience a 404 error while opening a view of a newly added controller. I found out that this issue is due to cache problems, so removing the cache (usually found in  tmp/cache) can solve this problem. Also delete the persistent directory inside the cache dir.