So, have you heard of LinkieWinkie? An enigma, wrapped inside of a puzzle that calls itself a social experiment.

"a very altruistic little site and loves to be talked about." - Quote

A spider of some sort that crawls the blogosphere in search of mentions to itself. Using it's uknown logic, it then adds links back to the reference on it's home page.

When you run a WHOIS lookup you get this:

Registrant:
   Denise Russell
   33 Kirby Drive
   Telscombe Cliffs
   Sussex
   BN10 7DY
   UK  
Record created on 22-Jun-2006

So we can deduce that the "creator" of this little project hails from the UK and this domain was registered fairly recently. It seems to have developed quite the following based on its traffic stats in a very short time, perhaps just all the blogos-buzz.

Yes, I'll bite as well, I'm interested to see where this leads and curious as to the amount of traffic I'll receive if my link does make it on to the home page!

I'll report any findings back here, Cheerio!

Other sites where LinkieWnkie is mentioned:

http://arteccentrix.blogspot.com/2006/07/what-is-linkiewinkie.html
http://thisbiochemicallife.com/2006/07/26/what-the-hell-is-linkiewinkie/
http://www.senserely.com/james-the_meaning_of_linkiewinkie.php
http://rumboard.com/2006/07/linky-winky/
http://thepinkpanther.typepad.com/pinkie/2006/07/follow_up_linki.html

PS:

http://www.linkiewinkietracker.blogspot.com/
http://postmodern-living.blogspot.com/2006/07/linkie-winkie-take-3.html

Just found this great little trick!

Have you ever attempted to Remote Desktop connect to a server running Terminal Services and received the dreaded "Too many active connections" ? Fret no more! Just open up a command line and type:

mstsc -console

This will open you're RDP client, type in the server addres, and voila! You're connected to the rarely used console session!

Thanks goes to Jon Galloway through Haacked

In 1956 IBM introduced the RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control), the great grandfather of the most widely used desktop storage device, the Hard Disk Drive. Oh what a long way we've come! This behomth was the size of two large refrigerators, weighed a full ton, required an air compressor to protect the heads, and it's total capacity was only 5 megabytes!

 The Hard Disk That Changed the World

One fundamental problem with driving these days has to do with accountability. People can do whatever they want as long as a cop doesn't see it regardless of the type of headache they are causing other people.

Well, if you cause trouble, draw a few eyes, or are a great driver then you are likely to show up on Platewire. Platewire is a site that allows you to enter the plate number of a car that you came across on the road as a flag, hazard, flirt, or award. If you don’t have a pad and paper handy in the car you can always call-in a plate number and retrieve it later.

Gratis Internet, the company that started with Free Condoms and earned their mark giving away Free Ipods, are closing up shop.

It appears that the lawsuit filed by Elliot Spitzer, New York state Attorney General, affected them tremendously. Being an ex-employee of this company, I saw this coming, primarily due to the fact that they hired a COO from a completely different industry, who after 3 months, still didn't understand how the company generated revenue! Just goes to show, a business model based on breakage, will eventually break.

All of my condolences go out to my ex co-workers, half of which were laid off this week. Peter Martin, one of the co-founders left the company last week.

Another internet saga comes to an end.

Gratis R.I.P.

PS: Here is supporting documentation. Besides the fact that half off the staff has been laid off, and "more cuts coming" whispers are heard through the galley, the lawsuit filled against Gratis request at minumum $500 per New York residents email address in their database. As NYC was one of their top cities in a database of over 150 million email addresses, you do the math.

There have been volumes written on the mysterious formula behind PageRank, so I won't explore that here, but I do believe I've found another piece to this puzzle.

It started about six months back, I began developing a small site for a client. It was not the best setup, for reasons beyond my control, the only development server, was the production server (Ugh!).

For the first 2 months, the only visitors to site to speak of were the client, his staff of eight, and myself. As I was primarily working on the server through Remote Desktop, I used the vanilla server install of Internet Explorer, sans Google toolbar. 3 months after launch, the site still had a PageRank of 0, besides a random stumbler, traffic was to this site was negligeable. Around this time, I was working on another web app for the same client, and the topic of PageRank came up. I instructed the client and his staff to install Google toolbar, with Advanced Features disabled (They work from a low speed DSL line, so I figured every little bit counts). Through work achieved on this project I was finally capable of seting up a somewhat more robust development environment.

As I was able to work remotely from my own workstation, not Remote Desktop, so I began viewing the initial site from my browser, which has the Google Toolbar's Advanced Features turned on. Within 2 weeks, to my surprise, the PageRank value of the site showed (1/10), although the traffic was still nothing to speak of. Out of curiosity, I contacted my clients office and requested that everyone browsing this site enable Advanced Features in their Google Toolbar. Less than 3 weeks later, the sites page rank was (4/10)

Now, I've actually been able to repeat this on 2 other sites, and I'm still paying around with the variables. I'm curious to know if anyone else has come across anything similar.

"The internet has become an ever evolving entity with sublte patterns that emerge if you know where to look."
-Me

moo.fx is a superlightweight, ultratiny, megasmall javascript effects library, written with prototype.js.

It's easy to use, fast, cross-browser, standards compliant, provides controls to modify Height, Width, and Opacity with built-in checks that won't let a user break the effect with multiple crazy clicks. It's also optimized to make you write the lesser code possible.

moo.fx has been successfully tested with: Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. It should work in most of the gecko browsers too. Only Height and Width will work in Opera, since that browser does not support opacity.

The developers of this library have done it again, an excellent release from Italy, this years World Cup champions!

Get your copy today!

AMD announced plans to purchase Canadian based ATI for $5.4 Billion. Will this venture pose a threat to Intel? I believe so, both companies have consistenly delivered quality products and technological advancements. I'm excited to see the products they've yet to develop.

AMD’s acquisition of ATI will position the new company to deliver innovations that fulfill the increasing demand for more integrated solutions in key market segments while also continuing to develop “best-of-breed” discrete products that empower customers to choose the combination of technologies that best serves their needs. In 2008 and beyond, AMD aims to move beyond current technological configurations to transform processing technologies, with silicon-specific platforms that integrate microprocessors and graphics processors to address the growing need for general-purpose, media-centric, data-centric and graphic-centric performance. Thus, the combined company intends to empower its customers to create their own unique products and solutions within an open-innovation ecosystem free from artificial barriers to customer success.

“ATI shares our passion and complements our strengths: technology leadership and customer centric innovation,” said AMD Chairman and CEO Hector Ruiz. “Bringing these two great companies together will allow us to transcend what we have accomplished as individual businesses and reinvent our industry as the technology leader and partner of choice. We believe AMD and ATI will drive growth and innovation for the entire industry, enabling our partners to create differentiated solutions and empowering our customers to choose what is best for them.”

Under the terms of the transaction, AMD will acquire all of the outstanding common shares of ATI for a combination of $4.2 billion in cash and 57 million shares of AMD common stock, based on the number of shares of ATI common stock outstanding on July 21, 2006. All outstanding options and RSUs of ATI will be assumed. Based upon the closing price of AMD common stock on July 21, 2006 of $18.26 a share, the consideration for each outstanding share of ATI common stock would be $20.47, comprised of $16.40 of cash and 0.2229 shares of AMD common stock.

AMD anticipates it will finance the cash portion of the transaction with a combination of cash and new debt. AMD has obtained a $2.5 billion term loan commitment from Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, Inc. which, together with combined existing cash, cash equivalents, and short term investments balances of approximately $3.0 billion, provides full funding for the transaction.

ATI has received an opinion from its financial advisors that the transaction from a financial point of view is fair to its shareholders. The transaction was unanimously approved by the board of directors of each company. The transaction is subject to ATI shareholder approval, Canadian court supervision of a Plan of Arrangement, and other regulatory approvals including merger notification filings in the United States, Canada and other jurisdictions, as well as customary closing conditions. In the event that the transaction does not close, ATI has agreed to pay AMD a termination fee of $162.0 million under circumstances specified in the acquisition agreement. The transaction is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2006.

Vonage has had a pretty bad couple of months.

There was the botched IPO leading to plenty of pissed off shareholder customers (myself incuded), combined with a few new patent lawsuits. The stock hasn't done well at all -- something many predicted well before the IPO in the first place. Now, spyware researcher Ben Edelman has released his latest article, noting that Vonage ads seem to show up in an awful lot of spyware -- including every one of the major spyware providers. And you wondered why the customer acquisition costs were so high? Now you know that a large chunk of that money was going directly into the bank accounts of some awfully questionable companies.