I read this article a few minutes ago about a certain company in Silicon Valley that is sending a few people’s DNA into space. It’s called Operation Immortality, and it’s meant to preserve the DNA of the best and the brightest (and seriously, please turn the sound off on your website — there’s nothing worse than navigating the web and having something chirp in your ear randomly when you hit a page). Who have they chosen to represent mankind? Well here’s the short list so far: Kevin Rose, creator of the social-bookmarking website Digg Robert Scoble, one of the world’s most popular ...

Apparently some hotelier in India told everyone that he saw an image of the Virgin Mary in the sun, and also claimed that some of his statues were crying honey and bleeding oil in his home. Since then, nearly 50 people in India have gone completely blind while trying to look into the sun to try and see what he saw: At least 50 people have lost their sight after staring at the sun hoping to see an image of the Virgin Mary, according to reports. Alarmed health authorities in India’s Kottayam district have set up a sign dispelling rumours of a miraculous image in the sky and warning of the dangers ...

There are a lot of different ways you can increase the speed of your website, even if you have relatively cheap hosting. If you’re lucky, your blogging platform already has a caching engine built in (Drupal does). If you’re unlucky, and running something like WordPress, you have to do a bit more work. Caching makes a website more responsive because it takes an expensive operation (such as a long database query) and stores it so that next time it doesn’t have to recompute it entirely. For example, when you go to this website, normally Apache would execute PHP, parse the WordPress code, do ...

I love Digg. I surf it at least a couple times a day, usually when I’m bored, sitting a work waiting for something to compile. I would say that without a doubt the majority of my “cool” news actually comes from Digg. Lately I’ve begun submitting the odd story on my own to Digg. No matter how many times I try to submit something though, I always seem to get stuck on the same old problem — what category does the story fit in? The main problem I think is that Digg categories are more mainstream news oriented and less about the things I actually am interested in (even though I think most ...

I wanted to pen this entry really quick before bed. A few days ago, one of the main encryption keys for the HD-DVD platform was leaked, apparently by an insider within the video industry. Basically, having this key will allow anyone with access to the hardware the full ability to decode and decrypt every HD-DVD that has been manufactured so far. Oops. The key, which amounts to no more than a 128 bit string, has been circling the internet, pulling a string of cease and desist orders along with it. Many a webowner has tried to publish the key online, only to be given a legal letter demanding they ...