Tag: digg Posts

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 tech blogger Tim Draper, founder of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson So I gotta ask, and I mean no disprespect to any of the guys on the list, but is that really the best mankind can offer for the future? What about a nobel peace prize […]

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 of looking into direct sunlight. Forty-eight cases of sight-loss, allegedly caused by photochemical burns on the retina, have been recorded at St Joseph’s ENT and Eye hospital in the region since Friday. Despite warnings, and the potentially harmful […]

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 some MySQL database queries, and then finally output the HTML page. Depending on the hosting service, this may take a long time. With a cache, the final HTML page is simply written to disk (or memory if a memory cache is being used) so that when that […]

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 techies are interested in the same things I am). Image from here The main technology categories are: Apple – this seems straight forward Design – what the fuck does this mean? Gadgets – I can live with […]

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 take it down. How in the world you can assume ownership of a unique sequence of numbers is beyond me, but apparently that’s what they are attempting to do. Many users on Digg.com have created top stories with the HD-DVD key […]