Any ideas for hosting?

I have spent the afternoon trying to work out if 1and1 can host the services currently running on the Qube. I suspect that ssh andcron are enough for the planet and dyndns, but I might need a full virtual server with root authority for snipsnap, although .htaccess might be sufficient for the port redirect. Unfortunately they want to charge me £15 p.m. for this package, a 100% increase. Basically this is a vanity site, and while I am pretty vain I find this a bit steep, does anyone know of any other web hosting services that might do what I want for less? …

Searching europa, is there a limit to Google

Just some times I come across a piece of research which my search engines find hard to help me with. Since Google, they all seem to use in-list based sorting algorithms. Some resources, such as the EU’s web complex don’t seem to have enough sites pointing at it for this to be a wisdom of crowds solution and their own search engine doesn’t seem to help me either. You’d think that the various News organisation feeds that specialise might issue permalink based pointers but querying the EU site remains hard. …

Has Digg jumped the shark?

The comments on the Digg post on “Shouting in the Data Centre” see here on this Blog disappointed me. I am not a great user of Digg and very few of my submissions have taken off. It is one of the feeds I subscribe to using Google Reader. It seems that I am obviously not interested in the same stuff as most of its users, but to find the majority of comments about the provenance of the Digg takes self reference to the point of absurdity.  …

How real is virtuality

We travelled north up the strip, and had dinner at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba. It was a bit of a European thing with a bunch of Brits, French and Germans. This cafe has an excellent if more limited wine list and we were fortunate to have the advice of Eric Bezille and Dave Tong. Our waiter was excellent, knew what he was selling and very patient. It must be hard selling to a bunch of opinionated engineers. We talked about a number of things, of which one was “Second Life”.  …

The shape of the internet, inside and outside the corporate firewall

The shape of the internet, inside and outside the corporate firewall

I have been discussing the efficacy of our internal search tools and how hard it is to find stuff, and to be honest, assumed that it was the crapness that most users accuse their IT colleagues of. However a colleague, Bernard Horan recommended that I read “Searching the Workplace Web“, which suggests a different answer. Searching the Workplace Web argues that intranet’s are different from the internet and that more flexible, and different search algorithms are required to search an intranet; the most successful internet search algorithms are not necessarily going to work well on an intranet. …