Wow, lots of stuff going on. Where to start…
First, apologies for the silence on the blog front. That can be explained by the following:
1. It’s summer
2. We’ve trying to push out a few big and/or complex publications
3. We’ve fallen into a systems migration sinkhole (but your reading this is an indication that we’re pulling out of it)
We’ll have a complete postmortem on the systems migration snafus (possibly with some managed service vendor critiques) downstream; if only because I want to be like Mark Cuban. But for now it should be enough to know that by the time you read this, we should be on a brand new platform, one with the flexibility to do some new things. You should expect look and feel changes as we ease into our new system (we’re open to some design suggestions, as well), but for now hopefully everything will just work.
Other items:
* The latest MyDoom generated a flood of traffic to our redmonk.com addresses, though as far as we know our machines weren’t affected. Made me wonder if Bayesian filters will ever get smart enough to judge true social engineering
* Lots of interesting debate on Slashdot about the alleged invocation of the PATRIOT Act by the FBI in busting the operator of a Stargate TV show fansite. It’s interesting because the guy was initially martyized because of the story on his personal website, then vilified because of some Google Group posts. Regardless of his guilt which he may very well be this is why many people are concerned about the PATRIOT Act. Passed under the auspices of the fight against terrorism, the powers it confers are broad and overarching, thus likely to be employed for purposes they were not intended.
* I’ve got a response for Danese Cooper of DivaBlog, who asks Has it become socially ‘uncool’ to admit you use IE?. To many of the folks I know, yes. I’ve turned a few of my friends and relatives onto Firefox, and happened to be at a party this weekend where a topic of conversation was the browser. People were talking about their favorite extensions or themes, and the few IE people there felt left out, and said so.
And that’s it for now. Will have more shortly.
