i.justrealized

No, and maybe you shouldn’t.

The Yahoo! way is about rejecting a business deals and have many shareholders upset and then watch executives start exiting the company. It’s a sad state. Today, Yahoo! trades at around 21USD.

Speaking of Internet Explorer, AVG has been disguising as Internet Explorer to visit websites. Web developers and webmasters aren’t too pleased. AVG’s LinkScanner is estimated having to be downloaded by more than 20 million people. The LinkScanner attempts to disguise itself as a real live human click claiming itself to be Internet Explorer 6. It just screws up web analytics.

AVG disguises fake traffic as IE6

…webmasters who rely on log files for their traffic numbers may be unaware their stats are skewed. And others complain that LinkScanner has added extra dollars to their bandwidth bill.

…(Paid AVG) appears that scans now use these agents as well:

• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
• User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
• User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)

…the first agent is by far the most common. Which is bad news for webmasters. That’s also the Internet Explorer 6 user agent. Unlike the other two - and the original “1813″ agent - it’s a perfectly valid agent that may turn up with real clicks.

AVG’s chief of research Roger Thompson says the for-pay LinkScanner is only using the IE6 user agent

In an effort to fix this problem, one web master advocates redirecting AVG scans back to AVG’s site. “Many webmasters simply tell LinkScanner to scan AVG’s site instead, so their site gets marked as malware free every time - while AVG gets handed the extra bandwidth cost,” says the webmaster of TheSilhouettes.org.

But this assumes that AVG is using a unique agent. And at the moment, it’s not. The send-it-back-to-AVG method may redirect legitimate clicks as well.

Which gets to the heart of the matter: AVG’s security philosophy is fundamentally at odds with webmaster peace of mind. The company wants to scan search results, and it wants to scan them in a way that’s difficult to distinguish from real traffic. “In order to detect the really tricky - and by association, the most important - malicious content, we need to look just like a browser driven by a human being,” AVG chief of research Roger Thompson has told us.

And if that causes problems for webmasters, Thompson says, so be it. “I don’t want to sound flip about this, but if you want to make omelets, you have to break some eggs.”

Clearly, the company doesn’t fully realize the importance of web analytics.

“In order to make an omelet you have to crack some eggs. But a good omelet has cheese, ham, peppers, mushrooms and all sorts of other ingredients which AVG seem to have forgotten about.”

But AVG continues to say it’s working to solve the problem - including the bandwidth issue. Referring to LinkScanner’s new IE6-like user agent, Thompson told us, “We intend to leave those in place until we can find the right balance point which will allow us to continue to provide the best possible protection for our customers, without imposing too much extra bandwidth on websites.” (Source: The Register)

I was reading what the chief of research had to say - “If you want to make omelets, you have to break some eggs.” Sir, that’s just a nonsensical comparison, when you break eggs, you don’t get your neighbors to pay for them.

Bandwidth is a clear issue. It is not free. This solution is another example of how innocent parties are penalizes just because of a tiny number of visited sites infected with malware.

(By the way, I go around disguised at GoogleBot as my user agent. But that won’t hurt your bandwidth, I have reasons for doing so.)

Love us, not eat us. All lives are precious. Well something like that it says here:

Chinese loves pigs by the way. When there’s a lack of pork or the prices are not right in China, there may be revolts. The Chinese government stock up pork for emergency. Singaporeans, on the other hand, loves chicken. We have chicken burger, chicken rice, chicken drumstick and chicken pie. It’s probably an integral part of the local staple (I typed stapler) diet.

I like dogs so I don’t eat them.

Just thought it’s a refreshing name.

I haven’t tried their pies, probably trying it next week when I pass by that area. It’s at Choa Chu Kang Exchange. Lot 1 has got a lot nicer too I notice.

I love it when a software has a good and catchy name but I love it more when a software has a name that looks funny in the a Linux install command:

A Better Way to Monitor

God is an easy to configure, easy to extend monitoring framework written in Ruby.

Keeping your server processes and tasks running should be a simple part of your deployment process. God aims to be the simplest, most powerful monitoring application available.

God is useful, learn more about god.

You can get Eclipse 3.4 here. I have nothing to add. Most of the improvements appear to be Java-related.

If you don’t use the Java development stuff, maybe you can laze a while longer. There’s a JavaScript IDE too if anyone’s interested.

Wired wrote something that got me tinking a bit. I’ll quote in excerpts, the full article is here. I’m more interested in the Singlish portions.

How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand

An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don’t get enough quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese.

It’s the 1.3 billion people can’t be wrong thing. If more Chinese speak in their Chinglish, they would be the majority. We can’t say the majority of English language speakers are speaking it wrongly, can we?

In Singaporean English (known as Singlish), think is pronounced “tink,” and theories is “tee-oh-rees.”

Dude, it’s Singapore English, not Singaporean English. I never heard of tee-oh-rees in Singapore anyway. Do we say that? I don’t tink so!

One noted feature of Singlish is the use of words like ah, lah, or wah at the end of a sentence to indicate a question or get a listener to agree with you. They’re each pronounced with tone - the linguistic feature that gives spoken Mandarin its musical quality - adding a specific pitch to words to alter their meaning. (If you say “xin” with an even tone, it means “heart”; with a descending tone it means “honest.”) According to linguists, such words may introduce tone into other Asian-English hybrids.

I haven’t thought of the ah, lah, loh stuff this way leh. To me, it was added to sound more casual and to fit in. If everyone doesn’t add this, no one would use it. It’s just to fit in. But our government launched a campaign to go against it - clearly not fitting in well enough.

And it’s possible Chinglish will be more efficient than our version, doing away with word endings and the articles a, an, and the. After all, if you can figure out “Environmental sanitation needs your conserve,” maybe conservation isn’t so necessary.

I tink we’re in some sort of transition. If the Chinese can end up standardizing English by bastardizing the current standard of English, so be it. We would see a bunch of English purist crying but hey, we switched old English to middle English to our modern English. Yeah, it took ages but today we are experiencing an acceleration on technology advancements, globalization etc.. Maybe we forgotten that language developments can accelerate too.

Welcome to post-modern Asianglish.