Feb 29 2012

Need to vent…

Category: Kazakhstan,Tweets — ChrisM @ 8:32 am

Things that have severely tested my patience this morning…

Un-necessary (I think, could be wrong) PPPoE connections configured badly (certain of this point) by Megaline staff that visited in-laws whilst I was in UK. An already flaky connection is further ham-stringed by extra hoops to jump through/fall over.

Posterous (my main media hosting service) blocked here in Kazakhstan. Sorry, I’m assuming this is yet another technical error. Will try and check which elite ex-government member (opposition figures with a clean past are thin on the ground here) now uses the service. Bypassed with Opera, and once I have the url for the image itself, no problem, as posterous use Amazon’s cloud service and amazon.com isn’t yet blocked/experiencing male cow faeces technical issues.

Google services still blocked in some cases. Using translate link from search results blocked for example. (Using Google Chrome’s auto-translate feature once on a page still working. I’ll check if Google Docs is also still fubarred by incompetence/over-eager censoring later.

note: Kazakhstan is great, and certainly heading towards one of the top 50 countries to live in, globally. The government is superb, makes the right decisions for the right reasons, and no one should ever protest. Any “news” to the contrary is false. Always.

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Aug 13 2009

Caffeine Hit On Bling?

Category: Videos — ChrisM @ 1:07 am

With Google claiming that the new back end workings for their search engine having been in the pipeline for a while, and Microsoft explaining it merely as a kneejerk reaction to their Bing search engine, who should we believe? Does it really matter?
Well first I would like to give you the opportunity to see Microsoft’s chosen viral ad for Bing. I’d recommend moving sharp objects, small children and pets from your immediate vicinity first.

Next we have the Onion’s take on Google and their privacy policies. This one might make you laugh, you might not, but you won’t be wanting to time travel and stop the conception of the video maker at least 🙂

So, back to the story, what changes can we expect from Caffeine? Well, searching for a term like “Kazakh Yurt Rental” would not simply just use the old Google algorithm where the site with the most (with weight for relevancy) links would be in first place, allowing for on and off page SEO obviously. When implemented, if the rumours are true, when two sites of roughly equal ‘value’ to the reader (as pre-determined by Google) contend for a search term, the site with the most recent article/post would nudge ahead, and therefore place higher in the search results.

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Oct 08 2008

Don’t Want To Register?

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 2:54 am

Having just seen a section of a Ray Mears episode I’d already caught before, I wanted to check if he had done any filming in Kazakhstan. Simple enough, chuck in Ray Mears Kazakhstan to the search box in Firefox, and wait to see what gems Google returns. One of the entries looked interesting, so I opened it in a new tab, and checked to see what people had to say with ‘Bear Grylls or Ray Mears – who’d survive?” as the ecademy thread title. I was greeted with a “Join Now or Login to read all comments and to submit your own content, questions and comments.” message. Rather than register at every forum or knowledgebase that may or may not have useful information, I have two approaches to such occasions. The first is to return to the Google search results, and click on the Cached link at the bottom of most search results. This will then open up a page with what the Google bot originally found. This tends to effectively grant full access, as if the search engines can’t see the content, then search results aren’t likely to include the site.
Alternatively, if there is no cached version available, or if the site looks too garbled, I use the BugMeNot add in for Firefox. This checks their database for accounts that have been previously shared by other users, and if a match is found, you can log in without handing over your e-mail address to an organization you don’t know well.
If you use the second method, don’t forget that posting under that account is not a great idea, as anyone potentially has access to the same account, and may also alert the site owners to the fact that the account in question is not strictly genuine any more.

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