mekosh.org

The Interwebs are buzzing with Cuil news today, a new search engine developed by a few Google expatriates. Cuil (pronounced “Cool”) aims to index all web pages, something which Google does not do. Considering the buzz and the potential, I gave it a quick test run, but I was not impressed. My first search, like [...]

The Baltimore Homicide Map I built in June at baltimoresun.com landed on Fark.com today. There was a significant boost in traffic to the map (ten times the daily average in the two hours after Fark posted the link) and some interesting/funny comments about the state of crime in Baltimore. Update: The map also appeared on [...]

I noticed earlier this week that Google has added some new features to its already great Google Map site. I’m not sure if these changes have been rolled out gradually city-by-city, but it is now possible to see the outlines of individual buildings and Metro stops. It appears that the individual buildings feature is limited [...]

Within the past week, Turkish hackers losers decided to hack the Northumberland.us Forums using a simple exploit of phpBB‘s session handling twice. Why? I have no idea. There are only three forum members and hardly any activity, so why anyone would go to the trouble is beyond my understanding. Were they tired of popping zits [...]

It’s true. I put it off until the very last day, but I contributed my $2.50/month to help Jason make blogging his full-time job. For the sheer number of great links I’ve followed from his site, it would be worth it for me to help keep him in business. However, I really like the way [...]

I received an amusing spam today from an email address based at gmail-is-too-creepy.com in my Gmail account. I’ll bet that “kvfmdtmb” didn’t know that I have all of my email forwarded to Gmail, but he/she/it still should be careful because “Gmail is nearly immortal!” Don’t worry “kvfmdtmb,” your crap is “Spam.”

Apparently, a few people stormed a recent post over at The Dead Parrots Society for a sight-seeing cruise/tour. It’s not really comment spam or a DOS attack, because there doesn’t seem to be any animosity among the comment posters (nor links to spam-like sites). I guess the best name for this event would be flash [...]

I read this interesting snippet on Boing Boing: Until now, it’s been easy to spot a PayPal fraud site by the telltale URL. But here’s a PayPal fraud page that uses a Microsoft feature/bug (take your pick) to overwrite the scammer’s URL with a legitimate-looking URL. If you make the page small, you’ll be able [...]

Apparently, Google is now offering image ads in their AdSense program in addition to their established text ads. They are targeted—or relevant, as they say—but it seems a little odd for Google to divert their focus from a non-obtrusive advertising format to images. Perhaps Google isn’t making as much money with their AdSense as they [...]