Netflix SEO Efforts Expose User Data In Google and Yahoo

Netflix is apparently leaking customer data through its URLs, resulting in that data being cached by Google and Yahoo!: It seems user data from Netflix customers can be retrieved by the popular search engines Google and Yahoo by performing special queries reveiling a cached version of the page.

Bank puts clock backwards, crashes cash points

Another reason to run your systems in GMT/UTC rather than the local time zone: A man at Barclays put the clocks backwards rather than forwards an hour when the UK moved to British Summer Time over the weekend, causing ATM machines here to stop dispensing beer tokens over the long Easter weekend.

Via echo: used evil 2u 2-u black rack mount server case antec PS

This is a case we bought about 18 months ago to build into a lightweight server. We put an amd based MB in it and placed it in service where it ran ok for about 6 months before it started to flake out. We messed around with it for another 3 or 4 months leaving it inoperative in the data center with several of our techs taking it out and trying to get it going on a number of occasions. when the old MB, ram, CPU and HDs were removed the CPU was dead, the MB was dead, one of the two sticks of ddr ram failed memtests and one of the two hard drives was giving a SMART error.

I think I'll pass, I have enough bad luck with systems.

Telecommute to NY? You owe NY State taxes

State Ruling Has Tax Implications For Telecommuters (washingtonpost.com): A telecommuter who lives out of state while working by computer for a New York employer must pay New York tax on his full income, the state's highest court ruled Tuesday in a case that could have wide implications in the growing practice. … The court relied on a fairness rule called the "convenience of the employer" under law that says a worker's income is taxable if he chooses to live outside the state, as opposed to if he or she was transferred there.

Yahoo's Tech Buzz Game market flaw

At etech, I wrote about Yahoo!'s Tech Buzz Game and the concept of the Dynamic Pari-Mutuel Market. Apparently they've had to change the game/market a bit: Buzz Game: Maintenance: We discovered that our dynamic pari-mutuel market (DPM) allowed players to exploit a market when a player is permitted to simultaneously invest in competing instruments. As a result, you will now be required to sell all of your holdings in a given market before you are allowed to purchase a competing instrument. As an example, if you hold "IE" but desire to purchase "Firefox", you must first sell all shares of "IE". Must have been behaving a bit too much like the stock market.

epcostello.net v3

So, I got off my duff and finished the redesign I've been working on since August 2004. There's bits that need to be completed still but I think this is what I'm going to go with for awhile.

I played with a couple of different layouts and ended up with this, mostly because HTML is not a layout language, and CSS implementations across browsers is too much of a pain to deal with. I truly detest having to code for specific browser combinations, and I think I managed to come up with a CSS based design that does what I want and degrades workable for Microsoft Internet Explorer. Of course, I think everyone should be using Firefox or Safari, or Opera. Anything but Microsoft Internet Explorer.

I dropped my Personal Journal from the navigation. It's still on the site, but for a variety of reasons I'm not going to highlight it. Partly because I found it to be a pain to maintain two bloggy like sections, and partly because there's too many freaky people online these days for me to continue a personal journal. Maybe I'll set up a mailing list or something.

Other notable bits: all pages use a common PHP which includes a wee bit of logic to handle caching better. There's a common object model for a page (yes, it's true that I can program in object-oriented fashion when I feel like it). There's some stubs in place for using XMLHTTPRequest when I hit my next quantum level for hacking. My goal had been to drop PHP entirely but given that I can handle modified-GET requests with the new code, and everything should (in theory) be compressed, that goal dropped in value. In theory there's some more refactoring I could do in the PHP code but I pushed as much function as possible into one common library (down from 3-4 libraries).

One other thing I've done is switched to using content-negotiation for a variety of files (stylesheet, javascript files, RSS & Atom feeds). I wrote up an article on content negotiation over at my business site: Content Negotiation (aka Multi-Format Processing) for CSS and RSS earlier this month. The benefit is that most browsers & user-agents will request files which are compressed using gzip, dropping my bandwidth utilization. Now, I don't exactly get a lot of traffic, but were I to get slashdott'ed or boingboing'd I'm somewhat better prepared. No guarantees of course, this is still primarily a personal web site and not a mega-corporation site. Yet.

Anyway...either drop me a note or try to use the comments thing here (I turned it back on, will probably get spammed to death again), let me know if this sucks, is so-so, or does-not-suck (to paraphrase a friend). I'm not a designer, I willingly cede that role to others.

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Date: Wednesday, 30 March 2005 11:14:00 PM -0500
I suppose it would help if the comment script actually worked.
I think it's fixed now.

v3.1

Minor updates. Of course, I tested this with MSIE and Firefox on a PC, faced off against Safari, Firefox, and MSIE 5 on a mac. I made one little tweak to the margins and it totally destoryed the layout on MSIE for no good reason.

I also think I've fixed the comments. Not that I expect any other than links to poker, phentermine, vioxx, and viagra sites.