My review of No Nonsense XML Web Development with PHP by Thomas Myer was published on Slashdot yesterday. It’s always interesting to read the comments the day after, and see the discussions evolved, and some interesting links like this one pop up.
My review of No Nonsense XML Web Development with PHP by Thomas Myer was published on Slashdot yesterday. It’s always interesting to read the comments the day after, and see the discussions evolved, and some interesting links like this one pop up.
The alliance of America Online and Time Warner is finally generating all those synergies investors were promised after during the merger. In2TV will stream free episodes from about a hundred TV shows, including Babylon 5, La Femme Nikita, New Adventures of Batman and others.
Newsweek magazine presents AOL’s Blog King - Jason Calacanis of WebLogs, Inc., which was acquired by AOl back in October of 2005. Calacanis talks about the reasons big Web players buy out small companies, instead of building their own competition, discusses his days at AOL Time Warner, and suggests that any Internet entrepreneur nowadays should first and foremost worry about the revenues, not pageviews or social network links.
Back in October 2005 NetCraft predicted the domain parking industry shakeout, however, with the big players involved in domain parking game, the industry continues to grow. Looking at the number of newly registered domains over the past 6 months, a small outfit DomainCar from Panama, who owns and operates millions of parked domains like my-name-server.com, experienced the highest growth, registering more domains than registrars GoDaddy, directNIC, Yahoo! Web Hosting and 1&1.
Buying expensive items online from the people you’ve never mett without any guarantees on the seller’s part might seem a bit risky even for an experienced Internet shopper, but apparently the “hotness” of real estate investment market influences some cash-heavy investors to look for opportunities online. When the entire transaction is done via a click of the mouse, and the deed for newly bought real estate arrives in the mail, some unsuspecting buyers might discover that a cozy house near the bus line in the middle of a busy street might imply a criminalized neighborhood and proximity to crack house. New York Times investigates negative experiences of people buying investment real estate online.
The New York Times runs the story on the long tail of television, where the channels that would not be hits on the mainstream media are migrating to the Internet and finding interested audiences there. The article mentions Sail.tv - TV programming for those into sailing and yachting, TrioTV - the cornucopia of pop culture and music, BrilliantButCancelled will rerun the reruns of old TV shows, and OutZone will feature programming pertaining to gays and lesbians.
If you’re a current NetBank customer, log on to your account and then click on Your special offers link on the back. Currently NetBank offers a $50 gift card on 12-month 5.01% certificate of deposit. I e-mailed them asking whether the promotion was limited to typical 1 per household, and got a response that it’s not true - you will get a $50 Visa gift card for every CD at $2,000 or above.
There’s little incentive then to go above the $2,000 minimum, and if you lock two grands in a NetBank FDIC-insured certificate of deposit, you get 5.01% rate and $50 in 4-6 weeks from opening the account. $50 return on a $2,000 investment amounts to 2.50% APY, so effectively NetBank is running a 7.51% APY promotion.
It doesn’t get better than this. Government I-Bonds are currently yielding 6.73%, and that could change in May, so there might be a better rate to hold out for, but that’s depending on the inflation curve and government decision on I-Bonds.
Did ya know that you can subscribe to company-specific news from Yahoo! Finance in RSS format? Request like
http://finance.yahoo.com/rss/headline?s=YHOO
accepts 1 and more company tickers.
http://finance.yahoo.com/rss/headline?s=YHOO,GOOG,MSFT
The 5 page menu at this place features more than a hundred items, with selections in soups, fowl, pork, mu shu, chicken and seafood.
After seating the guests are greeted with obligatory tea and spicy cabbage, which I haven’t seen at other Asian places.
The meals are served in family-sharing mode, so anything you order comes with a number of plates, and the waiter distributes a generous portion of the meal to everyone at the table.
The place is not expensive, although there were some items on the menu (sea cucumber, I think), which were at $25 a plate. Expect most of the food to be in the $8-12 range.
Mark Pilgrim’s book “Dive into Greasemonkey” is now available online for free under GPL license. Greasemonkey “is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML to any web page to change its behavior.” A list of 45 examples is provided, and those interested might check out UserScripts, a repository of Greasemonkey scripts. TechBooksForFree is another good resource for free online books.