But the point is, I am in Southern Ontario, and searching on just the restaurant's name does not get me Restaurantica results at all on the first page. And, it used to be that Restaurantica did show up by searching just the restaurant's name, in the first couple of results.

Google has been "going local" for a while, showing you results in your area first. But this is the exact opposite.

I have seen this in a few sites I run. One is a business site, another is a special interest with specific demographics, and the third is a blog.

It all started with Google shuffling their algorithms, with Panda then Pengiun.

I saw traffic drop on all three sites. Some coninciding with Panda, and the other coninciding with Pengiun.

One site was the top site for certain search terms for many long years. Not anymore. That site saw a 7.5X drop in pageviews per month traffic. Another site saw 3.5X drop, and the third was 2.5X.

What is weird is that Google de-indexed one site because of "un-natural links". When I contacted them, I asked what the links are, so I can remove them. They never came back with any definitive information, and sent the same template email saying site de-indexed because of un-natural links. It took 3 or 4 tries, and then they reinstated the site back in the index. They never told me what the links are, and never explained why they de-listed the site nor why they reinstated it.

Another thing of note: some sites no longer show up in Google searches. For example, here in Canada we have a restaurant review site called Restaurantica. It used to show up in the first few searches for restaurants in the area (Southern Ontario). Now, I don't see it at all on the front page. Seems Google decided that Trip Advisor and Urban Spoon are the authoratitive ones for restaurant, and Restaurantica is third class or something.

I also noticed that the search quality for Google has gone downhill starting in 2011. Really stupid matching of terms, some partial strings even. I've never seen Google's search that bad before.

They are for sure dumbing things down, a general trend in the industry in the name of "user experience" and such. You see this in Firefox with the dumbed down Australis, which requires Classic Theme Restorer to undo some of the damage.

Sigh ...

Or, perhaps it is the generation that can't understand procedural [programming] that is the issue ...

[/sarcasm]

This e-wallet stuff is not their main source of revenue.

Square is advertising on TV about how one pays with a credit card, using the plain old magnetic strip, using a card reader that plugs into the mic socket of a mobile phone.

Here is how it works.

Also, they are opening an office in Kitchener, Ontario, within the Kitchener Waterloo technology hub.

Evidence elsewhere does not support this theory.

Egypt for example, has one of the highest Schistosoma infections rates. Even its other name, Bilharzia, is after the guy who discovered it in Egypt in the mid 19th century (Theodor Bilharz).

My own father died from complications of Schistosoma. This is because in the 40s and 50s, the treatment involved antimony injections, and they used to stand up patients in line, and inject them all with the same glass syringe one after the other. This caused Hepatitis C virus to spread, even before they diagnosed the virus.

Back to the theory: Egypt has a very low AIDS incidence rate, so that seems to negate the finding.

However, there are many species of Schistosoma, so there may be variations there. And this vaginal version is something I have never heard about before. So perhaps the species they found over there is the cause.

Just install the Classic Theme Restorer extension. A bit of configuring and you have a better Firefox than either version 28 and Australis.

To be fair, APL was a wonderful language, and perfect so long as you didn't want to actually /do/ anything.

I worked with a guy in the mid 1980s who used APL for everything. He came from the mainframe world, but had APL for MS-DOS on floppies. When he was contracted for writing an MS-DOS application in RM-COBOL, he used APL to write a full screen text editor so that he would not use edlin and such.

I've got 8GB on my machine, and every day or so I need to shut down Firefox to reclaim the memory it's been leaking. Firefox starts at around 300MB of RAM, and grows to 1GB if I let it.

I had 4GB and upgraded to 8GB, and have 1200+ tabs open in 19 windows. Firefox is fast, and the whole laptop is smooth.

Just install NoScript and don't enable Javascript for any but the sites you use more often. This way Flash ads will not play, and memory usage will be far less.

And make sure you disable Firebug as well as YSlow if you have them.

If you want to know how much each device uses by hour, day, month, then you need wrtbwmon.

It is a simple shell script that uses iptables, and runs on OpenWRT just fine.

wrtbwmon shows a graph for each device by MAC address. if you configure OpenWRT to use a fixed IP address per MAC address, then you see the device name that you assign on all graphs.

The original is here. There is also this fork.

I have modified it to run off of a USB memory stick, and store its data there as well. It does not use much storage, barely 85 to 100 kilobytes per day. So even an old 512MB USB stick should last for many years.

According to the statement on the CRA web site, it was security agencies that told the CRA that 900 SINs were stolen:

Regrettably, the CRA has been notified by the Government of Canada's lead security agencies of a malicious breach of taxpayer data that occurred over a six-hour period. Based on our analysis to date, Social Insurance Numbers (SIN) of approximately 900 taxpayers were removed from CRA systems by someone exploiting the Heartbleed vulnerability. We are currently going through the painstaking process of analyzing other fragments of data, some that may relate to businesses, that were also removed.

So, are the security agencies monitoring traffic to government web sites, so that they are so specific? What else are they monitoring?

Back in 2008 when Israel attacked Israel because of foolish Hezbollah misadventures, Condoleezza famously said:

What we're seeing here is, in a sense, the growingâ"the birth pangs of a new Middle East, and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East.

Here is the source.

To this day, the words "New Middle East" is believed by a vast majority over there as a USA conspiracy against Arabs/Muslims. When the 2011 revolution broke out, the first explanation by many was : "It is the USA conspiring against Mubarak, Egypt, Arabs, ...etc."

Now both sides of the political divide in Egypt (pro-Military, pro-Muslim-Brotherhood) point to the other party as an accomplice or agent for that conspiracy.

It is so powerful and pervasive .. no thanks to that ideologue of a Condy ...

Here is how you can test your servers to see if they are vulnerable.

Download this Python SSL Heartbleed test script.

Download it, rename it to ssltest.py, then run it as:

python ssltest.py example.com

You did not understand what I said ...

First, I was giving an example of how to get free Dynamic DNS if you already host with Linode. No extra service needed.

Second, the script I described and included the source code for, runs on OpenWRT. Since OpenWRT is a router it does not need to run a remote script (PHP or otherwise) to know what its external IP address is.

Finally, the PHP script was if you do not have OpenWRT, and want to have the equivalent functionality with Linode from a Linux machine that is not the router, inside your network. In this case, you need to get the external IP by running a script on your Linode VPS, then updating Linode's DNS using curl command.

Clearer now?

If you have a Linode VPS, then you do have free Dynamic DNS. All you need is a script to update the relevant subdomain.

Here is a script that does it for an OpenWRT router.

Using Linode Dynamic DNS with OpenWRT

If you don't use OpenWRT, you can still use any Linux box behind the subdomain, but you need to setup a small "what is my IP" script outside your subdomain. For example, simple script like so will do the trick:

<?php
print $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . "\n";
?>

Now, you need to change the OpenWRT script above to contact the server that has the PHP script, and get the public IP address of the subdomain.

He is the 21st century edition of Jon Katz.