February 2005

Solace for NHL hockey fans

February 25, 2005

With the NHL hockey season officially lost, some fans are taking matters into their own hands. An article in today’s discusses how some fans are coming to grips without NHL. Taking fantasy sports one step further, WhatIfSports.com allows users to simulate entire seasons using any combinations of past or present players. WhatIfSports says the participation in their hockey sports simulation games have increased 40-50%. With links from the site, their traffic has been spiking. Raised outside of Pittsburgh and being a Penguins fan, I desperately miss the NHL (ok, not as much as if it were the NFL). But this simulation stuff may be taking it a little bit to far…

Importance of RSS

February 25, 2005

RSS is only going to become more critical to web sites. Robert Scoble (via Ross Mayfield) has a fired up post about marketing of sites using RSS. Or more to the point, those NOT using RSS. From Scoble,

Sorry, if you do a marketing site and you don’t have an RSS feed today you should be fired.

Something to keep in mind for all the marketing gurus.

Doctors playing video games

February 24, 2005

Doctors playing video games? That’s exactly what this New York Times article proposes. Apparently, research shoes that surgeons who play video games improve their skills.

Dr. Rosser…keeps an Xbox, along with PlayStation 2 and GameCube consoles, just a few strides from the operating room so he can warm up with a favorite, Super Monkey Ball, just before surgery.

Last year Dr. Rosser was a co-author of a study that concluded that surgeons who played video games for at least three hours a week were 27 percent faster and made 37 percent fewer mistakes than surgeons who did not play video games.

As many medical simulators are too expensive, researchers have been looking into PC and console games to improve their operating-room skills.

Google filters

February 21, 2005

Blog Business World has a detailed article on search engine optimization, specifically on the possibility of .

As Google is still the 800-lb gorilla of search engines, I always take the time to read up on Google developments. Any process they implement typically affects all our sites, both business and personal.

Skype coming on strong

February 21, 2005

After hearing more and more buzz surrounding Skype, I finally downloaded the software to see what it was all about. As far as VoIP providers go, I think Skype has a great business model – free calls to existing Skype users, cheap rates to everyone else on a per minute basis. Unlike other VoIP providers that allow customers to simply plug in their existing phones, to this point Skype has relied on an all-computer setup. This worked for a set of users, but couldn’t really hit mainstream usage in that form. New developments may be changing that reality. Skype recently announced a strategic alliance with Motorola. The announced partnership goals:

The initial focus of the collaboration will be on co-marketing of new optimized Motorola ‘Skype Ready’ companion products, such as Bluetooth(R) headsets, dongles, and speakerphones, as well as delivery of the Skype Internet Telephony experience on select Motorola mobile devices.

Skype is not without its challenges though. Poor performance of both Skype and SkypeOut have been reported. Although this is to be expected with any newer technology (especially as all VoIP providers have documented issues), it will be interesting to see if Skype can make the leap from an an all computer based server to one more integrated with how people are currently familiar with making voice calls.

As far as my experience with the service, Skype really looks like vocal instant messaging. When you sign up, you select a username. This username then becomes your “phone number” in the network. Much like IM, another user either needs to know your username or look it up in a directory. Unfortunately, my own trials are incomplete, as i don’t know anyone using Skype yet!

Related resources:
Skype, Xandros Bundle VoIP, Linux
Skype to provide WiFi VoIP service to Motorola mobile devices

Coffee may help prevent liver cancer

February 21, 2005

As a bona fide coffee addict, I take great joy in seeing articles positive on the effects of drinking coffee. I’m obviously trying to justify my habit and I’m completely aware of it. There are much worse things to be addicted to. With that said, I saw an article today on how coffee may prevent liver cancer.

A study of more than 90,000 Japanese found that people who drank coffee daily or nearly every day had half the liver cancer risk of those who never drank coffee. The protective effect occurred in people who drank one to two cups a day and increased at three to four cups.

RPI rankings and calculations

February 20, 2005

After a few big wins by my alma mater, I was curious to see if our pathetic RPI ranking had moved up a bit. For those uninitiated in this arcane metric for college basketball, the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) is the formula used by the NCAA to rate both men’s and women’s college basketball teams. The RPI is then used by the for picking teams for the tournament and establishing the brackets.

The Rating Percentage Index (RPI) was created in 1981 to provide supplemental data for the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee in its evaluation of teams for at-large selection and seeding of the championship bracket.

The RPI is intended to be used as one of many resources used by the committee in the selection, seeding and bracketing process. It never should be considered anything but an additional evaluation tool. No computer program that is based on pure numbers can take into account subjective concepts, e.g., how well a team is playing down the stretch, what the loss or return of a top player means to a team, or how emotional a specific conference game may be.

Ken Pomeroy has a re-creation of the Ratings Percentage Index for the 2005 NCAA men’s college basketball season. Pomeroy discusses the formula calculation here and here.

As interesting as all this is, the bottom line to me is where Virginia Tech falls. As of 2/19, the Hokies have an RPI of 101. Still bad, but at least we’re moving in the right direction.

Study finds Windows more secure than Linux

February 18, 2005

Can it be true? Is a Windows server more secure than Linux? Common technical opinion tells us this cannot be. So, when I read this article from (and ), I was astounded.

Two Florida researchers presented their findings to an RSA Conference of computer-security professionals. Apparently, one was a Microsoft enthusiast, the other Linux. My first thought was that this was another Microsoft sponsored study, so that is obviously not the case. Comparing Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Enterprise Server 3, their research computed a metric called days of risk described as “the period from when a vulnerability is first reported to when a patch is issued.” The researchers found that on average the Windows server configuration had just over 30 days of risk versus 71 days for the Red Hat configuration.

This is obviously going to be very controversial. Hopefully, though, more objective studies like this one will be performed to spark constructive debate on the topic.

Additional resources:
Linux fan concedes Microsoft is more secure
Study finds Windows more secure than Linux (Mikehall’s Embedded WebLog)
Windows More Secure Than Linux? (Say Anything)

Blogsnob from Pheedo removed

February 18, 2005

Some of my readers (and I suspect very few) may have noticed the two small ads at the bottom of the left navigation on this site. They’re gone now and there’s a big reason for it – the slow speed the pages were loading. from is a great idea. As an ad network for blogs, you promote your blog through the network for free by simply displayed other free blog ads. You receive credits for every ad your site displays and then those credits are used to display your ads. Now I didn’t expect to see tremendous traffic from this, so the low click through rate wasn’t my biggest concern. What prompted me to remove them was the fact that the ads were holding up my page load time. The Blogsnob ads were slowing my page loading to a crawl. My unscientific tests had them delaying a full page load by over 10 seconds after half of the other content loaded. This is wholly unacceptable and since I was getting very little traffic from them, it’s goodbye Blogsnob.

Microsoft plans new version of Internet Explorer

February 16, 2005

According to Microsoft Watch, a new standalone version of Internet Explorer will go into beta this summer to be delivered to Windows XP Service Pack 2 customers. Labeled as version 7.0, the new IE will have anti-phishing, anti-spyware, and anti-virus protection built-in.

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