Within a few days after the super bowl, a site called missgodaddy.com sprang up. It purportedly featured pin-up style pictures of the actress who portrayed the godaddy girl in the Godaddy.com Super Bowl Advertisement in various stages of undress. That site is now gone! (see adult rated google cache from 3/1/05 – so it disappeared overnight apparently as on 3/2/05 it is no more)

The site had this disclaimer:

Disclaimer This site is not affiliated with GoDaddy.com or any of its subsidiaries, It is also not affiliated with Candice Michelle, This site is intended as a parody to godaddy and its SuperBowl Commercial 2005. The owners of this site cannot be held responsible for any information contained herein. All Information gathered and placed on this site is available at various other resources on the internet. All photos contained are copyright protected by their respective owners. Contact us at msgodaddy[ at ]gmail[ dot ]com

In addition to the pictures, it featured several sponsor links and google ad bot ads. The site has disappeared. If you click on that domain name now, you get … that’s right … godaddy itself.

How did the name get transferred? According to the cached site, Godaddy purchased it.

More importantly, why isn’t the name registered with Godaddy, the proud new owner of the domain name?

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Two flaws have been discovered in Real Media’s Realplayer, they can be used to compromise the machine on which Realplayer is running. You can read more about it here and you can get updates for your Realplayer here.

On the Virus front, the new Bagle variant is running amok, it isn’t technically a Virus, but rather a Trojan horse (a progam that opens a back door on your PC that allows a remote party to take control) and as such has no self propagation method itself relying instead on an apparent spam out, read more here. The danger is not just the Trojan itself, but also that it can in some cases turn off your anti-virus protection making you susceptible to other infection. Here you can find the top ten Viruses from Sophos for February which makes for interesting reading. For anyone not sure they are protected we suggest you head over here, and pick up one of the free anti-virus programs listed there.

Today I happened onto Stu Nicholls’ CSS Playground. I found the site interesting in design, for example the hover over links on the main page shows a flashing brown bar. Is it over the top or interesting? I found some of his general menu structure hard to understand at first without playing, for example his speech bubble that is his comment link.

I like the negative image of the lady that appears … but where are the positives? Not sure what the relevance of the picture is other than it is interesting. I like the color blocks that come on for hovers as well.

I also like some of his menu examples.

Recently both Websidestory and Onestat released their findings that although Firefox usage was still growing, it’s uptake was slowing down a little. I don’t believe that is the full story and I’m about to tell you why. The first thing to keep in mind, is that Onestat collect their statistics from users of their various online counter offerings. Websidestory apparently get their statistics from several big sites like Disney, Sony, Best Buy and Liz Claiborne.

The problem is is that both of these methods miss a crucial (vast) and growing Internet population, namely the power users. In the case of Onestat with their online counter systems, the problem is that generally only two types of clients use this type of service, newbies and occasionally businesses. In the case of Websidestory, the big sites they monitor are not those likely to be those visited by power Internet users, if you are one yourself, do you remember the last time you visited Disney or Liz Clairborne?

That skips a vast portion of the Internet’s users, namely the techies and power users. These guys know what they want online, they know where to go, and a vastly higher number of them use the Firefox web browser. The Internet’s users are slowly becoming more knowledgeable then they once were, and this group of power users are growing all the time. Experienced Web developers are likely to be using their own log file analysers for statistics and for those without log file access, counters like our own statistical counter that serve the same purpose. The only places I really see remote hit counters is on newbie web pages and free blog services (the exact places where one expects people to be using the default browser that came with their computer.)

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Google currently has the search engine crown firmly fixed to it’s collective heads. Nobody would argue with that status at this stage, but many aspire to take that crown. I’ve found myself wondering why Google has the crown, when they are not much more then half the age of Yahoo, and have a tiny portion of the funds available to MSN (Microsoft). Why do people keep turning to Google?

For web search, I think I can answer this question. The answer is “results” folks. You seem to get what you want faster and with less wading through fales positives then you do with either MSN or Yahoo. I hear you ask: What do I base this declaration on? I’m basing my judgement on the statistics from this very site. Ninety percent of the search traffic leading people to this site is from Google, but that isn’t the statistic behind my reasoning. My statistical counter collects the terms used by people who found this site from several of the big search engines, and it collects the terms they used to find the site, and the number of times that search term was used.

When I look at the search terms people used in Google to find us, I see loads of searches for HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, MySQL related terms, and terms related to stories we’ve covered. In fact out of the 500 odd Google search terms collected from the first of March thus far, there are almost no gibberish terms that should never have lead people to us. Then I look at the Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista and AOL terms collected and I see hardly any terms that directly relate to our site, the people searching for this stuff would not have found what they were looking for here. And therein lies the key.

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Wiki’s are amazing things. Community maintained founts of information. Many are run using MediaWiki, an open source project on sourceforge. If you are running version 1.3.10 or below, you should immediately upgrade to 1.3.11. If you are running the beta release of 1.4, you should immediately upgrade to 1.4.ec1. This is because a routine security audit turned up several flaws in prior code.

In what appears to be an amazingly anti-democratic sign of the problems faced by the EU, the European Commission has declined the European Parliament’s request to restart the legislative process on the “Software patent directive”. The directive no longer has a majority backing in the EU, but it has been said that other forces have been pushing to get the patent directive into place. Twice now certain parties tried to slip the approval process into EU Fisheries meetings, and twice Poland stopped them. It seems that the powers that be are not going to allow democracy to get in the way of big business. Read this rather more descriptive breakdown of the situation.