Over the years people have asked me why I maintain yafla.com (after a Slashdotting a few years ago, a reader wrote to ask if yafla.com stood for "Yet Another F'n Lame Ass.com?". I got quite a kick out of that, and I considered replacing Yet Another Five Letter Acronym in my mind with this more cynical variant). While it is a legitimate company that I do work under, basically I'm by design a one man crew and have no lack of work, so I don't actively solicit for business. Nonetheless I've always wanted to maintain a credible internet presence just in case I think up something that would be .COM brilliant.

To serve this desire, one of my goals with yafla.com was to maintain it at a middling ranking, publishing enough interesting information that people would link to it and visit, and when I do post something interesting about a non-mainstream topic, it at least has a chance in heck of appearing somewhere near the front of the links returned by search engines (given that people who actually care are most likely to get here via a search engine. People coming from blog-of-the-day or discussion links are much more likely to be fly-bys who pad the hit-count but don't actually value from the content. I get no pleasure from empty hits).

Of course there's also the personal credibility angle: Along with published print articles, I also post informational tools or papers on yafla.com to maintain some karma in the industry, and also as a goal - a destination - that drives me to investigate topics that otherwise I might not so thoroughly consider. I've placed Google Adsense ads on a couple of papers as a test, but they yield a pittance: I could "make" far more than the Google ads yield by getting a regular coffee instead of a large in the morning.

One thing I have noticed, however, is that the number of hits coming from search engines like Google has been rapidly declining over the past couple of years, basically charting as an inverse of the number of blogs filling the medium. It seems that as more and more blogs are coming online, all of them promiscuously cross-linking and trackbacking, the value of getting a couple hundred links for a neat domain tool, or a dozen links from highly specialized sites concerning a specific topic, has declined to the point of being irrelevant.

With the new inflationary pressures, it seems that nothing less than thousands of blog swarming links will really get you search engine credibility. This is doubled by the fact that most (or all) of the major search engines are terribly dumb, in that a million generalist blog linkings to a guy for his xbox game tips will yield him top results for SQL queries the day he posts his first Hello World SELECT statement. To my knowledge there is no search engine that separates links out into areas of expertise (Google pseudo-does this by analyzing the context of each link, but it is terribly deficient), eliminating this useless global ranking for all searches. Many blogs are earning credibility by association (due to demonstratable weaknesses in algorithms like Pagerank), such as the huge rise of blogs.msdn.com entries for virtually every search term (even where the individual blog itself has few or no direct links from the outside world, but has credibility by being linked within the whole of blogs.msdn.com. This is weakness I wrote about several years ago on this very site, though in that iteration it was GeoCities accounts that were disproportionately being ranked).

The question I am pondering, then, is whether the only way one can remain internet credible (in search engine terms) is to integrate heavily within the blogging community, quid-pro-quoing endless links and trackbacks, ingratiating oneself with other bloggers, posting meaningless comments about every posting every other blogger makes (which they will of course do in turn). It's a sort of super-pyramid scheme, but with no bottom level.

Several years of critical power shortages here in Ontario, along with a sense that excessive resource consumption is morally wrong, have led me to power down my PCs when they're not in use. While I'd prefer a partial sleep solution, even standby mode consumes a considerable amount of power (measured not with a watt meter, but rather just feeling the heat of the air coming out of the still running power supply). While Windows XP and Windows 2003 have vastly improved start-up times, once you couple in a large number of services such as SQL Server and various desktop search utilities, along with tools like Visual Studio, getting back to where you were before the shutdown can be very time consuming.

As such, over the past years I've been relying upon the excellent feature called Hibernation. Enabled in the Power Options (as shown below), this gives you a new "Shut Down" option (available by configuring a key in the advanced section of power management, or when holding shift using the XP theme shutdown menu) that basically freezes the state of your PC and then spools the entire memory contents out to a file. On restart it spools the state back exactly where it was, resets the state on the CPU, and then you're off and running again. Getting back to exactly where I was takes just a few seconds.

Back in about 1986/87 a revolutionary product, I believe called SnapBack, for the Atari ST came out that did exactly this, spooling out the state, compressed, to a disk file. Of course, in that case it was generally spooling out 512KB or 1MB, rather than 1GB+, but the idea was the same. At that time people often used it to add "Save Game" functionality to games that intentionally or unintentionally didn't offer the same. Other people used it for piracy, spooling out a running game (after the copy protection checks had occurred), and then giving the file to others.

Just had to mention this as it's remarkable how many people don't know about, and thus don't use, this excellent feature. It isn't perfect, however, and several times it has failed to recover to where it was, so you probably shouldn't hibernate with that document you've worked on for the past three weeks sitting unsaved.

The title of this entry will likely get some people up in arms. I assure those people that I do not mean to draw attention from the tragedy, or to diminish it in any way. Nor do I think this blog entry will stop a single rescuer from going about their business.

However, what has happened has happened, and many of us have pledged our monetary donations and are really left twiddling our thumbs at what else we can do.

As software developers and technology experts, I think there is plenty we can do. For instance, there were obviously technological gaps in information management (knowing who and what was where when, and sharing that information with everyone. The lack of this sort of knowledge led to some of the chaos that horribly delayed the response). After the disaster technology was necessary for communications, with many of the emergency personelle and victims having no means of communicating. There were gaps in battery storage, with basic infrastructure dying quickly. There were gaps after the pieces began to be cleaned up, coordinating communications amongst the victims in various municipalities.

Technology can't stop a category 5 hurricane (yet), but it can help ameliorate the damage and to help society get back on track as quickly as possible.

Given this, invariably this tragedy will be followed by billions of taxpayer dollars going into various strategies to prevent occurrences like this from happening again, or to at least have a better grasp on responding to it. Many of those dollars will be going towards IT projects. Something to keep your mind open to if you have ideas for solutions that would avoid this sort of nightmare scenario from happening again.

Something to think about.

I've finally decided to take the plunge into blogging. While I've published countless online and print articles, papers, and of course an endless stream of perhaps hundreds of thousands of online message board and forums postings, beginning back in the BBS days with my Commodore 64, I'd never actually taken the initiative to evaluate the various blogging tools and services.

At least not to a level where I was comfortable making a defini tive choice and actually moving forward with one.

I should confess that part of the reason I delayed getting into the blogging game was due to a desire to roll my own blogging tool. Eventually each initiative would fall prey to the standard Babbage's Syndrome of worrying about every possible use and technology, and I'd shelve it again: It just wasn't important enough for me to spend much time and energy on, yet I really wanted to do it myself.

I've finally decided to go with Radio Userland, a fairly simple little tool that publishes blogs as static content, something I greatly prefer over database driven dynamic content. I also want to be entirely in control of the content ownership and "fringe benefits", which rules out many of the hosted services. Over the coming couple of days I'll actually work on the themes and clean it up and personalize it.

Why so late to get into blogging? Generally I have two styles of writing, formal and informal. Formal writing is where I spend hours here and there over perhaps a week on a 3000 word essay detailing a specific topic. I carefully prune and shape every sentence into what I think is a readable and worthwhile resource for readers. This is not the sort of venture that blogging is really intended for, so I stuck with the standard "write it in a word processor, then eventually reformat to HTML and FTP it up. Voila" style of posting content. On the flip side, I've posted countless informal off the cuff - and often poorly thought out and poorly edited - messages on forums and message boards. These, by design, are generally disparate and diffused, and only marginally associable with me.

With blogging I am looking for somewhat of a middle ground: I'd like quick and relatively low effort postings where I can speak my mind about this industry (and whatever else comes to mind), yet which are easily attributable to me in a centralized, search-engine friendly manner, and where those who appreciate my mindset and skillset can more easily follow my postings.

I hope you like it.

BTW: You can find several of my online papers at http://www.yafla.com/papers/articles.htm.