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Excerpt: I'm a geek.  Based on the content of this blog, many of my readers are too.  But some of you just may have seen a woman at some point.  If you have, you have likely been rejected, but don't understand what she means.  This handy guide will put rejection into terms we can all understand — HTTP Response codes.  SEOs should especially appreciate these.  Implementation via PHP. Note: These are all real.  I didn't make them up!header("HTTP/1.0 306 (Unused)"); "I'm a virgin."header("HTTP/1.0 402 Payment Required"); "I'm from Craigslist."header("HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden");"I'm Catholic." header("HTTP/1.0 303 See Other");"Maybe we should see other people."header("HTTP/1.0…

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Excerpt: This recent article cites that many universities are experiencing a sharp drop in computer science student enrollment.  Many attribute it to outsourcing scares and a final acknowledgement that the dot Com bubble did indeed pop.  It is no longer totally rad to be a computer scientist.  I'm a computer scientist, so I can reflect on why I still have a job, and perhaps what the future has in store.  For now:"This fall, Vanderbilt University's computer science department is less than half the size it was in 2001. This year, enrollment fell again, to 61 students from 78 a year ago….

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Excerpt: This is totally off subject, but I promise another post today.  In the meantime, though — I can't make this up.  I'm staying in Washington D.C., visiting a friend, and I forgot to bring deodorant.  Since I have mercy on the souls of others who stand near me in this heat, I decided I'd go pick some up at the local CVS.Unfortunately, when I got there and found the deodorant, it was locked up.  Yes, the deodorant was locked up.  I had to wait 10 minutes to get someone from CVS to open the case for me.  So either there…

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Excerpt: Is the world upside down?  By way of Jake's post on blog.outer-court.com, Microsoft was the only search engine that passed the W3C Markup Validation Service test in flying colors — no errors.  All the other search engines bit the dust.  Google came in fourth with 61 errors. Was it not Matt Cutts who said in one of his videos that HTML standards-compliance should not be a top priority for the web master, but it should not be entirely ignored either?  So why is Google seemingly not following its own advice?My guess is that they do it deliberately.  I looked, and…

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Excerpt: Hurry up and start a blog if you haven't already, because even the fundamentalists are ahead of the curve.  Mahmood Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, announced his new blog over here.  In an unabashed display of self-importance, his first post is an autobiography:It starts with "In the Name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate," and then it rambles on and on about the evils of western culture.  Surprisingly, he didn't use the word "Zionist" or "Crusader" once in the post.  He also didn't bother to deny the existence of The Holocaust.  I'm impressed.  Maybe he read a book or…

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Excerpt: You might get sued!  Expect Google to mail lots of legal letters as they make a desperate effort to protect their ailing trademark.  Google has become almost synonymous with search — and if they aren't careful, they'll end up like "Band-aid," "Spam," and "Frisbee."If any of those terms have not lost their trademarks yet, they are already travelling down Generic Lane.  Ask yourself if you would say "adhesive bandage strip," or "plastic flying disc."  I doubt it.  And when a trademark becomes synonymous with the generic item, eventually it loses its trademark status — genericide. The word 'google,' with…

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Excerpt: Apparently, he entered a deep bout of depression on June 27, and never acted quite the same since then. Matt Cutts stated something extremely vague in response here. "I believe any changes on the 27th were refreshing data used by an existing algorithm." Cryptic indeed. And many screamed expletives as they fell from grace to oblivion. … including me. OK, so I was the guy, and I didn't really contemplate suicide, but I was pretty upset. I got hit on the 27th; and the only thing that cheered me up is that the…

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Excerpt: Recently, the performance gap between Intel and AMD has been closing — first with AMD leading and gaining some much-earned credibility, then, more recently, with Intel making a comeback.  Intel also apparently leads in performance per watt now, too. But Google had to know about the "comeback" when they announced that they were going to use AMD Opterons in the future a little while ago.Mark Edelstone, a prominent equity analyst writes:"Based on our various research efforts, we believe that most of Google's near-term server purchases will use AMD's Opteron for the first time." But why?  If the CEO of Intel,…