Vimeo - Another Dead Man Walking

Here's another fearless prediction.  Vimeo, the video hosting site won't be around for long.  Quite frankly, Vimeo sucks.  Their upload time is horrendous.  Their processing time is over half an hour.  They say that you can pay to get to the front of the line.  They act as if it is 1999 and disk and storage space is expensive, and bandwidth is to be hoarded.  Their revenue stream is so early internet.  They are carving steaks off their race horses with their program.   Jeepers, compared to Youtube, I can't find one value proposition that Vimeo delivers on.  Another dead man walking in the tech world.

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Monetizing Your Content - How Much Money Do You Make From Youtube

I monetize my digital content.  I would be a fool not too.  This includes my videos on Youtube.  I participate in Google's Adsense programs.  This works out well, because Google owns Youtube.  So how much money do I make on Youtube?

Here are my metrics.  I make exactly half a cent per minute of videos watched.  Two minutes of viewing makes me one cent.  To make a dollar, I need 200 minutes of viewing time with monetized ads.  I need 40 views of a five minute video to make a dollar.  My most popular video has 12,765 views.  It is 10 seconds long.  That's 2,127 minutes of view.  That video has made me $10.64 cents in ad revenue.  Not exactly a get-rich-quick scheme.  Obviously the trick is to upload as many videos as possible.

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Best PDF to Word Online Converter

I had this pdf from a few years ago.  I had lost the original MSWord document, and I wanted to change it.  I went online and Googled a pile of online services.  One asked me if I wanted to make my document public.  Not trusting them, I moved on.  Another accepted my document, and said that I was 5,500 in the queue and it went down by one every couple of minutes.  I cancelled that job.  I went to another one, and it sent me a conversion into my email box.  However it was just an image pasted into an MSWord document, and I couldn't edit it.

I came to the conclusion that I needed my PDF scanned with OCR or Optical Character Recognition.  The first one that came up in the search was www.scannedpdftoword.com .  Note:  This is not pdftoword.com which I didn't like.  It had the word "scanned" in the URL.

Bingo. This was it.  It promptly sent back an MSWord doc that I could edit.  They sell a desktop version as well.  I was totally pleased with the result.  There was a spelling error or two, but the error was consistent.  I would heartily recommend their product and services.  I was not paid for this product review, nor did I receive any inducement to make it.

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Strange GMail error

Got a strange GMail message that persisted with a single message.  I composed an email, and clicked on send.  Up popped the following message:

Oops... a server error occurred and your email was not sent. (#793)

It persisted.  I was able to create and send another message, and yet when I went to my drafts folder to send it again, I got the error again.

I finally solved it by closing the browser and re-signing into GMail.  

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MySQL Can not issue data manipulation statements with executeQuery()

Had an interesting MySQL error.  It was:  Can not issue data manipulation statements with executeQuery().

This was the code snippet that caused it:

try {
stmt = conn.createStatement();
myQueryString = "delete from groupnames where id=" + gid;
stmt.executeQuery(myQueryString);

The thing to notice is the query string.  What it was doing, was deleting a record in a table.  It wasn't a query so the line in red is incorrect.

It should have read:

try {
stmt = conn.createStatement();
myQueryString = "delete from groupnames where id=" + gid;
stmt.execute(myQueryString);

Notice that instead of executeQuery, because there is no query in a delete, it should merely read execute.

Hope this helps someone.

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Traffic Faking Saga continues

Well the traffic faking saga continues.  In a previous post, I outlined how I contacted the .PW abuse desk for the PW registrar where the internet rectums and societal scourges called blogsrating.pw were hosted.

The registrar asked me for proof, and I sent back this reply:

Hello:

For supporting evidence of the spammer in your midst, please google blogsrating.pw and you will find the internet is full of complaints of these spammers/traffic fakers.  They operate under a few different domains but the blogsrating.pw is front and center.

It is highly annoying to me, but highly damaging to your good name as a registrar.  I would seriously suggest that you perform a simply google of that domain for all of the evidence that you need.

And they sent back this reply and closed the ticket:

Thank you for contacting us.

However, in order to proceed with suspension of the domain name, we require corresponding evidence supporting the same. 

Once, we receive the necessary evidence, we shall definitely take strict action against the domain name.

Best regards,
Abuse Mitigation Team
.PW Registry



Ticket Details

---

Ticket ID: ZTV-616-97794
Status: Closed

So in essence, they are a bunch of ticket-closers who have no interest in doing simple investigative work of their own.  It is my job to police the internet according to them.

If the assholes at blogsrating.pw are polluting your blog, you too can contact the abuse desk and have them do nothing as well.

Here are the frustration particulars:   .PW Abuse Desk <abuse@registry.pw>


 In the meantime, the dickless wonders have put 32 fake hits on this blog in the past few minutes.  Here are the offenders:

http://r-e-f-e-r-e-r.com   - 12 hits

http://t.co/MaAptuGFVu  - 12 hits

http://www.vampirestat.com  - 8 hits

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More of why Facebook is finished

Since CNN doesn't have a blogger button to share, I am cutting and pasting this article from CNN.   Here is the URL:  http://us.cnn.com/2013/06/21/tech/social-media/facebook-contact-bug/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Facebook bug exposes some contact information

By Heather Kelly, CNN updated 10:46 AM EDT, Sat June 22, 2013 | Filed under: Social Media

(CNN) -- A newly discovered Facebook bug may have inadvertently compromised the contact information of 6 million users, the company says.

The bug, which has since been repaired, was part of the Download Your Information tool, which lets Facebook users export all the data from profiles, such as posts to their timeline and conversations with friends. People using the tool may have downloaded inadvertently the contact information for people they were somehow connected to.

Some people upload their contact lists or address books to Facebook, which the company then uses to suggest new friends they can connect with who are already using the service.

Though the number of people impacted is sizable, the actual spread of their contact information appears to be limited. The phone numbers and e-mail addresses were not exposed to developers or posted publicly. It is only shown to people they had at least a tentative connection with, and who may have already had their contact information. Even in that pool, it was only exposed to people who had used the data-exporting tool.

"For almost all of the email addresses or telephone numbers impacted, each individual email address or telephone number was only included in a download once or twice. This means, in almost all cases, an email address or telephone number was only exposed to one person," Facebook's security team said in a post.

The company says it has no evidence that the bug was "exploited maliciously" and that there have been no complaints so far.

The social media company announced the bug on Friday afternoon. The issue was discovered by a third-party security researcher who submitted it through Facebook's White Hat program.

Facebook's White Hat program is set up so that people such as security researchers can report any vulnerabilities they find on the social network and get a reward for $500 and up in return. These types of programs are common at Internet companies.

"Your trust is the most important asset we have, and we are committed to improving our safety procedures and keeping your information safe and secure," read the post.

People who were affected by the bug will receive an e-mail from Facebook.

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