Alex Reid

This map should remind you why you should have strong passwords.

The map, created by Deutsche Telekom, the German parent company of T-Mobile, claims to show where cyber attacks are happening in real time.

After two years of beta, Google released mod_pagespeed from beta.

Mod_pagespeed is an open-source Apache HTTP server module developed by Google to automatically optimize web pages and web media assets including images, CSS, and JavaScript – without requiring any changes to the website itself.

Google has said that website speed performance impacts search engine ranking results, however there are dozens of factors for many web sites via a variety of platforms. This new update automates many of Google’s web optimization recommendations.

I’m proud that my company now offers this feature and my own web site is already loading up faster than before. Very slick. If you have a spare hour, you can watch this detailed explanation.

Unfortunately this server module can cause minor conflicts for third party software such as WordPress and some e-commerce software. The most common conflict I’ve seen is with WordPress; specifically that the visual editor in the WordPress dashboard disappears when editing existing posts.

To fix this, add this line to your .htaccess file.

ModPagespeedDisableFilters rewrite_javascript

You can also disable mod_pagespeed all together, by adding this line to your .htaccess file.

ModPagespeed off

A billboard for Shaw caught my eye the other day. I noticed the font had changed and there was a broken parentheses. I thought to myself, ‘I hope that’s not their new branding’.

Sure enough, it is.

Founded in 1971, Shaw provides broadband cable television, Internet, VoIP phone service, and satellite direct-to-home services. They have 3.4 million customers and is the fourth in the telecom business in Canada behind giants Bell, Rogers, and Telus.

Their logo was last designed in 1998 and the new logo is supposed to be a reboot of the iconic Shaw elements; the font is intended to be friendlier and softer, and the swoosh replaced by a bracket which, the company says, is to resemble a pipe , as well as a happy face ala SMS interpretation. The pipe reference is something Shaw has been trying to identity with for over a decade; their business services arm was called Big Pipe until 2006, when they simplified it to just Shaw Business.

Logos and design work should be revisited at least once a decade, so this is fine.

However, Shaw wasn’t content with just changing their font and replacing a swoosh with a bracket. They wanted mascots.

Upon last week’s relaunch of their branding, Shaw introduced two new mascots; Bud (who represents “the 40-year cable veteran” like the company itself) and Bit (the newbie who is introduced to the company’s offerings, along with the viewer). The mascots is just the beginning. Shaw plans on introducing a series of other characters, each relating to one of their service offerings; a sort of product characterization.

The new creative strategy was handled by Vancouver-based agency Rethink.

The Winnipeg Free Press laid off seven of their staff; five reporters, a deputy editor and a copy editor. One reporter, Melissa Martin, posted a very interesting post about the future of journalism.

Many popular web services went down last night due to a massive thunderstorm that knocked out power to most of the East Coast, including Amazon Web Services, which hosts much of the data for some of the big social media heavyweights.

Instagram, the photo-sharing service recently bought by Facebook, said on Twitter, “Due to severe electrical storms, our host had a power outage, no data is lost – we’ve been working through the night to restore service.”

Netflix and Pinterest, which were both completely offline for most of the evening, also took to Twitter to tell users the status of the failure. Foursquare was partly affected and updated its own status blog to tell customers.

Amazon was tight-lipped about the situation, beyond admitting that the failure had happened at a server facility in Virginia and it was because of the lighting storm in the area. It wasn’t until this morning, before lunch, that the company said it had managed to get some services back online.

Things happen, most people agree, however the question remains why didn’t Amazon have a backup plan or have a better redundant network setup. Despite the company being quiet on their data centre setup, this electrical engineer says that over 70% of their servers are housed in the Virginia data centre, where the storm hit.

~ Source and notes from NY Times Blog