Click Fraud

Anyone using Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing has probably heard of "click fraud".

"Three times as many online advertisers and search engine marketing (SEM) firms said click fraud was a serious issue in 2005 compared to the year before. Of the 553 respondents to SEMPO's December 2005 "The State of Search Engine Marketing" survey, 16 percent of advertisers and agencies say they are tracking click fraud, and agree it's a significant problem."

http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3587696

Source Code saves the day

Interesting article on the power of source code:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30186

McAfee Update Kills More Than Viruses

Headline: McAfee Update Kills More Than Viruses

"A recent virus-definition update from security firm McAfee incorrectly flagged several applications as viruses, even removing the core Microsoft Excel executable from some users' computers. "

What is interesting about this article is that the author downplays the problem: "While the problem might sound severe, it had limited impact because the error occurred only when a user initiated a manual scan."

Recommendation: remove McAfee's virus scanning utilities.

Outrageous Pricing

This makes my head spin.

Companies like Webmetrics offer online services like our website monitoring solution WebWatchBot, however, the cost is simply outrageous.

To monitor 3 (three) URLs with their product costs $30/month. Ok, that's not cheap, but not expensive either. The real cost comes in when you have to do something more complicated.

The cost of monitoring a transaction, that is, monitor step-by-step actions on a website such as filling out forms, clicking links, etc. costs between $330 and $750 a month! Wow.

For basic server monitoring, our product WebWatchBot sure seems like a sweet deal. I hope no one out there is paying $330/month. Geez.

Beeping

Ok, it's driving me nuts.

I have installed a new hard drive, Seagate 200GB drive, and it beeps whenever there is high disk activity.

Been monitoring it for a while and it doesn't seem to be causing any data integrity errors, but the noise is like Chinese water torture!

A search of newsgroups yeilds little.

Perfectdisk

We have deployed Perfectdisk by Raxco software on our desktops here. The tool is very easy to use - then again, what disk defragmentation tool isn't simplistic.

One of the cool things that Perfectdisk offers is offline defragmentation, which basically defrags the pagefile and other system files when you reboot. I've noticed immediate performance increases on some machines after only one defrag even after running Window's built in defragging tool.