Latest news

Flu Found Resistant to Main Antiviral Drug

Health officials are trying to figure out why virtually all the flu in the U.S. this season is resistant to the leading antiviral drug.

08.01.2009 18:23:09 - NYT > Health

Morning Rounds: Drug Makers on the Defensive, Rising Teen Birth Rates and the Medicaid Nightmare

Health news from around the Web.

08.01.2009 18:14:02 - NYT > Health

Personal Tech: Macworld 2009

The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro discusses recent reviews and answers your personal tech questions.

08.01.2009 18:00:00 - washingtonpost.com - Technology

Measuring Feedburner's latency

Yesterday I listened to a Gillmor Gang podcast that focused on one issue -- how much time does it take Feedburner to reflect the changes in a feed they're hosting. Steve had some evidence that it was taking as much as three hours for it to reflect changes in his feed at techcrunchit.com.

Being an engineer, I wondered what was actually going on, so I constructed a test.

Here's the original feed and here's the Feedburner version.

Here's what my test does. Every minute it reads the Feedburner version and compares it against the original. If they don't match, it does nothing. When they do match, it notes the time in a log, generates a new version of the test feed and repeats the process.

I'm going to let the test run for a few hours and then make one change -- I'll ping their server when I create the new version.

And of course I'll report the results here when they are available.

A note: I ran the test overnight and got what to me are astonishing results. Feedburner never noticed the change in the original feed. Anyone who was subscribed to it would not have known there had been news. I couldn't believe this, I felt there had to be a bug somewhere in my test, and it could be that there is. That's why I'm re-running it this morning while I'm working.

08.01.2009 17:56:36 - Scripting News

SanDisk flashes notebook flash

Third generation with the secret sauce

SanDisk has unveiled faster notebook flash SSDs using its ExtremeFFS technology and with a new controller, a day after attacking the netbook market.…

08.01.2009 17:50:28 - The Register

Holiday Retail Sales Lower Than Expected

Economic gloom, as expected, dragged down Christmas sales at retailers throughout the U.S., with discounters like Wal-Mart, luxury vendors like Neiman Marcus and pretty much everybody in between saying today that their holiday season results were poorer than expected.

08.01.2009 17:47:58 - washingtonpost.com - Business

Carder linked to TJX hack jailed for 30 years by Turkish court

Ukrainian boards Midnight Express

A Ukrainian fraudster linked to the infamous TJX hack was sentenced to a 30 year prison sentence in Turkey on unrelated charges this week.…

08.01.2009 17:28:47 - The Register

Review: The Polaroid camera is back, in digital (AP)

AP - A strange little ritual used to go along with Polaroid cameras. The shooter would grab the print as it came out of the camera and wave it in the air, as if that would stimulate the chemicals and make the picture appear faster. It didn't. Yet it felt dumb to just stand there, waiting for the picture to develop.

08.01.2009 17:26:05 - Yahoo! News: Technology News

Asus demos touchscreen Eee

Swivelling screen for tablet use

CES Asus has treated CES attendees to a preview of its upcoming touchscreen Eee PC.…

08.01.2009 17:23:49 - The Register

Wrath of Spielberg smites Welsh uni leaflet

Unauthorised use of image, lawyers thunder

The "little-known" Lampeter campus of the University of Wales is certainly now familiar to Steven Spielberg's lawyers after they fired off a letter to the seat of learning accusing it of using the director's image without his permission.…

08.01.2009 17:18:59 - The Register