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Today is Opera’s 10th birthday, and to celebrate they are offering free registration codes!

Since the creation of our blog, CentreSource’s page rank (click here for explanation) has shot up from 0 to a 6 in a span of just 3 months. Since we know that our corporate website is not the source of all our popularity, we are positive the blog accounts for this dramatic change.

Besides constantly sending article links to our friends/clients – we also spent a lot of time registering our blog with the most popular aggregators. It took me a long time to search and register with each one… But I lucked out and found this list! Hope it helps you register your blogs!

Referrer Spam is the bane of any blogger’s statistic tracking. These low-life people attempt to trick bloggers into ‘clicking’ their URLs because the blog software lists them as the top referrers to the blog. This, as with other types of spam, causes grief because it exists purely to deceive and ultimately wastes time.

In the CentreBlog, our top 10 referrers are all Spammers – primarily split between online casinos and generic directories with hundreds of links. Given that its a Sunday afternoon and I some free time, I decided to go against the crowd and NOT IGNORE IT.

So, not to beat the Google IM/XMPP story to death, but I love to make metaphors between XMPP and SMTP, since they are similar protocols for a similar purpose.

I’ve often said that for years and years of anguish in the instant messaging battleground, Jabber/XMPP has been quietly (too quietly) sitting in the background going “hey, guys? guys! open standard! over here! embrace me! extend me!”

Now, Google has taken the interesting step of embracing XMPP, a protocol designed with the explicit purpose of being an open standard for IM communication on the Internet, except they .. haven’t opened it up to the internet. There’s no s2s communication — so talk.google.com is incapable of communicating with the myriad of jabber/XMPP servers already on the Internet.

OperaWatch is speculating that news hinted at by Opera might involve removing the ads from their free browser.

Personally I haven’t seen any ads in Opera since I bought a license 6 years ago — the best $30 or so bucks I ever spent — it got me through the Dark Years of the browser wars, and it was worth it for that alone.

A List Apart has a great discussion of PDF accessbility that includes a great summary of what PDF is and isn’t, and when it should and should not be used.

A rather nasty bug in Windows has a rather unfortunate result:

What started like a nice and quiet day ended with the potential for lots of nasty surprises. A reader alerted us to a vulnerability note published by Secunia that on first sight did not appear to be overly scary. Once we started to play with it, though, the nastiness became apparent: An overly long registry entry can be added, but won’t be shown by regedit and regedt32. Even better, all registry entries that get added afterward under the same key, even if not overly long, will be hidden as well.

Psi, a pretty decent Jabber client, has just released Psi-0.10-test1, and with this release, we finally get tabbed chat windows!

With this addition, it looks to be shaping up to be the best Jabber client I’ve seen by far — I might make the switch from Tkabber, which has long been my favorite Jabber client, but suffers from an inability to login to multiple accounts. (The website says it supports it, but I can’t figure out how — anyone know?)

I came across this very interesting article that talks about the value of being dumb and lazy as a programmer.

In a nutshell:

1. It’s good to be lazy because it means you’ll avoid writing repetative, monotonous code — thus avoiding redundancy. In turn, production will actually be sped up.
2. It’s good to be dumb, because you’re willing to ask the simple questions (one’s a “smart” programmer wouldn’t even care to ask — see link for examples). Additionally, you’re willing to take a step back and look at the complexity of using the site/program. If you approach it as a “smart” programmer who knows everything about the system, chances are good that you’re not properly representing the people who will ultimately be using it.

Some interesting theorizing on Google’s step towards embracing XMPP/Jabber — perhaps as a stepping stone towards a Skype purchase?