[via Netcraft]

We now find more than 60 million web sites on the Internet, as the March 2005 survey received http responses from 60,442,655 sites.

The milestone comes just nine months after the survey crossed the 50-million mark in May 2004, as the growth of the Web continues to accelerate, approaching the dizzying pace of the height of the Internet boom. During the year 2000, the number of sites found by the Netcraft survey doubled from 10 million to 20 million in just seven months. More recently, it took 13 months for the Web to grow from 40 million to 50 million sites.

This month’s gain of 1.34 million sites was the largest since April of last year (+1.7 million) and marked the 25th consecutive month of growth for the Web after a two-year shakeout to absorb the collapse of the dot-com and telecom industries.

Apache continued to take market share from Microsoft servers, gaining nearly 0.7 percent last month after gains the previous two months. After little or no change in server market share during 2004, Apache has widened its margin by 2.0 percent thus far in 2005.

It was incredibly cold yesterday morning, -14°C at home at 06:45 !! Surely the coldest night of this winter…

I was in St.Gallen – Switzerland, it was strange. I had the impression I was in a new ski resort in the Alps ;-)

[via Russell]

Oh my, that’s good.
The morons at the Tribune and three other papers banned this comic. Not only is it hysterical, it’s accurate (and we all know it).

It’s also now being viewed by my 10,000 daily readers. Please post the comic on your blog so your readers can help counteract this obvious political censorship.

-Russ

Plus my readers (with all the requested humility), Russell ;-)

Yeay, my blog is exactly one year old :-) I published my first post on March 1, 2004.

Some statistics, the last 12 months

Interesting to note that the number of hits per pageview and/or session is very low. This comes from all the traffic on the "atom.xml".

Evolution of the traffic

The last month (February 2005)

• 525 downloads of the Bootstrapper’s Bible from Seth Godin
• traffic structure:
  

  • weblog: 78%, thereof about one third comes from the atom.xml (in January: more than 50%)
  • website: 17%
  • robots: 5%

• the two most requested web pages are the one about Fuerventura and the other about Belle Ile
• the most requested month from the weblog archive is July 2004 (12% of the overall traffic)
• some traffic surely comes from Mac users :-) => Safari browsers (about 1.5%)
• I can see readers from over 30 countries, who are on my weblog more or less regularly: Brazil, Germany, South Korea, Russia, Japan, Austria, Spain, UK, US, Australia, Greece, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Sweden, Slovak Republic, Israel, France, Latvia, Portugal, Ecuador, Hungary, Denmark, Taiwan, Poland, Romania, Ireland, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Norway, Colombia
• browsers which access my weblog

Wired published an interview of Jeff Bezos realized in January 2005.

Some interesting inputs:

How much of retail sales do you think eventually will be online, and how much offline?
I think online ultimately will be 10 to 15 percent of retail. The vast majority of retailing will stay in the physical world because people have acute needs, they want things now. Also, there are products, like a yard rake, where the economics of delivery don’t make sense. But a 600-pound table saw is a great item to sell online because it always gets delivered. And it’s expensive enough that there is enough profit in it to cover the cost of shipping. Plasma TVs, same idea.

Do physical bookstores have anything to offer that Amazon doesn’t?
One thing is face-to-face meetings with authors. And what Howard Schultz at Starbucks likes to call a third place, where people go and sit and spend time. We humans are a gregarious species; we like to mingle with other humans.

In the magazine world, we rely on ads. Should we be terrified?
I’m not saying that advertising is going away. But the balance is shifting. If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your energy into shouting about your service and 30 percent into making it great, over the next 20 years I think that’s going to invert.

[via NASA Planetary Photojournal]

A handle-shaped cloud of plasma erupts from the Sun.

Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) image of a huge, handle-shaped prominence taken on Sept. 14,1999 taken in the 304 angstrom wavelength – Prominences are huge clouds of relatively cool dense plasma suspended in the Sun’s hot, thin corona. At times, they can erupt, escaping the Sun’s atmosphere. Emission in this spectral line shows the upper chromosphere at a temperature of about 60,000 degrees K. Every feature in the image traces magnetic field structure. The hottest areas appear almost white, while the darker red areas indicate cooler temperatures.

Do you know that the worldwide unemployment level decreased last year? That the worldwide unemployment level reached 6.1% in 2004, which represents 184.7 million people? I didn’t know…

I discovered the ILO – International Labour Organization – in one of my last holidays readings. Interesting. Their motto:

Promoting decent work for all.

The International Labour Organization is the UN specialized agency which seeks the promotion of social justice and internationally recognized human and labour rights. It was founded in 1919 and is the only surviving major creation of the Treaty of Versailles which brought the League of Nations into being and it became the first specialized agency of the UN in 1946.

The ILO formulates international labour standards in the form of Conventions and Recommendations setting minimum standards of basic labour rights: freedom of association, the right to organize, collective bargaining, abolition of forced labour, equality of opportunity and treatment, and other standards regulating conditions across the entire spectrum of work related issues. It provides technical assistance primarily in the fields of:
• vocational training and vocational rehabilitation;
• employment policy;
• labour administration;
• labour law and industrial relations;
• working conditions;
• management development;
• cooperatives;
• social security;
• labour statistics and occupational safety and health.

It promotes the development of independent employers’ and workers’ organizations and provides training and advisory services to those organizations. Within the UN system, the ILO has a unique tripartite structure with workers and employers participating as equal partners with governments in the work of its governing organs.

One of their last worldwide statistics published about unemployment:

I was two days in Frankfurt for some business meetings with our outsourcing provider – Triaton. On last Thursday evening, we had a *very* good dinner at the Old Opera House’s restaurant (Alte Oper). Great building!

The Old Opera House still looks as magnificent and imposing as it did when it was opened by Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1880. The building was financed by wealthy Frankfurt citizens and was designed in Italian Renaissance style by Richard Lucae. Destroyed in a 1944 air raid, it was rebuilt in 1964-81 and renamed the ‘Old Opera Concert and Conference Centre’. The main auditorium, with seating for about 2,500 people, is the central part of the building and is used for concerts, conferences and other events. Smaller rooms can be hired for functions. Visitors can obtain refreshments in the café, the restaurant or the bistro.

New version 1.0.1 of Firefox available! Install this one, it includes several security fixes.

Latest changes:

• Improved stability
• International Domain Names are now displayed as punycode
• Several security fixes

• Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) homograph spoofing
• Unsafe /tmp/plugtmp directory exploitable to erase user’s files
• Plugins can be used to load privileged content
• Cross-site scripting by dropping javascript: link on tab
• Image drag and drop executable spoofing
• HTTP auth prompt tab spoofing
• Download dialog source spoofing
• Download dialog spoofing using Content-Disposition header
• Overwrite arbitrary files downloading .lnk twice
• XSLT can include stylesheets from arbitrary hosts
• Autocomplete data leak
• Memory overwrite in string library
• Install source spoofing with user:pass@host
• Spoofing download and security dialogs with overlapping windows
• Heap overflow possible in UTF8 to Unicode conversion
• SSL “secure site” indicator spoofing
• Window Injection Spoofing

[via NASA Planetary Photojournal]

A beautiful picture of Mimas, a satellite of Saturn (mission Cassini-Huygens).

Mimas drifts along in its orbit against the azure backdrop of Saturn’s northern latitudes in this true color view. The long, dark lines on the atmosphere are shadows cast by the planet’s rings.

Saturn’s northern hemisphere is presently relatively cloud-free, and rays of sunlight take a long path through the atmosphere. This results in sunlight being scattered at shorter (bluer) wavelengths, thus giving the northernmost latitudes their bluish appearance at visible wavelengths.

At the bottom, craters on icy Mimas (398 kilometers, or 247 miles across) give the moon a dimpled appearance.[…]

The images were obtained using the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Jan. 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) from Saturn. Resolution in the image is 8.5 kilometers (5.3 miles) per pixel on Saturn and 7.5 kilometers (4.7 miles) per pixel on Mimas. The image has been contrast-enhanced to aid visibility.