Jason Pearce

Building online forms used to be the bane of web developers. Forms require not only more markup, but a back-end script to process them. Many often require a database. All of which add complexity to building useful forms.

When Wufoo launched a web application in July 2006 that eases the complexity of online forms, many web developers rejoiced (I sure did). In less than a few months, Wufoo is now the first place I turn to build even the simplest of forms.

This week, a competitor entered the space: Icebrrg. While I often think competition is a good idea, Icebrrg offers little ingenuity and appears to be a clone of the services and functionality Wufoo has offered for four months. Even Icebrrg’s pricing model closely resembles Wufoo’s pricing model:

Icebrrg copies Wufoo pricing model

In less than four months, I’ve become a trusted Wufoo user. Until Icebrrg brings something new to the table, I think they deserve a cold chill for simply copying a unique service.

Although Brian Krebs from the Washington Post recently reported that “Microsoft plans to push out Internet Explorer 7 as a ‘high priority update’ when it ships security patches tomorrow [October 10, 2006],” it doesn’t appear to be the case.

At 6:00 pm EDT, my Microsoft Update yielded 14 High Priority Updates, none of which were Internet Explorer 7.

On the same day OpenDNS launched PhishTank, an OpenDNS server located in Washington, DC, stoped answering DNS for 45 minutes.

PhishTank is operated by OpenDNS, a company founded in 2005 to improve the Internet through safer, faster, and smarter DNS. PhishTank is a free community site where anyone can submit, verify, track and share phishing data. Both are cool services.

I received a call from the Wikimedia Foundation today. They were trying to track down the owner/creator of a German website that I’ve never heard of, but I immediately knew why they called me.

In April 2005 I developed a MediaWiki Skin and released another in October 2005. At the bottom of this skin is a link that says “developed (by Jason Pearce of Lambda Chi Alpha).”

While I developed the MediaWiki skin and freely share it to the world, I don’t deserve (or want) the credit for the hundreds of sites that use my skin.

Once I explained this to Wikimedia, they quickly understood. More so, they thanked me for participating in their project. I told them I appreciate their code and all of the things they have offered me and millions of others.

I’ve long turned to CNET’s Bandwidth Meter and McAfee’s Internet Connection Speedometer to test my internet bandwidth upload and download speeds. But Speedtest.net’s new Ookla Speed Test offers a fresh new interface and stores your 10 most recent tests for comparison purposes.