Apart from the Virtual Keyboard, lots of other cool new stuff was highlighted at this week’s Demo exhibition in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Play arcade games on the side of a building with your mobile phone. (via JRB)

The Nintendo DS will launch in Australia on February 24th, at a bit under A$200, with 7 games initially available, more on the way.

I got an invitation to join sms.ac. A quick Google seemed to indicate it’s not a great idea unless you want to give your mobile number to people who will SMS-spam you.

Further, if they convince you to reveal your Hotmail password (on the pretext of letting you read it from your mobile) they’ll also spam the people in your address book, inviting them to join. Delightful. And the person who “invited” me? She wasn’t even aware it had happened.

So remember kids: sms.ac is bad. Now email this warning to all your friends.

This is possibly my favourite programming quote of all time:

“You know, when you have a program that does something really cool, and you wrote it from scratch, and it took a significant part of your life, you grow fond of it. When it’s finished, it feels like some kind of amorphous sculpture that you’ve created. It has an abstract shape in your head that’s completely independent of its actual purpose. Elegant, simple, beautiful.

“Then, only a year later, after making dozens of pragmatic alterations to suit the people who use it, not only has your Venus-de-Milo lost both arms, she also has a giraffe’s head sticking out of her chest and a cherubic penis that squirts colored water into a plastic bucket. The romance has become so painful that each day you struggle with an overwhelming urge to smash the fucking thing to pieces with a hammer.”

– Nick Foster (“Life as a programmer”)

(via Owen)

I’ve just moved houses and thought it would be a grand idea to replace our fixed phone line with a VoIP phone like that supplied by Engin. Save the $30/month fixed line rental, skip the $60 connection fee and also upgrade our net connection to broadband, come out ahead with features and finances. Everything would be great.

What a stupid idea.

The VoIP service offered by Engin is $20/mo, so you are saving $10/mo on connectivity. Our ISP costs $10/mo, so the most we can afford to pay for an ISP and come out equal is $20/mo. But if we pay only that then we are effectively getting broadband for free. The VoIP is $150, but we’ll just ignore that cost. It’s only $90 more than hooking up a fixed line.

Obviously, to use a VoIP phone you need IP connectivity – an ISP. Okay, so we’ll just sign up to one of those $20 / 200meg plans ADSL and that’ll be great; I did some figuring and we’d use nothing like that kind of traffic, even with voice calls consuming 1K/sec (all figuring based on Engin’s figures, supplied in the user forum, which has been pulled – methinks because the users were slagging them off). No problem signing up for a couple of years, no worries, I’ll be in the new place for at least that long.

You can’t have ADSL without a fixed line phone.

You Freaking WHAT?!

Fine. Cable, I’ll have cable. Call one of the two cable providers, the house has been cabled up by both. Except they’ve merged, to increase competition. No worries, I’ll call the only monopolistic cable provider, hook up (ought to be cheap, the house is already cabled up) and away we go. $279 to connect to your cable service?!?! $40/month to stay connected?!?! You Freaking WHAT?!

Fine. I happen to know that although cable and ADSL are widely regarded as your two options for broadband, there’s a third option here in Melbourne – radio. Alphalink provide superfast wireless access for only $33/mo; but connection is $286. But guess what? $33 is greater than $20. So we come out Losers.

So I resigned myself and we got a fixed line. And that’s why VoIP isn’t gonna happen this month, and I suspect won’t be happening for a long time yet.

Microsoft have announced the forthcoming release of IE7. Well done Firefox.

When I registered my first domain name, toxiccustard.com, in November 1996, I didn’t keep my email address secret. It wasn’t obvious (at least to me) that spammers were picking up any valid email addresses they could find, left right and centre. The address: dbowen@toxiccustard.com. I can quote it now because it hasn’t been valid for many years.

But they keep distributing it, and keep spamming it. I know this because my web ISP told me last week that toxiccustard.com is now getting about five thousand e-mail messages PER DAY. Aye carumba.

In fact so much mail is coming in that before they realised the nature of it, they were saying they’d have to decline to provide me with shared web hosting for that domain in the future, because of the impact on other customers. As it is they’ve said okay they’ll live with it, since they’ll be upgrading their systems shortly so bouncing mail doesn’t impact them as much.

I’ve disabled mail completely on that domain in Plesk, and I’m looking into fiddling with the MX records, which hopefully should stop dead any mail way before it reaches anybody and starts costing them money. This may involve moving the domain to a new registrar, since the current mob doesn’t appear to provide this level of customisation.

The lesson: keep your email address secret. Once the spammers have it, expect a snowball effect. It may take 9 years, but eventually it’ll be unusable.

A while back I was moaning about how I couldn’t get my iPod to function on my PC, it refused to work with any USB 2 port and I had to resort to the incredibly slow USB 1. So instead of one hour of importing it took me a couple of weekends to get my 4500+ songs on.

So, to recap, I had plugged my iPod in to my USB card before and it didn’t work.

Last night I plugged my iPod in to a USB 2 hub connected to the same card and it worked perfectly.

I’m sure Microsoft must be to blame here somewhere but until I figure out where I’m going to blame it on Apple.

From the way-way-way-too-cool department: the virtual laser keyboard. You press a switch and it laser-projects the image of a keyboard onto any surface, then detects your “key”-presses on it via bluetooth. No stuck keys, no getting food jammed in it, or coffee poured over it. At US$199, it’s not particularly cheap, but for pure cool points, it looks like a winner. There’s a gushing review here. (via David.)

I’m enjoying mucking about with Asp.Net. For someone who’s done a fair bit of “Classic” ASP like myself, it’s a great step forward.

But maybe I’m way off the mark here, how on earth could they implement something as useful as a DataGrid HyperLink column or a <asp:hyperlink> tag and not include an easy way of setting the title attribute in the link? Nor does the syntax checker seem to recognise the <span> tag. Did the W3C go and depreciate these while I wasn’t looking? Don’t believe so…

(The solution for the DataGrid is to use an <ItemTemplate> and code it yourself.

Ditto the Hyperlink tag. For the <span> tag, well, what care I if the syntax checker puts a squiggly line underneath it and it shouts a warning during compilation. Ah, seems to allow <span> and other such niceties, you have to tell it your targetting IE5 (or later), rather than IE3/NS3. Makes sense.)

One of my long-term Outlook gripes: Undo can catch a lot of things, but one of the things I use it most for is when I’ve changed my mind about deleting an email, so I want it back out of the Deleted Items. But it only works if you deleted from the folder, not from within the email itself, which then returns you to the folder. Would it be that hard for the logic to say “hey, he pressed undo, he must mean undo the last action” (well duh) “so I’ll undo the mail delete he just did.”

The weird bounces I was getting a while back are apparently due to a bug in QMail. They’re also causing some mails to be sent multiple times from webmail. Triffic. But I’ve switched webmails from SquirrelMail to IMP, and that seems to help. I don’t like IMP’s “This mail was sent by IMP” footer, but I do like its features, especially the timezone setting, which was never satisfactory in SquirrelMail.

A big batch of Microsoft patches are out. Through as someone at work pointed out, they shouldn’t be due to buffer overflows, ‘cos MS claimed years ago that they’d eliminated them in Windows XP. (Thanks Ian)

Mr 99Zeroes has apparently been sacked from Google. As Scoble remarks, the rule for blogging about work really needs to be: Don’t piss off your boss. The alternative is simply not to blog about work.

C/Net’s new online news/RSS reader/aggregator: NewsBurst. (via Steve Rubel who features on the latest G’day World podcast)

An Englishman was arrested after he used the text-only browser Lynx to donate money to a tsunami fundraiser. Apparently British Telecom technicians looking through the web site logs thought it was a hacking attempt.

For those in the US (or visiting it), Google has introduced a very nifty Google Maps site. Way cool.

Hopefully they can spread it to other cities, but I hope when/if they get to Melbourne, they adopt the locally preferred, and frankly unbeatable Melway format and data.