This guy’s gone to the trouble of finding out how to add “Did you mean?” to your own website’s search.

Check out these Principles of American culture, and naturally to a an increasing degree, Australian culture.

When you make these assumptions, the behaviours that we’re seeing just pop out as obvious side effects. It boils down to: it’s not my fault, the rest of the world is wrong.

A couple of weeks ago Josh posted about virtualising your overloaded, slow, not-rebuilt-for-years PC, and keeping it on standby within a new build in case you need anything on it.

How about the idea of keeping that new build clean — putting on only your most frequently used, essential applications, with everything else going onto a virtual PC?

For me, that would mean Office, Firefox, my usual web-building stuff (Photopaint, UltraEdit, Filezilla), Nero, and one or two others, such as perhaps Trillian. I’d draw a line under them, and anything else not worthy of a permanent spot in my Windows setup would be virtualised, possibly in various separate virtual PCs, setup for different roles: one for Visual Studio, one for trying out freebie apps from mags, a Linux setup for LAMP development, one for stupid software that insists on running as Administrator, etc, etc.

What to use for the virtual machines? There’s a few different options.

The freebie Virtual Server will only support Windows NT 4 and above, and only server OS’s, which to my mind would unnecessarily weigh down your virtual machines with more than they need. (Linux as a guest OS seems to be coming.)

Another option is the free VMWare Server, which will host a wider range of guest OSs.

The non-free Virtual PC will host just about any x86 operating system. If you don’t want to try the 45 day free trial, it’ll set you back A$215 or so, or it’s available via MSDN Universal.

A problem would be performance, of course. It’s not like emulating a 2Mhz 6502 under BeebEm. But then, hopefully it’s not as bad as what I’ve seen on my brother-in-law’s PowerPC Mac trying to run x86 AutoCad in Windows 2000.

Nonetheless games and other performance-intensive apps may not perform well under virtualisation, especially if they require particular hardware. And yet they would benefit the most, as they often have installers that wreak havoc on Windows setups, chucking weird-arse DLLs everywhere. As the “Virtual PC Guy” is fond of telling us, a lot of the older games run okay, but newer ones might be a problem.

Maybe the only solution there is to put them on a completely separate computer, or move up to Intel’s latest chips which have better support for virtualisation.

Or give the whole thing up and resign yourself to a slow computer with rebuilds every year or two.

I think I’ll try Win98 with a couple of recent-ish games (say, Midtown Madness 1 and 2) and see how it goes.

• Installing Win98 on Virtual PC in 7 easy steps (with a download for a VPC boot disk — very handy)
• More Virtual PC boot disks
• How to configure Ubuntu Linux for Virtual PC
• Which OSs work in Virtual PC/Virtual Server, and which don’t
• Comparison: Virtual PC vs VMWare Workstation. In summary: They’re both good, depending on precisely what you want to do. VPC is easier to use, but VMWare has more power and slightly better performance. Includes some good performance figures, which show virtualisation isn’t necessarily mind-numbingly slow.

Hah!

Kyle Scholz has developed code to represent Force Directed Graphs in Javascript, and you can interact with the nodes. We’re talking mathematical directed graphs here – you might know them as networks.

Basically, there’s a bunch of nodes and they settle themselves into a stable state minimizing tension between them – the graphs balance themselves out, and you can see it happening – it’s animated. And interactive – you can grab a node and move it around. It is ubercool.

Downside is that it sucks huge CPU.

Report web spam to Google. Please.

I’m thinking splogs here. Specifically for splogs is SpogSpot.

Them iPods are funky devices, “designed in California”, so the box says. And, as revealed by the UK’s Mail On Sunday, built in factories in China in somewhat squalid conditions. One factory has 15-hour workdays for US$50 per month. Another is slightly better: 12-hour days for US$100 per month (but about half of that is paid back for housing and food).

Mind you, I suspect this isn’t unusual in the consumer electronics business. Just about nothing’s made in Japan or the USA or other high-cost (read: decent wage) countries.

The only thing I can think of that I’ve got is a Loewe TV, made in Germany.

Update Monday: Apple says: “”Apple is committed to ensuring that working conditions in our supply chain are safe, workers are treated with respect and dignity, and manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible” and is investigating the claims.

If you’re going to have a custom 404 page, you might as well try and make it fit in with the subject of the web site.

If you’re a Lego geek, and in Melbourne tomorrow, Brickvention 2006 is open from 10:00-15:00 at Melb Uni. $5 Adults, $2.50 kids.

Scot Finnie from ComputerWorld says that there are 20 Things You Won’t Like About Windows Vista.

They boil down to demanding hardware requirements, UI change for the sake of change, intrusive security, massive UI complexity, stability, price, multiple versions, little originality.

I think perhaps the problem is that it’s change, and he can’t see why. To be honest, nor can I.

Gmail geekitude — In GMail with US English set, when you delete mail it goes to the “Trash” folder. Set it to UK English, and it’s “Deleted Items”.

TV geekitude — See how the ABC News titles look with no stories and no voiceover.

Google Video geekitude — Lots of snippets of info here, including the fact that Google’s video format is pretty much just a renamed DivX AVI.

Webmail geekitude — My web mail (Horde) puts a little flag against the country of the domain name of the sender. Of course it’s a little misleading when a message from someone using fastmail arrives, as it reckons it’s the Federated States of Micronesia…

Web design geekitude — The best freebie DHTML menus I’ve found so far are here. (Which I’ve implemented here and here. I reckon without too much trouble, WordPress’s categories could drive it automatically. Maybe something to put on the list for Geekrant 2.0.

No, they don’t support Talk like a Pirate Day, they support stealing IP. It’s the Pirate Party of the United States.

Arrrrrr!