Since the Fairfax dudes (The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Financial Review, etc) have probably noticed how their web sites’ popup ads don’t appear anymore because almost everybody’s got a popup blocker via Firefox, XP SP2 or the Google toolbar, would you believe they’ve started putting popup ads as stickers onto their newspapers.
Here’s one from last week, with an advert for Microsoft Office:
(They’re a bit like a Post-It note; they peel off quite easily.)
I’ve found under some circumstances, new versions of Windows (XP and 2000, using NTFS) are still looking at the DOS 8.3 versions of filenames when using wildcards.
Real world example: a set of files such as tpo12345.xml tpo12346.xml tpo12347.xml etc. To find these, you’d use a wildcard such as tpo?????.xml
If you have a file called tpo1234567890.xml, it shouldn’t match using this wildcard, but it does, because the filename’s backward-compatible short version (in DOS 8.3 format) is something like TPO123~1.XML, which matches. It appears to only happen when the first part of the wildcard (without the suffix) is 8 characters long.
So it may be ten years since most of us said goodbye to short filenames, but it seems they’re still with us. I wonder if Windows Vista will still use them?
Jeremy Zawodny theorises that NoFollow was a waste of time, making no difference to comment spam, and discouraging legitimate commenters.
Coding Horror has some more details on the Microsoft anti-piracy (Ahoy!) nag screens that we mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
Google Australia has jobs available in Sydney.
I’ve been thinking… I wonder if someone would write a Greasemonkey script to correct Charles Wrights’ personal pronouns? we -> I; us -> me; our -> my; ours -> mine.
Tim O’Reilly responds on the fuss over O’Reilly partners CMP sending a cease and desist letter over the use of the term “Web 2.0” for a conference.
According to PC World, here’s the 25 worst tech products of all time.
My quick rants about some of the top 25:
The all time number 1 is AOL… the ISP whose damn software still shows up in unlikely places. Such as the free copy of Broderbund’s 3D Home Architect that one of my kids convinced me to try out the other day (came with the latest issue of Australian Personal Computer). Hint: I’m in Australia… I don’t need, want, nor can use, an America Online trial. I’ve certainly had a few AOL coasters in my time, too. (By the way, the short-lived AOL Australia got bought by Primus. I like the way the info page for their dialup offering is broken.)
#2 — RealPlayer. Oh yeah, I hate RealPlayer, but some of my favourite content providers (such as ABC and BBC) still use it. Fortunately there is now a reasonable alternative (a codec for Windows MediaPlayer).
#10 — dBase IV. I had a theory years ago that version 4 of anything wasn’t very good. It happened with DOS 4.0, VB4, dBase… and others, I’m sure.
Anyway, have a read of the entire article.
I use Microsoft products every day, and indeed make my living off them. Doesn’t stop me slagging-off Bill Gates regularly of course, though Danny Katz would like us to leave him alone.
One of my pet hates has been the dumping of support for legacy hardware. It’s not just a Microsoft issue of course; the vendors are equally to blame (often even more-so). My own experience was that an old Diamond Viper V550 graphics card I have in one of my machines would do astounding 3D things when DirectX 7 was the latest version, but somewhere between 7 and 9, the 3D stuff went out the window. (Knoppix Linux didn’t like it, either.)
I’d long given-up on this particular issue, hoping to find the time at some stage to get super-brave and attempt to downgrade DirectX, which is theoretically possible, but certainly not for the faint-hearted.
Then the other day on a whim I decided to go searching for updated drivers for the card. Turns out NVidia (who bought Diamond) have put some new ones out. Well, newish. Okay, three years ago. Did I not find this the last time I looked, or was it really longer ago that I last tried?
Downloaded, installed. They work. Now my kids can play Midtown Madness 2 with fast graphics again.
I’m even pondering upgrading that ol’ Win2K to XP, now that you can get an Academic XP Pro for under $100. 512Mb RAM and a 1.something Ghz processor, so hopefully it should be able to hack it. Would avoid the kids arguing over who gets to use Windows MovieMaker. Must check the driver situation out first, though. That old dodgy TV capture card will be the tricky one…
Dammit, today was Towel Day. Why did nobody remind me? I’ve forgotten every year since 2001.
Update to this post about human comment spam, about a new trend in blog comment spamming, using real life human spammers, to get around the fact that most bloggers can see the robots coming from miles away.
I’ve had a large number of these come through on my blogs in the few weeks. They’ve all been leaving links to sites like the one pictured. This one’s about antioxidants, but some are purportedly about computer viruses, drugs, whatever.
I really should update all my remaining blogs to use NoFollow, so if any get through, they don’t gain any PageRank. Time to chuck WP-Hashcash into the fray on all of them, as well.
Uh, so many blogs, so little time.
Update 26/5/2006: Another example added.
The mob I work for, eVision, are looking for an extra person, so they put an ad on Seek for the position.
Seek’s URLs are broken. The only way to get a URL that you can link to or send to somebody is to use their own “Email this job to a friend” feature and send it to yourself. That way you get a sensible, working URL, such as:
http://www.seek.com.au/showjob.asp?jobid=6946759
rather than the broken one you get by copying it off the browser (even after clicking through the above), which is something like:
which goes to an error page that complains that your browser doesn’t take cookies (even if your browser does take cookies).
Dick Smith Electronics’ otherwise excellent web site suffers from a similar problem.
Jakob Nielsen’s article URL as UI remains as relevant — and as unfollowed — as ever.
Pretend to be a Java developer by watching three webcasts, and get a free copy of Visual Studio.Net (US and Canada only). (via Jekke).
Channel 9 launches commercial downloadable TV in Australia (the ABC’s broadband casting of their shows has been going for a while, though theirs don’t download), starting with a freebie episode of McLeod’s Daughters. It’s WMP files (so playable on Windows computermachines only) and normal price will be A$1.95 for a show that will play for up to 7 days. (via TV Idents blog).
I wonder how prominent AU shows are on BitTorrent, anyway?
Meanwhile there’s speculation that Hollywood may embrace Torrents, with Warner Brothers planning to use it to distribute some of their content, at US$1.00 per episode for TV shows. It’s unclear if users outside the US will be able to join in — so those who, for example, Torrented the final West Wing earlier this week may have to stay on the wrong side of the law. Making this content available internationally must be considered at some point — many overseas viewers are sick of waiting to see their favourite shows months or even years after they broadcast in their home territories.
Google maps has reached Australia.
Love them draggable maps. Seems reasonably accurate. There’s some interesting errors, for instance there are Melbourne Tennis Centre access roads shown (which is right) overlapping old rail lines (removed years ago).
For every day use not as detailed as Melway/Ausway (no public transport routes or house numbers marked, for instance, many points of interest missing, such as sports venues) but if you zoom right down, it does intriguingly include property borders. Hey, I can see my house from here.
Alas, the satellite maps for most of Melbourne are still pretty fuzzy.
Amongst all the easy-to-spot robot comment spam, I’m getting a bunch that (at first glance) looks like it’s written by humans. Gone are the stupid out-of-context broken-English comments and links to drug sales. These all have comments that look like they’ve got a few milliseconds’ thought put into them, all on new posts, they all leave a rediffmail (Indian GMail-type operation) address, a 209.97. IP address, and a link to a web site featuring lots of links and no content.
So far I’ve been spiteful and kept the comments but wiped the URL link.
I wonder if they’re particularly targetting WordPress sites that haven’t yet been upgraded to use the NoFollow links.