OmniNerd – Articles: Beating Traffic

Brandon U. Hansen tries to figure out if he can get to work faster – beating traffic.

The world is full of traffic and people who hate it. This article analyzes a year of data to determine if minor tweaks to departure times can significantly impact commute length – or if it is all out of the driver’s control.

Well, duh. Of course it does. But who’s going to go to work at 11:00 and return home at 19:00?

Anyways, looking at his opening figures is weird, because he says that driving to work soaks up 100 hours a year, and involves 15,000 miles – which implies an average velocity of 150mph. Even if he forgot the trip home, you’re looking at 75mph (120kph), which is unlikely unless your cousin is a cop or you live right on top of an Autobahn. Perhaps they’re driving to work in a rocket tractor – which I always thought was one of these, with one of these attached – but it seems most of the net thinks they’re one of these, and that would never work!

Broken URLs still abound

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:

http://www.seek.com.au/users/apply/index.ascx?Sequence=82&PageNumber=1&ChannelID=1&SiteID=1&JobId=6946759&Keywords=

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.

Soft Taskbar Shuffle

Want to organise the order of your programs on the Windows XP taskbar? Then try the fantastic free Taskbar shuffle and shuffle to your hearts content. I always like to have Outlook the left most program, followed by Firefox. How about you? What order do you like your programs in? Or is just me?

TV downloads

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.