Ren on what happens when somebody buys an iPod but has no idea how it works — Yep, one of my music nut friends who doesn’t have a computer keeps asking me about them.
Tim Berners-Lee on where the web is going.
Jakob Nielsen on designing web sites for international use — Previous rants on this topic: MSN Weather (F vs C); Web site globalisation (date and address formats)
CNet on ten sorely missed technologies — I knew a couple of guys who had Newtons… I wonder what came of them?
Game nostalgia strategy quiz:
In Donkey Kong, did you bother getting the hammer to smash the barrels, or just head for the top?
In Galaga, did you try to get the double fighter?
Gyruss: double bullets? Or not bother?
Did you keep feeding in coins in Moon Patrol, to try and get to the end?
Pacman: save the power pills for when you can get multiple ghosts, or just clean up the board ASAP?
Who was your favourite character to play in Gauntlet?
In Popeye did you favour the top, or bottom of the screen waiting for the hearts?
Space Invaders: start shooting the sides, the middle, or in rows starting from the bottom?
Scramble: Try and shoot the fuel tanks ahead, or bomb them from above? Make it to the end?
The Google Blog has just announced you can now subscribe to Google News feeds via RSS. They provide their standard categories or you can set up a search on any news topic, eg ‘Vancouver Canucks‘. You can choose your feed format too, RSS or Atom.
My favourite Mozilla bug, the cropping of “title” attribute tooltips, recently turned five. That is, it is now more than five years since the bug was originally reported. A flurry of new discussion has popped up around it, with some people strenuously arguing that tooltips should be cropped, as they were never intended to hold long strings of text, and people can’t read a lot of text in the six seconds displayed.
Pah, to hell with that. At least if all the text is displayed, the user has the choice of reading it or not. And it could be an option in about:config if it were that worrisome to the Inquisition. It’s not even as if the web standards spell out that the text should be cropped at a particular point.
Until bugs like this are fixed (without users having to install a separate fix such as PopupAlt), it’s hard to justify pushing Firefox onto everyday users.
Google blacklists CNet, saying they won’t talk to news.com reporters for a year, in reaction to a news.com story that highlighted various information about Google CEO Eric Schmidt that could be considered sensitive, but was found through Google itself.
It’s interesting, because it seems so at odds with Google’s cleancut friendly image. I suppose it was a bit cheeky of CNet to use a Google executive as the subject of its searches, but the proliferation of personal information on Google and elsewhere on the Net is an important subject.
And if you’re wondering, yes, you can find this story in Google news.
(BTW, Lucas Heights nuclear reactor are nervous about Google Earth, though the Federal government doesn’t seem too concerned.)
Google r0x0rs. Utterly. But there’s a couple of things they can improve.
If they’re clever, they should read sites like those done on WordPress and work out how to index the content at the permalinks, rather than the front page, so that people can find content on sites that have frequently updating front pages. Example: Geekrant is currently top hit for “melbourne itrip frequency”, but it’s pointing to the front page, and is no longer on the first screenful. It will have fallen off the front page in the next few days.
They need to realise that sites hosted in country X are not necessarily about, native to, or located in country X. A better way would be to check the country of the admin contact of the domain. (Tony mentioned an example of a .co.uk site he did for somebody; it hardly rated on Google UK until he moved the physical hosting to the UK.)
Buying a monitor? Make sure it has HDCP, the up-and-coming digital content protection standard that will be built into Windows Vista and other future playing devices and systems. People with monitors that don’t have HDCP (and that’s almost everyone) will find their display deliberately fuzzy or even blacked out completely. Pah, bastards.
Will Apple and Linux follow suit in supporting this standard? Will monitor manufacturers start actually telling people about this, rather than actively selling them new kit that has built-in obsolesence? Will somebody hack the Vista Media Player to ignore the protection flags?
Up until a week or so ago I used 91.5 as my iTrip frequency in Melbourne. Most of my driving is in the inner West and inner East and it worked fine until ‘Vega 91.5‘ muscled in on my bandwidth.
I’ve now switched to 95.3 and it seems to work okay. Anyone else have suggestions for frequencies that work well in Melbourne?
The blog comment/trackback anti-spam refinement continues.
I’m testing the WP-Hashcash plugin, which inserts Javascript code to calculate an authorisation code into the comment. Since comment spammers don’t actually use the comment forms (at least I hope not; not until they start using people to enter the comments), this means only real comments get through. Well, real comments from people with Javascript running. If they don’t have Javascript running, they may be out of luck. Hopefully that applies to nobody these days, and I think this solution is less painful than a captcha-based one.
But trackback spam is still a problem. One available option is to block direct access to the WordPress trackback PHP, but this isn’t very effective, since most current trackback spammers however are clever enough to call the “real” URL.
A version of Auto shutoff comments modified to close trackbacks on posts older than 28 days, however, seems more effective. I don’t particularly want to shut comments off (especially since the above plugin effectively stops comment spam), but trackbacks are less compelling to keep open.
Together with previously discussed .htaccess entries to block big bandwidth thieves, this appears to be a fairly effective set of anti-blog spam measures. For now.
Tony: Rae actually discovered we can change our phone picture quality to high over the weekend so I’ve fallen in love with my phone all over again.
Daniel: Woo hoo! (Must put my phone contract expiry in my diary. Upgrade to camera phone top priority.)
Tony: The latest crop, the ‘i’ models for Nokia, have 1.5-2 mega pixel cameras now. Very very impressive.
Daniel: So by the time I upgrade, I’ll probably be able to get 3mp, which is what my Real Camera has! But even 2 is plenty for web use.
Tony: When I went to Canada all those years ago I had a 2MP camera and thought it was the bees-knees. I’m leaning more and more towards the phone being the great convergence technology. I can put a 1G SD card in to my phone now to turn it in to a more than adequate MP3 player, it even plays AAC files. A 2MP camera would do just fine for snaps. It already has the calendar feature and all my contacts. I probably won’t get another PocketPC when this one falls over.
Daniel: It makes a lot of sense, because making phone calls is really the killer app for mobile technology. I’ve long taken the view that I’ll carry a phone no matter what, so the more features I can pack in there, the better.
Tony: Exactly. The phone and keys are the two things you always seem to have on you.
Daniel: I might turn this conversation into a GR.
Tony: Cool.
Reg: IE7 beta 1 breaks third-party toolbars!
Scoble: Only old versions of toolbars. It doesn’t break new ones.
Reg: Yes it does!
Scoble: No it doesn’t!
Reg: Yes it does!
Scoble: No it doesn’t!
Reg: Yes it does, you said it does!
And they quote an email from Scoble that is without any context, and thus proves nothing, unless you assume that the content of the email is directly in reply to the subject line. And now Scoble claims the mail isn’t real.
(Oh yeah, the recipient of the email gave the Reg permission to publish it. That’s nice. Shame the recipient doesn’t own the copyright; Scoble does. Well, if it’s real.)
Orlowski at the Reg then speculates that this somehow means the end of Scoble’s Microsoft blogging career. Talk about drawing a long bow.
Guys, IE7 is a beta. The first beta. You can expect this kind of stuff in a beta, and provided MS have pledged to fix the issues, it doesn’t matter one jot. I’d be more concerned so little progress has been made on standards-conformance, and why they put out a beta before doing more on this.
From the forthcoming book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, here’s an article about how Google got started.
How to deploy Visual Studio .Net applications to Linux. (via Brad)
Now maybe I can sell off my old BBC B, once I get a Beeb emulator working. Shame I might never recover my old Ultima clone that some friends and I were working on in 1988.