- As Eric points out, the increase in the number of seminars, workshops and conferences, as well as the excellent attendance, is testimony to the recovery of the industry.
- Some might argue that the existence of Web 2.0 Bingo serves the same purpose
- Anders highlights a fairly weird Flickr policy and has a great discussion of why he thinks it’s a bit crap. I agree — the lines are pretty blurry and excluding people from the community aspects of the app just because they post art as well as photos seems rather counter-intuitive
- Xooglers looks really interesting. Mainly bookmarking so I go back and check it out
Zeldman’s article about the difference in coverage of the London bombings and bombings in Baghdad, made me think about to Aaron’s thoughts on the intentionality of evil. I think Aaron is right — very few people do evil things intentionally : most believe they are working towards the Greater Good, even if they have to do some unsavoury things.
There are a smaller minority who quite happily do bad/evil things and somehow manage to downplay the effect on others. Examples here would include the Enron executives. I suppose there are also murderers and rapists and so on, but if there’s one thing Law & Order has taught us is that there’s usually a reason…
What IS done intentionally, however, is exactly what Zeldman describes: the framing of “Them” to show that they are worse than “Us”. Coverage of terrorist attacks and wars is the most obvious, but this also extends in a more subtle way to the lack of coverage Terrance describes. If a particular victim isn’t seen as important, then there will be no coverage.
- I like Kottke’s thoughts on pinging/sweethearting. In South Africa, the equivalent was to give someone “3 rings”. You’d call, let the phone ring three times and then hang up, to let them know that you were leaving now/home safely/needed calling back. I suppose it doesn’t mesh so well with cellphones tho.
- Ten Reasons Gay Marriage Should Be Illegal. Worth spreading around
- Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is a GREAT framework for explaining the microformats principles. I’ll definitely use it when next trying to explain the concept!
- Although I desperately want to attend the London Web Frameworks night (and indeed I’m even near London that day), I’m flying out from Gatwick at 2030 so I don’t think my chances of manipulating the British transport system are quite good enough :-\
- Chess is a lovely and heartwarming little anecdote. Libraries shouldn’t just be storage places for books, but centres of the community. This kind of thing makes the reality closer to the ideal.
We are so sad. Last night, we not only attended the 10 minutes past midnight first possible showing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but also bought the scammy kiddie pack of popcorn, sweets, drink and Hogwarts colours novelty scarf!!
Doesn’t Tara look fetching in it?
- This article about the PC Conectado programme in Brazil is really interesting, both in what it actually says and the warnings it holds for other similar programmes.
- I find this whole concept quite disturbing. That said, I can see their point of view and I suppose the particular “armed” element is in some ways peculiar to America. In Britain it might just be a message that taking self defence courses and carrying yourself with confidence would be a good idea.
- The UnZen of Python is brilliant.
- Dana’s written a little list of what you have to do to be a big-time 21st century brand. I think he’s right in a number of regards — I think what a lot of people don’t realise is that many of the perceived benefit of, say, blogging, is personal.
I love when during simplification we actually complicate matters. I also love the image of a rat chasing scientists to avoid capture. They do say the best form of defence is offence!
- Ian has a great metaphor for DRM which also pulls out how ridiculous some of the ideas are. Well said, mate!
- MJ talks about Childhood Truths. I remember having a similar experience because as a child I didn’t realise that the various languages being spoken around me weren’t all the same. I learnt some Afrikaans at school and assumed that now I’d be able to communicate with everyone who wasn’t speaking English. Ah naivete!
- This amazing map shows where those displaced by Katrina have gone. Amazing way to turn data into information
- CSS Vista looks very cool — not that I do a lot of proper web development these days, but I’ll bear it in mind for the next site I need to test
- Sometimes Dilbert cartoons are just too close to the bone. Too funny!
- This reminds me of a software engineering textbook we used at uni, where the diagrams always made simple concepts seem much more complicated. Talk about killing your message with bollocks
- Simon writes about Orange calling him and asking him for his password. Another example here. I must say that I’ve had the same experience with various companies and they would all do well think about what behaviour they’re encouraging!
- Ian makes a point about how consistency is important too. Being able to customize the look and feel isn’t always a great thing
Matt has written this little post about things that he found to be different in Canada. The thing I found particularly funny is that he says “Oh, and milk comes in plastic bags. WHAT THE HELL CANADA?!”
I am SOOO glad that this happens in at least one other country. Since I left South Africa, I have been worried that my home country is the only one with this strange practice. At least now I have a second milk-in-bags home-from-home in Canada.
If you think about it, it’s probably a lot less wasteful than massive hard plastic cartons!
- I love how eBay has become not just an auction, but a source of real comedy. I love this Death Star subwoofer and the story accompanying these leather pants
- This article about Firefox marketing is quite long, but well worth a read. I’m particularly interested by the discussion about the gender skew in the various areas of Mozilla projects
- These predictions about the UK in 2040 are entertaining, mostly because they seem so feasible!
- I saw this absolutely ages ago when the latest book came out, but was having some connectivity issues at the time so didn’t blog it. Nevertheless, it has stood the test of time and remains my favourite Harry Potter commentary EVER
- This Global Rich List is brilliant — pop in your salary and it’ll tell you where you are in the greater scheme of things. Great way of getting some perspective…
- Blair announces abolishment of elections. Y’know, this would be funnier if it didn’t seem at least partially plausible…
This is my bad design showcase for the day. I originally noticed this months ago and took the screenshot — I quite honestly haven’t used Windows Media Player since then, just because it annoyed me so much.
What is the problem, I hear you ask? Well, if you look at the screenshot, you’re seeing the top right-hand corner of my screen. There’s a Firefox window in the background, with a Windows Media Player window in front (the blue bit).
The issue is that the WMP window’s close icon is not in the right place when it is in default mode. “Just maximise it!”, I hear you shout! I think the point is that unlike other applications, WMP when unmaximised takes up a strange amount of the screen — it’s toolbar is close to the top, but not in the normal position.
The net effect is that every time I try to close down WMP, I in fact hit whatever is behind it! With Firefox I at least usually have a hundred tabs open, so it warns me that I’m closing them all and so isn’t too disastrous, but often enough it’s been something important.
What designs really annoy you?
- Yvonne’s done an initial review of Measure Map. Can’t wait for my preview invite to arrive!
- Simon has a the lowdown on the new Yahoo maps stuff. I must say it looks VERY cool.
- It’s amazing how some people can make anything beautiful
- Cheap & Tiny is a very cool looking blog about small, affordable gadgets. Possibly dangerous for my wallet, if you add all the must-haves up, but nevertheless very funky!
- I could save myself hours every week by using Week in Review as my sole news source. Still love my daily BBC emails too much though…
- Molly’s visiting the UK soon and so there’s a Geek Dinner in London on the 24th. Elly will be going along but unfortunately I can’t be there
- More details on the $100 laptop project aka One Laptop Per Child. Looking veeerry interesting
- Opensource Nokia is Nokia’s official site for all its open source activity — great to see this sort of resource being born!
- Seems people have been living on the space station for 5 years now. This just seems crazy and scifi — although not so much as IBM “slowing the speed of light”….
- Ajax hits the mainstream. Interestingly this seems to have gotten out into the world a lot faster than I remember a lot of past innovations doing. Maybe it’s because it’s riding the new investment wave behind this elusive Web 2.0 idea…
- On that note, Eric has written a great article about the demands Ajax places on web design. I agree that we’re going to need more of an HCI/UI focus to give users a consistent and useful experience when using Ajax.
- Apparently the candidates for the Tory leadership are bickering over who is mimicking Tony Blair more. Strangely I don’t think that’s their biggest problem…
- Zeldman makes a good point that those affected by the Pakistan earthquake need help more now than ever … and that Western governments don’t seem to be doing a great deal to help at the moment
I got this via email this morning. First of all, let me assure ALL of you that they had ZERO reason to believe that I would want to buy an Enya CD. There is nothing in my CD collection that I would class as anything remotely like Enya.
Recommendations on the whole are a great idea. Amazon’s return on investment for their reco emails must be massive — I certainly am usually prompted to buy something when one arrives. Often not what they’re recommending, but something nonetheless.
This time, however, the recommendation has gone seriously wrong … I’m not encouraged to buy anything. I mainly just feel insulted!!
- There are rumours that Steve Jobs might consider selling Pixar to Disney. I can’t imagine him doing so except to hope that it bombed without his leadership and then Disney had to buy him back to make it all work. He’s crafty like that.
- Interesting Wired piece on the value/contribution of IRC. I think the key thing is this: the internet is great for getting help and advice and troubleshooting problems. It’s another way to get a load of eyes on a problem — and a lot of businesses would benefit from letting their employees seek help more transparently in this way.
- This is an absolutely brilliant article about challenges Linux needs to overcome to be a desktop contender. To be honest I don’t think much of it is revolutionary, but it is very well distilled and clearly put
- Ping’s written part of a new book which just got reviewed on Slashdot!
- Wow, that ther intarweb sure is a useful thang. I wonder how long before this becomes an everyday accepted fact? Actually, I wonder how long before this comes up as a plotpoint in CSI or Law & Order?
Recently, there’s been a lot of coverage on British TV of sports that wouldn’t normally be considered as particularly mainstream. I imagine the sad truth behind it is that everything except bowls, darts and snooker has been bought up by cable and satellite channels, but even back 10 years or so I can remember there being lots of late-night coverage of these kind of sports.
What I’m finding really strange is how addictive and compelling some of these sports turn out to be. I mean the rules are pretty weird and involved in a lot of cases. And most of these sports are hardly exciting in the way that, say, a rugby match is. And yet I just keep watching and keep enjoying.
Am I the only one who finds this?
The other strange element of my entertainment calendar is Strictly Come Dancing. Although I enjoyed the first series, we only really got hooked last year. That was a great series, with two very strong contenders in Denise Lewis and Jill Halfpenny.
This year, however, the amazing thing is that we’re only 4 weeks in and already MOST of the couples are getting scores above 28 or 30. There’s also some surprisingly strong male celebrity dancers (Darren Gough, Colin Jackson, James Martin) which is nice to see. It’s increasingly looking like a real competition this year, rather than just a long period of voting out the crap majority and being wowed by one or two exhibiting actual talent.
Strictly Come Dancing is an amazing show, not least because it even makes ME want to learn to dance!
It has just occurred to me than the real value of projects like Greasemonkey and even very quick-to-prototype languages like Python and Ruby is that they let you fix things that bug you really really quickly and with relatively little effort.
There are so many things that people put up with, just because they figure “Well, it’s just this once”. Doing it manually THIS TIME is better than spending the time making a generic tool that can fix the problem every time. Abstractions are a bit of a bitch, after all. There are different levels of this, largely depending on computer ability: CS students are more likely to write a quick script to automate ordering pizza than for instance management students (who would set up a committee to discuss the possibility of getting an assistant to do their pizza ordering).
With scripting languages, you can get a quick-and-dirty one-off solution in a very short amount of time. No need to generalise and a lot of time saved overall.
Here’s something that’s been bugging me. Why, when I am uploading multiple exhibits of gastronomic delight to Flickr, has no-one been commenting?
Today I worked it out, after uploading a bunch of photos at the weekend. Essentially the problem is this: normally, when I upload things, I first transfer them as “Private”. This is so I can go through, update the titles, descriptions, tags, etc, without the photos appearing multiple times in my photo feed and annoying the hell out of everyone.
At the weekend, however, I accidentally uploaded everything as “Public” and then went through updating the metadata. Suddenly it’s comment city! So I suppose that there is some kind of annoying feed feature in that if you don’t initially publicise your photos, then when you do so later they aren’t included in your feed either.
Frankly, Flickr, that’s a little crap. Isn’t there a middle way?
