Author Archives: daniel

Ozemail floppy disk

Amazing the things you find during a clear out. Here, from 1996, is an Ozemail disk.

Ozemail disk from 1996

Australians would remember they used to turn up in magazines and so on, though they were never quite as ubiquitous as the America Online disks that seemed to show up everywhere in the North American magazines.

I haven’t tried to see if this one will still install on Windows 7… in fact for now it’s still sealed in its plastic.

The Ozemail web site www.ozemail.com.au forwards to iiNet, so I guess they got bought out by them somewhere along the line — in 2005 according to Wikipedia.

Google engineer’s rant about Google Plus

A fascinating rant about why Google Plus isn’t working (as well as some interesting stuff about Amazon), from a Google insider.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.

The full rant.

Analysis from Ed Bott:

And there’s the problem with Google+ in a nutshell. It’s a clone of Facebook, built by engineers for people who think like engineers. I now realize what it was I couldn’t put my finger on: this service started out as a list of features. But it didn’t start out with a vision. In fact, I’ve never heard anyone articulate, from a customer’s point of view, why Google+ came into existence in the first place.

I think they’re both probably right… and it’s why I suspect Google Plus won’t get the critical mass to become the replacement for Facebook or Twitter anytime soon.

Giant embedded slides

Email arrived. Embedded Powerpoint slides. 9Mb. Wow.

Saved the slides out to a temporary directory, loaded them in Powerpoint, saved again as PPTX, edited the message (thank goodness Outlook allows this) to remove the embedded slides and attach the PPTX versions instead. Result: 663 Kb — a 93% saving in space, with no loss of fidelity.

Either we need to send everybody on compulsory email attachments training, or email systems need to get much more efficient at this stuff, and clean up the stupid stuff for them automatically.

By the way, Outlook 2010 made it very difficult, if not impossible to save the slides. Outlook 2007 looking at the same message managed it easily. Hmmm.

Google Desktop discontinued

The Google blog has detailed a number of Google products being discontinued. Most of them I’ve never heard of (Aardvark?) or considered of doubtful use (Google Pack).

But the really disappointing cheap cialis online one for me is the end of Google Desktop.

In the last few years, there’s been a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing, as well as the integration of search and gadget functionality into most modern operating systems. People now have instant access to their data, whether online or offline. As this was the goal of Google Desktop, the product will be discontinued on September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.

I really like the way Google Desktop can simultaneously search my local documents, emails in Thunderbird, and in GMail as well. I suppose I’d better learn more about Windows 7 Search — does it even offer the same capabilities?

NoFollow not working?

Nofollow attributes were added to the web in 2005, with major search engines and blog/CMS vendors providing support.

I find it interesting that it clearly hasn’t stopped comment spammers, who continue to bombard blogs. I can only assume they don’t care about Pagerank etc, but just want their links to be seen by humans, though I would have assumed most blog owners use spam detection of some kind, and most spam comments which do make it through are unlikely to get clicked on.

But that’s always been the issue with automated spam. Only a tiny number have to be acted upon to make them profitable.

Hotmail/MS web weirdness

Seeing weird behaviour on Marita and Justine’s PCs: trying to access Hotmail, and most other Microsoft web sites, the browser will divert to login.live.com, but not be able to render the page. It appears to load much or all of the data, but never completes.

It’s apparently been doing this for about a week, on both PCs, using a variety of browsers installed on them, including IE9, Firefox 3 and 5 and Chrome — so presumably not a cache problem.

It’s affecting hotmail, microsoft.com, msn.com (which in Australia redirects to iat.ninemsn.com.au/tickler ), even support.microsoft.com. It seems the common ground is they all use live.com/Passport for authentication.

However if you use IE’s Help / Online Support option, it does get to the relevant page. I wonder if that bypasses the authentication stage.

Using View Source, it appears the pages partially load, but do not complete, so do not render completely (eg ninemsn.com.au), or at all in some cases (hotmail.com). Or on some sites (including this blog) it loads the page, but chokes on other content (such as the addthis.com sharing widget).

One PC is running Vista, one XP. Both have the latest patches. One has MS Security Essentials, the other AVG.

They both use the same connection via a router and modem, but other devices (such as a phone browsing via wifi and the same router/modem) don’t have the issue.

Tried turning off the firewall. No luck. Tried removing all of last week’s Windows patches. No luck.

The net connection is okay. A speed test says line speed is 4.75 Mbps.

The affected web sites are fine at my place.

Anybody seeing the same? Any ideas of things to try?

Update 9:05pm. Tried bypassing the wireless router in favour of the modem. It now all works. So it’s some weird-arse setting on the router. Investigations continue.

Update 9:30pm. Would you believe rebooting the modem fixed it? Blargh! This is why they always suggest to turn things off then on again.

Gateway computer, circa 2000

Was clearing out some papers on the weekend and found this: an order form for a Gateway computer from June 2000. I can hardly believe I used to spend that much dosh on buying computers.

Order form for a Gateway computer, June 2000

I seemed quite impressed with the spec when I ordered it.

That computer worked until 2005, when its (custom) PSU died.

Comparison of costs: 1995 vs 2000 vs 2005.

To this day, the speakers that came with it (from “Cambridge Soundworks”) are still going strong, even though their beige colour doesn’t match all the black stuff.

Google Apps to support last two browser releases

Interesting: Google Apps has stated they will support the last major version, and the second-last of web browsers.

As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3.

I suppose IE6 was around for so long that it’s easy to think of IE7 as being “new”. But in fact it’s five years old this year (official release October 2006), and was officially superseded two years ago.

Hopefully all those corporates who dragged their heels on IE6 can move a little faster off IE7.