Author Archives: daniel

Do you want to appear in adverts on Facebook?

Want to appear in adverts to your friends on Facebook?

I don’t. I don’t see why an advertiser should be able to imply that I use or recommend their product. And I had been wondering why people I know started showing up in ads like this:

Stupid Facebook ad

Note that all three suggested dates are wrong. Pretty stupid.

Anyway, you can stop your profile image appearing in adverts by going to this Facebook settings page.

Or if that doesn’t work, go to Settings / Privacy / News feed and wall / Facebook Ads. Nicely obscure, isn’t it.

Facebook advert options

(via Rae… who also pointed me over to this article about recent changes by Facebook in this area.)

Lessons from video games

This week isn’t just the 40th anniversary of the first moon landings, it’s also the 40th anniversary of the video game Lunar Lander.

Having a go at this excellent remake (for Windows), I learnt an important lesson that one can use in real life:

Try pressing Shift to start if nothing else seems to work No, that’s not it.

Don’t go for the bigger fuel tank. Upgrading to the more efficient engine is a better buy.

Lunar Lander 2

Actually that’s got a fairly narrow application, hasn’t it.

Oh well, the game was fun.

Bye bye Teletext

In Australia the 7 Network’s Austext teletext service is to shut down at the end of September, with only Supertext subtitles/Closed captioning continuing to be transmitted. (I wonder if they’ll move them from the current page 801 to the default 100, to make them easier to use?)

Over in the UK, ITV’s Teletext service is to shut down in January 2010.

The BBC’s Ceefax will last until analogue TV is switched off in 2012.

Hardly surprising really. I’m sure demand for text-based news and other information has plummetted since the widespread adoption of the Web. In fact I’m surprised teletext has lasted this long — I struggle to think of anybody I know who uses it.

Youtube – What the…?

Oh great. So Youtube has been running flawlessly all day, allowing my kids to watch any number of videos, but the moment I want to upload something it starts having problems.

Right now, youtube.com is responding to me with this joyous news:

500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

Also, please include the following information in your error report: 

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What the hell that means is anybody’s guess.

Wikipedia featured article

Oh bravo Wikipedia, well done. Today’s Wikipedia featured article (found highlighted on the front page) is Gropecunt Lane.

Wikipedia's featured article 9/7/2009

That should do wonders to help convince doubters that Wikipedia is an authoritative resource able to be used by everyone, particularly families and those behind company firewalls with over-zealous administrators.

Now, I’m no prude, and I don’t think the article should be excised from Wikipedia or even censored. But I do think that if you want your product to be mainstream, you probably need to keep what is generally considered the single most profane word in the English language off the front page.

Right on Commander!

I’ve been trying out Oolite, the open-source Elite clone.

It’s got its niggles, but it’s a very good copy of the BBC Micro original — I took a look at that again to compare. I’ve found myself wanting the original keyboard controls, and may go ahead and reconfigure it to match.

While playing around with the BBC version (actually the slightly-enhanced Master version) I refreshed my memory of how to dock without using a docking computer. I was a bit rusty, but managed to do it without too much trouble. (Well, okay, it was actually my second attempt — BeebEm includes an option to record output to an AVI.)

Use FoxIt Reader in Chrome

Chrome fast. FoxIt reader fast. But by default they don’t work together so well, insisting on PDFs being saved to disk before FoxIt will open them.

Here’s how to get read PDFs inside Chrome using FoxIt reader:

  • Copy the file npFoxitReaderPlugin.dll from C:\Program Files\Foxit Software\Foxit Reader\plugins to C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\plugins
  • If the plugins directory doesn’t exist, then create it
  • C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome… only exists if you’ve used the Google Pack version of Chrome. If instead you’ve got the version that (oddly) shoves it into C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\ then you’ll need to find the right place under there for it.
  • Restart Chrome

(Source: Chrome forum post, and some fiddling/experimentation)

UPDATE: As commenters have noted, unfortunately the relevant files may be in place only if you installed the Firefox plugin with FoxIt Reader — which may not offer to do so unless it detects Firefox is installed.

Jumping the gun

Fairfax got a lot of flak for revealing Australian Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s Iraq trip before it happened, something normally not done due to the security risk it entails.

But they weren’t the only ones. Sky News online also reported the “secret visit” before it happened.

Sky News reports Gillard's Iraq trip before it happens

IT upgrades

Ho boy.

The Bushfires Royal Commission has been told staff answering calls at the Bushfire Information Line on Black Saturday were unable to see crucial information about the fires because of an IT upgrade.

More than 12,000 Victorians called the Victorian Bushfire Information Line or on Black Saturday.

Calls that were not answered went to Centrelink.

But the commission was told staff there were unable to see the Department of Sustainability fire database because an IT upgrade had accidentally blocked that access.
…

— ABC News Online

So on the hottest forecast day ever, and which everyone from the Premier down had warned would be the worst fire danger day ever, Centrelink staff, who are the designated backup responders for the bushfire information line, were blocked from getting the information they needed from the DSE web site?

Apart from the timing issues of IT upgrades to systems that are important to the fire-fighting effort, it appears to underscore the severe dangers of restricting network access unnecessarily.

Bing/Live Maps FAIL

Attn: Microsoft/Bing/Live/Whatever… you dumb-arses.

If I look at Google Maps, get a great view in the map or the satellite view or Streetview or whatever, I can get a link for that precise view that I can send somebody or embed into a web page for people to look at and browse around in it.

I love the Bird’s Eye view in Live Maps, but… Oh looky, it’s a Share link. But all that gives me is the URL for the original search I did. And it’s broken.

For instance, if I search for:

swanston and flinders streets, melbourne, vic, au

I get the spot I was looking for, outside Flinders Street Station in Melbourne. Cool.

Then I can switch to Bird’s Eve view. Nice. Zoom in, rotate so I can see the steps. Gorgeous!

Flinders Street from above

So I want to share it with my friends. Click Share to get the URL for it. It gives me this:

http://maps.live.com.au/index.aspx?action=location&location=swanston%20and%20flinders%20streets%2C%20melbourne%2C%20vic%2C%20au

Try it. Go on, click it, see what you get.

See the problem?

Not only does this go to a standard map, ignoring that I switched to Bird’s Eye view, zoomed, rotated, etc.

Not only that… but it somewhere along the way it chops out the commas from my original query, and which causes the Live Maps parser to take me to somewhere else… to be precise, it takes me to the corner of Swanston and Flinders Street in Bulleen, a suburb in Melbourne’s northeast!

Bing/Live Maps FAIL.