I love the idea of Google’s Firefox sync for keeping my bookmarks and so on synced between my work and home computers. It works really well.
But I’m rather less keen on sitting waiting for it to do the update when starting Firefox. Sometimes it seems to take ages. Thankfully you can cancel it if you’re too impatient.
Smegging frelling goit! A list of fictional expletives. (via Jekke)
The security problems related to AJAX and mashups.
Believe it or not, there are guidelines for what makes someone notable enough to have a Wikipedia page.
You must have seen the Dell exploding laptop by now.
PS. Wednesday. Exploding laptop update: Dell gets hold of it to investigate, and confirms it was one of theirs; declines to name the model.
Jensen Harris remarks that many people still double-click on the top-left of a window to close it.
How do you most often close a window in Windows?
Or some other way I haven’t thought of? Or some other way on another operating system?
As Bill Gates prepares for semi-retirement, The Guardian has looked at where the other original(*) ten members of Microsoft are now.
(*)Okay not quite original, but those in the picture taken in Albuquerque.
The article doesn’t make comment on how many of them still have facial hair.
Most amusing: Ode to catastrophic failure in Windows XP
A couple of weeks ago Josh posted about virtualising your overloaded, slow, not-rebuilt-for-years PC, and keeping it on standby within a new build in case you need anything on it.
How about the idea of keeping that new build clean — putting on only your most frequently used, essential applications, with everything else going onto a virtual PC?
For me, that would mean Office, Firefox, my usual web-building stuff (Photopaint, UltraEdit, Filezilla), Nero, and one or two others, such as perhaps Trillian. I’d draw a line under them, and anything else not worthy of a permanent spot in my Windows setup would be virtualised, possibly in various separate virtual PCs, setup for different roles: one for Visual Studio, one for trying out freebie apps from mags, a Linux setup for LAMP development, one for stupid software that insists on running as Administrator, etc, etc.
What to use for the virtual machines? There’s a few different options.
The freebie Virtual Server will only support Windows NT 4 and above, and only server OS’s, which to my mind would unnecessarily weigh down your virtual machines with more than they need. (Linux as a guest OS seems to be coming.)
Another option is the free VMWare Server, which will host a wider range of guest OSs.
The non-free Virtual PC will host just about any x86 operating system. If you don’t want to try the 45 day free trial, it’ll set you back A$215 or so, or it’s available via MSDN Universal.
A problem would be performance, of course. It’s not like emulating a 2Mhz 6502 under BeebEm. But then, hopefully it’s not as bad as what I’ve seen on my brother-in-law’s PowerPC Mac trying to run x86 AutoCad in Windows 2000.
Nonetheless games and other performance-intensive apps may not perform well under virtualisation, especially if they require particular hardware. And yet they would benefit the most, as they often have installers that wreak havoc on Windows setups, chucking weird-arse DLLs everywhere. As the “Virtual PC Guy” is fond of telling us, a lot of the older games run okay, but newer ones might be a problem.
Maybe the only solution there is to put them on a completely separate computer, or move up to Intel’s latest chips which have better support for virtualisation.
Or give the whole thing up and resign yourself to a slow computer with rebuilds every year or two.
I think I’ll try Win98 with a couple of recent-ish games (say, Midtown Madness 1 and 2) and see how it goes.
Them iPods are funky devices, “designed in California”, so the box says. And, as revealed by the UK’s Mail On Sunday, built in factories in China in somewhat squalid conditions. One factory has 15-hour workdays for US$50 per month. Another is slightly better: 12-hour days for US$100 per month (but about half of that is paid back for housing and food).
Mind you, I suspect this isn’t unusual in the consumer electronics business. Just about nothing’s made in Japan or the USA or other high-cost (read: decent wage) countries.
The only thing I can think of that I’ve got is a Loewe TV, made in Germany.
Update Monday: Apple says: “”Apple is committed to ensuring that working conditions in our supply chain are safe, workers are treated with respect and dignity, and manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible” and is investigating the claims.
If you’re going to have a custom 404 page, you might as well try and make it fit in with the subject of the web site.
Gmail geekitude — In GMail with US English set, when you delete mail it goes to the “Trash” folder. Set it to UK English, and it’s “Deleted Items”.
TV geekitude — See how the ABC News titles look with no stories and no voiceover.
Google Video geekitude — Lots of snippets of info here, including the fact that Google’s video format is pretty much just a renamed DivX AVI.
Webmail geekitude — My web mail (Horde) puts a little flag against the country of the domain name of the sender. Of course it’s a little misleading when a message from someone using fastmail arrives, as it reckons it’s the Federated States of Micronesia…
Web design geekitude — The best freebie DHTML menus I’ve found so far are here. (Which I’ve implemented here and here. I reckon without too much trouble, WordPress’s categories could drive it automatically. Maybe something to put on the list for Geekrant 2.0.
Here’s what it looks like. Click it to see it bigger.
Not bad, but looks very simple compared to Excel. This could be a good or a bad thing. Does a lot of Excel-like things. This kind of comparison is inevitable, as most users are familiar with it.
Doesn’t feel as refined as Writely. Right-click not harnessed.
Linked to your Gmail/Google logon, of course.
Exports a reasonably clean HTML table. (Certainly better than any released versions of Excel/Office.)
Watch out if you lose your connection:
My immediate reaction is this could be useful for some things — like Writely, if you want to be able to edit from anywhere connected, and/or share the document realtime with others.
But like Scoble, I can’t see it replacing “offline” apps for individual users just yet. Hosted apps within a corporation however, that could (eventually) be another matter, especially as the technology matures.
See also: Josh and I look at Writely.
It’s widely reported that Google will be releasing an online spreadsheet on the 6/6/2006 (presumably US time).
Probably limited signup initially, but keep an eye on spreadsheet.google.com, which is currently showing a 404 (rather than a “Host not found”).
Update 20:15. Sneak peak and sign-up (they’ll email you when it’s available).
Update 22:00. Now at spreadsheet.google.com I get “Server Error. The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds.”
Since the Fairfax dudes (The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Financial Review, etc) have probably noticed how their web sites’ popup ads don’t appear anymore because almost everybody’s got a popup blocker via Firefox, XP SP2 or the Google toolbar, would you believe they’ve started putting popup ads as stickers onto their newspapers.
Here’s one from last week, with an advert for Microsoft Office:
(They’re a bit like a Post-It note; they peel off quite easily.)
I’ve found under some circumstances, new versions of Windows (XP and 2000, using NTFS) are still looking at the DOS 8.3 versions of filenames when using wildcards.
Real world example: a set of files such as tpo12345.xml tpo12346.xml tpo12347.xml etc. To find these, you’d use a wildcard such as tpo?????.xml
If you have a file called tpo1234567890.xml, it shouldn’t match using this wildcard, but it does, because the filename’s backward-compatible short version (in DOS 8.3 format) is something like TPO123~1.XML, which matches. It appears to only happen when the first part of the wildcard (without the suffix) is 8 characters long.
So it may be ten years since most of us said goodbye to short filenames, but it seems they’re still with us. I wonder if Windows Vista will still use them?