Category Archives: Internet

Directing Mailman replies

For an announcements list, you don’t want people replying to the list, which will reject their messages. I had to do some digging to find out where to set this in Mailman. It’s under the General Options:

Where are replies to list messages directed? Poster is strongly recommended for most mailing lists. — which lets the recipient replies go back to the list, to the poster (which is the old-fashioned way to do it on discussion lists) or you can set to go back to an explicit address — which for reasons I won’t go into right now, is the way I wanted it.

OK, so this setting probably should have been really obvious, but I only just found it. Call me slow if you like.

mailto: no more

It’s time to stop using mailto: links.

I mean c’mon. You think I still read my email in a local client? That’s just so twentieth century.

Captcha FAIL

I think my eyesight is okay. I know I’m a bit colourblind, but other than that and a lack of perspective, it’s okay.

These captchas, seen on the Oz-Astra web site forums though, these are too much. I know you have to fight spammers, but there comes a point where real humans are going to be defeated too, and eventually give up in frustration. Thankfully you can refresh the image and hope for something a bit more readable, but why not bring the difficulty level down from eleven so it’s not so hard?

Captcha image Captcha image Captcha image

(I’m not trying to single this site out; there are others that also frustrate. And I suspect this is down to an over-zealous implementation in vBulletin.)

The dangers of HTML email

See what happens if you don’t properly anticipate how your HTML email might be rendered?

Dangers of HTML email

Yep, the world’s thinnest and lightest 17″ notebook… featuring a really odd-looking askew display, apparently.

(GMail in Firefox 3.0.6 on Windows)

Twitter spam

Spammers have discovered Twitter. That's not really surprising; it had to happen sometime.

What is surprising is that, in this example, 45 people have blindly followed the spammer when they followed them. Do people not even look at who it is?

I mean really. “Jenny” of “online friend”, with such an obviously spammy bio?! Could it be any more obvious that this person intends wasting your time?

Twitter spammer

TinyURL

TinyURL went down the other day.

Thankfully they had a workaround (add a. to the start of the URL), but it's a reminder, especially in these days of Twitter, how much we've come to depend on it.

What happens if one day Kevin Gilbertson goes crazy and shuts it down? Or some other disaster befalls it? How many people have things recorded as TinyURLs that they couldn't get back?

Don't get me wrong, there's no reason to assume the worst. But for many it does represent a single point of failure.

YouTube goes widescreen

Youtube wide with 4:3 contentYouTube has gone widescreen (note: this link currently breaks if your YouTube preference is for a non-US locale, eg for Aussies you end up here, which currently displays nothing).

The only catch of course is that 4:3 videos now appear letterboxed… or whatever the vertical term for letterboxed is.

My question is: why? Why not just make the player (at least on the YouTube web site) the aspect ratio of the video that it's playing?

In fact at the moment, embedded 16:9 videos still appear letterboxed; 4:3 videos “full screen” … what should happen is that the embedding code should define the player size and so match the video's aspect ratio.

Surely it can't be that hard to avoid those black bands?