Google. Dumbing. Down.
WTF do these people think when they talk about "soft 404s and hard 404s? Why not call those what they are? Errors. Problems. Laziness. Ignorance. There's an HTTP Status code for most of them.
Google and Error Pages
Ah - got it in the end. The repeated attempts to highlight the subject of error pages by Google's Webmastercentral blog does serve a purpose after all. You can now add support for Google into those pages.
Open Office vs Textmaker
I had to use Open Office every day last week. It's pleasing on the eye, and it drives me mad, because of some things I absolutely detest. When I move a window while an application is loading a file - and taking its time doing so - I expect the window not to jump back to its original location on the desktop. And because I learnt computing before there were any mice I prefer to use the cursor keys for navigation, because it's so much faster. Trying that in Open Office is a Royal Pain in the Lower Back, as you instantly get stuck in some pop up dialogue box for tables, images or whatever interrupts the text flow. I now bought a copy of SoftMaker Office.
It doesn't look as nice. But it's faster. And it hasn't angered me yet.
Who watches the Watchmen?
AT&T is the first really big provider who appears to be considering the falsification of web pages requested by their customers, possibly using the same or similar methods employed by Phorm and Nebuad. Financial gain obviously justifies any action. I just wonder why people accept this and other types of interferences?
Web One-and-a-half
Microsoft still don't get the Web, despite Ballmer's claims of intending to display leadership real soon now. I can't remember why I wanted to see the page at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX102832771033.aspx [which I couldn't do because ActiveX "technology" obviously doesn't work here]. All I remember is that they once again displayed disregard for what I wanted:
One Moment Please...
To help optimize how your Web pages are displayed, we are checking to see if a 2007 Microsoft Office program is installed. If this page does not automatically redirect, you have scripts disabled. See more information on scripts. Follow this link if the page is not redirected.
OS X Software Installer
There are still people who don't know how to write a program installer for OS X [and probably other multi user systems]. I've just seen another sub directory containing program "bits" that were installed world writable, so that any ordinary user would be able to scribble in there. And if such file or directory names contain spaces or - God forbid - ampersands, you have a recipe for a very frustrated admin.
Why Clouds are just that
Some folk seem to be taking some things at face value, and they're surprised that remote servers or applications installed on those can fail[1], and that data could disappear. Before moving locally hosted data onto some remote cloud they should consider the safety aspects mentioned here in the last two paragraphs.
[1] http://www.infoworld.comärticle/08/08/15/Google_Apps_admins_jittery_about_Gmail_hopeful_about_future-IDGNS_1.html
Firefox transparent Background problems
Because I use Seamonkey as my main browser I hadn't noticed that Firefox 3 [3.0.1 Linux] fails where Firefox 2 and older had no problem: images with transparent backgrounds. More than half of the PNGs [with transparent backgrounds] created here - with Photoshop on a Mac - are invisible in Firefox 3 Linux. Others seem to be fine.
Trying to find a solution I came across this page. Ironically it explains how to get PNG transparency to work in IE [there is a far better solution than this]. To illustrate the effect it uses GIF images. And the very same GIFs don't appear in FF3 Linux.
Delving a bit into this it appears the problem is known but the culprit is not. It could be Firefox, but it could also be Cairo or just the X server.
Depending on your graphics card and the driver used the following modification [highlighted in bold] in xorg.conf may help:
Section "Device" Identifier "Videocard0" Driver "nv" Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" EndSection
Duplicate Detection
Most algos used in today's information retrieval are old, some of them have been created as far back as the sixties. Even duplicate detection seems pretty standard these days. Improvements are marginal, not earth shattering. Cribbers may be able to replace the key terms of a paper with synonyms, but once they try to rephrase stop word sequences they discover that writing from scratch requires far less effort.
Lock-In in 2008
Tim Bray phrases it very eloquently:
Nikon is a competent camera company. The IOC is a competent sports impresario. The Chinese government is a competent authoritarian dictatorship. Pity they're all so fucking stupid about technology.
See What?
Google's Offering of the Day is called Google Insights for Search. Byline See what the world is searching for. That is, if you permit the execution of unseen code from an external source in your browser.
If you do [have Javascript on], you can see where queries come from, not just on a country map, but "down-drillable" to regions and towns. If you don't, all you see is some white canvas.
The next incarnation will probably have more than photos of the people searching for a given term.
Query syntax is innovative as well. To exclude a word from a query you use a minus sign. To indicate or you use, what seems to be obvious to someone, a plus sign.
Is you Browser past its Best By Date?
The information itself is very likely old hat to most of those who care. But the Google Online Security Blog has a very nice chart highlighting the issue.