And while I’m thinking about the past, here’s one of those posts from 4 years ago in which I issued a challenge to mobile phone manufacturers. I don’t think things have really improved since then.
The mobile phone challenge
June 22nd, 2005
Wilde things
June 22nd, 2005
It occurred to me, after a recent conversation with a friend, that not everybody will necessarily appreciate the staggering wit behind my little tagline about “something sensational to read on the net”. Since it’s been on the site for a little over four years, I should perhaps explain it for those of you feeling left out.
The character Gwendolen in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest pulls out her diary at one point in the play in order to check something, and comments:
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
So there you have it.
And now, a topic for dinner-party conversation:
Which fictional character’s blog would you most like to read?
AJAX
June 20th, 2005
The buzzphrase of the moment is AJAX. If you’re a programmer, and you don’t know about this, you will soon. It stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML, which is an increasingly common technique for updating parts of a web page from a server without having to update the whole thing.
It’s being heavily used by Google in Gmail and Google Maps, for example. And I think it my duty to keep Status-Q readers up to date with such terms so that you can casually drop them into conversations around the water cooler. “Oh no, it isn’t using Flash. It’s based on AJAX…”
While my ukulele gently weeps…
June 20th, 2005
A truly fabulous version of ‘While my guitar gently weeps’ played on the ukulele by Jake Shimabukuro.
(Update – that link is now dead. Try here.)
Thanks to the Creative Generalist blog for this and lots of other great stuff.
Three stories
June 20th, 2005
If, like me, you normally only hear Steve Jobs talking about the latest Apple product launches, you might like the
Commencement Address he gave at Stanford recently.
Who remembers the Armenians?
June 19th, 2005
My wife’s family, on one side, are Armenian. Her grandparents managed to escape the ruthless Turkish ethnic cleansing of 1915 by getting a boat to America, but most of the rest of their families were wiped out.
This is one of history’s biggest and yet least-known atrocities, so it’s refereshing to read Ben Macintyre’s article What’s the Turkish for Genocide?, which suggests that Turkey really ought at least to acknowledge its past before being allowed into the EU.
The question “Who remembers … the Armenians?”, by the way, was used by Hitler to reassure his generals that another holocaust they were embarking on would not be a long-term problem. It would be sad if any future dictators were still able to use the same reasoning.
Podcasts
June 17th, 2005
Podcasts are becoming more and more important to me. Every day, while shaving or dressing, I get to listen to about 20 mins of interesting, educational stuff, usually talks from conferences that I didn’t get to attend. Now I can ‘attend’ them without any cost in money or time! If I had a daily commute to work, it would be even more valuable.
I’ve always been a big fan of radio. The quality of radio & TV broadcasting here is one of the few things about Britain that still makes me proud of my country. The more I travel, the more I realise that our publicly-funded BBC really is the best in the world. And I’m ever more aware that, despite this, its days in its current form are numbered.
But if I, as an enthusiastic supporter of radio in Britain, find myself spending more time listening to podcasts than the radio, no wonder it’s taking off at such a rate in the rest of the world! I don’t expect, for example, when I turn on the radio, to hear any commercials, but for most of the world the simple matter of podcasts being largely advertisement-free is probably enough of an incentive in itself.
Seeking the Google reputation // Even in the cannon’s mouth
June 16th, 2005
My good friend Dale made what I think is an exceedingly interesting discovery. Let me quote a bit of his email:
For reasons related to a joke, I did a search on Halliburton in Google. Got the following response:
- Halliburton
- Home page of Halliburton with links to many newspaper articles rebutting critics’ allegations of improper conduct.
www.halliburton.com/ – 17k – Cached – Similar pagesOkay. But, I don’t see that text in the page. Nor in the page source. This description, with a prominent mention of rebuttal of improper conduct, doesn’t seem to be in either the current page or the cached page. So who came up with this description? Google?
No, DMOZ.
See
http://dmoz.org/Society/Issues/Business/Allegedly_Unethical_Firms/ Halliburton/Opposing_Views/.So the description comes from the open directory project. An entry quite deep, and in an dissenting view. Could just anyone become a volunteer editor for certain categories and modify the entries of major websites to be whatever they wanted? Why should Google or I trust this?
Or am I missing something?
A very good question – thoughts anyone? Is this just somebody at Google being mischievous? Dale later pointed out that the same is true of IBM. Google’s description of their home page is taken from here, and while that description’s uncontraversial, it does raise the same question…
Update: What’s more, it happens even on important sites! Google’s description of Status-Q also comes from DMoz. I think I submitted this entry, back in the days when the weblogs section had a couple of dozen entries!
The general problem here, I guess, is to decide whether the owner of a site gives a more balanced description of it than the editors of some moderated third-party site. Perhaps it’s not such a bad practice after all. Unless you’re Halliburton.
Paper Rulers
June 16th, 2005
Ever find yourself without a ruler? Thanks to Mitchell Charity, you can print your own!
Now, here’s a thought: Would a small ruler be called a roulette?
FixIt Guides
June 13th, 2005
If you need to dismantle your Powerbook, as I have recently for a hard disk replacement, you need the excellent PB FixIt Guide Series.
Flickr Export Plugin for iPhoto
June 13th, 2005
Fraser Speirs’ Flickr Export Plugin for iPhoto. Lovely!
Ruby
June 13th, 2005
Ruby is a language that’s getting a lot of attention as a slightly cleaner and nicer alternative to Python and Perl. If you have some basic programming experience and want to learn Ruby, there’s a very good tutorial here.
It’s mostly used, it seems, in the Ruby on Rails framework for writing web apps.
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