So true...

My favourite aphorism of the moment is:

Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.

There's some confusion about who to attribute it to though.

All right, we don't really know why we recommended it..

Bit of a WTF from Amazon:

Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots

I finally went out and bought a disk big enough to back up all the disks and data on my poor old PowerMac G4 with Time Machine. Bit surprised to find there are 939,685 items on it: I deleted fink and all sorts of other stuff after the Leopard upgrade. Maybe I need to start a new user account and dump this one. Maybe I need to do a clean install after all - I have had a few Colonel Panics (i.e. crashes), though fewer since 10.5.2 came out.

Nothing, nada, nil

I watched The English Surgeon on Sunday night, a superb documentary about an English neurosurgeon called Henry Marsh who goes to the Ukraine every year to hew out brain tumours with Homebase drills and a Ukraninan doctor called (of course) Igor. I wasn't watching at first, just left it on after MOTD2, but by the end there wasn't a dry eye in the room.

The last line (spoken by Henry) was:

"What are we if we don't try to help others? We're nothing, nothing at all"

What a scam!

I wish I'd thought of this .uk.com stuff - Centralnic will sell you yourname.uk.com for £32.50!

What this basically means is they bought the domain uk.com (and lots of other codes) and they are selling people subdomains. For £32.50!

(About subdomains: if I owned stuartd.com, I could set up blog.stuartd.com and fubar.stuartd.com and crapola.stuartd.com as many others as I cared to do _for free_.)

Dead Brum Society

footballfunerals.co.uk are the "Official Contracted Funeral Directors to Birmingham City Football Club" and will give you a good send off if you're a blue. Slightly misleading domain name, or perhaps they hope to expand and become the Official Contracted Funeral Directors to more clubs, or maybe the league itself.

Who is the sire, sir?

"What Is Radio 4?

Created in 1967 out of the Home Service, Radio 4 is the "daddy" of speech radio."

This is on their interactive TV page and mobile pages.. Odd that they would choose a quote from Scum.

First-order Freak

After my previous post on my fellow employees, I've been wondering which category I fall into. Oh dear!

Be like has real

These are random quotes from the first few paragraphs on blog.webhosting.uk.com - this has to be dodgy translation, surely, no-one would actually write these..?

There are various reasons why an online sector individual suchlike you has decided to shift to a new web hosting providers. Your old web hosting provider be like has real impecunious specialized funding

Doing channelize in inferior than one month clip under frame will put your website in assay of untracked.

Now, sign-up your new web hosting bringing once you make definite the morpheme familiar mentioned above.

In most cases, you already jazz all the files of your website on your local computer.

In addition, you should run all the hyperlinks in the modal web pages if affirmable to secure no humble course.

Satanic Jon reckons it's keyword injection, but I'm not so sure. Funnily enough, the older entries are quite comprehensible, maybe someone there took a trip too..

Freak Or Unique?

I work for a fairly large local government organisation, so I get plenty of chances to play "Freak Or Unique?" when I have to leave my desk.. so far the score is 237-0 (with maybe a dozen or so exceptions)

MacVista takes a trip, gets double vision

I installed Vista Service Pack 1 last night in Boot Camp my MacBook: well, I tried: three restarts and two hours later it failed (error 0xC004F013) and had to roll the update back - which it did, more or less successfully, a couple of reboots (and another hour or so) later. Everything seemed OK except I had a quite large message on the bottom of my screen with the build number (6000) and a message saying my copy of Vista isn't genuine. Cheek!

I wouldn't have minded the restarts - I am very glad Vista and Leopard do updates after logoff and before shutdown, it's much more sensible than doing them in userspace - but I was only expecting one like previous service packs so I didn't bother changing my boot disk to Windows, which meant I had to sit about watching it and waiting for it to reboot.

It seems the second time the service pack is installed it works, but failure took so long - it was 86% through phase three (of three) that it really started to drag - I uninstalled update KB941649 which is the bad boy just in case and resinstalled and that's more like it. Took a bit less than an hour: it's build 6001 now, which is a departure from Microsoft's usual build nomenclature.


Oh, I do have one problem - Vista now thinks this MacBook has two monitors in it..

Claim Your Vista

A Firefox vs IE comparison is one thing, but Paint vs The GiMP proves this is a spoof..

Technically, Sir, I was never alive - but I appreciate your concern

I saw Sir Ian McKellen crossing The Level today - he was walking with a stick, it was definitely him. Gandalf! Magneto! I was with James, scootering.

Hate

From 'I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream' by Harlan Ellison:

HATE.
LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE.

THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD 'HATE' WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU.
HATE.
HATE.

Always useful. Today, to the woman in front of me in the canteen queue who ordered three ("no, can I make that four?") coffees at the last poossible minute - that's you that is.

Yes, you may

I Can Haz Cheezburger is a site for what seem to be called "cat macros". Funny pics & stuff, for the rest. I get bored of things quickly, but it's consistently very good - the pictures are great, the captions are funny. The spelling is atrocious deliberately, especially in the comment section which it becomes exhibishioistic.. Here's my favourite today:

Layout fucked up by blogger.com

They said I could get my old layout back if I tried a new one. They lied. Now I have a stupid ugly navbar and I can't get the old one back, and now I miss it. Stupid ugly narrow design. Stupid ugly Trebuchet (oh, no, please, name >all< my fonts after the medieval siege engines their ugliness resembles). Stupid ugly header. Stupid ugly spacing. Double stupid doubleplus ugly "interface" for editing the stupid ugly layout. Stupid ugly stupid blogger.com

Edit: OK, I have vented and am tinkering. Stupid me for letting them do it, stupid me for trusting them and not saving a copy of my template, stupid me for not being able to figure out how to fix it. (The navbar is now an iframe, which save having to hide the individual bits, but they've used variables in the template which makes it hard to edit the file externally, and browsers are shit for that kind of thing work with the auto-resizable textatreas which are fashionable now (and generally nearly work). I was very close to deleting this blog out of anger, both of your personalities will be relieved to find I didn't :)

Catastrophic security idiocy

So, a CD with 25 million sets of personal details of child benefit recipients has been "lost". We will be on this. How tragic! I have never known such fear: anyone who knows my name and address will be able to look me up in the phonebook or the electoral roll! If they know my bank account details they will be able to deposit money in my account! If they know I have children they might paedophile them!

The end of Safari and other browsers

The new version of Safari on OS X Leopard still doesn't have a "New Tab" button in it's toolbar options and the hacks that used to let you do it don't work anymore and aren't being re-developed. This is no good for me as I always customize browser toolbars to stick a new tab button just to the left to the location bar where the web address is, always have, always will (where possible of course, Mr IE.). I'm a big user of separators as well, back/forward, separator, refresh/stop (I don't really approve of integrating the two, especially as Ajax style apps often make them redundant but not consistently enough to do without the functionality of both), separator, print on it's own, and new tab. I can live without everything else customizable, but not without new tab: you can't double click the tab bar to get a new tab in Safari like you can in Firefox (Edit: you can now do this in Safari 3.1) and you can't drag a bookmark to the tab bar to open it like you can in Firefox (as Safari deletes it, and there's no Undo available!). I use Camino myself but the rest of the family use Firefox, it was my baby daughter's word for "Computer": having more than one browsers installed is always handy (especially as none of them are any good at identity management).

The sky is not falling in, and it is not onerous to cmd-T and click/type or command-click a link in your Safari bookmark bar to open it in a new tab. Using modifier-key commands don't really scale though: I can substitute cmd-c for ctrl-c easily enough using Stuart Logic (i.e. "always get it wrong the first time") as ctrl-c was 'break' for me long before it was 'copy', but remembering what variant to use for UI operations is annoying cross=platform. What's command-click going to be in Safari for Windows (control-click, but I don't want to have to think about it, that's the point of usability, plus I have to remember which browser I'm using and make it a special case)? What if I'm using Parallels Desktop to run Windows within OS X, which is it? If I am running programs via remote desktop, which isn't good at all at recognizing the differences in keyboard layouts? Not exactly Jane User maybe but not rocket science.

The other annoyance is that switching from mouse to keyboard or keyboard to mouse is what you might call a "high cost user activity" - it takes time, and attention - you have to look for the device, orient to it, use it, and then return to the task. When I watch people using programs I often feel myself wanting to say "You could just press enter" as they switch from text entry or selection to using their mouse to click the OK button in a dialog. I don't, though, as the first 500 times I did it made no difference.

Usability means offering as many ways to achieve your user goals as possible, in the hope you find the right one for a given value of 'user'. Why can't Safari have a new tab button I don't know (Dave Hyatt adamantly doesn't want one, is my guess, but why?)

It's a shame, as Safari has fantastic CSS support for exciting new capabilities, and is the browser du jour as regard iPhone development. Ho hum.

Another thing that annoyed me about Safari was that I couldn't configure it to search with what I typed from the location or address bar. Firefox by default does a semi-optimized "I'm feeling lucky" ("I'm feeling useless" more like) search, but I always set the keyword.URL preference to http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q= in about:config (keyword.enabled needs to be true, but that's the default anyway) to always search google.co.uk as searching from the location or address bar is just so obvious to me, it's a textbox, you can type in it, let's search. I have nothing against the location box (which ironically I have started enabling after all these years of address bar searching and I had even trained myself to type cmd-c cmd-t tab cmd-v enter instead of old faithful cmd-c cmd-t cmd-v then enter when I wanted to search for selected text from a webpage. Most browsers now have a context menu option to search for a selection using the default search settings.

Oh, when you type text in the location bar in Firefox 3, it searches the full text of your history URLs as well as the title of he web page, so when you type foo it matches "http://bar.com - my foo web page" as well as http://bar.com.snafu.foo/zomg - it's much easier to find what you're looking for.

Got to be quick..

My employer has introduced new rules: you are allowed three 10 minute sessions on "social networking" sites like Facebook or blogger, and I've already used one slot playing the movie quiz on FB (access is completely blocked from 10-12AM and 2-4PM)



Anyway, I've found a whole new way the BBC is deceiving and manipulating viewers: you know on the weather forecasts they seem to be standing in front of the UK - it isn't real, it's a fake! People should be told.

Amazoooh!

Tog On Interfaces for £6 delivered. Thank you Amazon! You can get very good prices on popular books secondhand.