Author: bakert

There are now loads of designs at CSS Zen Garden which are absolutely brilliant, despite the site’s crappy name.

Looking at the pages in Lynx, they do a lot better job at degrading gracefully than this site does. Based on that and the fact that its The Right Thing(tm) I have converted bluebones’ basic design to use CSS not tables.

That gracefully degrading CSS is better than tables for layout I am 90% convinced (the other 10% of me worries about the browsers I haven’t checked on). But there’s still the question of whether the loading times of those graphics are worth it (all the designs use quite a few graphics) and whether the visual quality of the designs isn’t a whole lot more to do with the graphics than the CSS (for an example of this see This is Cereal). There are still plenty of people out there on 56k modems or with mobile internet access of similar speeds and 250KB of graphics (which several of the designs have) adds 30 seconds or more to their page load.

Basically the standard pattern of web use apart from a few favourite sites is to put a query into google and visit the most likely looking from the first page of results. Brilliant graphic design and beautiful pages are irrelevant to that kind of use because the images and design are exactly what google and other search engines strip out.

If you are trying to create some kind of brand or continue and offline identity on the web then strong design and graphics may serve some purpose. But for a community or an altruistic site with no brand to push isn’t the cut-down design and quick load times of a site like apache.org, for example, more appropriate?

I have to say my final conclusion is that I’m torn. Visual impressive sites are exactly that, impressive; and surely its better to be impressive than not to be? But you have to look at the tradeoffs. CSS SAVES bandwidth so its a no-brainer but the graphics that go along with it in demonstrating ‘The Beauty in CSS Design’ can make your page 20 times heavier. 250KB of images just can’t be justified, however good it looks.

Get this from the Zen monthly newsletter:

OUT OF AFRICA Sensible Internet users know better than to take any notice of e-mails from semi-literate Nigerians promising a share in million-pound mountains of cash in return for help with a UK bank account. But others fork over enough money to sustain an industry that ranks in Nigeria’s Top five. Britons are losing up to £10 million per year (The Register story over-estimates the UK total) to the fraudsters and globally experts put the annual take at a staggering $1.5 billion.

That is just wicked.

Nigeria. Population: 133,881,703. Main Industries: Oil, Cocoa, Rubber, Email Scams.

What makes a Slashdot troll do it? What’s the motivation? I’m talking about the tech-savvy and bright troll here rather than just the pointlessly abusive troll. There’s an interesting discussion on Everything in Moderation in which a self-confessed troll explains some of his methods and motives.

One highlight:

“let me just say that, as a slashdot troll, i have a firewall which allows me to dynamically modify my o/s fingerprint, a highly adaptive cookie manager/poisoner that can decode many cookies in realtime (stop using urlencode!), a browser plugin that lets me modify my entire http header including user agent, a database-driven transparent proxy tracker which harvests new proxies 24/7, scripts to generate free email accounts by the 100’s, good web scripting skills, and on a good day around 500 moderation points on slashdot from over 1,000 monitored accounts.”

I knocked together an ASP page that generates an RSS feed for bluebones.net. It validates via the RSS Feed Validator. Its not the kind of thing you can reuse off-the-bat because its got SQL specific to my site in and so on (its not an elegant reusable OO solution – this is ASP for crissakes) but I’ve made the source available because you could easily use it as pseudocode for your own implementation in whatever language.

I never really saw the point of RSS when the only blog-like site I read regularly was slashdot but now I like to read a bit of scripting.com, boingboing, metafilter and others its all started to make sense to me as an idea.

View the ASP Source

Clay Shirky’s latest article, File-sharing Goes Social is an interesting look at where filesharing might go should the RIAA lawsuit bandwagon eventually cause Kazaa and similar networks to degenerate to the point of uselessness.

I don’t think its a done deal that these RIAA lawsuits will force even the “Connectors” to shut down (they seem to have largely ignored the threat so far) as there is an awful lot of them but the future he envisions is a definite possibility.

Watched a short called ‘Outsiders’ on Channel 4 about music outside the mainstream. Best thing in it was Bingo Gazingo who made a great track called You’re Out of the Computer with a band called My Robot Friend. MP3 from the usual places. Can’t find the lyrics online anywhere though, so here’s my best bash. Any corrections? bakert+logoff@gmail.com or stick them in the comments.
Update 2003-10-24 10:14 – after a quick email chat with the robot from www.myrobotfriend.com I got the real lyrics and have replaced my effort with those:

(www.myrobotfriend.com)

you’re out of the computer
written by bingo gazingo

you don’t exist
you’re off my list
you’re just an intruder
you’re out of the computer
i didn’t abuse you
i didn’t shoot you
i just took you
out of the computer
and i turned my head
and i said
you couldn’t be cuter
but you’re out of the computer
because you’re the world’s worst slacker
and i’m the world’s greatest hacker

i didn’t know
you were a hooter

you’re out of the computer

B-I-

what does a hooter mean? it’s a breast? yeah.

N-G-O

i took you out of my heart with a roto router
and i ran you over with my brand new scooter
and i turned my head
and i said
you’re out of the computer
’cause you’re the world’s worst programmer
and i’m the world’s greatest hacker
you were the one i would die for
you were the one i would climb the sky for
you were my lover
but you made me suffer
when you became
the world’s greatest surfer
now you’re
out of the computer

you were subline
but you were offline
with the online
do i have to draw you
a diaroma
you’re the world’s worst scammer
you’re the world’s worst slammer
i wish things could be smoother
but they couldn’t be blacker
i’m the world’s greatest hacker
i’m the world’s greatest hijacker
i’m the world’s greatest…

B-I-

i’m the world’s greatest hacker

N-

and you’re the world’s worst…

G-

limburger… i don’t know… fuck it…

O

i took away your key
i took away your mouse
i’m a turkey
i’m a louse
i threw you out of the house
and now you’re out of the computer
and even if you yell “i need a key!”
you ain’t getting back
’cause you’re out of the computer

i spent wonderful moments
in your components
get out of my memory
get your digitals out of my modules
get your mish-mash out of my macintosh
or i’ll hit you with a swiss wrist watch
you showed them your modem
and as sure as my name is yahuda
you’re out of the computer

we were riding down the highway
when you put your hand up my byway
and you tried to sell me a floppy of my biopsy
and a copy of my autopsy
you looked in my iris
and you gave me a virus
you took away my lap desk
you took away my website
you took away my disk drive
you took away my database
and you drove away with my jalopy
and you scrambled my scanner
and you took away my banner
you’re the world’s worst home shopper
you’re the world’s worst pornographer
and if you see me first
you say hello
and if i see you first
i’ll say hello

hi hello
hello hi

LOG OFF!

You’re out of the compuuuuterrrrrr.

Lyrics from the best band that ever went to my school (The Cooper Temple Clause) are up on the Kick Up the Fire, and Let the Flames Break Loose lyrics page. Just have the raw scans plus one OCR-ed track will do the rest soon. My See This Through and Leave lyrics page is still where its always been. Enjoy.

I am writing a .NET application which has a number of classes that are basically just data holders. They are instantiated by Factory objects that know about the DB but they themselves are just a collection of data members. For example, the User object has Email, Name and other such values but does no real work.

I did create all the getter methods (there are no setter methods as all values are put in the constructor) as methods but then I discovered Properties — one of the few things different between C# and Java. I am now in the process or replacing all get methods with Properties. Probably because I’m used to Java though code like this, “user.Region.Currency.Code” seems strange. I suppose its no different to “user.Region().Currency().Code()” but it just looks wrong!

I can’t find anything on the web about when to use properties and when to use methods (they are the same thing really) and the fact that I don’t really use setter methods means I don’t get that much benefit from Properties anyway. But I am using them to be more idiomatic and why not. What do you think?

Soulseek is not down — its just moved! slsk.org no longer works and the new site is www.slsknet.org

You can make your old version of soulseek work by adding the following lines to your hosts file:

38.115.131.131 sk2.slsk.org
38.115.131.131 www.slsk.org
38.115.131.131 mail.slsk.org
38.115.131.131 server.slsk.org

Enjoy!

I think i came to the party late on this one but a number of my long-term filesharing wishes have just been satisfied on soulseek like When in Rome Kill Me by Cud and Long, Lonely Day by the Go-Betweens. Also the only filesharing system with genuine Razorlight (best new band of the year) songs.

Update 2004-04-24: Soulseek is now based at slsknet.org so I’ve corrected the above URL.