Adventures in Computer Programming – bakert@gmail.com
Inspired mostly by Microsoft employee’s blogs we’ve started a blog for Cable & Wireless developers.
We talked about how no one would read it and how we might get fired for our posts. And then we did it anyway.
Get more bitching and moaning about internal office politics and poor technical decisions imposed from on-high than you could possibly want at ableandtireless.blogspot.com.
Carl Beeth makes a spirited defence of the money usability of US dollar bills but this seems to me to be a case of “usability is what you know”.
Leaving aside the issue of the blind and partially sighted, the most important difference between US and UK money is that you are much less likely to hand over the wrong note in the UK. I suspect that Americans have a learned behaviour where they always check that they are handing over a note of the right denomination but in the UK because of size and (more importantly) colour differences this can happen in the subconscious. You aren’t going to hand over a big purple note (20) when you need to hand over a small blue one (5), even if you are not concentrating on giving over the correct note. After this, advantages of US bills don’t seem so significant.
Google’s AdSense has got to be the most painless way to put advertising on your website. There are no costs involved and a simple online signup procedure. The ads are text-only and relate to the content of the page. Google Weblog lets you try out AdSense with your site (or anyone else’s) without having to sign up.
Here’s Ads for microsoft.com, Ads for slashdot, Ads for bluebones.net and Ads for aol.com (which at the time of writing are all for pants, for some reason).
Google pays about 50 cent per clickthrough (NOT per view) and this number is falling all the time. Actual stats are hard to get hold of because Google is uncharacteristically reticent in publishing stats or allowing others to publish their stats (probably because Google is paying everyone wildly differing amounts). Personally, I prefer my site to stay free of ads. If I had more than the thousand or so hits a day that I am getting maybe greed would overcome me but as the minimum payout is 100 USD I’d probably be waiting months for that.
From selectsmart.com/PHILOSOPHY:
Well the BBC article wasn’t so incorrect after all. England are in the second pot and Sweden are seeded above England, Spain, Germany and Holland.
Get the skinny from Sky Sports.
OK, this really BAD article on bbc.co.uk which CANNOT be true says seedings for Euro 2004 are based on World Cup 2002 performance and the Euro 2004 qualifying round and then goes on about how that’s bad for England. Only we reached the last 8 (5 of that 8 are not at Euro 2004) and we qualified top of our group with the third best record in any group! Given that their application of the premise is so bad I have to wonder about the reliability of their information that it is, “likely to be based on qualifying for Euro 2004 and the 2002 World Cup”.
However, assuming they are right and that is what it is based on then the possibilites are:
MUST be seeded above us:
France (holders, 24, 1R),
Portugal (hosts, 1R)
MIGHT be seeded above us (better in 1 of 2 categories):
Czech Rep. (22, X),
Germany (18, F)
Our record:
England (20, QF)
MUST be seeded below us (worse in both categories):
Sweden (17, 2R),
Spain (17p, QF),
Italy (17, 2R),
Denmark (15, 2R),
Croatia (16p, 1R),
Holland (19p, X),
Russia (14p, 1R),
Greece (18, X),
Bulgaria (17, X)
Switzerland (15, X),
Latvia (16p, X)
Any fair application of the WC2002 + qual rule puts us in the top seed bracket with France, Portugal and probably Germany or maybe Czech Rep. (depending on which of the two qualifying aspects gets accented). Of course this is the final clinching proof that this isn’t the way it will be done by UEFA.
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.