Tangential Ramblings

I've mentioned before the existence of a 3G coldspot around Vauxhall. Here's an update, with further data now available.

The coldspot begins midway across Vauxhall Bridge. By midway, I mean midway. Literally. The rising half of the bridge brings with it a successful interface with the internet. As soon as the bus tips to descend down the gentle slope of the western half of the bridge, the connection disappears. Entirely. I know exactly when my last Google Reader article download can be made, and I have to choose it carefully, to maximise my coldspot reading pleasure. The coldspot continues up the full length of Millbank and St. Margaret Street, round the perimeter of Parliament Square, ending at the turn on to Parliament Street, at which point, the 3G warmth returns. Bloody annoying, I tell you. And here is the 3G coldspot map.

View Larger Map

Following Icann's decision to allow a free-for-all of TLDs, my plan is to register http://intranet and make my millions through advertising aimed at users looking for their colleagues. Don't tell anyone though; it'll be our little secret.

About a week ago, I unsubscribed from the digg feed in Google Reader. The move has added immeasurable value to my life, saving me from navigating through pages and pages of tat in search of that mediocre gem of a story on my morning bus journey to work. I can instead spend the very time saved writing similarly tatty posts to contribute to the wealth of information and drivel that is the internet. Everyone's a winner.

Google is great. Probably not the opening sentence you'd expect given the post's title. Let me explain.

If I had a multitude of email accounts, I could get all of my mails consolidated into a single place, all with a lovely Google-esque front-end. My calendar is similarly lovely in its Google look-and-feel. And with Google Reader, all textual content I could ever wish to read is also presented in a comforting, consistent interface, all of the titles appearing underlined in blue (to indicate their clickability), content in Arial black, mimicking the interface of its other offerings, Search included. Hell, even Google's adverts are comfortingly consistent.

But has this consistency and predictability ripped the very heart and soul out of the internet? I no longer visit my friends' blogs; nor more business-related ones. Instead I access them via Google Reader. When I shared the concept of this post with a colleague today, he relayed a recent story of someone asking him whether he liked his blog's re-design. "What re-design?" came my friend's reply, as like me he'd been accessing all of the guy's content via Google Reader. Before and after the re-design, all content had been available in 12-point Arial black, with bold, blue, underlined headings and blue, underlined links.

Information has been commoditised, in a similar way to how Apple has commoditised music with iTunes. We as users have gained hugely through consistency, immediacy and ease of access. But we have lost out too. No longer are we delighted by the beauty of someone's site design, nor do we appreciate the painstaking effort that has gone into the stylesheets that underpin it. Instead, we scroll through our content through a consistent front-end, hungry for the content itself over and above the beauty of its presentation. With iTunes, content of the musical variety is accessible literally at the click of a button, without the opportunity to experience the joys of the physical products that accompany the music, the record sleeve, the vinyl itself, or the CD artwork and the booklet's contents.

Maybe it's time to take a step back, to appreciate the frame within which the content sits, or to appreciate the artwork accompanying a music purchase.

There are two auto-completes that are really pissing me off right now. First of all, my BlackBerry has suddenly started converting "a " into "on on ". So whenever I space off an a, it suddenly gets replaced. If I hit backspace once, it converts it back. On on real fucking annoyance, I have to say.

My second one came today. i'm working on SharePoint implementation, within which there is a concept of My Sites. If I refer to Your My Site in an email (edited by Word), it changes it to You're My Site the moment I space off the y of My; one can only assume to avoid the mistaken punctuation of the Owen Paul track You're My Favourite Waste Of Time. Ho hum.

I received a marketing/spam email earlier today from the following "person":

Email address: email@sainsburys.emv1.net
Friendly name: Sainsbury's Onlien [sic] Groceries
Subject: Great 'Buy 1 get 1 FREE' deals for the sunny weekend

Despite the content of the email itself seeming to be genuine (complete with professional graphics and generally Sainsbury-esque content, a few things threw me. Firstly, I don't like getting marketing emails from 'people' for whom the domain name is different from the company's online presence. emv1.net is not a domain I recognise.

Secondly, the typo in the sender's friendly name is unprofessional, increasing the "watch out; this might be spam" part of my little brain.

And finally, the inconsistent capitalisation of the subject line, with a capital B for buy, a fully capitalised FREE but everything else sentence-case is a bit weird.

All in all, I'm confident it's not spam. But it did little to avail any worries I might have.

(Oh, and as an aside, what's with the quotes around the Buy 1 get 1 FREE deal? By encasing the deal in quotes, does it mean that Sainsbury's (or indeed emv1.net) aren't obliged to honour it?)

Lots of people hate YouTube. If you're one of them, please bear with me, and trust me when I ask you to watch this video. (Huge thanks to Elise for pointing it out.) I've watched this video twice. The first time I was blown away. The second time, it only got better. Six minutes and 14 seconds of your life. Twelve minutes and 28 seconds if you watch it twice like I did.

It's absolutely mind-blowing. Having watched it twice and typed a blog-post, I'm still grinning like a Cheshire cat.

The award has to go to the implementation team behind Microsoft Word's Reading view. It's the default view in which documents open in recent versions of late, unless you find the tick-box in the options menu that saves you from the pain.

I'm genuinely hoping that the technical implementation missed the mark by a long shot, because getting the technical implementation so woefully wrong would be way more forgivable than anyone writing such dreadful business requirements.

I opened a twelve-page document today, which displayed across 154 "screens", the first two of which were visible on opening the document. The first screen was entirely blank; the second contained a single word, wrapped over two lines.

Dreadful.

Google is doing what AOL tried to do a few years back. They're working on providing stuff that will keep more and more of your internet viewing time within the confines of Google. But they're going about customer engagement in a very different way.

Take Google Mail. This was a great introduction. But besides threading, a slightly more appealing user interface and a greater level of storage, it had little to tempt a Yahoo! or Hotmail user across. So they developed Google Apps, allowing you to fully control your own domain's mail through the same interface. Oh, and you can then manage all of your domain's email accounts through that same interface. And it's integrated with Google Calendar. Sweet.

Aside from email, what else do people do a lot of online? Ah, read stuff. Google Reader enters stage left. Now you can read the stuff that you generally read within a single interface, all in a single place. (I often wonder whether I'm losing out because of the resulting blandness of the peripheral experience. That's an aside.) Oh, and then there's news, catered for by Google News—news reading is just not suited to Google Reader.

Why limit things to traditionally online activities? Now we have Google Docs and Spreadsheets, taking albeit a tiny proportion of viewing hours away from Microsoft..Slowly they're drawing us into a Google world, one which you may or may not like, or indeed approve of.

AOL tried to do the same five years ago, but there is a key difference between the two approaches: Google invites you to join their world; AOL foisted everything upon you the moment you inserted that wretched CD into your machine. The browser itself, email, shopping, messaging, everything was AOL branded and unless you had a certain amount of technical ability, an amount that most people are devoid of (not a dig, just reality), you couldn't escape from the resulting AOL-branded hell-hole.

I like what Google's doing. I enjoy using their products, and I feel that they add huge value to my online experience. I despised AOL with a passion, and whenever I used my parents' PC (brought to me by AOL), the hatred raged further while I hunted for the uninfected IE shortcut on the desktop.

Whenever things are foisted upon a user, whether they're good or bad, there is an equal and opposite reaction by the user, Newton's fourth law, I believe.

Movie websites annoy the shit out of me. Not the sites themselves, but their URLs. I rarely (never) visit them, preferring to get any such data from IMDB.

A Google search for "themovie" brings back pages from the following sites as the top five results:

• www.madagascar-themovie.com/
• www.guysandballs-themovie.com/
• www.simpsonsmovie.com/
• 300themovie.info/
• zeitgeistmovie.com/

The list goes on, no doubt through Google's 493,000 (approximate) results. Basically, when a movie creates an associated movie, they generally strap "themovie" on to the end of the movie's name, possibly with a preceding hyphen, then add whichever domain extension that's still available.

Would it not be better for one of the big movie companies (or even an independent body) to consolidate all of its campaign sites (for that's essentially what they are) under a single URL (themovie.com, for example), each movie taking its own sub-domain? 300.themovie.com, simpsons.themovie.com etc.?

As well as centralising control for the seemingly endless proliferation, it would allow a more logical experience for the end user.

The packaging for Microsoft Office 2007 sucks big time. It made my recent such acquisition traumatic and thoroughly unrewarding.

Whenever you buy an Apple product *, you know you're in for a fabulous, rewarding experience when you open it. Every component is meticulously designed for pleasure and function. Irrespective of the product itself, you know that by the time you've got to it, you've enjoyed every moment of discovery—every unfolded box, every individually-wrapped component, every carefully crafted booklet. By the time I reached my Microsoft product (no more, no less than a holographic CD), I wanted to snap it in half out of sheer desperation and frustration. (I didn't.)

Once I was through the ubiquitous cellophane wrapper, I was confronted with an inelegant frosted-plastic case about the size of a standard paperback fiction book, its only redeeming design feature being one rounded corner. Immediately beneath the plastic was some thick, glossy paper marketing the product therein. But the puzzle of how to get to the CD itself was confounding to say the least—something worthy of the Krypton Factor's Intelligence round. A red tag seemed to indicate the intended direction of travel, but I was unable to figure out what it meant, or how it should be operated.

In the end, I prised apart the plastic packaging, breaking the hinge that I later discovered to be the critical part of the preferred method of opening, and tearing slightly the paper that supported the marketing blurb. I'd hope that the experience highlighted Microsoft's lack of attention to product design, as opposed to my own intention. I'll let you decide that.

A couple of shards of plastic later, I was confronted with the CD itself, but I took another five minutes to find the 25-character reference number that is crucial to the Office install. Looking in vain all over the outer part of the packaging, I eventually found it on a sticker on the rear of the inner portion of the packaging—not obvious at all.

Overall, a dreadful experience that has sullied the product itself.

* My Apple experience has been limited to iPods, but I understand the same to be true of the wider Apple range.

I've just found this fabulous little API from Google. It allows you to create parameterised charts of any size which display within a URL as a png file. Here are the details.

You provide the parameters, including data, as part of the URL and the PNG can be embedded wherever you like.

Lovely.

rickroll (v. tr.) [rik-rohl]: to post a link to a video that itself looks appealing, but which actually links to something dull like Rick Astley's hit single Never Gonna Give You Up.

Some time ago, I started using GMail as my mail client. The only way I could do this without changing my email address (me@domain.com) was to auto-forward all email to me@domain.com to me.domain@gmail.com. I could then configure GMail to respond from my me@domain.com account, but it did this by putting "From me@domain.com on behalf of me.domain@gmail.com" at the top of each email. Rubbish.

Recently, Google Apps enhanced its functionality to allow you to direct your MX records directly at its servers, and for it to control your domain's email address. So now, me@domain.com can be accessed directly through GMail. And I can even change the GMail logo to my own domain logo. No reference to GMail apart from a google url and a "Powered by Google" footer, accompanied by a diddy logo. Fabulous!

Now I need to figure out how to migrate all my me.domain@gmail.com mail to me@domain.com. It's no mean feat, by all accounts.

Today, Amazon launched their new product: Kindle. And what a bag of bollocks it appears to be.

First, a summary. Kindle is a portable device that allows you to download the text of books and read them on the go. It is capable of storing over 200 books, weighs in at 292 grams—compared to an iPhone's 135 grams—and measures 19cm by 13.5cm, very similar dimensions to your standard paperback fiction book. And it's a mere 1.8cm thick. The cost: $399 (£195 and falling, not that it'll be available in the UK).

So, it's small in size, relatively big in storage, and light. It's not cheap, but not crazily expensive.

Now to its drawbacks.

The first obvious one is that it's about as proprietary as you can get.

• Books are downloaded over a bespoke wireless network—Amazon Whispernet, built on a Spring mobile network. Maybe this is a great idea for Amazon, allowing it to safeguard revenue streams, but it strikes me as a bizarre choice for the user, given the wireless they already no doubt have at home, and the increasingly fast connection that comes with their mobile phone
• Blogs can be read on it, but not via your industry-standard RSS. It uses its own bespoke Kindle file format, so blog owners that their content to be accessible need to do some work to make their content available in that format. WTF?
• And each device comes with its own email address. Fabulous. Just what I need: another email address. Only by sending pdfs and docs to this email address can such documents be accessed on the device.

The screen is not backlit which allows the battery to last for 30 hours; but not having the option for backlighting is a big weakness. Its screen has a good resolution enabling beautiful font display, but don't expect a reaction when you touch it. A touch-screen it ain't, despite this becoming an expectation of portable devices during the three years since Kindle was on the drawing board.

This is primarily a reading device, so why it has a fully-functioning QWERTY keyboard I have no idea. (Further, why the keys are angled to suit the few true touch-typists among us beggars belief.) It would have been much more appealing to save the space (or make the screen bigger), and incorporate a touch-screen keyboard into its, er, touch-screen. And even the keyboard itself is bespoke. Its only symbols seem to be forward slash, @ and the full-stop/period.

And get this: it's black and white. Actually, it's capable of four shades of grey, 15,999,996 fewer colours than the iPhone.

All in all, it's weak. Maybe it's competing in an entirely different market to that in which other portable devices sit—aiming at the book reader rather than the technophile—but nonetheless, these people are likely to be familiar with mobile devices and functionally-rich keyboards. It's the equivalent of Nintento unveiling the Atari 2600 in 2006 instead of the Wii.

Amazon itself admits it's a technology company, not a retailer. It's had a go here, but it's missed the mark by a mile. Maybe I'm also way off the mark with this, but my first impressions are not good. You may have gathered.

(BTW, if you're still reading, the title of this post was inspired by a 1980s TV advert for Kinder Eggs. I know nothing of the advert itself other than the line Kinder; Chocadoobies. I googled chocadoobies to do some research, and am pleased to announce that no reference has yet been made to them, whatever they may be. So here's the first, along with second and third. Does anyone else remember the ad.?)

I have a problem understanding trackbacks. As far as I'm aware, they're a way of officially linking to a blog post. But beyond that, I'm neither sure of how they work nor of their use. Please help ill-educated Dan by providing a comprehensive, layman's description.

Google's possibly the most powerful and well-recognised brands of our time. So tell me: what colour is each of the letters? Please use the comment facility for a non-cheaty guess.

I know, but only because I remember the acronym that their colours spell out. (Mnemonic would be a step too far, as it's hardly easily memorable.)

No looking, now.

I was very excited when Google announced Wednesday that Gmail would now support IMAP. Co-incidentally, the announcement came on the same day that I exchanged my defunct MDA Vario I for a whizzy MDA Vario III.

IMAP allows me to send email from my mail client on my phone (Outlook Mobile), for inbound Gmail messages to automatically appear in Outlook, and for the whole thing to be sync-ed. Or it would if it worked. There is a known problem with WM5 and WM6 causing inbound HTML messages to appear blank. If it gets fixed, then the whole experience will be sweet. In the meantime, I know that you've emailed me, but I don't know what you've said. And I'm annoyed.

I tried to download a programme for the BBC's iPlayer tonight. Below were the hurdles I had to jump over to get to where I wanted:

• You're not using Internet Explorer. That's the only browser we support. [Dan switches to IE]
• You need to install iPlayer. [Dan installs iPlayer]
• You need to register for iPlayer [Dan registers]
• You need to install a security update for Windows Media Player. [Dan downloads]
• A license [sic] is required to play the selected video content. Are you sure you want to open the web page to obtain the license [sic]? [Dan hits Yes]

Not the best user experience to get someone to use your product. I then had to download the 578Mb programme itself (titled Beautiful Young Minds). I'm 7% in so far, at which point I realised it was sucking the life out of any meagre bandwidth I might have wanted to use to, say, post about the ordeal I'd just gone through to register.

It's hardly Joost now, is it? The content may be better, but the UE sucks.

Update: iPlayer uses a P2P thingamyjig called Kontiki which hoards your bandwidth and gives your CPU an unnecessary workout (courtesy of a process called Kservice.exe). And this is when iPlayer's completely shut down. Dreadful, BBC.

Every so often, I get an email from those nice people at Friends Reunited, a site I've barely returned to since registering during the buzz that surrounded its launch. Here's the title of the email:

Dan, New people listed on Friends Reunited

And here's the crux of the email itself:

Your Friends Reunited Update: NEW people listed and NEW profiles for you to read.

Putting aside the grammatical faux pas of succeeding a comma with a capital letter in the title (something that never fails to irk me), it's not particularly compelling is it? Two or more people who I may or may not know have added themselves to the FR user base. And there are two or more new (NEW, even) profiles for me to read too, which I suppose could actually be those of the two (or more) people who've just registered. Forgive me please for dragging my mouse swiftly towards the Archive button.

I'm not a huge online shopper. I dabble here and there: the odd router from dabs.com, flights from Expedia, quite a bit of stuff from Amazon and odds and sods in and amongst from various other companies.

I was surprised recently on finding out that most shopping baskets empty when you either leave the site in question or leave your decision-making process that bit too long.

This strikes me as stupid on the part of the retailer.

I think the principle behind the decision is that if you don't get around to checking out, then you mustn't actually want the products. I disagree.

Often, I'll put something in my shopping basket either fully intending to buy that item or prompting me to buy something similar—an iron, for example, but not necessarily that iron.

The retailer's decision to remove the iron from my basket may result in my forgetting completely that I need a new iron, causing either irritation on my part when I next need to iron my shirts, or an impulsive buy from an offline retailer (Robert Dyas?) when I next see an iron in the flesh/metal/plastic/Teflon™.

Surely much better for the retailer to have a conveniently placed Empty Basket button to allow those shoppers annoyed by the persistent basket to let its artificial bottom fall out ready for their next shop, which may also never see the light of the check-out. Windows shopping, if you will. ([Dan bows] I thank you.)

That way, I get to save stuff indefinitely in my basket, the online equivalent of leaving my Sainsbury's trolley on aisle three while popping for a haircut, returning to find it where I left it, contents still intact. Not that I do that, of course. That'd be madness!

It seems that the title used in digg articles is of paramount importance in attracting hits, and associated diggs. Which is the likely reason this article received so many diggs (653):

How to make a homemade gun that can send a penny ripping through a can

I struggle to imagine a post better geared to attract the geek's mouse-click.

BBC News' articles have gone all techie, each now succeeded by a little box inviting readers to bookmark the page through any one of del.icio.us (quaintly written Delicious), Digg, reddit, Facebook or StumbleUpon.

Interesting way to go. Not one I'd associate with the BBC.

I need an extra flag in Google Reader. Currently, posts can be. starred: they're either good or they're not. And you may have noticed, unless of course you read my posts through Google Reader, that I now have a little widget on the right hand side of my blog exposing my last five starred items.

But often there are posts that I want to flag for reading at a later date. It's because either I don't have time to read the full post right now, or I'm skimming through my unread items on a device that's unsuitable for the content. (I skim through a lot of my subscriptions on my MDA Vario on the way to work, a device that's fine for text, but cumbersome for anything more advanced.)

So Google, I'd like a new flag, one that says "judging by the title, this article may well be of interest. But I'm not able to qualify this possibility right now, so just keep it to one side for me will you until I can, there's a good chap."

Thanks.

I saw a response to a defect recently. It read:

Can't be fixed, so it's a feature.

What a wonderful approach to development.

Pádraig Harrington's Wikipedia page has been updated 332 times in total since its creation at 3pm on 11 November, 2004. 141 of those updates were made today, 133 of which have been made since he won the play-off against Sergio García in The Open this evening. One such update corrected someone's assertion that Carnoustie was in Augusta., which was live for one minute.

Each version is stored and can be compared with any other version.

Wikipedia's top ten languages account for a total of over five million articles. It's mind-boggling when you think about it.

Sympathies to Jon for his recent faux pas (and subsequent retraction) thinking he'd reached his 100th post. I've been pondering my somewhat distant 1,000th post (this is number 924), for a while thinking I was closer than I actually am. The url suggests that this is post 994, but test posts and mistaken duplicates (click the submit button twice used to generate two identical posts) has resulted in a 7% deletion rate, the urls incrementing without any associated content.

Oddly enough, the dearth of posts in April (twelve, equalled only once in May 2005) attracted more traffic than ever (115,622 hits from 23,988 visits). Maybe less is more.

Where'd it go? It used to be a little BBC icon. Now, just a little white square.

I'm being inundated with comment spam, despite having an albeit weak captcha aimed at filtering the automated stuff out.

I received 437 such comments in the last 19 hours, an average of one every 2 minutes 37 seconds.

Need to speak to Rob to see whether there's a better way of getting shot of it. There are certain characteristics of the comments that make them easy to identify.

I wouldn't care, but none of them ever see the light of day, given that I'm in pre-moderation mode.

I installed Google Gears shortly after its beta launch a few weeks ago. The only thing I currently use it for is my Google Reader, but I can't help but think that it's missed the point.

The overarching concept is that web applications can be made available even while you're offline. But unless I'm missing something, it requires an active decision from the user in advance of going offline. You click a little green arrow at the top of the site, and hey presto, it goes off and stores a whole bunch of stuff that is needed to present that site to you when you're offline.

But I don't always know when I'm going to be cut off from the internet. Often, I disconnect quickly and unexpectedly (either by choice or technical fault) yet still want to be able to access those applications.

Wouldn't it be better if the activity that ensued when you clicked the green arrow was happening as a matter of course in the background while you're online? Then, when my network connection disappears, I don't miss a beat. I'm simply warned that my information may be a little stale.

Just a thought.

My previous post (see below) was quite long. Just after hitting the Blog this! button (that's what the button says), I decided in an instant to click back into the content entry text box, hit CTRL+A (highlight everything) swiftly followed by CTRL+C (copy to clipboard). All this while the next page was loading, over broadband.

That next page was the you've been timed out page. The annoying thing about my blogging software is that it doesn't auto-save partial posts.

Imagine my delight when I could copy my clipboard into a second attempt. I think you can only imagine.

YouGov's branding seems odd to me. It strikes me that some branding people decided that they wanted to embrace the second person plural, so branded it such. But the people who use the site are, by definition, living life in the first person singular. And as a user, you has a different meaning than was intended by the branding folk. If anything, you for the user could be construed to mean government.

The same could be said of YouTube. And the BBC's email address for sending pictures: yourpics@bbc.co.uk. But not of myspace or my.yahoo.

Ever since I can remember trying, this site has come second when searching for my name on google.com. I don't mean when you search for my name itself; I mean when you substitute the words my and name with the names that make up my name, first name and last name. I've always been pipped by www.myname.com.

Well those days are over. I'm now number one in Google's rankings. Huzzah!

So Google Maps has introduced a cool new Streetview feature, enabling you to see images of the sides of each street as you glide around the map.

I noticed that London is not covered by this feature. So I plan on taking a slightly extended lunch tomorrow to map London. I figure an hour and a half should cover it, equipped with my 1.3 mega pixel camera. I'll do the major bus routes (taking photos from both sides) and then email the photos off to Google for them to incorporate. The 8, 26, 55, 87, 452, 137 should get me 95% coverage, I would have thought..

The Google Maps model gave us our first high-profile insight into what can happen on a website when it doesn't wait for the user to do something to prepare what might next need displaying. By downloading the maps immediately surrounding the map you're looking at, it allowed you to drag around the map seamlessly. It was revolutionary and was the forerunner for that horrible phrased, Web 2.0.

Most webpages, this one included at the time of writing, don't do that. They display a page complete with a bunch of links to unloaded pages and wait for the user to click one before doing anything. What if there was a little link counter running in the background that weighted each link on a page based on its likelihood of being clicked according to users' behaviour? And then some Firefox plug-in came along and on accessing a page, called the associated weighting information and started downloading the pages in the background in descending order of weight. Then if the user happened to click one of the most popular links, the page would appear instantly. Maybe the idea is superseded by the speed offered by broadband, but I'd like to think not.

One day we will look back on the QWERTY keyboard and laugh at the fact that we used it at all.

(As an aside, whenever I type QWERTY in a post/document, I always have to find each letter through traditional typing techniques. I never think to sweep my finger across the top row until I've already typed the Y.)

Congratulations, little site. After 992 days in existence and 841 posts, you've have your 1,000th comment.

The momentous comment was from Thomas in response to post 839 at 2.02pm today.

Of course, you're a website, so you deal in 1s and 0s. So you're eagerly awaiting comment 1,024, right? Shouldn't be long now.

For the statistically-obsessed, some averages for you.

• 1.19 comments per post
• 0.85 posts per day
• 1.01 comments per day
• 204 words per post

That is all.

A couple of neat captchas designed to go beyond the traditional warped letters and random sums. For those not in the know, captcha stands for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart, and it's that step you have to go through sometimes when you buy tickets, add comments etc.

First of all, asirra from Microsoft Research. Basically, you're presented with a picture of nine cats and dogs, and you have to pick out the cats. Apparently, asirra stands for Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access. (I wonder if they're going to offer me a fortune to buy my domain name off me.)

And then there's Hot Captcha, the same concept, but with attractive and unattractive women/men (you can choose).

Great concept.

So, it seems that DotP is dead. Its death was sealed by the Department of Health's website moving off the DotP platform on Wednesday, 40 days shy of DotP's fourth birthday.

It could have lasted longer and been more successful; it could have died a death. In the end, it achieved something in between. It would be interesting to know how many clicks it supported during its 1,420 days' existence.

I've just been futzing around with Greasemonkey. It's basically a Firefox extension that allows you to install little scripts that can do cool stuff.

The original reason for installing it was to exploit Matt Cutts' advice on more efficient management of Google Mail. That needed Google's own saved searches script installing. That works very nicely—thanks, Matt.

I then had a look around for other scripts, and found a gem: postcode linkify. It basically identifies postcodes when a page loads, and displays them all as links to the relevant Google Map. I can't begin to estimate how many times I've copied a postcode from a page, opened Google Maps and pasted the postcode in to find out where something is. I love this.

There's also Tin Foil Hat, which displays the correct URL of all TinyURLs on hover. Quite useful if you don't trust the source.

What a wonderful idea. Katherine Gallia has developed a set of six stylesheets that present themselves depending on the time of day. She has sunrise, morning, noon, afternoon, sunset and twilight.

Lovely concept. I might even implement it if I had the time and skill to develop six stylesheets. I have enough trouble keeping on top of the one.

When I want to attach a file to an email in Google Mail, there's a redundant click. First, I click the Attach a file link, then I click Browse. The first click brings up the text box that will store the filename; the second one brings up the standard file browser pop -up.

If I want to attach something else, I click Attach another file and then Browse again.

For a little while, Google had removed the need for a second click when attaching further files. Not sure if this was an enhancement or a mistake, but either way it's gone.

It's not the end of the world, but it's a little frustrating.

I'm a big fan of the Cool Tools website. Among other things, it's directed me to a number of useful products, including the LapDawg (bed-based laptop stand), a knitted skiing helmet, a fibre optic flashlight adaptor, a Gorillapod, the Banana Bunker and the Tosagata Hocho 6" Santoku knife. None of these have I bought.

Today's cool tool was the Storm Whistle that can apparently reach a volume of 118–120db, which apparently is three times the volume of the Fox 40, which only reaches 115db. (Logarithmic scale before you ask.) I'm not that bothered about the product itself, but enjoyed the following excerpt:

"I did some non-scientific testing against my Fox 40 (rated 115 decibels) by having my son blow into each of them across a soccer field."

I just loved the image of this.

Dad: son, you stand there. I will walk to the other end of the field. When I raise by left hand, you will blow into the Fox 40. When I raise by right hand, you will blow into the Storm Whistle.
Son: but Daaaaad!
Dad: [already marching into the distance]

I wonder whether this constitutes abuse and more generally, how much money is saved in testing by using family members.

There is a four-level hierarchy of people in terms of their web knowledge, as far as I'm aware.

At the top, there's Rob. Rob from Sydney. He knows everything, and woe betide anyone who falls short of the mark. He knows stylesheets, HTML, databases, template systems, php, Web 2.0 and anything else that's worth knowing.

Next down the chain is Elise. She knows lots of good stuff about CSS, HTML, information design and holds her own on the template stuff. She also has a great understanding of how it all hangs together.

Next is me. I dabble in stylesheets and can find my way around a template, but editing is a trial-by-error exercise which sometimes comes off. Other times I give up and revert back to my handily saved original.

And last but not least is Rob. East London Rob. He shows wonderful willing, but will be the first to admit his limitations.

It's funny how people look up the chain when they need help. I'm glad to help Rob (East London) out when he needs to do something, but it's nice to have someone to turn to (Elise, Sydney Rob) when I need help.

I wonder if the chain continues on up, and whether Rob has his own support mechanism above him. And if he does, whether he'd admit it.

The other day I noticed for the first time a .travel domain name. It was a TV advert, promoting Florida with the following url:

www.VISITFLORIDA.travel/UK

With that capitalisation.

It's odd that I've not seen more of them, given they've been around for almost 18 months. Maybe people have steered away from them because they are as confused by them as I was. The fact that there was a UK at the end of the URL didn't help at all, as my immediate reaction was to look for an associated CO.

But even without the extension, it's confusing. It just seems odd to have such a long string as a top-level domain. (The only other six-letter TLD in use is .museum.) Maybe that's why they opted for the bizarre (and to me similarly confusing) capitalisation.

Whatever the reason, it's hardly a memorable URL.

I bet there's a high level of overlap between developers and digg posters. No rocket science there.

But as I've said a couple of times before, the grammatical correctness of digg posters is dreadful. Some of it is plain ignorance; some of it is laziness and is symptomatic of a low attention to detail.

I'm not so worried about the ignorance. You don't need to know how to spell to be a good coder, nor do you need to be able to punctuate its/it's correctly. My concern is with laziness.

If the posters are this lazy when it comes to content that could be seen by thousands, possible millions of readers, why would they be any different when it came to coding?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt it. The moral of the story: never employ a developer with more than three mistakes in their CV. If you do, there's a risk that your code will be messy and buggy.

Thoughts?

I've spent the entirety of the last 31 months with unmoderated comments on this site. There has been the occasional one that I've deleted because of offence or stepping over the line, and quite a few sporadic spam comments that have gone by the wayside. But in the main, I've welcomed the few comments I've received (917 undeleted comments from 797 posts).

However, recently I've resorted to pre-moderating comments. That means reading the comments before allowing to appear as part of the site. The reason is the recent arrival of a new spammer, one who doesn't seem phased by the captcha.

This flummoxed Francis at first despite the instructional copy (the same comment coming through four times), so I've made it a little more obvious, adding a background image to the comment box on focus. I don't think it works in IE, but hopefully it hammers home the message to Firefox users.

This is a new acronym invented by me. It stands for Not That Simple Syndication.

A little while ago, my friend Rob asked me the seemingly simple question:

What is an RSS feed?

Below is my response.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, one of my favourite acronyms ever. It basically means that the content of your blog is put into a standard pre-defined format (titles are tagged as titles, content is just text, etc.) so that it can be read by anything that knows what the format is. This is done using a language called XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language).

[...]

The great thing about RSS feeds is that they're consistent. So instead of opening a bunch if Internet Explorer or Firefox windows to see all the stuff I'm interested in, I can do it all from a single place: Google Reader. News sites have RSS feeds (you can check BBC Sport etc. from there), as do blogs and other sites with time-sensitive content.

Apparently, this was not simple enough an explanation. Hence the replacement of RSS with NTSS as an XML standard. (Just in case RSS is not actually an XML standard, please don't comment. I have neither the time nor the inclination to bother entering into such a debate.) You may need to update your RSS buttons accordingly.

Francis pointed me to a product called WriteRoom. It basically makes your entire screen black, giving you a distraction-free canvas for noting down ideas, stories, etc. Apart from being a neat idea, the site it was surfaced on also has a neat little feature, which is both useful and sweet.

The toggle width link next to the title widens the main content column and removes the right-hand modules section, allowing you to focus on the content itself. Beautifully, it does it gradually, as if you're widening the browser window. Lovely use of stylesheets, or some sort of technology.

A very balanced, objective synopsis of the Mac and its users on the Guardian's website from Charlie Brooker, the best quote being:

Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

Let the comments begin.

Hell I'm pissed.

I browse through my digg articles in Google Reader and stumble upon one that draws my attention. (Actually, I tend to click each one of interest and then go straight back to my GR-scrolling-task to look for other interesting stuff. Only when I've got to the bottom do I turn my attention to the content of interest.)

At the end of this process, I have a bunch of digg tabs stacked up on the right of my Firefox tabs. In days of yore (which I think ended yesterday), clicking on the digg title opened the article of interest in the same browser tab. As of today, it spawns a new one. So if there are six articles that catch my eye I have to spawn twelve browser tabs.

Hell I'm pissed.

And these are just from the titles, never mind the summaries.

• 7 Sex Shockers from scoreboard27. Don't start a sentence with a number, unless you write it out in full
• Diggnation viewers map arround the world. Join now. Lets make this happen!! from noath. Apart from misspelling around, there should really be an apostrophe in let's
• Where do the Super Bowl losers t-shirts and hats go? from mace. Losers' should have a trailing apostrophe
• 4 Hate-Crime Beating Teens Get Probation ONLY from davenp35. Apart from the lousy structure, see the first item above
• Jack Thompson finally loosing his license? from Toco8804. One too many Os in losing
• Modified Mario's from Mmedia. Mario's what?
• NFL now says OK to people displaying the game on TV's larger than 55". from Lixie. See above
• 8 Simple Steps to Build Traffic For Your Internet Startup from BoneyB. That numbers one again
• 3 Women Charged With Sexually Abusing A 16-Year-Old Boy from toast1226. And again
• 'Terror-free' gas now available; Oil from non-terror states from AdmiralAdama. Lower case after a semi-colon
• Oxygens HD sound cards compared in-depth to X-Fi from theraindog. Apostrophe needed in Oxygen's
• R.I.P Mollie Ivins from interg12. I never understand it when the last letter of an acronym is deemed not to warrant a full stop
• Boston bomb scare suspects hold press conference...its a total must see! from tim507. Ouch! It's a total mustn't see.

I've had a bit of a traumatic weekend on the iPod sync. front. Before we headed to the US in 2004, I copied all of our music on to my old laptop and then on to our two iPods. Since then, we have gone through four life events:

• Two failed hard-drives (one each)
• Two replacement iPods (one each)

In the meantime, I've downloaded a bunch of music (completely above board through iTunes, I hasten to add), and my wife has done the same. Different tunes of course, but tunes nonetheless.

All of this has meant that our three music collections (what should be the 'master' on my laptop, my iPod and that of my wife) have got out of sync.

Even more frustrating is that in the intervening two and a half years, Gracenote's database entries for old stuff have changed slightly. Typos have been corrected, ands have changed to ampersands, regular parentheses (Disc 1) have become square [Disc 1] and so on. And not as rarely as you might think.

The net outcome of this is that I'm finding it very difficult to reconcile any two music sources. I've got spreadsheets into which I've copied library listings (one tab called "Old iPod", one called "New iPod" etc.) and I've created artificial unique names for each entry, stringing together song title with artist and album name. VLOOKUP shows me the songs that don't match, but it doesn't tell me whether this is because the track's genuinely missing on one source, or whether Cigarettes and Alcohol is now Cigarettes & Alcohol.

Now I'm down to a list of 672 mis-matching tunes (were on old iPod, haven't found their way to new iPod) from 119 CDs, 522 of which come from 50 albums. So I think I'll target these and call it a day.

There are two big issues with iTunes.

Firstly, the DRM stuff is really frustrating. I own the tunes (either through download from iTunes or buying CDs), yet I am not allowed to copy them from one hard disk (the iPod) to another (the 'puter).

And secondly, even if song details aren't necessarily the same throughout their life due to the issues highlighted above, please give them unique reference numbers that stay constant. That way, I can easily and confidently establish the mis-match between two music sources, thus saving a whole day's effort. Amazon uses (invented?) the ASIN (American Standard Identification Number) which sits at the product level. String a three-digit number on to the end of this, and you're sorted.

Just in case I didn't have enough friends and acquaintances called Rob with a web presence, it seems that another will be adding themselves to that list imminently. An acquaintance, I hasten to add. He will add confusion to the world currently comprised of Rob, Rob and Rob.

A colleague that I can't seem to shake, let's call him Rob for that is his name, has decided to join the wonder that is the internet. I used to work with him back in 2000–2, and like a sticky Twix wrapper that just won't come off your shoe, no matter how hard you shake your leg, he turned up in my workplace again in 2006. To be fair, I turned up in his (he was working there first), but that would be missing the point.

Today, he sent an email entitled "blog" that was for some reason rather bereft of prepositions. Below are the entire contents of that email:

what do you do then?

What are you up to? Drink?

Will find out what my new timetable is....

cheers,

Rob

The four dots after the last sentence are a grammatical faux pas on his part, btw.

Anyway, I've directed him to blogger, but I think there will need to be a little hand-holding over the next few days as he gets to grips with the world of t'internet, and indeed thereafter.

The purpose of his blog will be to post about "nothing", which I have to say I'm looking forward to.

I find long periods of time quite difficult to visualise. Anything more than about six weeks, and it becomes "a long time", but without a comparator, it's difficult to give it a frame of reference.

I'm looking forward to a big event due in about 75 days' time. A little under eleven weeks. In order to picture this, I work back from today by the same amount of time and imagine a relatively memorable event that took place that many days ago. 67 days ago today, I took a trip to Newcastle on business. I can vividly remember that event, and it doesn't seem that long ago at all, and that's roughly how long I have to wait until the big event.

It would be good if I had a little app. that plucked the nearest such event from my Google Calendar to give me a comparator for any given date I'm eagerly awaiting.

I think that the BBC has introduced some new static copy on its News homepage. Just under the Sport Headlines title on the right-hand side, it reads:

Cricket: Dismal England collapse

I'm pretty sure it's static. I think it's been there ever since the Australia tour began on 10 November. I can't imagine there's a need for it to be content manageable.

I'm annoyed. Very annoyed. Here's why.

In Internet Explorer 6, CTRL + central mouse wheel used to change the font size. It used to drag the fonts from smallest to smaller to medium to large to largest. As far as I can recollect, wheel towards you increased the font sizes; wheel away from you reduced them.

In IE7, two changes have occurred:

• Instead of changing the font sizes, CTRL + central mouse wheel now zooms in and out of the page
• The scroll wheel has reversed its behaviour. Towards you now makes things smaller

The first of these issues doesn't seem to take into account stylesheets particularly well. For the BBC News website, things look fine. For this site, the different components drift towards or away from one another, as you zoom out and zoom in respectively.

The latter is annoying not because of its inconsistency with IE6, but because of that with Firefox 2.0.

Now I'm not saying Microsoft is wrong. There are certainly arguments for zoom rather than font scaling from an accessibility perspective. And as for the zoom direction, you could argue that either Mozilla or Microsoft is right:

• Mozilla: dragging the wheel towards you brings the content closer
• Microsoft: dragging the wheel up has a notion of increasing things

My issue is with the inconsistency this causes in people's user experiences. While Microsoft may have had some logical explanation for changing the behaviour of the scroll-wheel, the fact that people had got used to its old behaviour meant that (in my view) it was too deep-rooted to change.

So, now we have two products, both of which I use to do the same thing (in different contexts—sometimes things don't work properly in Firefox, and other times I want to do a spot of IE testing), the two of which react in diametrically opposite ways when I perform the same function.

I'm annoyed

It seems that these two 'qualities' are mutually exclusive: a healthy understanding of grammar and an above average appetite for all things technical.

While I've already referred to the sliding standards of people at large, it seems this trend is particularly prevalent among techies.

To prove this point, simply scroll down the titles and short summaries of articles on digg, and cringe away. Inconsistent mixed-casing, heinous apostrophe crimes and overall grammatical disappointment abound. It's not as if they have to write long essays; digg summaries are really short.

I'm not sure whether it's an education issue or one of attention to detail. Either way, it's distressing, and one of the reasons you rarely get well-rounded techies.

Today I'm wearing my DotP t-shirt, under the assumption that it will be replaced as the platform for Directgov this weekend. Fingers crossed.

It will still exist, supporting DH, for the time being. But I don't think it will reach its fourth birthday, which is 94 days away.

For the record, you'll be pleased to know that the t-shirt is covered with a jumper.

I came across this site recently via digg. It's a collection of handwriting fonts that can be downloaded directly from the page. Some of them are quite neat, but it reminded me of a problem with these fonts, and a possible solution.

The very nature of handwriting (mine in particular) is that we rarely write a particular letter the same way twice. Furthermore, the letters that we form are often dependent on the preceding letter. In the word letter, for instance, the first e is affected by it appearing after an l, the t is affected by the preceding e and so on. As far as I'm aware, these two characteristics are never addressed in fonts, as each character is treated as an independent entity, and every instance of a particular letter is technically equal.

I'm proposing a twofold solution:

• Firstly, introduce a character-set of 676 letter characters. These represent a different form of each character when preceded by each of the letters of the alphabet. So there will be 26 lowercase As: one for aa, one for ba, one for ca etc. The same goes for Bs, Cs etc.
• Secondly, introduce, say, five or so subtly different versions of each letter
  

For the former, the character would only be displayed to its half-way point. The latter half of a character would be displayed as part of the next character. So you'd also need 26 space characters (one to succeed each letter) and 26 of each punctuation mark.

It would be a complex font system (the two requirements requiring upwards of 3,500 characters), but it would much closer mimic real handwriting than do the current offerings, which limit themselves to work within our current understanding of character sets.

It's interesting how the Luna Bar font on the page linked to above uses horizontal overlaps between the characters. Maybe there is something there that could be used.

Thoughts?

I'm confused. Google has a lot of products nowadays. A non-exhaustive list of its biggest ones would include Search (along with its various nuances—Image Search, Blog Search, Book Search etc.), Mail, Maps, News, Froogle, Calendar, Documents & Spreadsheets, Photos (Picasa), Groups, Reader, Video and that's by no means comprehensive.

Some of them are marketed on the various country homepages (Google US, Google UK etc.) just above the search bar. And some stuff is surfaced on top of some of its personalised services. But it's not consistent. Here's how it looks.

• Google US: Images, Video, News, Maps
• Google UK: Images, Groups, News, Froogle
• Google Mail: Search, Calendar, Photos, Docs & Spreadsheets, Groups
• Google Calendar: Search, Mail
• Google Reader: nothing
• Google Photos: nothing
• Froogle UK: Search, Images, Groups, News
• News UK: Search, Images, Groups, Froogle

There just doesn't seem to be a consistent aproach to this. Overall, it's a mess. Google has got away with a shoddy user-experience for too long. It's time to rationalise.

I've often thought it would be useful to have an email merge facility in Outlook, similar to Mail Merge in Word. And I've often looked for this feature, to no avail.

But finally I've found it. Instead of being in Outlook, where you might expect it, it's hidden within the Mail Merge feature of Word. Strikes me as bizarre, but there you go!

The report by Sir David Varney last month prescribed a reduction in the number of departmental websites, instead using Directgov and Businesslink as the primary information and transactional channels for citizens and businesses respectively.

Finally!

And it seems the report has developed an impetus, the BBC today reporting the Cabinet Office's decision to close down 551 sites, with "hundreds more ... expected to follow". They estimate the total number of sites currently out there at 991, although this seems woefully low, especially if you bring in local government.

This makes me happy because (a) the government web-presence is currently chaotic and (b) I project managed the implementation of Directgov. So it's nice to see its ever-increasing profile. However this news has been a long time coming.

The iPhone has just been unveiled at Macworld in San Francisco. According to Steve Jobs its screen is 3.5" across its diagonal (with a resolution of 160 pixels per inch), and it's only 11.6mm deep. Funny how he mixes his imperial and metric lengths.

He could have gone for 88.9mm across (with 6.3 pixels per mm), or else gone for 0.45" depth.

Incidentally, the iPhone itself looks sweet.

Update: Nasa's going metric, as of today, for moon activity.

Further update: more detail on the iPhone. The phone itself is fricking unbelievable. I love it. The interface is poetry, and 95% of the functionality is beautiful, both in its simplicity and its offering.

The iPod part of the phone has advanced in leaps and bounds. Most of these advances relate to the fact that the whole thing is running OS(X), but I also love its "accelerometer", which is essentially a gravity-detector, orienting your screen according to the way you hold it. That's particularly neat, although I have no idea why they chose that name.

The traditional phone bit is also great. They've taken all of the annoyances with regular phones, and simply addressed them all—switching between calls, accessing contacts and a particularly snazzy visual voicemail, allowing you to listen to specific voicemails rather than trawl through a plethora to listen to the one that you want.

However, there is one area that is dreadful, but which is a symptom of keyless devices: typing. SMS texting and writing emails is cumbersome to say the least. Jobs says "I've got this little keyboard which is phenomenal. [...] It's actually really fast to type on".

He's lying. It took a long time for him to type a one-line text message, which was no doubt rehearsed many times over. With traditional mobile phones, there used to be a comfort factor. The feedback that the keys gave me (a little click with a tangible pressed/released state) confirmed that my press had been recognised, and I could move on to the next letter. Intelligent texting allowed 90% of the QWERTY user experience, without needing the space for all those keys. (When I typed QWERTY just then, I actually touch-typed it, instead of swiping my finger across the top row. Weird.)

My current phone (T-Mobile's MDA) has a slide-out keyboard, which offers similar, vital feedback, although the QWERTY keyboard is a little cumbersome for the two thumbs that remain free (hooray for opposable thumbs!) while my fingers cradle the unit.

The touch-screen for typing doesn't work for me—nor, it seems for Steve, who undeniably had trouble. (This in spite of the whoopings of the notoriously "Apple did it so it must be good" crowd.) It's not as if it's the lack of SMS take-up in the US that has driven the weakness, as the "keyboard" is similarly important for web browsing and email, fundamental offerings of the iPhone, what with its Google and Yahoo! partnerships.

Lastly, Apple's introduction of Safari onto the phone doesn't work too well for me either. It displays the full webpage as it would appear on my 15.4" laptop monitor. It's illegible, but you can zoom in easily. But how do I know what to zoom into? I don't. But I can zip around the screen to try and find what I'm looking for, as long as I know where to zip. I'd prefer a linear view on such a relatively small screen. The whole idea of graceful degradation and the beauty of stylesheets goes out of the window.

But neat nonetheless...

It's early days, what with it being the 8th day of the calendar year. But we already have a contender for purchase of the year.

On Friday, I bought a "line-out to RCA cable". Basically, it goes from my iPod cradle to the back of my amplifier to provide me with uninterrupted music while cooking.

I've thought about buying one for a while, particularly since my FM transmitter no longer fits my upgraded iPod. But I've just never got around to it. £3.99 well spent.

Credit to Gavin (who doesn't have a blog and therefore cannot be linked to) for pointing out the correct cable to buy.

A while ago, Elise pointed me to Snap, a neat little application that generates previews of links when you hover over them.

I've finally got around to looking at it, having seen the app. installed on a few websites that I've stumbled upon lately. I decided to give it a try here.

I quite like it, although for some reason the bubble doesn't quite pop out of the link itself. It's offset to the right a little. Probably something to do with the stylesheets.

Let me know whether you like it or not (by commenting). I'd be interested in your feedback. I'll take it off if you don't like it.

There are a couple of Firefox extensions I've recently stumbled upon which, when used together, are quite beautiful. They're both to do with the tabs at the top of the browser.

The first is called PermaTabs. Basically, it makes any tab(s) that you choose permanent. So you can't close the tabs by accident, and new pages can't load in their place.

The second is called FaviconizeTab. This allows you to reduce the width of any tabs to the width of the favicon.

Combined, the two extensions are neat. They allow you to keep all of your "always open" pages safely on the left-hand side of the tab bar, while ensuring that they don't waste unnecessary page width.

Like so! Now my email, meebo and calendar are always there and handy.

Let me describe my symptoms, and hopefully a 21st century doctor out there can diagnose the problem.

I think the behaviour is limited to Firefox. In short, it has recently become very slow to react to keystrokes and mouse clicks.

If I click a field in my blog's rich-text editor and start typing, the cursor doesn't appear, nor do the words that I type appear in the box. On occasions, it ignores the preceding mouse-click, and when it eventually wakes up it throws the words into the box lucky enough to have previously been the focus of both my attention and my cursor. Sometimes, it obeys the mouse-click but misses the first few keystrokes. Other times still, when it eventually kicks in, it picks up all previous actions.

If I click in the search bar or address bar, I get a similar lag, the words appearing a number of seconds after I have typed them. (As an example of the delay I'm talking about, after I'd typed the word "after" in the previous sentence, I had already typed the words "I have typed them" before they started appearing letter by letter.)

If I CTRL+TAB between tabs, it's similarly slow. And if I have an application open in the foreground and ALT-TAB back to Firefox, it takes a few seconds to appear.

I was recently upgraded (without being given a choice) to Firefox 2.0.0.1, and the only other change I can think might have made a difference is my virginal use of the newly installed IE7 (again installed without my active consent) recently.

It's killing me. Can anyone help?

There's a little hubbub right now in the blogging community about Microsoft's recent publicity stunt. They sent Vista pre-loaded laptops to a bunch of high -profile bloggers (I was not included, judging by my naked doormat) to generate some publicty and momentum in the tech. world.

My friend Francis mentioned it yesterday; Robert Scoble (Microsoft) thinks it's an awesome idea; and Joel Spolsky thinks it's indistinguishable from bribery. (Interesting how the latter's integrity wasn't an issue when he received a Google App.)

I'm not particularly bothered about the ethical issues surrounding the gift, but Joel's brief review of Vista, along with a link to a more in depth review, is probably about right:

1. Do not, under any circumstances, consider upgrading an XP system to Vista... even if it's fairly new and even if it's Vista Supremo Premium Ultra-Capable
2. When you get a new computer, if it comes with Vista pre-installed, that's when you'll upgrade
3. Don't buy a new computer now just to get Vista. If your current system meets your needs, stick with it until you really need a new system. Vista is not reason enough for a new PC
4. Need more details? Read Paul Thurrott's review.

The Guardian has given us a categorised list of the 100 most useful websites. Twenty categories, each containing five sites. Here's my list, only giving one (usually) per category.

• Applications: Microsoft's Office 12 demo. Not sure if that counts as an application, but it's sweet. Only works in IE, btw. Oh, and Google Calendar is a piece of poetry too
• Blogs (reading): Google Reader. No question
• Blogs (writing): I've just put up a new site for my friend Robin using Wordpress. It's rather neat
• Email: Google Mail. I now love it
• Gaming: not interested. Sorry
• Maps: Google Maps is the only choice, as long as you're not on dial-up. If you are, then use Streetmap for UK maps
• News (mainstream): BBC News. Again, no question
• News (recommendations): Digg. A fantastic sou