This is the most retarded thing I’ve ever seen in a URL:

http://www.surveymethods.com/Preview.aspx?B7A9BDB0E3F9E0F2F6BDBBB0BBF1E0ECB4&DO_NOT_COPY_THIS_LINK

If your survey system is vulnerable to reuse of the link, it’s better to fix the problem, rather than tacking on such rubbish at the end. Shame on you, whoever you are.

So, for reasons that aren’t important, I was… hang on, if it’s not important, I can still explain it here, especially given the warm reception to the most boring thing I’ve posted in ages…

While looking at the list of pages that link to the current “Picture of the Day” on the front page of Wikipedia – it’s currently a Giant Planes Comparison (with the links in question shown on that page) – I was wondering why quite so many people link to it from their Wikipedia User pages. So I picked one at random (User:Harryboyles as it happens, although that’s really not important), and found that he is one of 248 people to classify themselves in the category “Wikipedians who help fix disambiguation pages with links“.

What? Are these people who use links in order to fix broken disambiguation pages? Or are there broken disambiguation pages that have links, which these people fix? Does anyone see the delicious irony here?

Actually, if you look further, it’s actually not the disambiguation pages that need fixing, it’s the other, unspecified, pages that link to the disambiguation pages that need fixing. So it doesn’t matter which way you read the collective title of people-who-fix-something-or-other, since it actually means something else entirely.

Well, somebody needs to clarify all this ambiguity, and it looks like that someone is me.

In Thunderbird, sorting by date with the newest emails at the top means the little arrow on the column header points up. But in Outlook, sorting by date with the newest emails at the top means the little arrow points down.

This vexes me. I never know whether I want the arrow to point up, or down, since I can’t remember which application does which. I always want the newest at the top (apart from when I’m sorting by name or something else for a minute, but then I want it back to normal), but the arrow is completely useless as an indicator, since there’s not enough info to tell which way is which. Anyone have any better suggestions for visual feedback?

Yahoo mail, along with most other crappy webmail accounts, puts a little tagline at the bottom of all the emails you send. Free advertising for themselves, and a good way to annoy anyone else having a conversation with you – you rapidly start pushing around loads of nested adverts whether you like it or not.

However, this amused me, from the climbing list I’m on – Yahoo! put the following tagline in a poor guy’s email:

All New Yahoo! Mail – Tired of Vi@gr@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you.

… which then got promptly munched by the anti-spam filter on the mailing list. Nice work, Yahoo!

So if you use Yahoo!, or Hotmail, or any other crappy free email, and every now and then you emails don’t get through, maybe this is the reason.

I’ve discovered a new pastime – Internet TV courtesy of the Participatory Culture Foundation’s “Democracy Player” software. It lets you subscribe to video feeds (”channels”), and obviously play them back after they’ve downloaded. So this is definitely something for which you want to have uncapped broadband!

My favourite channel so far has got to be Terra, a nature documentary series. It stands out from the crowd for being close to TV production quality – real, interesting documentaries, for free. Lots of the other channels are just computer geeks with a camera and no producer in sight, so I tend to avoid them. The daily Rocketboom is also fantastic, and worth subscribing to. While most channels are available elsewhere (on YouTube or wherever), it’s much better to subscribe to them all in Democracy Player, let the high-quality versions download, and watch them when you want.

A quick work about the software – for me, it crashes all the time. It crashes between videos. It crashes on startup, it crashes on closing, it crashes while browsing the channel guide. It’s by far the least stable and least polished piece of software that I use. It’s a little bit rubbish. But it’s completely worth putting up with for the content – from documentaries to comedy to music videos to current affairs. Try it – it’s open source, and all the channels are free.

Read on for my list of recommended channels. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the reasons ASP.NET is successful is that it lowers the bar for Web developers.

I’ve been using Ruby on Rails for one of my current web apps that I’m developing, and it’s great (and every time I work on the other one, I regret a little more that it’s in PHP). It’s so easy to get things done, and so long as it’s not the first MVC web app you’ve developed, you’ll really appreciate how it works. I can only scoff at the above statement, from this page – as Simon Willison said, “Holy cow, ASP.NET is complicated”. Still, it’s by Microsoft, so it’s guaranteed that it’ll be pushed by millions of IT managers who know not what they are talking about…