Rants
This is a rant, for which I will make no apologies. The wonderful thing about web applications is that they free you from being tied down to a specific platform. A well written web application is acce...
One of the many thing the Mozilla/Firefox team have got right is the fantastic ease with which the application can be downloaded. Visitors to www.mozilla.org are greeted with a nice big "Free Download...
So what's the deal with this?
I'm sure you've seen it. I get it from QuickTime on Windows, and I get it from QuickTime on my Mac as well. If this was attached to some lousy spyware infested pri...
Like everyone else on the internet, I get a fair amount of spam. I tend to keep my main work as clean as possible, while skipping over the spam in my lower-traffic personal account and cleaning ...
I needed to scan a couple of signed documents at work, as a cheaper alternative to locating a fax machine. The office scanner is an HP scanjet 4570c. I plugged it in to the back of my PowerBook to see...
Robert Scoble went to lunch with the head of the Internet Explorer team - yes, they still exist, despite having released nothing but security patches for over two years.
Robert says that the team i...
Sorry for the radio silence; I've been playing with my new Mac. It's been an almost entirely positive experience - it's certainly the most enjoyable computer I've ever owned. I've also only crashed an...
From the New York Times:
Computer security researchers have been watching the evolution of remote-access rogue programs as they have become more common and have put more machines under the contro...
So you're writing the software for an ATM. It needs to display something pretty on the screen, control the hardware that serves out the money and talk securely to your central servers. It also needs t...
PHP.net has a new feature on their search page - a really nice implementation of an auto complete text widget in Javascript. Even better, the search page is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and uses CSS for the...
Usability.gov's Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines lose instant credibility for being available only as a 39.2 MB PDF file [ Update: this statement is incorrect - see my correction ]...
Slate: Digging for Googleholes:
Type in the make and model of a new DVD player, and you'll get dozens of online electronic stores in the top results, all of them eager to sell you the item. But y...
Michael Pick has kicked off an interesting discussion on the usefulness of Flash, which is continued on mezzoblue. The key idea under discussion is that while Flash has its uses it remains a fundament...
The Register's coverage of the end of development for IE on the Mac makes some worrying conclusions:
Had Apple worked with inspired vigor since January to improve Safari, users might feel safe wi...
Why do official film sites almost always suck? www.x2-movie.com is a prime example: 100% Flash, ridiculous loading times (and I'm on broadband), totally unintuitive interface, tedious, unnecessary ani...
I've been somewhat taken by surprise by the latest round of anti-CSS rants (initiated by JWZ, followups all over the place), mainly because I've been using CSS for long enough now that I'd started to ...
And the prize for freakiest CSS bug in the universe goes to... IE6! I was having a problem with the new design and a horizontal scrollbar occuring in IE6 for no readily apparent reason (the same bug h...
Via Scott, this oh-so-true quote from a Microsoft "next-generation technology" consultant:
Internet Explorer hasn't had any revolutionary features for over 3 versions now. And it's now surprise ...
Anil Dash: Diamonds are for never. A thoroughly entertaining and educating rant about the Diamond industry. Some day I hope to be this articulate....
Dave Winer on TrackBacks and push backs (and presumably PingBack as well):
I'm old school. I think the cool thing about weblogs is that they are not discussion groups or mail lists. If I want to ...
A top notch rant from Leonard Lin:
Often times, I like to think of these little thought experiments. Imagine the inventor of the wheel, or of stone cutting implements getting and enforcing a patent...
Acts of Volition: What's wrong with MSN Messenger 5.0. I rarely load up MSN (I like to browse in peace) but I'd like to add a few points, aimed at Messenger in general rather than any particular versi...
Hixie and Aaron Swartz are debating Hixie's infamous Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful on a W3C mailing list. While I am just as guilty of sending XHTML as text/html as anyone else (I've b...
It's the first day of the month. I don't believe in rabbits, but I do believe in Mailman - I just had my fourth "monthly reminder" email of the day. It beats me why the lists I am subscribed to see fi...
A member of KPMG's web team responded to my query about Mozilla support (sent via their online contact form using IE because the site was unusable in Mozilla) and informed me that a new site is on the...
Why is it that badly designed high profile sites that completely fall apart in Mozilla never have a "contact our web team" or "send us feedback" link anywhere? You would expect better from a company t...
Moment of realisation: I just figured out what it is about Flash that bugs me so much. Flash is rubbish at text. Sure it can render text in pretty ways, but it never feels like real words. Flash takes...
An interesting discussion (scroll to the bottom)....
This is ludicrous. NAF have ordered the transfer of the domain name canadian.biz to Molson beer, who hold a trademark on the word "Canadian" (a brand of beer):I find that the registration by the Respo...
Connected Earth is getting a fair amount of criticism for its shoddy browser detection. In my opinion, browser detection is only a small part of its problems. Should you get past the front door the in...
This site will make you cry: Connected Earth, BT's new million pound (yes that's £1,000,000) online museum devoted to the history of communications. It's so bad it isn't even funny - and don't even t...
I need a good, reliable way of automatically checking when various weblogs have been updated. I've tried aggregators (both Radio Userland and Amphetadesk) and they don't do it for me - I don't want to...
Slashdot: Shocked, Shocked at Payola. This is just tragic. American record companies are all upset about the huge amounts of money they have to spend bribing commercial radio stations to play their mu...
I'm headed off to Glastonbury on Thursday and I've been checking out the offical festival website. It's pretty good - the information I wanted was all there, it was easy to find and the site has a ple...
John C. Dvorak: E-Mac, i-Mac, No Mac. This is so poor I just had to link to it. John claims that the Mac is on it's last legs and deserves to be put down, which is a complete contradiction to almost v...