Banditry

This is awesome statistical-demographic stuff. Combined with Rick Astley and depraved Japanese pornography, it’s precisely what the Internet was invented for…

[via Matt]

So, it transpires that Apple will launch a 3G iPhone within 60 days. Thanks for announcing that the same day my new TyTn II arives…

The hot drinks vending machine currently has a sign on it saying ‘no tea’. Obviously, that made me think of this.

I didn’t try and get any ‘no tea’, though.

A very long time ago, I had a blog whose software platform I wrote myself. It was pretty ropey by the standards of Wordpress and Moveable Type, although it beat Blogger’s offer in those days (for really dull reasons, the only server I had access to ran Windows and Access; no existing blog software supported this setup, so I had to write some).

I learnt a lot about Access, IIS, and databases and scripting in general. And for ages I was relatively immune to spam, because automatic spambots were configured to deliver the right form data to work with Blogger, MT and WP. But after a year or so, blog comment spamming was sufficiently big business (and my old blog sufficiently popular, he said self-aggrandisingly) that - presumably manually - the droves of spam started coming.

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Article: O2 (UK) has shifted 190,000 iPhones in its first two months of sales, just short of its target of 200,000.

From the comments: “190,000 surprised me at first - given that we and the Europeans understand mobiles far too well to buy an outdated overpriced paperweight like the iPhone, I thought the number sold in the UK should be closer to 19. Then I remembered that there are Americans in Britain too. Some rigorous intertubes research later and I find that there are 220,000 Americans living in Britain. Mystery solved.“

This is a great logical argument:

1) A pretentious man claims that CDs aren’t as good as vinyl, despite the fact that they are;

2) If you compress a song to MP3, it doesn’t sounds all that great compared to an uncompressed song. People increasingly listen to MP3s on their personal music players, instead of, err, tapes;

3) Overproduced records by mediocre bands can sound quite good, but aren’t as distinctive as great records by great bands. There are more of the former than the latter;

THEREFORE: music is dead as an artform.

In a Computing Which? survey, Bebo has been rated the best social networking site, ahead of Facebook because its security settings make it harder for unwanted ‘friends’ to get user information. Yahoo Groups was rated as poorest, due to its lack of social networking features.

Relatedly, in a Sarcasm Which? survey, C-BBC has been rated the best TV channel, ahead of Channel 4 because its content guidelines make it unlikely that users will see adult-oriented content. Radio 4 was rated as poorest, due to its lack of visual content.

Look, computing-Which-people: Bebo is a networking site for kids, so it makes information sharing harder (note: this is a bad thing per se) so that weirdos can’t stalk them, groom them or nick their photos and post them on pervy websites (obviously, this is a good thing that outweighs the bad thing). Facebook is aimed at grown-ups, so it doesn’t. And Yahoo Groups isn’t a networking site at all.

Morons.

[sorry, this post is written in Incomprehensible Geek. If you don’t understand what the four letters and three characters before “www.johnband.org” on your screen to the top-left of this post mean, then it’s not for you. On the other hand, if you’re using a browser esoteric enough that the address isn’t displayed Up Top, then it almost certainly is.]

Does anyone know of a blog that’s hosted on a secure http site? Or perhaps more relevantly, can anyone think of a reason why the hell anyone would choose to host their publicly accessible blog on a secure http site?

What about ftp? Does anyone write a blog in text documents and upload it to their ftp server? Does this strike you as a sensible thing to do? How about writing your blog on Usenet and linking to articles in a “news:xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx” format? No? How about hosting it on a telnet server, for that true retro 1980s feel?

Let’s be honest, here - if you have a blog, then its URI will always, always, always begin with “http”. So why the sodding hell do some of the comedians who write blogging comments software insist on you including the protocol when asking you for the site address? ‘Ah yes, thanks for rejecting my comment there; after all, I didn’t specify the protocol, and wouldn’t want people to miss my amazing Gopher page’.

Eejits. Just because you’re programming a computer, doesn’t mean you have to accept the same degree of meaningless anality about your inputs that a machine would…

Ignore the pointless new wi-fi iPhone-with-no-phone device (although it’ll serve as a good badge of ‘who is a tosser’).

The truly excellent news is that a 160gb iPod is soon to be available. I reckon that’ll last me at least another year of music…

Unrelatedly, I’ve got another Sharpener piece up about the Tube strike - specifically how Bob Crow isn’t even protecting the interests of his members (never mind the rest of us…)

Dear Lenovo -

Congratulations on making some of the best and most rugged laptops available; buying IBM’s PC business was a good idea (even if you have been dogged by Japanese suppliers‘ ineptitude at battery manufacturing).

However, now that your machines no longer fall under the IBM umbrella, there are a couple of bizarre Big Blue eccentricities you might want to remove. In particular:

1) put a Windows key on the keyboard. I know IBM and Microsoft always had an uneasy relationship, but that’s no excuse. I’d wager 95%+ of your PCs use Windows, so it’s utterly Pyhrric to leave it off.

2) put the USB ports on the right hand side. Most people are right-handed; most laptop USB ports are used for mice and memory sticks which are best accessed with your right hand.

3) remove the umbelievably irritating website navigation buttons that are immediately above the arrow keys, which mean that when filling out online forms and aiming to move the cursor you instead go back to the previous page and lose everything you typed.

Otherwise, carry on as you were.

Regards,
John B