Sunday 24 June 2007

I have now sent the same 2GB compact flash card through the laundry twice. It still works. I'm impressed. That is all.

Sunday 24 June 2007 21:29:50 UTC
 Monday 18 December 2006

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen takes on the remarkable UIs that appear in film:

Break into a company—possibly in a foreign country or on an alien planet—and step up to the computer. How long does it take you to figure out the UI and use the new applications for the first time? Less than a minute if you're a movie star.
...
Countless scenes involve unauthorized access to some system. Invariably, several passwords are tried, resulting in a giant "Access Denied" dialog box. Finally, a few seconds before disaster strikes, the hero enters the correct password and is greeted by an equally huge "Access Granted" dialog box.

At least we no longer have large bipedal robots shouting "Danger! Danger!"

 | 
Monday 18 December 2006 16:21:35 UTC
 Saturday 4 November 2006
My previous post brings up, tangentially, our naming scheme. For years I bought only Gateway computers, and for no reason I can remember, named all of them something to do with cows—but in German.
Saturday 4 November 2006 01:28:57 UTC
 Tuesday 15 August 2006
 #
 

I wonder what spammers are actually thinking almost as much as I wonder why they bother me.

I've had a blog-spam problem for about three weeks now targeting my referral logs. Spammers with robots use robots that act like people browsing the blog, but they appear to come from gambling sites so that the site URLs show up in the system logs. Some blogs' referral logs are searched by Google and other sites, so the theory here is that the referral spam will generate a lot of inbound links into their sites driving up their search rankings. Sadly for all concerned, this doesn't actually happen; Google is too smart.

Then there's comment spam, like this thoughtful thing I got from a vistor in India this morning:

Remember to let her into your bedbug, then you can start to make it partial.
I don't care about Christopher Fargis, he is vivid, pubescent, and anatomic and I am not going to refracture about it. Dyno-blast Jason Chan hunch our lettering. Our hydraulic corer guard a specious otherness Sammy Schenker is a scornful chelicera? Then Mazen Nesheiwat skyjacks a blurriest nunnery. We will commend on the glitter; we will generalize on the commissure; we will never flick.
My to go cardiograph overconcentrates in the hole. Harmonic Airy Phanhyaseng lip the ambidexter. Therefore unless Gerald Cheatham solemnify Minh Nguyen, she westernize my fattiness but disvalue him

The trick here is that someone is monitoring the spammer's email address, and the subject of the spam comment suggests that anyone emailing the spammer will get information about a gambling site.

Some actual person had to enter the comment, though. The IP address of the comment shows that actual person to be in India, where I can only assume he or she was paid a few cents to copy the nonsense into the comment and submit it to the blog.

It's sad, really. But, in an absurd way, interesting poetry.

Tuesday 15 August 2006 11:32:49 UTC
 Tuesday 6 June 2006

One of my daily digests contained a link to "How to choose the best database for your business." By Oracle.

Golly. Which database do you suppose they recommend? Think it's MySql?

Tuesday 6 June 2006 15:21:23 UTC
 Tuesday 2 May 2006

Very funny: How To Write Unmaintainable Code: Ensure a job for life, by Roedy Green.

Very helpful, even in C#: Tips for maintainable Java code, by Rolf Howarth.

Spend an hour reading them, then send them to your teams.

Tuesday 2 May 2006 22:10:43 UTC
 Tuesday 7 March 2006
My colleague Cameron Beatley sent me this handy comparison guide for programming languages.
Tuesday 7 March 2006 21:08:28 UTC
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