- Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? – “Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That’s no longer true, and Adobe’s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells.”
- Penguins, Peaks and Penny-Farthings: Nat Geo Covers 1959-2000 – “The National Geographic Society celebrates its 122nd anniversary on Jan. 27 … Though the early issues had rather drab academic looking covers, by 1959 they were consistently adorned with eye-cathing art and photos.”
- Verified by Visa bitchslapped by Cambridge researchers – “Secondary credit card security systems for online transactions such as Verified by Visa are all about shifting blame rather then curtailing fraud, Cambridge University security researchers argue.” Or put another way: those annoying screens you get when you buy something online are not for your benefit.
- Realism in UI Design – “The more realistic something is, the harder it is to figure out the meaning.”
- Jan. 19, 1983: Apple Gets Graphic With Lisa – And without the Lisa there wouldn’t have been the Mac…
- Googlephone No Match for Kafkaesque Carriers – Steven Levy finds that mobile (cell) carriers are all evil… I wish this was an isolated problem but it seems to happen everywhere. Does anyone actually like their provider?
- Priori Acute – What if M.C. Escher had been a typographer?
- What “Nothing to Hide” is Hiding – Why “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” is a bad argument in favour of increased surveillance.
- Google Android Personal Thoughts – “Uniformity is not a word you’ll find in Android’s dictionary. How about the fact that the application icons aren’t the same size. Uh, why? Since there’s no transparent padding around the icons … there’s no uniformity in the touch areas when you go to tap on an icon.” These things probably don’t seem important to Google but the attention to detail is what makes the iPhone (usually) a pleasure to use. I’ve not used an Android handset but these things would bug me pretty quickly.
- Japanese Photographer Bends Electricity to His Will – Beautiful.
- The Cost of Care – Nice graphic showing the relationship between the cost of healthcare and life-expectancy.
I got a lot done and with the ninety minutes I saved by not commuting I went to the gym, but there are problems with working from home…
I don’t mean to single out a single business here. The flaw I’m pointing out is shared by many sites but this post was inspired by a recent visit to TripIt. In general it’s a great service. It’s well thought out, allowing you to enter all your details with a minimum of effort; just forwarding your email confirmation to them is a masterstroke.
However. (You knew that was coming.) However, many links on the main page are non-functional, by which I mean they push you straight through to their paid-for service sign-up form.
I just realised that there are two anniversaries this year. Neither would be worth grabbing a bottle of champagne for but they are vaguely connected and it does give me a chance to reminisce about some neat, old technology.
I forget the exact dates of both events but they were fifteen and ten years ago. Back in 1994 I first installed Linux on my 386SX-based PC. At this point in time my exposure to Unix had been only on “big” computers, the Sun (Solaris) and HP (HP-UX) machines in the Universities labs. It seemed incredible that you could even get something approaching a full version of Unix running on my little home computer.
It’s that time of year where all the papers, magazines and websites devolve into the best of the year articles rather than actually generate new content. I didn’t want to feel left out so here’s my contribution.
Of course “best” can mean any number of different things, so I’m going to pick a few top fives.
Here are the most popular pages viewed this year:
- Installing Oracle 10g Express Edition on CentOS 4
- Professionalism
- Oracle 8i for Linux Installation HOWTO
- Minolta Dual Scan II
- Review: Belkin Wi-Fi Phone
It continues to surprise me how popular the Oracle pages are. They are now very old products and the pages have not been updated for quite some time now.
- Separating Explosives from the Detonator – A sensible response to the pants bomber…
- Google ‘open’ memo betrays deep corporate delusion – “Aside from Apple, no tech outfit is more secretive about what goes on inside the company.”
- Q: “Once in a blue moon” is a rare event. But what does “blue moon” really mean? – These things are never as simple as you think they should be…
- exactly – “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?” Looks like we’re not going to find out because of a few hold-outs…
- A Typeface for the Underground – Design and typography on the London Underground. Fascinating stuff.
- Britain to Levy a One-Time Tax on Banker Bonuses – “To a large extent the levy underpins a quite broad understanding here — even among those generally sympathetic to the industry — that bank profits this year were largely subsidized by the government due to historically low interest rates.” The best discussion I’ve seen of today’s pre-Budget speech is, bizarrely, in a US paper.