Category: Random

• Secret Santa 2004 – where the whole weblogging community comes together to buy each other happy nice things Don’t tell me you can resist. This is like our fourth year of running Secret Santa for the web community with Denise doing the design, Cal doing the code and me doing the bloody copy for the site and e-mails. We suffer for your pleasure! Sign up today…
• Project Honey Pot aims to get website owners working together to stop spammers collecting e-mail addresses It’s an interesting project this, that uses fake e-mail addresses on people’s sites to assertain which bots are connected to which spammers – which means that other people can take action against them. Very nice.

• Cold Turkey by Kurt Vonnegut who frankly deserves a hagiography
  “We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we‚Äôre hooked on.”
  (categories: america beautiful coldturkey conservative corruption cynical drugs fossilfuels kurtvonnegut liberal politics president terrible whitehouse)
• Music piracy ‘does hit CD sales’
  “The study contradicts a previous report, conducted in 2002, which said swapping songs online had no negative effect on music sales.”
  (categories: audio cds copyright corporate downloading drm itunes mp3 music recordcompanies rights rightsmanagement sales statistics)
• Matt Biddulph writes about deli.cio.us for XML.com
  Del.icio.us and tag-based structures like Flickr are still interesting the hell out of me – mainly because of the possibility of the sudden creation of a completely new layer of information worth mining and manipulating.
  (categories: api article delicious design developer development ethnoclassification folksonomies folksonomy mattbiddulph platform socialsoftware software tagging tags technology web)
• Flash interface for insanely detailed 2 gigapixel photo
  An extraordinarily high-quality digital image that allows you to zoom in to a ludicrous extent. It’s a bit of a shame that the place they took pictures of is so banal, but hey…
  (categories: camera dorky flash gigapixel industrial industrialpark interface pan photography photos stitching zoom)
• Photographs of President Reagan
  “There was this odd moment where Mrs. Reagan and President Reagan were having this little private chat and right in the middle you see Michael Jackson.”
  (categories: 1980s 80s america american culture kitsch michaeljackson photograph photography politics popculture president ronaldreagan strange whitehouse)
• Lorry rescues car from sea – with hilarious consequences
  If it’s real of course, which it might not be. And then of course if no one got hurt in the process. Which they very well might have been. Still, pretty awesome visuals…
  (categories: calamity car catastrophe dock humour image lorry photography pictures sea)
• The Apple Store Regent Street Preview Gallery
  Pictures of the new Apple Store to open tomorrow morning on Regent Street in London. There are apparently 250 grab bags with a value of over ¬£700 for sale for under half that price, if you’re prepared to wait outside for six-ten hours to get them…
  (categories: apple applestore architecture computers imac ipod ipods mac photography retail storefront windowshopping)

• “Blog Threat Management” – ludicrous and scaremongering crap? “Viruses, Trojan horses … organized crime, terrorists … continue to make the Internet a dangerous place due to fraud, extortion, denials of service, identity theft, espionage, and other crimes. Now, blogging is emerging as a threat to the Internet use
• Mugwump – Kerry Bailey’s weblog Favourite LA pal and regular host of my sporadic visits to West Coast America starts a weblog. Weblog has all the incredible energy and weird rhythms of a newbie but with added pith. Worth a punt.
• Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock? “A few months back, I started wearing an intimidating-looking black leather thong with menacing metal studs in the hopes that it would frighten those faggots off, but it didn’t work. In fact, it only seemed to encourage them.”
• This Citroen transformer also dances in a really sexy way Reminds me of that other transforming car a couple of years back and reinforces my desire to see a live-action Transformers film…
• Google Scholar – a new way of navigating through scholarly materials This is pretty awesome – using keyword searches and citations to help you find academic materials from across the web. When it can, it links through to PDFs of the articles concerned. Many hours of fun to be had here…
• Londonist on reported movie versions of Bat Boy And Jerry “The show recently held it’s one hundredth performance, at which the producers announced that the musical was about to become a movie, directed by John ‘American Werewolf in London’ Landis.”

• Colour-coded bookshelves
  I’ve no idea what this set of photographs is about – I can’t even remember where I found it although almost certainly it was on kottke’s site because I nick a lot of his stuff. I just link to it because of the pretty colours…
  (categories: art blue books colour colours design green photography photos rainbow)
• Jakob Nielsen on Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons
  “Even prominent websites make elementary errors in the use of basic user interface controls. The main guidelines are clear, but there are ten other things you should consider when using checkboxes and radio buttons.”
  (categories: checkboxes design forms html informationarchitecture jakobnielson radiobuttons usability userexperience userinterrface web)

So here’s a little easter egg you might enjoy for users of Delicious Library. It’s not exactly unknown – I just did a search and found a reference to it on MacSlash somewhere. But anyway – it doesn’t look like it’s public knowledge so I thought I’d throw it out here. Anyway, next time you’re playing with the well-known and slightly over-hyped cataloguing app (at least using the Amazon.com lookup) try scanning a Harry Potter book without freaking out and jumping fifteen feet in the air. The cause? Your Mac’s suddenly saying “Vol-de-mort” out loud in a really creepy voice just when you least expect it. This is your Easter Egg. I need to figure out how to write these things in a more dynamic style. The end. Bah. You guys suck.

• BBC News website scoops award The Online News Association says on its website that the judges “were effusive in their praise for this site, noting that it has continued to improve and innovate” since it last won the award in 2001.

• Awesome animation of a man walking composed out of stencilled imagery From a presentation by Timo at Design Engaged. Everyone went ooooooh. I particularly like the fact that you can pause it at any point through and see what it’s been tagged onto.

• Women design databases too – on Cal Henderson saying normalised data is for sissies ‘Sissy’ as a term is often used as a term to suggest that a man is gay. Sure it’s not positive about the feminine either, but to pick up on one injustice at the cost of another is ludicrous. And bluntly, in this case misplaced, given how well I know Cal.

• Stunning, if annoyingly pseudo-political, video if you’re into graphic design stuff Even if you can’t cope with the mixed “actually true and scary” / “cheap propagandising arse” message, then the infographics / constructivist stylings are worth checking out.
• Shelf life – applications of RFID in Libraries At the moment almost the most important things that technologists shouls be developing are systems of identifiers for objects and concepts and things, ways of inter-relating them and new ways of describing them.
• Microsoft’s new beta for search isn’t in any way biased towards their products I mean God knows there probably is only one web page on the entire internet that has “Word” on it – and it’s not Merriam-Webster’s dictionary at word.com! This is just dumb – people are not going to use and trust a search engine that so blatantly deforms

• Firefox 1.0 has been released to the general public And no doubt the advert will be appearing in the New York Times any day now too. It’s all terribly exciiting and I shall download it immediately.
• Nation’s Poor Win Election For Nation’s Rich “The alliance between the tiny fraction at the top of the pyramid and the teeming masses of mouth-breathers at its enormous base has never been stronger,” a triumphant Bush said.