So I have put in my preorder for an Optimus Mini Three keyboard.
In case you missed it, they are a three button keypad, with each button being a 96×96 pixel colour screen. Now $33 a button is an expensive keyboard, but $33 per monitor seems like good value.
They are supposed to ship on May 15, so I look forward to it.
Episode 5 is also only officially available in the UK
This widely carried Associated Press story, amused me.
It is mostly a standard “predators roam MySpace” story. I have no idea why The Agechose to illustrate it with a picture of a stewardess or some sort of tidily dressed woman on a plane. There does not seem to be any indication in the story that rogue stewardesses (or “female flight attendants” if you prefer) are a significant internet problem, but it would explain airlines insistence on turning off mobile devices I suppose.
Buried among the usual concerns and anecdotes that have probably been repeated about every means of communication ever invented is the gem that:
MySpace profiles have been used to threaten classmates and in at least one case, to mock a school principal.
(my emphasis)
It sounds like time we pulled the plug on this whole interweb thingo. Won’t somebody think of the principals? If distributing the Anarchist’s Cookbook was not bad enough, now somebody is mocking a school principal. The horror.
So everybody ignores Meta Tags right? Search engines know that poeple put any old junk keywords in them to attract traffic, so search engines completely ignore them.
Tagging on the other hand is flavour of the month. For some reason, blog search engines at least give significant weight to tags, and assume that people are not tag keyword stuffing.
I give it three months.
Tags: brrreeeport Abu Ghraib Cheney Du bist Deutschland Office Live *
* Any resemblance between these tags and the post content or the top 5 current searches at technorati is purely coincidental.
Dale Begg-Smith, Canadian-Australian Winter Olympic gold medalist is getting strange media coverage. It seems that he does not particularly want to talk about the Internet business that funds his Lamborghini and his skiing lessons.
Here is a newspaper article linking him to CPM-Media.com and cpmads.com who may not have been operating at the more glamorous end of the internet economy.
Here is a more flattering newspaper article.
Here are some related links so you can make up your own mind
Spywareguide.com blames CPM-Media for the FreeScratchAndWin adware
Official Description: FreeScratchAndWin is an IE spyware Browser Helper Object dressed up as a web ’scratchcards’ game. (What exactly is available to be won, and whether anybody has ever won it, remains unclear.)
It also highjacks your home- and search-page settings to point to xzoomy.com, and complains if you try to change them back.
Comment: Opens pop-up adverts every few minutes.
The software’s terms of use advises that the software can track users’ web usage.
Downloads and installs arbitrary unsigned code as part of an update feature.
And 2nd-thought.com malware
Official Description: Accepting their “second opinion when you surf” actually gives you a toolbar named “Mysearch”. 2nd-thought will redirect your searches as long as it is installed on your computer.
Comment: Browswer hijacker that will reset your home page and often redirect your searches to porn sites. Sometimes it will prevent you from changing your home page.
http://www.cpm-media.com/ seems to be down.
It does not look like it ever had much content though.
cpmads.com is for sale and has a generic for sale page on it now.
It has had content recently.
In 2004 the home page was a removal form for some sort of mass email list:
More recently (but undated from Google cache) it sold popunder advertising.
According to this guy the reason the number 404 is used is because CERN’s central database was in room 404.
Now it is well known that nerds select identifiers for all sorts of stupid reasons, and it sometimes comes back to bite them, but that story is about as believable as the one about the lady who wakes up in a hotel room with one kidney.
Shoes full of vomit, if you are anywhere near me, that’s what.
Just what every child needs for Christmas, a $300 toy that is afraid of the dark and needs reassuring. Behold Butterscotch the robo pony, a Hasbro offering for this Christmas.
Read the official press release in all its gag inducing glory.
This Top 10 list of bad programming advice has some very defensible ideas, and some sections were the author seems to have missed the point on how conventional wisdom became conventional wisdom.
Digg commenters are not always the most insightful bunch, so the fact that the article copped a pasting there made me want to like it, but it has two main problems. The nested double negatives make it very hard to read, and for most of the advice you would be at least as bone headed to dogmatically never apply the presented advice as to dogmatically always apply it.
Can somebody explain “The a square is a rectangle problem” to me? To my mind, “a square is a rectangle” is a basic fact, not a problem. Maybe I need to learn to think outside the box more.
From the article:
People who think in such parallels are likely to find themselves confused if they run into the “a square is a rectangle” problem. In math, squares may well be subclasses of rectangles but making square inherit from rectangle is plainly wrong.
Why is it plainly wrong?
From Wired, there is a certain irony in using Ning to annoy one of its founders, but although I really do like annoying people, I don’t think I will be able to make it.
The trigger for the event was Marc telling an anecdote to analysts, that because somebody came to visit once, Ning took their sign off the door. In his opinion, one of the great things about internet businesses is that you never need to meet your customers. It is always good to see the nerd ethos of shunning human contact thrives at all levels of the Internet community.
Update: the “unannounced visit” is on the official Ning Blog. In the same blog, there is a Ning Magic 8 Ball. I am not sure if it is a one off in-joke, or a really cool piece of conference schwag.