Here’s a good one: The Daily Sucker has found 300+ organizations using a legal statement containing the phrase, “Wow You actually came to this page.”
Highly professional, that, along with “Our lawyers made us include it and made us use a precious link on our home page to get you here.” Which isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate the sentiment, but the fact that it’s been copied over and over is…interesting to say the least.
It does make me wonder who originated the statement, though.
You’d think with the number of years we’ve been sharing files across networks we’d be able to do it somewhat reliably.
Windows: Try to connect to a computer that’s down or misconfigured, and sit for at least 30 seconds, unable to use an explorer window, click on your desktop, or, if you’re really unlucky, use the taskbar or Start menu, until it realizes it can’t connect. (I don’t know if this has been fixed in Windows XP, but it’s still a problem in Windows 2000.)
Unix: On one hand processes are separated better so you don’t normally get a full system lock-up unless it’s trying to connect while starting up…but if you have a modern GNOME desktop, and you have a file in your recent documents list on an auto-mounted NFS share that isn’t available anymore (say, because you turned the computer off), it can lock up your desktop while it tries to connect to create a thumbnail. (This happened to me last night.) And don’t get me started with trying to disconnect from an NFS share that isn’t available.
Mac: Have you got a folder on a server with lots and lots of files in it? Especially images? Hope you can wait for it to transfer every single image over the network and create a thumbnail, because you aren’t going to be able to see anything in that Finder window until it does. (To be fair, I’m basing this on connecting to a Linux box via Netatalk, which implements Mac file sharing. For all I know, connecting to an actual Mac would pull thumbnails out of the images’ resource forks or something.)
Hmm, now that I think about it, generating thumbnails of files on network shares seems to be a problem in itself.
Whew! After 6 weeks, Project Honeypot has identified a spam harvester trolling one of the sites I signed up with them. Considering it only took 3 days for them to hit some of the local spamtraps I set up at the same time, I’m surprised. I’m especially surprised that it was found on the least trafficked site.
I picked up a new mouse to use at work yesterday, mainly because I wanted a scroll wheel that actually turned. (The old one was jammed.) I figured I’d go optical as well, since I much prefer optical mice. I ended up getting a basic $15 Microsoft mouse, though I would have gone for a more expensive Logitech if I were getting one for home.
When I plugged it in this morning, I was surprised to find that it skipped all over the place. Not constantly, as if the KVM had gotten its signal mixed up, but enough that it would be a real pain to use. (Oddly, it worked more smoothly on my Linux box than the Windows box. I have no idea why.)
So I pulled out the manual, looking for a troubleshooting section. Something like “If your mouse skips, it may be caused by XYZ.” Nothing. The contents were:
Useful information to be sure, but not quite what I was looking for.
As it turns out, I just tossed away my mouse pad and tried the mouse directly on the desk. It works like a charm now. I guess the pad was too reflective or something.
OK, this is bizarre. Apparently a Hong Kong software company is preparing to release a Virtual Girlfriend for high-res mobile phones. It—or I suppose I should say “she”—is structured as an online game, on the virtual pet model. (Remember the tamagotchi fad?) You hold conversations with “Vivienne,” give her virtual gifts, even work up to a virtual wedding—which adds a virtual mother-in-law to the game.
The graphics are nice, and apparently they’ve put together a very elaborate conversation engine, but I have to wonder who this will really appeal to. The way she’s described she’s pretty high-maintenance—why go to all that effort when you don’t get the benefit of a real person?
Of course, there are other possibilities for the technology:
Vivienne, for instance, will double as a translator for travelers. Type in the desired words in English while traveling and, with additional programming in the next few months, her synthesized voice will coo it back in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish or Italian.
Just as games have driven desktop computing to keep pushing the envelope, this could lead the way toward the conversational interfaces that are so prevalent in science-fiction.
Remember UnitedLinux? It was a consortium of Conectiva, SuSE, TurboLinux and Caldera to build a common distribution that could compete with Red Hat. That effort got derailed, in part because Caldera decided they could make more money by changing their name to SCO and extorting suing the market into oblivion. Now Novell owns SuSE, TurboLinux is facing competition from Red Flag, and Conectiva is merging with Mandrake.
Mandrake’s a nice OS. I keep trying to switch, but I keep coming back to Red Hat Fedora. While my own experience with Conectiva has been, shall we say, less than stellar, they did port Debian’s outstanding package manager APT to work with RPM, and started the development of Synaptic, which should (in my opinion) be the standard way to install and upgrade software on any package-based Linux distribution with a GUI.
For now it looks like they’ll be maintaining separate brands based on a common core (hmm, sounds familiar), but I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up merging the products in a few years.
Hey, if it means Mandrake replaces their clunky update system with APT and Synaptic, I’m all for it.
(See also CNET’s take.)
As reported all over the place, Microsoft has reversed its previous plans and will be releasing a new beta of Internet Explorer this summer instead of keeping it locked to the next version of Windows.
About frelling time.
Of course, there’s no word on whether they’ll actually improve page rendering—all the statements so far have focused on security, anti-phishing, and the like—so we web developers will probably have to continue using hacks to work around buggy rendering and missing features that are so much easier to build for Firefox, Opera and Safari. And even if they do fix things in IE7, they’re focusing on Windows XP (we might get it in Windows 2000, if we’re lucky), and there are still people using on Windows 98/Me who will still be stuck with IE6.
Of course, unlike Microsoft, Mozilla hasn’t stopped working on their browsers. By the time IE7 is out, Firefox 1.1 or 1.5 will be available, and they may be well on the road to 2.0.
Congratulations to Mozilla and Firefox for convincing Microsoft to get back to work!
Competition is good.
