When blogs and regional newspapers trash Jerry Yang it’s one thing. But when the New York Times does it, people really notice. Public lynchings like this are few and far between from that bastion of traditional journalism.
Yesterday’s article by Joe Nocera, titled “Oh Jerry, It’s No Longer Your Baby” was a stinging condemnation of Yang. It’s presented as a memo from Nocera to Yang, with the subject “Shafting Yahoo’s Shareholders” and outlines the many ways Yang has failed Yahoo’s shareholders and employees.
Yahoo actually did a deal with Google – their BIGGEST competitor just because they didn’t like the vibe of Microsoft; which demonstrates their reluctance has nothing to do with thinking their company was worth more – but that their CEO just doesn’t like the idea of Microsoft running “his” company. What he failed to see is it stopped being “his” company when he sold swathes of it off to investors for billions of dollars.
Jericho fans are working hard to save the series… again - this time producing a “Save Jericho” TV commercial and raising the funds to have it broadcast during prime time over two hundred times. See the video after the jump.
Haha - love it. Seriously though - Facebook valued at $15 billion and people claiming there isn’t a tech bubble? The job market has gone nuts with designer and developers over the past few years and now the only candidates we get want North of $100k with less than a years experience “reskinning wordpress”. I was the *only* web developer when my IT crowd went into tertiary education; and now next to all of them after finishing their Computer Science degrees are switching across to web dev as it’s where the money is.
So I just finished watching the second season of “Jericho” today - a fantastic (at least in my opinion :p ) series surrounding a small town in the US of A (or is that AS of A? - Subtle reference to season two ) post a nation-wide nuclear attack on various US cities. It is a witty post-apocalyptic drama which explores some very interesting concepts and philosophies in a post terrorism world; and it’s setting (small town called Jericho) brings an emotional warmth to the series without sacrificing its provocative and challenging ideas and situations.
For those of you who aren’t aware of Jericho’s history, it was originally cancelled by its network in the US (CBS) at the end of its first season due to poor Nielsen ratings (More on those later). By that stage the series had picked up a significant fan base which didn’t appreciate the sentiment. In the final episode of Season One in a very dramatic scene one of the characters responds to another town that has declared war on Jericho “Nuts to you”. So what did the fans do in response to its cancellation?
Seems to be a lot of hype in the media lately re the collapse of Microsoft Windows to its “foe” Apple MacOSX. Apparently Vista has been a complete failure.
Wow…. If Vista is a complete failure - with triple the market share of OSX - what exactly does that make Apples flagship product?
Seriously though - I hate big evil money grubbing corporations as much as the next guy. Problem is - the company many of you have chosen to rally behind under this banner is no better (and in many respects a lot worse). That’s not to say Apple is rubbish compared to Microsoft - but at least get the facts straight if you’re going to try sell me on them being such a better company than MS.
The funniest thing about it is that despite not being a fan of either platform - I manage to see the actual advantages Macs have over Windows boxes; they are nice to look at and you get to belong to a clique - somewhat akin to the alienware gear in the “PC” world (although you do know that Mac’s are “Personal Computers” right? And you also know that the reason windows can now run on them is because they are identical in hardware?). That doesn’t mean I don’t think Macs should exist - far from. I think there are lots of niche markets for various platforms and that for anything in life there is no single solution to rule them all. But - you mac people need to stop feeling so insecure about the rest of the world not using Macs. Enjoy your niche clique for what it is and stop feeling you need Windows to collapse to prove that you were right all along.
Frankly I have no idea what the future holds for the windows platform - Linux is coming in leaps and bounds towards being a solid all-round platform and who knows if the king will finally be knocked off its high horse. I do promise however that if any operating system manages to take that crown - it wont be MacOSX. Why would people replace one “evil” organisation for another? And whether you like it or not price vs performance will always be a key factor for majority market share - something that Apple’s core philosophy is against competing in. Apple is reaching market saturation of its niches - a fear that most investors of APPL stock have started sharing over the past 4-5 months.
Fantastic article that Charl sent through to me today that ALL web designers and developers should read so they get an informed idea of both how the industry works and the reasoning behind the decisions from the web giants - Martian Headsets - Joel On Software.
Quote the article:
The consumer is not an idiot. She’s your wife. So stop laughing. 98% of the world will install IE8 and say, “It has bugs and I can’t see my sites.” They don’t give a flicking flick about your stupid religious enthusiasm for making web browsers which conform to some mythical, platonic “standard” that is not actually implemented anywhere. They don’t want to hear your stories about messy hacks. They want web browsers that work with actual web sites.
So you see, we have a terrific example here of a gigantic rift between two camps.
The web standards camp seems kind of Trotskyist. You’d think they’re the left wing, but if you happened to make a website that claims to conform to web standards but doesn’t, the idealists turn into Joe Arpaio, America’s Toughest Sheriff. “YOU MADE A MISTAKE AND YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD BREAK. I don’t care if 80% of your websites stop working. I’ll put you all in jail, where you will wear pink pajamas and eat 15 cent sandwiches and work on a chain gang. And I don’t care if the whole county is in jail. The law is the law.”
On the other hand, we have the pragmatic, touchy feely, warm and fuzzy engineering types. “Can’t we just default to IE7 mode? One line of code … Zip! Solved!”
Without the standards Nazis the web would still be as it was in the 90s - but they also need to understand that the web for the most part is by the people for the people and nobody will get any traction with breaking the web for the sake of “cleaning it up”. *IF* the browsers decided to be strict with standards by default - all that would happen is the average user would download the new browser, test their favourite sites, see it all broken - and BLAME THE BROWSER; not the site - for the resulting ugliness. At which point they would revert to their old browser and the standardists would be back to square one.
The only way to approach this from both sides is transitionally. Provide a token for standardists who want full features to enable them for their sites and default to non-standards for all other sites. Whilst standardists might not like this approach - it will give them the full featureset without breaking the web; and they will find that EVENTUALLY more and more developers and designers will get sick of not working with standards and create all new sites with this standards friendly approach. Once the overwhelming majority of sites (at least all the popular ones) have been written this way the default behavior can be at this point switched without the average joe wondering why the majority of sites they visit on a day to day basis all of a sudden dont work with the new browser.
Okay, so Jack Slocum over at EXTJS has put together a very cool example on how to develop new Vista sidebar gadgets using the ExtJS Framework - opening up a huge realm of posibilities for developing advanced sidebar gadgets *without* ending up looking like so many of the tacky ones released on Windows Live. Take a look at this entry from Jack’s Blog:
Quote Jack’s Blog:
A while back in the Ext forums I mentioned a Forum Gadget I was working on for Windows Vista created with Ext 2.0. The gadget gives the ability to monitor the Ext JS forums (all posts or by individual forum), perform fast searches and supports both docked and undocked mode.
At 12:38pm local time, the team of Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff, and Mark Daniel from Independent Security Evaluators have successfully compromised the Apple MacBook Air, winning the laptop and $10,000 from TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative.
Three computers (A Macbook Air, a Vista box and a Ubuntu box) were set up in parallel at a hacker conference in Vancouver to challenge the hackers to have their way with them - with prize money and the boxes up for grabs as each machine gets compromised. The very amusing thing (almost ironic given Apples security claim to fame) was the first box to succumb… Thats right… the Macbook Air…
Being hacked at one of these things isn’t that big a deal; but being hacked before the Vista box went down? Thats got to be hard for the Apple apologists to swallow. I can just see the Mac vs PC parodies springing up on youtube :p
Stay tuned to DVLabs blog though to see who is next to fall out of the remaining Ubuntu and Vista.
Demo Girl (http://demogirl.com/) has put together a great screencast on website/application user friendliness. I’m currently working on a fairly large web application and usability is one of the key areas that so frequently suffers in web applications - both in part to inexperienced/lazy developers and/or “overly creative” designers.
Quote:
“I sign up and navigate through a lot of different Websites and services every single day so I can create screencasts to help my readers decide if they want to try them out or not. In doing this, I notice every little detail from arriving to the site, to locating my account settings, to signing out. It’s my job to know where the help pages are, how to change a password, and how to generally navigate through whatever site I’m currently creating a screencast for. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve ditched a service that I actually thought was kind of cool, but navigation was so horrible that I didn’t want to share it with you here - And that’s the topic of the screencast today. “
It’s only a few minutes long and well worth taking a look at if you have any influence over the design and development of web applications: if you care about your users experience anyway!
Interesting discussion going on over at the EXT forums at the moment re a new convention that has sprung up with putting the seperating comma at the begging of a line rather than the end with a list of value-pairs in an object - under the proviso that if an error occurs in Internet Explorer - the line that IE detects the error on will be the line with the surpurflous comma. Take a look at the thread for more info…
I was interested in profiling the differences between the two, as logically having the comma on the following line forces the javascript interpreter to have to do more guess work as to whether the previous line is supposed to terminate or continue (javascript automatically does this check for each line to enable developers to leave out semicolons). Thats the theory anyway.
Interesting though. From my ‘experiment’ it appears (as expected) that putting commas before items rather than after does have an effect on the interpreter - average 74ms on my quad core machine (in firefox). Keep in mind though that this object has 300,001 properties which is huge for a javascript object. I don’t think anybody is going to cry over a lost 74ms when creating an object with that many properties. Still - this kind of thing might have a larger impact on less powerful devices such as handhelds.
See below for the results of my experiment:
Okay… so I decided to do a little test over my lunchbreak. Keep in mind that with almost all profiling its completely subjective as cosmic rays hitting my processor could affect the results - but here is what I got anyway:
Code:
Average Min Max
After 1434.8ms 1382ms 1498ms
Before 1508.1ms 1434ms 1680ms
I ran the below tests 10 times each using the firebug profiler. Whilst there is a difference I doubt many people would be creating objects with 300,000 boolean properties :p
This was to create a simple object with 300,000 properties in both styles. The code I used for this is:
Amy and I finally finished setting up our new home theatre on Friday (separate photo gallery to follow when we get around to it ) and then by luck stumbled across BigpondMovies. One of our ADSL accounts (yes… we have two ADSL lines… we’re geeks, so sue us :p) is with Bigpond and whilst I had heard of it before I figured it was probably a crappy service with over-inflated prices.
I was very very wrong - I seriously doubt I’ll ever rent movies from the stores again. Not only has Bigpond movies got a huge library of movies available, its completely integrated with Media Centre which makes it perfect for our HTPC home theatre setup. Even better - the prices are decent (plus you get a 20% discount if your a Bigpond broadband customer - not to mention the downloads don’t count towards your limit), you don’t have to worry about return fees, and they are high quality digital downloads. All this aside - it’s available right now to customers in Australia (unlike crappy ITunes).
The price for renting movies through them varies (depending on how new the movie is) from around $2.00 for 72 hours, to $5.00 for 24 hour new releases (for movies anyway - tv series are a tad cheaper as are the music + music videos) and the DRM allows you to watch them unlimited times during that rental period. Check out the website Bigpond Movies Download to see what kinds of movies, tv series and music they have available for what prices and what ‘rental periods’.
Anyway, to get bigpond movies set up with your Media Centre HTPC, first of all create an account on the Bigpond Movies Download website. The one annoying thing about this step if you are a bigpond member is you need to find the “My Account” page on the Bigpond Movies site and “activate your Bigpond Discount” before you will start receiving a 20% discount on all purchases. It does not automatically detect that you are a bigpond customer even with your @bigpond.com email address - so don’t forget this step!
Next download and install the Bigpond Media Manager application on whichever computers you want to use it on (we have three HTPC’s, the one in the theatre room, and Amys and my own computers in our bedroom hooked up to our bed).
After you’ve got that up and running you can close it again and it should now be integrated with Media Centre. Open up Media Centre (should be on your start bar)…
Now scroll down to the “Online Media” row and select “Explore”
Now if the install worked correctly you should have a button in online media called “Bigpond Movies”. Open it to launch the Bigpond Movies, TV & Music rental service…
Once you have opened it you can browse through the various Bigpond Movies sections including Movies, Music, Music Videos, Sports, and TV.
Once you open up the section you are interested in (In this case Movies) you will be taken to a list of all the Genres, as well as the “Featured” and “Whats New” movies:
After selecting the movie you’d like to rent you can add it to your cart, and then go to the check-out. If its the first time you’ve used it you will be prompted for your login details (as per the account you registered on the Bigpond Movies site) and your credit card details to pay for your rentals. If your happy to you can tell Media Centre to remember these settings (credit card and login) so that you don’t have to enter them each time.
After you have gone through the checkout your movie will start downloading. One really cool feature of Bigpond Movies on Windows Vista Media Centre is that you can start watching your movie before the entire thing has finished downloading, and it will let you know how long before you can start watching it (for us we could start watching our new movie in two minutes - much much quicker than driving to the video store!).
Bigpond Movies also has an albeit not as complete as Itunes (then again itunes tv is only available to Americans) TV series section
Anyway…. I now have a new favourite toy :p Time to go watch a movie!
Before 9/11, before GWB became President, a movie about a series of terrorist attacks in NYC leads to the President suspending the Constitution and declaring Martial Law.
Can America justify the use of torture on its’ “prisoners of war”? Could the same argument not be made by “the other guys” that torture and terrorism is acceptable to protect their beliefs and ways of living?
Besides… Western countries should look at themselves. Terrorism has been successful in its goal - scaring people and having a major impact on the “freedom” that we cherish. Politicians and authorities love it, just another way to influence the masses. Who dares step out of line when the government is the only thing preventing boogey-men jumping out of garbage cans with anthrax bombs and killing everybody???
Don’t get me wrong. I decry any form of violation against basic human rights and the right to feel safe and secure I believe is one of them - however I do find it somewhat disturbing the way western civilization has through the manipulation of the media and politicians, so dramatically ignored the one difference that puts us on morally higher ground. What is so different between “us and them”?? With all of this water-boarding crap going on in America at the moment the only difference I can see is religion. Does that make it a free for all and “may the strongest religion win”? If thats what we believe, then how can we condemn the extremists for following essentially the same principles applied to different deities?
So out of boredom I’ve thrown together a much much more insidious version of the “Rick-Roll’d” page. For those of you who don’t know what “Rick Rolling” is, it’s an Internet meme involving tricking somebody into visiting a link or site that contains the music video for “Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up” - an incredibly annoying song from the 80’s. A bunch of sites showed up with this video tied with some javascript to make it annoyingly move around the screen slowly.
So, I decided to modify the script a tad to make it move around much more and much faster
Anyway, if your feeling cruel - free free to Rick Roll people by sending them to this link http://www.precariouspanther.net/amusing/… Just try avoid clicking on it yourself
I have been breeding rabbits for almost 2 years now. Due to University work i am having to stop and focus more on my studies. So i am selling my rabbits for $15 each, i have the following available:1 3yr old Male Red-eye White Dwarf Lop
1 2yr old Female Frosty Point Dwarf Lop (Who i bred myself and i have had three beautiful litters from her!)
1 5month old Female Frosty Point Dwarf Lop (She is truly adorable!)
1 5month old Male Fawn Dwarf Lop (Father is a Pedigree)
1 1yr old Female Sooty Fawn Dwarf/mini lop (Has a cute face hehe)
Also on the 27th February i will have 5 kits available (Fawn, Black Otter, Black, 2XDark Sooty Fawn)
If you would like some more pictures please email me at amy@precariouspanther.net or if you have any questions!
So… The windows command line has a bunch of commands built in for common tasks such as creating directories, renaming stuff, moving things about, yada yada yada. Its kind of stunted though when I compare it to the kind of file operations I do all the time in my development work.
I just finished sorting a huge number of files into appropriate directories, and noticed annoyingly that about 10,000 files (images in this case) had signatures in the file name making them ugly when displayed on my HTPC as a slide show. For example “Blue Iris (!downloaded from precariouspanther.net!)”… (The site link obviously changed in this case). Rather than having that garbage show up on my screen, I much prefer it to just be “Blue Iris”.
The easiest way to do this is just selecting the file, pressing F2 (or right click/rename) and editing the name removing out the garbage. This is normally fine - however with this collection of around 10,000 images it would take, oh I dunno… three years???
Frell that for a joke! After five mins scouring google I didn’t find a quick and easy solution, so whipped up a quick php script to enable simple find/replace on file names in a directory, opened up trusty CMD, typed in
findReplaceName * ” (!downloaded from precariouspanther.net!)” “”
and within 2 minutes all the work is done. I used to use perl for my shell scripting in linux all the time on the web servers, but given I’m coding php all day every day (and setting up perl on windows is annoying) this worked out much much better for me.
) post a nation-wide nuclear attack on various US cities. It is a witty post-apocalyptic drama which explores some very interesting concepts and philosophies in a post terrorism world; and it’s setting (small town called Jericho) brings an emotional warmth to the series without sacrificing its provocative and challenging ideas and situations.
