Archive for January, 2008

I’ve added a few Firefox extentions recently and it’s quickly making me wonder how I lived without them.

I’ve had IE View installed for ages which is really simple but really valuable. All it does is add an option when I right click on a page to open it in Internet Explorer. As I said it sounds so simple but I use it so much, especially when I’m testing cross browser compatibility of my sites.

I finally got round to reinstalling Web Developer which adds a toolbar and a load of functionality specifically designed for those developing websites and web apps. I’ve been without it for ages (we’re talking years) but I don’t know why, it add loads of stuff.

For example I can disable JavaScript and CSS with a click to see how the page degrades. This is especially useful in backward compatibility testing my Web 2.0 apps for users without JavaScript. What I also find mega useful is the ability for it to display all forum values including hidden elements and allow you to edit them so you can easily test things like people putting in rogue values (such as trying to edit someone elses profile by changing the user id in the hidden form variable to someone elses user id). I’m just scratching the surface here though, it has a massive toolbar of stuff.

Finally I also installed FireFTP which is an FTP client which sits in a tab of Firefox. I never got round to installing an FTP client on my desktop as I always used my laptop but it was annoying a lot of the time. So it’s convient to have one, especially that just sits in my always open browser. It’s not too shabby either it supports multiple accounts, quick connect, two panes (local and remote) and even lock-stepping.

Remember how we were repeatedly told Google doesn’t translate results for you?

We were told wrong.

Maybe it happens by magic? 😉

It seems the uncultured masses are taking over these days. Even traditional heavens such as university campuses and (if you can consider anything that is less than 4 years old, traditional) Facebook are now awash with quote unquote riff raff communicating with each other in text speak and showing each other pointless videos on their £10,000 phones which have everything but the ability to do voice chat.

Whether I myself fall into the category of Philistinism is a whole different debate. I’m not one for the material you would find in an art gallery though my love for art is passionate when you switch the specific area to for example motion pictures or CSS.

What I want to talk about here is the positive side effects we experience from the prevalence of Philistines in our society. I often comment on how much I like the fact that brainless movies from Hollywood sit on Tesco’s shelf for £10+ a piece while I recently acquired 2001 for the delightful price of £3 while Donnie Darko and American Beauty were also available for £2.

It occurs to me though that this applies to a wider social context. For example, while I was down in London I spent a day looking around the British Museum which was a fascinating experience. How much did I pay for it? Nothing. It’s free. Like almost all museums in the UK (much to Owen Johnson’s annoyance having just successfully integrated the entry payment system into every other system at the Royal Armories in Leeds :D).

The question then is this – would all these museums be free if people were arriving on mass at them all? I somehow doubt it. The cinemas are opening up massive multiplexes to deal with the load of customers waiting to pay £6 a ticket and an extra £10 for a popcorn bigger than their body mass while one of the most famous museums in Britain has no queues to be seen.

As I said, my guess is that if museums were as popular as say cinemas or sports events, there would probably be an entry fee. Maybe I’m wrong and the government would continue to fund it which would be nice but I think the principle is more important. After all, you pay what, £30-40 to go see a sporting event? The same for a music concert with a famous artist. Which such prices, charging the same for entry to the British Museum doesn’t seem unreasonable. But of course, due to the general attitudes we have, if they did, few people would go.

It’s a similar situation with public libraries. They’re completely free to use. Would this be the case if everyone uses them? There is an even stronger case for rebutting my answer of no here as this is case of public education but that’s not to rule it out – DVD rental companies be it instore at Blockbuster or online with Love Film charge what, £5 a movie or £15 a month.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule – for example, the theatre is no cheap excursion but then I’m not sure how popular demand would affect prices there. They generally play to full houses anyway so unless we’re going to get stadium-sized theatres (which I would think would somewhat ruin the experience) the laws of supply and demand may drive up prices.

So there you have it. The case of allowing the uncultured to continue to wallow in their Sky TV and chav’ed up Corsas.

As we all know, Facebook is on the way down. It’s bad enough that they now allow non-university students to use the sites but now with all these pointless applications (as well as now having the types of users that will use and spread them) which people constantly send you requests for and putting a million different boxes on a user’s profile so you have to scroll for 30 minutes to reach their wall, how much better is Facebook than MySpace?

Well, still quite a lot better. But the gap is closing. I was using MySpace today (viral marketing, it’s still the biggest social network in the world) and they have really been working on it. The layout is good, the functionality works. It’s a huge improvement on what it would have been like a year ago.

I was uploading some videos to Revver today to find that they now review every video manually! Every single video is apparently now moderated by a Revver staff member to ensure that it doesn’t violate copyright (among other reasons).

Meanwhile in YouTube‘s fight against copyright they had now banned any videos longer than 10 minutes long, no matter what account you have (previous you could sign up for a director’s account which required a few extra contact details to get the limits increased).

An email recently arrived in the inbox of registered users of Pandora from the UK informing them that Pandora will be switching off to UK users on January 15th.

It’s a real shame as Pandora is a fantastic service. For those who haven’t discovered it yet (and I wouldn’t advice trying it now as you’re only going to get into it as they start blocking us), basically you put in your favourite song or artist and it goes away and finds new music that is similar so you can discover new cool stuff. It also takes your feedback on songs so it can improve what it picks out. It’s a customised radio station for you much like Launch Cast on Yahoo Music.

Unfortunately however, after blocking almost everyone else last year, Pandora have finally given up on trying to secure rights to play music in the UK having been unable to agree on a price with the music industry for licencing broadcast rights and so will only be available in the US after next week.

I’m currently in the process of testing out the new Worfolk Online Backup System which will automatically back up the sites in the network. It’s taken quite a bit of development but hopefully it should all come together now and it’s reasonable swish.

It supports daily, weekly and monthly backups all of which is done automatically. The system goes through the lists of sites and sends a request to cPanel to package everything up nicely so it can be easily restored in case of emergency. It also sends cPanel details of my off-site FTP server (the one I have here at Burchett Place) so cPanel can directly upload the backup via FTP.

Then later on the system logs in to my FTP servers and validates that the backup has been generated and logs the filename that has been generated. It then logs said status. You can then access the web based control panel, check to make sure everything is working via the log and see what backups are available for each site and download them if you wish.

I was reading a topic on Cozy Campus (an adult webmaster forum) earlier today about the gossip blog PerezHilton.com.

Standard ad (150×200):

One week: $9,000
One month: $30,000

Hi rise (150×600)

One week: $16,000
One month: $44.000

And before you say, “Yeah, but how many of those ads is the selling at those prices?”, take a look at his site and count them.

I count 15 standard size ads and 5 hi rise.

That’s over half a million dollars a month. I always said there was qood money in gossip blogs.

Ok, so I’m sat in The Old Bar.

Ignoring the flashing games machine and table football to my left which is permissable in a pub I have two plasma screens showing different things, a large screen showing something else on my right, a bright neon air hockey table further to my right and music blaring out behind me.

Does anyone else miss the times you could have a quiet drink in The Old Bar?

So are you.

We’re all Humanists really.

These days it seems the atheist community has more labels than members. Atheists, rationalists, secularists, Humanists, secular humanists, naturalists, Darwinists, nontheists, agnostics, week atheists, strong atheists, secular believers, free-thinkers, skeptics. I agree a lot of these are very different terms but they are all terms in which someone showing up to an A-Soc meeting may well describe themselves as.

Watching the Life of Brian to check everything is in order before the upcoming screening this term it got me thinking.

“People, don’t fight! We are all here together! We must join up against the common enemy!”
“The Judean’s People Front?!”
“The Romans!”

I’ve been wondering recently if we spent too much time worrying about the semantics, squabbling over names and labels when we should actually be doing some productive. Is it really that bad if someone mistakenly calls us a Humanist? I could think of a lot worse labels.