Offmessage

Not just an ad blocking Firefox extension, but an ad blocking Firefox extension that replaces ads with art. Nice.

Apparently brain teasers are the new psychometric testing, or something. This is worth reading just for the payoff. It’s a “tea -> monitor” moment.

The horrifying possibility that Vista’s file deletion and copying problems may be in fact a ‘feature’ of the DRM is gaining some traction. Originally a conspiracy theory, more and more people are testing the case. Perhaps someone should make use of the Vista Bootkit to prove it once and for all?

Fascinating (stats below summarise the report):

• 70 million weblogs
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or…
• 1.4 new blogs every second
• 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
• Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
• 1.5 million posts per day, or…
• 17 posts per second
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
• 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 – up from 12 in the prior quarter
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
• English second at 33%
• Chinese third at 8%
• Italian fourth at 3%
• Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
• English the most even in postings around-the-clock
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
• 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
• 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February

Mike Arrington today mentioned the new feature on LinkedIn, allowing you to see who’s been viewing your profile.

Sadly I can name everyone who’s looked at mine…

Tories plan open door for open source. Friends joke that self employment and age have been pushing me progressively to the right over the last few years, but joking aside things like this do make the Tories more compelling. I’ve always been to the “Orange Book” end of the Lib Dems (more Lib than Dem, if you get my drift). Seeing an opening up of Government procurement, particularly for IT projects, is (to my mind at least) absolutely vital, and quotes like the following are exactly what I’ve been wanting to hear for some time. Shame they have to come from the Tories to hit the press, I suppose. But at least the debate is open for a short time at least. Likesay, I’m not a Tory, but…..

But, there is bigger game, which is the culture of secrecy in public sector procurement that has flourished behind the “commercial in confidence” defence. The Tory plan will work on the premise that secrecy hides bad decision making, protects vested interests, locks small, innovative firms out of government business, and could be one reason why the government has such a bad reputation for IT.

Ostensibly this is an article about the recent bees hate mobile phones scare. In fact, it’s a general rant about bad science and invisible death rays (and a pissing contest between the Grauniad and the Independent too).

For the sake of clarity – bee colonies really are disappearing, but the research quoted about mobile phones is apparently bollocks. As is WiFi smog and anything else you can’t see but scares you.

Part of the problem (that’s perhaps a little unfair, but hey, bear with me) of an automatically updated Kubuntu desktop is that sometimes the defaults change, and you end up with a change that you aren’t happy with. Recently, and for no reason I could divine, the default viewer for PDFs in Thunderbird (mail client) changed to evince. This should, of course, be fine, but for yet more reasons I can’t divine evince can’t print. Or rather, can only occasionally print, which is frankly worse.

After about a month of muttering to myself I finally broke and tried to find out what the hell was going on… It’s not defined in the Attachments menu (in Thunderbird Edit -> Preferences -> Attachments -> View & edit actions). It’s not defined in the system Default Applications (from the ‘start’ button System Settings -> Default Applications). It’s not even defined using update-alternatives. Instead (and thanks to Tim Fredrick’s site for pointing me in the right direction) it’s defined in /usr/share/applications/defaults.list. In that file look for the line starting application/pdf and change the value to be the .desktop file of your choice, relative to the /usr/share/applications directory. In my case my app of choice is KPDF, and so I have changed my line to read as follows:

application/pdf=kde/kpdf.desktop

Sorted.

I’ve been wondering for a while about tracking comments on blogs…. There’s a group of us who have been in electronic contact for years and years. It started out as a mailing list, but over the past few years moved through IRC to the current network of blogs.

What I’ve been feeling the lack of with this move to blogging rather than mailing lists is the conversation. If I comment on a blog I have to remember to watch that post to see the replies and possibly comment again. The minute I post more than one or two comments to one or two blogs I find it impossible to track the conversations that I’m involved in. This has meant, so far, that I’ve been pretty taciturn when it comes to commenting on other people’s blogs.

I was muttering about this today prior to a planning session with a customer (so much so that my mutterings made in to a User Story) and thought that a) I can’t be the only person with this problem, b) it’s a very web2.0 problem, and c) someone must have built something to solve it already.

And indeed they have… I’m currently trialing both coComment and co.mments.com. Apologies in advance for the possible outpourings to come…. It’s all in the name of research, obviously.

Also, my apologies to Mark for not getting it (at all) when he suggested that we built almost exactly this type of system back last summer. To be fair, we built Sleevenotez instead, so it wasn’t an /awful/ mistake, but still…

OK. Doug‘s just pointed me at another feature of the new MultiMap site… Check out the hybrid mode (move your mouse over the map). Now that is really rather nice.