Google Web History Updater extension icon

I’ve created my first extension for Google Chrome – Google Web History Updater!

One of my favorite features of the Google Toolbar is that it records your browsing history in Google Web History.  If you don’t like that feature or are paranoid about Google keeping information about you then you might as well stop reading now.

The benefits of Google Web History are that Google uses your history to personalize your search results, and that you can track down a site you visited while on another computer.

Unfortunately Google Toolbar isn’t available in Chrome.  The reasons for this are fairly clear (Chrome doesn’t do toolbars at all because of its minimalist aesthetic) but I still missed my Google Web History.

Several people entered bug reports for adding Toolbar’s features to the browser, but I got tired of waiting and decided to try and make an extension that would update Web History.  I quickly hit a dead end and contacted the Chrome developers to ask them for help.  They said there was no published API for updating Web History and suggested I reverse engineer the way Toolbar does it.  I couldn’t work out how to do it, and the developers said that the Toolbar team were thinking about making an official extension to do it, so I waited some more.

Then I read an article that reminded me that some browsers (Opera) have had this problem for a long time, and there was a solution available for them – the UseGoogleWebHistory userscript.  This is a small javascript file that runs whenever a page loads, and sends the URL to Web History.  I could have converted the userscript to an extension pretty easily or even had the conversion done for me automatically using a new feature of Chrome but although the userscript worked, it didn’t work for every URL.  I couldn’t work out what was wrong with it, so I went looking for another solution.

It turns out that sending a URL to Web History is actually done as a side effect of asking Google for the PageRank of the URL.  This means that PageRank extensions like this one actually do exactly what I want, except that they also take up space on the screen.

I ended up just modifying that extension (mostly just removing the UI) so I can’t take much credit, but the majority of the code is lifted from the Toolbar anyway.

In the end I got what I wanted – Chrome updating Web History.

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• How Google Uses the Toolbar Data (googlesystem.blogspot.com)
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Amazon 10th Anniversary Wishlist Sweepstakes

To celebrate their 10th Anniversary, Amazon is holding Wishlist Sweepstakes.

Every week from the start of October until the middle of December they’re giving away prizes.  To enter the sweepstakes all you have to do is add something to your wishlist and then click on the link to enter the sweepstakes for that week.

Here are the prizes for each week:

• Week 3 (Oct. 19-25): Meet the Jonas Brothers in London Wish List — A trip for two to London to hear the lads in concert and then meet them in person
• Week 4 (Oct. 26-Nov. 1): Kindle Love Wish List — 10, count ‘em, 10 Kindles
• Week 5 (Nov. 2-8): Ultimate Backyard Theater Wish List — $15,000 for a backyard makeover, plus all the equipment needed to start the show
• Week 6 (Nov. 9-15): Yellowstone Photo Expedition with Canon Wish List — A trip for two to Yellowstone National Park, and a private lesson with a professional photographer
• Week 7 (Nov. 16-22): The Magic of Disney Wish List — A trip for four to explore the wonders of Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Fla., plus a $2,000 Disney gift card
• Week 8 (Nov. 23-29): High-Def Heaven Wish List — A 55-inch HDTV, a Blu-ray home theater, and a Wii
• Week 9 (Nov. 30-Dec. 6): Glamorous Life Wish List — A stunning set of 1½-carat diamond stud earrings
• Week 10 (Dec. 7-12): This one is under wraps until it launches!

Certainly some of the prizes aren’t interesting to me – Disney?  No.  Jonas Brothers?  Hell no.

But HDTV?  Yes.  Kindle, oh yes.

I’ve written before about how much I like the Amazon Wishlist, and as it happens I tend to add something to my wishlist at least once a week, so entering the sweepstakes is easy for me.  Even if it wasn’t for the sweepstakes I’d recommend to anyone to use the Amazon Universal Wishlist – it’s very useful.

Vicon Revue

In the past I’ve posted¹ about my search for a wearable camera and how Microsoft’s Sensecam project looked promising but wasn’t commercially available.

Finally it appears there is good news – a British company named Vicon has licensed the technology to release a version of the SenseCam, and it will be available in the next few months.  The bad news is that it’ll cost £500 (about $820).

I’m starting to get the impression that I’m not the target audience for the SenseCam – it needs to be about 10x cheaper before I could consider buying one.  I think the price could come down if they made it a bit less smart – it currently has accelerometers, light sensors and heat detection that it uses in an attempt to only record interesting images so that it doesn’t fill up its storage too fast.  Storage is cheap – if they got rid of all the cleverness I think it would be a lot more affordable.

Then again I guess life-blogging isn’t exactly a huge market – the subset of all people who are geeks, the subset of geeks that are less paranoid, the subset of them that are interested in auto-instrumenting etc.

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• Zee.: New Camera Promises to Capture Every Minute of Your Life (thenextweb.com)

1. I would wear one of these every day, Finally some movement on the SenseCam front and Wearable cameras

Heat Wave book cover

I just finished reading Heat Wave by Richard Castle – a tie-in novel for the TV show Castle (I wrote about the show previously).

There are some TV tie-in novels that I’ve enjoyed – for Burn Notice¹, Psych² and Monk³, however they all had a certain pulpiness in common.  Not just because they immediately came out in paperback (which I’ve always taken as a sign of the publisher putting in less effort because they don’t expect to make a lot of money from the book), but because they were a bit hobbled by their connection to the TV series.  The writers can’t kill off or otherwise make any major changes to the characters, their back story or setting – something writers of original novels can do at will.

Heat Wave is different – it’s meta-fiction.  In the TV series Richard Castle is a writer, and has written a book called Heat Wave - this book is written as if it is that book, by him.  For a brief while we get to live inside the world of the TV series because we can read the book that they’re reading.  The illusion is maintained flawlessly – from the dedication and afterword to the picture on the back cover.

An advantage Heat Wave has over most (if not all) other tie-in novels is that because it’s supposed to have been written by the TV character instead of about the TV character, the actual author can change things without causing any problems.  Any differences to the TV series are put down to the meta-author changing the names to protect the innocent or improving on (what is to him) real life by making it juicier.

A difference between the TV series and the book is that Castle is the main character of the series, but Nikki Heat is the main character of the book.  The main difference this makes is that although a good portion of the series is dedicated to Castle’s personal life, that aspect is almost completely missing from the book.  Once again the meta nature of the book smooths this over – Castle’s mother gets a cameo in the book, and if you’ve seen the TV series you can easily imagine her haranguing her son to be written in.  His daughter is completely missing, but as a protective father you can imagine Richard Castle wanting to spare her any embarrassment by leaving her out.

The book is further tied back into the TV series by the actual cover being used in an episode and the actual page number of a sex scene in the book (p105) mentioned in the episode.

Additional meta is provided by Nathan Fillion showing up to book stores and signing the books as Richard Castle.

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1. The Fix and The End Game
2. A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read and Mind Over Magic
3. Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse, Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii and Mr. Monk and The Blue Flu

Our DirecTV satellite reception has been getting worse for a while, and now it’s at the point where our DVR can’t record any programs without wild glitches.

We were finally able to convince DirecTV that the poor reception wasn’t caused by the summer storms we’ve been having, and they sent out a technician.  Unfortunately, the problem seems to be that there’s a tree between the satellite and our dish, and over the years the tree has grown to a point where the line of sight is too obscured.  Apparently there’s nothing they can do – wherever they would reposition the dish there’s a tree.  We also can’t do anything drastic like cut the tree down, because we live in an apartment complex and it’s not our tree.

So we cancelled our DirecTV account and signed up with DirecPath.  Apparently DirecPath just resells DirecTV to apartment complexes like ours – there’s a big dish somewhere in the complex and all of the apartments are serviced from it via the built-in cabling.  Needless to say, there are no trees in front of this dish.

We also took the opportunity to upgrade to HD – we bought an HD TV immediately after signing up for SD DirecTV and it’s been annoying me for three years.

This is all fine except that DirecPath aren’t installing the receiver until next week, the mid-season finale of Burn Notice is tonight and the season premiers of Psych and Monk are tomorrow – my three favorite programs.

I have created my first Wikipedia article – Zemanta.

I’ve been using Zemanta since March 2008, and I was surprised that it didn’t have a Wikipedia article.

I’ve been planning on creating an article for Zemanta for a long time, but Wikipedia is pretty intimidating.  There are a lot of rules about what you can write about and how you write it – if you do it wrong up they might unilaterally delete your article.  Added to that is the fact that wikis use a unique kind of meta-data that I needed to learn, and I just ended up putting it off week after week.

In the end what worked was telling my wife to nag me to get it done.  I guess that goes to show a negative can be turned into a positive  Considering how easy it turned out to be, I feel foolish having put it off at all.

As you can see, the article is pretty bare at the moment because I was concentrating on just providing referenced facts without bias – it can always be fleshed out (by me or anyone with relevant knowledge) later.

Wikipedia have obviously put a lot of work into providing FAQ’s, tutorials and help sections for beginners like me, but I’d say they still have a long way to go.  I spent the vast majority of the time just trying to find answers to simple questions.

While writing the article I found several things that should have Wikipedia articles but don’t, for example Common Tag, LinkWithin and Outbrain.  If my first article is well received (or at least not immediately deleted) I might write some more.

EDIT: Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks that Wikipedia is less welcoming to new contributors – After the boom, is Wikipedia heading for bust?

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Battlefield 1943 was released on Xbox Live Arcade yesterday (it comes out on the PlayStation Network today) and it puts a lot of other XBLA games to shame.

I’m getting a lot of hits from searches like “failed to connect to ea online”, so here’s something to help those people:

EA underestimated the demand for Battlefield 1943, so there aren’t enough servers.  They’re adding more, so just be patient and either keep trying to connect or wait a day or two.  In the meantime you can follow their twitter feed or go to their forums for news.

It must be embarrassing for a large company like EA to be having problems like this when it’s exactly the sort of thing that big companies are supposed to be good at.  They had to have known that everyone that bought either of the Battlefield games on Xbox plus a load of new people were going to want to pay Battlefield 1943 on the first day…

The best news for me was finding out that Battlefield 1943 has Battlefield: Bad Company style destruction.  In fact although it’s a bit less detailed in some ways, I think you can destroy slightly more objects.  All games should have destructible environments (I’m looking at you, Modern Warfare 2).

One thing that annoyed me was that the airplane controls have the vertical axis the wrong way around, presumably to cater for console-heads who’ve never used a joystick.  It’s easily fixable in the options, and I was surprised how natural it felt to get back in the cockpit after not having played a flight-sim in years.  I still can’t accurately bomb targets worth a crap though.

Battlefield 1943 comes with three islands, and there’s a well publicized competition to unlock the fourth one when there’s a total of 43 million kills in the game.  I really like the idea of the competition, but the new map is planes only, and there’s a reason I don’t buy flight-sims on console.

Why is it that every Battlefield game on the Xbox prompts you for the hard drive every time you start it?  Especially as it’s the only storage medium connected.  It would be nice if it could assume that I want to use the last storage medium I chose, or at least if it could be configured to assume that.  And then it shows the help text about auto-saves, which I really don’t need to see again.

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GeekChart logo

I recently read a Lifehacker article about Geek Chart and decided to check it out.  Basically Geek Chart gives you a widget that shows the social media sites where you share things.

Here’s my Geek Chart:

Ghosttie’s Geek Chart

Currently they support Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Last.fm, with support for Facebook coming soon.

You can also see Geek Charts for famous people like Al Gore and Barack Obama.

Geek Chart seem to be having some problems at the moment – none of my tweets are showing up and there’s a message on the site saying:

GeekChart.com is currently experiencing a high load. Things may be slower than normal. Please be patient.
We’re also hitting the Twitter API limit so Twitter feeds may not update until next hour.

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Our camera is a Kodak EasyShare DX3900.  I have no complaints with it, but the camera does show its age in the fact that it only takes 3.1 megapixel pictures, only has a 2x optical zoom and only has a 1.5inch LCD screen.  For some reason my wife has always disliked this camera and wanted a new one.

Canon Powershot A1000IS

So for her birthday this year I bought her a Canon Powershot A1000IS.  It’s 10 megapixel, has a 4x optical zoom and a 2.5inch LCD screen.

It has all the exposure, white balance etc. settings if you know how to use them, but more conveniently for us it has a very nice automatic mode.

The Powershot has a cool face detect feature to make sure that any faces in the picture are in focus.  It also has an optical image stabilizer which is extremely handy because I tend to move the camera just as I press the shutter.

The camera comes with a 32MB memory card, but as that’s only big enough to store about 12 pictures you’ll really need to buy a bigger one.  We got the Transcend 4GB SDHC Class 6 Flash Memory Card and it’s fine.

I also bought the Canon PSC-85 Deluxe Soft Case to go with the camera because Amazon suggested it, but it turned out to be too big.

The camera comes with two AA batteries, so unless you like spending money on batteries you’ll need something like the Canon CBK4-300 Rechargeable Battery and Charger Kit for PowerShot Cameras.

I hadn’t realized that it could do this when I bought it, but the Powershot can record videos.  At 640×480 the 4GB card can hold about half an hour of video.  It’s very good quality – at least as good as any webcam or digital camcorder.

So far we like the Canon Powershot A1000IS very much.

When I moved from the UK to the US, one of the differences I noticed was in weather reporting.  First of all it’s a lot more accurate, but I think that’s a matter of geography not competence – the UK is on the meeting point of three weather systems, so if the meeting point moves slightly you can go from tropical to arctic, which makes it impossible to predict.  Atlanta is far enough inland that the meteorologists can see the weather systems coming several days out, and so their predictions are very accurate.  In the UK the weather report always says “chance of rain”, “chance of sun” etc. so either you always carry an umbrella or never carry one because the prediction is no help.  In Atlanta, if the weather report says it’s going to rain you’d better bring an umbrella because it is going to rain.

The other thing I noticed about the difference in weather reporting was the hyperbole.  In the UK they just say it might rain, whereas in the US they say DANGER – Severe rain warning! It’s always “DANGER – Severe something warning”, whether that’s rain or clouds or wind or sun.  Every day you’re in danger of the sky trying to kill you.

Now to be fair, sometimes the sky does try to kill you here.  They have tornadoes and floods every year.  Setting aside the question of why you would choose to live in such a precarious environment (I’m also looking at you, California and New Orleans), it’s still not that dangerous every day, the way they’re reporting it.

I do understand why they exaggerate, even if I find it reprehensible.  Information is so freely available now that they can’t really sell it anymore.  Why would you watch a weather report on TV when you could look it up online in a fraction of the time and at your convenience instead of theirs.  The answer is that if they can convince you that your life depends on watching their report then you’re more likely to do it.

The long term consequences of all of this hype is either (like me) you see all news reporting as tainted and ignore the tornado warnings (probably unwise), or you live in a constant state of fear.  I think that’s where most people are, nowadays – they’ve had so much of this kind of exaggeration that they see the world as a terrifying place – terrorists under every rock, pedophiles behind every bush!  Then they overreact, wrap their children in bubble wrap and who knows what problems that will cause a generation down the road.

If this is what news companies do for something as inconsequential as a weather report, imagine how much worse it is with real news.

Which brings us to a very recent news story that I’m sure we will be beaten over the head with for the foreseeable future – swine flu.  Some people in Mexico died of a new strain of the flu, and people who were recently in Mexico brought it to the US, New Zealand and Spain.  The World Health Organization has warned of a possible pandemic.

The overreaction is immediate and extreme – doctors are telling concerned patients to wear masks, countries are planning quarantines, and the news reporting goes into hyperbole overdrive.

Now I don’t deny that a pandemic is possible – I don’t doubt that this is an unusually nasty variant of flu – but look at the facts of the story and it’s not as frightening as it seems.  There are no deaths outside of Mexico and Mexico wouldn’t be on the top of the list when it comes to good nutrition, hygiene or health-care.  If you’re concerned about getting any kind of flu, a doctor will tell you to wear a mask.  Planning quarantines is not the same as implementing them – governments are constantly planning for worst case scenarios and responses to disasters.  The World Health Organisation has warned there could be a pandemic, but it’s their job to warn about things like that – they’re still meeting with medical experts to advise on whether to raise the alert level.

It’s by no means the end of the world, but guess how it’s being reported.  If this all sounds very familiar, look through the news archives for avian flu and West Nile virus.  Remember when they wiped us all out?  No?

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Robocode is a very cool game where you program a tank to fight against tanks that other people have programmed.

As a programmer it’s fun to write a frivolous program that’s concerned with blowing things up instead of serious business rules.

Basically several tanks are placed in an arena and are tasked with destroying each other.  Each tanks runs code written by a contestant.  The code has access to the angle of the hull and turret of the tank, other tanks that the turret sees, and can rotate and move the tank and fire shells.

At its simplest the code can just drive the tank around randomly, firing a shell whenever it sees an enemy tank.  At its most complex it can track other tanks based on their last known position, use neural networks, multiple threads – the sky is the limit.

I found out about Robocode several years ago but only ever really scratched the surface.

You can download code other people have written to test your program against theirs before submitting your code in a tournament.

From my point of view Robocode isn’t ideal because the code the tanks are written in is Java, and although I’ve used Java before I don’t have a lot of experience in it.  Having said that, Robocode is really the only game in town when it comes to this type of thing, and it is a lot of fun.

Project Wonderful logo

I’ve been using Google AdSense for over three years and Project Wonderful for six days, so this probably isn’t the fairest comparison.

I replaced the Amazon Omakase ads an my blog with Project Wonderful ones, as I only had 26 clicks on the Omakase ads in the last year.

Google Adsense ads are automatic and context sensitive.  A publisher (person with a website, e.g. me) puts the AdSense code on their site, Google crawls their site to find out what a page is about, and then shows ads relevant to the contents of the page.  To be honest it’s either not very accurate or there just aren’t that many ads out there relevant to my blog posts.  The second part of how AdSense works is that advertisers bid in an auction to have their ads placed for certain keywords.  The advertisers pay for either a number of impressions (times the ad is shown to a person viewing the site) or for a number of clicks.

Project Wonderful works differently in that the advertisers choose specifically what websites they want their ad to be shown on, and they compete in an auction with other advertisers that want to use the same ad space.  The publisher can then accept or deny the ads to keep things appropriate to the site.  It’s more involved than the AdSense model, and sounds like it could mean more work for everyone, but there are automatic accepts for publishers and campaigns for advertisers that can be used to automate things.  Advertisers pay for a certain amount of time, regardless how many impressions of clicks that involves.

So here’s where the comparison comes in – on average I make about $8 a year on AdSense and $1 a year on Project Wonderful (projected).  Not exactly big bucks, but it’s only been six days and I’ll give it more time.  At the moment the Project Wonderful advertisers are bidding a maximum of $0.01 per day to advertise on my site, which isn’t much.

Another distinction between the two is that AdSense only lets you withdraw your earnings once you get to $100, whereas Project Wonderful lets you withdraw at $10.

One thing I like about Project Wonderful is the manual approvals – if you have the time, it’s quite entertaining to see what ads people want to put on your site and how they bid against each other to get the ad space.

Where Project Wonderful has so far disappointed me is in the variety of ads – the majority seem to be for comics.  That’s fair enough if that’s appropriate to the publisher’s site, but what about all the non-comic-related sites out there?

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Castle DVD cover

I’m a fan of the new police procedural TV series Castle, starring Nathan Fillion.

It seems that there always has to be something special about the main characters in these shows  - Adrian Monk (Monk) has OCD, Shawn Spencer (Psych) was trained from a young age to be observant by his cop dad, Patrick Jane (The Mentalist) used to be a fake psychic…  What makes Richard Castle (the main character in Castle) special is that he’s a writer.

Now I realize that doesn’t sound like it makes him very special, and to be honest it doesn’t.  He consults with the police and won’t let them accept the obvious solution to a crime because it “wouldn’t make a good story”.  This is obviously ridiculous – in real life it’s almost always the obvious solution; the last person to see the deceased or the closest person to them is usually the killer.

It gets a bit better in the fact that as a famous writer he has access to important and unusual people that the police normally wouldn’t have access to.

Nevertheless the show is well written, acted, directed etc. and is fun to watch.

What I think is really interesting about Castle, though, is the relationships between the characters.  Although the main character is a man, he’s completely surrounded by women.  The other main characters are Detective Kate Beckett, Castle’s daughter and mother.

As a young(ish), white, male, middle class westerner I’m about as privileged as I could be¹.  One of the ways I’m privileged is in the way books, movies, TV shows etc. are written from a male point of view.  I’m not a feminist, but once you notice how male-centric a lot of things are, it gets annoying.

Which is why I think Castle is interesting – he’s flighty and irresponsible where Beckett is responsible and serious; deliberate role reversal?  The climax of the show is usually the confrontation with the perpetrator, and Castle is always told to stay in the car out of harm’s way while Beckett dons a bullet proof vest and kicks in the door.

Although The Mentalist also has a female detective and a male consultant, it’s not the same because Patrick Jane dominates everyone he comes in contact with, so Lisbon never really gets any spotlight.

To be honest I started watching Castle because I enjoyed Nathan Fillion in Firefly.  I continued watching it because it’s enjoyable.  Now I’m appreciating it on another level.

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1. short of being fabulously wealthy

Polldaddy logo

Last October Automattic (makers of WordPress) bought Polldaddy, a company that provides embeddable poll and survey widgets.

I tried out the original version of the Polldaddy WordPress plugin, and to be honest it wasn’t great.  The original version mostly just showed you pages from the Polldaddy website in an iframe on your WordPress admin pages, and it was pretty buggy.  The poll I created back then to see which WordPress theme people liked doesn’t even show up in my account now.

In March they released a new version of the plugin that’s much better – it integrates properly with the WordPress admin pages.  They’ve also embraced and integrated Twitter – you can create a poll and easily post it to Twitter in one step.

The new version of the plugin is finally in a state where I would confidently use it, although the difference between free and paid accouts still exists – free accounts are only allowed 100 survey responses and a paid account costs $200 a year!  I realize they need to make money, but that’s a hell of a lot of money.

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I love it when someone writes them into a sci-fi book or movies.

One of my favourite paintings is Returning Home, The Z-R-5 Macon:

Returning Home, The Z-R-5 Macon

Unfortunately airships haven’t been mainstream since the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, although the bad press from that should have worn off by now.

Nowadays there’s no practical reason to use airships – they’re slower than airplanes and more susceptible to bad weather.

This is where my idea comes in – airship cruises.  When you take a cruise you’re not concerned with how quickly you get to your destination, you’re concerned with how enjoyable the journey is.  Airships are expensive to build and maintain but so are cruise ships.  And no cruise ship can rival the view you’d get from an airship.

It looks like someone has actually taken this idea a bit closer to actually happening, although I’m not aware of anyone actually getting as far as offering it for real yet.

Aeros Cruiser

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WP-Cumulus screenshot

WP-Cumulus adds on to WordPress as a sidebar widget, which means it ends up pretty small, and you lose a lot of the detail.

The upside is that the plugin looks very pretty – it spins in 3D and can be controlled by the mouse.

The downside is that normal tag clouds are just regular HTML hyperlinks so with WP-Cumulus you lose some navigability, especially from the point of view of a crawling searching engine.  You lose it completely if you don’t have Flash installed.  It also slows down your page loads a bit.

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Hunch logo

Hunch is a new website (still in alpha) that helps you make decisions.

For example if you wanted to rent a movie and didn’t know which one to watch, Hunch would ask you a series of questions and give you a recommendation based on your answers.

Where Hunch gets really clever is that it learns about you based on your answers and gets more and more accurate as you use it.

An interesting thing they can do with Hunch is take a look at larger trends based on the answers of all Hunch users.  For example according to the Hunch blog, people who answered “Yes” to the question “Have you ever broken an arm or a leg?” were more likely to prefer games like Madden NFL 09, and people who answered “No” were more likely to prefer games like Super Mario Galaxy.

As the accuracy of Hunch’s predictions relies not only on your answers but on its knowledge of everyone’s answers, it’s not as smart now as it will be in the future.  For example if Hunch has no idea what to recommend you but other people who gave similar answers to you chose a particular answer, that will give Hunch an idea of what to suggest to you.

A question that some people are asking is how Hunch will make money.  One idea is for companies pay to be included in the recommendations Hunch makes.  How the recommendations would maintain their accuracy while at the same time being sold is another question.

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Baconfile logo

Sometimes you want to share a file – it could be a picture, a video, whatever.  You want to be able to upload the file somewhere and publish a link to it, for example on Twitter.  Enter Baconfile!

Baconfile is a web service created by Leah Culver (co-founder and the lead developer of now-defunct Pownce).  You create a login, upload a file of your choice and then share the (short) URL.  Basically it’s like TwitPic, only not limited to images.

Baconfile uses Amazon S3 for storage so it’s high availability and low cost, although it does mean that you’ll need to create an S3 account order to use it.  Apparently they’re considering free/paid accounts directly through Baconfile which will eliminate this requirement once it’s a bit more mature.

Wordle of my tweets

It’s a bit similar to what I did when I originally posted about Wordle.

If you wanted to clean it up a bit you could go through the CSV file and remove any words you want to ignore.  For example I have Raptr set up to tweet whenever I play a game on the Xbox 360, so my first attempt at the Wordle was dominated by “just started playing” and “http://raptr.com/ghosttie“.  As it is, I’ve left the names of the games in, and “Battlefield: Bad Company” and “Call of Duty: World at War” are fairly noticeable.

I also recognize “New blog post” from every time I tweet about a blog post and “Prediction” from when I had Hubdub automatically tweeting my predictions.  I suppose it shows that most of my tweets are automated – that can’t be good.

This issue is being covered in depth by newspapers, blogs and #amazonfail on Twitter so I won’t echo the coverage too much, but apparently Amazon has “de-ranked” books with “adult content”.  This seems to mean that the books don’t show up in bestseller lists or even searches.

While at first glance this seems like a well intentioned “won’t someone think of the children?” move, the de-ranking seems to have been implemented extremely unevenly.  Award winning books and romance novels are gone but Playboy is still there.  Gay people seem to be taking it personally, as apparently the first three results for “homosexuality” on Amazon.co.uk are all anti-gay.

While I don’t tend to read romance novels or gay literature, literary censorship of any kind needs to be carefully examined – “they came for the gays and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t gay” etc.

Image via Wikipedia

Assuming Amazon’s motives are pure, it was a very clumsy move – there are much less controversial ways of achieving the goal, for example a Google style op-in/out safe search.

An interesting effect of this is the cyberactivism backlash that immediately took effect – there was talk of a boycott, and then a Google Bomb of the phrase Amazon Rank.

I think Amazon needs to realize that like Google they’re so big that everything they do gets scrutinized, and take steps to avoid being painted as the bad guy.  Maybe it was just a PR failure more than anything else – I expect them to make a very public U-turn very soon.

To be honest I’m very surprised at how long it took them to make a statement about this – apparently they’re blaming it on a glitch.

EDIT: And finally an official response:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

EDIT: Some people are now saying that it was actually caused by a hacker…

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Plinky logo

Plinky is a relatively new website that helps inspire you to create content.

Every day Plinky “prompts” you – asks you a question.  In answering the question you end up with an idea for a blog post.

For example the prompt for yesterday was:

Write a haiku about the last movie you saw.

Plinky also has some social networking features – you can follow your friends on Plinky and see their answers to the daily prompts.  The prompts are so random that you’ll end up finding out unusual and interesting things about your friends.

Plinky can also connect to other services, so your answers to the prompts can get automatically posted to your blog.

What keeps me from using Plinky regularly is a nagging feeling every time I answer a prompt that I’m putting a bit too much personal information on the Internet…

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The Prodigy - Invaders Must Die

Last month The Prodigy released their fifth album – Invaders Must Die.

I’ve been a fan of The Prodigy for a long time – not since the beginning, but a long time.

I really enjoyed their previous album Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned.  It was different from their previous albums in that only Liam Howlett was involved from the original group - only guest vocalist were used.

In Invaders Must Die, Keith Flint and Maxim Reality are back doing the vocals on most of the tracks, and it’s at least as good as Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned was.

Invaders Must Die is identifiably Prodigy, which means it sounds a bit 90′s.  I can see why some people wouldn’t like that, but it has progressed and grown since then and it’s exactly my style.

Here’s the music video for my favourite track on the album – the single Invaders Must Die:

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Pixazza logo

Pixazza is an interesting service that Google recently invested in.  It’s similar to AdSense in that it lets you make money from your site by automatically adding contextual ads to your content.

Unlike Adsense, instead of adding text ads to text webpages it hyperlinks products in your pictures.  Since image recognition technology is in its infancy, the hyperlinks are created by people working for Pixazza.

Pixazza sample

I’m not sure I’d actually get much use out of Pixazza.  I don’t usually post a lot of pictures, and the ones I post are intended to support the blog post they’re on.  They therefore don’t tend to contain a lot of products or they only reference a blog post I’ve already written about.

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TinEye logo

Image search is hard.  Web pages are full of text, links and metadata that tell you about them – they lend themselves to being searched.  Images on the other hand mostly just come with a filename and if you’re lucky a caption – that isn’t a lot information to go by.  As for the image itself, getting a computer to understand a page full of text is a lot harder than getting it to understand a picture – image recognition is still in its infancy.

So along comes TinEye with a different way of looking at image search – instead of entering text that describes the picture you’re looking for, you give it a picture to look for.  Now obviously this isn’t much use unless you already know what you’re looking for, but it’s fantastic if you’re trying to find the original source of an unattributed picture.

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I’ve been using the WP Super Cache plug-in on my blog for a while.  I’m quite happy with it, although I doubt my website gets enough traffic to really need it.

WP Super Cache does have one drawback – it only caches a page after it has been accessed the first time, so if a lot of pages are accessed just once (for example when a search engine crawls your website) you get no benefit from the caching.  This is understandable considering WP Super Cache was designed to help when a single page is accessed a lot of times (e.g. the digg effect).

I recently found out about DB Cache (I don’t remember where from), which is a similar plug-in in that it’s intended to speed up your website and reduce the load on the server.  However it works differently from WP Super Cache in that instead of caching pages it caches database queries.

This means that DB Cache provides less of an improvement when a single page gets a lot of hits, because PHP still runs for every hit – only the database queries are sped up.  In this case WP Super Cache would be faster because PHP only needs to run on the first hit, and from then on it’s serving static HTML.

The case where DB Cache provides more of an improvement over WP Super Cache is when lots of different pages get hits around the same time (e.g. when a search engine crawls your website).  In this case WP Super Cache never gets to serve static pages, so it doesn’t provide any improvement.  However because hits on different pages will use a lot of the same database queries, DB Cache will be able to speed this up.

I’m currently using both DB Cache and WP Super Cache at the same time, and they seem to co-exist without any problems.  This way I get the best of both worlds – either a page is already in WP Super Cache and a static page gets served, or the page is being accessed for the first time and so the database queries get cached by DB Cache.

Unlike most of the other plug-ins I use, the author of the DB Cache plug-in isn’t a native English speaker (he’s Ukrainian) so help and support seem to be more of a challenge than usual.

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gooseGrade logo

ReadWriteWeb recently did an article on gooseGrade, so I thought I’d try it out.

GooseGrade is a website that lets you suggest corrections for spelling errors, factual errors etc. on websites.  Your suggestions are then reviewed by the owner of the website and then either applied or discarded, depending on whether your suggestion was correct.

Apparently it works with pretty much any website just by inserting some HTML, but they also have plugins for popular blogging platforms like their WordPress plugin.  I’ve installed it here but I haven’t been able to get it working yet.

You can learn a bit more about it by watching this video:

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In any case I never found a gadget that fit my requirements – some were still theoretical, some not for sale, some not adequate.

Backpacker's Diary

Yanko design is an excellent website with lots of interesting design ideas.  A couple months ago they did a mockup of a very interesting gadget called the Backpacker’s Diary for tourist/trekker types.  It’s not exactly what I was looking for – it’s not just a camera, it’s also a laptop, solar panel and light.

It’s purely a concept and will probably never get made, but it’s very cool.

VIEVU PVR-PRO

Another gadget I found is a lot more like the wearable camera that I want – the VIEVU PVR.  In a lot of ways it’s perfect – a small, wearable video camera with a built-in battery.

But this is where we run into the limitations of current technology – it only has space for one hour of video, so my dream of capturing a whole day is right out.  The other way it’s limited by current technology is that it costs $299.95.

Those figures are for the VIEVU PVR-PRO – they also sell a VIEVU PVR-PRO 2, which has space for four hours of video but costs $399.95.

I suppose if this sort of thing ever hit the mainstream the cost would come down and the performance would go up, but I can’t see that happening for a long time.  At least someone out there is actually making and selling the things, which is more than I’ve seen up till now.

I thought it was interesting that wearable cameras got a mention in Cory Doctorow‘s excellent short story The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away as a “lifelogger”, although the ones in the story do a lot more than just record video.

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Stimator logo

Stimator is a bit like Website Grader in that it analyzes your website, incoming links etc. and gives you a score.  Where it’s different is that instead of being a percentage like Website Grader gives you, Stimator gives you a value in US Dollars.

The number isn’t just arbitrary – it’s based on how much actual money real websites have sold for and how your website compares to those sites.  For example Stimator estimates that google.com is worth about $940 million.

As of today, Stimator thinks my website is worth $747, which isn’t a huge amount but at least it’s more than I’ve spent on the website over the years.  They provide a bit of html to include in your site to show off your estimated worth (similar to Website Grader), but it didn’t work when I tried to include it in this post.

I originallydiscoeverd Stimator via someone’s tweet, but I don’t remember who it was from.  When I later decided to revisit Stimator and couldn’t remember its name I found a lot of other website valuation web apps out there, but Stimator seemed to be the best.  They seem to have put a lot of thought into it, especially the concept of linking the valuations to the financial markets.

I don’t think any of this should be taken too seriously, but it’s a fun thing to run ever so often to see whether your website is getting better or worse.

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ECA logo

The Entertainment Consumer Association is a non-profit organization that lobbies for gamers’ interests.

Throughout history the establishment has always been afraid of new things that they don’t understand – from the waltz to rock and roll.  These days gaming is the new kid on the block and I’m sick of the media and politicians ignorantly blaming it whenever some lunatic shoots someone.  With the ECA around there’s finally someone to counter the rhetoric and hyperbole.

In addition to this, I found out from an article on Kotaku that one of the membership benefits of ECA membership is 10% off of gaming purcahses on Amazon.  As membership costs $20 and games cost about $60, you break even if you buy at least three games a year.  So not only can you help a cause that’s dear to your heart, but you can effectively do it for free!

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Spreadshirt logo

I found out about a cool t-shirt website called Spreadshirt from one of @gandalfar‘s tweets.

Like several other t-shirt stores, in addition to the pre-designed shirts available you have the option of designing your own.  You can upload a design of your own or design a shirt using the existing designs and text or just change the colors on an existing shirt.

Unlike any other t-shirt store that I’ve seen, Spreadshirt lets you create your own store containing your designs.  They make and ship the shirt, collect the money from the customer etc. and you get a commision.

My store is here.  I’ve created one shirt so far:

I’ve wanted a lion rampant shirt for a long time and couldn’t find one.  With Spreadshirt I was able to design the shirt I wanted and as a bonus I can make it available for other people to buy and make a little extra money.

Spreadshirt also gives you the ability to include your store in your website, but it uses iframes so I there are problems with cookies so I’m not using it.

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I humbly beg your kind forgiveness for the deafening silence that has been coming from my blog for the last two months (holy crap).

I got completely out of the habit of posting, and since I quit Plurk I started twittering a lot more.  I’ve found that twittering all day means that I’m left without any topics that I want to blog.

For example I had found that I was always tired, even after lots of sleep, so I decided to cut caffeine completely out of my diet.  I didn’t even mention that here but gave progress updates at least once a day on twitter.

If I hadn’t been twittering the experience it definitely would have given me enough material for at least one blog post.

Has anyone else experienced this?  I only have so much energy and so much information to communicate – there are so many options these days that either I only use one method of communication, or use them all a little or just freeze up and don’t communicate at all.

I mostly grew up in big cities.  Big cities have a reputation for being rude.  I think the impression of rudeness has to do with how strangers treat each other.

In a big city, when two strangers walk past each other in the street they don’t acknowledge each other at all, whereas in a small town they’re more likely to give eye contact, smile and say hi.  I prefer the big city way of doing things, at least partially because it lets me avoid something I call “glance jousting”.

Glance jousting is a game involuntarily played by all strangers who walk past each other.  Like a lot of things in life, it’s very easy to lose and very difficult to win.

Basically here’s how glance jousting works – you’re walking down the street and a stranger is walking towards you.  You both pretend the other person doesn’t exist until the very last second, and then you both do something.  If you both do the same thing then you both win, otherwise you both lose.  On the up side, both the prize for winning and the penalty for losing are extremely transitory – either you get a brief flash of feeling good or feeling bad.

Here are some losing scenarios:

• The other person tries to make eye contact and you don’t, or you try to make eye contact and the other person doesn’t
• The other person smiles and you don’t, or you smile and the other person doesn’t
• The other person nods and you don’t, or you nod and the other person doesn’t
• The other person greets you and you don’t respond, or you greet the other person and they don’t respond

Here are some winning scenarios:

• You ignore each other
• You both make eye contact
• You both smile
• You both nod
• One of you greets the other, who responds in kind

The verbal greeting is the only one that you don’t need to do simultaneously, because if you both spoke at the same time that would be another losing scenario.  However as you only have a split second to respond, you need to be ready to speak in case the other person does.  Note that verbal greetings are only appropriate in some cultures, so I never initiate in case of an unexpected losing scenario.

It’s possible that you’ve been playing this game your whole life without realizing it because you’re not aware of a good feeling prize/bad feeling penalty.  If so, it’s possible you’re a sociopath – seek help immediately.

There are subtleties for the advanced player – if you both smile but one of you smiles more or less than the other person, that could be a losing scenario.  To a certain extent these subtleties are culturally defined, and in some cultures anything short of a successful full greeting is considered a losing scenario.  If you live in one of these cultures my advice to you is to move to a big city.

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I’ve been using the private beta of Woopra for about a week.

Woopra is a web analytics service like Google Analytics, but its unique feature is that you can see the traffic live instead of just a report at the end of the day.

The other thing that’s different about Woopra is that instead of being completely web based (like Google Analytics), you need to install a Java-based client application.

At first glance it seems like a step backwards to need a client application – all the heavy lifting happens on the server anyway, and a web app is accessible anywhere whereas client apps need to be installed.

However the upside of having a client application is that you can set up Event Notifications so that you get a systray notification when a visitor that matches some criteria (that you define) arrives – that would be difficult to do in a web app.

I really like  Event Notifications because my website only gets about one hit per hour, so in order to see the visits live I would need to have the client application open all the time just in case.  With Event Notifications I can have the client hidden until I get a visit.

The client consists of a Dashboard, a Live display, Search, Analytics and a Management screen for Event Notifications.  No matter what screen you’re on you can always see a header with some quick visit numbers and a line graph of today’s visits and hits by hour, and a footer with a ticker of today’s visit information as compared to yesterday’s.

The Dashboard has tables with an overview of visits and hits, what content has had hits today, referring sites and search keywords used.  It’s a good overview of the day’s traffic but doesn’t make it very easy to see live traffic so I don’t spend much time there.

The Live display is much more interesting, assuming you have enough traffic to see some of it happening live.  This screen has a map of the world that shows visits as dots on it when they happen – it’s very exciting to watch  You can change the map to only show a specific country, if you have enough traffic to be worth it.  There’s also a table that shows your current visitors and a bigger table that shows the details of the currently selected visitor – for example location, operating system, browser, where they came from and which of your pages they’ve visited this session – it’s fascinating.

For me, the best thing about the Live display is that there is a button you can press to maximize the map to take up the whole monitor.  If you have a second monitor attached to your computer or a spare computer with its own monitor you could have map showing all the time, with your visitors appearing on it live!

The Search screen lets you mine the data that Woopra collects about your visitor’s browsing sessions.  It’s useful because the live data disappears off of the Live display when the visitor leaves.

The Analytics screen gives you more of a bird’s eye view of the data.  This is more conventional web analytics – graphs of visits per day, pie charts of the operating systems your visitors use etc.

One thing people worry about with web analytics is whether their web pages will be slowed down.  The Woopra tracking script goes into the footer of your website, so it is run last and doesn’t slow the page load down at all.  They also have plugins for various blogging platforms (like WordPress) so the tracking script is added for you automatically.

When it is released, Woopra will apparently have free and paid versions, but at the moment it’s still in (free) closed beta.  You can sign up for the beta and they’ll approve you when they want to open it up to more users.  During the beta testing phase it is restricted to sites with less than 10,000 pageviews per day.

With the economy the way it is I can’t say I would definitely pay money for Woopra, especially with free alternatives like Google Analytics out there but I suppose that depends on the capabilities of their free version and how much the paid version will cost.

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One of the most eagerly anticipated features for GMail is offline access, and today Google finally announced that it was available! (as a Labs feature)

Once this is finalized as a release quality feature for everyone to use, Google will have really closed the gap with Outlook.  Combined with Google Apps functionality for enterprises, Google Calendar and Google Docs, I can’t think of a compelling reason to keep buying new versions of Office every couple of years.

As expected, the GMail offline access feature uses Gears – same as the offline access in Google Docs etc.

As well as straight offline mode, it also has ”flaky connection mode”, which acts like offline mode in that you’re always dealing with a locally cached version of your mail, but also synchs continually in the background like online mode.  I imagine this will speed some mail functions in the same way that Outlook’s Cached Exchange Mode does because more of the processing happens locally.

Apparently they’re slowly rolling the offline feature out, so I haven’t been able to test it yet but I’m really looking forward to it.

Once the option shows up in your Labs, you enable offline access by following these steps:

1. Click Settings and click the Labs tab.
2. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
3. Click Save Changes.
4. After your browser reloads, you’ll see a new “Offline^0.1” link in the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don’t already have it.

EDIT: There appear to be some known issues – you can’t send an offline message with attachments and you can’t access the contact manager offline.  Forgivable in a beta, but these things will need to be fixed.

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Obama hope poster

One of Barack Obama‘s campaign themes was Hope.  Now that he’s been elected and sworn into office (twice), the question is whether he will be able to live up to everyone’s hopes for his presidency.

Someone (I really can’t remember who) suggested that since we have such high hopes, it would be interesting to write them all down and then revisit them in a year (or four) to see whether President Obama was able to live up to them.  The fact of the matter is that even the most well meaning president will have a lot of obstacles in his way – from the popularity of his choices with the voting public to the other branches of government – such is democracy.

Anyway, here are the things that I hope President Obama will be able to accomplish in the next four years:

• Close Guantanamo Bay detention center.  Between the fact that the inmates there have not been convicted of anything (or even charged), have all their rights denied and that they are tortured, Guantanamo Bay detention center should be closed as soon as possible.  Incredibly, this seems to already be on its way – on his second day, the President signed an order to close it.
• End the recession.  Everyone agrees that something should be done to repair the economy as soon as possible, but nobody knows what should be done.  It is the President’s unenviable task of being responsible for solving this problem, and I think four years is long enough to do it.
• Leave Iraq.  The occupation is expensive at a time when the country can least afford the cost, and does not benefit either the Iraqi or American people.  Obviously the withdrawal needs to be carefully managed in order to avoid making the situation worse, but that is the direction I think they need to be going.
• Repair the damage to the constitution.  Between the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps, torture and illegal war, a lot of damage has been done to the civil liberties of Americans (not to mention foreign nationals who have been kidnapped and killed).  While it may be impractical or unwise to prosecute everyone responsible for these negative changes, the laws and practices of the country need to be returned to their right and just state.
• Environment policy.  For the last years corporate profits have taken priority over environmental concerns, from expanding oill drilling to taking animals off of the endangered list.  President Obama has already started changing things for the better.
• Network Neutrality.  I lived through the bad old days of CompuServe.  The free Internet is so obviously immeasuably better that only greedy ISPs could want to return to walled gardens and charges by the minute for every service and the ISP controlling everything.  This is a minor point compared to the other items on the list, but it’s personally important to me.  President Obama has already made positive progress on this issue by appointing an advocate of Network Neutrality as FCC chairman.

What have I missed?

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In case you don’t know the song, here’s a music video:

A few days ago, I came across a project someone had done to automatically append a Google Analytics campaign identifier to URLs shortened using Cligs so that you can tell what clicks came from that shortened URL.  It seemed like a really useful idea, but from my point of view the execution was less than ideal – it used a php file I had to host and a bookmarklet.

The only URLs I shorten are blog posts, and I already use the WP to Twitter WordPress plugin to do that.  So I suggested it to the developer of the plugin on his website.  The next day he’d added the feature to his plugin.

I was shocked – I’m still used to the old, monolithic model of development where you get a new version every year or two, it’ll have whatever features the company decides, you have no say in the matter and you definitely have no contact with the developers.

I guess the accessibility of home computers has increased the number of smaller companies and individual developers, and the Internet has connected everyone together better to make this possible.  It’s a brave new world.

Storytlr logo

I recently found a website called Storytlr.  It’s a lifestreaming service similar to soup.io, Sweetcron and to a lesser extent FriendFeed - it aggregates your blog posts, Flickr pictures, tweets etc. into one stream.

Like soup.io, Storytlr lets you set up a DNS CNAME to point to your lifestream from your domain, so mine is here.

What makes Storytlr different is that it has the concept of “stories” – for example you could group a blog post, some tweets and some flickr pictures together as a story to describe a vacation you had.  It’s an interesting twist, but I’m not sure I’d use it – I’m probably more likely to just write a blog post about my vacation, link the pictures and leave the tweets out.

• Lifestreaming Evolves with Storytlr
• Messing about with Storytlr
• storytlr the cool new lifestream
• Storytlr.com – Your Life Online
• HOW TO: Turn Your Photos, Videos and Tweets into Stories

INSERT_MAP

It’s a pretty cool plugin that lets you insert maps into your posts, as well as associating a post with a particular location.

The location information is also included in your feeds using GeoRSS.

Maps can be Google, Microsoft, OpenStreetMap, 3D Globe, or any major mapping provider by using the Mapstraction mapping library and it also adds KML for viewing in Google Earth.

Image via Wikipedia

Here’s a trailer for an amazing looking movie called Franklyn - an awesome indie neo-noir sci-fi film.

Preest is a masked vigilante detective, searching for his nemesis on the streets of Meanwhile City, a monolithic fantasy metropolis ruthlessly governed by faith and religious fervor. Esser is a broken man, searching for his wayward son amongst the rough streets of London’s homeless. Milo is a heartbroken thirty-something desperately trying to find a way back to the purity of first love. Emilia is a beautiful art student; her suicidal art projects are becoming increasingly more complex and deadly.

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• Early Movie Trailer for “Franklyn”
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• Franklyn Trailer

As it’s almost the end of the year, this might be a good time to take stock of 2008.

I posted a lot more in 2008 - 168 out of my 196 posts were written this year.  I posted almost daily from October through December (until the sever move problems).  I also had a lot of comments and discussion on a few popular posts.

I switched from Blogger to WordPress and moved servers a couple times.

So what about 2009?

I intend to continue posting more or less daily.  Beyond that I don’t really have any plans.  I tend to be always trying out new technologies, so there’s no way to know where that will lead in the coming year.

ShareTabs logo

Today I read an article about ShareTabs.

ShareTabs is a URL shortener like TinyURL, Bit.ly, Cligs etc. except that you choose multiple URLs to combine together behind a single ShareTabs URL.

When the ShareTabs URL is followed, you get a page showing thumbnails of all the URLs and set of tabs so you can quickly switch between them:

ShareTabs screenshot

I haven’t had a reason to use ShareTabs yet but it looks like a useful service and I’m going to keep it in mind to use at the earliest opportunity.

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Apologies for the lack of posts recently.

My website’s been having some connectivity issues since I had it moved to another server to get PHP5.  My host (Easily) can’t find what the problem is so they told me they wanted to move my site to another server.

I took a backup of the site and stopped posting, but it’s taken longer than expected to get it moved over, so I’m going to start posting again.

I’m hoping that we’ll be able to get the site moved over soon, but there’s no telling exactly how long it will take – especially with Christmas and New Years coming up.

I have a thing for skies and clouds – I have a picture in my mind of what I’d ideally like in a theme, but I haven’t found a perfect one yet.  My WordPress/theme/CSS/HTML/PHP/art skills aren’t really up to making it myself, although I may give it a shot at some point.

One of the themes that I’ve found that closest matches my ideal is called UpDown Cloud.

Here’s the current theme – Evanescence:

And here’s the theme I’m thinking of switching to – UpDown Cloud (the WordPress page for the theme has disappeared):

Which one do you like better?  I’ve created my first PollDaddy poll – feel free to vote or leave a comment.

Slightly off topic – why is a plugin browser built into WordPress 2.7 but there’s no theme browser?

EDIT: Apparently the reason the reason the WordPress page for the UpDown Cloud theme disappeared was the theme contains a link to the website that created it, so if I use it all of my pages will link to them.  Hmm.

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• New theme – Evanescence

The new WordPress 2.7 plugin browser makes that a lot less painful.  There were a few different footnote plugings, but in the end I settled on WP-Footnotes.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, using it is extremely simple – you just put your footnote in the text of your post surrounded by double parantheses.  When you view the post the plugin replaces the text in the double parantheses with a number and puts the footnote at the bottom of the post¹.

The number is automatically generated so you don’t have to work out the right one to use if you have a lot of footnotes, and the number is made a link so your readers can click on it to jump to the footnote and then click on a link there to jump back.

The only (very minor) problem I have with the plugin is that the footnotes are placed below the Zemanta related links and the Outbrain rating stars, but above the Disqus comments, so they can be hard to see.  It’s not the footnote plugin’s fault, it’s just a bit unfortunate.

1. Like this

Burn Notice: The End Game book cover

The first book must have done well enough – Tod Goldberg‘s writing another Burn Notice novel - Burn Notice: The End Game is coming out in May!

To be honest I don’t know a lot about it yet, but the fact that it’s Burn Notice is enough

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• Behind the scenes of the Burn Notice books

Spinnerette - Ghetto Love EP cover art

Spinnerette have released the Ghetto Love EP for digital download (yay!).  It costs $5 and features four tracks that will be on the yet-to-be-released album Valium Knights:

1. Bury My Heart
2. Distorting A Code
3. Valium Knights
4. Ghetto Love

My favourites are Valium Knights and Ghetto Love, though the other two tracks are good too.

Here’s the excellent music video for Ghetto Love:

EDIT: I’ve already started getting hits for people searching for download links for Valium Knights and Ghetto Love.  Just buy it you cheap pirates – it doesn’t cost that much and if you’re really a fan then you’ll want to support the band, right?  The announcement email even contained a plea from the band:

Please note that we are putting this out ourselves and that downloading for free, “stealing” will mean that we might not tour as far and wide as we’d like to, due to a lack of funds…and also Santa will steal your Mom away and make her a gift wrapping slave. But seriously think about it and think about doing good and lovely things for each other, after all these are the best gifts of all. We hope you enjoy this as much as we enjoyed making it. 

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Don’t you hate it when you do a search or follow a link or type in a URL and you get a domain squatter?

These are people that buy up thousands of domains and don’t use them for anything real, they just stick ads on a page with no actual content.  Why do they do this?  Because they make money from the 0.00001% of people that click on one of their ads – same logic as spam.

Even worse, they often buy domains for misspellings of real domains so if you type the URL in wrong you see their ads instead of the page you wanted (this is called typo squatting).  It’s internet pollution.

This is also why it’s pretty much impossible to get the domain name you want anymore – they’re all owned by domain squatters.

Now Google is helping these people (and hurting you) by creating an AdSense program specifically for domain squatting.  Because Google gets paid same as the squatters do when those ads get clicked on.

I guess “do no evil” gets trumped by “recession”.