Link: Fighting Talk
If you enjoy football/sport then this is a funny show. You can podcast the show or listen live on Saturdays at 11am.
Archive for Blog
Link: Paint.NET
A real alternative for basic photoshop techniques without the cost. Its 3.59Mb without .NET framework and 49Mb with framework.
Link: Excellent AJAX based timeline app
A useful tool for remembering the chronological ordering of events. Especially good for small project notes to remember when coming to writing a final report. [ An example of a timeline]
Link: Avoiding becoming a false positive
Lifehacker tips on how to avoid getting shoved into the place where the sun don’t shine ….err…. I mean the spam folder. A few tips I would add:
- Use the recipients first name if possible
- Use plaintext (Change to plaintext if using Outlook/Thunderbird)
- DONT attach docs, wmv’s, gifs. Try to get them hosted on something like YouSendIt so if they wish they can download.
- Have a "to the point" subject line. That way even if it does get consigned to the spam folder it can easily to seen.
How to stop a company from suing you(tube)
Interesting. One way of avoiding getting sued is to make a music label dependant on your success. This way if they sue you they know they are just losing out in the long run. Of course they could just sell up and then sue you but at least you can see the selling of shares as a warning.
YouTube losing its appeal
Google Blogoscoped talks about how YouTube may be losing its appeal after being bought by Google. It may be accurate but its nothing to do with who has bought it that will be the downfall of YouTube. The more YouTube starts to be aggressive against copyright infringers the more people will move away.
It is Google’s responsibility to try and balance the desire of the user to view clips of films, football goals, news items, funny "oops" moments and whatever else that comes from copyrighted material but is considered in general society as being fair use, with the desire of big business to shut out their content for all but those who pay money.
For me a 30 secs highlight clip of a football (soccer) match is fair use since it is just showing a minimal amount compared to the original. Furthermore, it is more of an advert for the network that shows the original live. The same goes for a film clip or a music video.
As was the case with Napster, Kazaa and others, if a company puts obstacles in the way then people will just shift and move elsewhere. The only way to keep people in is to add value to a system whereby people are fearful of moving elsewhere due to the amount of effort required to transfer that value that has been added over time. The best case in this day and age is what Microsoft have done with Windows. Due to the amound of applications build for windows it is more or less impossible for many businesses to move to Linux or Mac due to the costs of finding alternative software or of rewriting in-house software.
I don’t think that YouTube does this yet. Often if I see an embedded video on a site it takes an effort to discern which service the video comes from. For the publisher to change service is as easy as just uploading the video to a different provider.
One possible way of adding value is to provide functionality that no one else provides. This is getting more and more difficult. On the other hand, locking in the user is counter-productive as it drives away your users to more liberal sites.
I would recommend to Google to spend as much money as possible to try and convince the companies whose copyright is being infringed to place links/adverts next to the vidoes to an alternative service which has better quality and is provided much more immediately than the short clip.
By directly being the cause of sales will Google be able to keep both users and BigBadBusiness happy.
Gmail Thesaurus
Isn’t it time that Gmail added a simple thesaurus to their email client. I don’t know why but for some reason it is very difficult to find dictionaries in applications on a desktop or within Web Applications. I know one can just use something like Answers.com or Dictionary.com but what if I am working offline?
So much so that even MS Word, to my knowledge, doesn’t have a means of finding the meaning of a word (the true essence of a dictionary) by default. Google through social networking techniques may even be able to come up with what I would call a social dictionary whereby it learns from people’s language like the search function’s ability to suggest correct spellings.
Firefox search box
I’m not sure why but I have this mental barrier of using the Firefox search box. If I wish to go to a site I’ll either use the address bar which uses Google’s Lucky Search or I’ll manually type in google.com and then type in my query.
Firefox 2.0 when it is finally released is going to have a Google Suggest style AJAX search box that will autosuggest the search query. However, I dont think this is enough. I want something like a top 3 results automatically show up for a search query I put in without having to go to the Google.com site. This module does something similar which I’m sure can be hacked up to be used with the Firefox search bar/box.
Link:At last they realise
A health authority becomes the first to take off smokers from their waiting list until they stop smoking. Next stop….obese people until they stop eating as much.
If it were upto me I would give everyone a score based on their lifestyle choices and then rank waiting lists based on this. Smokers and fat people often only have themselves to blame for the illnesses they get.
Of course I would only enforce this for directly related illnesses, not if a smoker had a car accident or whatever.
Link:The Ultimate Art Gallery
Modern art can get no more contemporary than a gallery that is empty! Try telling the viewers with a straight face what the gallery contains after taking their money.
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