The music industry launches yet another highly convincing report. It would appear that the people most likely to share files are young people (no mention of corralation with the people most likely to be using a computer). And apparently, they are more likely to cheat on their exams, shoplift, and walk shouting ‘Arr, me hearties’ at innocent consumors.
I guess they’re not trying to prove anything, just angling for more column inches along the tired themes of ‘they took my toys, gimme, gimme, waah’ or whatever it is they come out with normally.
Globetechnology: What’s with them young whippersnappers?
It seems that shouting at Labour party conferences makes you a terrorist too. If you were ever going to give up on politics, now’s the time.
Can’t understand why the new link category I created doesn’t appear. It has two links in it. More fiddling required.
I’ve updated other parts of the site to point to the new blog.
I found one big usability issue with WordPress already. I went to edit the timestamp on a post (I had the time offset wrong for my first post), and couldn’t figure out why it would not save my changes. There’s a check box next to the timestamp called ‘Edit timestamp’ and you have to check that before pressing save otherwise it doesn’t save it. Now I can see why they did it, otherwise every edit would adjust the time by the amount of time spent editing… which would a problem! But I wish they did it a different way. Ah well, that’s the beauty of the GPL, I can suggest it as a fix or even hack it myself.
After some configuration, Word Press is shaping up to be light years ahead of Blogger. It’s a bit more of a power user application than Blogger, in both the good and bad sense. Literally anyone can create a Blogger account, but once you get beyond the real basics, WordPress is much stronger. So for someone like me, well, I wish I’d moved a long time ago.
Well, that’s it. I have posted my last Blogger post. It seems that that the Blogger FTP publishing cannot cope with passive FTP, and my webhost no longer seems to accept passive FTP. So… I could hassle the webhost, or do some fiddling around with copying between FTP servers… or I can just abandon Blogger and start using some slick GPL software which doesn’t rely on a third party… so welcome to WordPress!
Is it a sign of shifting consumor culture or something? I normally have exactly zero money to spend on new computer hardware, so I have an extreme culture of ‘make do and mend’. (I’ll be posting some notes on hacking a 486 laptop sometime soon)
But, yesterday I gave up searching for another ethernet cable and bought one on eBay for ?1.68, including shipping. In retrospect, it would have been worth doing that a long time ago, since I’ve probably wasted 2 or more hours (and annoyed my wife) looking for an item that costs about 10 mins wages.
It’s a bit like relying on the web to backup your software, or the ‘Kazaa backup service’ as it’s known. 
I’ve got millions of cables in a bag carefully packed away somewhere, and I shall no doubt find them now. Sometimes its just easier to give up fixing something, and restore from backup.
Took a butchers at MSN Virtual Earth today. It’s good. Really good in fact – if you live in the only country in the world, the good old US of A. For anywhere else, well, sorry, maybe in a future version.
The interface is very loveable. A nice big map fills most of the screen. tools pop up in little ajax-y type boxes. mouse scroll wheel zooms by default (I had to use greasemonkey to enable this for google maps.)
There are some serious problems for them to iron out in the beta. tile loading is poor – sometimes 50% of the tiles would fail to load. could be server overload maybe. Scrolling around is buggy, sometimes you ‘pop’ back to where you started scrolling from. The place names are often duplicated, and different sizes, with no apparent logic. For example, on the world map, the most prominant, largest name is the Marshall Islands. Very nice place I’m sure, but hardly a primary focus in most applications. And the coverage is dire. England in aerial photos is blurry green blob where coastlines are indistinct, and the ‘road map’ view does not zoom in far enough to display any roads.
Compare:
MSN Virtual Earth coverage of south east England
Google Maps coverage of Lichtenstein
Google Maps manages to show recognisable buildings in a county many people would be pressed to find on a map. That’s pretty good, and a big target for MSN Virtual Earth to chase.
I look forward to what future versions of both sites (applications?) have to offer.