Author: Rory

I’ve just noticed that Google now shows it’s modified logos on search results pages as well as on the main page. By modified logos I mean the ones they use on special occassions like when they cover it with snow at Christmas. They used to only show those logos on the main page but used the standard logo on search results pages. I guess with Firefox’s growing popularity more people are using keyword searches and the search box so they don’t see the main page very often any more. I know I don’t.

The internship starts tomorrow. I’m easing myself back into the extension-writing game. I’ve just updated the MakeLink project page with a new version of MakeLink. It’s just a couple of fairly small fixes, unsurprisingly since that’s pretty much all MakeLink is ever going to get. One bug was keeping version 2.0.1 out of the Mozilla update site which obviously isn’t a good thing. I’ve resubmitted now so it should show up there in a few days (after review). Another bug was only showing on one user’s system, so I couldn’t even reproduce it. When I looked at the bit of code his error console was complaining about I saw some code that should be refactored anyway, so hopefully after that it’s working again.

Not content to print photographs of a prisoner of war, in direct and blatant violation of the Geneva Convention, it seems the Sun newspaper has turned its hand to theft. Actually, to be fair, they were only trying to deal in stolen property—not quite theft—but the path to common criminality is lying wide open in front of them.

I’ll be starting my internment internship on Tuesday, writing an extension for Thunderbird. Given that I have ten weeks, full time, to develop this you can imagine that it’s a rather… complicated extension. It will allow Thunderbird to figure out which of your emails are related to each other, and what those relationships are.

A few weeks ago I bid on an item on eBay and won the auction. This involved six emails: confirmation of the bid, notification that I won, an invoice, a receipt from PayPal, a "thank you" from the seller, and a notification of dispatch. My email client had no clue that these six emails related to the same transaction, but in future hopefully it will. That’s what we’re working on this summer. The real cutting edge research is done (and published); I’m just there to put it into human-useable form by incorporating it into a real email client.

And just in case I forget, I’m going to need some resources:

• Mozilla.org Application Extensions
• Reusable Web components (XBL)
• Some bash functions for Mozilla development

Microsoft is planning on dropping the ‘My’ prefix from ‘My Computer’, ‘My Documents’, etc. in the next version of Windows. All I can say is it’s about damn time. Will they be changing the ridiculous ‘Documents and Settings’ to something a bit more keyboard friendly too? I suggest ‘Home’.

Slashdot’s covering this too.

Caoimhe recently finished her thesis on "weblogs and the Irish Blogosphere". She used some data from a sample of questionnaire-ees among whom I am counted. Before I miraculously appeared on Caoimhe’s list of Irish bloggers I wasn’t aware of much of an Irish blogging community, but I’ve since gone on a little quest to find intersting countrymen and -women.

My main resource in finding said interesting people is Planet of the Blogs, an Irish blogs aggregator. It’s much better than that hateful IrishBlogs.ie (which is still spamming my referrer logs some weeks after I started to complain—I must follow up on that). I’ve been browsing that site for a while, clicking through to potentially interesting sites and subscribing to those that live up to their promise. Those subscriptions have been crammed into my "Irish" folder in my Bloglines subscriptions (publicly viewable).

I’m not saying that the nine sites in that folder are the best in the Irish blogosphere, or that there are no others worth reading. I couldn’t possibly know that. But they all caught my attention and kept it long enough for me to click on the little blue Bloglines button. I will continue to collect.

Update: IrishBlogs.ie has fixed its crawler so the spamming has stopped. There’s nothing like going over the top in your criticism to get people to listen. Thanks for the update Roger.

I’ve thankfully avoided much mention of The Huffington Post, possibly because I don’t read the type of blogger who feels compelled to follow celebrity, or possibly because it just isn’t generating as much buzz as Huffington hoped. Of the few remarks I have read, the most interesting is Skeptico’s ired response to the Post‘s apparent "anti-vaccination obsession". Skeptico has been running a series of articles on the alleged connection between mercury in vaccinations and autism, citing a heck of a lot of data to back up the "it’s just a crackpot fantasy" side of the argument.

Interestingly the only article I’ve actually read on the Post is far more supporting of genuine science and scepticism than you would expect. It’s an excerpt from an essay called Creationism: God’s gift to the ignorant, by one Richard Dawkins. If only we could expect regular blogging from that fellow.

In The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Wonko the Sane builds an asylum to contain the entire world, except for the one small area outside in which he lives. His justification is displayed on a small sign just outside the asylum door. It reads,

Hold stick near centre of it’s length. Place pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion

In his words,

Any civilization that has so far lost its head as to include a set of instructions on a packet of toothpicks was no longer one in which I could live and stay sane.

I’m forced to draw similar conclusions about a civilisation that can propel a mobile phone ring tone to the top of the music charts, even accepting the usual standards of popular music.

When Hammurabi wished to bring levity to the situation, He would stand on a person’s right, and reach over and tap on that person’s left shoulder. As a result, the victim would invariably look to his left, where no one was standing, all would laugh, or by law, Hammurabi would stone them.

The Oldest Trick in the Book also covers such classics as Socrates’ "Ahomosezwut" and Schmelling’s defeat of Himmler with the "Who can Hit the Softest?" trick.

Rob McKenna’s All Weather Haulage has got to be about the least convincing fake website in existence.